Dedicated to Dreams of Drem Remi of Em 
for being the best fake cousin ever

Below the hum of the grandfather whisper, footfalls still sound the way we came. A quick look passes between the three of us, and we scramble to the hole, dropping into the revealed tunnel. The last one in, Idyne grabs the door on her way, submerging us into inky black.

"Do you think they'll find us?" Jacin whispers.

Idyne pulls out a glowing charm. The half-light and close walls feel so much like the High Valley caves I grew up in, the déja vu is nearly overwhelming.

"I don't know."

We pick our way through the unnaturally straight tunnel. It's like we're spiders, skittering about, hiding from those who roam freely on the surface. None of us speak anymore, as though afraid someone could hear us through a hundred pounds of rock and soil.

We walk for hours with no end of the blackness in sight. I begin to wonder if this actually leads anywhere, if we're going to reach a dead end or wander for days, the grandfather voice having failed me. But this is man-made; surely it can't go on forever.

Just as I'm starting to doubt that logic, we reach a dead end. A single, well-fitted door sits so flush with the wall that it shows only a thin seam in the rock. I gesture for Idyne to put her charm away, and she obliges. After my eyes overcome the shock of the dark, I press against the door. When it doesn't budge, I dig into the crack to pull it instead.

It swings in easily, revealing the back of a tapestry, which I push aside. The bright torchlight of a stone hallway assaults my eyes. Before I can get my bearings, a man calls out, and rough hands grab my arms. My head flicks from side to side, revealing two armed men in shirts of jangling chain. One of them jerks me to the side, and I stumble.

They shout something at me in Aster's language, and my frantic brain struggles to process what's happening. The one holding me turns to his partner, and a short exchange passes between them. They nod.

The man's hands tighten on my arms while the other searches me, patting down my boots and legs.

"Hey!" I call.

He ignores me, working with the other man to strip off my backpack. The one holding me slings it on and regains his grip on my arms, forcing me in front of him. As he drags me down the hall, I twist in his grip.

He shakes me, leaning down to growl some warning in my ear. It's like a mountain bearing over me.

"I haven't done anything wrong," I say in Avadelian, but stop struggling. He marches me through grand stone halls with silver-capped walls and vivid mural ceilings. Alternating sconces provide light from torches and white crystals that glow with a wispy illumination. Words in the magic language echo all around me, like a chorus of whispering wizards. My eyes dart left and right, but I can't place the sources. Disoriented, I try to keep track of the soldier's turns through the labyrinthine halls, but I'm like a blind rat dropped in a maze.

The soldier takes me down stairs and into an antechamber. A few words pass between him and the two people waiting there, and a woman sprays green powder at a great door. "Et væ!"

She pushes her hands away from herself, and the door swings inward, revealing darkness beyond. My brow draws together.

The other man in the antechamber stands, a set of keys jangling from his belt, and enters the dark room. Torchlight flickers into existence as he lights it, and in the light gleams the iron of rows and rows of cell bars.

I step back and run smack into my soldier's chest. He prods me forward, and I twist wildly. "I haven't done anything! You can't lock me up!"

The soldier holding me barks something, and the other one comes to help grab me. His hand clamps hard on my arm.

"Please!" I try to meet the woman's eye. "Don't you speak any Avadelian? I came here with Prince Aster. Please!"

She sneers, looking away. "Kadra."

Together, the guards force me into the prison and march me down the hall. All the cells are empty but one. I search for that man's gaze, desperate for a shred of compassion, for a shared piece of humanity. The torchlight throws shadows over his face, though, and he simply turns away from me.

We keep marching. I go limp, hoping to break their grip, but they just lift me up, holding me tighter. One unlocks a cell, and the other's rough hands push me onto a stone floor scattered with straw. The cell door clangs shut.

I shove to my feet and rush to the bars. "I'm with the prince!"

Receding torchlight is the only response until the door slams shut and cloaks the world in darkness.

I stopped being scared of the dark a long time ago, though.

I relax my clenched fingers' grip on the metal bars, take a deep breath, and examine my cell via touch. The walls are dry but coated in grit. Stone extends a couple feet from the back wall—a bench, presumably—with a thin, scratchy blanket spread atop it. In the quiet, the faint sound of running water reigns, and I trace it to a fist-sized hole in the corner of my cell. Waste disposal.

Faint hope grows. This isn't some random stream running through a stone building, which means the Morineause really do have running water, just like Jacin said. In their prison, no less. Anyone that technologically advanced can't be savages. No matter how their soldiers treated me, these people won't be the barbarian Traders who tricked me and Sean into leaving our home in the High Valleys. These people will have laws, morals, ethics, which means they can't leave me in here forever.

