Those tunnels were fine only two weeks ago. And as Quin loves to say, only a jackass believes in coincidences.

“It was the Karkauns,” I say. “Tell Quin his sappers must clear a path. The Karkauns are trying to herd him. They want to ambush him aboveground, no doubt, and stop his men from getting into the city. If he doesn’t get through, he might as well turn back.”

Harper takes me aside, voice low so that the soldiers still passing through the door don’t hear us. “He should have been nearly through those tunnels by now. He won’t make it on time.”

“He’s Quin Veturius,” I say. “He’ll make it.”

“We need those men,” Harper says. “We cannot take the capital with five hundred men and untrained citizens, no matter how many there are. Not with tens of thousands of Karkauns quartered here. It would be impos—”

“Don’t say it.” I put my finger against his lips, and he falls silent. “We know better. Keris trained that word out of us. Impossible doesn’t exist. Not when the Empire is on the line.”

The rest of the soldiers are through the doorway. Harper and I are the last. “I will take this city, Harper,” I tell him. “With my bare hands, if I must. Come. I have an idea.”

XXXIII: Laia

I walk along a river of death, but I am not alone.

“I have missed you, my love.”

A shadow walks beside me. Pale hands pull down a hood, revealing fire-red hair and dark brown eyes that hid so much more than I ever imagined. Not my foe, but the first boy I ever loved.

“Keenan,” I whisper.

My skin burns, and I feel like I cannot breathe. For the blink of an eye, I see seething, muddy water roiling around me.

Then Keenan speaks, and the image fades.

“You’re in trouble, my love.” He brushes a calloused thumb against my chin, and there is no lie when he calls me his love. “You’re drowning.”

“I do not feel like I’m drowning.”

“You’re strong.” He takes my hand and we walk. Something calls out to me deep in my mind, a scream locked in a chest, locked in a closet, locked in a room that is too far away from this place to notice. “You always have been, because of the Star. But for other reasons too.”

“The darkness,” I say. “The one that lives within.”

“Yes,” he says. “Tell me of it. For I have darkness within me also, and I would know if we are two sides of the same coin.”

“Two sides—” I look up at him, dazed. It hurts to breathe, and when I look down, my clothes are soaked, and my arms and hands bleed. I taste salt and put a hand to my head. My head bleeds too. A voice within calls out. Laia.

“I cannot tell you about it,” I say. “I am not supposed to.”

“Of course.” He is so gentle. So kind. “Let’s not wake it if we shouldn’t.”

“I have already woken it,” I say. “I woke it when I defied you.” I look down at my body again. I am so tired. “Keenan, I—I cannot breathe.”

“You’re drowning, my love,” he says with such sweetness. “You’re almost gone.”

A flash across my vision. Darkness. The rain-heavy sky. Debris-choked water around me, dragging me along. High canyon walls rise on either side, streaked red and white and orange and yellow, like one of Darin’s paintings.

Darin, my brother, who loves me, not like—

Fight him, Laia. A voice calls out. So far away. But insistent.

“I should not be here.” I pull my hand from Keenan’s, because if he does love me it is a twisted sort of love.

“No,” he says. “You should not.” Though his voice is soft, something behind it makes me draw away. Deep in his brown eyes, I see the flash of a feral creature, riven by a hunger that never ends. I feel surrounded by that hunger, suddenly, as if it’s a pack of wolves, closing in.

“Get away from me,” I say. “I will tell you nothing—”

His body changes, the way it did when I gave him the armlet. Except he is no shadow creature now, but something explosive and wild, an unchecked fire, malevolence emanating from every flicker of his body.

“You will tell me what lives within you and where it came from—”

“I’ll die first!”

I open my eyes then to a nightmare world. A turbid river of rock and branches and debris tosses me to and fro like a rag doll, and though I try to stay afloat, I am yanked under again and again, until water fills my nose and I cannot breathe.

No, I think. Not like this. Not like this. I scream as I break through the surface of the water.

“Let me inside, girl!” Rehmat appears, reaching for me. “I can save you, but you have to let me in.”

