A chill went up Sarai’s spine that had nothing to do with the ice. This might have been a scene from Nova’s youth, and this place might be her provenance, but when she spoke that threat, her eyes weren’t young at all. Everything was in them: all her years of seeking and failing and believing—believing what? That she would save her sister, when there wasn’t even a wisp of hope to grasp at, let alone a strand to hang on to and follow into the dark. Belief like that, that hasn’t tasted any real hope in centuries, but has been fed and nurtured on darker things—loneliness, desperation—it doesn’t simply subside when faced with its own end. It doesn’t accept or adapt. It exists in spite of reason, and will only ever defy it.

Kora was dead.

The truth would destroy Nova. Somewhere, her mind had built a blur around it, like the one Sarai had encountered in Minya’s mind. But the truth has a way of seeping out. The mind can’t erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone.

It struck Sarai that Nova’s belief was like this ice: It was fragile, it was thin, and it was all that was keeping her from plunging into her own black depths. A spark of panic chased the chill up Sarai’s spine. All of their lives rested on this ice, and it would not hold.

Nova was a half step in any direction from madness. Sarai could feel it in every crack of the ice, and in the pull of the black water, almost as though the sea were calling out to her by name.

Urgently, she fed her own will into the dream, refreezing the ice, strengthening it, and settling it, as though by doing so she could strengthen and settle what was breaking apart inside Nova. If only she could. Her mother could have, but wouldn’t have.

What could Sarai do? She had an arsenal of nightmares. If she wanted to hasten Nova’s madness, she was well equipped. But she didn’t want to be the Muse of Nightmares anymore. Who did she want to be? She remembered Lazlo telling her, before she went for the second time into Minya’s dreams, “You’re not trying to defeat her. Remember that. You’re trying to help her defeat her nightmare.”

But how could you defeat a nightmare that was only and simply the truth?

“I wouldn’t try to stop you,” she said to Nova, trying to keep her voice calm even as the ice fragmented under her. Thinking back to Minya’s dream reminded her how futile it was to try to alter the pattern, when fear had carved so deep a path. She would have to try something else. She wished Lazlo were here to help her. What would he do? she wondered, and as soon as she did, the answer came to her, and the dream wavered and changed. The whole bleak ice landscape vanished, and she and Nova were standing instead in the amphitheater of Weep.

No, not Weep, and not as Sarai had seen it last, full of ghosts and warriors. This was Dreamer’s Weep, a place built of stories and longing and wonder, to be found only in Lazlo’s mind—and hers. Always before, he had made it for her. This time she’d gotten here on her own.

“Where are we?” demanded Nova. She wasn’t wearing her cold-weather gear now, but her oil-black skin with its armored plates.

“A safe place,” said Sarai. That was the answer that had come to her. That was what Lazlo would do—had done, time and again. The library, the riverbank, her father’s house, and, above all, Dreamer’s Weep with its wingsmiths and tea stalls and wonders. He had brought her somewhere safe.

“There are no safe places,” scoffed Nova, and Sarai felt the ground give under her feet, and realized, with a sinking sensation, that they hadn’t left the ice behind. “If you haven’t learned that yet, you will.”

That was the lesson of Nova’s long life: that there were no safe places. Or perhaps, Sarai thought, there was one. She shifted the dream again.

Surely mesarthium floors were stronger than ice. She brought Nova home—to her own home, that is, which Nova had stolen—to the very room they were actually in.

In reality, Nova was asleep in Minya’s chair and Sarai was lightly touching the back of her neck. In the dream, they were standing under one of the arches, looking out into the garden. There were no huge white stalks, no low gray mist. A sun was rising in the distance. What sun, what world, it didn’t even matter. They couldn’t see the ground from here, but only plum trees against the balustrade, and clouds like spun sugar. “Is this better?” she asked Nova.

“It’s only as safe as the one who controls it,” said Nova, but the metal was firm underneath their feet, and Sarai thought that was something.

“That’s true,” she acknowledged. Skathis had used the citadel to set himself up as a monstrous god. Lazlo would have...

She swallowed hard. Lazlo would have and would still make it a safe place, and not just for them but for others who needed it. “People,” she said. “People are our safe places. I have one: a person who’s a home and a world to me.” Her eyes welled with tears. “And I can’t imagine losing him, as I know you can’t imagine losing Kora.”

