Sean went straight to Serena’s main hospital. Insgar, the founder of the Watchers’ Academy and his primary ally among the highest ranks, had been ill for almost a year. Sandrine, the doctor whom he and Dillon had met at the Cyrian train station, greeted him with the same somber news he had been hearing for months. Insgar slept. She was comfortable. Sandrine would alert him if she rose to full consciousness. Which had not happened since his last visit.
Sean sat by her bedside for a time, missing her scolding voice and guidance more than he knew how to say. Now more than ever, he needed a wise friend.
The next day Sean returned to the loft apartment near Raleigh’s main university. He arrived at well after midnight Eastern time. He and Dillon had stocked the place with frozen ready-made meals and veggie packs and long-life milk and juice. Until the crisis had unfolded, he and Dillon had spent months communicating by notes, arguing over whose turn it was to do chores.
Sean microwaved a meal and carried it out onto his balcony. The summer night was balmy, and a breeze kept the insects at bay. He studied the stars that came and went beyond scuttling clouds and pondered the empty nights ahead.
So many triumphs had begun in this place, so much sorrow. He could see a light in Carey’s kitchen and wondered if she was handling the breakup any better than Dillon. They were a perfect match in so many ways, and yet wrong in all the others.
Which pretty much summed up Sean’s love life as well.
He finished his meal, pushed his chair away from the table, leaned back, and asked the stars how he was going to survive the vacant hours. His life since he’d learned to transit had been a headlong rush into one roller-coaster thrill after another. Even his awful days at the awful Diplomatic school had been crushingly full.
Everything that had come before—his empty home and now-divorced parents, the agonies of high school, the teenage boundaries that had ruled and limited his existence—all of that was gone now. Replaced by a realm containing a hundred and nineteen known worlds. Only now . . .
Defeated by the future void, Sean rose from his chair and went inside. As he stretched out and turned off the light, his gaze repeatedly fell upon Dillon’s empty bed. His lonely frustrations blanketed him. He could not shake the sense that his life was over.
He was three months shy of his twentieth birthday.