How long I wandered, I couldn't say. Time had no meaning here. The whispers grew louder, then softer, sometimes forming words I almost understood before dissolving back into meaningless sound.
Then, as if it rose up to meet me, I was suddenly standing on solid ground, though I couldn't see it through the dense, dark fog that covered my boots and rolled along the surface. I took off running, shouting for my crew, for Kora, for anyone. Click was nowhere to be seen, and I wondered in horror if he'd been left behind. Maybe they were all gone. Maybe it was just me here. I didn't know if that was worse or better.
"Juno!" A voice called through the fog, faint but unmistakably Cypher's.
"Here!" I shouted back, sounding muffled. "I'm over here!"
I spun in place, trying to determine which direction the voice had come from. Sound behaved strangely in this place, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Then I saw it—a pinpoint of blue-white light cutting through the darkness, growing larger as it approached. The familiar glow of an anchor crystal.
"Cypher?" I called again, moving toward the light.
He materialized from the fog, anchor crystal held high in one hand, his other gripping the hilt of his sword. Relief flashed across his face when he saw me. "You did it," he said, closing the distance between us. "You brought us back to the First Dark."
I blinked at him. "I didn't mean to?—"
"Intentional or not, we're here." His eyes scanned our surroundings, though there was little to see beyond the small sphere of light cast by his crystal. "We can find the Engine now."
"The others," I said, head on a sudden swivel. "Kora, everyone—where are they?"
"Scattered, most likely. The transition was chaotic." He gestured to the darkness around us. "First, we need to locate the crew. Then we can search for the Engine."
A terrible thought struck me. "What about Pike? His men? Did I bring them through too?"
Cypher's expression darkened. "Possibly. Anyone within range of your power when it manifested could have been pulled through."
"If he’s here, he'll be looking for the Engine too."
"It won't work for him even if he finds it first," Cypher said with absolute certainty. "The Engine responds only to those touched by the First Dark. To anyone else, it's just a pretty crystal."
I wasn't comforted. "But he could still take it, hide it, destroy it?—"
"We'll find it first," Cypher said firmly, raising the anchor crystal higher, illuminating more of our surroundings. The light caught my face, and his eyes hardened into something dangerous. "You're still bleeding," he said, reaching toward the cut on my cheek.
I slapped his hand away, stepping back. The concern in his eyes might have once moved me, but now it felt like another manipulation. "Don't," I warned. "Don't touch me."
His hand dropped to his side, but his eyes remained fixed on my injury. "It needs attention."
"What Ineed," I spat, "is for you to explain what that was back on the ship. That dark magic. Those shadows. Why is this the first time I'm seeing it? If you had that power all along, why didn't you use it before? Against the krell and the scathers? Against the Assembly guards? Why keep it a secret?"
Cypher's face went carefully blank, a mask I recognized all too well. He was weighing his words, calculating how much to reveal—probably preparing another half-truth designed to placate me.
"And don't bother lying to me. There's nothing you could possibly say that would make this any worse for you. I don't trust you, but I'mreallyhoping you aren't as much of a bastard as you're trying to make me believe you are."
He looked at me in silence for a long moment, and I wondered if he was actually planning on lying to me, or if for once, he might respect me enough to hear the truth.
"I told you I escaped the collapse of Nytheris," he said. Every word sounded strained. "I told you I was found by a wayfarer captain who raised me. That I was one of the lucky ones." He shook his head slowly, running a palm over his face in utter exhaustion. "I lied. Not about all of it. But I didn't tell you the whole truth."
A chill skittered across my skin. "Cypher?—"
"The Assembly was waiting for us at the evacuation portals the day Nytheris collapsed. They knew the realm was falling long before it happened. They knew we would be vulnerable, panicked, easy to corral. So they rounded us up—me, my mother, and over three hundred others who had managed to claw their way to the gates. My sister was lost already. They told us we were being taken to a waypoint. A processing centerfor refugees, promising us we could seek asylum in the Prime Realm."
He looked at me then, and the emptiness in his eyes terrified me more than the krell, more than the Gideon Pike, more than anything I’d faced in the Gallery yet. This was a broken man.
"They took us to the Dredge."
My heart sank as memories of that horrible place flitted through my head. I'd been there for several hours to speak to my father and that was enough for a lifetime. But I didn't understand. Why would the Assembly take them to the Dredge of all places?
"Ten years. I spent ten years in that fucking pit. I grew up in that darkness. They kept us in the lowest levels, down where the hull plating was so thin you could hear the void on the other side. They wanted to see what would happen to Nytherian soul magic when exposed to the Deep Gallery for long enough. We were an experiment. They collared us with dampening iron to suppress our magic and fed us tonics that kept us docile. And when the tonics didn't work, they used their air batons. They beat the defiance out of us until we were just meat waiting to expire."