My feet twitch.
“Do you know which powers you’re missing?” Esther asks, her voice cracking.
I try to feel for them, but aside from the body-sharing, all I can feel is the gap. It’s the center of everything, and all feeling draws me to it. I switch to the Sarrs, try to work out which ones I can’t feel.
But I don’t know all their powers. I’ve still got some, but it’s like it’s written in a foreign language now.
“You won’t be able to tell yet,” Taras says. “I don’t want you looking when you’re in this state. You may have lost great power to the enemy, but your Seer instability is still strong. We have to protect what you still have.”
I gulp.
I feel sick as we continue exploring the wider area, setting traps for game.
Taras told me to stay calm, but he must know that’s not possible. Raleigh’s going to find out he’s got my powers. What if it’s my important powers? The ones that win the war? The augury says it’s my powers that are important. Not necessarily me.
What if I’ve given him everything he needs to make sure only his people survive?
“I really am sorry,” Esther says for what feels like the hundredth time. “I didn’t know that would happen.”
I shake my head. Haven’t got the energy to talk over it any more. Talking is useless. It doesn’t undo what’s been done. Taras is certain I can’t undo it. Maybe Raleigh’s the only hope to find out what I lost—but asking him would guarantee he knows. There’s a chance he doesn’t.
But when I close my eyes, I see him, the look on his face as he realizes. See him brandishing my powers, throwing them around, saving the Enhanced Ones.
It’s only my imagination, but it weighs heavy on me.
Body-sharing. It’s the only way of knowing whether he’s found out. I can’t just wait, wonder, in the dark. If I can make it light, shouldn’t I do that?
But my mind is a chaos-ridden ground. Unstable, Taras says. I’ll have to wait a bit, wait for the calm, else I’m sure I’m just going to mess up again.
“Sev?”
Corin’s voice jolts me out of my thoughts, and I startle, look up, see him. His skin glows with sweat and anger, anger that radiates from him, yet his voice doesn’t sound angry. It’s just…low.
He indicates for me to follow him, and I glance at Esther. She nods, then steps back.
My feet feel ten times as heavy as I follow Corin. We seem to walk for ages, through the knee-high grass, my jeans rapidly soaking up water droplets from the stems.
Corin stops by a small clearing, next to some rocks. The air smells damper here, makes my nose tickle.
I take a deep breath. “Corin, I—”
But he holds his hands up, shakes his head. “No. Let me talk.”
He leans back against one of the rocks, leans in a way that makes it seem uncomfortable for him, but, if it is, he doesn’t show any signs.
“You betrayed me,” he says at last, and he stares fury into my soul. “We agreed. We made the decision not to do anything about Raleigh and my death. You thought your feelings were more important?”
I sigh. “It wasn’t like that.”
He shakes his head. “Aside from the fact that all you’ve done is made things worse, you put what you want over what I want.” He presses his lips together for a long moment. “I thought we were in this together.”
“We are.”
“No, Sev. We’re not.” He kicks at the ground, then shakes his head. “Look at you—you’re powerful, amazing. But me? I’m just… I can’t do all the amazing stuff you can. Finding a way to save your life is all I want—and there’s nothing I can do about it. But learning I die—if Raleigh’s right about what he said—that we’re equal in that way, made it more bearable. But now it’s not going to be equal, is it? Not when you can try and save me—and you’ll manage it—and I can’t do anything.”
“But, Corin, I didn’t manage it. All I did was make things worse.”
He balls his hands into fists. “You’ve tried once, and I know now, you’re going to try again.” He looks up, meets my eyes, and I see the tears in them. “I thought we were together on this.”
“We are.” I reach for his hands, but he pulls away before I can make contact. Tears fill my own eyes. “I’m not going to try and save you, okay? If that’s what you want.”
“You knew it was what I wanted before, and you still did it.”
“Because Esther begged me. Corin, I wasn’t going to before then—I really wasn’t. But she…” I exhale hard, close my eyes for a moment. When I open them, the hurt in his eyes is deeper.
