At first I think she’s wrong. The spaces couldn’t feel more different. But on closer examination, I realize she’s right. The bookcase has been replaced with an actual door, and the windows are different—they’re bigger, and let in more light—but the room is the right size and shape.

“So what do we do now?” Niklas asks.

“We should probably go back to Ivory Hall,” I say. But the thought makes me feel as if I’ve swallowed a stone. I have no idea what will be waiting for us there. Will we be safe? Are we even apprentices in this reality? Yet the moment I have the thought, I’m flooded with new images of the six of us competing in bone races, eating together in the dining hall, studying for exams. And we all still have the gray bands tattooed around our arms that connect us. We belong together on this path too. I’m sure of it.

“Do you think we’ve been gone a long time?” Tessa asks. “Have we missed the last bone game?” Her expression falters, and I can see her struggling to reconcile the same kind of fuzzy new memories I’ve been grappling with—events that didn’t really happen in the reality we just left, yet the ghost of them lurks in both of our minds because they happened to us here. Tessa frowns.

“Hopefully there’s still time to find the hikers,” Niklas says. He fidgets with an emerald ring on his index finger. Wasn’t his ring silver before? And what is he talking about?

Tessa must have the same question because confusion washes over her face. “What hikers?”

My heart sinks. Something is wrong with Niklas.

“The third bone game,” Jacey says, “the hikers trapped in the Droimian Mountains? We’re supposed to be figuring out how to rescue them?” She shakes her head. “I swear, I’m the only one who listens in workshop.”

And then it hits me. We have different memories of the past. Not of the one where we confronted Latham, but of the new past I created.

“There were no hikers for us,” I tell her. “Our third bone game involved designing a new town hall.”

Talon’s mouth falls open. “I remember the town hall too.”

I tried so hard to bring each of them along with me when I healed the bones, but I lost track of them at the end. I succeeded in getting us all together in the present, but we must have arrived here on slightly different paths.

“So … what’s real?” Tessa asks.

My eyes automatically find Bram. It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself for months. “It’s all real,” I tell her. “We just remember it differently.”

She bites her lower lip. “I’m not clear how this works.”