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“Yes?” she answered.

In her periphery, she saw the smaller objects in her room begin to rise and float, her scattered clothing and her “Number One Flyer” trophy.Advertisement

“I love you,” her brother’s voice echoed, sounding now as if it were emanating from the bottom of a deep well.

The words sent a sharp pang through her, and turning the knob, Isobel ripped open the door again.

Her brother was gone, though.

In his place waited windowless stone walls, a winding spiral staircase, and far below, a bottomless well of pure darkness.

27

Amid the Mimic Rout

There was no banister. No railing. Only the looping ribbon of stairs and, at their center, the abyss.

With one guarded step, Isobel crossed out of the reality she knew into the realm she dreaded. Placing a hand to the cold stone wall to ground herself, she peered up—and found an exact replica of the descending view.

An upside-down flight of steps, like the coiling underbelly of a serpent, wound up and away forever.

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Fighting a wave of vertigo along with the sense that she’d somehow been transported into an optical illusion, Isobel turned to face her room again. Her door had vanished, though, and as she stared into the grooves and cracks of the stone surface, nausea crept over her.

Swallowing, she concentrated on the solidness of the step beneath her, the sense of gravity pulling her down, holding her in place.

While she thought she could move if she didn’t peer over the edge of the stairs again, she doubted she could bring herself to climb any higher than she already was. So, shifting, legs shaking, she angled herself toward the descending path. Not willing to risk losing her equilibrium a second time, she kept her focus on where the steps anchored into the wall.

Down and around, down and around. Down, down, and down.

The farther Isobel went, the deeper the black helix seemed to wind, making her wonder if she could be venturing underground.

She considered stopping to alter her surroundings, to open a wall or create another door. But would that only lead her away from what she sought? Who she sought?

Isobel thought of Varen’s name over and over. She pictured his face. The stairwell didn’t change, though. No doors appeared. And yet each time Isobel completed a revolution—or assumed she’d completed one—she kept expecting to encounter an archway or a window. Something.

But there was only rough stone, mortar, and more stairs.

Halting, she pressed her spine flush to the wall. She flicked her eyes to the inverted set of steps above and wondered why her thoughts weren’t working.

Every time before, when the images in her mind had been clear, when she hadn’t been battling distractions like the Nocs or Reynolds, the dreamworld had, in some form or another, always presented her with a pathway.

But even when she’d entered the dreamworld through the veil earlier that day, her thoughts, she reminded herself, had failed to take her directly to Varen. Instead they’d led her to the cluttered attic, which housed the remnants of the Varen she knew from before. The fragments of his subconscious. Pinfeathers.

True, she had found her way to the courtyard, to the real flesh-and-blood Varen. She knew now, though, that that had been Lilith’s doing.

Like Reynolds, the demon had wanted Isobel to find Varen—to interact with him. Yet even though it seemed as if Reynolds and Lilith shared the goal of igniting the fuse to the bomb Varen had unwittingly become, Isobel still wasn’t sure the two had the same endgame vision.

Of course, she thought, switching her gaze to the wall directly across from her, she highly doubted that she and Reynolds did either.

Nevertheless, at least some of the information Reynolds had imparted to her had to be accurate. When Reynolds had drawn her into the gym at Trenton, for instance, and attempted to explain to her that Varen could not have stayed in reality even if Isobel had been able to bring him home on Halloween, he’d said it was because of Varen’s unbreakable ties to the dreamworld. In so many words, he’d said that Varen had become ingrained in this world, part and parcel of it. As lost to it as he was to the demon who had taken him.

Lilith, Reynolds had said, had a claim on Varen just as she’d had on Poe. And even if the dreamworld had yet to absorb Varen utterly, he had still become a cog in the machinery of this realm. A puzzle piece clicked into a slot fashioned to fit him perfectly.

Or, Isobel wondered, was it that Varen, being the way he was, just so happened to fit the mold? Like Poe would have.

Whatever the case, if Varen had become an element of this world rather than a trapped outsider, then maybe thinking of him as a way to locate him was like pressing enter on a blank Internet search. It could only lead nowhere. pqdm.com