I barely hear it before the water pulls me down once more. I claw and kick and thrash, pain exploding along my hands and legs as the flood’s undertow drags at me. When I surface again, Rehmat is somewhere between furious and frenzied.

“Stop fighting the flood!” it shouts. “Keep your feet up!”

I try to do as it asks, but the river is a starving giant clutching at my ankles, as hungry as the maelstrom I see in my nightmares.

“Let me in, Laia!”

As I break the surface, I imagine a door in my mind and fling it wide. Almost immediately, I go under again. My whole body is on fire. I swallow a lungful of water and this must be death.

Then, like that day weeks ago in Adisa, I am pushed to the back corner of my mind—this time with a shove instead of a nudge. My body shoots through the water, clothes ripping, my pack falling away. The wind bends beneath me, Rehmat manipulating it as easily as clay.

I wonder if this is real or if the flood has killed me.

It’s real. When Rehmat speaks, it is from inside my own mind now. The creature’s magic saturates my limbs and we are one, riding the wind as easily as I tread the ground. It carries me to the top of the canyon, and I collapse on my side, staring down at the flash flood in wonder and horror. Rise, Laia. The Nightbringer is near—

A soft thud beside me, and then there is a hand at my throat, lifting me, squeezing. The Nightbringer, cloaked and shadowed once more, fixes me with his hateful, sun-eyed stare.

“You—cannot kill me—Nightbringer—”

“But I am so much more than the Nightbringer now, Laia.” His voice is that flood below, all-consuming and treacherous.

Once again, I am shoved to one side of my own mind. I stare down the Nightbringer in all of his wrath. But I feel no fear, because Rehmat feels no fear.

“You,” the Nightbringer whispers, “have been hiding for a very long time. What are you? Speak!”

“I am your chains, Meherya. I am your end.” But Rehmat does not sound triumphant. It sounds anguished. It sounds broken.

The Nightbringer releases me. He takes a step back, a slow shock rolling over him. I expect Rehmat to use the moment to spirit us away. But it does not. Nor does it attack the Nightbringer. Instead, we stare together at the king of the jinn, and an unexpected emotion unfurls within Rehmat. One that makes me recoil in disgust.

Longing.

The Nightbringer appears as paralyzed as I am. “I know you,” he says. “I know you, but—”

Rehmat lifts my—our—hand, but we do not touch him. Not yet.

“I am your end,” Rehmat says. “But I was there at the beginning too, my love. When you were king alone, solitary and ever apart from our people. You went wandering near the sea one day, and you found a queen.”

I try to wrap my mind around what I am hearing, but it is too deep a betrayal for me to comprehend. This . . . thing living inside of me was a jinn? And not just any jinn, but their queen?

“Rehmat,” the Nightbringer says, the name a prayer and a curse at once. “You died. In the Duskan Sea battle—”

What the bleeding skies is happening? I scream in my mind at Rehmat.

It—or she—ignores me. But when she speaks again, it is in the manner that I’ve become accustomed to, as if she has finally remembered why she is here.

“I did not die,” she says. “I saw what was to come and I called on an old magic, blood magic. Lay down your scythe, Meherya. Stop this madness—”

But the Nightbringer flinches. “I was alone,” he whispers. “For a thousand years, I thought I was—” He shakes his head, and it is such a human gesture that I actually feel sorry for him. For in this moment, we have both been betrayed.

Damn you, Rehmat, I shout at her in my head. Get out of my mind.

Laia—

Get out! Her magic fades first, then her presence, and I am alone.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the Nightbringer, “I—I didn’t know—” Why am I telling him this? He will only use it against me. He might have loved me, but he hated himself as he did so, because his hatred for my people is the air he breathes.

An aroma of cedar and lemon fills my senses, and I return to a cellar miles to the north, where a red-haired boy I loved made me feel less alone. I have spent so long hating the Nightbringer that I never mourned who he used to be. Keenan, my first love, my friend, a boy who understood my loss so deeply because he had endured his own.