Copyright © 2025 by Graci Kim

All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 7 Hudson Square, New York, New York 10013.

First Edition, April 2025

Designed by Zareen Johnson
Jacket illustration © 2025 by Jessica Fong
Map illustration by Virginia Allyn © 2021 by Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024013933
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-368-10477-7
eBook ISBN 978-1-368-10509-5
Visit www.DisneyBooks.com

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1: Good Morning, Resthaven

2: The Field of Sunflowers

3: Live on National Television

4: Leaving on a Jet Plane

5: Are We There Yet?

6: The Bridge of Blossoms

7: A Fish Out of Water

8: The Official Royal Welcome Ceremony

9: How to Fold Butterflymail

10: Orientation and Alliances

11: May the Classes Begin

12: Ready, Steady, Scroll

13: Devotion, Knots, and Tassels

14: Down in the Underground

15: Seedlings and Sabotage

16: Slumbering Simulations

17: Uncles and Aunties Galore

18: Happy Chuseok to All

19: Journeys and Revelations

20: Who Are You Really, Though?

21: Confronting Confrontations

22: The Harvest of Service

23: Water Lilies Reveal the Truth

24: Friends Are the Family You Choose

25: The Third and Final Trial

26: Seasonbilities and Slides

27: No Second Chances

28: Blowing Up Ballistics

29: Unwelcome Reunions

30: Inductions on the Lagoon

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Aria’s Lullaby

About the Author

Also by Graci Kim

To all those who are exceptions to the rule.
May you rise to be exceptional.

TODAY WAS GOING TO BE revolutionary, Aria Loveridge thought, as she got out of bed and reached for the metal-fiber gloves from her bedside table. Next to them, propped up against the box of dominoes, was a little note from her dad.

Morning, Sparkler! Wager a game of dominoes after the big do?

Aria smiled as she slipped on the gloves. “Sparkler” was her dad’s nickname for her, after the little firework. Ever since she was born, she’d been quick to alight and quick to temper. Her childhood tantrums were legendary—a common early indicator of the gene.

But even before they discovered she was a dreamslinger—that is, a carrier of the dreamslinger genetic mutation—her dad had made sure she knew there was nothing wrong with her. She was merely a deep-feeling kid. A person who felt the world more than the average. As her parent, his job was to teach her how to manage those big emotions.

He was, hands down, her biggest hero. And today he was finally going to be recognized in front of the entire country.

Giddy with nervous anticipation, Aria made her way down to the lab in the basement of Resthaven Home for Dreamslingers, joining her fellow PJ-clad residents for their morning check-ins.

“Aria Loveridge, please approach,” Dr. Dixon’s stiff voice rang out as he released a resident from one of the four chambers spanning the length of the lab. He strode across the shiny tiled floor to sit back at his desk, opening Aria’s file on his computer and nodding toward the plastic chair. Before Aria had a chance to sit down, the questioning began.

“The brain monitor recorded heightened activity during your sleep last night between 3:12 a.m. and 3:40 a.m. Did you have any dreams?”

Aria fidgeted with her gloved fingers. “I remember one where I lost a few of my teeth. I hate those. And I think I also had one where I couldn’t find the toilet. Pretty crappy, if you ask me.”

He pretended not to hear her joke. “Did you have any dreams about the Nightmare Circle?”

“Yes.” This was pretty standard. For a reason no one really understood, all dreamslingers shared the same recurring dream. They would find themselves in a circular wilderness, containing a creek, valley, and eerie woodlands, all blanketed by a violet sky.

“Did you encounter any of the Beasts in the Circle?” Dr. Dixon continued.

“Yes, the Bird Beast.”

The gigantic bird with a tail of flames was one of the four Beasts that dreamslingers could encounter in their dreams. There was also the Turtle Beast (whose shell was made of ice), the Tiger Beast (whose fur was made of autumn leaves), and the Dragon Beast (whose scales were made of flower petals). All four were as giant and terrifying as they were strange and mesmerizing.

Dr. Dixon typed into his computer. “Did the Beast lure you to its sea?”

Aria lowered her eyes and gave a small nod. She’d followed the bird to the south end of the Nightmare Circle, where the curved boundary abruptly gave way to a chasm of burning fire.

No one knew why there were four “seas”—the South Sea of Fire, the North Sea of Ice, the West Sea of Floating Leaves, and the East Sea of Poisonous Plants—surrounding the edges of the Nightmare Circle, each guarded by one of the Beasts. Nor did they understand why the Beasts tempted the dreamers to jump into them. What Aria did know was that ignoring the inexplicable desire to leap into the seas took every speck of willpower she had.

Dr. Dixon stopped typing into the computer and narrowed his eyes at Aria. “And did you make contact with the South Sea of Fire?”

“Only with my toes,” Aria quickly admitted, knowing that any lies would be uncovered as soon as she went into the chamber. “Then I immediately pulled back, I swear.”

Entering the seas infected dreamslingers with that particular affliction. That meant when the dreamer woke up, their Outbursts that day would take the form of the sea they encountered. Fire, ice, wind, or poison.

Dr. Dixon’s shrewd eyes bored into Aria as he pushed the return button on his keyboard. “You know as well as I do how much is riding on today. Your dad has worked hard to get us here. Do not let us down.”

Aria huffed. “Really, Dr. D? As if I’m not putting enough pressure on myself!”

She was well aware that as Professor Jack Loveridge’s daughter, she’d be seen as a walking example of his work. Her dad’s pioneering research on dreamslinger welfare was the reason the gene-compromised were finally being treated with the care they’d been denied for far too long. Resthaven was the result of all his work. And if today was a success, the Resthaven model would be replicated throughout the entire country. There’d be no room for mistakes today.

“Now go extract everything acquired during your dream. Every last drop.”

Aria hurried down the hall of extraction rooms, past the heated chamber able to melt ice within seconds, the detoxification chamber able to nullify all manner of poisons, and the vacuum chamber designed to withstand gale-force winds, to get to the fourth chamber. This one was padded with fireproof walls, the floor and ceiling covered with a white fire-extinguishing gel.

Bolting the door behind her, Aria peeled off her protective metal-fiber gloves, and immediately felt the onslaught of feelings she’d been trained to withhold. As with all dreamslingers, emotions were the trigger to Aria’s Outbursts, and inside the safety of the chambers was the only time the residents were encouraged to let them go. She cracked her knuckles, the anticipation of release almost painful under her skin. Then she allowed the storm of nerves, fear, excitement, and tension to reach their peak before expelling it all from her person.

She let out a deep-bellied howl as hungry flames whooshed out of her fingers, and with it came a delicious release. She closed her eyes and let her mind wander. She thought about how lucky she was to be in Resthaven. How nice it’d been to celebrate her fourteenth birthday with her fellow residents. How safe she was inside these walls.

Soon, she was traveling back to the memory of her first Outburst. It was a year ago now, when she was still thirteen, during school camp at Almiro State Park. She’d fallen asleep in her cabin, her belly full of s’mores and campfire stories, when she’d had a terrifying dream of a giant amber-leafed tiger chasing her into a sea of floating autumn leaves.

When she bolted awake from the nightmare, her body had tingled painfully like it had been dunked in hot crackling candy. Scared and confused, she’d shaken out her throbbing fingers, only to release a deadly windstorm into her cabin. The windows exploded and her sleeping cabinmates were violently flung from their bunk beds, hitting the ground like rag dolls. That was how Aria discovered she was a carrier of the dreamslinger gene.

It was safe to say she was traumatized. Learning you suffered from the same genetic mutation as the people who killed your mom was enough to scar a kid for life.

Back in the extraction chamber, Aria drained every last wisp of fire she could conjure from her hands until all that spat out was smoke. And only when her body was numb and her throat hoarse from howling did she allow herself to leave, finally feeling prepared to face what was sure to become the best day of her and her dad’s lives.

“Basima, I think we need a bit more polish on these floors. I can’t see my reflection.”

“Maria, let’s make sure the singed curtains are all replaced. Oh, and the yoga mats with the acid burns, too.”

“Do you think they should film the meditation room or the breath-work pods? Actually, maybe the art-therapy wing would be better.”

Aria was aware she was probably coming off bossy and demanding to the Resthaven staff, which was not her intention. But as she scoured every corner of the Home on the way to the Morning Mantra session, she was gripped with the need for everything to be perfect for her dad’s big moment.

It wasn’t every day that the US Commissioner of Dreamslinger Relations and the governor of Texas came to visit, let alone sign the national rollout of your dad’s Dreamslinger Home initiative live on national television. This was their one chance to make Resthaven the sparkling example of what could be in every state in America.

Realizing she was late for leading Morning Mantra, Aria hurried to the commons room.

“Restrain, contain, maintain!” Aria chanted from the stage as the residents beat their bowl drums and joined her in repeating the same three words over and over again. “Restrain, contain, maintain!”

Morning Mantra always took place after the check-ins with Dr. Dixon and his team. It only took five minutes, but Dad was right that it helped start each day with gratitude and united purpose.

“Grateful are we for the protection we receive, from the dangers within us we cannot foresee,” Aria recited to conclude the session. “May we be free from doing harm to our kin, and each do our part for goodness to win.”

“Restrain, contain, maintain!” the residents echoed in unison.

Aria was just stepping off the stage when Pablo, a sixteen-year-old fellow resident, turned on the news.

“Guys, look—there’s been another anti-slinger attack in Almiro!”

Everyone crowded around the tiny TV.

“That’s the third in as many weeks,” Levi, another resident pointed out, shuddering. “Isn’t that the town hall? That’s just down the road.”

Aria spoke above the residents’ worried mutterings. “That’s why today is so important. Dad’s work is helping counter anti-slinger rhetoric, but there’s a lot more work to be done.”

The residents nodded in agreement.

“Makes you appreciate how far we’ve come,” Pablo murmured, which incited another series of nods.

He was right. Dreamslingers had always been a marginalized group in society, deemed dangerous, volatile, and to be avoided unless necessary. But ten years ago, when there was a mass dreamslinger Outburst in Texas, thousands of people died and the landscape shifted overnight. Many states passed laws that allowed dreamslingers to be locked up without the need for trial. Mere suspicion was enough to be incarcerated for life. They’d become public enemy number one.

Some particularly fervent anti-slingers went as far as to demand the eradication of all dreamslingers, as if they were pests who needed to be culled. But through the chaos, Aria’s dad had risen as a voice of radical compassion.

Despite the Great Outburst having killed Aria’s mom, her dad had introduced a revolutionary approach to dreamslinger welfare. He argued the gene-compromised were not criminals. They were patients who deserved society’s care. If dreamslingers could be taught the skills to “restrain, contain, and maintain,” it would create a win-win for humanity. Little did he know that when his daughter hit puberty she’d become one of the beneficiaries of his work.

She owed everything to her dad. Pride swelled in her chest as Aria returned to her room to grab one of her late mom’s journals and to wrap the band with a four-petaled flower—the universal dreamslinger symbol—around her upper arm. It was another of her dad’s recommendations. Wearing the symbol prevented dreamslingers from being accused of hiding their identity for nefarious reasons. It also allowed more cautious citizens to keep their distance, and be safe from any potential Outbursts. In Aria’s experience, the armband was an effective tool for her safety, and for others’.

Satisfied that it was affixed properly to her arm, Aria made her way to the main doors of Resthaven and faced the bright morning, already heady with the summer heat. Her dad and the important guests were arriving later this afternoon for their big live-streamed event. And there were still many things to be done.

But first, there was somewhere important Aria needed to go.

ARIA’S MOM HAD ADORED SUNFLOWERS. It Was why her dad had scattered her ashes at the Almiro Sunflower Fields, where, in the summer, the meadows would come alive—their bright, gleeful faces blooming like a million petaled suns. Her dad said Aria had taken her first steps amongst these flowers, recounting how the giant stalks crowded around her like proud doting aunties, and how they’d celebrated afterward with a picnic by the lake.

Aria was barely four years old when her mom, Ersa Loveridge—who’d chosen her English name after the Greek goddess of dew—was killed during the Great Outburst. And with her died a part of Aria too, including her connection to Korea—her mom’s birth country. The only memories she had of her mother were the lucky number eight pendant she’d worn around her neck, the warmth of her embrace, and her scent—a light citrusy white musk that Aria would recognize anywhere. That, and a lullaby she used to sing as she cradled Aria to sleep. Aria visited the Fields often, whenever she wanted to feel closer to her. Because here, her mom was eternal.

“Hey, Mom, today’s the big day,” Aria said out loud as she wandered through a grove of happy yellow faces, rubbing the pendant that had belonged to her mom and that she now wore around her neck. She looked down at the journal she’d brought with her. This one was titled Ersa’s Treasures, Volume 8: Highly Specific Emotions I Didn’t Know There Were Names For in her scratchy handwriting.

Her mom had a box full of the tiny journals, each one a unique collection of treasures that tickled her curiosity at the time. Funny song lyrics. Interesting names. One even chronicled a database of animals she could see in the clouds. This notebook was one of Aria’s favorites, though, because it almost felt like having a conversation with her mom.

“Dad’s going to wow the nation today, Mom. I’m so proud of him. Aren’t you?” Aria opened the journal to a random page and pointed to the first word her finger landed on.

The entry read:

SAUDADE (Noun) (Portuguese origin):

Nostalgia and the love that remains;

a desire to be near something or someone distant.

Aria nodded. “I wish you could be here with us, too. But you’re okay wherever you are, right?”

Aria chose another random page and placed her finger on a word without looking. This time, the entry read:

HIRAETH (Noun) (Welsh origin): (1) Homesickness for a home to which you cannot return; or (2) A longing for a home that never existed.

Aria sighed. “I’m sorry you’re homesick, Mom. If it’s any consolation, I am, too. But not homesick for a place. For a time. Back when home was the three of us.”

She felt the sticky tendrils of loss weaving through her ribs, and she put the book away before the gluiness seeped farther in. Instead, she walked toward the lake, singing the lullaby her mom used to sing to her.

Fly, free bird, fly

Fly, free bird, fly

Don’t let them clip your wings

When you were born to soar

Fly, free bird, fly

Fly, free bird, fly

For there, beyond the gray

You’ll find a new door

My wings will guide you home

Grief was the hardest emotion to restrain, let alone control or maintain. All the emotional regulation techniques she’d learned from Resthaven hadn’t yet given her the skills to master it. Because grief couldn’t be tamed like frustration or anger. It was slippery. Unpredictable. It creeped up on you when you least expected it and took the floor out from under you.

As if illustrating the point, an errant flame erupted from her fingers, leaping onto the patch of grass as she came out into the lake’s clearing. She grunted and quickly stamped it out before it could spread.

There was a flurry of activity near the lakeside, and she turned her attention to the commotion, grateful for the distraction. There seemed to be a group of young kids gathered in front of some older teenagers in cloaked hoods with symbols on the backs. It looked like some kind of a cosplay meetup.

But as one of the teenagers chanted something, a turtle the size of a dinner table with a shell of ice materialized beside him. Then another cloaked teen summoned a gigantic dragon who had petals for scales. A shiver ran down Aria’s back.

Most of the local kids shrieked and immediately made a run for it. They knew the rule when it came to dreamslingers—engage at your own peril. Only a brave few, or perhaps they were the foolish ones, stayed back, trembling but too curious to leave.

Aria gawked at the familiar creatures in the unfamiliar setting. That ice-shelled turtle and petal-scaled dragon were Beasts from the Nightmare Circle. But how were they here?

“You guys want to have some fun?” the teen with the Turtle Beast asked the remaining kids with a grin, and he slung his hands toward the lake. Aria flinched, expecting an ice Outburst. Instead, a sheet of ice began forming on the water. The frosty shell on the Turtle Beast glowed as the boy’s fingers did an intricate dance, constructing an ice slide on the floe that spilled into the lake. “Thought you might like to cool off in this heat.”

One fearless kid peeled off his T-shirt and jumped into the lake with a howl, eager to try out their frosty new waterslide.

“What about a rope swing?” the teen with the petaled dragon teased. “Bet I can make one like you’ve never seen before.”

She slung her hands toward the nearest field of sunflowers and made a Come here motion. Her dragon glowed as one stalk stretched all the way toward the lake as if made of stretchy elastic. The girl twirled her hands and made a tying motion, and the stalk affixed itself to the branch of a tree overlooking the water. One kid jumped on, using the sunflower head as a pommel seat to swing himself into the lake.

Aria watched the scene with equal parts fascination and fear. Who were these people who could wield their Outbursts with such calm precision and skill? There was no ugly release of emotion like Aria let out in the chambers every morning. None of the raw, uncontrollable wildness of her Outbursts. It was like they had real-life superpowers.

“You can join us if you want to,” an older teen with dark hair said as he approached Aria. There was a daisy on his cloak. “We don’t bite.”

It was only then that Aria noticed the intricate knot charm hanging from his waist, long silky tassels flowing from it. She frowned. Where had she seen that before? It looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. She thought back to her lessons at Resthaven…. Something to do with preventing dreams? No, that wasn’t it. Something to do with historical methods of capturing—

She gasped and stumbled back as awareness dawned on her. “That’s a B—Beast catcher!” she stuttered.

The boy cocked his head. “Not quite.”

Aria’s mind spun. “Yes, it is! We learned all about them. And the only people stupid enough to use them are—” Her eyes widened. “You’re a royal slinger from the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk, aren’t you? But how? You’re a hermit kingdom. You guys aren’t allowed to leave.”

“And yet here we are.”

Aria took another step back. The Kingdom of Royal Hanguk was a tiny country nestled on an island inside Seoul, known for its disproportionate population of dreamslingers and for their decision to live completely isolated from the rest of the world. Little was known about them, but their king governed the Royal League of Dreamslingers, which trained teenagers to harness and wield their Outbursts.

You’d think that was an enviable skill, except that the controversial training involved catching dream Beasts from the Nightmare Circle and pulling them back into the real world. And this put young dreamslingers—and the general public—at great risk. In an interview, her dad had once likened the League’s methods to giving loaded guns to young people. Except worse, because young people were being turned into loaded guns.

The boy looked down at Aria’s armband and paused. “You could be a hero, you know.”

“You mean like you?” she spat. “You can’t be a hero if you’re already the villain.”

“You’ll find that depends on whom you’re asking.”

Aria’s gaze flitted down to his tasseled knot charm again, and the boy lifted it up for her to see.

“It’s where we house them,” he explained. He chanted something that sounded like “Suri suri masuri.”

Aria blinked, and suddenly, a giant dragon with rose petals for scales was standing next to him. Aria screamed and leapt back.

“There’s no need for that.” He jumped on the Beast’s back with a well-practiced ease, and the long, wingless dragon let out a hiss. “My name is Tae and this is Jaya. He’s a bloom dragon.”

When Aria merely gaped in response, he continued. “Having the genetic mutation doesn’t make you a villain—it makes you an exception. The Royal League could help you become exceptional. Remember that.”

For a split second, Aria was so caught up in the moment that she found herself nodding along. But then her senses returned, and she remembered why this all looked too good to be true. Because it was.

After all, the Royal League of Dreamslingers were the ones who caused the Great Outburst ten years ago. The hermit kingdom had suddenly sent hundreds of their young royal slingers on a world tour, to showcase their controversial abilities to the public. They claimed it was a diplomatic effort to help dispel negative myths about the League, and to build positive public sentiment toward dreamslingers—royal or otherwise. To show the world that dreamslingers’ powers were a force for good.

But that’s not what happened. By the time the contingent arrived in Texas, they’d been pushed beyond their limits and were exhausted. A fight broke out between some royal slingers and a group of local protestors, which sparked a mass conflict. What resulted was a series of fires, ice storms, hurricanes, and poisonous plagues that ravaged multiple cities and took thousands of innocent lives. Including Aria’s mom’s.

At the thought of her mom, fresh grief seeped into Aria’s bones. Since the Great Outburst, hardly any royal slingers had been seen outside the hermit kingdom.

Until now.

“Hey, kid, be careful!” a royal slinger shouted as one of the local kids swung himself too eagerly on the sunflower rope swing, almost colliding headfirst with the ice slide.

“This is incredible!” the boy cried, ignoring the warning and going for another, bigger swing.

Another slinger summoned his Tiger Beast and used his wind Outburst to pull the floating ice sheet closer to the shore. But at the same time, the one who’d made the sunflower rope swing lassoed the stalk around the boy’s body, dropping him into the water. Unfortunately, the marriage of the two actions resulted in the boy suddenly being dropped, not into the lake, but onto the hard ice. His head struck the sharp edge of the floe with a sickening crack. Blood began to pool under his head.

Aria screamed.

She suddenly understood her dad’s analogy. The problem with becoming a human loaded gun was that you didn’t have to want to hurt people to still be able to hurt them. There were many ways to pull a trigger.

Quickly, she sprinted back to the carpark to find someone to call an ambulance. A man there complied, but not before he muttered under his breath.

“Human abominations.”

It was only when she caught him sneering at her armband that she realized he wasn’t talking about the royal slingers. He was talking about her.

“It wasn’t me!” she shouted, feeling indignant. “I didn’t hurt him. It was them. I’m different, I promise. I’m not like them at all!”

The man looked at her with pity, which only made her fume even more. Soon, her fingers were sparking with heat from a ballooning Outburst, and she gritted her teeth. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her lose control.

Restrain. Contain. Maintain.

It was like her dad always said. A wise person allowed some battles to be lost in order to win the war. And this guy? He wasn’t worth the fight.

Checking that the boy was being looked after, Aria turned and ran. She put all trace of stupid ignorant haters and of weird royal slingers out of her mind. Because for the briefest of moments, she’d almost forgotten. Today, back at Resthaven, she and her dad were about to win a real war.

And that was something worth fighting for.

ARIA KNEW SHE HAD TO find her dad. The timing of these royal slingers suddenly appearing in Almiro today was too coincidental for it to be an accident. She needed to warn him. But her dad had left this morning to meet the governor and commissioner, and she didn’t have a phone.

“Dr. D!” Aria cried as she burst through the front doors of Resthaven. “We need to call my dad. Please, it’s urgent!”

Dr. Dixon didn’t even hear her. He was too busy corralling the residents in the entrance atrium, getting them ready for the big welcome. Everyone milled about nervously in their Sunday finest and on their best behavior. Well, almost.

“Juno, go put your gloves on now!” Dr. Dixon barked, as one of the residents accidentally released a poison Outburst, shooting a jet of acid from her hands. It landed at the entrance, burning a hole through the welcome mat.

The doctor rushed to hide the smoking mat behind the reception desk, his face reddening. “If you’d extracted properly like I told you this morning, you wouldn’t be losing control!” he yelled. “Go get your restraints immediately.”

“Dr. D,” Aria tried again, waving a hand in front of his face. “I really need to call my dad. It’s about the ceremony, and it’s really important he knows that—”

“Aria Loveridge!” he scolded her, his eyes narrowing as he took her in. “I expected better from you. Where have you been? And why are you sweating like that? You look like you’ve been wrestling with a bush!”

Before she could explain, he gasped and shoved her out of the way as the delegation’s limousine came to a stop outside the main doors.

“Everybody, in position! They’re here!” he cried.

Aria felt like she was standing on hot coals as she watched a tall angular man and a short plump man step out of the vehicle, accompanied by a small entourage of officials. Her panic rose further as a mob of camera people leapt out from the van behind them, their equipment in tow. Finally, Aria’s dad appeared from one of the cars in the convoy.

“Dad!” Aria cried, at the same time as Dr. Dixon rushed forward to shake the VIPs’ hands.

The doctor shot daggers at her over his shoulder before he cooed at his guests. “Welcome to Resthaven, Governor Miller, Commissioner Reid! Please, do come in. Let us take you on a tour of our humble premises.”

“Dad!” Aria yelled louder this time, waving her hands over her head as the doctor led the entourage into the atrium. “Dad, I have to tell you something. I was at the Sunflower—”

“Aria,” her dad said calmly but firmly as the commissioner and governor gazed curiously at her. “Are you sure this is the best time?”

He raised an eyebrow as he walked past, and Aria knew it was a warning. If there was any day she needed to restrain, contain, maintain, it was today. But Aria also knew that this news was too important not to share. The entire live-streamed announcement could be at risk.

“But, Dad, you don’t understand, this is urgent!” With her blood pumping, she cut in front of the sharp-featured commissioner’s path to get to her dad. “Just before when I was at the Fields, I saw—”

“Argh!” The commissioner tripped over Aria, and some document-carrying officials rushed to help him to his feet. A few papers slipped from one of their folios, just in time for the rotund governor to step on it. His footing slipped, and he, too, fell to the ground with a shuddering thud. He groaned in pain.

The entire entourage froze, and her dad swiveled to face her, his expression heavy with embarrassment. “Aria, please!”

Realizing what she’d done, Aria took a step back. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, shame burning her face. “I didn’t mean to, I just—I just needed you to know that—”

“Enough is enough,” her dad admonished, and the look of disappointment on his face was enough for the words to disappear straight back into Aria’s mouth. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but now is not the time, do you hear me?”

Aria shrank back. She could count on one hand the number of times her dad had used this tone with her, and that’s how she knew there was no way she was getting through to him now. She swallowed back the tears and nodded meekly. She was just going to have to cross all her fingers and toes that the royal slingers being in town was an unfortunate coincidence.

“Make sure you keep your distance from our VIPs,” Dr. Dixon hissed as he walked past her. “There are cameras, for god’s sake!”

Aria made herself scarce as the tour progressed, but noted how the commissioner and governor nodded approvingly as her dad explained the rationale behind Resthaven’s programs. Thankfully, it seemed they’d forgiven him for his daughter’s misdeeds.

By the time the group entered the auditorium for the true purpose of the visit, Aria’s nerves had begun to settle. Everything was proceeding as it should. Despite her earlier faux pas, they were on the home stretch now. Everything was going to be okay.

The governor and commissioner sat at the signing table, while the camera crew set up in front of the stage and at the back of the auditorium. When everyone was seated in the audience, Aria’s dad walked up to the podium, his wooden cane clicking against the floor. Aria sat in the front row so she could beam up at him.

“Ten years ago, I lost my dear wife to the Great Outburst, just as many of you lost loved ones, too. The truth is, we all lost someone or something that day.”

The cameras panned over his leg, as if to illustrate his personal loss. He’d suffered horrific burns trying to save Aria’s mom.

“But over the last decade, I have embarked on a comprehensive fact-finding mission. My research has proven that criminalizing and incarcerating our gene-compromised population is not the answer. It merely masks the symptoms, which only kicks the problem farther down the road. The only way to solve our national dreamslinger crisis is to embrace radical compassion. We must care for our most vulnerable in society, and in doing so, help all of humanity.”

He gazed out at the audience of residents before him. “Look around you, the proof is right here. Resthaven has directly contributed to a ninety percent decrease in Outburst-related incidents in Almiro—we now have the lowest in the state, and the lowest, in fact, in the entire country. And it brings me nothing but pride that from today, we will be able to apply this proven, science-backed approach to every state in our great nation.”

There was a thundering round of applause, and Aria at the front was the loudest by far.

Governor Miller and Commissioner Reid both made short remarks, and then the government officials prepared the paperwork for them to sign. The cameras homed in on the signing table, where shiny pens were waiting to deliver the country into a new era of dreamslinger welfare.

“And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for,” Aria’s dad announced. “I invite the governor and the commissioner to sign the National Dreamslinger Home Rollout agreem—”

He was interrupted by a teenager in a daisy-symboled cloak bursting through the doors of the auditorium. Accompanying him was a giant Dragon Beast whose scales were made of rose petals. Aria’s blood stilled.

“What the—?” her dad breathed into the mic.

The royal slinger, who Aria recognized as Tae from the Sunflower Fields, strode confidently up the aisle as the cameras swiveled hungrily, lapping up the confusion in the room.

Seeing her dad’s panicked face, Aria quickly searched for the guards. But then she remembered. There were no guards. It had been an intentional decision to make a statement to the public—that the gene-compromised didn’t need policing. Dreamslinger Homes were peaceful places. They hadn’t considered outside interference.

Tae and his bloom dragon stopped in front of the cameras and turned to face the audience.

“I’m sorry to burst in unannounced, but I have come to relay an important message from His Royal Majesty, King Lee Ogu, from the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk.”

The entire auditorium stilled. Even the cameras seemed to stop breathing.

“For the first time in history, the Royal League of Dreamslingers will be opening up its Annual Royal Slinger Trials to any teenager with the genetic mutation, regardless of one’s birthplace, ancestry, or creed.”

Aria gasped, along with everyone else. On the stage, her dad’s eyes bulged.

“It will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the gene-blessed to compete on equal standing with our own, for a chance to harness the gene and to reap the many riches of the Asleep.”

As if in response, the bloom dragon opened its mouth and summoned a giant pomelo-size orb in its jaws. It was a dazzling violet globe with golden lightning streaks swimming through it. The Beast pointed its snout in Tae’s direction and released its jaws, hurling the orb at its human.

On impact, a shimmering aura of a spider appeared around the royal slinger, and then, unbelievably, Tae began growing additional arms. Each one was hairy and distinctly arachnid-esque, and they continued to sprout until there were eight of them, each moving with its own agency.

The audience shrieked, and one of the officials fainted on the spot. The stout governor began praying loudly from the stage. Aria lost her ability to think clearly. What was that violet orb? Had Tae really just grown spider arms?!

“As you can see, there are exceptional powers available to those who are successful in the competition.” Tae’s eyes lingered on Aria. “Furthermore, those who pass the Trials will be inducted as Fellows of the Royal League and be granted lifetime citizenship of the kingdom. The Trials will begin without delay on August seventh, but all those interested must first register their attendance via scroll.”

Aria blinked, and hundreds of tiny scrolls rained down from the ceiling. Her dad started making a beeline for Tae.

“As you may or may not be aware, no electronics are permitted within kingdom borders. But appropriate communication channels will be provided to every trialeer upon arrival. Does anyone have any questions?”

The unexpected call for questions jolted Aria back to her senses. She looked around, and it dawned on her that the situation was even worse than it looked. This entire encounter was being live-streamed on national television. All her dad’s hard work was being sabotaged by the Royal League for their own dangerous interests. She could not let this go on.

She bolted to her feet. But her dad beat her to Tae.

“This is not the place, young man.” He pointed his cane at the royal slinger, the colorful cozy she’d crocheted for the stick on full display. “Please, leave now. We have heard enough.”

It was a peaceful request, but the bloom dragon took offense at the cane being pointed in Tae’s direction. It hissed protectively before swiping its long muscular tail toward the professor. It whacked her dad’s legs with full force, and he collapsed with a painful thud on the ground.

“DAD!”

White-hot fury flared in Aria’s gut like the sparkler she was. How dare they touch him!

Before she knew what was happening, a torrent of fire was shooting out of her hands, raw and potent and full of rage. A nearby cameraman’s legs caught alight, and he shrieked and flailed about, toppling his tripod and spreading the flames to the rest of the camera crew.

Aria gasped and hid her hands behind her back. No, no, no! That wasn’t supposed to happen. Not today! A thick silence spread through the auditorium as all eyes landed on Aria. And as she took in their horrified expressions, the blood drained from her face. What had she done?!

As she stood there frozen, one opportunistic cameraperson swiveled their lens toward Aria, eager to capture the culprit on film. Immediately, Aria’s dad leapt in front of her, blocking the camera’s view with his body.

“Turn that thing off. NOW.”

Aria dared to glance at her dad, who’d turned to check on her. Their eyes met, and Aria’s heart shattered. His disappointment was spelled so clearly in his red-rimmed eyes, she knew she’d crossed a line that could never be uncrossed. Against all her best intentions, she’d somehow, with one fell swoop, made her dad’s legacy and reputation go up, literally, in smoke.

By the time the ambulances and fire trucks left, the real fire at Resthaven was just beginning to burn.