For some reason, that assurance leaves me cold. Worried fingers play with the necklace my father gave me.

It'll protect you, he said when he passed the heirloom down. A mirthless laugh escapes my lips. "Maybe Mom was right to tell you not to fill my head with superstitions and fantasies, Dad. They don't seem to have done me a lot of good."

Tendrils of homesickness creep around my heart, and I force them away. The time for feeling sorry for myself passed long ago. I need to figure out what my next step is.

Even if I could break out of this cell, bust past the giant dungeon door, and evade the waiting men, I'd be completely and totally lost. My lips twist, and I pull my hair up as I think. So what are my other options?

A sinking feeling hits my gut. I could wait to talk to whoever comes to get my side of the story, but the men who captured me obviously don't speak any language I know. Aster speaks Avadelian, which I'm fairly proficient in now, but there's no guarantee the rest of his people do.

Which means once more, I'm going to be stuck in a foreign land with no way to communicate. The idea throws me back into the grueling months with the Traders and dread curls in my stomach. I won't go back to that. I won't.

Ever since Sean and I fled Karsix, the world has thrown us one wild challenge after another. I'd give almost anything to be somewhere safe and settled right now, somewhere where I was known and understood. Yet Sean, the only person who really knew and understood me, I simply let leave—told to leave. I wince. Rash and illogical. That's what I am. That's what landed me here, and that's what drove him away. Whatever trouble we get into, we shouldn't be facing it alone. Head falling into my hands, I sink onto the bench.

Silver flashes but dissolves into the inky anti-world that gripped me after stepping through the portal. Terror spikes just before a new reality flashes into view, and I'm falling, struggling to take in a dirt road, snow-covered fields, farmhouses, and a dusty, weary figure wearing a backpack and a trenchcoat...

I hit the ground, failing to make sense of what I'm seeing.

The traveler's face contorts in shock. "Leavi?" Sean's worried voice warms skin that's suddenly freezing. His lanky frame hurries toward me.

Everything dissolves again, through the black nothingness, and then I'm falling a second time. I call out as I slam into cold stone, gasping for breath and a shred of understanding.

Slowly, I take in my surroundings. Darkness, but nothing so dark as the anti-world. Strands of straw under my fingers and water trickling in the quiet.

My breath levels out. I'm back in the prison cell.

As I push up, my mind becomes a system of gears churning, sparks and smoke flying while I calculate. What the blazes just happened? No matter how it makes my brain want to short-circuit, only one response comes to me.

I teleported.

Not just when I went through Idyne's portal earlier, but somehow, just now, I was there wherever Sean was in Draó. And not a moment later, I was back here. There's too much physical evidence to doubt—the cold, the dust, the bruises from where I fell to the ground there and here. That wasn't my imagination.

But my imagination doesn't have much in the way of answers either. Strange voices in my head and traveling over immeasurable space for no discernable reason—those are not things I'm trained to account for.

If I want answers, I'm going to need a cool head and the words to ask my questions. Words I still don't have.

Beneath the dread of being mute, a memory sparks, and I dig through my pockets. Please, please be there. It might have been in the satchel the guards confiscated, but since they didn't take anything off my person, maybe, just maybe I still have it...

Smooth wood greets my fingers, and I gently pull the bead bracelet out of my pocket. Instantly, a childish whisper, just like the voice of Idyne's portal, fills my head with babbled words. In the bracelet's center, colorful lights swirl in a glass bead, glowing as faintly as tiny fireflies on a moonless night. The fear of having lost it drains to be replaced by a different kind of apprehension.

Idyne told me of the magic she'd stored in this bracelet for me. According to her, after I put this on and overcome its initial side-effects, I should be able to speak Morineause.

Yet I hesitate to wear it. I almost got myself killed last time I played with magic, and while Idyne said using this would be different, I don't know how much.

There's also the side-effects to consider. If Idyne's right, once I put this on I won't be able to speak in any sort of intelligible language for an unknown amount of time. That means someone could return in the meantime—someone who, by luck of the skies above, might actually know Avadelian—and I wouldn't be able to talk to them.

I pull in a deep breath. Everything since escaping the plague in Karsix has been a gamble. Life is a roll of the dice with no way to know what the results could have been if you'd just shaken the cup for a second longer. You throw the dice, you read the numbers, throw them again, and hope you get a better result next time. The only other option is not playing the game at all.

I stare at the bracelet. Its lazily swirling lights taunt me.

I slip it on.