Something about this dream tasted wrong, and it wasn’t the lava. Anna could breathe that as well as air, thanks to the jellyfish Jesse had jammed over her head before they dove in. She held a tentacle in each hand for steering. Another tentacle could be connected to Jesse’s jellyfish for communication. The rest were for propulsion, and she had to hand it to Jesse: they were moving along at an impressive speed.

At least, it felt like they were. She couldn’t actually see very much. Or anything at all.

The creature felt cool and slimy against her face, which, despite being a nice counterpoint to the raging heat of the volcano, was not an entirely pleasant sensation. It felt kind of like she’d sneezed all over herself and walked out into the December cold without cleaning up.

But with the jellyfish for protection, Anna could breathe. She could open her eyes underlava, not that there was much to see – it was mostly opaque, a dim, roiling orange swirled with yellow and brown, pressing so close to her face that it was all she could do not to panic. She couldn’t even see Jesse a foot away on her left (presuming he even was  still a foot away on her left).

He’d said the jellyfish on their heads were mates and would stick together. Anna would believe it when they surfaced on the island.

If  they surfaced on the island.

Because there was still that taste, a bitter, octane, coffee-ground kind of taste. Anna could almost feel the grit of it scraping around on her tongue as she chewed it, trying to get rid of the flavor, but these flavors didn’t work that way. They didn’t come from something she’d eaten or drank. They came from other people, and as long as those people were near, she could only do her best to ignore whatever flavor they brought with them, because it wouldn’t go away until they did.

The coffee/octane taste was the worst. It was the taste of nightmares. It meant that Jamus was near, or that one of his boggarts was. It didn’t make much difference whether the King of Nightmares had come himself or sent his minions after them. In the lava caves, she and Jesse didn’t stand a chance.

They should’ve gotten a submarine. That was their second mistake.

Their first mistake was, probably, leaving their Muses behind, although it had seemed like a golden opportunity at the time. Both their Muses had gotten to be serious wet blankets of late, Jesse’s deliberately attracting zombies at every turn and Anna’s mostly just turning everything into flowers. Her old Muse had been way better. She may have gotten Anna into trouble, but she also got her out of it. Unfortunately, Dad had mostly focused on the first part and had gotten Lila fired, so now Anna had Flo.

Dreamers weren’t supposed to wander the Myriad without a Muse, but (they’d figured) Asaph and Flo had  been protecting them by fighting off those zombies (or, in Flo’s case, turning them into hedges) while Jesse and Anna clambered down a manhole. And they did  have each other for protection now, so it wasn’t like they’d been totally  irresponsible…

But they hadn’t banked on meeting Jamus here.

Anna squeezed the jellyfish tentacle in her left hand and veered in the general direction of where she’d last seen Jesse. To her massive relief, her shoulder collided with his. She fumbled for the communication tentacle – there! – and guided it toward the matching port on Jesse’s jellyfish. Despite being made of biological material, the pieces snapped together as if magnetized.

“We should go back,” Anna thought.

Even though she hadn’t spoken aloud, the sound of the words hit her ears, crystalline. It wasn’t at all like hearing your voice on tape or through the cavity of your own skull. It sounded like music. Heavily auto-tuned music.

“Why?” asked Jesse. His voice, too, sounded like music, a sweet, pitch-perfect tenor sound that put Anna a little more at ease.

But now wasn’t the time to be at ease. She swallowed, her throat clicking with the dry, bitter bite of burnt coffee grounds. “Because I’m picking up the Jamus taste,” said Anna, “and there’s no way we can fight him down here.”

Jesse was silent. Contemplating.

“You aren’t seriously thinking about going on,” said Anna.

“He might not be here for us,” Jesse said hopefully.

“Oh, right, my bad,” said Anna. “He’s here for the other  Walkers who decided to go for a dip in the lava caves. Jesse, I don’t want to stay here. We can’t see, we can’t hear, and we know for a fact that the most dangerous guy in Myriad is somewhere in this neighborhood.”

“I didn’t get a zap from Asaph,” Jesse said. It was pretty obvious he knew how weak an argument it was; he just didn’t want to give up on his science experiment, now that they were finally shot of the Muses and sheer minutes from the fabled burning bush.

She got it. Jesse was stubborn. But he was also, usually, a bit smarter than this. “Asaph could’ve had his head chewed off by now,” Anna said brashly.

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” said Jesse, but he didn’t mean it. He liked Xanthic Asaph a lot; Anna could see the way Jesse looked up to the older, more powerful Cadant like the father he’d never had. Even if he was dead sick of Asaph’s petulant zombie dreams.

