Ellery threw open the door and yelped as she tripped on the crumpled curtain. Her arms flailed out for balance until she fell and caught herself on the floor—only a foot from where Domenic was still crouched, like a soldier in trench warfare.
They locked eyes, then burst into simultaneous, hysterical laughter.
“It looks like you tried to clean with a bomb.”
“Believe it or not, this is…” He gasped for breath, tipping dramatically onto his side. “This is actually an improvement.”
“Is it? There’s barely any decorations in here. It looks like a guest room.”
“Itwasa guest room. I just never bothered to gussy it up.” Surveying it, he spotted his discarded Enchantment Theory III textbook lying beneath where the dresser had once stood. “Well, what do you know? I’ve been looking for this! You think I’ll still need it?”
This only made Ellery laugh harder, a real laugh, like the one he’d heard at Mercester Square. She, too, tipped over and rolled onto her back—eight, maybe ten inches away from him. “This is… This is real, isn’t it? It’s really us.”
“It’s really us.”
“Alderland’s saviors.”
“The Chosen Ones.”
“It’s up to us to stop the cataclysm. Us!”
They continued cracking up on the floor for what might’ve been a minute or might’ve been an hour. Time had gone sludgy, like the leftover grounds at the bottom of that seventh mug ofcoffee. Valmordion’s heat simmered deep in Domenic’s center, and he kept picturing himself like a planet. Like if you peeled back his layers, the crust of his skin then the mantle and flesh or however the order went, you’d find the exploding magma of his core. Power of the most incredible, unfathomable sort.
“Do you think we actually can stop it?” Ellery murmured. “Whatever grand feat of magic it asks of us, you really think we can pull it off?”
She looked so strange in Valmordion’s filter. Not strange in a bad way—definitely not in a bad way—but like whatever vibrancy Valmordion lacquered over the world didn’t apply to her. She was all contrasts. Light glinted off the planes of her face, and iridescence limned the frizzed waves of her hair. Shadows laced down the slopes of her neck, her cheeks, her mouth. Shadows that he swore moved as he stared at them, hypnotic as the eye of a storm.
She looked like a fixed point. Like it was impossible not to notice her.
“Yeah. I think we can,” he answered truthfully.
Ellery smiled, and so did he. Her eyes were glassy, and so were his. Their worlds were reorienting in indescribable, terrifying ways, two stars colliding, yet he was no longer the least bit sorry about it.
He felt compelled to touch her.
He inched his hand forward until his knuckles skimmed hers. Much like when they’d hugged in the Barren, an electrifying rush swept over him as if he’d been doused in ice water. Reflexively, he wrenched away, and the two of them sat up and scrabbled back, panting and gaping at each other. His every hair stood on end. His magic shivered down to that exploding magma core. And despite the past two-or-singular day, despite everything, he was suddenly wide awake.
“I, um…” Domenic said, because he felt the need to say something. Ellery’s cheeks blazed pink.
Downstairs, the back door slammed open. Footsteps clobbered through the kitchen.
“Dom!” Hanna yelled. “Dom, are you here?”
Domenic’s mood crash-landed like a meteor.
“Oh, shit.” He scrambled up and rushed downstairs, where Hanna had already reached the foyer. “Hey.”
“Hey?Dom, from the bottom of my heart, what thefuck? Why didn’t you show at the Council meeting? I’ve been everywhere—at the Gardens, every movie theater uptown, driving around in an NDC vehicle because I’ve been so panicked I—I lost my car. And Iseul, she’s beside herself. She even went to Peak, asking how you were behaving on the train home, if—”
“Woah,” he said. “Take a breath. I’m fine.”
Yet Hanna uttered a noise between a growl and a scream. “I should’ve known leaving you here was a bad idea. This isn’t class, Dom. You can’t just flake on a Council meeting—”
“I didn’tflake.”
“Well, you look like shit, so you sure as hell weren’t sleeping. So what were you—” Hanna cut off, sighting Ellery, who stood by the banister. She’d tucked Iskarius’s sheath beneath her sweater.
Hanna threw up her hands and stalked across the ground floor. “There it goes!”
