Chapter 9

Sable's POV

I fell asleep faster than I expected that night, worn out from the walk around camp and everything Ivy had told me about the tent full of rogue gear. My body just gave out somewhere in the middle of turning it all over in my head.

The dream came fast and clear, clearer than dreams usually get.

I was back in Reva's kitchen, standing over the sink with a bowl in my hands, except the bowl kept filling with water no matter how many times I tipped it out. Water spilled over the edges, ran across my fingers, pooled on the floor around my bare feet. I tried to stop it. I turned the bowl upside down, shook it, set it as far away from the tap as I could reach.

It kept filling anyway.

The water climbed higher, past my ankles, past my knees, cold enough that my whole body ached with it. I called out for someone, though I couldn't say who, and nobody answered. The water kept rising until it covered my chest, until it reached the mark on my collarbone, and the second it touched the brand there, the whole room went white.

I woke up gasping.

For a second I didn't know where I was. Then the tent canvas came into focus above me, dark grey in the dim early light, and I remembered. The Hollow. Bram. The old man's warning is still sitting in my chest like a stone.

I sat up and immediately realized something was wrong.

My blanket was soaked through, cold and heavy against my legs, water dripping off the edge onto the dirt floor beneath me. I looked around, half expecting to find a leak in the tent, some crack in the canvas letting rain in, but the sky outside had been clear all night. No storm. No reason for any of this.

Then I noticed the wall.

A thin layer of frost had spread across the canvas near where my head had been, delicate white patterns creeping up from the ground like something had grown there overnight. I reached out and touched it, and it melted under my fingers, leaving a wet smear behind.

My heart started pounding.

I remembered the dream, the water rising, the cold. I remembered the frost from the fight with Dax, though that hadn't happened yet, not in this telling of things, but something similar had already cracked through once before, back during that first training exchange with Ivy when the blade in my hand had gone ice-cold in my grip.

This felt like more of that. Whatever that was.

I grabbed the edge of my blanket and scrubbed hard at the frost on the wall, working fast before anyone could walk by and see it. My sleeve soaked through in seconds, the cold biting into my skin, but I kept at it until the canvas looked dry enough to pass for normal.

"It's condensation," I whispered to myself, not really believing it. "Just condensation."

I balled up the wet blanket and shoved it into the corner of the tent, telling myself I'd deal with it later, telling myself there was probably some simple explanation for all of it that didn't involve anything strange happening inside my own body while I slept.

I didn't sleep again after that. I lay there until the light outside turned from grey to pale gold, listening to the camp slowly wake up around me, footsteps and low voices and the clatter of someone starting a cook fire.

When I finally crawled out of the tent, my legs still felt unsteady, like I hadn't rested at all.

Bram was sitting near the edge of the camp, propped up against a supply crate, a blanket draped over his shoulders and a bandage wrapped tight around his ribs. He looked pale, weaker than I remembered from the clearing, but his eyes tracked me the second I stepped into view.

I hadn't planned on talking to him. After the way he grabbed my wrist the night before, part of me wanted to avoid him entirely. But something in the way he was watching me made it hard to just walk past.

"Morning," I said, mostly out of habit.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"I'm fine."

"I didn't ask if you were fine. I said you didn't sleep." He shifted against the crate, wincing at whatever the movement cost him. "I can tell. You've got that look."

I glanced down at my hands without meaning to, half expecting to see something different about them, some proof of whatever had happened in the night. They looked normal. Just hands, a little raw from scrubbing frost off canvas an hour earlier.

Bram noticed where my eyes had gone.

"What happened," he said. Still not a question, more like he already knew part of the answer and just wanted me to fill in the rest.

"Nothing happened."

"You're staring at your own hands like they did something without asking you first." He said it plainly, no accusation in it, just a strange kind of understanding that caught me off guard. "That's not nothing."

I hesitated, unsure how much to give away to someone who grabbed my wrist and called me dangerous less than a day ago. But something about the way he was looking at me now felt different from that. Less afraid. More like he actually wanted to know.

"There was frost," I admitted finally. "On the tent wall. And my blanket was soaked through, like something had been dripping all night, except there was nothing there to drip."

Bram nodded slowly, like this confirmed something he'd already suspected.

"You felt it too, didn't you," he said. "Whatever's in you woke up last night."

"What do you mean, woke up? What is it?"

His hand drifted to his side, to the spot where the wound had been the night before, now closed and healing thanks to whatever I'd done without understanding it.

"Whatever you did to fix me," he said, "it didn't come out of nowhere. That kind of thing doesn't just happen once and go quiet again."

"So what happens now?"

Bram looked at me for a long moment, something careful and a little uneasy behind his eyes.

"Now," he said, "it's just getting started.”