“How dare you let this happen, Professor Loveridge!” the governor shouted, his round face red and blotchy. His voice reverberated around the walls of her dad’s office. “I have never, do you hear me, never, in my career experienced such a PR disaster. Were you aware the royal slinger would make an appearance?”

From Aria’s hiding spot behind the filing cabinet, she could see her dad carefully arrange his face so his emotions couldn’t be read. It was one of the Outburst suppression techniques taught at Resthaven.

“Absolutely not, Governor,” her dad responded, a forced calm in his tone. “It was news to me that they were even in the country, let alone in Almiro.”

Aria wanted to scream. She’d tried to tell him! If only he’d listened!

“And what of that offensive child who had the Outburst?” the commissioner demanded, his nasal voice as thin as his physique. “I hope she’ll be dealt with accordingly.” It was clear he had no idea Aria was the same person who’d tripped him over earlier.

“That was my daughter,” her dad snapped, his body visibly tensing. “And I would warn you in future to mind your choice of words, Commissioner.”

“You do understand you’ve put us in a rather difficult situation,” the commissioner remarked, unaffected by her dad’s warning. “After the abject humiliation we just experienced on national television, surely you don’t expect us to support the rollout now?”

Her dad swallowed thickly. “I would, in fact, argue this incites even greater urgency for the rollout. If the Royal League is suddenly opening their borders again, we need to be prepared. The last time they emerged, it resulted in the Great Outburst. We need to ensure our gene-compromised don’t get indoctrinated into their extremist ways.”

The governor sighed heavily. “It’s a valid point. We wouldn’t be able to survive another Great Outburst. Not after what they did to us last time.”

The commissioner scowled as he fingered the vase of flowers on her dad’s desk.

“The problem is that we have no idea what they’re up to,” the governor continued in a huff. “It’s like trying to provide an answer when you don’t know what the question is!”

As the governor waffled on with his stream of consciousness, the commissioner stared at the flowers with an eerie intensity. And then, out of nowhere, he ripped an entire dahlia head off its stalk, crushing it inside his fist. He mumbled something about bleeding flowers.

“What was that?” the governor asked.

“I said we’ll send someone to find out,” the commissioner replied.

“Why in the world would we do that?” The governor looked confused.

The commissioner spoke slowly as if explaining something to a small child. “You said it yourself—we don’t know what they’re plotting. And if this is the first time they’re opening the Trials to any dreamslinger in the world, we need someone on the inside. Someone who can infiltrate the system, find out what they’re up to, and prove the League is up to no good. Someone who can find evidence. Undercover.”

The governor mulled it over before his eyes lit up. “And if we can show proof that they’re planning anything akin to another Great Outburst, our skins will be saved. It’s the perfect scapegoat. I can see the headlines now—Governor of Texas saves world from Great Outburst Two!” He chuckled heartily and slapped the commissioner on the shoulder, who bristled at the gesture. “You’re a genius, Reid! My only criticism is that I didn’t think of it myself!”

Aria’s dad shook his head fervently. “There’s no way we’re sending anyone into that lion’s den. They create child soldiers. They teach vulnerable youth to wield their emotions as weapons. We have a duty to protect our young people.”

The look on the commissioner’s face could’ve chilled the sun. “Send someone and get the proof we need,” he said icily. “Or else say goodbye to your national rollout. In fact, you might as well say goodbye to Resthaven while you’re at it, too.”

Her dad’s face crumpled. “But—”

“I’ll do it!” Aria cried, revealing herself from behind the filing cabinet. “I’ll go to the Trials. I’ll be your spy and find the proof you need.”

Her dad’s eyes flared, exposing a fury she’d never seen in him before. “Like hell you will!” he growled. “That hermit kingdom doesn’t recognize international laws. The US doesn’t even have official diplomatic relations with them! If something terrible happened to you there, we’d have no legal recourse to bring you back. Do you see what I’m trying to say? This would be a suicide mission!”

“I beg to differ,” the commissioner replied, his tone steely. “I would argue this is rather a beautiful solution to our little predicament.”

The governor nodded a little too eagerly. “It’s the least she could do after today.”

It was clear by the look on her dad’s face that he knew her fate had been sealed. Still, he didn’t let up.

“But this is not how we do things in America,” he argued hotly. “We protect our own. How can you support sending a minor into what is essentially enemy territory?” He wrung his hands. “Please, I implore you to have mercy. She’s my daughter!”

The commissioner cleared his throat. “You forget legislation stipulates that any gene-compromised minor is ultimately the responsibility of the state, not their parent.”

“Oh, precisely,” the governor quickly agreed. “So I’m afraid, Professor, it’s not your decision as to whether this child enters the Trials or not. As governor of Texas, it’s mine.”

Her dad stared into Aria’s eyes with a supreme look of fear that chilled her to the bone. What have you done?! it demanded. Aria knew he’d never forgive her for this. And yet she felt her chest fill with a dark sort of satisfaction.

This was going to be her penance for ruining her dad’s career, his legacy, and his reputation. This was the only way she could salvage what was left of it.

Her dad couldn’t see it yet. But Aria was going to compete in the Annual Royal Slinger Trials in the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk. And by proving they were guilty, she was going to fix everything she’d burned.

FOR THE NEXT WEEK, ARIA was an anxious pinball pinging off the walls. She didn’t know if it was the guilt of the botched signing or the fear of what was to come. But whatever the reason, she’d spent more and more time at the Nightmare Circle. Every night, it became increasingly hard to resist the pull of the four cardinal seas. And despite the lengthy extractions in the chambers each morning, her Outbursts were reaching a whole new intensity.

She was almost relieved when departure day finally arrived a week later, and she wheeled her green suitcase toward the doors of Resthaven.

“Please don’t let them shut Resthaven down,” Pablo, who had organized a small farewell party at the atrium, pleaded. “We’re counting on you.”

“And for what it’s worth, I think what you’re doing is really brave,” Levi added. “Crazy. But brave.”

She received a round of hugs from everyone, although Dr. Dixon was notably absent. And Basima the cleaner didn’t bother hiding her tears as she kissed Aria on every available surface of her face. “Please be safe, habibi. We will miss you.”

The weight of Aria’s burden was already buckling her knees. If she didn’t succeed in her mission, what would become of her friends here? The thought was too much to bear.

“We better get moving,” Aria’s dad murmured as he straightened the four-petaled flower on her armband. “It’s a long drive to the airport. And an even longer flight to Seoul.”

Her dad had been painfully quiet the entire way to the airport, and now, Aria fiddled with the fake passport as her dad argued with the check-in counter. Apparently, someone in the line had complained that having a dreamslinger on board was a public safety issue and had demanded Aria be moved to a different flight.

Aria opened the passport that the US Commissioner of Dreamslinger Relations had arranged for her, to match the name they’d put on the scroll registration. There on the bio data page, under her face, was her new name: Aria Love.

Since Royal Hanguk didn’t use technology, they’d assumed the live footage of the signing fiasco hadn’t made it to the League. But with a dad as prominent as Professor Loveridge, they’d wanted to make sure Aria’s surname wouldn’t be linked back to him. So Love it was.

She knew a few letters shaved off her surname wasn’t going to help her if she ran into Tae in the kingdom. But she’d deal with that if and when it happened. In the meantime, she was grateful her dad had been such a stickler when it came to keeping her public profile hidden. He’d always made it a point to keep her out of the limelight. Hopefully, that meant no other competing dreamslingers from the rest of the world would recognize her, either.

“I’m sorry, Sparkler, but it looks like you’re going to have to wear your gloves the entire flight,” her dad said, finally having reached an agreement with the check-in officer. “On the upside, they’ve bumped you up to first class.”

Aria slipped on the metal-fiber restraints and fist-pumped the air. “Niiice! Nothing like being a complete social reject. You get the best flight perks!”

Her dad winced at the comment.

“It was just a joke, Dad. Sorry.” She lowered her head. “I’m—I’m sorry for everything.”

They headed toward the airport café to order their usual iced coffee and iced hazelnut oat milk. And as they waited for their drinks, her dad sighed with the weight of the world.

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry. If only I hadn’t pushed the no guard thing, then everything wouldn’t have snowballed the way it did at the signing.” He pulled his hands down his face and sighed again. “How could I have let this happen?”

“Come on, Dad. Stop torturing yourself. You’re making this all about you. But you’re not the one who lit your big day on fire. That was me. And you’re not the one forcing me to be a spy. That would, again, be me.”

“You and the good state of Texas,” he muttered darkly before glaring at her. “I’ll never forgive you for putting yourself in this situation.”

“I hope someday you will. But for now, I’m grateful you’re letting me do this.”

He grunted. “It’s not like I had a choice.”

Aria twiddled her mom’s lucky number eight pendant in her fingers. “What do you think Mom would say if she were here?”

He paused thoughtfully. “I think she would’ve told you to… spread your wings.”

The comment made her think of the lullaby her mom used to sing to her.

Fly, free bird, fly

Fly, free bird, fly

Don’t let them clip your wings

When you were born to soar…

In some ways, this mission was as much for her mom as it was for her dad. After all, the Royal League created the Great Outburst, and the Great Outburst killed her mom. So really, holding the League responsible for their crimes felt like a way of avenging her mother’s death. The thought gave her strength.

“Listen, about your mom…” her dad started. “The thing is, your mom, she was—” His voice cracked. “She, uh, she was—”

Aria touched his arm. “It’s okay, Dad. I know it’s hard for you to talk about her.”

He nodded and took her hand, his eyes watery. “You’re just so much like her.” He opened her palm and placed a small rectangular object on it. “Here, this is for you.”

It was a single domino tile. One black pip was painted on either side of the center line.

She groaned. “You and your old-man dominoes. I told you no one my age plays with those. I’m fourteen!”

“I don’t care if you’re four or forty, you’re still my kid, so give your old man a chance to explain himself.”

Aria harrumphed.

“This is the starter piece—the one that kicks the game off. No matter how small you might feel, or how impossible a task may seem, I want you to remember to be like this starter piece. Just lay out that first tile, and like in every good domino wall, know that everything else will come tumbling after.”

He closed Aria’s fist around the tile. “I hate that you’re doing this. I hate myself even more that I can’t stop you. But I also have complete and utter faith in you.” His breath hitched. “God, I’m going to miss you so much, Sparkler.”

She buried her face into his side and her insides wobbled uncontrollably. “I’m going to miss you too, Dad.” She clutched the domino tile tight. “And I promise to be the starter piece.”

First class was huge and fancy and absolutely deserted. Even the flight attendants gave Aria a wide berth as they asked if she preferred the fish meal or the chicken. Aria was tired and wouldn’t have minded a nap, but she didn’t dare try. The metal restraints were only effective to a point, and she wasn’t going to risk needing extraction thirty thousand feet in the air.

Instead, she opened her mom’s journal—the one with the collection of highly specific emotions—and asked how her mom was feeling.

Her finger landed on the entry:

RESFEBER (Noun) (Swedish origin): The restless race of the traveler’s heart before the journey begins, when anxiety and anticipation are tangled together.

“Me too, Mom,” Aria whispered. “Me too.”

Fifteen long hours later, the plane touched down on South Korean soil. Aria disembarked the aircraft and followed the crowd through immigration and to the baggage claim to find her suitcase. Then, steeling herself, she walked through the doors into the arrivals area.

Immediately, an attack of bright flashes assaulted her senses. Aria yelped and shielded her eyes.

“Trialeer Love! Trialeer Aria Love! Just one minute of your time, please!”

“How are you feeling in advance of the Annual Royal Slinger Trials?”

“Is this your first time abroad? How does it feel to leave your home country for the first time?”

Aria peeked through the gap between her fingers. In between the white spots in her vision, she saw a sizable camera crew pointing all manner of fuzzy and long microphones her way. She shuddered. She’d had enough of camera crews for a lifetime and then some.

There was a second explosion of flashes as the media mob started shouting another name.

“Trialeer Walker! Trialeer Tui Walker! A minute of your time, please!”

Aria glanced behind her to see a girl her age, tall with light brown skin, an unruly head of hair, and the coolest rainbow combat boots she’d ever seen. Unlike Aria, she didn’t seem fussed by the crowds. She coolly walked up to one of the reporters and answered their questions.

A hand tapped Aria on her shoulder.

“Trialeer Aria Love, please come with me.”

The British-accented voice belonged to a large potbellied man with ruddy cheeks who bowed deeply when she turned toward him. He was dressed in a traditional Korean outfit with roomy pants and a crossed-collar top that had billowing sleeves. A four-petaled flower was embroidered on the chest.

Instinctively, she reached out to touch her armband. Her flower symbol was just an empty outline, a functional reminder of her genetic condition. But his was vivid and vibrant, with symbols etched inside each petal. The north-pointing one had a snowflake, the east-facing one a daisy. The one pointing south had a sun, and the petal to the west had a sweetgum leaf. They were the same symbols she’d seen on the royal slingers’ cloaks at the Almiro Sunflower Fields.

“I am your designated driver. We must leave with haste.”

Aria narrowed her eyes and gave him the most intimidating look she could muster. “I’d like to see proof that you’ve been sent to fetch me. How do I know you’re not some anti-slinger psychopath? I’ll have you know I’m stronger than I look.”

His eyes creased warmly as he let out a deep chuckle. His big belly jiggled in response, and Aria found herself wondering if Santa had a distant Korean cousin.

“My name is Nam Changdo. You can call me Changdo or Driver Nam, or whatever you feel most comfortable with. And you’ll find everything is in tip-top order. You can see here yourself.”

He unraveled a scroll and passed it to her, which had her name, birth date, country of origin, and the photo that she’d submitted in the scroll registration.

She mumbled an approval and passed it back.

“I have been instructed to have you arrive in the kingdom in time for the Official Royal Welcome Ceremony, so we really must make haste. Punctuality is a quality the king values highly. So unless you’d like to accuse me of any other crimes, sins, or general misgivings, do allow me to escort you to the diplomatic vehicle.” He took her suitcase and gave another hearty belly-jiggling chuckle.

As Aria followed the strangely jolly man through the airport, her body buzzed with nerves. And as the driver ushered her into the shiny black car with full-tinted windows, it struck her like a bolt of lightning. She’d volunteered for this. She’d chosen to be here. And now there was no turning back.

“Please do buckle your seat belt, Trialeer Love. As they say, safety comes first.”

Aria gulped and gripped tightly to the single domino tile in her hand. Just be the starter piece, she reminded herself. Lay out the first tile and have faith that everything else will come tumbling after.

THE INSIDE OF THE DIPLOMATIC vehicle was pristine, if a bit lacking in character. It smelled of new leather, and the temperature was dialed to a perfect crisp freshness. The only thing giving the car a pop of personality was a little photo of the driver and a smiling young girl—presumably his daughter—on the dashboard.

Driver Nam glanced into the rearview mirror and nodded toward the center armrest that had been lowered. “Please do avail yourself of all that’s on offer, Trialeer Love. Courtesy of the king.”

Inside were a variety of Korean snacks and drinks, all completely new to Aria. The cute bottle of banana milk jumped out at her, as did the green grape candies that were satisfyingly round and shiny like marbles. The individually wrapped honey cookies in the shapes of flowers looked good, too. Her stomach rumbled.

“You haven’t poisoned them, have you?” she demanded, only half joking. She realized in hindsight it was probably an inappropriate thing to say. But she was tired, nervous, and hungry, and her thoughts seemed to be coming out unfiltered.

He let out a jolly laugh and winked at her. “I guess you won’t know until you try them.”

She looked away from the snacks, deciding not to take the risk. But it had been such a long time since she’d indulged in any sugary treats. Resthaven’s carefully planned nonaggravating diet was good for lessening Outbursts, but it was definitely bland.

Feeling her resolve fade, she nabbed one of the flower-shaped honey cookies, only to find that it was impossible to open with her metal-fiber gloves. She quickly threw the restraints off and popped a cookie in her mouth before she could change her mind. The cookie was nothing like she expected. It was sticky, chewy, and decadently sweet. She reached for another.

The sugar high was almost instantaneous, and it emboldened her to kickstart her evidence-gathering mission with gusto.

“Driver Nam, tell me. Why has Royal Hanguk suddenly opened its borders after all this time?”

“Oh, despite what some believe, our borders have never been fully closed. Selective is perhaps a better word. In fact, you’ll find our kingdom is full of people from all over the world who have expressly been invited to join our proud nation.”

She raised her eyebrows. “How so very exclusive.”

Her dad had always argued that dreamslinger welfare should be accessible to all the gene-compromised, not just a lucky, hand-selected few. That was precisely why his initiative was to establish Dreamslinger Homes in all fifty states.

“Take the fact that our two official languages are Korean and English,” Driver Nam continued. “That’s because some of our prominent forebears were from Great Britain. You’ll see it in our architecture, too—it’s the perfect marriage of British elegance and Korean flair.”

Ah, that’s why he spoke with a British accent.

“So why suddenly open the Annual Royal Slinger Trials to any teenager in the world, then?” Aria probed.

“Oh, that’s not really my place to say. I’m just a driver!” He laughed, but it sounded a bit forced. “But what an amazing opportunity, if I say so myself. To have the chance to learn from our greatest and harness the blessing of your mutation!”

The choice of word, blessing, gave Aria pause. She’d only ever known the gene as a curse.

As Driver Nam went on to describe Royal Hanguk’s geography—including how the kingdom was a rice-shaped island situated on the Han River in Seoul—Aria tried the banana milk, which was the creamiest milk she’d ever tasted. She demolished the green grape candies next, sighing at how delectable they were.

She didn’t know whether it was because she was so tired, or because her tummy was not as empty, or because the driver seemed so friendly, but she found the tension releasing from her shoulders. She even let out a little yawn.

“So Royal Hanguk is physically inside Seoul, which is inside South Korea, but you’re technically a whole different country,” Aria summarized.

“Precisely. I guess you could liken us to the Vatican in Rome, which is very Italian in many respects but not actually part of Italy. In the same way, the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk is located inside Seoul and is Korean in many ways but is not part of Korea. And of course, instead of a pope, we have our king.”

Aria made a mental note to herself that the king, as the head of the League, would be where the evidence of foul play would be found. She’d have to devise a plan that would allow her into his inner circle. Somehow…

“We did start off life just as Korea’s monarchy once upon a time,” the driver continued. “But when the dreamslinger gene became dominant in so many of our people, the royal family split from Korea and became its own sovereign nation. Did you know King Sejong the Great—the man who invented Hangul, the Korean alphabet—was also a dreamslinger?”

Another yawn escaped Aria’s mouth. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just weirdly tired.”

“Totally understandable considering your travels,” Driver Nam said kindly. “This will all become second nature to you soon enough. For now, please sit back and enjoy the sights of Seoul until we arrive in the kingdom.”

She nodded gratefully as yet another yawn bubbled out of her. She couldn’t remember the last time her eyelids had felt this heavy. The flight must’ve really taken it out of her. She gazed out the window as her eyes continued to droop, and she noticed the scenery had changed since they’d left the airport. The endless rows of expressways had now given way to greenery, with groves of trees lining the roads and spots of parkland peppered in between.

“I thought Seoul was supposed to be a bustling metropolis,” she mumbled, her tongue stumbling with fatigue. “Why are we driving into the countryside?”

She thought she heard him say something like “Enter the archway. Find your seed.” But his voice sounded so far away.

“Wh—what did you say… ?” she managed, before finally giving into the irresistible pull of sleep.

When she opened her eyes, Aria realized with dread she wasn’t awake at all. She was in a dream—and a recurring dreamslinger one at that. She groaned. Served her right for falling asleep in the car.

As always, the dream began at the heart of the Nightmare Circle, inside a circular grove of trees. She’d once seen an article about Stonehenge in a British sightseeing magazine, where gigantic eerie stones stood in a circle like a coven of witches. The grove of trees at the Nightmare Circle always reminded her of that, the way they convened around her, welcoming her to the dream.

Except instead of stones, they were more of a four-seasons pizza. The trees in the northern section of the grove were bare as if plucked from winter, while the ones in the south were dressed in a summery green. The eastern trees were always blossoming with spring buds, and the leaves in the west crisped with the touch of autumn.

Aria looked up at the impossibly violet sky and hoped whatever Beast was coming for her today, she would have the fortitude to ignore its temptations. Having an Outburst on the way to the kingdom was hardly a good way to start the competition.

Mere seconds had passed before she heard it. No—before she heard them. A groan from the north, a hiss from the east, a squawk from the south, and a roar from the west.

“Oh, come on,” Aria moaned, as the Turtle, Dragon, Bird, and Tiger Beasts appeared through the four-seasons Treehenge, their giant forms closing in on her from all four cardinal points. “Way to gang up on me.”

As she stumbled backward, a collection of things fell out of her pockets. A vial of creamy liquid, two flowers, and a peculiar bronze rattle with green glass bells. She stared at the strange objects. She’d never brought anything into her dreams before.

Instinctively, she picked up the rattle. As the glass bells rang shrilly, the four Beasts stopped in their tracks. Aria blinked, and the next thing she knew, the hulking creatures had shrunk to the size of labradors. She stared at the rattle in her hands. “What is this?”

She went to shake it again, but the Tiger Beast swished its tail, knocking it out of her hand. The Turtle Beast crushed it immediately under the weight of its body. Then the four Beasts turned back on her and bared their teeth.

“Not your favorite toy. Got it.”

The Tiger Beast attacked first, striking her with its sharp claws. Aria shrieked as it drew blood, ripping her dreamslinger band clean off her arm. The Dragon Beast pounced next, its vicious teeth snapping at her ankles. She managed to jump out of the way, but not before the Bird Beast flicked its fiery tail and lashed her back with a whip of open flame.

“Argh!” She dropped and rolled to smother the fire. One of the flowers was crushed under her weight, its petals ripping off its stem. The Turtle Beast approached her, and in desperation, Aria grabbed a handful of the petals and threw it at its face, buying a few seconds to roll out of the way.

But as the petals hit the Turtle’s body, it let out a bark of pain before its legs gave way beneath it. Its head flopped limply to the side, freezing in place with its mouth gaping open. It looked dead.

Aria clambered back. “What the—?”

Seeing its companion fall, the Dragon Beast hissed and raised its tail like a scorpion, ready to strike. Before Aria could think through her actions, she grabbed another fistful of petals and threw it at the Dragon’s face.

Just as before, the Beast immediately lost consciousness as soon as the petals touched its scales. Its long serpentine body fell with a thud on the ground, and its head rested in the pool of milk that had leaked from the vial when it fell out of Aria’s pocket. The Dragon’s limp tongue fell into the liquid, and suddenly, it reanimated—leaping to its feet and hissing with a vengeance.

Aria’s brow furrowed. So the flowers killed them, but the milk brought them back?

She scrambled to her feet just as the Tiger Beast clawed her again, this time drawing blood from her thigh, and she cried out in pain. The Bird Beast whipped its tail toward her, barely missing her head. And the Dragon Beast lunged forward, managing to nip her knee.

Her mind reeled. Something was wrong with this dream, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She had to think.

Quickly, she sifted through the various emotional regulation techniques she’d learned at Resthaven and picked the one she affectionately called the What the heck is happening right now? method.

She planted her feet into the ground, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Then, as she exhaled, she imagined herself floating out of her body and hovering over the scene below. The rationale was that with the benefit of perspective, one could figure out what the heck was happening right now.

From above, Aria could immediately see that a few things were wrong with this picture. First, there were four Beasts, not one. She’d never had a dream where all four had come for her at once. Second, she’d never had physical items in her dreams before, least of all random things like vials and flowers and rattles. Third, those items looked strangely like the snacks she’d had in Driver Nam’s car—the banana milk, two flower cookies, and the little grape candies.

Surely it wasn’t a coincidence that this bizarre dream happened the moment she stepped into a Royal Hanguk vehicle. She’d felt overwhelmingly tired after those snacks. Maybe they had been poisoned. Which meant this could be some kind of test…

She reflected on how one touch of the petal had rendered the Turtle and Dragon as good as dead. And she winced. Of course. They wanted to see if she had what it took to kill. After all, that’s what the League trained their royal slingers to do. To turn them into human weapons.

Aria lowered herself back into her body and clenched her fists. There was no way she was going to give them the satisfaction of breaking her like that. She refused to be a loaded gun whose trigger was so easily pulled. She was going to fly her dad’s flag and show them what a true dreamslinger was capable of.

Before the Beasts could act, Aria uncorked the vial and threw the remaining contents at the unconscious Turtle Beast’s face, making sure some reached its mouth. She waited a split second to make sure it stirred before opening her other palm.

Then she threw what was left of the poisonous petals into her mouth. And she swallowed them all in one clean gulp.

ARIA HELD HER BREATH. SHE didn’t dare open her eyes.

When the silence became unbearable, she peeked out from one eye. The four Beasts were gone, but she was still standing inside the circular coven of trees at the heart of the Nightmare Circle.

Except now there was a carpet of white rose petals at her feet, stretching toward the blossoming trees to the east. The path beckoned her to follow, and she thought she could hear a faint voice somewhere in the distance.

We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.

Aria frowned. She was still dreaming. Had she failed the test with the Beasts? Or had she passed and arrived at the next stage?

Whichever it was, she got the distinct impression that following this petaled road was the only way she’d find out. She steeled herself and started moving.

The path of white roses cut right through the mossy valley, weaved around the creek, and traversed across the dense woodlands. She’d been walking for about twenty minutes, when the blooming carpet delivered her to the outer boundary of the Nightmare Circle, where the open grassy clearing abruptly gave way to a sea of poisonous flora. It was the edge of the recurring dream world, and carnivorous plants snapped their sharp hungry teeth, releasing little clouds of noxious gases above them.

She stumbled to a stop. The East Sea of Poisonous Plants was not unfamiliar to Aria. But that didn’t mean she ever got used to it. In fact, from experience, it was probably the worst of the four seas. Not only did it hurt like hell to be bitten by hundreds of bloodthirsty plants, but the poison Outbursts were particularly hard to restrain, contain, or maintain. No matter how thoroughly you extracted during morning check-ins, toxins lingered inside the hands, demanding to be unleashed during the day.

Staring into the endless ocean of plants now, she felt the familiar pull—that urgent, inexplicable desire to leap headfirst into its painful depths.

Before she could act on it, the flowered road under her feet suddenly started to stretch, growing and extending until it curved sharply into the air. When it finally stopped, it reached at least six stories above her and the sea. It had formed a…bridge.

Something shimmered into being at the end of the path. It was an arch, floating in the wide expanse of sky, made of modest brick and mud, but topped with a beautiful sloping tiled roof, like an artifact from ancient Korea.

Aria’s eyes widened. Enter the archway. Find your seed, Driver Nam had said before she fell asleep. So she hadn’t heard him wrong, after all. The test was whether she could enter that archway.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she started up the bridge.

She’d only made it a quarter of the way before her confidence began to falter. First because of the path that tapered until it was so narrow she teetered dangerously over the edge. And then because of the treacherous incline that seemed to steepen with every step.

Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down, she chanted over and over again as she raised her arms for balance and kept her eye on the prize.

She crossed the halfway mark, and sweat started dripping into her eyes, but she didn’t dare wipe her face. She hardly breathed as she continued to edge forward to the finish line.

As she progressed, her muscles started to burn, then tremble, then lock. And just when she thought she couldn’t possibly move one more inch without keeling over the edge, she did the only other thing she was physically capable of doing. She dropped to her knees.

The soft rose petals broke her fall. And realizing this was as good of a solution as any, she stayed on all fours and crawled the rest of the way—straight into the sloping tiled archway.

Immediately, Aria was embraced by the sweet scent of nectar. The sound of birdsong filled her ears, and the heady aroma of forest wafted in on the breeze.

She jumped to her feet… and her jaw dropped. Gone was the East Sea of Poisonous Plants. She was now under a soft periwinkle sky, standing in a dewy green meadow bursting with wildflowers. She thought she could hear a stream nearby.

“Whoa. What is this place?”

As if answering her question, a baby bunny with ears three times the size of its body hopped toward her and sniffed her foot.

“Oh, hello, little one,” Aria murmured. “Maybe you can tell me where we are.”

She reached down and patted it, and a golden warmth washed over Aria’s body. Her ears began to itch, then stretch, and suddenly, she could not only hear the nearby stream, she could hear the fish swimming inside it, too.

Astonished, she reached out to touch a winged hamster who fluttered past her face. A similar golden aura spread over her body, and a terrible itch grew in her shoulder blades before spreading to her skin. Before she knew it, she was covered in fur and had sprouted wings. She managed to get them to flap by squeezing her shoulder blades tight. But she only lifted off the ground for a fraction of a second before she fell back onto the grass.

Aria looked around, gaping. And she couldn’t help but think that she’d somehow found herself in spring. Spring on steroids.

Something brushed her arm, and she turned to see a dandelion puff the size of a bowling ball blowing past, its fuzzy furs exploding from its head like fireworks. She reached out to touch it, only for it to titter and float away.

She followed it through a cornfield of singing cobs, where she witnessed a newborn fawn testing its legs, which created sparks with every step. She stroked it, and Aria’s feet turned into hooves, making the ground underneath her fizzle with electricity.

It struck her then that this was how Tae had grown his spider arms at the signing. His bloom dragon had slung a violet orb at its human, which had enveloped the royal slinger in a golden aura. Whatever was inside must’ve been like the creatures from here, allowing Tae to tap into its magical essence.

Aria was so captivated by these strange creatures that she didn’t notice how much time had passed. It was only when her fingers and toes started tingling that she realized she’d completely forgotten why she was there.

“Enter the archway. Find your seed,” she reminded herself.

She frowned. Tingling extremities meant that she only had about ten minutes before she’d wake up from her dream. That meant she only had as many minutes to find her seed. But where was she going to find one of those?!

A fruit tree came into view, and she raced toward it, ripping one of the star-shaped fruits off the branch. Fruit had seeds. Maybe she could take one of those. She tore the soft flesh with her fingers, digging into it for a pip of any sort. But there was only sweet fleshy pulp that glowed like the stars. She huffed.

The dandelion puff was back, and it jittered mischievously around her as if amused by Aria’s inability to find a seed.

“If you’re not gonna help, then buzz off!” she yelled at it.

The tingling had now spread to her upper limbs, and she anxiously raced to a gourd patch, hoping one of the waxy blue pumpkins might be housing a seed. She cracked one open using a nearby rock, but that, too, was all cerulean flesh and no seed. Aria grunted. She was running out of time.

The same dandelion puff peeked out from behind a tree and repeated the motion several times as if wanting to play a game of hide-and-seek. Aria, in her frustration, turned and yelled at it again.

“Just leave me alone, you annoying fuzzy seed head!”

Aria froze, realizing what she’d just said. Then she dropped her head in her hands and groaned. How stupid could she have been? No wonder the puff had been trying to get her attention. A dandelion puff was literally a head of seeds!

“Hey, come here, you! Maybe I do want to play, after all.”

As if now sulking, it swam away. But Aria chased after it, newly pumped with adrenaline. The puff flew down a ravine and eventually drifted into the mouth of a dense grove of shrubbery shaped like a cave. Aria tailed it inside.

“Got you!” she exclaimed as she caught the puff and clutched it to her chest.

Feeling triumphant, Aria turned to leave the dark thicket, when she noticed the heavy vines drooping from the ceiling. At first glance, she thought there were fruits hanging from the stems. But on second glance, she noticed they were, in fact, skulls. There was a great quantity of them, each as big as her hand, growing like cherry tomatoes on the vine.

One of the skulls—the one glowing ever so slightly—called to her.

I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

Aria shuddered and hugged the dandelion puff closer to her chest. But the voice called louder now. More insistent.

I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!

Feeling bewitched, Aria gazed into the sunken hollows of the skull’s eyes. And suddenly, a deep sense of hiraeth assaulted her like a blow to the stomach.

HIRAETH (Noun) (Welsh origin): (1) Homesickness for a home to which you cannot return; or (2) A longing for a home that never existed.