The sunlight gets a little stronger, makes his skin glow more.
“You take more notice of what she wants than me, and I’m supposed to be your boyfriend.”
Supposed to be? I stare at him. My legs feel weak, my arms ache. Everything pounds.
“Maybe Taras is right.” Corin shrugs. “Maybe we shouldn’t be together. Not when you’re going to try and find ways to save me, make it worse for both of us.”
I inhale sharply. We shouldn’t be together? “How can you say that? After everything we’ve been through?” I step closer. “Corin, please! You really think that not being together will make me stop loving you, make me stop trying to save you if that’s what I want to do?”
He grits his teeth so tightly a muscle in his jaw moves.
I reach for his hands, succeed in getting them, and cling to them, to him. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m not going to do it again. I promise. I won’t keep anything from you. Look, if we break up now, it’s just silly.”
“Silly?” He raises his eyebrows. His hands are limp in mine. No feeling.
I squeeze them. “Corin, I want to be with you. I don’t want us to waste any time being angry with each other, not when we haven’t got forever. I’m sorry about trying to save you, please. You can understand why I did it, right?”
I look into his eyes, see the emotion there, swimming round and round, so strong.
A muscle in his temple tightens. He pulls his hands from mine in one clean movement.
“No,” he says. The path crackles as he walks away.
Walks away.
I stare after him, a lump in my throat. I start to follow him, but then Esther’s suddenly in front of me, hugging me.
“I’ll go after him.” Her breath is warm against my ear. “I’ll make him understand. Don’t worry, he’ll calm down. He’s just angry. Go back to the others, okay? Bea’s got Toivo.”
I nod, sniff, realize I’m crying.
By the time I reach the others, I’m crying harder than I can remember. So hard my head pounds, and it’s hard to see, hard to breathe. My chest makes wheezing sounds.
“Hey.” Elf wraps me in a hug. “It’s okay. I get it. I do. If you hadn’t tried to save him, it would’ve meant you didn’t love him. And you do. Anyone can see that. He’ll understand.”
But I shake my head. He won’t. Something deep down tells me he won’t.
Maybe what’s worse is that part of me now wonders whether I would’ve tried to save him if Esther hadn’t persuaded me to. And if I hadn’t, would that mean I don’t love him?
When Esther returns twenty minutes later—alone—my mind is a tangled mess. She tries to give me a smile, tries to be cheerful, but it seems so fake. It makes me cry more, which just makes me feel even more silly.
“You have to stay calm, child,” Taras says, some time later. “We have to focus on the actual problem here. Raleigh has your powers.”
I gulp and wipe my tears away. “I can body-share with Raleigh again. I can find out what he knows.”
“No,” Taras says. “That would be too dangerous. But you’ve healed a bit, and I think it’s time to examine your own mind. Marta’s Lore indicates you can do that without actively using your powers. You have the Sarr legacy inside you. It may still be too early to know, but see if you can find out which of them no longer has their powers. It may be possible to communicate w
ith some of them.”
Yes, that’s what I’ve been doing. Their voices have been guiding me….
I take a deep breath.
“You need to be completely calm,” Taras says. “Put all emotion aside.”
Like that’s easy to do.
But I try, of course I do. Yet I can’t help but notice Corin’s still out there. It’s late now. He’s the only one who hasn’t returned. Even Yani’s back, though empty-handed, but says he’s set more snares, and overnight they should catch something in them.
It’s humid now too, feels like there’s rain in the air.
Taras is still watching me, so I clear my mind again, concentrate on the Sarrs inside me. But, with the abyss in my mind, my powers, they feel different. The bank of power is smaller, and the voices…I can’t hear them.
They’re not speaking.
Why not?
But they don’t speak all the time anyway. Just when I need them to.
Now isn’t a time I need them to? Not in their opinion….
I take a deep breath. Have I heard them since Raleigh got some of my powers? I frown, I can’t think. Their voices never sound very desperate to me anyway… They’re like me. We’re all one, but slightly different….
