I reach out and wipe one away gently. She stirs slightly.
“Please don’t leave me,” she mutters.
“Never,” I tell her again. “Sailor, I meant it when I said I wasn’t going anywhere. I’ll be right here beside you for as long as you want me to be. I failed you earlier; I let you down. I wasn’t there to protect you, and I promise you that will never happen again.”
“You didn’t let me down,” she mumbles.
She reaches out her hand and I slip mine into it. She tugs at my hand and I realize she’s trying to pull me onto the bed beside her. I lie down behind her, wrapping my arm around her waist and pulling her closely against me.
“Stay here with me forever,” she says.
I smile at the mumbling quality of her voice, but her words still make my heart skip a beat.
Sailor shifts in my arms and I tense up for a second, but then I realize she’s almost awake. She rolls over to face me and smiles at me. Her eyes are only half open and I don’t think she’ll be able to wake up fully yet.
She reaches up and strokes my face and then puts her hand on my hip.
“I love the team, Rye. All of them,” she says in a voice so quiet I have to strain to hear her. “But I feel a deeper connection to you than the others. Like, I don’t know, I’m stronger when I’m with you, braver when you’re by my side. When we’re together, I feel like I can do anything. I know I’ll never be good enough for you, but I just want you to know that you’ll always be my light.”
I lean forward and kiss her forehead.
“Don’t ever think you’re not good enough for me, Sailor,” I say.
I open my mouth to say more but I see her eyes have closed again and she’s back asleep. I snuggle closer to her and let myself fall asleep beside her.
***
I jump awake in the middle of what feels like an earthquake. The bed is thrashing around beneath me and I sit up in a panic. Sailor is still beside me. She’s flat on her back and she’s thrashing around on the bed, lifting into the air and slamming back down onto the mattress. It’s not an earthquake. Sailor is causing this. The Soul Gem in her tattoo is glowing, lighting up the whole room.
I glance at the time on my cell phone as I send Nexus a simple message: Get here now.
It’s almost half past three and I can’t help but wonder two things. First, why Adam didn’t wake me and send me home, and second, how the hell the noise of Sailor’s bed banging on the floor isn’t waking him up and having him come running in.
I know I have way bigger mysteries to deal with than that though. Sailor has stopped thrashing around, but she’s four feet in the air, lying as flat as if the mattress were still beneath her, her hair hanging loosely beneath her.
I jump to my feet, whispering her name and trying to pull her back down onto the bed, but it’s like she’s being held in place by some sort of force field and I can’t move her. I am trying my best to work out what’s going on, but I can’t. There was none of this trouble with the first Soul Gem, so why is this happening now?
Nexus and the team appear behind me, and I turn to Nexus.
“What the hell is happening here, Nexus?” I demand.
She avoids meeting my gaze for a moment and I know she knows something. She would look me in the eye if she didn’t. And her earlier comment to Sunday comes back to me about Sailor’s dreams maybe being important.
“Tell me,” I say angrily.
“When Sunday was able to pull Sailor out of her nightmare, I thought maybe that would be it, but obviously it’s not. This is a warning, Rye. Someone is trying to steal the second Soul Gem.”
CHAPTER FOUR: ABOUT TIME
“I don’t get it,” I say.
“The staircase, Rye. The second Soul Gem has to be down there. That’s why Sailor felt so drawn to it. And now the other gem is warning her that someone is trying to steal it,” Nexus says.
“How did they find it? Sailor only found it because she followed the pull of the first gem.”
“I don’t know for sure, but if I had to guess, I would say that whoever it was followed Sailor to the gate. That she unwittingly led them right to it.”
“That’s who slammed the gate, isn’t it? The Boundless wanted to kill Sailor so they could take the first gem too. When I find out who is behind all of this, I swear I will tear them limb from limb,” I say.
Before Nexus can respond, Aziza gasps and points to Sailor. The team have been silent up until this point, as mystified by all of this as I am. I turn to face Sailor and my jaws drops, my body freezing on the spot.
She’s floating upwards. I’m glad there’s a ceiling above her, or she might just go on floating away forever. I’m not quite so glad of the ceiling when her body slams off it and the spell holding her in place breaks. Sailor flies back down through the air, slamming down on the mattress with a bone-shaking crash.
She lets out a scream of such pain and terror that I feel my insides shrivel up at the sound of it. There’s no way her landing caused her that much pain. Something is going on in her head. Something awful. Something that feels real enough to her that she’s making that god-awful keening sound.
The keening sound stops
