Wyatt pursed his lips, clasped his hands together, and rested his elbows on either side of his bowl of NutriGrub. He contemplated how he should start, but before then, he watched Annabeth continue tapping against the table.

  When she finished, NaviSys brought up a blank page for her to take notes on, then pointed at herself. “You know I’m somewhat of an enthusiast. Obscure or unique information is my passion. Secrets, mysteries, and all the other stuff nobody wants to find the answer to, I want to know.”

  “Mhmm, that’s why you risked getting expelled last year to set up a proxy in the deeper NaviWeb and made sure not to leave any traces back to you.” He looked around while she took a few seconds to collect her thoughts.

  She looked around the cafeteria outside the dome to see if anybody might’ve heard. Her eyes kept shifting everywhere, searching for some unseen foe—and after his dream, he believed she might find something if she looked hard enough.

  “Can’t you darken the dome?” he proposed, seeing how paranoid she acted. “If not, we can wait until after class. We can reserve an empty study hall or head back to one of our dorms.”

  “Not high enough privilege,” she grumbled, tapping her fingers against the table in irritation. “I’m not sure where we could go. My roommate never goes out, so we wouldn’t be able to use my place. A study hall would be quite hard to book at this time of year. Most of them have been booked for ages by all the graduate candidates—probably should’ve thought to do so myself.”

  He stared back at her.

  “What?” she asked, her face slightly red. “Are you really suggesting we go back to your dorm room?”

  Wyatt wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. For all her bravery, being alone in a room with him always unsettled her. In the face of a horde of monsters, laughter. Faced with time together, paranoia and uncertainty.

  The extensive history he’d shared with her in Demiurge before she disappeared without a trace one day ten years in the future—also, apparently, five years in the past. Their time together had made that fear go away, but they didn’t have that kind of time now.

  Not if he wanted to recruit her before things got dicey. Allies would go a long way to keeping himself safe. And above all else, he wanted to keep her close by so she didn’t run off and… get herself killed again.

  The headache returned with a vengeance, even more severe than before. Memories of his past clashed with the present, and he didn’t know how to stop them from making his brain feel like splitting open.

  She thumbed a ring on her finger and pulled out a vial of Ambrosia. “Despite Awakening again, you look terrible right now. Take this.”

  “I’d prefer not.” He softly shoved the vial back towards her.

  “I know you don’t like the taste. Right now, you need to get over it. Take the Ambrosia and drink it, or we’ll be staying here all day.” She pointed towards the table.

  He rolled his eyes. The NaviSys operated on a priority basis, and she had a higher clearance than him—for now, at least. If the information came out that he’d Double Awakened, he’d probably take the highest clearance given to a student.

  But for now, that meant he wouldn’t be able to leave until he revealed everything. She could override any command he gave. Seemed like a massive flaw in the system and a dangerous oversight to him, but he’d long since given up trying to talk sense into people of authority.

  At least that never changes, he thought, grinning.

  Truthfully, he wanted the vial of Ambrosia, but he really didn’t want the taste of battery acid and static to mix with the NutriGrub. He tried to think of a solid argument, but he couldn’t find any. Double Awakenings were intensive, and the stimulation of Ambrosia would go a long way to make him feel less awful.

  “Fine. I’ll take it,” he grumbled.

  Intrigue flashed through her eyes for a moment, but then she shrugged and pushed the vial towards him. “Here’s to hoping you feel better. If the records are correct, you should feel just fine afterwards. No more headaches or paleness.”

  He grimaced. “I forgot headaches were a common occurrence, to be honest.”

  She left the thin-topped, round-bottomed vial in the center of the table. Unlike the high purity of those he’d carried when he’d fought the Devils, the one she’d gifted him had impurities mixed in—otherwise the quality would be too high for her to afford.

  The biggest reason he didn’t want to drink, the taste, lessened based on the quality of Ambrosia consumed. At this grade, the NutriGrub he struggled to stomach probably tasted better.

  Apparently, he stared at the vial for too long, because Annabeth smacked her lips and said, “Just drink it already. You look like a sheet of paper.”

  “So do you,” he replied with a grin as he twisted and pulled the small cork from the vial, raised the bottled Ichor to his lips, and threw his head back. He’d done so for so long to avoid the battery acid taste of doom, but he couldn’t avoid tasting all of it.

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  However…

  Is this what people have always described to me? he wondered, smacking his lips in satisfaction. Crispy apples with a hint of cinnamon.

  “Wow, that works fast,” she said, smiling. “Now, how’d it happen?”

  Wyatt considered his answer for several moments. If his dreams were actually the events of a previously lived life, then he didn’t know who he could trust. The Devils in disguise had infiltrated Demiurge, and the guild specialized in Devil hunting.

  Except Annabeth.

  He didn’t know who he could trust and had no idea when the Devil’s infiltration began, but Lucifer himself had killed Annabeth, if what Cameron said was to be believed.