I frown.
Did I hear them before? Before my mother died… There were voices inside me, weren’t there? Thoughts flew at me, and I just thought it was me…like when I held an augmenter, and there were voices both urging me to drink it and to discard it.
There’s a Sarr inside me who was Enhanced too?
I frown, but my head’s pounding now. Not clear at all. Really, I’m just being silly. It can’t have been their voices I heard. Not when I only became aware of the Sarr legacy and felt all their power when my mother was dying, when I looked into her eyes and saw myself reflected back—saw the gateway inside me, the Sarrs, felt their power as the bank activated, as it became mine, boosted one final time by my mother’s death.
No.
I take a deep breath and—
A flash of red light, above. Then black. Heavy darkness. Two seconds of it, and then it’s clear.
What the hell?
I look up, but the sky tilts, and the ground moves, shakes. I yell out, throw my hands to my sides, try to steady myself, because I’m falling and….
The air tastes bitter as I’m pulled forward, and my soul recognizes the movement—the movement as I travel into the—
No.
I inhale sharply.
Oh Gods.
I stare at the land around me.
No. It can’t be.
But it is. It feels like it.
I turn.
That’s when I see the bison.
The Dream Land.
The actual Dream Land. Only it can’t be the Dream Land. Not the Dream Land.
But this is… I am here.
I stare at the bison. He’s standing high up in the sky, looks the same as he always does in Dream Land warnings. My mind flashes back to the destruction, the deaths. The bison…he screamed. He screamed after the Dream Land was gone.
He survived.
There’s a new Dream Land—this is it? It’s not over. I didn’t destroy all hope?
And now I’m here.
I reach for my pendant, squeeze it.
This is a warning? Something bad is going to happen.
Because Raleigh’s found out?
“Okay, stay calm.” I don’t know why I say the words out loud, but I do, as if saying them will make each one into a tiny anchor that grounds me.
I take a deep breath and look around. Grassland stretches for miles, looks sort of like the grasslands where our group is, though the land feels heavier. And—and there’s a heavy mass of trees ahead, in a place where there aren’t trees in the real world, the mortal world.
I frown. I need to find out what the warning is. What this means, what this—
A figure steps out from among the trees.
I jolt back, heart pounding, eyes narrowing. An Enhanced?
But no….
“Elf?” I stare at him. Elf is here? Then I see Taras behind him.
I run toward them, my breath in short, sharp bursts. My feet sting as I run, and my shoes—the tennis shoes are a different style. Little details are never right in the warnings. My pendant slams into my chest with every stride.
“What is this? The bison’s there.” I look to Taras as I reach them, but his face is blank. “A shared Seeing dream?” My voice is breathy, but I’m barely panting. A shared warning—is that even a thing?
“A Seeing dream?” Elf’s eyes are wide. “I thought there weren’t going to be any, if the Gods and Goddesses are all dead?”
“This is not the Dream Land,” Taras says, and he takes a step back. He reaches out with a shaky hand, points to the right, but then he’s moving, turning, pointing all around.
“What? What is it then?” I look around and—
The trees have no leaves. Cobwebs wrap tightly around their trunks, like they’re cocoons for darkness, and they’re all connected to each other by thinner silk layers, but their branches are clean, thin, reaching out like bony fingers. Behind—behind all the trees—lies a heavy, black mist.
In the distance, something shrieks.
The shrieks of the dead fill the air.
I flinch. The shrieks, the cobwebs, the black mist… Cold shivers run down my spine, and an icy wind sets in.
“The Dark Void?” My voice is barely a whisper. “We’re here? We were by an entry point for it? And it’s taken us? All of us?”
“We’re trapped?” Elf’s voice is too high-pitched for him.
I turn, look around, nausea rising. I look at the branches, remember what the Stone Seers said, expect to see the ends of them decorated with severed heads. With Juanita’s head, though I don’t know what she looks like.