“Anyway,” said Anna. “We left them behind on purpose. I’m the only guardian angel you’ve got now, and I say we turn back.”

“Come on, Anna! The burning bush only blooms once every nine years! If we miss it, we’ll be halfway through our twenties before we get another chance.”

Anna sighed. “I guess it’s too much to ask that someone who made valedictorian for book smarts might have a little bit of street smarts, too.”

“I resent that,” said Jesse, who was on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout and had considerably more in the department of “street smarts” than Anna did.

“Resent away. I’m going back to shore. You coming with me, or are you leaving me to doggy paddle my way blindly to shore alone?”

It was Jesse’s turn to sigh. “Had to make it a matter of chivalry,” he muttered. “Look, I bet we’re closer to the island than we are to the shore. Hurry up and we can—”

Anna never got to hear what Jesse intended them to do, because just then, something grabbed her by the waist and wrenched her apart from him. The jellyfish gave a piercing electronic scream as it was pried from its mate.

Anna instantly lost all sense of orientation. Up, down, sideways, toward shore or toward the island – it was all the same to her, just a fiery palette smeared across her vision as her ears rang from the jellyfish’s scream and her brain rattled against her skull as the attacker dragged her through the lava.

She couldn’t scream; the jellyfish was pressed against her nose and mouth, hence the telepathy tentacle connecting her to Jesse. She couldn’t fight; it was like boxing underwater, if water had the consistency of cake batter.

She had only one weapon: the Cadence.

She squeezed her eyes shut, for all the difference it made, and reached for the river of power that flowed through her veins, through the veins of all who Walked the dream world as she and Jesse did. Her blood flowed warm and bright. Distantly, she heard a melody and reached for it—

The thing around her waist tore her free of the lava. The jellyfish became worse than useless, because now, instead of helping her breathe, it was smothering her. Anna wrestled to free herself of the creature, although she was afraid to let go of it in case she found herself in the lava again.

But she couldn’t use the Cadence without at least humming the notes, and she couldn’t make even so small a sound as that without taking a breath.

She tore the jellyfish off her head. Heat hit her face in a horrible wave; her tongue charred and cracked instantaneously. Anna croaked out the five-note shielding song. The heat lessened, but she still felt like she’d swallowed a desert.

“Anna!”

Jesse. He was alive. “I’m here!” she screamed. Her voice cracked.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Jesse demanded. His voice came from somewhere above and to the left. As he spoke, it swooped around behind her, plunging closer to the lava. Apparently he was being treated as delicately as she was – in other words, not at all.

“Light it up!” Jesse ordered.

Oh. Right.

Her bornsong – the one piece of magic she could simply do, without any effort at all – was to cast light. She reached with her heart toward the stars, and just like that, they were there: a blush of twinkling freckles across the cavernous heights. She pulled, and the light sucked toward her, intensifying.

What it showed her made her wish she’d left them in the dark.

A creature that could best be described as a kraken had her in one of its forty or so tentacles. Only the crown of its massive cranium breached the surface, but that was enough to strike terror in any mortal heart. It was like something from the endtimes, a horrible, black, reptilian iceberg with seven long, vertical eyes, the pupils just black specks in the center of each, and seven horns, the one in the middle black and twisted like the horn of a unicorn from hell. Three rows of spines ran down the back of the skull, along the neck, and out of sight under the lava.

“Douse it, Jesse!” Anna screamed.

“Trying,” said Jesse. “Not a lot of—oof.”

Jesse was cut off as the tentacle holding him jerked violently to the side. “Of water to work with down here,” he finished, now somehow several meters to her right. Still, Anna felt the air growing more humid, and she knew that Jesse’s bornsong must be working.

She just wished it would work faster.

Jesse’s bornsong was to attract water. He was learning to control it from there, but that part took training and prowess. Those songs had words. Anna understood there was only so much you could sing when you were being shaken in a manner that should never actually be applied to a Polaroid picture, much less a human being, but she wished (as the tentacle around her waist soared closer to the ceiling) that Jesse would hurry up. Now she swung forward, faster than before – so fast that the G-forces grabbed her cheeks and pulled them back from her teeth.

Suddenly the grip was gone from her waist. In another moment, Anna slammed face-first into the hard rock ground. She tasted blood. The knee and elbow she’d thrown out to catch herself exploded with pain. The ground carved striations into her flesh as she skidded to a halt.

“The Burning Bush is not for you,” said the kraken.

Anna had the wild impression she had just reached the voice mailbox of hell.

“Alphais alone may eat of its fruit, or select who is worthy to partake,” the kraken went on.

