“No, Lukas, wake up.” I grip his black hair and yank hard.

He draws back, his expression bewildered.

“I’m here! Really here!” I cry out, suddenly desperate to break through. “A dream connection has opened up through our fasting!”

Breathing hard, Lukas’s gaze turns inward for a moment before he stares back at me, seeming dazed.

“Where are you?” I demand, noting, with mounting alarm, that the fastlines on his hands are also emanating a faint, gray mist. “Tell me where Vogel has you!”

The scene around us spirals away, the pressure of his body on mine lifting. We’re suddenly standing in the middle of a night-darkened valley, the stars like scattered diamonds against the arc of the sky. The bone-white peaks of the Northern Spine are wrapped around our backs, the Caledonian Mountains before us.

I know exactly where we are.

The valley that contains Gardneria’s Fourth Division military base, all the military buildings and structures stripped away. Only Lukas stands before me, both of us dressed in our Sealing greens and lit by moonlight.

“Elloren,” he says as an Ironwood grand piano shudders into being beside him, a violin suddenly in one of my hands, its bow in the other. “Play with me,” he offers, his voice suffused with emotion. “One last time, Elloren.”

“No,” I growl, hurling the violin and bow to the ground as I step toward him, grab hold of his shoulder, and shake him. “I’m here. And I’m going to rescue you. Tell me where Vogel has you!”

His eyes widen with a look of profound realization, and I know that I’m finally breaking through. “I don’t know,” he rasps, clearly fighting the murky dream state. “A cave.”

“Where?”

He shakes his head again. “I don’t know.”

I press a hand over his heart. “Describe it!”

Lukas swallows and looks around with the expression of someone trying to think through the muzzy influence of strong spirits. “Dark stone,” he manages. “A catacomb—like a giant hornet’s nest. Shadow-corrupted Mage soldiers with gray eyes.” He closes his eyes tightly, as if willing himself alert. When he opens them once more, they blaze into mine with sudden clarity. “Elloren.” He grabs my arms, his expression turning almost violent in its intensity. “Get your power unbound. Break the fasting spell. Get it off you! He’s tracking you through it!”

“Where are you, Lukas?” I demand again.

“Don’t come for me,” he growls, impassioned. “I’m a trap!”

A phantom hand grabs my shoulder and shakes it. I whip my head around to find the scene fracturing at the edges, fault lines forming to crackle inward toward the bleached Spine and moonlit field, shattering.

A cry of protest rises from my throat as Lukas and I grab fiercer hold of each other, his affinity fire surging toward mine as he gives me one, last tortured look before he, too, fragments to black.