But the branches are bare.
“Don’t touch anything, child.” Taras’s voice is sharp.
“But are we trapped?” I touch my pendant.
“That won’t do any good when you’re already here.”
“I thought the Dark Void only takes one at a time?” I shift my weight from foot to foot. “And the bison’s here?”
Taras tilts his head back. “The bison should not be here.”
“But he is.” My fingers wrap around my pendant, tighter, tighter. Just doing it gives me comfort, something to do, to distract myself. “Could this be a warning?”
“The Dark Void is not the Dream Land. And the Divine Ones are dead.”
“But the spirits aren’t. What if they’re trying to give us a warning—using this place?”
“Shouldn’t we be trying to get out?” Elf asks. He looks over his shoulder just as we hear another shriek. The shrieks of the Seers already trapped here?
I narrow my eyes, trying to see if there’s anyone else visible—Juanita, perhaps—but it’s just the swirling mist and fog. And us. No one else in sight.
“If this is the Dark Void, we cannot get out,” Taras says. “We are trapped.”
I glance again at the bison. He hasn’t moved. “But if it’s a warning, we have to be able to escape, else there’s no point in us having it,” I point out. “So what is it? What could they be warning us of?”
We all wait. There’s a light crackling sound in the air that makes my mouth feel even drier.
“Maybe we need to head in there.” I point deeper into the cobwebbed trees, and as I look, more and more seem to appear, as if they’re sprouting from the black mist behind it—or being revealed as the mist retreats. “You two were brought straight to the trees, weren’t you?”
Elf nods, but neither he nor Taras moves back toward them.
I look to Taras. “Can the Dark Void change its appearance? Like the Dream Land could?”
Taras’s eyes are haunted, deep. “There is nothing in Marta’s stories about spirits using it in the same way they used the Dream Land.”
Okay. I swallow hard. The bison
is here though.
“I think we really do have to go in there.” I point to the trees again.
The air gets even colder as we step through the trees, deeper and deeper, ducking under cobweb shelves between padded trunks, and Elf whimpers. I shiver, wrap my arms around myself. I’m not wearing a jacket, and my arms feel like they’re being rubbed raw. The black mist lurks low among the trunks, and I look down, can’t see my feet.
I turn, look around again, see we’ve walked a long way. The weak sun’s in a different place, just visible in streaks through the thin branches that pattern the sky.
The trees go on and on, until we’re in a thick wood. I don’t recognize the species of any of the trees, not from their branches, and the trunks are concealed. And the ground—there’s no life on the ground. No mosses, no grasses here.
I frown. Time… How long have we been here? Does time work faster or am I losing it?
“Maybe this isn’t a warning,” I say. “Maybe…” Maybe we are trapped? But it doesn’t feel like we’re trapped. But what would it feel like?
I look up at the broken sky again, eye the bison, as if he’ll tell me.
He doesn’t. A branch cleanly divides his image in two. He hasn’t moved. Hasn’t blinked, has he? Is he trapped here? Is that why we’re here?
Taras clears his throat. “The Dark Void only takes one Seer at a time, and we are not weak in power and easy pickings, nor are we in pain, being tortured by this realm. No other Untamed Seers are here,” he says. “It’s just us. The bison is here. Seven, you must be right. The Dark Void is adapting, taking on the Dream Land’s role. Perhaps that is what it always wanted to do, why it took Seers to it—just as the Dream Land summoned us. Only they couldn’t escape once there. This has to be a warning, one that pertains to us. We’re in danger—our group—but we don’t know what it is.”
“Because of Raleigh?” I swallow hard. The dry ground cracks underfoot, and it seems wrong that it’s so dry and crackly when the air is thick with moisture.
“If it’s because of Raleigh, we should see him here. We should see what he’s going to do.”
“But there’s nothing,” I whisper. Because nothing’s happening. “This realm may not be able to show much. It isn’t the actual Dream Land, even if it might be adapting, trying to show us.”
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