She staggered back. The tingling was now rapidly spreading down her head and in toward the chest. She knew from experience that once it hit the heart, her time would be out. She guessed she had less than a minute left.

Panicked, she looked down at the dandelion puff and then at the skull. Back at the puff and at the skull again. She reminded herself why she was here. The task was to find your seed. The choice was clear.

But I’m here! I’m here! I’M RIGHT HERE!

As tears stung her eyes for a reason she couldn’t fathom, the tingling reached Aria’s heart.

And although she knew she shouldn’t—despite knowing she’d fail this test—she dropped the dandelion puff.

With mere seconds to spare, Aria wrapped her hands around the delicate glowing skull and wrenched it from the vine.

“BRAVO, TRIALEER LOVE. CONGRATULATIONS! YOU are now officially in the running to become a Fellow of the Royal League of Dreamslingers.”

Aria groaned as she came to, still sitting in the back seat of Driver Nam’s car, which had come to a stop. Out of habit, she quickly pulled on her metal-fiber gloves, and noticed her skin was scratched and bloody and raw. The dreamslinger armband was gone. Something was weighing down her legs, and when she looked down, there was a skull on her lap.

She gasped and quickly covered it with her hands.

“I’ve never seen a trialeer bring back a snapdragon seed before,” the voice said approvingly. “How very refreshing. We normally get lots of dandelions. Sometimes devil heads, among others. But snapdragon is a first.”

A tall, wiry man stood outside her open passenger door, wearing a long hooded cloak with the symbol of a sweetgum leaf. He wore tiny square glasses on his pointy nose, and his mustache was a living entity unto itself—it twirled up on both ends like a pig’s tail, and had little gems threaded on it. A tasseled knot charm hung from the waist of his traditional Korean garb.

Aria tentatively removed her hands from her lap and stared at the delicate skull. “So this is a seed?”

“Oh yes. The species from the Asleep are much larger than the ones we have in the Awake. But I assure you these delightfully macabre pods, indeed, contain the seeds of the snapdragon flower.” He swatted the air in front of him. “But where are my manners! My name is Fredrik Tak, and I am one of the four Head Scholars of the Royal League. You may call me Head Scholar Tak.”

He twisted one of the gems on his mustache. “As I was saying, it brings me great joy that you successfully entered the archway to a Season and found your seed. It means your actions embodied one of the League’s four core values—the wise, the kind, the rule, and the just. It also means that you have now made it through the preliminary round of the Annual Royal Slinger Trials, which is why you are now eligible to enter this year’s Trials proper.”

Aria blinked. “So that entire dream was the pretrial? I knew it was some kind of test!”

“I am happy to answer any questions you may have at this juncture,” he continued. “Otherwise, you may now proceed with your driver to the kingdom for the welcome festivities.”

Head Scholar Tak nodded toward Driver Nam, who was still sitting in the driver’s seat, looking at Aria with a mixture of sheepishness and awe.

“Well, since you’re offering.” Aria pointed at her lap, adjusting her legs underneath the surprising weight of the skull pod. “What is this for?”

“For planting, of course!”

“To grow… larger-than-average snapdragon flowers?”

He chortled. “How amusing, Trialeer Love. All things going in your favor, the seed in your possession will sprout your dreampanion.”

“What’s a dreampanion?” she asked suspiciously.

Head Scholar Tak took his knot charm in his hand and chanted, “Suri suri masuri,” which Aria recognized as the same words Tae had chanted to summon his bloom dragon. Except unlike Tae’s bloom dragon, it was a Tiger Beast that materialized beside the scholar.

“This is my dreampanion, Kit. He’s a harvest tiger.”

So Beasts from the Nightmare Circle were called dreampanions here.

The scholar gave the stallion-size tiger an affectionate rub on its head, making its pelt of autumn foliage crinkle and crunch. A pile of leaf debris gathered at the man’s feet like shed fur.

“A dreampanion is your dream guide. They guide you between the Awake—the world we’re in now—and the Asleep—the place we go when we dream. You were permitted briefly into a Season of the Asleep during the preliminary round to retrieve your seed. But it will never happen again unless you can endear yourself to your dreampanion.”

That place that looked like spring on steroids must’ve been one of the Seasons. If she was understanding the scholar properly, Aria would have to “sprout” a dreampanion from her seed if she ever wanted to return there.

“Riiight. So you’re saying that these seeds are how everyone in the League gets a Beast?” She’d always wondered how royal slingers pulled the Beasts from the Nightmare Circle into the real world.

The tiger’s nostrils flared as the scholar corrected her. “No one gets anything around here, Trialeer Love, least of all a dreampanion. And we do not use that derogatory B word in the League. By passing all three Trials, one earns the honor and lifelong privilege of a dreampanion endearment.”

Inwardly, Aria scoffed. They could call them whatever they wanted—it didn’t change the fact that these vicious creatures had done nothing but torment Aria in her nightmares. But outwardly, she merely cleared her throat.

“I wasn’t aware that Beas—I mean, the B word was derogatory. I didn’t mean to offend.”

The scholar gave a nod. “Unless you have further questions, I suggest you make your way to the kingdom.” He leaned into the car to take the skull from her lap, and she found herself instinctively reaching out to snatch it back.

“Hey, that’s mine!” A feeling of protectiveness washed over her, and she realized she didn’t want to let her dreampanion seed out of her sight. Her actions reminded her of a word she’d seen in her mom’s journal:

AGNOSTHESIA (Noun) (Greek origin): The state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person.

“You will be reunited with your seed soon,” Head Scholar Tak assured her, as he cajoled the skull out of her hands again.

“Are you sure?” she asked nervously.

“I swear it on my harvest tiger.”

He nodded to Driver Nam. “Now please do make haste to the Official Royal Welcome Ceremony. I would hate for you to miss the lantern rite.”

Before she could ask what that was, Head Scholar Tak closed her door.

“Safe travels, Trialeer Love,” he said through the open window. “And may you enjoy the ride.”

“You will have to excuse my excitement,” Driver Nam gushed as they drove through the busy cityscape of Seoul and up to an immigration border with tall, impenetrable walls. “This is all just so exciting for me. Oh, my daughter is going to be over the moon when I tell her you passed the pretrial!”

There seemed to be at least five different security checks, each administered by a different officer, before border control finally waved them through the checkpoint. They drove over a bridge overlooking the small river.

“And here we are. Welcome to the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk!”

On the other side of the bridge stood the towering gates of a walled-off island (involving yet another security check), and suddenly it felt like they’d arrived in a completely different world—and a completely different time. A minute ago, on the other side of the river, Seoul had been full of high-rises covered with flashing screens advertising the latest face cream and instant coffee mixes. There’d been cars honking everywhere, and people swarming the streets wearing the latest fashion trends.

But here inside Royal Hanguk, there was not a high-rise in sight. The buildings were traditional, in the same style as the archway from her pretrial. They all had the distinctive tiled roofs and sloped eaves, wooden beams, and paper doors reminiscent of Korea from hundreds of years ago. Except the winding roads and alleyways looked like they came straight out of London, with quaint cobblestones, beautiful Victorian streetlamps, and rustic stone walls covered in moss and vines. As Driver Nam had mentioned, the place had a lost-in-time, Korea-meets-England vibe that was uniquely charming.

“Wow,” she breathed, unable to hide her amazement. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Driver Nam parked inside the gates and came around to open her door, his cheeks plumping under his smiling eyes. “Wait until you ride a gama.”

“A gama?”

Instead of answering, Driver Nam whistled a short tune—just five notes that sounded like part of a wider melody. The next thing she knew, a wooden carriage had appeared in front of them.

It looked like a tall box, with a door, two open windows, and a spacious interior that could fit three adults. Its exterior panels were adorned with white swan feathers, while a delicate pink tulle encircled its middle, as if the box were wearing a tutu. The thing that stood out most about this carriage, though, was that it was suspended… four feet above the ground.

Aria took a step back. “Uh, what is that?”

“Some call them palanquins or litters, but we call them gama. Traditionally, they were carried by servants. But our gama are crafted from the wood of the soarfree tree—a common species found in the Asleep. As you can see, it’s known for its exceptionally buoyant properties.”

Aria’s brows almost hiked right off her face. It was mind-boggling to her that trees from the dream world could be brought back to the Awake. And even more so that this was the first she’d ever heard of it. If soarfree trees could make things fly, what could other dream species be capable of?!

Driver Nam hoisted Aria’s green suitcase onto the gama’s roof before helping her up. She was relieved to find that the seat had a soft plush cushion, and surprised that the main melody from Swan Lake filled the carriage. It matched the swan-feathered decor and tutu, as if this gama harbored secret aspirations to become a ballerina.

“Well, Trialeer Love, I must leave you here.” He bowed and gave one of his hearty belly-jiggling laughs. “Thanks to you I’ve had one of the most exciting workdays I’ve had in a long time. Saemi will be beside herself when I tell her!”

Before she could thank him for the ride, he turned to address the carriage. “To Central Palace, please, dear gama. I appreciate your service.”

As the setting sun painted a warm glow over the kingdom, the gama glided forward, weaving through the bustling cobbled alleyways. Aria poked her head out, immediately startled by the sheer number of Bea—no, dreampanions roaming openly on the streets.

She passed an open-air market where children were lining up to have their marshmallows toasted by a fire-tailed bird. Beside them was what Aria could only describe as a shoeshine stand—except instead of shoes, turtle dreampanions were having their ice-shells polished and carved with trendy patterns. There even seemed to be people with brooms whose sole job was to clean the streets of molted dragon petals and shed tiger leaf-fur.

She was so struck by the sights that she almost missed the girl racing past on the back of a harvest tiger, moving at the speed of the wind. And she almost didn’t see the snowflake-cloaked rider poking out from the lake, the icy shell of his turtle glinting beneath him.

In fact, Aria was so taken aback by her surroundings that she almost mistook the group of bloom dragons flying over the gama for a mere figment of her imagination. Since they were wingless, she’d assumed dragons couldn’t fly. But the snakelike creatures with their long bodies and sweeping whiskers rippled through the sky like eels in water, their daisy-cloaked riders mounted on their backs.

Feeling an intense sensation of being out of place, Aria retreated back inside the safety of her floating box and took a few deep breaths. Her mind was glitching, unable to compute what it was seeing. Emotions stormed inside her, competing for attention.

A part of her was jealous that these dreamslingers lived in freedom, away from anti-slingers and others who wished them ill. And a part of her felt pity that these people were closed off from the world, ignorant and trapped here. Yet another part was resentful that she had never been offered the choice to be part of this strange, impossible world. And as soon as that last thought entered her mind, she felt genuine disgust that she’d even consider wanting to be part of this exclusive hermit kingdom when they were the ones that killed her mom.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, Aria vowed that she would keep her head screwed on straight as she embarked on these Trials. She only needed to stay in the running long enough to find proof of the League’s malicious intentions. And the last thing she needed was to be distracted by the League’s flashy party tricks. Superpowers were cool, but not worth the price of being turned into a human weapon.

The gama finally approached the shimmering golden gates of Central Palace, where teenagers with suitcases were making their way through the main gates. As Aria stepped down from her floating carriage, she steeled herself.

I won’t let you down, Dad. And I won’t lose sight of why I’m here. I swear I’ll make you proud.

ARIA FOLLOWED THE OTHER TEENAGERS through the gates of Central Palace, lugging her suitcase behind her. As its wheels rumbled over the granite pavers of a large, sparse courtyard, she thought of the word rubatosis from her mom’s journal. The unsettling awareness of one’s own heartbeat. She had no idea what she was walking into, and she felt like a boot strapped too tight. Contained but at risk of exploding at any moment.

The courtyard was surrounded on all sides by shimmering gold walls, and apart from another set of gates up ahead, there was nothing here but big open space. She followed the other trialeers through the next set of gates into a second courtyard, which culminated in yet another set of gates. This time, though, they were manned by a group of stern royal guards, each carrying a bow and arrow, a sword, and a big machete-bladed staff. Aria immediately lowered her head. Talk about being overeager with the weaponry.

“Reckon they’d paint our nails if we invited them over for a sleepover?” someone asked next to her. “I’ll ask one if you dare me.”

She turned to see a girl with light brown skin and a beautiful mess of hair framing her face. She had an air of groundedness, and yet stood high and effortless, as if the world could fall but she’d still be standing.

“You…” The girl looked familiar, but Aria couldn’t quite place her. That is, until she noticed her rainbow combat boots that matched her rainbow suitcase. “Hey, you’re the girl from the airport.”

The girl gave a little upward nod. “Kia ora. I’m Tui, from New Zealand. What’s your name?”

She remembered now—the girl had calmly answered the camera crew’s questions as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“I’m Aria. From America.”

“I like your necklace, Aria from America. Eight is my favorite number, too.”

Aria pointed to Tui’s colorful boots. “Those are awesome.”

Tui grinned. “Right?”

Aria was in the middle of returning the smile when she remembered she wasn’t here to make friends. This was a competition. And she was a spy. Having friends would be an added complication she didn’t need.

“Good luck in the Trials,” she said instead, giving Tui a curt nod before walking off.

Aria lined up as the royal guards made trialeers enter the gate in two lines, despite the doorway being marked into three distinct paths. One trialeer with two instrument cases strapped across his back (Aria guessed a guitar and a violin) tried to walk down the center aisle and promptly got whacked on the butt by one of the machete staffs. Aria flinched, even though the trialeer seemed unfazed—he bowed dramatically at the guards with a mischievous grin on his face.

“Only royals walk through the center!” the royal guard barked. “Keep to the outer lanes, trialeers.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird, all the wide empty spaces here?” Tui asked from behind, seemingly unperturbed by Aria’s earlier curtness. “There’s not even a single tree.”

Aria shrugged. “Maybe they’re going for the minimalist look.”

“The palace is designed like that on purpose, actually,” a quiet voice said from Aria’s left. “This is where the king resides, and if there were bushes and trees, people could hide in them to ambush him. The palace grounds are kept empty to make sure the coast is always clear.”

They turned to see a boy dressed in traditional Korean garb, except with big fluffy earmuffs around his neck, despite the heat. Aria guessed he was mixed race of Black and Asian heritage, and thought he looked like a young John Legend.

When he noticed their stares, his face glistened with sweat and he nervously rubbed his hands on his pants. “Oh, um, I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything,” he stammered. “I just overheard you, and I thought you might like to know. I’m a Royal Hangukite, a heritage kid, as in I was born and raised in the kingdom. So this kind of stuff is second nature to me, and I… just, um—” He abruptly stopped talking. Then, putting the earmuffs over his ears, he turned on his heel and stalked off.

“Laters, mate!” Tui sang out, as they were finally let through the third set of gates. “Now, this is a royal courtyard.”

Unlike the ones before, this courtyard wasn’t empty. Guards lined its perimeter, and at its heart stood four enormous stone statues. Under the dimming night, she could make out the one facing south as a stern-looking bird, then, going clockwise, a sleek tiger, a majestic turtle, and a formidable dragon. Behind the statues was a cavernous hall, at least three stories tall and in the same traditional Korean style as the rest of the palace.

They followed the trialeers to congregate on the stairs of the hall, which had its paper doors thrown wide open. Inside, colorful wooden pillars lined the space, housing a colossal wooden throne at its core.

“It’s starting!” a nearby trialeer squealed as a gong chimed.

A spark of energy ignited behind Aria, as if someone had struck a match. When she turned to look back at the courtyard, she saw the sky was now filled with rectangular paper lanterns, floating above the statues like magical ocean buoys. As the lanterns glowed bright, hundreds of cloaked Fellows ranging from teenagers to adults began materializing beneath them. Aria’s jaw dropped.

“Look, Aria,” whispered Tui, pointing inside the hall. “King Lee Ogu is here.”

Indeed, a regal man dressed in splendiferous silk finery was now sitting on the massive wooden throne, smiling warmly at his dominion. On his left was the largest fire-tailed bird Aria had ever seen, its scrutinizing eyes fixed on the crowd. To his right was a woman with a face of heavy makeup and a scowling expression. She was dressed in a traditional robe with long, oversize sleeves that billowed with stripes of vibrant color.

“Is that the queen?” Aria asked out loud.

A tall, freckled trialeer to her right scoffed. “She’s the Royal Mudang. The king’s official shaman and his most trusted royal advisor.”

Aria frowned. “Shaman… as in people who talk to spirits and stuff? Isn’t that weird that the king would be into woo-woo stuff like that?”

“Who says it’s woo-woo?” The trialeer shrugged. “It’s not any weirder than King Charles being the head of the Church of England. The shaman’s family has been around for as long as the king’s—the role has been passed down their family line.”

Aria made a mental note of the Royal Mudang. As a trusted member of the king’s inner sanctum, she’d be a strategic person to mine later for information.

“Welcome to Royal Hanguk, trialeers!” the king boomed from his throne. “Annyeong-haseyo! My sincerest congratulations to all who have made it here this evening. Today marks an auspicious moment in history as we open up our Annual Royal Slinger Trials to worthy competitors from all over the globe. Our records show over four hundred dreamslingers arrived in Korea’s borders today. And look around you. You are all that remain.”

Aria estimated that just over a hundred trialeers were huddled on the steps. That meant three hundred dreamslingers had already been sent home, and the proper Trials hadn’t even begun.

“You may be aware that the average human sleeps for a third of their life,” the king continued. “That means by the time we’re ninety, we have spent thirty years in bed. Some might say that’s a waste of three decades, spending it unconscious to the world. But of course, we dream when we sleep. And dreaming creates immense amounts of energy.

“Across generations, the collective energy of humanity’s dreaming gave birth to an entirely new realm—the wondrous place we call the Asleep. And despite what you may have been told, I am here to tell you that the Asleep is a real place. As real as the waking world in which we currently stand.”

While this should have been shocking to Aria, his revelation made sense. How else could dreamslingers all experience the same Nightmare Circle? Plus, the soarfree wood of the gama, not to mention the dreampanions themselves, had to have come from somewhere.

“Over the years, we have discovered the most extraordinary flora and fauna in the four Seasons, whose very existence has, in turn, influenced the types of dreams people have today.” He paused, thinking. “Molarmice are a good example. Their daily teeth-shedding practice, paired with their liberal breeding habits, are why dreams of losing one’s teeth are so terribly widespread.”

Aria shuddered. She hated that dream, almost as much as the falling dream, or the one where she couldn’t find a toilet.

“Despite the entire population having contributed to the creation of the Asleep, most will never be able to enter the Seasons or reap its riches. It is only the blessed few born with our genetic gift that will have the chance to experience its wonders. And only if we can endear ourselves to our dreampanions.”

The tail on his fire bird flared as he continued. “Humans are born with a third of our souls missing. It is why we are doomed to sleep away a third of our lives. But dreampanions fill this Soul-Gap, making us profoundly whole. This is what allows royal slingers to access a full Life-Time. It is why Fellows do not require sleep.”

Aria frowned something fierce. Humans were born with a third of their souls missing? And Fellows never went to bed? Surely people here didn’t actually believe in this ludicrous League propaganda.

“Everyone here has the chance to lead a truly exceptional life. But we must remember not all the world sees our gift in the same light. We must remain extraordinarily cautious as to whom we allow into our embrace, in order to protect our own. It is why this year, we will only be inducting twenty new Novices into the second year of training.”

The hairs on Aria’s back rose as she felt the icy glare of nearby trialeers sizing up their competition—especially from the group of teenagers in traditional Korean clothes who didn’t have suitcases. She assumed they were locals, or “heritage kids,” as the boy earlier had called it. They must feel the League’s precious spots were being stolen by foreigners.

“This may seem severe and uncompromising. But a duty as great as ours is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for the weak of spirit. Which is why rules are upheld here above all else.” He paused to accentuate the point. “The competition will be fierce, and any deviation from the rules will result in swift and sharp action. You will do well to keep this in mind as you compete in these Trials.”

He cleared his expression and smiled magnanimously, opening his arms to the courtyard. “Now without further ado, I call upon the four Head Scholars to approach the Season Guardians. May the lantern rite begin!”

Fredrik Tak, the wiry man Aria had met earlier with the tiny square glasses and the bejweled mustache, was one of the four people who stepped out from the courtyard crowd to approach the stone statues. The others were a sharp-eyed woman with a striking blue streak in her hair, a small, shrewd man with a haughty, condescending air, and a cheery woman in a wheelchair whose perky black curls bounced as she wheeled forward.

Aria took heed of them, each with their tasseled knot charms hanging from their waists. As Head Scholars, she assumed they were high-ranking Fellows in the League. That felt important for her to note.

The Fellow with the bouncy hair and snowflake cloak was the first to approach the statues, placing a hand on the stone turtle. “Frost Turtle Guardian, it is I, Jamie-Ann Kim, who stands before you on behalf of Winter Palace, Season of the Wise. Because wisdom grows in the still of the ice.”

In response, the statue radiated a bright white light, making Aria shield her eyes. When she opened them again, snow was falling from the sky, and the stone statue had turned completely to ice. It grunted, sending a tremor through the granite tiles of the courtyard.

Aria shivered, as the small, shrewd man in the sun cloak reached out to touch the stone bird. “Solar Phoenix Guardian, it is I, Dongki Byun, who stands before you on behalf of Summer Palace, Season of the Rule. Because rules persist in the blaze of the sun.”

The statue glowed a brilliant ruby red before splitting in half, revealing a phoenix made entirely of flames. It squawked and flapped its fiery wings, the heat from its body creating an aura of steam. The warmth was palpable even from where Aria was standing, and soon, tiny sparking embers were raining down alongside the snow.

“Whoa,” Aria breathed.

Head Scholar Tak in his sweetgum-leaf cloak was next, and he placed his hand on the tiger statue. “Harvest Tiger Guardian, it is I, Fredrik Tak, who stands before you on behalf of Autumn Palace, Season of the Just. Because justice prevails in the fall of all life.”

This time, the stone tiger didn’t turn to ice or splinter to reveal a fire as bright as the sun. Instead, it withered away, as if it were being sucked dry of air. As the trialeers gasped, autumn leaves blew in across the courtyard and swirled and gathered where the tiger had stood, re-forming its majestic body. The leafy tiger threw its head back and roared, and Aria almost jumped out of her skin.

Finally, it was the turn of the sharp-eyed woman with the blue streak to approach her statue, her daisy cloak billowing as she placed a hand on the stone dragon. “Bloom Dragon Guardian, it is I, Hilda Bobby-Uma, who stands before you on behalf of Spring Palace, Season of the Kind. Because kindness blooms at the dawn of all breath.”

The dragon statue throbbed like a beating heart before exploding into a maelstrom of petals. Aria gaped as a floral scent filled the air and fresh buttercups weaved through the flurry of snow and embers and autumn leaves. They fell on the pedestal, the petals gathering scale by scale, until a formidable dragon was created. It let out a penetrating hiss, and suddenly, something dawned on Aria.

The Season she’d entered in her pretrial was Spring. That must mean her dreampanion seed would unfurl a bloom dragon, like this one. Her heart thumped loudly in her chest, imagining how it would feel to fly on the back of her very own dragon. As soon as the thought arose, she scolded herself. Be quiet, traitorous heart!

From the stage, the Royal Mudang opened her arms wide, making her long, billowing sleeves fan out like silken wings. “By the power bestowed upon us by the Holy Trine, may this year’s cohort of trialeers be assigned their gajok.”

“What’s a gajok?” someone asked nearby.

“It’s Korean for family,” a kind-faced girl near Aria explained. “Every trialeer is assigned to a gajok, which, like the name suggests, becomes your palace family during the Trials.”

Her eyes widened. They were going to be allocated into an actual palace.

One by one, the glowing floating lanterns, which until now had hovered still in the air above the Fellows, started shivering as if being awoken. They tilted from side to side, like boats swaying in the sea, until finally, they took sail.

“Oooh, they’re moving,” Tui breathed.

They watched as the lanterns each determined their path, gliding through the evening ocean until they arrived at their intended destinations.

A pretty girl in a long tulle dress was the first to have a lantern fall from the air and drop into her hands. The shadow of a different dreampanion flickered on each of the four rectangular sides, grunting, squawking, roaring, and hissing. Three extinguished, leaving only the solar phoenix behind.

“I’m in Summer Palace!” she squealed in a high-pitched screech. “Season of the Rule! I can’t believe it! Heritage kids for the win!”

“We all know what Season we went to,” a kid behind Aria said. “Why is that girl pretending to be surprised? So dramatic.”

The kid with the guitar and violin who’d been spanked by the royal guard earlier was next to receive a lantern. It settled on the shadow of a frost turtle, for Winter Palace—Season of the Wise. He grinned widely before doing a little dance and breaking out into song. “Ce-le-brate good times, come on! Dun dun, dun dun, dun dun dun dun!”

Then a girl wearing loads of colorful handwoven bracelets got a lantern that fixed on the harvest tiger, whose shadow mimed a ferocious roar from the thin parchment. “Autumn Palace, Season of the Just! That’s what I’m talking about!”

Soon, there were lanterns flying in all directions, and Aria couldn’t keep up. She lost track of what was going where until warm lanterns fell into both Tui’s hands and hers at the same time.

Tui’s lantern immediately settled on the dragon. But Aria’s lantern flickered indecisively between dragon and tiger, turtle and phoenix, then dragon and tiger, turtle and phoenix again. Aria held her breath, until finally, the shadow settled on the shadow of a bloom dragon.

“We’re in the same palace!” Tui exclaimed.

“The Seasons have completed their nominations,” the Royal Mudang declared. “Trialeers, you may now approach your palace matrons.”

“Welcome to the Spring Palace gajok, Trialeer Love,” the daisy-cloaked woman greeted Aria, as she joined the group of trialeers surrounding the matron. “We are the Season of the Kind, and if Spring chose you to join our gajok, your pretrial must’ve exhibited compassion as your strongest virtue. Whatever your actions were, I thank you for your kindness, that which blooms at the dawn of all breath. I am honored to serve you as your palace matron. You may now call me Sang-Gung Mama.”

She wrapped a hoodless daisy cape around Aria’s shoulders, which seemed to have materialized out of thin air. “I look forward to supporting you through the Trials and hopefully having you join us as a permanent gajokmate at its conclusion.”

Aria pulled the cape closer to herself. It was simple and short, definitely not one of the beautiful long hooded cloaks the real Fellows wore. But she found herself standing a little taller with it on. It was strangely moving to be welcomed into a family—a gajok… Then she remembered she already had a family, and she squared her shoulders.

She had to give it to them—the League had done a good job launching the Trials with glitz and glamor. Even she had felt herself being swept away with the ceremony.

But of course, they’d had ten years to plan how to put their prettiest face forward. To show only their prized jewels so they could ensnare vulnerable teenagers in their dangerous net. And there was no way Aria was going to fall for it. She was going to find the evidence she needed to prove this reckless elite League was dangerous and plotting something sinister.

The king’s voice bellowed from the throne hall, “If anyone wishes to appeal tonight’s lantern rite, this is your chance to speak. Please raise your concerns now or forever hold your peace.”

Aria bit her tongue so hard it hurt. And in the silence, she thought she saw the king studying her from his throne with a strange expression in his eyes.

“Then, as the King of Royal Hanguk and the Principal of the Royal League of Dreamslingers, it is my utmost pleasure and honor to conclude this evening’s proceedings. Trialeers, welcome to the Annual Royal Slinger Trials. The hard work begins tomorrow, for a chance at changing the course of your future forever.”

The crowd cheered.

“But for tonight, please enjoy the finest banquet Royal Hanguk has to offer.”

This received an even louder cheer.

Aria gazed up at the throne hall, and for a moment, she almost swore the Royal Mudang scowled directly at her.

“And may the Holy Trine be on your side that it not be your last.”

IT WAS LATE BY THE time Aria followed her matron to her lodgings after the banquet. Spring Palace was in a different part of the kingdom, but it looked pretty much like Central Palace, with buildings scattered across a maze of courtyards, separated by a wealth of gates. The main difference seemed to be the outer palace walls, which instead of a shimmering gold were covered in a thick layer of blossoms.

“Trialeer Love, I’d like you to meet your gung-nyeo,” Sang-Gung Mama announced as she introduced her to a slight, waifish girl not that much older than Aria. She was dressed in a simple, traditional dress and a white apron.

“Junghee will escort you to your bedchamber and ensure that all your needs are met while you are in the care of our Spring Palace. Have a pleasant evening.”

Aria looked suspiciously at the girl. “What’s a goong nyo—?”

“I’m your lady-in-waiting, your chambermaid, your handmaiden, your maid. You can really just take your pick of terms. It’s an honor to make your acquaintance!”

The girl spoke very fast, and it took Aria a moment to digest what she had said. “Wait, I have a maid?”

“See you in the morning, Aria from America!” Tui called from somewhere behind her.

Junghee was stronger than she looked, as she took Aria’s suitcase and directed her like a puppet through a series of gates (what was with this place and their gates?), chatting incessantly the entire way.

“You’ll find the kingdom’s palaces are located at the same cardinal points as the Seasons in the Asleep. Central Palace in the middle of the island, and then Winter Palace in the north, Summer Palace in the south, Autumn Palace in the west.” She waved her hands around her head, indicating each direction. “And of course, our Spring Palace in the east! The sun also rises in the east, which is why it’s the home of the—”

Abruptly, she swatted her mouth, as if remembering she wasn’t supposed to say whatever it was she was about to share.

Aria raised a brow. “The home of the…?”

“Am I babbling again? My mother tells me my mouth deserves its own creek the way it keeps babbling. Oh look, what do you know, we’re already here!”

They’d stopped at a collection of quaint stand-alone dwellings with that old Korean cottage look. Junghee pulled Aria, her suitcase, and her lantern deftly up the small stone steps to one of them.

“Welcome to your bedchamber, Trialeer Love.” Junghee took off her rubber shoes and stepped through the sliding paper doors. “It’s what we call a hanok—a traditional Korean house. I hope it’s to your liking.”

She took Junghee’s lead by leaving her shoes outside and stepped up onto the raised entrance. It was a modest hard-floored room with nothing more than an armoire inlaid with mother-of-pearl, an antique chest, a mirror, and a squat red-lacquer table big enough for one person, with two legless chairs.

“I know it doesn’t look like much, but simple yet splendid is kinda our motto around here.” As if to illustrate, Junghee started extracting shiny silk duvets and sheets from the antique chest. Her hands moved swiftly as she arranged them on the floor into an inviting bed, complete with a little corner triangle flourish.

She gestured toward it. “Give it a whirl.”

Aria obeyed, thinking that after the day she’d had, crawling into bed sounded like the best idea ever. But she was dismayed to find the floor was rock hard, even underneath all those layers.

“These fabrics are made with rhymesilk, harvested from the Asleep,” Junghee explained as Aria wriggled about, trying to make herself comfortable. “You’ll find they are very amenable to your personal preferences, as long as you repay them in rhyme.”

At Aria’s blank stare, Junghee turned to the floor bed. “The trialeer wishes for soft and puffy, bonus if it’s extra fluffy, but please, ideally, not too stuffy.”

Immediately, the sheets underneath and above Aria puffed up until she felt like she was enveloped by fluffy white clouds. They were nice and airy—not stuffy at all—but she did feel like she was swimming in blankets….

“Snug as a bug in a rug with a hug?” Junghee asked.

Dutifully, the bedsheets hugged Aria—so tight that she could hardly breathe.

“Urgh, as loose as a goose!” Aria squealed, and the blankets released their grip on her. “But I wouldn’t argue about a bit of cozy. That’d make my night real rosy.”

Junghee beamed. “You’re a natural.”

Truthfully, Aria was amazed. She wondered what else in life could benefit from having some rhymesilk weaved into it. But outwardly, she merely grunted. She couldn’t let herself be swept away by this place. She had to keep her head screwed on straight.

