I get up unsteadily from the folding cot I was sleeping on and go to her. She is shaking in the grip of the machine that supports her. Shuddering, like the Vow. Her screaming is rasping and hoarse as if it has been going on for a long time. Her eyes are squeezed closed. She must still be dreaming. I put my hands on her shoulders and her eyes snap open, but she doesn’t stop screaming. Instead Sofika lashes out at me with a thin, pale hand.

‘Get away from me!’ she yells.

I don’t. I keep hold of her, because I won’t let her hurt herself. I won’t let her go.

‘Sofi, it’s me.’

She fixes me with her mountain-sky eyes. Her pupils are dilated. Darker than darkness.

‘You were dreaming,’ I say to her.

‘Of black water and the stink of death,’ she says. ‘Of the darkness, pushing through the cracks. It wants to kill us, Ahri.’

I nod. It’s been the same since we set sail into the Rift. Sofika doesn’t need to touch me to see my dreams any more. She suffers them with me, as she has so much else.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I saw it too. But I won’t let it. We are going to find the Conduit. We are going to fix everything.’

She grabs hold of my arm, then. Her broken nails dig in through my sleeves and I am struck by a sensation of intense cold. By the swooping feeling of inversion. Of vertigo, more extreme than it ever has been before. It is as though I’ve been cast out into the void. As though I’m spinning into nothingness without a tether. Images stutter in front of my eyes, loud and bright. Overwhelming.

The Resonance, on Hellebore.

A gateway opening overhead.

Devils descending in droves.

A monster, in a serpent’s mask.

The mask draws closer until it fills my vision, edge to edge. So close that I can see my reflection in the heretic’s crimson eye-lenses. Only it’s not me that I see. It’s Sofika, screaming as she is torn apart by the sorcerer’s warpcraft. I feel every­thing. All of her pain. Her terror. Her grief. I hear the sorcerer speak, with a smile in his voice.

Not yet.

At the words, the images disappear, and I realise that I have pulled free of her grip. That my nose is streaming blood. That my eyes are running with tears. Sofika’s head is lolling, her eyes rolled back. She starts to shake again, then, in a way I can’t stop. Whole body tremors, from the inside out.