And then the season changed abruptly. Vika’s eyelashes froze at the tips, and she shivered, even though she wore her coat from the real Saint Petersburg winter. A gust of snow blasted at her and nearly knocked her off the path, which had now become a tightrope of sorts, a thin line of pebbles floating over a vast abyss, with nothing but sharp crags and the gaping mouth of a valley below.

I can’t die in a dream, I can’t die in a dream, Vika told herself, but she couldn’t stop her heart from pounding when it seemed as if she really could slip and fall to her death at any moment. Why had the terrain suddenly changed? It was as if Nikolai had wanted her to find him, but now that she had come, he had changed his mind. Was she supposed to turn back? But how? Even the tightrope disappeared behind her, leaving the tiny stepping-stones ahead of her as her only option.

Or perhaps it was a test of her own will, and whether she really wanted to find him or not.

The magic of Nikolai’s dream swirled around her, the silkiness and the perfume sliding against her skin, the oboe crescendoing. He’s not just a shadow boy with darkness in his veins. The thought came to Vika like a recollection. Like she’d forgotten he was an actual person and only now remembered—truly remembered—that Nikolai was complex and real. She had made a similar error earlier with Pasha, forgetting he was more than the black-and-white caricature she’d painted of him in her head. She would not make the same mistake with Nikolai.

I do want to find you, she thought, as if he could hear her.

The sky turned dark, like midnight, and the tightrope vanished. Vika shrieked at the sudden changes and grasped at the air, as if she could hold on to the nothingness to break her fall. She began to plummet like Icarus from the sky.

A golden eagle, larger than any in real life, soared down from the moon. It dove straight at her, but then caught Vika on its back.

“Oh, thank heavens.” She nestled into its warm brown feathers and lay herself flat across its back, not wanting to ride it like a horse and be blown off by the wind, for the eagle careened through the sky at near-reckless speed. Her ears popped as the eagle darted in and out of the clouds, and Vika’s hair trailed behind her like a flame, so bright that if anyone were watching, she and the eagle would appear to be a shooting star, streaking across the night.

Vika’s heart skittered like a frightened rabbit, but against her ear, she could hear the eagle’s pulse beating steady and strong. She tried to calm her own heartbeat.

Then it occurred to her that this was the type of magic she would have thrilled at before the Game. Before Nikolai tried to kill Pasha. Before she was suspicious of everything Nikolai did.

Vika half smiled. She sat up on the eagle’s back now, opened her eyes, and tried to enjoy this respite from reality, the cold night air blowing across her face. She looked at the stars above them, and it was as if they were sailing through the immense sea of midnight, explorers charting oceans where no one else had ever been. Nikolai’s oboe was now joined by an entire symphony, and the woodwinds crooned along with the gentle melody of the strings, the chimes ringing softly like a sprinkle of starlight.

The eagle soared faster, and Vika whooped, smiling broadly now, feeling alive even though she was asleep, feeling whole even though half of her lay on the other side of the bench. Magic, how she had missed it!

The eagle landed softly at the top of another mountain. But it had taken only two steps when the ground trembled beneath them. Steam and heat and the stench of sulfur rose nearby.

Vika froze.

A volcano. Like the one on which Sergei had found her, an exact replica, it seemed, of the volcano etching he’d carved into her wardrobe at home. Vika touched her scarf; her mother’s basalt pendant lay beneath it. Only the necklace wasn’t there, for she’d given it to Pasha. Her throat suddenly seemed too exposed despite being covered with a thick layer of wool.

“Why did you bring me here?”

The eagle shrieked. She couldn’t understand it, because she couldn’t use magic to translate what it said.

The eagle growled and shook her off its back. Without waiting for her to move out of the way, it flapped its great wings and took off into the air, leaving her stranded on the mountainside.

Vika clung to a small shrub to avoid being blown away. She shivered in the snow, but when the eagle was gone, she rose and brushed the ice off her coat. “I am fierce,” she said, repeating what Ludmila had said of her. “This is only a dream. I refuse to allow something as silly as an imaginary eagle and a made-up volcano to rattle me.” She walked quickly, proudly, to the edge of the crater, as if this would further prove her point.

But it was not a cauldron of lava, as Vika had expected. Rather, it was a long, narrow tunnel that went straight down, like a cylinder bored into the volcano.

Vika bit her lip. There was nowhere else for her to go but down. The only other option was to wake herself from this dream, and that was not an option, for Vika did not simply back away because something was perilous. Like caution, quitting on account of danger was not a part of her lexicon.

She looked at the hole again. It was a perfect circle, something created not from nature but by something—or someone—else. She latched onto a nearby tree and leaned over the edge of the opening. “Hello?” she called down.

Pure, untainted silk swirled up to meet her.

And then . . . “Bonsoir, Vika.”

She’d found Nikolai.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Nikolai could see her silhouette framed by the imaginary moonlight coming through the circular opening above him. He hadn’t known if she would come, or if she would be able to without the use of magic, but he thought that if they were still connected as they’d been before the end of the Game, then . . . perhaps there was hope for them yet. After all, she’d come to his house. It was possible, now that Pasha had taken away her magic, that Nikolai could convince her to join him.

“I’m coming down,” Vika yelled.

Before Nikolai could answer, Vika simply dropped straight from the hole in the ceiling, plummeting quickly at first, but then floating down like a feather to the ground. In fact, she was riding on a feather. From the golden eagle he’d conjured to bring her here.

“You do know how to make an entrance,” Nikolai said.

She curtsied.

“What are we doing in this volcano?” he asked, still hanging back in the shadow, out of the moonlight.