“A grunt is all I get? Wow. What a tough nut. Don’t worry, though, I’ll crack you eventually.” Junghee passed her a rock-hard cylindrical pillow that looked like the most uncomfortable thing ever. “And here’s your reward for your sparkling enthusiasm.”

Aria inwardly chuckled. Weird pillows always made her think of her dad. He was one of those people who needed blackout curtains, earplugs, eye masks, and the sacrificed whiskers of a mountain lion washed under the blood moon to sleep well. Pillows were no exception. She teased him incessantly about his obsession with finding the perfect one. Memory foam, bamboo, duck down, you name it, he’d tried it. In fact, one year he’d—

“Junghee!” she cried, suddenly realizing she’d still not spoken with her dad since she’d jumped on the plane. He’d probably lost his head worrying about her. “I was told there’d be a way I could communicate with my family?”

“Of course—I almost forgot.”

Rushing to the armoire inlaid with mother-of-pearl, Junghee opened the bottom drawer and extracted a thin calligraphy brush and a stack of slightly yellowed paper resembling the material used for the screen doors.

“This hanji paper is made from the pulp of the messenger tree, and the brush from the bristles of the whisperwish plant,” she explained, revealing a step-by-step illustrated guide on how to fold a paper butterfly.

She removed the top of Aria’s lantern. “Once you write your message, fold it into a butterfly according to these instructions. Then burn it in your lantern’s flame, wishing with utmost clarity that it reach its final destination. Your message will be delivered to your recipient instantly.”

Aria’s eyes widened. “But how will they see the message?”

“It will arrive in the form of a letter or voicemail or text message, or whatever is the ideal method of communication at that time and context.”

Aria lowered her voice. “And will the messages remain private?” The commissioner had demanded a report through her dad every two weeks for her entire stay here. If butterflymail was how she’d be sending her reports, she wanted to make sure the messages couldn’t be tapped.

“Are you kidding? We’re a nation that values privacy above all else. What do you think? Also, why do you ask? Thinking of committing information theft or something?”

When Aria stilled, unblinking, Junghee laughed. “I’m joking. Wow, I think we need to work on your sense of humor, too.” She made her way to the door. “Now, time for a good rest, Trialeer Love. I will attend to you in the morning.”

The door slammed shut, and for the first time since jumping on the plane in Almiro, Aria finally had a moment to herself. She felt like an anchor sinking to the bottom of the sea of exhaustion—or at least, into her rhymesilk sheets. Before she did, she rushed to the red-lacquer table and quickly drafted a message to her dad.

Dad, it’s me. Yes, I’m alive. I’m SO SORRY it’s taken me so long to contact you, but I’ve only just found time to send this. Don’t worry, I’m safe. I somehow managed to pass the pretrial and have entered the Trials proper. They’ve put me up in a palace and I have a maid (WILD, I know). I’ll send my first full report in two weeks’ time. I miss you already.

Hugs xx Aria.

It took her a while to figure out how to fold the paper butterfly, but once she’d burned it in the lantern’s flame, the shadow dragon growled as if confirming the message’s delivery.

Satisfied, she climbed inside her rhymesilk sheets and closed her eyes. She was about to give in to the sweet pull of sleep, when something tickled her face. She opened her eyes to find a glowing blue butterfly flapping its shimmery wings on her cheek.

“Butterflymail,” she breathed.

She reached out to touch it, and immediately, she heard her dad’s voice, as clear as if he were sitting right next to her.

“Sparkler! I almost lost my mind worrying about you. Are you sure you’re safe? Are they feeding you? Are they treating you all right???” Aria heard his voice tremble, and she knew he was trying to sound brave. “I don’t know what else to say but that you’re the most courageous person I know. Stay alert, stay wary, don’t trust anyone, and don’t forget to leave your anchor cards next to your pillow. I love you more than you’ll ever know. Write to me soon, okay???”

Despite what her dad called them, the anchor cards weren’t really cards at all. They were photos. Aria and her dad making pancakes. Her mom cupping her baby bump at the beach. Her mom and dad on a date at the Guinness World Record event for longest domino wall. Everyday snaps of life.

Her dad had made them for her when she was little to help her soothe herself after her nightmares. Even before learning she was a dreamslinger, she’d always had overactive dreams (a common indicator of the gene). Looking at the photos helped her remember what was real. Like an anchor, tying her to home.

Something hard and prickly lodged in her throat as she placed the anchor cards next to her pillow. Then, before she knew it, she was out like a light.

Aria was awoken by the sound of bustling.

“Finally, you are awake, Trialeer Love! I thought you would be snoring forever.”

Aria opened one still-dozy eye to see her fresh-faced maid literally standing over her, Junghee’s long braid dangling over her face.

“Argh!” Aria startled.

“It’s morning!” Junghee grinned. “You must make haste or you’ll miss the orientation.”

Aria gazed toward the paper sliding doors, but there wasn’t a huge amount of sun streaming through. In fact, it still looked quite dark.

“It’s kinda early, isn’t it?” she murmured, flapping the edge of her cape away from her saliva-caked face. She’d been so tired last night she hadn’t even changed out of her clothes. “Surely it isn’t time yet to—” Suddenly realizing she needed to extract, Aria bolted upright, hiding her hands behind her back. She didn’t want to accidentally let out an Outburst at her unsuspecting maid.

“Don’t worry. You can’t access your seasonbilities right now, so I’m perfectly safe.”

“Seasonbilities,” Aria echoed. “Is that what you call Outbursts around here?”

Junghee mimed a releasing motion with her hands. “You know, when Fellows wield their Season’s power to help people.”

Aria winced. Or to hurt people, more like.

“Now that Spring has nominated you, you won’t be having any more of your recurring dreams—at least for the time being. Fellows call it the Pause because until you either pass or fail the Trials, you won’t be allowed to enter the Asleep.”

“I see.” Come to think of it, Aria hadn’t visited the Nightmare Circle at all in her dreams last night. She hadn’t encountered any Beasts and hadn’t been lured to any of the four seas. Which meant she wouldn’t have any accumulated plagues she’d have to extract.

“So no Outbursts for the time being? Wow.” Aria tentatively shook out her fingers and was overwhelmed with a sense of lightness she hadn’t felt for a long time. She couldn’t hurt anyone. It was liberating.

Junghee passed Aria a package wrapped in a shiny yellow fabric. “By the way, this is a gift from the king.”

“From the king?” Aria untied the thick knot on the satiny yellow material to reveal a traditional Korean dress. It was a light breathable material, with a salmon-colored cropped top and a long, full skirt in mint green.

“We call it a hanbok. It’s the local fashion here in Royal Hanguk. Let me help you put it on.”

Aria learned that you put on the full-length under-dress (called a chima) before donning the cropped top (called a jeogori) above it. Junghee tied the two thick ribbons on the jeogori into a big bow, and Aria stared at her reflection in the mirror. A lump grew in her throat. It was like seeing a younger version of her mom from Aria’s first birthday party.

Her mom was from Seoul, and as per Korean custom on her first birthday, Aria had been given a choice of objects that would foretell her fate. Coins meant wealth, for example; a medallion, status; while a brush meant scholarly pursuit. Aria had chosen yarn for long life, and while she had no memory of the day, she had a photo of it in her anchor cards, with her mom dressed in a beautiful hanbok.

As Aria glided her hands down the long chima, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Her dad was right—she did look so much like her mom.

“It’s nice, but it’s not as nice as the hanbok they make at the dreamtailor my mom works at,” Junghee said. “No offense to the king’s tastes, of course.”

“What’s a dreamtailor?” Aria asked.

“There are many families in the kingdom who weren’t gifted with the dreamslinger gene. But over time, they’ve developed new trades using the dream flora and fauna that the Fellows bring back from the Asleep. Their consignments have allowed us to create some thriving industries in the kingdom, like dreampothecaries, dreamchitects, dreambars, dreamcuisine, you get the drift. It’s actually my goal to open my own dreamtailor shop one day. I have so many good design ideas, but my mom says they’re too out-there.”

Junghee went on to explain in great detail her ideas for a self-cleaning hanbok made from an Autumn weed called sparklesweep, a color-changing hanbok using kaleidosprout from Spring, and a hanbok that could regulate temperature using the manure (yes, manure) of the thermaglow worm from Winter. She’d even had early ideas of using zephyrmoss to create an outfit that could grant temporary flight or using phantomsap to allow for short-term invisibility.

“I want to create a hanbok fashion label that could truly go global. I know I’m not supposed to think like that—we’re an inward-looking people. But the world is out there for the taking, you know? And it’d be sad to deny people my genius creations.”

She was still babbling away when it struck Aria that a hanbok with superspeed, or one that granted her temporary invisibility, could be invaluable when snooping around the kingdom for information.

“Will you let me try them?” Aria asked. “The experimental designs, I mean.”

Junghee grinned widely. “I’d already decided you’d be my fashion guinea pig whether you liked it or not. But I guess having your permission is okay, too.”

Aria’s mask slipped and she found herself returning the smile. Junghee had a way of getting under your skin.

“What do you know!” Junghee exclaimed, her eyes triumphant. “She does know how to smile.”

ORIENTATION BEGAN WITH THE ENTIRE cohort of trialeers getting a tour of the kingdom by their respective Sang-Gung Mama. As Junghee had explained the previous night, Central Palace was located at the heart of the kingdom, with the four other palaces at cardinal points across the island. Peppered between the palace complexes were various suburbs, where the people of Royal Hanguk lived and worked. The island nation was small, but it was bustling and alive.

The thirty or so trialeers in daisy capes dutifully followed their palace matron as they dismounted their convoy of gama and reassembled on a busy cobblestoned square in the town center.

“You’ll recognize Central Palace right there,” Sang-Gung Mama explained as she pointed to the golden walls peeking out from the green reserve behind the square. “Now let me introduce you to some of our kingdom’s more unique amenities.”

She pointed to her left. “Allymo’s Triumphant Tonics and Tinctures is a beloved dreampothecary and a good port of call for all your common ailments.” She pointed to her right. “And that dreampotter studio there, Mike’s Mud and Marvels, is known for special mugs that auto-refill with your drink of choice merely by wishing upon it. I’m a loyal customer.”

She waved to a woman looking out the window of another shop called Joya’s Jolly Jewels and Java, who was cuddling a cavoodle in her arms. “And that there is dreamjeweler Joya, who specializes in pendants that echo your heartbeat, which make excellent gifts for loved ones. She’s also quite a barista—best place to get flat whites in the kingdom.”

She led them down a windy alleyway, pointing out some of her other favorite haunts before stopping at a storefront, which to Aria looked like a bed shop. Most of the lights were off, but through the windows she could make out little starlights that twinkled from the ceiling, giving it the appearance of the brilliant night sky. Under their glow were rows and rows of four-poster beds, each one embraced by silky curtains. And at one end of the shop, the entire wall was covered from floor to ceiling with vials of luminescent, swirling elixirs.

“This is one of the many dreambars you’ll find in the kingdom,” she explained. “Fellows don’t physically need to sleep, but old habits die hard. Here, one can drink a slumberbrew of choice and then enjoy a spot of recreational dreaming. I’m quite a fan of the Underwater Vacation myself.”

“Is it only for Fellows?” a girl asked curiously.

“Heavens, no. Slumberbrews can be enjoyed by everyone—including trialeers. In fact, those of you who make it to the third Trial will all be drinking your fair share of them.”

As they continued walking down another cobblestoned street, the matron pointed out several more shops—including a barbershop called Bloom Groom where bloom dragons could get their petals pruned, and a huge fireproof gym called Pyro Playground where solar phoenixes could go wild and let off steam.

“And here is the Pavilion!” Sang-Gung Mama announced as the group arrived at the edge of a lagoon, where Fellows and their frost turtles were having a swim. An arched bridge led to a majestic multistory pagoda on an island in the middle of the water. The building was larger and taller than any she’d seen yet in Royal Hanguk, and above it were a group of bloom dragons and solar phoenixes flying with their riders. Aria gawked at the sky. She was never going to get used to this.

The matron led the gajok over the bridge. “The Pavilion is home to the kingdom’s royal library and banquet hall and will be the main commons where trialeers can eat, study, and socialize. I expect this is where you’ll be spending the majority of your time.”

Inside, she took her rubber pumps off and put them in a cubby, replacing them with a pair of indoor slippers. “Please remember to take your shoes off, trialeers. We leave the outdoor muck where it belongs.”

The Pavilion was populated by Fellows from all four gajok going about their business—their regal hooded cloaks clashing with their cute indoor slippers. Aria and the group of daisy-caped trialeers followed closely behind their matron as she guided them through the majestic pagoda building. They passed the Advisors’ Courtroom, where the matron explained the king and his royal advisors held court to discuss important matters. Aria tucked that fact away for later.

“Welcome to the royal library, otherwise known as the Library of Scrolls,” the matron announced when they arrived at an octagonal atrium that seemed to shoot endlessly into the sky. The shelves were full of scrolls, covering every inch of the eight-sided walls. “And this is Librarian Yong. You may call on her for any of your research needs.”

A woman in a pink cowboy hat stood awkwardly in front of the group, not making eye contact. There was a constellation of food stains on her hanbok, and there was no tasseled knot charm on her waist.

A trialeer pointed to the strange little trampolines on wheels that lived between the shelves. “What are those for?”

As if to demonstrate, Librarian Yong locked a tramp’s wheels in position before jumping on it. She soared upward, and when she reached the fourth floor, she raised her hand palm side down, making her body freeze in midair. There, she hovered in place, as if there were an invisible platform under her feet, grabbing a nearby scroll from the shelf. Aria’s eyes widened.

“The mats are woven with gravitygrass,” she noted, as if that was a perfectly normal explanation. “You can use them to access any of the scrolls up to the eighth floor. But lock the wheels before jumping or you will break your bones.”

“But there are more than eight floors,” Aria pointed out. There was a blurry cling-film-like layer sealing off the rest of the stacks above level eight.

“Restricted access. You have to get clearance to use the gravitygrass slippers.” She pointed toward her desk, where a wall of rubber pumps were locked behind glass like in a bowling alley.

“Thank you, Librarian Yong, for the demo,” Sang-Gung Mama said, as the Summer Palace gajok started entering the library on their tour. Aria’s matron ushered their gajok out. “Spring Palace trialeers, let’s head to the banquet hall now for some lunch.”

Aria was the last out, and she happened to look over her shoulder just as the librarian accidentally dropped her pink cowboy hat to the ground. Librarian Yong reached down to grab it, only for a trialeer from Summer Palace to kick it out of reach.

“Oh, were you wanting to pick that up?” the trialeer asked the librarian, all innocent doe eyes.

It was the girl from the lantern rite who’d acted surprised at being put in Summer Palace. She’d called herself a heritage kid.

An unwarranted amount of anger flared inside Aria, doing justice to her nickname, Sparkler. But she knew it wasn’t wise to draw attention to herself on her first day. So instead, she stood there with her jaw clenched, glaring at the snickering girl.

Librarian Yong grunted and went to pick her hat up again, only for the girl to kick it out of reach once more. Aria balled her fists and felt her anger flaring even hotter. Why was this girl being so unnecessarily nasty? Someone needed to teach her a lesson!

No one spoke up, though. In fact, a few trialeers in her gajok actually giggled as the girl crossed her arms over her chest and smirked, making Aria’s sparkler-meter explode off the scale. In fact, if not for the Pause, she would’ve unleashed an Outburst by now, for sure. When the trialeer had the gall to kick the hat a third time, Aria lost her head completely.

“HEY, YOU! Do that one more time and I swear you’ll regret it!”

Another Summer trialeer’s eyes widened. “Did you just threaten Jina Jeong? Do you even know who she is?!” He shook his head, as if fearful for Aria’s well-being. “You’re in for it now.”

Jina narrowed her eyes at Aria and snarled, “Way to make an enemy on your first day here, outsider.”

Aria had at least ten different colorful words she wanted to throw at this girl. She hated bullies. But out of habit, as her blood pressure rocketed, she planted her feet in the ground and did one of the centering exercises she’d been taught at Resthaven. Outburst or no Outburst, she was taught better than this. Restrain, contain, maintain. It was clear she was attracting attention, and spies didn’t live in the spotlight. Making public enemies wouldn’t help her cause. She needed to shut her mouth.

Gritting her teeth, Aria walked over to the hat and passed it to the librarian. “Is she always like that?” she whispered, as the trialeers turned their attention to the trampolines.

The librarian took her hat but ignored Aria and walked off without a word of thanks. Aria sighed. The librarian must’ve been pretty embarassed by the whole thing. Shrugging it off, Aria started toward the banquet hall to join her gajok, but just as she was leaving the library, the woman returned to shove a strange leaf in Aria’s hand. Actually, it was two large leaves cupped together, plump and full like a fat clam.

“My snackpan tree grew these.”

“Your snack pantry?” Aria repeated.

The librarian huffed. “Not snack pantry! My snackpan tree.”

Aria raised a brow.

“I don’t like sharing, but these are the best chips you’ll ever eat. If you disagree, I would like you to advise me so I can debate your inaccuracies with you.”

Then before Aria could respond, the librarian left and turned her attention to the Summer Palace trialeers.

The banquet hall was a large room filled with the same red-lacquer tables and legless chairs from Aria’s bedchamber. The difference was that these tables were big enough to seat four people… and they were floating in the air. Made with the soarfree tree, Aria assumed.

“Everyone, find yourself a seat. But please be wary when you sit, won’t you? We’ve recently upcycled some old gama into chairs, and a few are still protesting their change in circumstance.”

While a few trialeers got taken on roller-coaster rides across the hall, Aria homed her attention in on the boy with the earmuffs—the one from last night who’d explained the palace’s sparseness was a product of design. He’d received a dragon lantern, too. She walked to his empty table.

Getting to know a heritage kid would be a good way to glean inside information. But Jina seemed too well-known and hostile, especially toward outsiders. This boy, on the other hand, was a heritage kid who seemed to be a loner. He came across perfectly nice—albeit a little awkward—but no other heritage kids seemed to want to touch him with a barge pole. He was perfect.

Tui quickly came to join them, as did a trialeer with sharp features and a buzz cut.

The matron put her hands on her wide hips and gave the group a big smile. “Now that we’re all present, I want to formally welcome you into the Spring Palace’s gajok. We are the Season of the Kind, because kindness blooms at the dawn of all breath. I know not all of you will be here at the conclusion of the Trials, but during your stay, please do think of me as your palace mother. It is, after all, why they call us Sang-Gung Mama.”

She pulled out a small scroll from under her tabletop. “Before I give you a short briefing about your upcoming Trials, let me show you how meals work in the banquet hall. The Mood Menu can be found under your tables and is available three meals a day. Apart from certain exceptions like now, the entire cohort from all four gajok will dine together. Tardiness is not encouraged.”

Aria and her tablemates copied their matron and opened the scrolls under their tables, only to find they were empty.

“Hey, there’s nothing on mine!” Buzz Cut complained.

“Clear your mind and focus on your current emotions,” Sang-Gung Mama explained. “The Mood Menu is powered by your emotional appetite and will provide you with exactly what you need.”

Aria closed her eyes and immediately thought of her dad. Her worrying about him worrying about her was like a constant buzzing in the back of her head, unable to be switched off. When she opened her eyes, the scroll was brimming with moving images of her dad’s best meals—ones they used to enjoy together before Resthaven. His spicy butter spaghetti, his tuna and rice bake with mountains of mayo, his signature pizza with pineapple, Spam, and sweet chili sauce, and even his famous three-ingredient cookies (one cup peanut butter, one cup sugar, and an egg)—all meals he’d learned from Aria’s mom.

Steam from the images peeled off the scroll, and their aromas wafted up her nose, making her feel all wobbly inside. Her eyes stung as she put her finger over the spaghetti. At her selection, the scroll rolled itself up and flew back under the table like a skittish moth.

Sang-Gung Mama clapped her hands together. “As we wait for our food, let me give you a brief introduction to the format of the three upcoming Trials.”

The trialeers sat up taller in their floating chairs.

“The first of your three Trials will be the Knowing. This is a written exam in which you will be tested on the foundations of dreamslinger knowledge. The Knowing will take place in exactly two weeks’ time.”

Aria frowned. She knew nothing about what the League considered to be foundational dreamslinger knowledge. How was she supposed to pass an exam about something she’d never been taught?

“You will be briefed on the necessary topics for study, so there is no cause for alarm,” the matron added. “Those who pass the Knowing will then be invited to participate in the Unfurling. To be successful in this second Trial, you will need to sprout the seed you brought back from your Season, nurture it to grow, and unfurl your dreampanion from its flower.”

There was a sudden pang inside Aria’s chest as she thought of the dreampanion seed Tak had taken from her lap.

“If successful in the Unfurling, you will then be invited to the third and final Trial—the Endearing. You and your seedling will need to fly, ride, or swim to the sacred archway of your Season in the Asleep. Only those who complete the Journey and return with your seasonbilities will be deemed endeared, and therefore invited to the final induction ceremony.”

Excitement rippled through the trialeers. Aria thought back to her pretrial, remembering the stone archway floating high up in the sky. Without the blossom path, she assumed she’d have to fly to the arch. Her stomach fluttered.

The sliding doors of the banquet hall opened wide, and court attendants entered carrying trayloads of food. One man in an apron delivered Aria’s spaghetti, along with a creamy pine-nut porridge, a mince-and-cheese pie, and a meat-stuffed pastry for her tablemates.

“Wow,” Aria murmured as she twirled her fork into her mouth. It was just how her dad made it—the sauce cheesy, garlicky, and buttery smooth, finished off with a hit of spicy gochujang.

“Now that our food is here,” Sang-Gung Mama announced, “I’d like for you to share your name, age, home country, as well as one interesting thing about you with those at your table. Your fellow gajokmates may well become your closest confidants in life. So don’t be shy. You’re only each other’s competition if you deem yourselves to be.”

Tui opened her mouth to talk, but Buzz Cut cut her off. “I’ll go first.”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“My name is Maxwell Forsythe. I’m sixteen and from the UK. I am proficient in eight different languages.” He looked very proud of himself. “You can have your go now.”

Aria raised a brow, but Tui just nodded. “Cheers. My name is Tui Walker, I’m fourteen, and I hail from Aotearoa New Zealand, the land of the long white cloud. One interesting thing about me is that I’m named after the tūī, a native bird back home. I wish I sang like one, but my sister says I sound more like a dying possum, and honestly, she’s not wrong.”

Maxwell grunted dismissively.

The boy with the earmuffs went next. “My name is, uh, um, Lion Lee-Hendrick.” He spoke very quietly, and Aria had to lean in to hear him. “I’m fifteen and I’m from here. One interesting thing about me is that I enjoy knitting and martial arts. Although not at the same time.”

Aria nodded appreciatively. That was an interesting mix of hobbies. Lion seemed a strange mix of shy introvert meets understated confidence that was oddly cool.

Maxwell didn’t appear to be as impressed. He guffawed and pointed his finger at Lion and Tui. “Your name is Lion, and you are named after a bird? What is this, a zoo?!” He wagged his finger at Aria. “Don’t tell me. Your name is Mouse. No wait, Pig! Har har!”

Aria snorted incredulously at his tactlessness, only to realize she’d just proven him right. She figured she might as well lean into it.

“I’m Aria Love, fourteen, from the US. And I love pigs.” Then she snorted again. Loudly.

She knew she’d committed social suicide. But Tui laughed heartily and let out a loud Chirp! in solidarity.

Without missing a beat, Lion deadpanned a Roar!

Maxwell abruptly jumped off his floating chair and picked up his food tray, looking disgusted. “You zoo animals need to get your heads checked. I’ve had enough.”

Aria, Lion, and Tui shared a look before drowning in a fit of giggles.

“I thought he’d never leave,” Tui managed between laughs.

The three of them sat there grinning from ear to ear, and Aria felt a warmth pooling in her stomach… and it wasn’t just from the spicy kick in the spaghetti.

She had no interest in making friends here—she needed to stay focused on her mission. But having had run-ins so far with Jina Jeong and Maxwell Forsythe, she got the distinct impression this competition was going to be anything but smooth sailing.

Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t hurt to have some allies. People she could trust. Yes. If these Trials were going to be cutthroat, she’d need people in her corner. And something told her she may have already found some suitable—no, zootable candidates.

THE NEXT MORNING, ARIA JUMPED into a gama covered in fuzzy red fur as she made her way to the Pavilion for her first Nursery visit. The gama was playing a song she thought she recognized from Elmo’s World, and the tune was still playing in her head when she jumped off in front of the lagoon and the majestic floating pagoda.

“Welcome, everyone,” Hilda Bobby-Uma, the Head Scholar of Spring Palace, announced as Aria’s gajok gathered in front of the bridge. Close up, Aria could see that one of the scholar’s sharp-witted eyes was so dark it was almost black, while the other was a deep cerulean, which matched the blue streak in her hair. “This morning, I am going to show you what is arguably the most important place in the entire League.”

Instead of crossing the bridge to the Pavilion, the scholar started toward a small, unassuming archway farther down the shoreline that looked like it led directly into the water. There was a man guarding the tiled roof, feeding the eels. He nodded when he saw the scholar.

“Morning, Hamsam. Thank you as always for your service.” She touched her tasseled knot ornament to the arch, making the roof tiles glow. Then she walked through the threshold and disappeared altogether.

Aria gasped, but Tui’s eyes twinkled. “Race you there!”

To Aria’s surprise, she did not fall into the lagoon when she and her gajokmates followed the scholar. Instead, she found herself inside the central atrium of a sparkling greenhouse. Sunlight filtered through the domed ceiling and the tall glass panels, casting gentle rays over the gardening paraphernalia and musical instruments that seemed to fill the space. Stretching to the north, east, south, and west of the atrium were four long glass conservatories, each one the size of a verifiable greenhouse in itself.

“Welcome to the Dreampanion Nursery!”

Bobby-Uma smiled when everyone’s jaws dropped. “As the name suggests, this is where you will be attempting to sprout your bloom dragons.”

“How come we couldn’t see the Nursery from outside?” a Cook Island trialeer called Tiare Taina asked, as she adjusted the flower tucked behind her ear.

“This is just a shortcut we take to get to the real Nursery, whose location is protected. In fact, even the true physical building is covered with phantomsap from the wraithwood tree.” Aria remembered phantomsap as the stuff Junghee wanted to use to design an invisibility hanbok. “All precautions we take to keep the seedlings protected from, well—” She cleared her throat. “Let’s just say it keeps them safe.”

Aria and her gajokmates explored their eastern wing, which had a plush purple carpet rolled down the center and was populated by square patches of garden on either side of the path. Each plot had a white picket fence around it, with a hand-painted wooden sign. What was most striking, however, was the deep crimson soil that filled each plot—the dirt so red it almost looked like blood.

“Here’s mine,” Tui exclaimed, as she located the plot brandishing her name. She pointed to the garden kitty-corner to her. “And there’s yours, Aria. Lion’s is farther down. I wonder where he is this morning.”

As their gajokmates rushed to find their named plots, Aria stared at her little garden. Something tugged at her chest unexpectedly.

“The soil looks freshly turned,” Tui noticed.

Aria kneeled down to touch the damp scarlet dirt, and a word from her mom’s journal punched her in the chest:

DESIDERIUM (Noun) (Latin origin): An ardent desire or longing; especially a feeling of loss or grief for something lost.

It felt like she’d registered for the first time that she’d been born with a third of her soul missing. Perhaps the king’s words hadn’t just been propaganda, after all. Maybe this dreampanion really could fill her Soul-Gap and make her profoundly whole. The thought frightened her in more ways than one.

“As you can see, your seeds have already been planted here, patiently awaiting your love and care,” Bobby-Uma announced. “It will take hard work, but it is my fervent hope that you will all sprout your seedlings, nurture them to grow tall and strong, and successfully unfurl your dreampanion seedling from its flower. But first, you must pass the Knowing.”

She led the group back to the Pavilion. “And on that note, I believe full-cohort briefings are about to start. Go forth and study hard, trialeers. Your dreampanions are relying on it.”

Aria cursed Junghee as she and Tui hurried to make their Asleep Geography briefing with the Head Scholar of Winter Palace, Jamie-Ann Kim. They were late because Aria had to get changed. Junghee’s experimental hanbok—which could change color depending on Aria’s mood—had given her a nasty rash. Even now, having changed, she couldn’t stop scratching.

They ran through the frosted white gates of Winter Palace and stumbled into the Scholars’ Hall, interrupting the bouncy-haired Head Scholar mid-speech.

“Dear delightful trialeers! You’re just in time. Do come in and find yourself a floating seat.” The scholar’s frost turtle napped near her desk, its gigantic frame dressed in a polka-dotted onesie.

Jina Jeong sneered as Aria and Tui hurried past. “Trust Spring Palace to be tardy. That’s why being kind isn’t enough to run the world. We need rules.”

They found seats next to Lion, who’d reappeared after his disappearance this morning. As usual, the heritage kids were giving him a wide berth.

Head Scholar Kim spun her wheelchair toward the cohort. “As I was saying, today we will be learning all about the geography of the Asleep.” She pointed to her desk. “Please come collect your Season maps.”

Everyone rushed to grab a scroll, and Aria saw there were four different ones—one for each gajok, with the symbol from their capes engraved into the tip of the scroll’s rod.

“Whoa,” Tui breathed as they returned to their desks and opened them.

The map of Spring had a circular center like the pistil of a flower. Blossoming out of it was one petal-shaped piece of land pointing east. It looked like the dreamslinger symbol, but with only one of the four petals.

“Hey, yours looks like Summer, but the landmarks have different names.” Daxia Hsu, a friendly Taiwanese trialeer with an undercut and lots of piercings raised her map. Hers looked the same as Spring, except that the petal was facing south, not east.

“Oh yeah!” Mason Hewett, a British trialeer, agreed from behind them, holding up his map of Winter, whose petal pointed northward. Mason wasn’t wearing his guitar or violin today, but he was wearing his mischievous grin, which he never seemed to be without. “Same-same but different.”

They compared landmarks across Seasons, to find that the Meadow Plains of Spring were called the Desert Plains in Summer, and the Ice Plains in Winter.

Zahra Amini, an Iranian girl from Autumn Palace who wore loads of handwoven bracelets down her arms, came to join them, and together they discovered that all four Seasons had different names for the mirrored landmarks on their maps. All except one—the circular pistil that everyone had at the heart of the map.

“Head Scholar Kim, why is the Heartsglade the only landmark we all share on our maps?” Zahra asked.

“The Heartsglade is like our arrivals gate when traveling to the Asleep,” the scholar explained. “No matter which gajok you’re in, we must all pass through it in order to get to our respective Seasons.”

As Aria took in the map, it suddenly clicked that the Heartsglade was the Nightmare Circle—the circular land of the dream world before the four seas began. Aria looked closer, and as she suspected, she saw the coven of trees at the very center, convening like a four-seasons pizza. The map called it the “Heart of the Heartsglade,” which Aria thought wasn’t nearly as catchy as Treehenge.

Studying the map of Spring further, Aria deduced that the land protruding eastward from the Heartsglade was where the East Sea of Poisonous Plants was in her dreams. In her pretrial, the Season archway to Spring had appeared above the poison sea. It made sense, then, that the entire petal-shaped land was Spring, once the archway had been crossed.

“Head Scholar Kim, what’s this gray stuff?” Niko Horvat, a Canadian trialeer with pink-and-blue braces asked, referring to the fuzzy border surrounding the petal-shaped land on his map.

“Oh yeah, I have it on mine, too,” said Misha Mora Perez, an Autumn Palace trialeer from Chile.

The frost turtle snored as the scholar wheeled toward the cohort. “I’m glad you asked. Does anyone know the League rule about the Ash Frontier? Yes, Trialeer Jeong?”

“The Ash Frontier is the outer boundary of the Asleep, and is strictly prohibited,” Jina answered confidently. “Those who are caught near it will face immediate disqualification from the Trials, or, if already a Fellow, immediate disbarment from the League.”