“Well, feces,” Jesse muttered, rolling gingerly to his back and sitting up. The side of his face was black with ash and bleeding where he’d slid along the ground.

“Go now.”

The lava pulled back from the kraken’s face, streaming between scales and dripping from spines. Anna couldn’t look away, even though the creature grew more horrifying with every inch revealed. Slashes gaped in its cheeks, showing bloody-red flesh inside, though they didn’t seem to be wounds – maybe gills? Then the mouth was showing, hundreds of teeth protruding from a maw that could have swallowed a Volkswagen. And the lava just kept pulling back, back, back….

Jesse figured out what was happening before Anna did. He grabbed her wrist and dragged her to her feet, ignoring her cry of pain as he yanked her elbow. His hand was cool, and a few drops of water splashed on her. She didn’t want to get up. She wanted Jesse to wrap her in his water-shield, to let her close her eyes and rest and be safe.

“It’s making a tsunami!” Jesse shouted. “Go, go, go!”

Anna forgot her self-pity and ran.

The tunnel was dark, but Anna’s stars followed them as Jesse navigated turn after turn with certainty. Her knee throbbed with every stride. Had she shattered the kneecap? No, she decided; if bones were actually broken, she definitely wouldn’t be running on that leg.

The tsunami of lava broke and crashed behind them, its dim, fiery light casting their long, gray shadows out before their feet as it rolled forward on their heels. Broken or not, this was a terrible time for her to have a knee injury. Anna pushed her stamina to its limits, but the lava was gaining ground.

“We have to,” Jesse panted, “get out of here.”

“Can we go – back up – the manhole?”

“I’d prefer to – find another one – but it may be – our only choice.” They careened around a corner and Jesse skidded to a stop. Anna collided with him.

“Feces,” said Jesse.

It was a dead end.

Anna’s heart went from pounding to dead stopped. “I thought you knew where we were!”

“I thought so too,” Jesse said.

“What do we do? Go back and take a different turn somewhere?”

Jesse shook his head. “We don’t have time. Go to the farthest corner and furrow. I’ll hold it off until you’re safe, and then I’ll follow you.”

Another dreamer might have insisted they weren’t going to leave him behind, but Anna knew him too well to argue. They’d shared enough dreams by now. Trying to talk Jesse out of chivalry would just waste time and put them both in more danger. She trusted him: if Jesse thought he could hold off the lava long enough for both of them to get out safely, then he could.

But she wouldn’t make him do it a second longer than necessary.

She gave his arm a squeeze. “Don’t die,” said Anna. “Or I’ll kill you.”

Her hand came away dripping wet: Jesse had collected a pretty thick membrane of water around himself, and it was growing faster now as he gave it all his focus. Anna retreated to the back of the tunnel and prepared to furrow. She had to shut her eyes; watching Jesse grow his shield was too fascinating. He was spinning it like a globe with himself as the axis, just like he’d been doing when they first met. The globe grew and grew, filling the tunnel’s ingress…

Anna looked away and pictured someplace else. Mes’Ella – the Table of the Stars: it was a place she and Jesse had spent many days and nights, Anna playing with the stars or the sunset, Jesse toying with the waves at the foot of the cliff or stirring up a distant rainstorm. It was familiar enough to make the spell easy.

Well, easier. Furrowing was never easy, except for experienced Cadants like the Muses and Dad, but she’d been practicing hard, and she felt almost ready.

Almost was going to have to be good enough. This was an emergency.

She heard lava crash against Jesse’s waterwall and he grunted. Steam hissed from the collision. Anna opened her eyes as she sustained the last note of the song, but there was nothing to see now. The scene had blurred into a dim brown-and-yellow tunnel, lines receding to a moonlit endpoint. Anna’s raised foot came down in the tunnel and she was gone.

Two moons rose over the dreamscape, snowing lavender lightdrops on the bending grass as it prickled Anna’s knees. The purple snow gathered, glowing, in the folds of her shirt and the pale curls of her hair; it traced the contours of night lilies and dimpled the surface of a far-off pond with its bright flakes. It left cool, iridescent kiss marks on her skin. It made her feel perfect and clean.

It wasn’t Mes’Ella, though.

She had allowed concern for Jesse to distract her and wound up in the wrong place. Would he still be able to follow her? Would the furrow trace to the place she’d meant to go, or the place she’d actually gone?

She bet Jesse would like this place. Shining freckles dotted her skin, spreading slowly into a bright stain. It was different enough from zombies that it might provide some inspiration for his project in the waking world.