  He trusted her wholly. However, he wasn’t quite sure how to reveal everything without sounding absolutely nuts. In all his research, he’d never found a Double Awakening that talked about premonition capabilities.

  Which left him with quite the dilemma. For being such a curious person, her skepticism could really make things hard sometimes. If he revealed what happened, he’d have to keep it exclusively to what changed now rather than anything that might happen.

  Because, if he knew anything about time paradoxes and the rippling butterfly effects, nothing this time would be the same—well, for the most part. Only the immediate history could remain unchanged until he started doing things with his new power and understanding of the future.

  Once he did that, too many things would change, and nothing would remain the same…

  So why did Gabriel seem so confident that we’d meet back up outside that Invasion Gate in fifteen years? Why would the timeline remain unchanged? He looked up at Annabeth and let out a huff. “We need to talk more than you know, but I don’t know where to start.”

  “From the beginning, of course,” she responded, without skipping a beat.

  Memories came flooding back of a time when Wyatt traveled Riacore, the World Dungeon, with Annabeth in search of a rumor. Nothing more than a man blinded by ambition and greed, he struggled through his days to find meaning.

  He found something else entirely and hadn't known until she'd disappeared. Those days anchored themselves in his heart, mind, and soul as both the best and worst days of his life.

  Annabeth had shared his enthusiasm for Riacore's secrets, mysteries, and adventure. She'd been the only person in his life he considered more than a friend or family, even to the day she ran off on her own and never returned.

  The day she died.

  Seeing her now still shocked him. Every second she moved, spoke, lived, he thought he'd wake up from a dream within a dream. He wanted nothing more than to reach across the table and hold her, hug her closely, and tell her everything would be alright.

  He tried to figure out what “the beginning” meant, but currently, his mind reeled. Was the beginning the first life he experienced, and if so, should he mention what happened to her and all their adventures? Their time together?

  That… didn’t feel right to him, but neither did starting at the end where Cameron began the transference of Gabriel’s deck. Wyatt didn’t even know what all of that meant, aside from having some sleeping entity inside his soul—or wherever weird angelic beings who’d had their souls ripped apart and were banished to purgatory was.

  Speaking honestly, he said, “I’ll answer your questions. I’m not sure how to explain things, since this all happened rather involuntarily.”

  “Fits the pattern,” she muttered, tapping the table to manifest words into the document. She looked at him once finished with her note taking. “Hmm.”

  “Hmm, indeed,” he agreed, stuffing more NutriGrub into his mouth. After drinking the Ambrosia, he cringed even worse than before. Again, he washed it down with a cup of water as he contemplated his next move.

  “Let’s go down the checklist of things that other Double Awakened have reported.” She compiled all of the articles with several deft movements, pulling different parts from each and throwing them into another empty page next to her notes. “The basic principle of Double Awakening is the formation of a second Ichor Hold.”

  He nodded and pointed at his eyes. “Residual Ichor passively channeled into my eyes is what I’m thinking.”

  “Interesting,” she mumbled, noting his words in her less empty page. “Can you turn the whole glowing thing off?”

  “Not that I know of, though I haven’t tried too hard,” he admitted sheepishly, looking away from her perplexed glower. “Hey, this happened less than half an hour ago. Food and headaches were the main things on my mind.”

  Kind of, he amended silently.

  “Without a Registry, we wouldn’t be able to see what’s the root cause either way. Do you have any additional effects, or is the whole glowing thing just an aesthetic change?” she asked, tilting her head.

  “As far as I can see, nada. Haven’t really done any testing. Not like I know what their effects might be to even make an attempt.” He shrugged. “This is why Registries are important. I think the last time I looked at the costs, a portable one cost nearly two crystals.”

  In Eyanora, the common currency accessible to most was crystal shards. Ten shards made a fragment, and ten fragments made a crystal. Dungeon divers brought shards, fragments, and crystals over from Riacore, but not without cost.

  To maintain a delver’s license, a large part of hauls were taxed, no matter how few or little a delver brought in. If a delver joined an organization, additional taxes, though the hauls were usually larger and more reliable with the addition of a more stable group.

  The two truths of living: taxes and death, he grumbled silently.

  “I’d probably have to use a private Registry, either way, and that’s constantly. I’m not sure what to do about the whole thing. If I don’t use a private Registry, my status as someone who’s Double Awakened would get out quickly,” he thought aloud.

  Annabeth raised a questioning brow. “Why’s that an issue?”

  Ah, that’s right. She doesn’t know how or why I’ve Double Awakened yet, so she would be oblivious to the dangers. He thought about what to tell her. In the middle of doing so, he remembered a concerning trend he’d seen in many of the articles she’d shown him. “Read over the articles again. Look up the names of those who have been Double Awakened.”

  She pursed her lips and did as he said. Minutes passed as she read through article after article, scanning the details and searching the names on the deep NaviWeb. Concern flashed across her face after the third, but she kept going until she’d searched and compared at least ten.

  Eyes wide, she looked up at him. “They’re being hunted.”