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Unlike what to do if someone has ingested water or is choking, I don’t know anything about how to help someone in this situation.

But I feel surprisingly calm – possibly from the particles of osimidite – and I get an idea. A simple, stupid one – so simple and stupid it might actually work.

Please sober up, I will him. I really need you to sober up, and wake up, so I can get you out of here.

I say the sentences a few times. But if my command is having an effect, it’s not immediate. Cosmer continues to lie there, pale and unresponsive.

I sigh. I didn’t think it would be that easy.

So I decide all I can do – all that is in my power to do – is move him away from here, so that at least he isn’t directly breathing in the thicker fumes surrounding the tank itself.

Carefully, I take his ankles and slide him towards me, so he slips off the tank. I drag him, flat on his back, across the tiled floor towards the archway. I only a manage a few steps before I’m panting, meaning I’m breathing in even more fumes I don’t want to be breathing in.

The heat in here swells. I’m dripping with sweat. I think being in here for too long would fry your brain even without the osimidite floating around.

Soon, I have to stop. He’s too heavy. All of the muscles in my back and shoulders are straining, jarring. And I can’t keep breathing so deeply in here. Who will come to get us – would even find us – if we both became comatose?

Drake, I suddenly think, with unbridled fury.

Drake knows Cosmer came down here. And he hasn’t thought to try to help me. He could get Cosmer’s body moved in ten seconds.

He could have even come down before Cosmer got to this point.

And to think he just proposed to me.

I’m so furious I crash cross-legged to the floor, my eyes fluttering back in their sockets.

I was able to find Old Mother’s mind, and I suppose Ephraine’s, by focusing on the thought of them, picturing where they might have been, and how they might have looked, at that exact moment in time. Homing in on the way they made me feel.

I do the same now for Drake.

He’ll be in his cabin, or just leaving it. He wouldn’t have tried entering my dream from anywhere else on the ship. He’s careful like that. He’ll be looking smug. I rejected his proposal, but he got to deliver me a blow – a wounding one.

And I know exactly what he looks like.

The image I get of him is perfect.

Then, how does he make me feel?

He makes me feel everything I can’t stand feeling. Twists me into a person that disgusts me. A version of myself that is by turns hateful, miserable, infuriated…

Powerful.

He does make me feel powerful. Sometimes.

The magic stays stagnant. It wants more from me.

Sympathy, I think. I do feel sympathy for him. I understand him, to an extent. And –

You know I disagree.

He’d been insinuating something when he said those words.

And maybe he’s right. There is something between us – I’d felt it the first time we met. But I still blame it on the magic we share more than anything else. Our connection is nothing like what I feel for Cosmer.

The magic flares. I suppose that’s what it wanted – my honesty – and I finally see Drake in my mind’s eye.

If he’d thought my world was an unexpectedly dark one, I find his unexpectedly bright.