“Clear and precise, well done!” Scholar Kim commended. “It bears repeating that the Ash Frontier is forbidden due to the unspeakable dangers that lie past its border. Everything beyond the Ash Frontier—the area we call the Beyondash—is extremely dangerous. In fact, of those who have attempted to cross the Ash Frontier, none have returned with their lives intact.”

She markedly slowed down her speech, as if to belabor the point. “So please, do take heed of the rule, trialeers. It is the League’s most important rule for a reason.”

The warning made a shiver run down Aria’s spine. Her dad had warned her that the League’s training was dangerous. And here was a Head Scholar confirming that there were areas of the Asleep that could kill them. She gulped.

“Honestly, though, what did you do? Did you kill someone? Kick a puppy? Why do they treat you like a social pariah?” Tui asked Lion as a group of heritage kids bolted from their study table upon seeing Lion. “Are you contagious? Should Aria and I be worried?”

Lion shrugged as his cheeks went all shiny. “They just don’t like me, okay? On the upside, we got the last table in the library. You’re welcome.”

Afternoon briefings had concluded, and the trio had decided to do some studying at the Library of Scrolls. It appeared the rest of the cohort had the same thought, too.

For a good hour, they studied silently, committing facts to memory, until Zahra came to join them, and she and Tui got distracted talking about the little creatures from the Asleep.

“Not the dreampanions,” Tui clarified. “I mean the little ones that Fellows catch in those violet orbs.”

“Yeah!” Zahra exclaimed, twirling the colorful bracelets on her wrists. “The ones that give you temporary powers. What were those called again?”

“You mean nightjoys?” Lion asked, being pulled into their conversation.

Aria remembered how Tae had grown eight arms after his bloom dragon had slung a nightjoy orb at him. She’d experienced them herself in her pretrial—the bunny that’d given her superhearing, the winged hamster that’d given her wings, and the tiny fawn who’d made the ground under Aria’s hooves fizzle with electricity. There were supposedly endless species of them across the four Seasons, all with different traits and powers—many of them still undiscovered.

“Yeah, the nightjoys,” Tui said excitedly. “What I wanna know is when we can start catching them.”

Zahra’s intelligent eyes shone. “I know, right? I overheard the king has over two hundred different nightjoys in his pride.”

“Amaaazing,” Tui breathed.

“We’re not being tested about nightjoys in the Knowing,” Lion reminded them. “You can’t start catching them until after you get inducted, anyway.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be curious about them,” Zahra argued. “Learning is like dessert for the mind. And what can I say? I have an insatiable sweet tooth.”

Tui grinned. “Me too. We’re just two nerdy sweetpeas in a pod, Zahra, and I’m feeling nibbly.” She turned to Lion. “Oi, do us a solid and help feed our dessert addiction, eh?”

Eventually, Lion relented and took Tui and Zahra to the huge section of the library that was dedicated to the identification and categorization of nightjoys. It gave Aria the perfect opportunity to do a spot of sleuthing.

“Librarian Yong, where can I find all the kingdom’s old newspapers?”

Aria figured that getting a sense of the kingdom’s news cycle leading up to the reopening of borders might help give a hint as to why the decision was made.

“The waterfiche system,” the cowboy-hatted librarian explained in that standoffish way of hers, as she took Aria to what looked like a stone birdbath in one corner of the library. “Water retains its history in its molecules, which makes it the most effective way of logging our historical records. You’ll find the old newspaper clippings in there.”

The librarian taught her how to use the system, which was a simple but tedious (and wet) process of manually “swirling” through chronologically filed newspapers, and Aria started by scanning the Royal Gazette articles. They were old and pretty unexciting—mostly interviews with local dreamtraders about their growing industries, stats and highlights for something called Battlejoy, which appeared to be the national sport, updates about a quarterly Harvest of Service event, and some advertisements for the newest dreambrews. It was essentially just a local community paper. The only notable thing about the articles was that they abruptly stopped just over ten years ago.

“Where are the newer articles kept?” Aria asked the librarian, her hanbok damp from using the waterfiche.

The librarian didn’t make eye contact as she pointed to the restricted-access slippers behind the locked cubbies. “They were moved to the classified section temporarily for the duration of the Trials. King’s decree.” She frowned. “I don’t like the articles being split and kept separately. It’s not as it should be.”

Aria gazed up at the cling-film-like layer above the eighth floor and harrumphed. Of course they were moved. Nothing like kicking your mess under the bed when the guests come over. At least it proved the League was hiding something. Aria just had to find out what that was.

Tui, Zahra, and Lion still seemed to be busy poring over nightjoy scrolls, so Aria went back to the waterfiche to see if she’d missed anything the first time around. Librarian Yong even brought Aria a leafy snackpocket of honey butter chips she’d freshly plucked from her snackpan tree, as if to apologize for the missing records. The librarian seemed to guard the small potted tree with the ferocity of a mama bear protecting its cub, and Aria had to agree it grew the best snacks she’d ever had in her life.

Scanning the Gazette, she didn’t find much that was noteworthy the second time around, apart from a super-old photo of the young king and his “bosom buddy, Ko Iseul, the daughter of the Royal Mudang,” playing chase in a meadow. According to the caption, they were inseparable. You couldn’t see their faces properly in the image, but Aria did the math and concluded Ko Iseul must’ve grown up to become the current royal shaman. If the role was passed down their family line, it made sense she’d taken over from her late mother.

It wasn’t much, but it confirmed for Aria that the Royal Mudang would be a valuable source of information. Not only was she the king’s most trusted advisor, she was also his oldest friend.

Aria felt a small sense of victory. At least now she knew whom to target. And that, for now, was better than nothing.

THE DAYS SEEMED TO FLY by for Aria. Every dawn and dusk, their palace matron led them to the Dreampanion Nursery so they could water their gardens. In between those two daily bookends, the cohort spent their days attending briefings and studying their scrolls until their eyes crossed and their brains felt like putty.

Despite her best intentions to not be indoctrinated by League propaganda, Aria was increasingly intrigued by what she was learning. That is, from a purely academic standpoint, of course. There was something satisfying about growing your expertise in a certain area of knowledge, and she hated to admit she wasn’t despising the entire process.

Aria’s least-hated text by far was The Royal Scroll on How to Sprout Your Dreampanion, closely followed by The Comprehensive Treasury of Flora in the Four Seasons of the Asleep—a collection of scrolls that took up an entire subsection of the library. Her least-hated briefings were all the ones not given by Head Scholar Byun from Summer Palace. Turned out the small, shrewd man was Jina Jeong’s uncle, and he proved to be just as insufferable as his niece.

Unfortunately, despite all the study she was doing—or perhaps because of all the study she was doing—Aria hadn’t yet found anything that warranted a formal report to her dad. She’d missed her first deadline already, but she was confident she’d be able to make up for it soon. She just had to make it past this first Trial first, so she could stay in the kingdom.

Somehow, the fortnight whizzed past. And before she knew it, it was the day of the Knowing, and she was being awoken by the sound of someone gasping, then footsteps scurrying around her room.

“Trialeer Love, why does it look like a bomb went off in your bedchamber?!”

Aria bolted up as Junghee picked up scrolls, clothes, and study cards that had been strewn everywhere. Little bits of red meat were spotted around the floor and walls.

Aria gaped. “Junghee, I did not make this mess.”

A waft of something that smelled like rotting sea creature slathered in sewage, then dunked in vinegar, assaulted her nose. She gagged.

“Urghhh,” Aria squealed, pinching her nostrils shut. “What is that?”

“This,” Junghee said, taking off her apron and bravely scooping up a meaty flower the size of a plate from the floor, “is a corpsespinner.” She dry-heaved before rushing to the door. “Let me return this before we die of asphyxiation.”

Aria flapped her hands in the air around her. She remembered learning that corpsespinners from Summer were unrivaled in their ability to spread their foul stink. The secret was in their spinning movement that flicked pieces of their rotting flesh to all corners. They were deemed more parasitic weed than flower, which was why they were kept locked up inside the Floratorium and not allowed to be removed. She had no idea how it’d managed to get inside her room.

Picking up her dad’s domino tile from the floor, she took a deep breath. However it happened, she wouldn’t rattle that easy. Corpsespinner or no, she had an exam to pass.

When Junghee rushed back wearing a fresh apron, she was uncharacteristically quiet. By this point, Aria knew her maid well enough that something was wrong.

“Out with it, Junghee,” Aria demanded.

The maid wrenched the white apron in her fingers. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’d probably get fired if they found out. But I just overheard the other gung-nyeo speculating, and…” She exhaled. “Every year, there’s some kind of added distraction to the exam. To see how you work under pressure.”

Aria raised her brows. “So the corpsespinner was the distraction?”

Junghee frowned. “No, I have no idea why the corpsespinner was in your room—that’s a mystery for later.” She let out a quick huff. “I’m talking about during the actual Trial today. They’re going to do something to throw you off.”

Of course they were—way to raise the stakes even more. “Did you hear what it will be?”

Junghee lowered her voice. “Something to do with a shriekcicada.”

Aria grimaced. She wouldn’t have known what that was, if not for Tui and Zahra’s obsession with nightjoys. Thanks to their incessant discussions about the creatures, even Aria knew that the shriekcicada allowed dreamslingers to produce bloodcurdling noises unbearable to the human ear. It would be impossible to focus on the Trial with that in the background.

“Anyway, I was coming out of the Floratorium when I saw these, so I might’ve just stolen them”—she coughed—“well, borrowed them for you. Argh. Quick, take them!” Junghee shoved two knots of green moss in Aria’s hand as if they were balls of fire.

“Condensemoss!”

Aria had studied this just a few days ago. A type of moss from the Asleep that was excellent at sucking up high decibels in its fibers.

She stared at Junghee. “You stole these for me?”

Junghee shrugged as she made her way to the door. “I can’t have my guinea pig disappearing on me before trying my entire season’s collection. Aaand I might still feel a little bad about that rash. Anyway, let’s go, or else you’ll miss the Trial.”

Aria fought the urge to run after her maid and hug the daylights out of her. “Maybe I can try another design tomorrow?” she offered instead. “The rash has cleared, so probably time for a fresh flare-up.”

Junghee’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll bring the salve!”

The Knowing was being held at Autumn Palace, where rows of floating desks had been set up in a courtyard facing the Tree of Judgment—a towering giant with a complicated web of gnarly roots protruding above the ground. A set of wooden scales was carved into the thickest part of the trunk, and its branches were adorned with amber leaves so sharp they gleamed like blades under the morning light.

They’d learned that the tree’s scales would weigh their exams, and if their responses were an equal weight to a single leaf, they’d have passed. Anyone whose answers were deemed too heavy (e.g., problematic or concerning) or too light (e.g., lacking or insubstantial) would immediately be packed up and sent home. As Aria took in the ominous-looking tree, she shivered, realizing her fate was held in the precarious tip of these scales.

“Aria from America, over here! We saved you a seat.”

Aria weaved through the hundred or so trialeers to join Tui and Lion as the king, the Royal Mudang, and the four Head Scholars appeared in front of the tree.

“Trialeers, the exam will commence shortly. Please take your seats,” the king announced.

Aria pointed at Lion’s earmuffs and lowered her voice. “Are those noise-canceling?”

He nodded. “Helps me avoid getting overstimulated and overwhelmed. Why?”

Aria shoved one of her balls of condensemoss into Tui’s hand. “Because you’ll need it. Trust me.”

They looked at her confused, but there was no time to explain.

“Trialeers, stop disrespecting the king and sit down!” Head Scholar Byun barked, reminding Aria of a feisty chihuahua.

Aria, Tui, and Lion gathered their hands. “The zoo crew on three,” Tui led. “One. Two. Three.”

“Roar! Snort! Chirp!”

“As you are aware,” the king began, as his solar phoenix preened its fiery feathers behind him. “The Knowing is the first of three Trials you must pass to receive an invitation to the induction ceremony. For those of you who will be leaving us at the completion of today’s Trial, it is our greatest regret to see you go. The Royal League wishes you well for the future.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Now with that, may the Knowing begin. I wish you all the best of luck.”

Head Scholar Tak rang a gong, and a floating sand timer appeared in front of the tree. “Your three hours begin now,” he declared, as his mustache gems twinkled under the sun. “Once completed, please bring your scrolls up to the tree to receive its judgment.”

As the shrill ring echoed around the courtyard, a scroll and brush materialized on Aria’s desk. With a good-luck squeeze of her mom’s lucky-eight pendant and her dad’s domino tile, Aria unraveled the scroll. The empty parchment quickly filled with the first set of questions, and Aria felt a rush of relief as she scanned them. She could answer these.

She correctly answered that Fellows were only able to enter the Season they’d been nominated for. Then she identified the five whistled notes to call a gama as the first five notes of the melody of “Arirang,” a Korean folk song. As soon as she completed the first set of questions, it was replaced with a new set, and another, and another. She was on a roll, and when she got a question about why musical instruments were offered in the Dreampanion Nursery, she confidently wrote about the benefits of vibrations on the growth of seedlings, which she’d read about in The Royal Scroll on How to Sprout Your Dreampanion.

She was in such a rhythm, she’d almost forgotten about Junghee’s warning. That is, until the first group of sun-cloaked Fellows flew over their heads, their solar phoenixes squawking ominously. Unprepared trialeers jumped at the unexpected distraction. A second group of solar phoenixes whizzed past—this time conjuring a violet orb in their talons, golden lightning streaking inside each one.

The phoenixes slung the orbs at their riders, and immediately, a glimmering aura of a cicada shrouded each Fellow. Ridged membranes started forming on their faces, and the strange tissues began to vibrate, creating a sound that amplified like a wave. Soon, the courtyard was echoing with the painful, inhuman screeches of the Fellows.

“Argh!” Aria cried, as she covered her un-mossed ear. It felt like needles were being stabbed in it. She looked around to see some trialeers falling off their floating chairs and rolling around on the ground with their heads clutched in their hands. Lion’s and Tui’s faces were contorted with pain, but they seemed to be holding it together. They threw her a grateful look.

Just when Aria thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Fellows torpedoed back, the phoenixes sharply descending and striking trialeers with their talons. Trust the League to make everything so violent and bloodthirsty.

Aria gritted her teeth. The floating timer showed over a third of the time had passed already, and she wasn’t going to let this distract her. Her mom and dad were counting on her.

Taking a few grounding breaths, she pulled out a technique from Resthaven she liked to call “gift-boxing.” She created a box in her mind and visualized herself shoving the painful shrieks inside it. Then she closed the box and wrapped it so thoroughly that she imagined all the distractions being locked neatly inside. It seemed to help, and she got back to work.

It was only when Aria stretched her cramping neck and looked up at the floating timer that she realized the shrieking Fellows had gone, and two-thirds of the sand had already accumulated in the bottom chamber. As the next set of questions popped up about grooming practices for the four types of dreampanions, she knew she just had to keep her momentum going.

She’d made it through a section on the most unusual dream flora kept in the League’s Floratorium (corpsespinners, anyone?), and had just aced a portion on naming conventions for dreampanions (a partial anagram of the dreamslinger’s full name for their nickname, as well as an official Korean royal name given during the induction ceremony), when the first trialeer took their completed scroll up to the Tree of Judgment. It was Zahra Amini.

The entire cohort froze mid-brushstroke to stare.

“Please place your exam on the scale,” the king declared. “And kneel to receive its judgment.”

Without hesitation, Zahra laid her rolled-up scroll on the right plate as one gleaming amber leaf dropped onto the left from a branch above. As the entire courtyard held their breath, the scales considered the weight of Zahra’s exam, tipping up and down before finally settling on equal value.

The air suddenly became crisp. A whispering mist picked up the leaf, carrying it toward Zahra, swirling around the edges of her sweetgum-leaf cape. She gasped as the bladed leaf danced around her neck, nicking her skin. When the mist evaporated, the leaf was gone, and Zahra’s cape had been lined with a soft white fur.

“Congratulations, Trialeer Amini. You have successfully passed the Knowing,” the king announced. “You are now one step closer to becoming a Fellow of the Royal League.”

Zahra fist-pumped the air, showing off her colorful bracelets, and strode off to the side of the courtyard, just as a trialeer called Maksym Kovalenko approached the tree with his scroll.

This time around, the scales tipped off-kilter, deeming Maksym’s exam too light. And when the mist returned, the knife-edged leaf sliced the snowflake cape clean off his neck. As drops of blood trickled down his shoulders, palace guards appeared to lead Maksym away.

“No, please. Don’t send me back. You don’t understand. I’ll never be let out again if I return!”

The trialeers all tensed in their floating chairs, watching the first trialeer be axed from the Trials. It felt so clinical, so final, and Aria grimaced. She didn’t know where Maksym had come from, but it sounded like it might be an anti-slinger country. What would happen to him now?

Aria tried to ignore the trickle of trialeers being judged, and focused her attention on her scroll, pausing only when Lion, then Jina, received their judgments. Both passed—the latter whispering “Hope you enjoyed your stinky start to the morning,” as she whisked past Aria wearing her newly fur-lined cape.

Aria groaned inwardly. She should’ve guessed the corpsespinner was a gift from Jina. Ever since they’d had that run-in at the library during Orientation, Jina had made it clear how she felt about Aria. She’d vandalized Aria’s hanok door, stolen her study scrolls, thrown one of her shoes into the lake, and even managed to sneak sneezing powder into her oatmeal one morning. Served Aria right for letting her emotions spark out of control.

She shook it off, and knew she was getting near the end when she snagged on a particularly curly question.

Do you agree with the work of the Royal League? If you were the king, would you have made changes to the way the Trials were administered this year? Discuss.

Aria grunted. This was a topic on which Aria had lots of opinions, and she wished she could answer them truthfully. No, she didn’t agree with the work of the League that turned vulnerable teenagers into loaded weapons. Yes, there were changes she’d make, starting with, oh, who knows, maybe not having the Trials in the first place? What about becoming a normal international-law-abiding country with healthy diplomatic relations while they’re at it? She could go on for days.

But she knew this wasn’t a question of her true beliefs—it was about doing what she must to pass this Trial. She needed to say what they wanted to hear. Something that toed the company line while still demonstrating that she could exercise critical thinking.

As she considered how to respond, more trialeers received their judgments. She estimated only half of them were passing, which included Daxia Hsu (the girl with all the piercings from Summer Palace), Mason Hewett (the musical kid with the mischievous grin from Winter Palace), and then thankfully, Tui (who mouthed “You’ve got this!” as she went to stand with Lion).

“Ten minutes remaining, trialeers,” the king announced.

Aria’s heart did a somersault. She glanced up at the timer, where the sand had indeed almost entirely drained. She stared down at her unanswered question and pictured her dad sitting at his office desk, his green eyes tired behind his smudged glasses.

Why do you work so hard, Dad? she’d asked him one day.

Because it’s important we help the most vulnerable people in society. Because we’re only as strong as our weakest citizen. By pulling others up, we’re helping ourselves, too.

Aria thought about that, and about Maksym’s fate back home, wherever that was. She thought about her friends back at Resthaven, and about how Jina was so hostile toward non-heritage trialeers. Unsuccessful heritage trialeers would be given apprenticeships in the dreamtrades if unsuccessful in the Trials. But for many, she knew it would feel like a consolation prize.

Suddenly, she knew how to answer the question.

If I were the king, she began writing, her brush gripped tight in her hand, I would’ve chosen to induct more than twenty Novices at the Annual Trials this year. In a world where anti-slinger sentiment is rife and unfortunately on the rise, shouldn’t the League be making such training available to as many dreamslingers as it can? We are only as strong as our weakest dreamslinger. By pulling the most vulnerable of us up, we’re helping the wider dreamslinger cause, too.

For international kids, it seems unfair that they have to fight so hard for a chance that may only come once in a lifetime. And for heritage kids, it seems unfair that they have to fight so much harder for a place in the League, when these are spots that would’ve gone to them if not for outside competition. Perhaps one day, the League could even do away with the Trials completely… and allow all dreamslingers who come in search of guidance to be unconditionally welcomed into the kingdom’s embrace.

Aria felt icky with her answer, as if somehow, she had betrayed her dad and his work by supporting the work of the League. But the best way to help her dad right now was to pass this Trial. And so she read over her response one final time, and decided it was as ready as it would ever be.

“Two minutes remaining,” King Lee Ogu announced as his solar phoenix flared impressively behind him.

Aria’s eyes flickered toward the Royal Mudang as she approached the Tree of Judgment. The woman was twisting the reeds of her colorful shaman flags in her hand, chanting under her breath, and Aria immediately felt uneasy. She hadn’t done that for the other trialeers, had she?

“Please place your exam on the scale,” the king said. “And kneel to receive its judgment.”

Aria kneeled, cautiously laying her scroll on the right plate of the scale, and she waited. And waited. And waited.

“How strange,” murmured Head Scholar Tak, fiddling with a mustache gem. “No leaf will drop.”

Aria’s heart pounded in her chest. Did the Tree somehow know she was a spy or something? Was that why it refused to judge her exam?

She held her breath as Tak conferred with the king and the other Head Scholars, while the mudang stood there, no longer chanting under her breath but her expression unreadable.

Aria couldn’t hear the full conversation, but she could catch snippets, here and there.

“It’s not unheard of that…”

“…just needs a nudge…”

“…exam will still need to speak for itself…”

“…But what of the rules!”

They turned back to Aria, having come to a decision, and it was obvious by the incensed look on Head Scholar Byun’s face that he was in the minority.

“I have conferred with the Head Scholars,” the king announced, looking at Aria with a strange expression, as if seeing right through her. “And it has been decided that we will manually place a judgment leaf on the scale. Sometimes even the mighty Tree of Judgment needs a helping hand.”

There was a shock of murmurs from the courtyard as Aria exhaled heavily in relief. The mudang scowled, looking distinctly unimpressed, and Head Scholar Tak carefully plucked a bladed leaf from the tree, and placed it on the scale.

The scale see-sawed up and down until finally, it stopped. She squinted. Was it equal? Or was it ever so slightly uneven…?

The swirling mist awoke, blowing the leaf in Aria’s direction. The sharp edges scratched her skin as the leaf danced around her neck, and she winced. She was going to lose her cape. She slammed her eyes shut.

It was only when she heard Tui and Lion’s joyous shouting that she opened them again… to see that despite the sharp sting from the cuts, white fur had blossomed across the edge of her daisy cape.

She’d passed!

“Congratulations, Trialeer Love,” the king said quietly. “You have successfully passed the Knowing.” His solar phoenix squawked, and Aria didn’t know if it was a sign of support or warning. “You are now one step closer to becoming a Fellow of the Royal League.”

RUMORS QUICKLY STARTED TO SPREAD through the cohort that Aria had cheated her way through the Knowing. Unsurprisingly, Jina Jeong was the most vocal about it, alleging she’d received the inside word about it from her dear uncle.

As Aria made her way to the Devotion Hall at Central Palace, she tried to ignore the whispers and looks from her fellow trialeers. She’d passed—and that was all that mattered. Besides, it wasn’t like she’d forced them to give the Tree of Judgment a nudge. The king and scholars had done that all by themselves.

“The Royal Mudang isn’t here,” a Turkish trialeer called Hakan Aydem commented as the group entered the cavernous hall. “Do we just start cleaning or do we wait for her?”

“I heard she and the royal sanctum had an urgent meeting this morning at the Advisors’ Courtroom,” said Estevão Oliveira Alves, a trialeer from Brazil. “Let’s wait a few minutes to see if she returns.”

Aria’s ears perked up. What a missed opportunity! If only she’d been a fly on the wall of the Advisors’ Courtroom to hear their discussions.

Estevão handed out the polish cloths and brooms in preparation, and Aria took a broom as she studied the three large statues in the Devotion Hall. They were of an old man, an old woman, and a small child, and all Aria knew was that they were called the Holy Trine and were the spiritual ancestors of the kingdom. This was the Royal Mudang’s dominion, and it was where Royal Hangukites came to worship the three ancestral deities.

It was why Aria had chosen to come here this morning for palace duties. All trialeers were expected to help with chores around the palaces once a week, whether it be housekeeping, groundskeeping, kitchenwork, or even toilet cleaning, because, as their Sang-Gung Mama said, You must learn that all jobs in the palaces, no matter how big or small, are crucial for the balance and harmony of the kingdom. The day after passing the first Trial was no exception.

Aria had decided sweeping the Devotion Hall would be a strategic opportunity to snoop around the mudang’s office. Tui had decided to help in the kitchen, but Lion hadn’t mentioned where he was heading this morning.

“Why are you all standing around and not cleaning?” demanded the royal shaman as she strode into the hall, making everyone jump. There was a brusqueness about the woman that was unsettling.

Everyone leapt to work, and Aria got busy sweeping near the entrance to the mudang’s private office. It was slightly ajar, and she’d hoped to find an opportunity to sneak in. But now that the mudang was back, she was lecturing the group about spiritual piety and duty to the Holy Trine, leaving no gap for Aria to slip out.

She droned on and on, and soon, Aria’s patience ran out. Thinking on the fly, she did the first thing that popped into her mind.

“Argh! Rat!” she screamed, pointing at the opposite end of the huge hall. “It ran over there! Into the altar hutch. It was huge!”

The royal shaman’s eyes widened, and she strode toward the cupboards full of paraphernalia used in the ceremony altars.

“Quick, open it and take everything out!” she ordered the other trialeers, who scrambled to obey. “I hate rats. Despicable rodents!”

“I’m scared of them, I’ll stay here!” Aria called out, pretending to cower in the corner. They didn’t need to know that she thought rats were actually quite cute.

When she was confident everyone’s attention was focused on finding the invisible rat, she took a deep breath and quietly slipped through the door to the mudang’s private office.

It was a humble space, populated by nothing more than a floating desk, a chair, and mountains of scrolls. Aria scanned them and found they were all spiritual scriptures—accounts of the Holy Trine, of reincarnation, of spiritual enlightening, that kind of thing.

Aria deflated. There was nothing here related to the League’s reopening to the world. Nothing about their nefarious intentions to engineer the next Great Outburst.

She was just about to leave when the corner of a book hidden under the lip of the desk caught her eye. She pulled it out, only to see that it was a bound journal, with a symbol hand-drawn on the front. It looked a bit like a dragonfly with a single pair of wings and a dot inside each wing.

She opened it to find three Korean characters written on the first page. She wanted to keep flicking through it, but noises from outside suggested the hunt for the invisible rat was coming to a close. She could hear the mudang ordering traps to be laid instead.

She frowned. As much as she wanted to keep snooping, the book wasn’t worth getting caught over. Especially not when rumors were already rife about her supposed cheating.

Instead, she committed the three characters to memory and slipped out of the office.

“So, you’re telling me this hanbok will clean itself?” Aria asked, as she studied her reflection in the mirror. The jeogori was a beautiful lilac, and the chima a slightly darker shade of mulberry.

Junghee took out a lipstick from her apron and started doodling a very rude picture on Aria’s chima.

“Junghee!” Aria admonished. “Did you just draw a—” Aria was distracted from finishing her sentence because within seconds, the cherry-colored marking completely disappeared.

“See? I wove it with an Autumn weed called sparklesweep. It hates being dirty and immediately cleans itself.” Junghee grinned in satisfaction.

Aria had to admit it would be useful to have a dress that kept itself clean.

“And I promise no rash this time!” Junghee assured her. “I think.”

Aria thought back to what she’d seen in the shaman’s journal earlier this morning. “Hey, can you translate this for me?” She took the lipstick and re-created the Korean characters on the mirror as best as she could.

Junghee gasped and quickly wiped the lipstick off the mirror. “You can’t write someone’s name in red! It means you wish them dead!”

“It’s a name?”

“Of the Royal Mudang, no less,” Junghee hissed. “Ko Garam. She’d order your beheading if she knew you wrote her name in red.”

In hindsight, Aria should’ve guessed it was a name. It was on the first page of a journal. It must’ve been the mudang’s personal journal.

But then her eyes widened. “Wait, I thought the mudang’s name was Ko Iseul.” She was sure that was the name she’d seen in the Royal Gazette. The king’s childhood best friend.

Junghee shook her head. “It’s definitely Ko Garam.”

Before Aria could ask any follow-up questions, Junghee hurried Aria out the sliding doors. “But come on, more important things await. I can’t believe you’re going to meet the Knotmaster!” She squealed.

“Why is everyone so obsessed with him anyway? Isn’t he just some dude that ties knots?” Aria harrumphed and dragged her feet as she followed Junghee to a gama.

She was here undercover. As a spy. She had a real job to do. And she wasn’t going to get excited about a man who made tasseled knot charms for a living. She was taught better than that.

“It’s actually called a norigae,” Lion explained as the trio rode in a black-leather-clad gama decorated with metal studs into the township.

“No-ree-gay,” Aria and Tui repeated, practicing the correct pronunciation.

Only about fifty trialeers were left after the Knowing, and the four gajok were each due to visit the Knotmaster today to receive their own tasseled knot charms. The norigae would, among other things, allow them access into the Dreampanion Nursery without their matron’s supervision.

“I still think it’s awesome that a norigae can hold an entire dreampanion inside it,” Tui said, trying to speak over the gama’s heavy-metal music (this gama was definitely a metalhead).

“Not to mention an entire pride of nightjoys,” Lion added.

It still shocked Aria to see Fellows summoning their dreampanions from the tiny charms hanging from their waists with nothing more than a chant.

“It’s dangerous, though, isn’t it?” Aria said warily. “Where I come from, they’re called Beast catchers.”

Tui shrugged. “They’re as dangerous as the people who wield them, I guess. And it’s not like Royal Hanguk is the only place that’s figured out how to catch dream entities in talismans.”

“Like dream catchers,” Lion noted. “They’re an Ojibwe tradition in North America, from what I understand.”

“In New Zealand, we Māori believe that pounamu—a type of jade—possesses mana, a spiritual power that connects the wearer to their ancestors and the natural world,” Tui explained. “Me and some of my fellow dreamslingers at home reckon we could house dreampanions in our pounamu. It’s a work in progress, but it’d be groundbreaking if we could.”

“Wow,” Aria murmured. It hadn’t crossed her mind that other cultures might find different ways of harnessing the power of the dreampanions. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel about that. A part of her was proud of Tui for having the vision to dream of such a feat. At the same time, she worried whether that meant more dreamslingers would be turned into weapons in other parts of the world, too. Thinking about it made her head hurt.

“So how exactly does the Knotmaster do his thing?” Aria asked Lion instead.

He politely asked the gama to lower the volume before responding. “They say the Knotmaster makes each unique knot with a person in mind, even though he hasn’t met them yet. And just by looking at you, he’ll know which norigae is yours.” His eyes shone with reverence. “He’s basically a living legend.”

Aria pictured the famous Knotmaster, probably sporting a long white beard with wise eyes, crouched over a workshop table, handcrafting each intricate knot with his expert fingers. Even as she tried to dampen her curiosity, her imagination ran wild. What would a norigae in her likeness look like?

The gama parked at their destination, and Sang-Gung Mama led Aria, Tui, Lion, and the eleven others in the Spring Palace gajok through a door sandwiched between Spudman’s Scrolls & Stationery and Scents & Scentsibility (the latter an aromatherapy shop using only “pure Asleep flora oils”). The door had been unmarked, and sure enough—they’d accidentally walked into a children’s indoor playground.

Before Aria could tell Sang-Gung Mama about the error, a kid—five years old at most—ran up to Tui, his cheeks ruddy and eyes shining.

“Do you like the slide?” he asked her with a cute lisp that made his question sound more like Do you like the thlide?

“Mate! The slidier, the better.”

The boy grinned. “Rathe you down!”

Sang-Gung Mama and the other trialeers watched as Tui chased after the boy, who was already climbing up the rope ladder toward the tallest, swirliest slide on the castle.