“I won’t lose her,” said Nova, defiant, and Sarai caught a flash of anguish in her eyes, and something else: She tasted blood. It was in the aura of the dream, and it carried with it an undertone like a hum that went too late, too late. Nova was biting down on the inside of her cheek, and Sarai began to understand, in some small way, the effort it was costing her, every second, to maintain her denial.

“Tell me about her,” she urged, to keep her talking—as though it could keep her from doing anything else, like waking up or shattering into a million pieces. “What was she like?” As soon as the past tense slipped out of her mouth, she tensed and added hastily, “Before, I mean.”

Nova was on the edge, but she let the slip pass. “Before” made sense to her in a profound way. Before Skathis, before blue skin, before they were torn apart. “She was Kora,” she answered, as though everything was in the word, and, in the way of dreams, everything was.

Nova gave Kora to Sarai in the same way that Lazlo had given her cake and expanded the boundaries of pleasure: through this medium of joined minds that was Sarai’s gift. Memories washed over her. She saw two motherless girls in a barren world who were more real to each other than reflections in a mirror. Indeed, they had no mirrors where they came from, and each imagined the other’s face as her own. Sarai felt what it had meant to be half of a whole, and to trust in a voice that would never fail to answer. The memories sank into her.

She learned the stench of uuls and the sting of Skoyë’s slap, and she saw the glint of a ship in the sky and understood what it meant. She saw Skathis when he was just a minor imperial officer in the home world he would later leave in anarchy and chaos. And...

She saw Wraith emerge from Kora’s chest.

It startled her. Eril-Fane had said that Wraith came out of Kora, but Sarai hadn’t been able to imagine it. The bird was so big it hardly seemed possible that it could come out of so slight a girl, and even less so that it could return, but it did. It poured out of her chest like a ghost, and melted back in like a soul returning to its body.

It wasn’t a ghost. They’d always known that. It was more like Sarai’s own moths had been. “Korako’s gift was always a mystery to

us,” she told Nova. “I never knew it was like mine.”

Nova looked at her sharply. “You’re an astral?”

“A what?” Apologetic, Sarai explained, “No one ever taught us about our gifts. We were all alone here.”

“No one ever taught me, either,” said Nova, and she didn’t need to add that she’d been all alone, too. “Astral means ‘of the stars.’ It’s someone who can send their soul out of their body.”

Of the stars. Sarai liked that. She wanted to tell Lazlo. “Mine was moths,” she said. “A hundred of them.” Wrinkling up her nose, she added, “They flew out of my mouth.”

Nova’s eyes went wide, and Sarai had to smile. “I know it sounds terrible,” she said, “but it wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t?” asked Nova, noting the tense.

Slowly, Sarai nodded. For a moment she indulged herself in imagining a future in which she would meet new people and have to decide if and when to tell them, By the way, I’m not exactly alive. To Nova, she said simply, “I died, and my gift changed. I suppose I’m not an astral anymore. I’m not sure what I am now,” she admitted. “Besides a ghost.”

Nova looked at her as though it finally made sense, how Sarai had been able to turn into smoke, and all the rest of it. “You’re a ghost,” she said.

Sarai nodded. She kept thinking of Wraith melting in Kora’s chest. She remembered the burgeoning sensation in her own every night just after sunset. Astral, she thought with amazement. There was a name for it, because there were more of them—more god-spawn like her, and Kora had been one of them.

A wild thought took hold of her.

Abruptly, without leaving the dream, she shifted part of her awareness back to reality. With her moths, it had been seamless, shifting among the hundred of them with the mad choreography of a flock of swifts. She hadn’t tried splitting her attention since she’d lost them. It made for a strange twinning: the real room and the dream room, both at the same time. Nova was still cradling her head on one arm, and Wraith was still there, perched on her chairback, watching Sarai’s every move.

Sarai stared into the bird’s eyes and murmured, thoughtful, “Why are you still here?”

Words came back to her from her own earlier musing: A shred, an echo. Both of those sounded haphazard, but could it really be chance, that the bird remained?

A dying wish, that was more intriguing.

A message in a bottle, she thought, and it lit up her mind like the moment the setting sun touches the sea. Was she mad or brilliant? There was one way to find out. Did she dare? Was it possible? She was a ghost and Wraith was a...a left-behind piece of a soul? Who knew what arcane rules governed the likes of them. Holding the bird’s gaze, Sarai put her hand to her own chest, in the same spot where she had seen it melt into Kora’s, and she tapped her breastbone in invitation.