Sora pursed her lips. “In case something happens to me and you don’t have my ryuu particles to help guide you out on the journey back.” She turned away so she wouldn’t have to see his reaction. They knew they were risking their lives. But it was still sobering to think about actually dying.

As they traveled deeper, the natural skylights vanished, leaving them in the dark. Sora commanded her magic to light the way, and the emerald dust glowed, casting an eerie luminescence around her and Broomstick’s shadows on the walls of ice.

An hour into the tunnels, Broomstick swore.

“What is it?” Sora asked.

He showed her his compass. The needle had begun to spin in lazy circles, as if unable to find north but not caring.

“We must have run into the magnetic fields mentioned in Mama’s research,” Sora said.

“Yeah, which also means that at least one of her notes is true. And maybe the others are, too.”

Sora stopped for a moment as this sank in. First, magnetic fields to confuse those who tried to find Zomuri’s vault. If the notes were correct, next would be “ghost faces,” whatever that meant. Then a snow monster. And a lake filled with water that gave you hallucinations of the worst version of yourself.

She ran through the details of her plan.

When the “ghost faces” appeared, she’d make herself and Broomstick invisible, in hopes that the ghost guards wouldn’t be able to see them.

Broomstick’s bombs were for blowing up the snow monster.

When that hurdle was cleared, they’d reach through their gemina bonds to Daemon and Fairy. The idea was they’d tether Sora and Broomstick to reality, like when Sora had been shot with genka and Daemon had coaxed her back to reason through their bond. Of course, this situation could be totally different, but it was the best analogy she had. She and Daemon, and Broomstick and Fairy, had spent over a decade bonded to each other, finely honed to every spike or nuance in their gemina connection. If there was any chance of Sora and Broomstick keeping their wits about them as they swam through the Lake of Nightmares to get to Zomuri’s vault, their gemina bond was it.

Admittedly, it was a sketchy plan. But it was what Sora could do with the very limited information she had. She just had to trust herself to adapt to the rest.

They followed the path of ryuu particles deeper into the tunnels. As the hours passed, the sweet perfume of winter berries faded, replaced instead by the strangely dead, hollow smell of cold, stale air. The hairs on Sora’s arms stood up. Everything about these barren ice caves felt like a cemetery.

Broomstick pointed at a part of the glacier wall that was recessed, with six long icicles like spears stabbing the labyrinth floor. “Is it me, or does that seem ominous?”