“Uh, who’s the kid?” Aria whispered to Lion. “Aren’t we supposed to be going to the Knotmaster?”

Lion nodded toward the boy who was now shrieking with glee as he beat Tui into the ball pit. “That’s him.”

“It is?” She stared. “But he’s like, five.”

“He’s the current incarnation of the original Knotmaster,” Lion explained. “The previous Knotmaster passed away five years ago, the same day and time as this one was born.”

“He was reincarnated? Like the Dalai Lama, or something?” Aria remembered seeing the scrolls about reincarnation in the mudang’s office.

“Yeah, he remembers the previous Knotmaster’s memories and everything. It’s incredible.”

Aria stared as the young Knotmaster swam through the sea of brightly colored balls, looking for something.

“I know ith here thumwhere… Oh, here it ith!”

He held up a norigae fished out from the ball pit and handed it to Tui. There was a big bold knot at the top, woven into the shape of a grand tree, using every color of the rainbow. And below it were three wrapped clusters of tassels, just as Technicolor as the knot itself, the long, silky threads falling gracefully underneath. It was like seeing Tui in norigae form. Tui beamed.

“Do you want to bounth on the twampoline with me?” the boy now asked Lion, pulling on his arm.

Lion bowed his head reverently as he whispered, “More than ever.”

Aria watched, curious, as the Knotmaster jumped up and down, laughing when Lion stumbled and tripped over his fallen earmuffs. Then she watched even more curiously when the little boy told Lion to pull on a gray thread poking out from the edge of the trampoline mat, revealing a simple yet undeniably regal norigae.

The knot was a rich gold, classic and circular, ascending from the gray tassels as if it were the morning sun rising from the horizon. It was smaller than Tui’s, but just as impressive—if not more—and it fit Lion like a glove. He bowed to the Knotmaster graciously, and the little boy giggled before running away.

Most of her gajokmates had already received their norigae by the time the Knotmaster came in search of Aria.

“Do you like…” the boy started. “No, wait, maybe you like…” He paused and stared up at her. “Hmm. You’re interethting.”

Before Aria could wonder if he meant interesting in a good way or a bad way, he grabbed her by the hand. “Come. Your norigae ithin’t here.”

He led her around the back of the playground and through a back door, until they arrived at a small storage closet full of dusty boxes.

“Can you pleath liff me up?”

Aria hoisted him up to the top shelf, where he opened an old shoebox. It was full of tassels and discarded threads—nothing that looked like a completed knot, let alone a full charm. But after rummaging around, he finally fished something out from the junk.

“Here it ith!” He passed it to her proudly. “Thith wath one of the first oneth I ever made—a looong time ago.”

Aria held her norigae, studying its frayed ends and uneven tufts flowing down from the two tassel clusters, and felt ever so slightly disappointed. It looked old and antique, the knot a complicated web of coiled silk, the two parts a mirror image of each other. It was impossible to tell where the knot began and ended, and it was definitely much older than something a five-year-old could’ve made in his life—at least not in this lifetime.

“It’s an endleth knot,” he explained.

“An endless knot?” Aria echoed.

He nodded. “Thum people call it an infinity knot, because they have no beginning and no end. They are very hard to make, but I’m really good at them!”

He looked in her eyes then, and she felt like he was seeing more than just her face. “You will have to make a big dethishun thoon. Jutht remember there ith alwayth another opshun.”

Aria swallowed. “What kind of big decision? And what do you mean another option?” But he was already loping back into the playground.

“I thee you!” he yelled over his shoulder as he bounded up to the next dreamslinger.

I see you.

Aria shivered. Could the Knotmaster tell she wasn’t here with the right intentions? Could he tell she was a spy? Whatever it was he meant, she didn’t like how it made her feel. Not one bit.

Later that evening, after having visited the Nursery without their matron’s supervision for the first time, the fifty trialeers left in the cohort had dinner together at the Pavilion’s banquet hall. It was a more relaxed affair than usual, as everyone momentarily forgot about the competition and instead focused on showing off their newly acquired norigae.

Everyone’s was unique and different—ranging from Zahra Amini’s perfectly proportioned knot to Daxia Hsu’s asymmetrical tassels, which matched her cool undercut. Tiare Taina—the Cook Island girl from Spring Palace who often wore a white flower tucked behind her ear—braided her norigae’s long tassels to look like the two long braids flowing down her back. And Mason Hewett wore his like a mustache and decided to show off some wild dance moves on the banquet hall floor. Unsurprisingly, Jina Jeong’s was the flashiest. Hers even had a precious stone embedded into the knot, with three embroidered butterflies stitched into it before the tassel clusters even began. (Of course it did.)

“Have you guys thought of names for your dreampanions yet?” Zahra asked.

“I’m gonna name mine Rico!” Mason replied straightaway. “It’s an anagram of my middle name, Cori. I initially wanted Kawan, which means friend in Malay, to honor my Malaysian Chinese heritage. But it doesn’t work as an anagram.”

“I think I’ll go with either Tweak or Kirtle,” Tui said. “I like how they sound. What about you, Aria?”

Aria shrugged. “I dunno yet. So far, the only partial anagrams I can think of are Liver or Larva. Or Areola.”

“Areola?!” Lion yelped, his face going all shiny. “Isn’t that the um… the, uh…”

He trailed off, too embarrassed to continue, and Tui tsk-tsked. “Lion Lee-Hendrick, I expected better from you. The areola is just the ring of pigmented skin surrounding the nipple. It’s a body part, no different than our eyes or our toes. Way to make things weird.”

Lion’s face went even shinier at the mention of nipple, and he coughed a few times before turning his attention to the norigae in Aria’s hand. “Aaanyway, on more important matters, I’ve been meaning to tell you. They say the older the norigae, the older the soul. I know you might think it’s not as flash as some of the others, but you should be proud of yours. It’s special.”

Aria studied her knot charm. It was undoubtedly the oldest, scruffiest-looking norigae of the lot. But as she looped it onto the high waist of her hanbok and let Lion’s words sink in, she found herself smiling. She’d worked hard to pass the Knowing, and the norigae was a direct result of that.

Surely she could be a spy working against the League while still enjoying her success… couldn’t she?

After all, she’d earned it.

OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, Aria’s stress levels rose as she continued to keep a low profile, waiting for the rumors about her alleged cheating to die down. She had taken to loitering near the Advisors’ Courtroom in case the royal sanctum had any emergency meetings. But she only saw one—something about precautionary measures to be taken in the event of an anti-slinger attack—and she hadn’t been able to hear any of it from outside.

In the meantime, Aria had shifted strategies and had resorted to directly interviewing people about their knowledge of the reopening. “Why did the League suddenly decide to open the Annual Trials to the world?” she asked any locals who would listen. It was an innocent enough question.

Unfortunately, everyone—including Lion—spouted the same line. That the king had merely decided it was time to share the knowledge held in the League with the rest of the dreamslinger world. The fact that everyone had the same response felt suspicious to Aria. As if they’d all been told to sing from the same song sheet. She couldn’t wait for the spotlight to shift so she could start digging again in earnest.

Because of the circumstances, Aria had no choice but to miss another of the commissioner’s deadlines. How could she send a report when there was nothing yet to report? Her dad’s butterflymails assured her the delays were fine—that the important thing was that she was keeping safe. But she knew he’d be under the gun to hand something over to the commissioner soon. The pressure was mounting.

As for the Trials themselves, the Unfurling had well and truly begun, with seeds beginning to sprout in the Nursery.

“Ahh! She’s sprouted!” Zahra Amini squealed as everyone crowded around her little square plot in the western wing. They’d learned that the gender of a dreampanion was the same as that of the dreamslinger. After all, they were a missing part of one’s soul.

As Aria stared at Zahra’s sprout, she was filled with awe… and a strange sense of envy. The stalk was short, but thick and sturdy, a deep crimson like the soil it grew out of. Sinewy red veins climbed all the way up the stem as if they were pumping blood, and two young leaves—as ruby red as the rest of the plant—protruded from the top. In the center where the two leaves met was a tiny little bud—the size of an egg—that, once fully developed, would unfurl a real-life dreampanion.

Jina Jeong was the next to sprout, followed by Rihaan Munro, an Autumn Palace trialeer with a strong Scottish accent, who always wore different-color berets. Then Misha Mora Perez from Chile, Adebamgbe Bolaji from Nigeria, Blessica Agwa Garcia from the Philippines, and then Tiare Taina in Aria’s gajok. Within the next week, everyone else had, too.

The morning it happened for Aria, she’d been crouched in front of her plot with the white picket fence open, lovingly spraying a mist of iced hazelnut oat milk onto the soil (Librarian Yong was convinced sharing your favorite drink with them would be good for bonding and trust). Head Scholar Kim had also mentioned that reading to the seeds was a useful aid for growth, so Aria had brought down her mom’s journal, sharing some of her favorite words.

She’d just been telling it about the German word torschlusspanik (literally gate-closing panic to explain that anxious feeling of time running out) when, out of nowhere, a bloodred stalk sprouted from the dirt, stretching itself tall and taut. In that moment, Aria felt like time itself had stopped.

She stopped breathing, and she stared at the stalk as both a paralyzing fear and an overwhelming sense of pride washed over her simultaneously. She was so relieved the seed had sprouted—she couldn’t have stayed in the Trials if it hadn’t. But at the same time, she was troubled by her eagerness for her dreampanion seedling to unfurl. Wasn’t this what her dad had warned her about? That she’d be indoctrinated into the League’s extremist ways? Aria feared she’d already crossed an invisible threshold from which she could no longer return.

Sure enough, it was halfway through the fourth week of the Trials when the matured buds that nurtured their dreampanions began to unfurl, and Aria’s anxiety revved up like an engine. As expected, Zahra and Jina were the first to unfurl. Mason was next, who claimed his guitar and violin recitals had helped his sprout grow superfast. Then Tiare, Daxia, Rihaan, Misha, and even Niko—the Canadian boy with the pink-and-blue braces from Winter Palace. Tui and Lion weren’t far behind.

“Look—the petals! They’re trembling!”

Aria had been sitting with Lion at his garden, learning how to cast on and do a basic knit stitch, when Tui’s voice boomed from farther down the eastern wing. The red stalk had grown to be as tall as Tui’s shoulder, and now, the balloon-sized bud was almost at eye level with her. It looked like a ripe fruit about to burst, and as they stood there with their mouths open, the ruby petals unfurled slowly, one by one.

“She looks like a living, breathing rainbow,” Lion murmured, as a bright-eyed bloom dragon emerged. She was already the size of a cat—bigger than most of the others—and each petal-shaped scale on her body was a different color.

Aria nodded, mesmerized.

“Welcome to the world, Tweak,” Tui said as the dreampanion seedling crawled with confidence into her arms. “You’re gonna love this place—I promise.”

It was only a few hours later that Lion called Aria and Tui over to his plot, all breathless, his cheeks shiny with anticipation.

“Guys,” he whispered, “I think it’s time.”

Sure enough, a small bloom dragon coated with the most incandescent golden petals awoke from his flower pod, blinking timidly at Lion.

“Don’t be scared,” Lion assured, as he cajoled the shy seedling onto his palm. “I’ll take care of you. I think I’ll call you…hmm… either Cheerio or Echo.”

Aria had laughed at that. “Isn’t Cheerios a type of cereal?”

“In New Zealand, cheerios are little red sausages you eat at birthday parties,” Tui mused.

“Okay fiiine, let’s lock in Echo. Sounds cooler anyway.” Lion stroked his seedling’s head. “Welcome to the Awake, little Echo. Your name means that which continues to repeat and reverberate after the original sound has ended.”

Aria nodded appreciatively. “That’s beautiful.”

Lion smiled. “Hopefully he grows to do the name justice.”

There were others who hadn’t unfurled their seedlings yet—like Antoni Kowalski, a Polish trialeer from Winter Palace, or Maxwell Forsythe, the rude guy who’d called Aria and her friends zoo animals during orientation lunch. But many had. And when Aria woke up one morning to the news that six trialeers had been sent home after their seedlings wilted and died, she started to descend into a mild panic.

Trying to come up with excuses for yet another delayed report for the commissioner was stressful enough. But trying to convince yourself you didn’t want something that you so desperately needed felt like living with two people inside her head. She could no longer imagine a world in which she didn’t meet her dreampanion. But admitting that to herself felt like the biggest betrayal of her dad, his work, and her mom’s life. They were impossible to reconcile.

It was excruciating. And it must’ve shown. Because two days before the Unfurling deadline, Aria was still at the Nursery at midnight, and Tui and Lion staged an intervention.

“That’s it, we’re dragging your sorry butt outta here,” Tui declared, as she and Lion physically pulled her out of the Nursery. “You look like you’re about to snap like Mason’s guitar string did yesterday. You need to take a breather.”

“And I have just the place,” Lion murmured.

“Where are we?” Tui asked. “When you said you had somewhere in mind, this is not where I imagined you’d take us.”

Lion had led Aria and Tui down a secret doorway in the Spring Palace kitchens into what seemed to be an underground tunnel. The narrow pathways were lit with torches, and upon closer inspection, they seemed to be little glowbugs, each one emitting a different color of the rainbow.

“It’s a network of underground tunnels that connect all five of the palaces together,” Lion explained. “They were built a long time ago in case we ever had an anti-slinger attack on the kingdom. Hardly anyone knows about them, but my mom used to bring me here when I got too overwhelmed and needed to get away.”

“Hope she doesn’t mind you sharing it with us,” Tui said with a grin.

Lion lowered his head. “My mom’s dead. She was killed during the Great Tragedy ten years ago.”

Aria assumed he was talking about the Great Outburst. “Mine too.”

Tui winced. “Guys, I’m so sorry.”

Aria looked at Lion and saw him in a different light then. He might’ve grown up here, but he’d lost his mom in the same way she had. She felt… understood. His expression mirrored her thoughts.

“I want to show you guys something. But we need to go all the way to Central Palace,” Lion said. “Directly underneath the Devotion Hall. You game?”

“If it’s going to get Aria out of her head, then yes,” Tui said, pulling on Aria’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”

They’d been walking for a while in silence when Aria remembered the last time she’d been in the Devotion Hall.

“Hey, Lion,” she called out, “you don’t happen to know who Ko Iseul is, do you?”

Lion stopped abruptly and turned to face her. “How do you know about her?”

Aria wasn’t sure what to make of his reaction. “That’s the thing—I know nothing about her. But for a minute I thought it was the mudang’s name, until I learned the mudang’s actual name was Ko Garam. So then who is Ko Iseul?”

“She was the mudang’s older sister,” Lion said carefully. “But she died during the Great Tragedy, like my mom. The mudang was never the same after that.”

Tui grimaced. “Man, I can see why you guys call it the Great Tragedy now. You lost so many people.”

Lion exhaled deeply. “We’re not supposed to talk about her, but Ko Iseul… She’s kind of my hero. She was the one who convinced the king to organize the world tour ten years ago.”

Aria startled. “But that’s what caused the Great Outburst! How can someone like that be your hero?!”

“The world tour didn’t cause the Great Tragedy. The anti-slingers did. If they hadn’t provoked the royal slingers, it would never have happened.”

Aria frowned. “But it did happen. And it could happen again. Think about it. A hermit kingdom suddenly appears to the world, parading their military prowess in the form of hot-blooded teenagers. Of course people questioned the League’s motives. It was essentially an invitation for trouble.”

Lion’s brow furrowed. “Are you saying they got what they deserved?”

“Of course not. But—”

“And the motive was peace. A public act in good faith to show that royal slingers needn’t be feared. To quash stupid ignorance about the kingdom and the League. To raise awareness and bridge understanding between—”

“But they proved exactly the opposite,” Aria pointed out, feeling rather incensed by the direction of this conversation. “Whatever their motives, they ended up killing thousands of people.”

“Only because they were forced to fight!” Lion argued, his voice rising. “Can you blame them for defending themselves and their loved ones?” He pulled up his sleeve, revealing a huge scar running down the full length of his arm. “My mom died while trying to protect me. How was that her fault?”

Aria retreated a little, both physically and mentally. She hadn’t realized Lion himself had been there. He must’ve only been five years old at the time. Her heart wrenched for what he must’ve endured.

“The world didn’t even give us a chance,” Lion said quietly. “They just saw something different to their ways, saw us as a threat, and immediately decided to stamp us out.” He continued thoughtfully. “That’s why this year’s Trials will succeed where the world tour failed. By allowing people into our borders, the world will start to understand that our intentions have always been honorable.”

He paused. “I really hope the League continues to invite international trialeers to the Trials—that it becomes something that repeats and reverberates even after this year has ended. It’s why I named my bloom dragon Echo.”

Aria frowned and chose her words thoughtfully. “But, Lion, as long as the League trains teenagers to wield the powers of the Asleep, there will always be the risk of another Great Outburst. People will never stop seeing royal slingers as a threat.” She hesitated. “Even if they’re not.”

He shook his head, visibly frustrated. “But that’s so defeatist. You’re only looking at the risks. What about the opportunities? Fellows could do so much for the greater good. Imagine using our seasonbilities to help counter climate disasters, or using nightjoys to help in conflict zones or humanitarian crises, or…” He petered out, as if suddenly exhausted. “Outside Royal Hanguk, dreamslingers are being taught to hate themselves—to be ashamed of who they are. I’ve heard some are even being recruited into the anti-slinger movement! We have to at least try, don’t we?”

Tui suddenly piped up, after having been silent this entire time. “It seems to me that both of you are buffetsplaining. And yes, I just made that up on the spot. But the point still stands.”

Aria and Lion both stared at her blankly.

“Say you go to a buffet. You might only choose seafood on your plate and argue it’s a seafood restaurant. Or you might only choose meat and argue it’s a meat restaurant. Neither of you are wrong, but it’s not the full picture. The full buffet is a lot more complex, so it’s easier to choose the facts that fit your own stories.” She bowed. “And that’s buffetsplaining. You’re welcome.”

Aria harrumphed, but on the inside, her chest felt heavy and prickly. This whole time she’d assumed the Great Outburst was something the League had imposed on the rest of the world. But it seemed that Royal Hangukites were as much the victims as anyone else. Things suddenly didn’t feel as black and white as they used to. And that just made her mission here all the more complicated. She didn’t know what to think anymore.

They were all lost in thought as they kept walking through the underground tunnels, and Aria was relieved when Lion finally stopped at their destination.

“We’re here,” he breathed. “Isn’t it incredible?”

They were standing before a gigantic hourglass spanning the entire height of the tunnel. Thick crimson liquid seemed to be dripping from the ceiling, filling the glass vessel.

“Is that—is that blood?” Aria asked, aghast.

Tui gaped. “Whose blood is it?”

He pointed up. “We’re directly under the statues in the Devotion Hall of Central Palace, which is the very heart of Royal Hanguk. As per legend, the Holy Trine so loved this kingdom that their blood continues to flow through our heart.”

He paused, as if trying to decide whether to elaborate further. “The blood flows from a flower hidden inside the statues, which the Holy Trine gifted to humankind before they left this world. It’s a fragment of the divine that continues to bleed for us. To remind us we haven’t been forgotten. That we matter. We call it the Bleeding Bloom.”

When Aria and Tui remained speechless, Lion shrugged. “I know people have different beliefs, and you can take it or leave it. But coming here reminds me that regardless of all humanity’s issues, there are benevolent beings out there who love us. Despite our flaws.”

Aria’s head felt woozy. So the literal blood of an ancient flower flowed into the underground tunnels as a reminder of the Holy Trine’s love for this kingdom? Was this for real?

“Lion,” Aria started. “Say all this is true, what do you do with all this blood? What is it all f—”

“Who’s there?” a voice boomed from up ahead, stopping Aria mid-sentence. “You better get out of these tunnels if you know what’s good for you!”

“It’s the mudang,” Lion whispered. “There’s a door from the Devotion Hall down here.”

“I mean it! If I catch you, you’ll be as good as dead!”

The footsteps got closer and louder.

“Run!” Tui hissed.

And run they did. All the way back the way they’d come. And it was only when they found their way through the hidden passage into the Spring Palace kitchens again that Aria realized she hadn’t worried about her unfurled dreampanion the entire time.

“THANK YOU FOR THE INTERVENTION,” Aria said to Tui and Lion, meaning it. “I think I’m ready to go back to the Nursery now.”

Despite the heated conversation with Lion, the trip to the underground tunnels had settled Aria’s mood. She felt calmer, even though her mind was more confused than ever.

“I’ll come with you,” Tui said. “I want to check on Tweak.” The already-unfurled seedlings had to stay in the Nursery until the Unfurling Trial officially ended in two days’ time. Or technically one, since it was three in the morning now.

“Are you sure?” Aria asked. “It’s really late.”

“I’m coming, too,” Lion said. “Sleeping seedlings are so adorable.”

They used their norigae to enter the Dreampanion Nursery and headed toward the eastern wing. Starlight shone down through the glass, making the conservatory look almost otherworldly, and Aria was overwhelmed by how beautiful it was.

It was then that Tui screamed.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Lion demanded. “Have you lost your mind?!”

Maxwell Forsythe, the trialeer who’d called Aria a pig at orientation lunch, was swinging a machete at Antoni Kowalski’s dreamslinger plant.

He grunted upon being caught in the act. But then he gripped the machete tighter and swung it again, slicing the remaining part of the attached stalk. Antoni’s watermelon-size bud dropped to the ground with a sickening thud, then immediately shriveled and wilted away.

This time, Aria and Tui both shrieked. He was cutting down the competition. Literally.

“Stop this mayhem!” Lion yelled, and Aria was surprised how commanding he could be when he wanted to. “Antoni will never fill his Soul-Gap now because of you. You killed his dreampanion! Put that machete down now.”

Maxwell wiped his forehead and sneered. “And if I don’t?”

“We know what you’ve done now,” Lion spat. “There’s no way you’ll be allowed to proceed to the next Trial. Give it up. You’ve failed.”

Maxwell slunk out of the garden plot, his machete dripping with the crimson sap from Antoni’s stalk. “You think I’m doing this to better my chances in this stupid competition?” He scoffed. “I’m doing this because it’s the moral thing to do! We can’t let this disease spread. We need to nip it in the bud before it festers and rots and ruins all of society. The world doesn’t need any more of our genetic curse. We need to cleanse the world of our dreamslinger filth!”

“You’re… you’re an anti-slinger?” Lion asked.

Tui gaped. “So you entered the Trials just to sabotage it from the inside?”

Aria felt a tsunami of guilt, knowing her objective wasn’t too far off his. But she wasn’t like him. She wouldn’t sink to such lows as to commit dreampanion murder. She wasn’t an anti-slinger—merely wary of the League’s methods.

“You’ve been taught to believe that you’re not enough,” Lion said calmly, as if changing tactics. “That somehow you’re faulty, and that you’re not worthy. But, Maxwell, it’s not true. Our mutation is not a curse. It’s an opportunity to—”

“This is what I think of your stinking opportunity!” Maxwell screamed as he ran to Aria’s garden, jumped over the white picket fence, and swung his machete at her plant.

Aria’s vision went white. She wanted to scream. She wanted to run and protect her sprouted dreampanion plant. She wanted to wring Maxwell’s neck. She wanted to do so many things. But all she did was stay frozen on the spot, too shocked to move a muscle, let alone utter a sound.

Tui and Lion, on the other hand, sprang into action.

“Don’t you freaking dare!” Tui cried as she ran and jumped on Maxwell’s back with a howl.

He swung his arm just as she slipped off his back, and his elbow jabbed her face. She yelped as blood gushed out her nose.

“Tui!” Aria screamed, her voice finally returning to her.

Aria ran toward Tui just as Lion approached Maxwell, his knees bent low and hands flapping dynamically. His feet were moving in a fluid triangle formation, and Aria’s first thought was Is he dancing right now?

Maxwell must’ve had the same thought, because he momentarily loosened his grip on the machete and smirked at Lion. Wrong move. Lion used his lapse in concentration to strike, propelling the weapon out of Maxwell’s hand with a perfectly timed roundhouse kick.

“What the—”

By the time Maxwell realized what’d happened, Lion had knocked him unconscious using a nearby spade and then used said spade to pin him down flat against the ground.

“What was that?” Tui demanded, her face still bloody.

“Taekkyon, an ancient Korean martial art.”

When Aria and Tui continued to stare, dumbstruck, he shrugged. “I told you I like knitting and martial arts.”

He turned his attention to Aria’s plant, and concern clouded his expression. “He struck the stalk. But I think it’s going to be okay.”

Suddenly remembering the arc of the machete, Aria ran to her garden, her heart in her throat. The stalk had been nicked, and bloody sap was trickling from its wound. She closed her hand over the cut, stanching the flow. For a second, she imagined what would’ve happened if Tui and Lion hadn’t run into the fire for her. If Maxwell had managed to kill her dreampanion before it’d even had a chance to unfurl.

A prickly lump formed in her throat, and her eyes burned with heat. “Guys, I… I honestly don’t know what to say.”

“Roar!” Lion said knowingly, as if he knew exactly what she was trying to say.

“Chirp!” Tui echoed.

They both pulled Aria into a hug, and it stole the breath out of her chest. In that winded moment, she realized she had well and truly crossed a line. These two people crushing her in their arms weren’t just her allies. If she was being honest with herself, they hadn’t been for a long time.

They were her friends.

“Snort!” she managed finally. And she really hugged them back.

And yet… Could friendships be built on lies? If they found out why she was really here in the Trials, would they still want to be her friend? The guilt ate away at her, feeding on her fear of losing them.

Tui abruptly pulled away from the group hug. “Guys, look! The petals!” she exclaimed. “Aria, I swear I just saw them twitching!”

Aria’s breath hitched as she turned to stare at her plant. Tui was right. The overripe bud had started to tremble.

Tui and Lion squeezed Aria’s hands as they all watched the flower uncork itself, like a camera lens being twisted open. Then layer by layer, the petals began to unfurl, each one unsheathing another piece of the surprise hiding inside.

Aria slammed her eyes shut. It was all too much. She couldn’t bear to look.

“Aria, she’s beautiful,” Tui breathed, squeezing Aria’s hand harder.

“Really,” Lion echoed in a whisper. “You can open your eyes. She’s perfect.”

Aria opened one eye, then another, and felt the blood rush to her head. There, sitting on the open flower was a small bloom dragon, coiled tight, its petal scales a bright, gleaming coral. It stirred awake, then yawned, as if waking from a long slumber.

The seedling turned to gaze up at Aria with big, intelligent eyes, and Aria whimpered. She felt like she’d been punched in the solar plexus, and an entire river of emotions was now flowing from the broken dam.

The seedling sniffed her hand. And just like that, Aria felt the final jigsaw puzzle of herself be slotted into place. It was in that moment that she knew for sure there had always been a hole the exact size of this creature in her soul. She exhaled, and realized for the first time in her existence that she felt full and anew. She felt complete. Profoundly whole.

“Rio,” she decided on the spot. “I’ll call you Rio. It means river, just like the one you’ve let flow in me today.”

The coral dragon seedling let out a small purr of approval.

Lion chuckled. “Thank gods it’s not Liver or Larva.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Or Areola.”

Tui groaned. “Duuude, why do you keep making that weird? We all have areolas, okay? Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Tentatively, Aria reached out a trembling hand, and the seedling stood and stretched. It was then that she realized something was wrong.

The dragon didn’t have a tail.

Aria gasped. Bloom dragons were known for her their long, serpentine bodies. They needed their tails to glide between the water molecules in the atmosphere. That’s what gave them the appearance of flying. But Rio only had a little stub where her extended elegant tail should’ve been.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Lion murmured as he put a hand on Aria’s shoulder. “The important thing is that she’s here and she’s safe. And you’ve passed the second Trial now. Everything else we can tackle later.”

“She probably just needs some time to grow,” Tui added in that grounded way that made everything in the world seem all right.

Aria nodded. But her mind was spinning. Was it because Maxwell had cut her stalk that this had happened? Was it her punishment for having come to the Trials with ulterior motives? Or was there something fundamentally wrong with her soul?

She took a step back, withdrawing her hand from Rio before the seedling could climb onto her palm. A primal fear ripped through her.

She wanted to take care of this seedling with everything she had—to nurture it, to protect it, to help it grow, and to love it unconditionally, faults and all. But stepping into this new responsibility felt like jumping headfirst into a black hole. She knew if she took this leap now, there’d be no turning back. She’d be overcome by the duty, all-consumed by her love for the seedling, and there’d be nothing she wouldn’t do for for it. She suddenly realized she’d even pledge her loyalty to the League if she had to.

And she wasn’t prepared to do that right now. She still had a job to do. She was severely behind on her last few reports, and even her dad was sounding less relaxed in his butterflymails with the commissioner breathing down his back. She still had to find proof of the League’s true intentions. And to do that, she needed objectivity. She needed to be able to look at the facts without being clouded by her bond to her seedling.

She took another step back. Restrain, contain, maintain. She couldn’t fall apart now. She had to keep herself together. She’d made a promise to her dad, and to her mom—and she wasn’t going to break her word.

As her friends called after her, Aria turned her back on her seedling and ran. She ran all the way out of the Dreampanion Nursery, not looking back once. And it felt like she’d ripped a part of her own soul right out of her chest.

THE FOLLOWING FEW WEEKS PASSED in a numb sort of blur, as the last dregs of summer finally clocked over to fall. Maxwell had promptly been disqualified from the Trials and sent home, having been forbidden to return to Royal Hanguk for the rest of his life. Poor Antoni Kowalski had also been sent home and, thanks to Maxwell, had lost his one chance to meet the missing third of his soul. Unsurprisingly, the League started implementing lockdown drills, in case an anti-slinger attack took the kingdom by surprise.

There were only forty trialeers left now, officially fighting for a spot in the final twenty, provided they passed the third and final Trial—the Endearing. And later this morning was the first day of training. Aria was not looking forward to it.

For now, the crisp autumn sun streamed through the paper doors of Aria’s bedchamber as Rio snored peacefully on her bed. Aria, on the other hand, sat hunched over in a blanket at her floating desk, her brush clenched tight in her hand, frowning deeply with every muscle in her face. She’d woken early because a butterflymail from her dad had arrived at dawn with an ultimatum from the Commissioner of Dreamslinger Relations: If Aria couldn’t deliver a report with at least some proof of the League’s misdeeds by the end of today, then he would call Aria back to the US. She would be pulled from the Trials, effective immediately, and the mission would be deemed a failure.

Aria could almost feel her dad’s relief in the message. Despite what that would mean for his career, Aria knew he was eager for her to come back to Texas. Where she belonged. Where she was safe…

But was it really her home?

Aria looked over at Rio, still snoring, none the wiser, and her body began to tremble uncontrollably. No, no, no. She couldn’t go back. Not without Rio. Not until she and her dreampanion were endeared at the final Trial. Not to mention her friends—the ones who’d jumped in front of a machete to save her dreampanion. How could she leave them behind? The guilt of lying to them was hard enough to bear.

It was in that moment that Aria realized something she probably should have figured out weeks ago. This was no longer just about passing the Trials to send intel back to the commissioner. She genuinely wanted to stay in the kingdom.

But where did that leave her unwritten report? She had to send something back today, and she hadn’t yet found concrete proof of nefarious intentions. In fact, she’d started to question what it was she was even looking for. Could it be that the evidence she was after didn’t actually exist?

Desperate and out of time, Aria resorted to summarizing all the random, slightly suspicious things she’d picked up so far. How newspapers covering any dates after the Great Outburst had been moved into restricted stacks for the duration of the Trials. How Ko Iseul, the mudang’s older sister, was the one who’d convinced the king to open the kingdom’s borders ten years ago, only to die in the Great Outburst. How there was a creepy bleeding flower hidden inside one of the Holy Trine statues whose blood flowed down into the secret underground tunnels, and how the mudang had chased them out. And of course, how an anti-slinger had secretly infiltrated the Trials and attempted to sabotage it from the inside.

