“It’s not real!” Kane pushed himself onto his side, then gained a knee. Spit fell from his numb lips.
“Don’t,” Adeline warned.
But Kane couldn’t lose his sister again. She had told him once that she was a smart girl, and that she could stay lucid if she knew she was in a fake world. Kane curled himself into his reckless desire to free her, and the selfish desire to save himself. He needed to not fail her again.
“None of this is real, Sophia. It’s a reverie. You’re in a reverie,” he cried.
The lights flickered. The forest flinched.
“Reverie.”
Sophia said the word as though trying out a new language, one with words that scalded the tongue. Kane saw the lucidity settle behind her gaze as she took in her false world, her sharp mind reorienting itself. But it didn’t last. The airships had finally found them, and their hurricane breaths swept Sophia back into her fantasy.
Except now the reverie was twisting. Kane could feel it building.
“Sophia, this is your world to control,” he shouted over the winds. “You can make it stop.”
But Sophia was lost to reasoning. She clutched the charms in one hand. Her other hand pushed the gun between Kane and the advancing soldiers. “You lie, Kane. You’re always lying!”
Shock waves rippled out of her, into the fabric of the reverie. Kane felt the agony of his sister as her fantasy began to turn acidic in her mind. He felt, physically, the ripple pass over him, and his uniform became that of a soldier.
“Kane,” Adeline murmured. “The charms.”
The charms smoldered in Sophia’s grip. If any of those reveries were activated…
Kane crawled toward Sophia. “You need to give those back. They’re not safe. I was protecting you from them.”
“What are they? A trap? Incendiaries? Nano-tech?”
She wasn’t waking up, so Kane dove into his knowledge of the reverie. Of tropes. He attempted a reasonable tangent. “They’re dangerous to the Committee. A secret weapon developed by Headmistress Smithe that I stole for you.”
“Headmistress?”
Sophia blinked rapidly, seized by an inner storm that sent another ripple through the reverie. It washed over the city in fractious echoes. The airships looming over the plaza bobbed dangerously, as through magnetized. Their cannons swung toward Kane, Adeline, and Sophia, electric energy crackling in their barrels.
This was it. This was how Sophia’s mind would murder her own brother. Revenge, for all the lies he’d fed her and all the mistruths he’d forced her to live within. It was a just and horrible fate, but it would kill Sophia, too, and Kane couldn’t allow that.
The cannons fired. Kane fired back. He flung his hands toward the assault, releasing a pure and singular hope, a formless yet torrential explosion of energy. He felt the etherea rip from him like rocket fire, then pushed himself to give more. To give everything he had.
Just as the ethereal blast was set to collide with the fleet, it hit something. A shield that had been waiting there to protect him.
Ursula’s shield, there all along.
She must’ve been close. There wasn’t time to look because suddenly, Kane was facing his own attack as it reverberated back at him, crushing him in a prismatic riot that swept over Adeline and Sophia. They screamed, and the reverie screamed with them.
Then, there was only the rising, discordant whisper of the charms as they began to sing the song of their waking worlds.
• Thirty-Two •
POLYCHROMATIC
When the ringing finally stopped, Kane lay beneath drifts of blue steam and lemony sunlight. Dawn had surged over Everest all at once.
He sat up in the center of a scorched crater the size of a tennis court. Water gushed from snapped pipes jutting from the earth, filling the crater with hissing pools. His whole body was one giant ache, blood gathering in his eyebrows and turning his eyelashes sticky.
Find Sophia. Save Sophia.
Kane tore through the rising tide, still dizzy. A moment later Adeline punched up through a turbid pool, sputtering and gasping, her ruined dress clinging to her like a second skin. She grasped for Kane, and he heaved her up.
“Sophia!” Kane shouted. “Sophia!”
Adeline wrenched him around. “There!”
Sophia was hunched at the top of the craters’ edge. Kane stumbled up the steaming walls, with no regard to the new blisters that kissed his palms. Reaching her—seeing her—he halted.
Sophia faced the city, her whole body an expression of awe.
Kane turned.
Sophia’s reverie was gone. In its place was a maddening, kaleidoscopic chaos. Six reveries, combined. Everest, and the five charms Kane had awakened.
The sky was a patchwork of dawn, night, and day, shared between two suns, a moon, and a looming planet that looked like Earth. Mountains swelled on the horizon, shifting from craggy cliffs to hills ribboned in waterfalls to dunes of silky ochre. The stoic buildings of futuristic dystopia had distorted into a buffet of architectures: contemporary castles, medieval office buildings, and rococo skyscrapers plated in glass, iron, and filigree. They leaned over the plaza, over Kane, capturing his spellbound reflection a thousandfold in their crystal facades.
And the plaza… It was a scene Kane knew; a garden choked with roses and poplar trees, with a gazebo at the center. The fallen soldiers at its edge were recovering slowly, finding their uniforms now came with bow ties and coattails. The aircraft sputtered and wheezed as they attempted to regain flight that had been possible in one reverie, but not another.
Kane could feel the chaos of it all, as though he himself were a single strand coiled tight within this polychromatic knot. He could not even begin to understand how to unravel this.
“Sophia—”
Kane turned to her just in time to see Sophia pick something off the ground. Something black and shiny. She raised the whistle to her lips, her eyes dim with wonder.
“NO!”
Kane tackled her. The whistle bounced into the crater and Adeline lunged for it, but no sooner had the silent tweet emitted from the charm when, with slapping abruptness, the reverie halted, and the black doors appeared.
Nothing happened. Kane held Sophia and let himself believe Dean had been successful.
Then the doors burst open, catapulting a spiky shadow into the reverie. The Dreadmare, a mutilated mess of twisting legs, slid to a stop at Kane’s feet. It was coated in a dark substance.
Blood.
No.
Poesy was in the doorway, her whole body furious with magic as she strode into the reverie. She wore a velvet leotard as black as her doors, thigh-high platform boots, and a cropped jacket thick in opalescent fringe. It flashed like armor as she lowered her hand. From her posture, it was clear she had literally just slapped the Dreadmare into this dimension.