But as seconds passed, and then minutes, Anna finally had to accept that she was alone here. Either Jesse had gone to Mes’Ella, or he’d been killed by the lava wave. There was no way to check. She didn’t have the strength for another furrow right away, and though her cell phone lived in her pocket even in the dream world, it rarely worked here.

“Blighted sun!” Anna cursed, kicking at the snow and thus reminding herself that she’d pretty seriously hurt her knee back there. The powder shimmered on the air and clung to her leg, making it glow. Oddly enough, the pain lessened…

Could this snow have healing properties?

She dipped a hand into a mound of the alien snow and it came out incandescent silver, the cuts and scrapes of her last dream erased. Now Anna grabbed handfuls of the stuff, spreading the light across her body and feeling the pain go out of her knee and elbow with gratitude. If she’d had to botch the song, at least she’d wound up somewhere safe and beautiful.

Down on the water, something moved. Anna dropped a handful of snow and squinted into the shimmering distance, but she didn’t need to see the figure’s white dress, or the silver circlet on her night-river hair, to know that The Woman had returned. She could feel the knowledge zipping along the hairs on her arms; she could taste it, honey-sweet and warm, on her tongue. It was always like this when the woman appeared.

Anna averted her eyes quickly, heart an electric bird in the cage of her ribs, the lava caves all but forgotten. This was where the dream usually shattered. She held it like a spiderweb, like a dark treeline against a dark sky that could only be seen by looking at something else.

Anna moved through the grass and snow, pretending not to notice the woman. If she made it seem like an accident, maybe the dream would let her get closer. Her bare feet didn’t mind; the light-snow didn’t bite like true snow, but swirled around her ankles like shallows lapping the beach.

She lifted her face to the sky, spread her arms and turned in slow circles. She lay down and the snow embraced her like a mother. She rolled down a hill of the gathering light – faster, faster, brighter, brighter – until she came to dizzy rest at the water’s edge.

Her landing knocked the wind out of her and sent a sparkling poof into the air. Anna’s eyes followed the cloud anxiously as it dispersed over the water: wanting to look, not wanting to look. She didn’t notice that she’d stopped breathing. In a moment, her gaze would land on the woman. In a moment she’d see her face.

It was the closest she’d ever come. Would she have a chance to say something before the dream dissolved? She panicked then – what would she say? She had spent so long just trying to make contact that, now it was happening, she had no idea what to do next.

The surface of the pond was bare, still but for the bright kiss marks that patterned its surface like television static.

Nearby, a dove made a great flapping show of taking flight.

Anna’s chest was hollow.

She lay down in the bright, cold snow. It embraced her like a straitjacket. The two moons stopped in their tracks, turned around, and went home.

The dreamscape went dark.

Savannah Jane Quinn awoke with her face pressed into a damp circle on her pillow. Without shifting her body at all, she carefully pressed her knuckles into her eyes until the tears were gone. She shifted the pillow a fraction of an inch, barely lifting her head. The less she moved, the more likely she could slip back into the same dream like she’d never left. Maybe the woman would still be there. Maybe she hadn’t left, but simply moved out of sight while Anna played in the snow.

Maybe.

Anna dropped her head back onto the cool, dry portion of the pillow and sank back into sleep.

Two moons rose over the dreamscape, snowing lightdrops on the tall grass. Purple snow gathered in folds and curls; it dimpled a far-off pond. It left cool, iridescent kisses on Anna’s skin. Something – no, someone – was missing, and she ached with longing, burned with frustration, hollowed out with fear she couldn’t explain…

Down on the water, something moved. There was no telltale electric prickle up her arms, no warm, sweet flavor on her tongue, but she didn’t need to feel or taste to know that the woman had returned.

Anna averted her eyes, pretending not to notice. She would make it seem like an accident. She spread her arms and turned in slow circles as the snow made her incandescent. She lay down, and it embraced her like a mother. She rolled down a hill of gathering light until she came to rest at the water’s edge.

The surface of the pond was television static. She heard a lone dove flap its wings but never saw it take flight. The cold, bright snow embraced her like a straitjacket. Anna looked to the sky, knowing how the dream would end before it did. The moons were already gone.

Two moons snowed lightdrops on the grass. It dimpled a pond. It kissed Anna’s skin.

On the water, something moved. Anna pretended not to notice. She spread her arms and became incandescent. The snow was her mother. She rolled to the water’s edge.

Static. The sound of wings. The snow weighed a million pounds under the dark, moonless sky.

Two moons snowed light on a pond. Something moved. Anna sprinted into the shimmering distance before her quarry could vanish, but she was too late; the woman in white was gone.

Next Chapter: New Chapter