It was insufficient, Aria knew. None of it really proved anything concrete. But it was all she had for now. Hopefully, it would be enough to keep the commissioner from recalling her back.

Hoping for the best, she burned the folded butterfly report in her lantern’s flame, thinking of her dad as its intended recipient. Then, wanting to get a head start on the next report, she decided to drop by the Library of Scrolls on the way to the first simulation training at the Pavilion.

After what Lion had told her about the mudang’s older sister, Aria wanted to learn more about her. If she’d been the catalyst for the world tour ten years ago, maybe learning about her would give Aria a clue as to why they’d reopened their borders this year.

“What do you have in here about Ko Iseul?” Aria asked Librarian Yong, who was sporting food stains on her pink cowboy hat today, the physics of which baffled Aria.

Yong frowned and pointed at the gravitygrass pumps locked behind her desk. “Trialeer Love, you have a habit of asking questions I am not permitted to answer.”

Aria sighed. Of course they were restricted, too. She should’ve guessed. She’d just have to find a different way of learning more about her, then.

“And frankly, I find this frustrating,” the librarian continued, “because I usually abhor most humans, but your presence strikes me as more palatable than most. I find myself not wanting to disappoint.” She plucked a clam-shaped leaf pocket off her snackpan tree. “Can I offer you a snack instead?”

Aria took it gratefully and smiled. “You’re not so bad yourself, Librarian Yong. Thanks for the chips.”

“Honestly, Tweak, you’re hungry again?” Tui chastised her seedling as she and Aria stood in line to collect their slumberbrews.

The forty trialeers left in the cohort had gathered in the slumbersanctum, on the second floor of the Pavilion, for their first day of Endearing training. Because trialeers were on the Pause and unable to go to the real Asleep, they needed to drink slumberbrews and enter a simulation of the real place in order to train.

Tui threw a handful of candied pecans at her technicolor bloom dragon, who wolfed them down before sniffing Tui’s hands in the hopes of more.

“Okay, fiiine, you can have a bit more,” she relented, throwing Tweak another heaped handful. “Guess a seedling’s gotta grow.”

Aria laughed. Dreampanions didn’t need to eat to grow. In fact, they didn’t need to eat at all—they got all the nutrients they needed through regular exposure to sunshine, water, and in due course, to the Asleep. But that didn’t stop them from being absolute snack fiends. And it didn’t stop them from growing at an astonishing speed, either.

Within two weeks of the Unfurling, the seedlings had grown to be the size of miniature ponies, just big enough for their dreamslingers to ride. Too big for the Nursery, but not yet trained to be housed in norigae, they now shadowed their riders wherever they went. It was expected that they would keep growing until the slingers became full-fledged Fellows. If they became Fellows.

As Tweak worked through her second lot of candied pecans, Rio slyly nudged her in the side with her snout, grunting expectantly. Instead of getting protective of her treats, Tweak spat out a mouthful of saliva-covered nuts, dropping them at Rio’s paws. Then she gave Rio an affectionate lick for good measure. Rio’s stub of a tail trembled happily as she munched on her treats.

Aria bit her lip and looked away. Tweak and Echo had a closer relationship with Rio than she did. And even though she’d created that distance herself, it still hurt to witness a bond she didn’t share with her own dreampanion.

They had just collected their three vials of slumberbrew when Lion finally joined them.

“You’re late,” Tui commented. “You know, you do that a lot.”

“Do what?” Lion asked innocently, as Echo greeted Tweak and Rio with a lick and tail flick.

“You disappear for a while and then randomly reappear again.”

He shrugged. “I’m just not very punctual. What can I say?”

“Stop dillydallying, trialeers!” Head Scholar Byun from Summer Palace barked across the slumbersanctum. “Lie down and uncork your vials posthaste! We will reassemble at the Heart of the Heartsglade in two.”

Aria and the rest of the cohort chose a recliner each and pulled on the lever to make it lie flat. And then they swigged the swirling silver contents of the vial and closed their eyes.

Despite knowing it was a simulation, Aria was caught by surprise when the cohort reassembled inside Treehenge, welcomed by the four-seasons-pizza coven of trees.

The cohort broke off into their four gajok, and Head Scholar Bobby-Uma guided the ten Spring Palace trialeers through the valley, around the creek, and across the woodlands toward the eastern sea of poison.

“This is where the final Trial—the Endearing—will take place in three weeks’ time,” the head scholar explained. “In order to pass the Endearing, you and your seedling will need to fly to the sacred archway of Spring. We call this the Journey. Only those who successfully complete the Journey and return from Spring with their seasonbilities awakened will be deemed endeared.”

Aria looked over at Rio, who was trying unsuccessfully to chase her stub, spinning round and round in circles. She frowned. Without a proper tail, how in the world was she supposed to fly Rio to the archway? It seemed an impossible task.

“But for today, since it is our first day of training, let’s begin with mounting our bloom dragons,” the blue-streaked scholar suggested. “It may look easy, but without a saddle or harness, it requires a certain amount of balance, strength, and practice. Not to mention trust.”

The ten trialeers began cajoling their seedlings, preparing to jump onto their backs. Tiare Taina leapt on her seedling gracefully on her first go, while Hiroto Günther and Philippe Choi both slipped off theirs a handful of times before getting the hang of it. Jaxon Campbell, an Australian trialeer with a mullet mohawk, cowered in the corner, complaining of his crippling fear of heights.

Tui and Lion were both preparing to mount Tweak and Echo, so Aria turned to Rio.

“Sooo, I guess we should give this a go?”

If Rio had heard her, she showed no sign of it. Instead, the seedling plopped herself on the ground and decided this was a good opportunity to give her paws a clean.

Aria approached, placing a hand on the seedling’s back. “Come on, Rio. Get up. Everyone else is trying it.”

The dragon hissed at Aria in return, making her jump in surprise. Aria shrank back. It was obvious these trainings were going to be hard work.

“I’ve heard lots of Fellows say it took a while for them to bond with their seedlings,” Lion said, trying to be helpful.

Tui nodded as she managed to mount Tweak on her third attempt. “I wouldn’t worry, Aria. Just give her some time.”

Rio didn’t play ball for the rest of the training, which didn’t surprise Aria one bit. Bobby-Uma had said that trust was required, and it wasn’t like she’d given Rio any reason to trust her. Still, it annoyed her something rotten.

She went to bed that night still frustrated about training and was only more flummoxed when she realized her dad had not yet responded to her first formal report.

On all fronts, things were not going great.

ARIA WAS SO DISPIRITED BY the daily training sessions that when a butterflymail arrived one morning inviting her and her friends to Driver Nam’s house for lunch, she almost cried with relief. Finally, a distraction from the torture of simulations!

Driver Nam and Saemi lived in a suburb called Sangju, which was in the northwest of the island kingdom, between Winter Palace and Autumn Palace. Their house was a simple hanok, but what it lacked in furnishings or opulence was more than made up for by the buzz and chatter of its inhabitants.

“Is it someone’s birthday?” Tui asked as Driver Nam ushered them through the door. “It looks like a party.”

“We didn’t bring a gift,” Lion remarked with embarrassment.

“Oh no, this is just a normal Wednesday at our house,” Driver Nam answered jovially, his big belly jiggling. “Saemi and I are quite fond of hosting. And here she is! Saemi, I’d like you to meet Trialeer Aria Love, Trialeer Tui Walker, and Trialeer, uh, Lion Lee-Hendrick.”

A bright-eyed girl, about eight years old, waved at them, then blushed like a cherry when Lion smiled at her.

“I think someone’s got a crush on you,” Aria teased Lion.

“At least someone likes you,” Tui pointed out. “By the wide berths everyone else here is giving you, you’d think you were carrying cholera.”

Aria and Lion raised their brows at each other, surprised by her bluntness. Tui had an open yet rooted, down-to-earth nature about her that often reminded Aria of an ancient tree—solid and real and unaffected by the winds or whims. But today, for some reason, there was a slight edge to her words that seemed uncharacteristic.

Saemi offered Rio, Tweak, and Echo some dried squid, and they eagerly loped off after her as Saemi excitedly introduced the dragons to everyone she passed. “Samchon, look! Imo, over here! It’s a school of seedlings. Or is it a dungeon of dragons? Aaah, it’s a dungeon school of dragon seedlings!”

“Is everyone here family?” Tui asked, her voice sounding a little off. “Samchon means Uncle, and Imo means Auntie, right?”

Driver Nam smiled, and his ruddy cheeks shone. “We may not be related, but we’re all family here.”

He led them to the table piled high with food and introduced them to a man with delightfully crooked teeth. “Joon here runs my favorite dreambakery in the kingdom. You have to try his famous bung-o-bbang. They’re famous for their spontaneously changing fillings.”

Joon passed them each a fish-shaped pastry, and Aria bit into it. The first bite tasted like sweet red bean, followed by chocolate custard. The third bite was tart rhubarb, quickly chased by the rich warmth of spiced pumpkin. Every mouthful was a surprise, and Aria squealed in delight. She wondered if Librarian Yong’s snackpan tree could grow these.

Soon, aunties and uncles were swarming around them like bees. One took it upon herself to teach Aria some basic Korean, gifting her a pack of vocabulary flash cards she used at the local school. Another gifted Aria some beaconsap, which he explained was a type of sticky tree sap from the Asleep. As long as you had a beaconmap made from the pulp of the same tree (which he also gifted her), you could track the sap’s whereabouts in real time. As a private investigator, he used them often for tracking people.

Aria was having so much fun that it took her a while to realize Tui was missing.

“Hey, Lion, did you see where Tui went?”

“No, I thought she was with you?”

They eventually found her outside, hiding between the earthenware pots of fermenting sauces, snuggling with Tweak.

“What happened?” Aria demanded. “Are you hurt? Are you all right?” It was unsettling to see the unwavering Tui hiding in the shadows like this.

Tui startled as she looked up at them standing over her. “Yeah, nah, I’m sweet as.”

Aria and Lion shared a look.

“Snort?” Aria probed.

“Roar?” Lion encouraged.

Tui bit her lip. “Geez, way to invoke the sacred zoo animals on me.” She blinked rapidly as her eyes reddened. She exhaled deeply. “Okay, fine. If you must know, the truth is that I’m homesick and I’m overwhelmed, and the pressure is all starting to get to me.”

Aria and Lion gave her space to continue.

“I know I always put on a strong face, and don’t get me wrong—normally, I am strong. But today, coming here, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I miss my whānau—like, really miss them. My mum, my dad, my sister, all my aunties and uncles, especially Paea and Colin, and all my cousins.” She sniffled and pointed to her chest. “I’m homesick and it physically hurts. Here.”

Aria clutched the bow of her jeogori as her eyes stung with tears and thoughts of her dad flooded over her. What she’d give to play one of her dad’s boring domino games right now. Apparently, homesickness was contagious, and she took a few grounding breaths to recenter herself.

“It’s a lot to have all these people counting on you, you know?” Tui continued, rubbing her eyes. “My community, they’re all expecting me to return armed with experience and knowledge, and to give back to our own dreamslinger whānau. It’s an honor to have their faith and trust in me.” She exhaled. “But sometimes, I think they forget I’m only fourteen.”

“Wow, Tui,” Aria breathed. “I didn’t know. That’s a lot of pressure.”

“And sometimes, I’m not sure if I’m cut out for all of this.” Tui sighed as more tears welled in her eyes. “A real leader doesn’t get all mopey because she’s homesick.”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with crying,” Lion murmured, as Tweak nestled her huge head in Tui’s lap. “It shows you care. Besides, it takes strength to be vulnerable.”

Driver Nam appeared then with a bounty of bright neon Band-Aids in his hands. He cleared his throat and smiled warmly. “Sorry for eavesdropping on your conversation, but I thought these might be useful right now.”

He unwrapped a bright pink one and stuck it on Tui’s hand. “Sometimes you need a physical reminder that what you’re feeling is real. Homesickness is no different than a cut or bruise. Seeing it in front of your eyes and acknowledging that it hurts can help you start to feel better.”

Tui ran her fingers over the neon Band-Aid. “Can I have a few more? Maybe yellow and green. Blue and purple, too, if you have it?”

Lion chuckled. “It wouldn’t be Tui if it wasn’t rainbow.”

Driver Nam obliged, then slapped an extra one on Tweak for good measure. “Listen to me. Family aren’t just the people we are born into. Family are also those we find in life, and those who find us. And sometimes, those bonds can be even stronger, more enduring, because they’re made by choice.”

He looked between Tui, Lion, and Aria with genuine warmth in his eyes. “There is nothing more precious than a bond created from your own free will. Like the one you three share. And the one you are now forging with us.” He clapped. “And to celebrate this milestone, from this day forth, I invite you to call me Nam Samchon!”

“Nam Samchon,” Tui said. “Uncle Nam. I like the sound of that.”

Aria did, too.

“Then you must call us by our first names,” Lion demanded. “It’s only fair.”

Driver Na—no, Nam Samchon’s brows hiked on his forehead, but he quickly recovered. “If that’s what you wish, Lion!” he said heartily.

Saemi came by then with Rio and Echo tailing her like oversize baby ducklings. “That means you’re my eonni!” she said to Aria.

“That means big sister in Korean,” Lion explained.

“Naturally,” Aria laughed, and felt a warmth spread through her chest.

After lunch, before heading home, Aria decided she’d ask Nam Samchon about Ko Iseul, just in case he knew something of interest. But he only looked confused at the question.

“As your newly minted samchon, I’m sorry I don’t know more, Aria-ya. I only know that she was the mudang’s older sister who died in the Great Tragedy.” He nudged her playfully. “But why are you asking about dead people, ng? There’s enough happening in the land of the living without needing to dig up the souls of the departed.”

He had a point. This whole Ko Iseul thread could be a total red herring, and Aria could be wasting her time pursuing it. But she couldn’t ignore the feeling in her gut. There was something about Ko Iseul that wouldn’t let her go. Besides, the commissioner may have let her insufficient report slide this time—she assumed she would’ve been sent home already otherwise. But she knew he wouldn’t be so lenient next time.

If Aria really wanted answers about Ko Iseul, there was one person in the kingdom who definitely would know about her.

Her sister.

But how was she going to get through to the prickly mudang? She scowled. She’d have to come up with a plan.

Later that evening, the forty trialeers gathered for dinner at the banquet hall. Aria chose her dad’s mayo-drenched tuna and rice bake from the Mood Menu and relaxed into her floating chair, grateful for how the trip to Nam Samchon’s house had evened out her mood. She listened in on nearby conversations, enjoying the chatter as Rio, Echo, and Tweak played chase around the hall.

Daxia and Misha were exchanging drink recommendations (Daxia advocating for bubble teas, and Misha a Chilean drink called chirimoya alegre—a mix of custard apple and orange juice), while Rihaan Munro, in a pleather beret and kilt, was passionately telling Niko, Adebamgbe, and Blessica about the similarities between haggis and soondae.

Hakan, Estevão, and two heritage trialeers—Susan Grace-Oh and Sarah-Jess Baek—were playing a card game over dinner, while Zahra braided a friendship bracelet for Tui that spelled out the word impossible with special lettered beads. A German Italian trialeer called Vittoria Schneider even regaled everyone with a song, as Mason accompanied on the guitar, and Tiare played a large skin drum called a pa’u. Jaxon Campbell, the Australian trialeer, tried his best to join in too, by jiggling a salt shaker to the beat.

Aria was busy enjoying the scene when she overheard some raucous heritage kids at the back of the banquet hall taking bets on something. She heard snippets of words—one of which sounded like… chew sock…

She frowned at Lion between mouthfuls of tuna and rice. “Please tell me I’m missing something. Why are they so excited about chewing socks?”

He stifled a laugh. “Not chew-sock. Tomorrow’s Chuseok—Korean Thanksgiving. It’s one of the biggest events on the kingdom’s calendar. Essentially a whole day full of food and games and competitions. We even get a break from training.”

Aria’s heart leapt excitedly. Well, that was a reason to celebrate.

Eugene Cho-Fisher, a tall, freckled heritage trialeer who was Jina Jeong’s number one henchman, shouted something from the back of the hall in Korean. It didn’t sound very friendly.

Lion made a face. “It’s also when rivalries between the four gajok get a bit ugly.”

“Oh really?” Tui asked, curious.

Zahra tied the completed friendship bracelet on Tui’s wrist. “Because of the Battlejoy match, right? I heard the biggest match of the year happens on Chuseok.”

“Battlejoy…” Aria murmured, the name ringing a bell.

“It’s our national sport,” Lion confirmed. “It’s when Fellows compete in the ring against each other by battling their nightjoys—hence Battlejoy. It’s a game of agility, strategy, but most importantly, of one’s bond with their dreampanion.”

Aria remembered where she’d seen it now. The Royal Gazette had featured the highlights and scores of the games.

“Anyway,” Lion continued. “It just so happens that Jina’s older brother is kinda awesome at it.”

Aria groaned. “Of course he is.”

As if hearing their conversation, Jina’s imposing voice echoed down the hall. “No, my brother will be champion! Everyone who’s anyone knows that Summer Palace is the shoo-in for Chuseok Champion this year.”

Another heritage trialeer called Joonho Kang in a snowflake cape crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, my sister beat your brother in the qualifiers last week, so there!”

Lion shook his head as if embarrassed by his heritage peers. “You’ll experience the full mayhem of Battlejoy tomorrow. I won’t ruin the surprise.”

The banquet hall erupted into a heated discussion that continued well past dinnertime, until the four palace matrons shooed everyone back to their bedchambers. Chuseok would start at the break of dawn tomorrow with jesa—the thanksgiving rite—and trialeers would be expected to be punctual.

“Does the mudang watch the game?” Aria asked Lion on the trek back to Spring Palace.

“Yeah, she’s not a big fan of the sport—it’s supposedly a sore reminder that she wasn’t born with the dreamslinger gene—but she sits in the royal box with the king every game out of duty, anyway.”

“And are trialeers allowed to sit near the box?” Aria probed.

He nodded. “Sure, but why you’d want to sit near those tight-laced old fuddy-duddies is a mystery to me.”

Aria gave him a funny look. She didn’t realize that was how he felt about the king and the Royal Mudang. But she promptly dismissed it, because she had finally found her in. She’d make sure to sit near the mudang tomorrow. Then she’d take any opportunity to grab the mudang’s attention and draw out as much information about Ko Iseul as she could.

Aria smiled. It was a long shot, but it might just work.

Then why, she wondered as she lay in bed that night, was she recalling a word from her mom’s journal?

CHEROPHOBIA (Noun) (Greek origin): The fear that everything seems too good to be true, and that disaster might be lurking around the corner.

She tried to bat the feeling away as she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

ARIA YAWNED AS JUNGHEE HELPED her into one of her experimental hanbok designs. It was still dark outside.

“I dyed it with phantomsap,” Junghee explained, “which should grant you short-term invisibility. Go on, give it a go.”

Aria looked at herself in the mirror as she repeated the finger-tapping motion on her chima, just like Junghee had taught her. Immediately, her body from her neck down disappeared completely.

“I look like a floating head!” Aria shrieked, utterly delighted, which even aroused Rio from her sleep. “I’m assuming you wanted the head to disappear, too, but this would actually make the best Halloween costume. And it’s already October, so great timing.”

Junghee grunted. “It’s not a costume, it’s couture! Besides, we don’t observe Halloween. We celebrate Dongji, which is in December.” She turned her attention to Aria’s hair, skilfully braiding it into one long plait, weaving a thick silk ribbon through it. The whole time, she mumbled to herself about needing to change the centrifugal processes that affect the viscosity and coagulation of the something or other…

By the time they jumped out of their gama (which was covered in brightly colored Lycra and blaring workout music as if it were an ancient aerobics instructor from the 1980s), King’s Square was bustling with energy. The whole kingdom seemed to be in the cobbled square, milling about under the illuminated Victorian streetlamps. As everyone waited for the jesa to begin, all eyes were on the main altar at the heart of the square, which bore a holographic rendering of the Holy Trine.

Aria, Rio, and Junghee joined the rest of the Spring Palace gajok, just as the king, the mudang, and the four scholars took their place beside the altar.

“That’s Grandma Samshin, the Goddess of Birth,” Junghee whispered as she nodded toward the icon of the old woman with her eyes gazing upward. “She’s the one who decides who gets born, when they’re born, and to whom.”

She pointed to the second statue of the old man whose eyes were looking down. “And that’s Gardener Igong, the God of Death. As the name suggests, he’s the one who decides how and when we die.”

“What about the third one?” Aria whispered back, staring at the last figure on the altar—the small child with her eyes closed shut.

“The last of the Holy Trine is Princess Bari, the Goddess of Dead Souls. She’s the one responsible for guiding spirits through the afterlife so they can be reincarnated into their new lives.”

“Reincarnated like the Knotmaster?” Aria asked.

Junghee nodded. “Exactly.”

As the mudang chanted and danced to the beat of the music, the king filled a ceremonial chalice with rice wine, swirling it with two hands above Grandma Samshin’s food, then Gardener Igong’s. For Princess Bari, he switched it with milk. Then he got on his knees to bow twice to each ancestor. The four scholars repeated the process, and then the mudang called the entire kingdom to bow. When Aria raised her eyes again, the altar had disappeared.

The mudang raised her billowing sleeves to the sky, which was now illuminated by the sunrise. “The jesa has concluded. May the Holy Trine—the spiritual ancestors of our kingdom—bless Royal Hanguk with another year of good fortune. I now declare Chuseok to be officially in session!”

The crowd cheered loudly, and it was only when Aria turned to find Tui and Lion that she realized the entire surrounding parklands had been transformed. Rows upon rows of open-air markets and food stalls had materialized, and special zones had been cordoned off for specific games and competitions.

“Wow!” Aria breathed as everyone dispersed to explore the sights. Even Rio’s mouth seemed to gape open.

A group of excited children rushed to the grass area where a sign said PLAY YUNNORI HERE. Aria, Tui, and Lion, accompanied by their seedlings, watched as the kids tossed four wooden yut sticks on a straw mat. How the sticks landed seemed to determine how many spaces the players could move on the board. Unfortunately, Rio attempted to eat one of the sticks, which got them quickly shooed away.

Farther along, two teenagers had begun a comical-looking competition called dakssaum (which Lion translated as chicken fighting), the aim of which was to knock your opponent to the ground while hopping on one foot and holding the other foot tucked in tight against the body. The seedlings seemed to decide this was a game worth replicating, and soon, Aria and her friends were rolling on the ground in tears.

“Is there a winning gajok for each game?” Aria asked, when she’d finally recovered from her laughing fit. She’d remembered Lion’s comment about the fierce rivalries between palaces.

Lion nodded as Tui raked up the bits of petal scales the seedlings had shed in their rough play. “Technically, all the points get added up, and one gajok gets awarded Chuseok Champion for the year.” He pointed at the lake farther down the reserve, where a huge floating boxing ring was being set up on the water. “But everyone knows the winner of the Battlejoy match basically wins the entire thing.”

The friends and seedlings bounced from game to game, flying kites, spinning tops, riding standing swings, and even jumping on gigantic wooden seesaws. When they got hungry, Lion introduced them to cinnamon-and-brown-sugar-filled pancakes called hotteok, and crescent-shaped rice cakes called songpyeon—both of which were mouthwateringly good.

It was only when Nam Samchon and Saemi tapped Aria on the shoulder that she realized almost three hours had flown by.

“If it isn’t my three favorite trialeers!” Nam Samchon boomed cheerily as Saemi buried herself in Rio’s petals for a hug. Rio wagged her stump and gave Saemi a slobbery lick, which made Aria look away.

Nam passed Aria a box of carp pastries. “I brought you some of these, courtesy of my good man Joon. They’re still warm.”

Aria beamed. “Bung-o-bbang! Thank you, Samchon!”

He ushered them toward the lake. “Now, let’s go find a spot before the match starts. I hate missing the start of the game.”

Aria studied the lakeside, looking for the king’s viewing box, which she immediately located front and center. A throne and an extra chair were cordoned off with a velvet rope and covered with a canopy.

“Let’s sit over there,” Aria suggested, striding over before anyone could argue otherwise.

They found a good spot on the grass next to the box, just as the king and mudang arrived to take their seats. The shaman scowled upon seeing Aria, which wasn’t exactly the most encouraging sign. But Aria figured she’d give the mudang a bit of time to settle in before throwing any questions her way.

“Can someone explain the rules of the match?” Tui asked as she opened a bag of shrimp crackers for the seedlings to share.

“The aim of the game is to steal the opponent’s feathers before they steal yours,” Nam Samchon explained, handing out little binoculars to everyone.

Aria looked through the lens to see two competitors on the floating stage. Both were teenagers—one from Summer Palace with his solar phoenix, and the other from Winter Palace with her frost turtle. Each competitor wore a large golden feather on a necklace, hanging low in front of their chests, as well as smaller silver feathers around their wrists and ankles, too.

“If they steal the silver feathers on the wrists or ankles, they get one point each,” Samchon continued. “But if they successfully steal the Golden Heart—that’s the feather around the neck—then the game is won.”

Saemi’s eyes twinkled. “They’re allowed to ride their dreampanions and use their seasonbilities, but not for direct attacks on the feathers. For that they need to use their nightjoys.”

Lion nodded. “The whole game is about showcasing the strength of the dreamslinger–dreampanion bond.”

They all raised their binoculars and settled in as the referee (who happened to be Head Scholar Byun from Summer Palace) kicked off the first round. Immediately, the two competitors started circling each other, and Aria was struck by how similar their movements were to Lion’s when he’d taken Maxwell down. They were constantly moving, their knees bent low, stepping in a fluid triangle formation.

“Those look like your martial arts moves, Lion,” Tui exclaimed, clearly thinking the same thing.

“The basic movements of Battlejoy are rooted in Taekkyon, too,” Lion explained. “Graceful, circular, and almost like dancing.”

Nam Samchon nodded. “Gentle in nature, but strong in spirit. That’s the way of Battlejoy. It’s why they use feathers.”

Just when Aria was wondering if anyone was going to make a move, the Winter Palace competitor formed a globe of energy in her hands and released it above the head of her opponent, releasing a deluge of hail. Little balls of ice fell like stones onto the Summer Fellow’s head, making his solar phoenix shriek angrily. Without missing a beat, the opponent threw a mass of fire from his hands toward the cloud of ice above him, turning the flurry into an explosion of hot steam.

“Whoa,” Aria breathed. “I thought you said they weren’t allowed to use their seasonbilities.”

“Not for direct attacks on the feathers,” Samchon reminded her. “But they can use them to aid their attacks, or to create diversions.”

“Or in this case, just to rile up your opponent,” Lion noted.

The strategy must’ve worked, because the Summer competitor’s phoenix squawked angrily before conjuring a violet orb in its talons. He slung it at his dreamslinger. As the orb reached the Fellow, he began glowing with the aura of what looked like a winged slug before wings started growing on his back. Flapping them, the Fellow propelled himself toward the Winter competitor, one of his slug-suckered palms reaching out for the golden heart feather.

The opponent’s speedy footwork allowed her to dodge out of reach, and the crowd roared to life. The three seedlings were too busy inhaling a second bag of shrimp crackers to even notice.

“That was a leechfly,” Saemi identified. “It’s a nightjoy from Autumn.”

“Saemi is somewhat of an encyclopedia on nightjoys,” Samchon said proudly.

Before the dust had settled, the frost turtle had already conjured a violet orb on her icy shell, its surprisingly long tail chucking it at her dreamslinger. As the aura of a giraffe enveloped her, the Fellow’s neck shot out unnaturally fast toward the Summer competitor, lengthening like elastic.

“A giratongue!” Saemi exclaimed, as the Fellow opened her mouth, revealing a long sharp tongue. It wrapped around the Summer Palace competitor’s wrist, ripping from it a silver feather, before the opponent had even registered what’d happened.

“One point to Winter Palace!” Head Scholar Byun shouted, as the Summer competitor recoiled in anger.

Embarrassed about losing a point, the Summer competitor’s face had gotten as bright as his dreampanion’s fiery tail. Even before the crowd had quieted down, he was jumping on the back of his solar phoenix and soaring into the sky.

The crowd didn’t even need their binoculars to see the Summer competitor riding his phoenix in circles above the ring, around and around, disorienting his opponent in a plume of tail smoke. As the Winter Fellow lowered herself to a protective stance, the Summer Fellow flew behind her, waiting until he was out of her range of vision before releasing a ball of fire to a corner of the ring.

The Winter Fellow jumped to avoid the flame, and using the opening that the distraction gave him, the phoenix swiftly slung an orb at his rider. As the aura of a cobra glowed around him, the Fellow leapt off the bird’s back, the momentum allowing him to skid past his opponent at great speed. Just as he passed the Winter competitor’s back, he opened his mouth and shot out three jets of venom in rapid succession. One after another, burning acid struck both her wrist feathers, as well as one of her ankles, before she’d even had a chance to turn around.

“No!” half the crowd roared.

“Yes!” the other half yelled.

Even the seedlings let out a cry of surprise.

“Three points to Summer Palace!” the referee screamed, not hiding his excitement that it was his palace that was now firmly in the lead.

“Yeah! You’ve got this, oppa!” Jina Jeong’s annoying voice squealed from their right.

“The dude with the phoenix must be her brother,” Tui guessed.

Aria tried not to get too sucked into the match as she brainstormed the perfect opening question for the mudang. But when the Winter Palace competitor climbed onto her frost turtle’s back and they dived straight into the surrounding lake, Aria found herself leaning forward on the grass and pulling the binoculars even closer to her face.

“What’s happening?” Tui asked. “Why did they jump into the water?”

Saemi clasped her hands together. “I think it’s a strategy to throw her opponent off. Winter Fellows can hold their breath underwater for as long as an hour, as long as they’re physically in contact with their frost turtles. I think she wants to make her opponent sweat.”

Sure enough, as the Summer competitor waited anxiously in the ring for his opponent to reappear, he and his phoenix became increasingly agitated. They both searched the edges of the ring, waiting, and waiting, and waiting, not wanting to be taken by surprise.

Just when Aria thought even her nerves couldn’t take it anymore, the Winter Fellow and her frost turtle rocketed up out of the lake. Everyone gasped as the turtle conjured a violet orb in midair, giving the Fellow the aura of a winged swordfish.

“A swordwing!” Saemi cried.

The Fellow and her frost turtle landed with a rough thud on the ring, but it didn’t deter the competitor one bit. She used the violent landing as a lever to gain flight, fluttering the gossamer wings on her back to shoot toward her competitor.

The phoenix quickly slung an orb at his dreamslinger too, which seemed to weave a protective spidery web around them. But it was too late. The Winter competitor’s nose had grown as long and sharp as a swordfish, and as she propelled herself toward her opponent, she flicked her nose up. It hooked the Summer competitor’s necklace up and over his head with a satisfying jingle, taking the feather clean with it.

The referee raised his hands to the air, his face stricken. “The Golden Heart has been claimed. The game goes to Winter Palace!”

The crowd went wild, and Aria found herself jumping up and down with Battlejoy fever. The seedlings didn’t seem to understand why everyone was cheering, but they joined in with the energetic leaping nonetheless. Aria could see why this was a beloved national sport.

In fact, she was so engrossed in the match that she almost forgot entirely about her plan to question the mudang. It was only when the king stepped out of the box to talk to some of his subjects, leaving the mudang sitting there alone, that Aria saw her chance.

Without knowing what she was going to say, she walked up to the velvet rope and cleared her throat.

“Um, Your Royal Holiness,” she started. “I was hoping that I could—”

That’s when she saw the glint of the blade.

Aria had seen a figure draped in a heavy cloak standing in her periphery. She had assumed it was a Fellow waiting for the king’s audience.

But in the next moment, the cloaked figure had closed the distance between them and the mudang, and pulled a dagger from their cloak.

“No!” Aria cried, as she lunged for the mudang.

But she was too late.

The attacker thrust the blade at the shaman, and she crumpled to the grass as dark red blood pooled underneath her.

“WHAT’S WITH THE EXTRA LEVEL of security today?” Rihaan asked as he chose a recliner in the slumbersanctum. His harvest tiger kept trying to nibble the sequins off his glittery beret.

Aria followed his gaze and saw there were indeed double the usual number of palace guards stationed around the edges of the slumbersanctum.

“Surely it’s because of what happened to the Royal Mudang. She’s lucky she’s alive,” said Mason, skidding into the room with Rico, his frost turtle. “We’re vulnerable when we’re in simulation.”

“I thought the lockdown drills were a bit much, but I get it now,” Zahra commented as she and her harvest tiger, Rahi, found a recliner next to Aria and Tui. “The threat of anti-slinger attacks is real. Even inside the kingdom.”

“It was never like this, you know,” Jina sneered as she and her tall, freckled henchman, Eugene Cho-Fisher, walked past with their fiery-tailed phoenixes. “You realize it’s only because they let you outsiders into the Trials this year that this is all happening.”

Rio hissed as Jina’s phoenix purposely swished its flaming tail in Aria’s vicinity.

“Yeah,” Eugene echoed. “It’s people like you who’ve brought risk and danger to our heritage community.”

“We were always at risk,” Lion argued from his chair, looking a little jumpy and off-color. “But at least now our numbers are growing. And that makes us stronger.”

Jina looked like she wanted to say something to Lion, but then thought better of it. Instead she turned to Aria and smirked. “We may be growing, but we’re not stronger. We’re weaker because of the offcuts we’re letting in. Just look at your poor excuse for a bloom dragon. It’s deformed.”

Rio stilled, and Aria felt the words like a dagger. She knew she should defend her dreampanion, but instead, she just stared at her feet, not knowing what to say.

Luckily, Tui did. “You’re a poor excuse for a human, Jina Jeong.”

“And we all deserve to be here, regardless of where we came from,” Zahra added defiantly. “No one asked for your opinion.”

Some days had passed since Chuseok, and the members of the royal sanctum had been tight-lipped about the mudang’s attack. But it was clear to the everyone that anti-slingers had gotten through the borders and targeted a high-ranking member of the kingdom’s leadership. The extra security in the slumbersanctum had confirmed their suspicions.

Aria had half thought the severity of the incident would’ve warranted a break from Endearing training. But far from delaying them, the trialeers had been pushed to work even harder.

“The show must go on!” Head Scholar Tak had remarked the day after Chuseok, fiddling with the gems on his mustache. “In fact, this provides greater motivation to get you trained, so you can defend yourselves!”

This was not good news for Aria. Over the past week, she had watched with growing frustration as her fellow trialeers mastered the art of mounting and then gaining air. Jina had taken to flying on her solar phoenix like a duck to water, as had Zahra, who was already traveling at breakneck speed on the back of her leafy harvest tiger. Mason had easily learned how to stay on the icy shell of his frost turtle, breaking previous trialeers’ records of holding his breath underwater. Even Blessica, the short Filipina trialeer from Autumn Palace, had managed to take her first ride after struggling to mount her tiger for ages.

Everyone seemed to be on track with their training. Except Aria.

Naturally, she blamed Rio’s lack of tail for their lack of progress. But Head Scholar Bobby-Uma had studied Rio’s stub with her sharp, two-colored eyes, and confirmed it was still possible. The problem wasn’t physics—it was trust.

Rio had zero interest in letting Aria jump on her back, let alone in getting off the ground. And today was the day the cohort would be attempting the simulation Journey for the first time. It felt like make-or-break. Aria’s stomach churned.

“All right, my delightful trialeers!” Head Scholar Kim sang as she parked her chair and locked the wheels. “Please uncork your vials and we’ll see you at the Heartsglade momentarily.”

The Spring Palace gajok drank their vials and reassembled inside Treehenge. They followed Head Scholar Bobby-Uma toward their Season archway as Aria leaned into her seedling.

“Hey, Rio, can you at least try today? Just a little? Please?”

Rio’s long whiskers billowed as she ignored Aria’s plea. Instead, her coral petals rippled down her body in annoyance. Then she began snapping playfully at Tweak, who was walking in front of them. Aria sighed.

“Hey, Lion, you okay?” Aria asked, throwing a worried glance at her friend. “Your eyes are bloodshot. Rough night?”

He didn’t answer.

“Earth to Lion,” Aria echoed. “Anyone home?”

Still nothing. It was only when Echo nudged him that he blinked.

“Sorry, Aria, did you say something?”

Aria raised a brow. Something was definitely up with Lion.

“Who would like to do the honors and be the first to attempt the Journey?” Head Scholar Bobby-Uma asked when they’d reached the eastern edge of the Heartsglade, which overlooked the East Sea of Poisonous Plants. To illustrate, she leapt onto her silvery bloom dragon and gracefully flew toward the Season archway suspended high in the sky. She made it look as easy as breathing.

Aria avoided the scholar’s gaze as she stared into the sea. Despite being simulations, the carnivorous flower heads looked as hungry as ever, as they released their noxious gases and snapped their sharp teeth.

“As you know, you will only get one attempt to make the Journey to your archway in the real Endearing,” the Head Scholar reminded them. “If you fall into the sea, you will have failed the Trial. However, there’s no need to worry about that today. If you fall, I will retrieve you and you may try again. This is, after all, just a simulation.”

Hiroto Günther volunteered himself, taking a big breath before jumping on his chocolate-hued dragon.

“Let’s show them how it’s done, Toto,” he declared.

The dreampanion leapt into the air, but the jump was so high and the movement so sudden that Hiroto’s grip on the seedling’s neck slipped. He managed to hold on for a few more seconds before he slithered off the side of the dragon, plummeting down to the snapping mouths of the plant sea below.

Aria gasped as Head Scholar Bobby-Uma thrust her hands into the air in an upward motion. Immediately, thick green vines shot out from the poison sea, like extensions of her arms. She seized the air, and the vines wrapped themselves around Hiroto and Toto, catching them and returning them safely to the ground.

Tiare Taina was next to step forward, and she adjusted the star-shaped white flower behind her ear before jumping on her sleek black dragon. The seedling leapt into the air—but not as high as Hiroto and Toto—and they hovered awkwardly as she tried to find their balance. Aria and her gajokmates held their breath as Tiare shifted her body to help the distribution of weight. And after some precarious tips left and right that made her two braids flap haphazardly, she finally found her rhythm. As Tiare held on tight to its long neck, the bloom dragon corkscrewed its serpentine body shakily up toward the archway.

“I touched it!” she cried, as they made a wobbly landing. “I actually touched the stone!”

“Well done!” Head Scholar Bobby-Uma exclaimed as Tiare did an impressive flip off her dragon before wrapping her seedling into a hug. “A little more work on syncing your weight distribution and coordinating your aerial balance, and you’ll be mastering flight in no time.”

Tui went next, then a still-distracted Lion, followed by four other trialeers in the gajok—none of whom made the full Journey, but all of whom at least hovered over the sea. Even Jaxon managed to take flight, despite turning back when they got too high (a problem with the structural integrity of his mullet mohawk, he claimed).

Finally, it was Aria’s turn.

“Don’t be nervous, Trialeer Love,” the head scholar encouraged, running her hand through her blue streak. “Just relax and let your seedling take the lead.”

“Yeah, right,” Aria muttered under her breath as she tried to approach Rio from the side. She calmly placed her hands on her back so that she could push off and hook her right leg over the seedling’s body. But as soon as she shifted her body weight, Rio shuffled out of reach.

“Come on, Rio,” Aria pleaded, aware of her gajokmates’ eyes following their every move. “Can we just give it a go. Please?”

If Rio heard Aria’s desperation, she chose to ignore it. Instead, the seedling loped toward the edge of the sea and playfully pawed a snappy flytrap. The plant released a thick gas in her face, but Rio just sneezed and swatted it again—this time with a wag of her stub.

A wave of irritation washed over Aria. The frustrating thing about all of this was that she knew Rio could do it, if she just put her mind to it. The scholar had said so. The problem was that Rio just didn’t want to. And Aria was sick of being embarrassed in front of all her gajokmates.

Before she knew what was happening, she was clenching her fists and shouting at the top of her lungs. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why won’t you even try?!”

Rio recoiled and let out an indignant whimper, which was followed by a deadly silence from Aria’s gajokmates. Realizing what she’d done, Aria dropped her head in shame. Way to make things a hundred times worse.

“Don’t be downtrodden, Trialeer Love,” Bobby-Uma later said to Aria on the way back to the Heart of the Heartsglade. “Bubba Holiday was also a late bloomer.” The scholar’s dragon poked its tongue out at its dreamslinger. “But look at her now. Some seedlings just take a little longer than others to warm up, and you still have time.”

“The Endearing is less than a week away,” Aria reminded her.

“Everything can change in a single moment.” She smiled knowingly. “But first, you must let it.”

After the training, Lion was still acting out of sorts. Even Echo was oddly jumpy, refusing to eat the snacks Tui offered him. At lunch, Lion absently moved his spoon around his bowl of kimchi jjigae, hardly eating. And when Aria asked him for knitting tips, he didn’t even respond, which was highly unusual.

“Lion, honestly, what’s wrong?” Aria demanded across the floating table.

He shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t know why you keep making a thing of it.”

Eventually, Aria pulled Tui aside, bereft. “Tui, do you think Lion is acting weird, or is it just me?”

Tui laughed. “The old mate’s as weird as they come. But that’s nothing new. He’s like one of those mysteries that if you try to unravel them, they get even more tangled.”

Aria frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, think about it. All the heritage folk here avoid him like the plague, but we’re still none the wiser about why. He’s prone to disappearing at random times and we have no idea where he’s going or what he does. Every other heritage kid goes to see their family on the weekends, but Lion stays in the palace with us. Not to mention he’s some kind of martial-arts prodigy, and can knit a sweater in half a day. Need I go on?”

“When you put it like that…”

Tui was right, and frankly, Aria was annoyed she hadn’t picked up on it earlier. What had he done to become such a social pariah here? Where was he disappearing to all the time? Who even was he? There were more questions than answers when it came to their earmuff-wearing friend.

Still, mystery of Lion’s history aside, Aria couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off with him today beyond his normal strangeness. It felt like a cry for help.

That’s when she remembered the beaconsap she’d been gifted by the private investigator at Nam Samchon’s house. He’d explained that the accompanying beaconmap would let her track the sap’s whereabouts in real time.

So after lunch, as Lion stood up to leave, Aria leaned in to give him a hug… and stealthily stuck some beaconsap on his back. If he wasn’t going to open up about it, she’d have to find another way of figuring it out herself.

Aria had been sitting in her bedchamber, watching Lion’s little beacon dot on the beaconmap for a while before she finally saw it move. Lion was leaving the Pavilion, where he’d been studying in the library, and was now headed to Central Palace.

Rio was having a deep nap on her bed (probably exhausted after embarrassing Aria at training), and Aria didn’t want to wake her—she didn’t think the seedling would make a discreet spy companion. So she sent an urgent butterflymail to Junghee requesting her babysitting services before setting off after Lion.

The gama (pirate-themed, complete with a mini gangplank ramp) expertly assisted Aria as she tracked Lion to the northern corner of Central Palace—an area Aria hadn’t been to before. She followed him all the way to a hanok, and discreetly jumping off the gama without being seen, she shadowed him into what looked like a small but ornate private library. She quickly hid behind a tall, densely packed bookshelf covered with scrolls from top to tail, and held her breath.

“Abo-mama,” she heard Lion call out. “Is the mudang doing okay? Is she recovering?”

Aria frowned. She wasn’t 100 percent sure, but she thought she’d seen that word before in a scroll. Abo-mama. She was pretty sure it meant father in certain contexts.

“It may take a while for a full recovery, but she’ll make it,” said a voice that sounded somewhat familiar but that Aria couldn’t quite place.

A pause. “Do you—do you think it was me they were after?” Another longer pause. Aria heard Echo whimper. “Do you think it’s because of what I did?”

Aria leaned forward, wedging herself in between a bunch of scrolls that were precariously packed on top of each other.

“I darn well hope you weren’t the intended target of that blade!” the voice exclaimed. Then he sighed. “And no, son, I think something like this would’ve happened eventually, regardless of your decision.”

Lion’s father stepped into Aria’s view then, and she got a glimpse of his face.

She staggered back. She knew that face.

Her back hit the shelf and the stack of scrolls toppled forward, clattering to the ground.

“Who’s there?!” Lion demanded.

There was a release of heat and the angry squawk of a solar phoenix from somewhere behind Aria. A talon clawed at her, and Aria edged out to avoid being mauled.

Lion’s father stared at Aria, and his eyes widened, as if he thought for a moment that she was someone else.

Aria swallowed thickly.

“Oh. Um. Hello, Your Majesty.”

ARIA SWIVELED TO FACE HER earmuff-wearing friend, Lion Lee-Hendrick, teenage John Legend lookalike, knitter extraordinaire, and Taekkyon maestro.

“You’re the prince? But you’re—but how—?” Aria stuttered. “I didn’t even know the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk had a prince!”

It clicked now where she’d seen the word abo-mama. She’d read about it in a royal terminology scroll that explained the special term was reserved for princes and princesses when addressing their father.

Lion gave his father (the king!!) a look that said I told you so. “Yes, it’s true. I am the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk.” He lowered his gaze to his hands, looking genuinely remorseful. “And I’m sorry I had to lie to you. I really didn’t want to. I swear. But I was given no choice in the matter.”

Aria suddenly found herself curtsying on autopilot to her friend, then frowned. She put her arms on her hips in defiance, but then, thinking better of it, curtsied again. “Am I supposed to call you Your Royal Highness now? I’m so confused.”

Lion grimaced. “Please don’t.”

“Why did you lie about who you were?” Aria asked, trying to ignore the warning tail flick of the king’s phoenix.

Lion looked to the king, who nodded his permission.

“It’s all to do with my manifestation wish,” Lion began. “I was a late bloomer. My recurring Heartsglade dreams only manifested when I turned fifteen. Usually they start when dreamslingers turn thirteen.”

Aria nodded. She’d had her first Outburst when she was thirteen.

“It’s tradition in the kingdom that a royal, upon manifestation, can make a wish of their own choosing, no matter how grand or outlandish, and it must be allowed. Mine was to open the Annual Trials to every teenage dreamslinger in the world.” The king grunted at this. “Because unlike my abo-mama, I think the gifts of the Asleep—the dreampanions, the nightjoys, all of it—should be shared, not squirreled away for a lucky few.”

Aria remembered the conversation in the underground tunnels, and how passionate Lion had sounded about the kingdom being opened to others. He wanted the world to understand the League’s peaceful ways—from the inside.

“Which is exactly the kind of naive thinking I have advised against time and time again!” the king lectured, looking unimpressed. “As you have both seen for yourselves, anti-slinger sentiment is on the rise. They are getting bolder. And my job as sovereign is to protect my kingdom, not to invite danger into our borders. As you can imagine, for my son, the Rising Sun of the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk, to wish upon such frivolity was not a moment I recall with pride.”

Aria’s gaze flicked down at Lion’s norigae, how simple it was yet so undeniably regal, with the golden sun rising out of the gray. Then she studied Echo, whose petaled scales were as majestically gold as the sun. She suddenly had a flashback of meeting Junghee for the first time, when she was giving her a tour of Spring Palace.

And of course, our Spring Palace in the east, and the sun also rises in the east, which is why it’s the home of the—

She’d stopped herself before she’d finished her sentence. But Aria understood now. Junghee was referring to the prince. To Lion. He lived in the Spring Palace because he was the Rising Sun of the Kingdom, and the sun rose in the east.

She couldn’t believe it. The clues were all right there. She just didn’t know to look.

Lion huffed, throwing off his earmuffs, as if they were hindering his ability to show his true self. Echo stomped on them with satisfaction. “But my abo-mama, here, would only allow my manifestation wish on two conditions. One, if only twenty Novices were inducted at the end of the Trials, to lessen the risk of outside influence. And two, if the entire kingdom was sworn to secrecy about my true identity—to protect against any ambush or attack on the prince. On me.”

“I had to protect you somehow, my son!” the king boomed, obviously still incensed by the whole thing.

Aria’s eyes widened. It all made sense now. Why Lion was always disappearing—presumably for secret meetings with the king. How he’d known about the underground tunnels. Why all the heritage folk avoided him like he was a walking virus. It was because he was their prince, but they were forbidden from acknowledging it. They had to pretend he was a nobody.

“And that’s the whole truth,” Lion swore. “I never lied to you—everything I said and did was me, the real me. My Korean name is Lee Saja. Hendrick was my mom’s last name, and Saja means Lion, so Lion Lee-Hendrick is really my English name.”

Echo rubbed his head in Lion’s side, as Lion lowered his eyes. And despite looking remorseful, he seemed less troubled now. As if telling the truth had made him feel lighter. “Do you hate me?”

Aria blinked. She was too stunned to take it all in yet. But she knew one thing. If they were comparing crimes, her secret was worse than his. Being a spy trumped being forced by royal decree to hide your identity. Love wasn’t even her real last name. A prickly wave of guilt washed over her.

“No, of course I don’t hate you,” Aria responded truthfully. “But—but I think I’m going to need some time to get my head around it all.”

He bit his lip but nodded. “I understand.”

“What about Tui?” Aria asked. “When are you going tell her the truth?”

Lion looked hopefully at his father, but the king only shook his head.

“It’s enough of a risk having one foreign trialeer know Lion’s true identity,” the monarch declared. “I forbid you—either of you—from telling another soul. Not until after the induction ceremony. Do I make myself clear?”

Aria and Lion remained silent, and the king raised his voice.

“I said, do I make myself clear?”

Lion sighed, and Aria nodded.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Back in her bedchamber, Aria found a note from Junghee saying that the maid had taken Rio to the dreamtailor. Her mom had needed some help in the shop, and she figured Rio might enjoy the new environment. They were scheduled to be back soon.

It was just the time Aria needed to get her thoughts in order. She took out a stack of paper and her writing brush. And in a feverish state, she began her formal report to her dad. She told him about the real reason behind the kingdom’s unexpected reopening. There had been no ulterior motives, no nefarious intentions. It was simply a fifteen-year-old boy’s idealistic wish for the world to know the League’s good intentions. In the spirit of sharing their knowledge and power.

As she wrote, she felt a sense of tightening in her chest, then a swelling, followed by a release, and a lightness. It was as if all the weight she’d been carrying was slowly being laid down. With the true reason for the reopening known, and nothing to suggest there was anything evil brewing, she hoped this report could finally end her double life as a trialeer and spy.

As she burned her folded report in her lantern’s flame, it struck her that at some point—although it was hard to pinpoint exactly when it’d happened—Aria had come to embrace the League. She’d come to understand in a fundamental way, in her very bones, that the League wasn’t trying to engineer child soldiers or create conflict. They were merely trying to teach them the skills their genetic mutation had afforded them.

Before the Trials, Aria had genuinely believed that her dad’s suppression approach to Outbursts was the only way to promote dreamslinger welfare. But she could see now that it was only one approach. Like Lion said in the tunnels, perhaps only looking at the risks was defeatist. What about the opportunities that came with the risks?

This place wasn’t perfect. They were rigid, they lied, and they held secrets like a troll hoarded treasures. But she thought of Resthaven—of their armbands, their metal-fiber gloves, all their rules and restrictions… And she understood that nothing and nowhere was ever perfect.

Knowing what she knew now, could she really blame Lion or the League for having done things this way? As Tui put it, would that just be buffetsplaining?

At that moment, Rio came bursting through the doors, accompanied by Junghee. They were both brimming with energy.

“Check out Rio’s new outfit!” Junghee exclaimed.

The bloom dragon was dressed in what could only be described as a mermaid tail, as if the seedling were wearing a prosthetic for her stub.

“She found the fabric herself, and demanded that I make it for her,” Junghee said, laughing. “It’s woven with eelweed, so it can even move!”

She pointed excitedly as the tail swished ever so slightly before it flopped heavily on the floor. Junghee groaned, complaining about how all her designs were failing.

Rio, on the other hand, did not seem to care that the tail hadn’t worked. She loped toward Aria, spinning and strutting in circles, proud as peaches, as if she couldn’t wait to show it off to Aria.

“Well, someone’s a fan!” Aria chuckled, unable to help herself. Rio’s enthusiasm was contagious. In fact, she couldn’t remember another time Rio had so eagerly and openly approached her. It was like she was with a completely different seedling.

As Rio affectionately rubbed her floppy fake tail against Aria’s feet, purring and seeking her approval, Aria wondered if this is how she must’ve looked to her dad, when she’d first learned the Outburst suppression techniques at Resthaven. She remembered how eager she’d felt to show off her achievements to her dad—to earn his attention and pride. And when her dad had praised her, she’d felt like she could fly. Despite believing she was “less than” as a dreamslinger, Aria’s dad had never made her feel any less loved.

Rio purred even louder now as she looked up at Aria expectantly, waiting for the dreamslinger’s mark of approval. And as Aria gazed down into her seedling’s hungry eyes, the cold hard truth slapped Aria on the cheek like a wet fish. Rio was waiting for Aria’s affection, her attention, her love. But unlike her dad, Aria had never given it to her dreampanion. She had never shown Rio her love.

Rio’s enthusiasm for her prosthetic suddenly made sense. This whole time, Rio must’ve thought Aria had put distance between them because of her lack of tail. That her faulty stub was the reason Aria had not shown any real affection for the seedling. After all, even when Jina had insulted Rio by calling her deformed, Aria hadn’t stood up for her. Now that she had a tail—fake or otherwise—Rio believed she was finally worthy of being loved.

The realization shattered Aria’s heart, and she let out a sob. “Oh, Rio, I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you, or make you think there was something wrong with you. I’ve always loved you—from the moment you unfurled, no matter the length of your tail. You’re a part of me. I just…” The truth struck Aria then. “I just didn’t accept myself yet. And without accepting myself, I guess I couldn’t embrace you, either. I’m so sorry!”

Perhaps it was having sent her final report to her dad that allowed it to happen. But as she opened the floodgates to her feelings, she let her love for Rio, well, flow. She thought it would feel like entering a black hole, foreign and frightening and endless. But all she felt was a warmth that enveloped them both so completely, that she wondered if she’d witnessed the edge of existence.

Rio licked her all over the face, tickling Aria with her long whiskers. Then she wrapped her serpentine body around Aria and squeezed tight, as if saying It took you long enough! Her little stub tail thumped against Aria’s ribs.

Later that night, Rio discarded her own bed and instead jumped into Aria’s. And as the seedling snuggled into her (taking up the entire bed space), Aria realized for the first time since entering the competition that she didn’t just want to pass the Trials. She genuinely and wholeheartedly wanted to become a royal slinger. She wanted to be a Fellow of the Royal League of Dreamslingers.

The revelation was so great, so obvious, and so powerful that she couldn’t go to sleep. She tried the anchor cards to no avail. She sang the lullaby her mom used to sing her, but that didn’t work either. In the end, as Rio snored and drooled next to her, Aria resorted to the flash cards one of the aunties had gifted her at Nam Samchon’s house. She guessed it wouldn’t hurt to learn a few more Korean words.

She flicked through them, trying to commit them to memory.

Horangi → Tiger

Tokki → Rabbit

Bada → Sea

Jib → House

Gom → Bear

Iseul → Dew

Haneul → Sky

Her blood stilled. She went back one flash card and stared at the picture of a morning drewdrop pooling on a green leaf.

Iseul → Dew

Something in her mind clicked into place, and Aria touched the lucky number eight pendant around her neck.

She gasped.

Ko Iseul was the name of the mudang’s late sister.

And her mom’s name was Ersa… after the Greek goddess of dew.

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF the night, and Aria knew what she was about to do would blow her cover. But she didn’t care. She felt like she was going to burst, and she needed to confirm if her suspicions were correct.

Before she could register where her body was taking her, she found herself outside the mudang’s hanok in the eastern quadrant of Central Palace, surrounded by the glistening golden walls. When studying for the Knowing, she’d learned that the shaman lived on the eastern side of the king’s quarters, because she was his right-hand advisor.

Rio panted heavily, having run alongside the gama now that she was too big to fit inside. Aria waited for her to catch her breath before pulling on the mudang’s sliding paper door.

Unlike other hanok, which were always kept unlocked, the door would not budge. Aria pulled on it again, harder this time, but it was no use. It was locked.

Rio sniffed at the door, nudging her nose against a slight marking in the shape of three interlocking octagons. The seedling prodded Aria.

“You found something, Rio?”

Aria ran her fingers over one of the eight-sided shapes, and immediately, it began to glow. Rio yapped. Encouraged, Aria placed her hand over the three interconnected symbols, and the entire thing illuminated in a swirl of color. The door unlocked.

Triumphant, Aria stormed in.

“What is the meaning of this?!” the mudang yelled as she bolted up from her floor bed, bewildered. She immediately winced and clutched her side in pain.

Aria had almost forgotten the mudang was still recovering from her injuries. She almost felt bad for storming into her bedroom in the middle of the night. But not enough to leave.

The mudang’s eyes narrowed as they focused on Aria and her seedling. “You! What are you doing here? Get out this instant!”

Aria held her ground as Rio stood staunchly beside her. “Was Ko Iseul my mother?” she blurted.

The mudang glanced at the time and glowered at Aria. “Can this conversation not wait until a respectable time in a respectable location, trialeer? I’m sure you’re aware I’m not a royal slinger. I need my sleep.”

When Aria didn’t make any movements, she grunted and rose from her bed. She draped a long shaman’s cloak around her shoulders and wrapped it tight. Almost as tight as her lips.

“If the truth is what you’re after, then yes. Ko Iseul was, indeed, your mother.”

Aria stumbled back. She was expecting it, but hearing it confirmed still felt like a punch to the gut.

“So you and I are related? You’re my actual blood aunt?” She stared at the shaman incredulously.

The mudang scowled. “How else do you think you got through my DNA-encrypted door, you insolent child?”

“But she—But I—But my dad—” Aria’s brain was already too fried, having learned of Lion’s true identity and the real reason behind the kingdom’s reopening, it couldn’t deal with this, too.

The shaman sighed, as if taking pity on Aria’s confusion. “Iseul and I were both born into this family, the two daughters of the Royal Mudang. We’re a family whose lineage goes back to the very first mudang family, who were the royal spiritual advisors of the first king. It is our birthright. Our duty that is passed on from generation to generation. It is who we are.”

It’s passed on from generation to generation… Aria gaped. “Does that mean I’m a mudang too?!”

The mudang scoffed. “If your mother hadn’t run away, then as the eldest daughter, she would’ve become the kingdom’s Royal Mudang, and you would not even exist. But that is not the decision she made.”

Something niggled at Aria, and it was only when Rio’s long whiskers brushed against her skin that it suddenly dawned on her. “Was my mother a dreamslinger?” The mudang didn’t have a norigae or dreampanion. But Aria did.

“Indeed,” the mudang said tightly. “Your mother, she was born with it all. The birthright. The gene. The charm. The affection of the king.” She pursed her lips. “But she was selfish. Too self-absorbed and obsessed with her own misguided notions of freedom.”

The lyrics of her mom’s lullaby floated in Aria’s head.

Fly, free bird, fly

Fly, free bird, fly

Don’t let them clip your wings

When you were born to soar

Fly, free bird, fly

Fly, free bird, fly

For there, beyond the gray

You’ll find a new door

My wings will guide you home

“The thing about Iseul was that she could draw you into her orbit,” the mudang continued, looking distant. “And you would feel like the most important person in the world. She had this power over people.” She shook her head. “But as soon as your time in the sun was over, she discarded you and moved on to the next willing victim. She was only ever out for herself, in constant pursuit of her whims, and she didn’t care who got hurt in the process.”

That made Aria think of what Lion had said—about how Ko Iseul had been the one who convinced the king to launch the world tour ten years ago, which meant…

Aria felt her heart drop into her gut, as heavy as lead. “So my mom was responsible for the Great Outburst. She’s the one who made the king open the borders.”

The mudang momentarily looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected Aria to know that. “I wouldn’t give her that much credit. She merely used her powers of persuasion to rouse action in the king. It was his idea to have a world tour—but he did it for her. In the hopes that his childhood love would see peace in her new home.”

“In her new home?” Aria muttered.

“The king was too addled by his childhood affections for Iseul to realize what he had done. And when the Great Tragedy unfolded, he had no choice but to close the borders again and take the kingdom into hiding. Until now.” She scowled.

Aria could see why the king had been so incensed by Lion’s manifestation wish. He must’ve felt his son was making the same mistake he’d made ten years ago.

Then Aria frowned. None of this made sense. Why would the king have thought a world tour would even help her mom?

“Why did my mom leave the kingdom?” she demanded.

“That’s a question for your father,” the shaman spat. “He’s the one who came and took her away.”

Aria’s eyes widened. “My dad came here? To Royal Hanguk?!”

“If it weren’t for him, Iseul wouldn’t have left the kingdom. Left the king. Or left me.” Her gaze hardened. “And look where that left her.”

The mudang’s eyes glazed over then, as if losing herself in her memories. “And here I was in her shadow, as always, picking up the pieces of her mess. You know, it was her fault our mother died of heartbreak. Because of her unyielding obsession with the Touch of Death.” She shook her head, anger clouding her eyes. “It’s disgusting that we’re even related.”

Aria wanted to ask what the Touch of Death was. But something about this conversation struck her as discordant.

“Wait, so you knew who I was this entire time? You knew I was your niece?”

The mudang laughed, a genuine sound. “You think hacking a few letters off your last name was sufficient in hiding your true identity? It takes more than a few library visits and probing questions to be a real spy.”

Real fear spiked through Aria, and Rio whimpered beside her. “But you haven’t reported me to the king. You won’t have me disqualified, then?”

She shrugged. “You’re the spitting image of her. I find it hard to believe the king hasn’t figured it out for himself. And what he decides to do with you is hardly my place to judge. No need for me to rub the worst decision of his life in his face.”

Aria remembered now how the king had looked at her with a strange expression, as if he was seeing someone else through her. “He knows. And yet…”

The mudang abruptly shoved Aria toward the door, making Rio hiss in the shaman’s direction before following Aria.

“Now let me ask you something, Trialeer Love. For the love of the Holy Trine, why are you still here? Visiting hours are over. Get out of my bedchamber now!”

As Aria trudged back to her bedchamber, she digested the information the mudang had unloaded on her, and something became increasingly clear.

She was furious.

At her dad.

He had been to Royal Hanguk. He knew her mom was from here. He knew she was a dreamslinger. He had lied to Aria her entire life about everything. But why?!

By the time she returned to her room with Rio hot on her heels, she was a flaming rocket about to shoot into space. And it was strange, really.

For the past year at Resthaven, all she’d done was restrain, contain, and maintain. Having deep feelings, let alone releasing these strong emotions, was precisely the thing she was taught to avoid. Suppression, after all, was the name of the game.

But now, as this fury filled her up, it charged her like a battery, and she realized she felt none of the shame she used to feel. If anything, she felt empowered by the intensity of her feelings. It made her feel passionate. It made her feel connected. It made her feel alive.

She just needed an outlet for it. To channel it toward something that mattered. Until she figured out what that was, she needed to release some of this energy so she didn’t implode. And what better way than to direct her grievances at the person who made her feel this way.

She ran toward the cabinet inlaid with mother-of-pearl and took out a stack of hanji paper and her brush. Then, as the emotions flowed through her, she furiously scribbled a butterflymail to her dad.

You preach about all these lofty values and claim to be the one with the moral high ground. But you lied about Mom. You never told me she was a dreamslinger. You never told me she came from a royal line of shamans. You never told me you’d been to Royal Hanguk before. You never told me about who I really was. What other secrets have you been keeping from me?? Were you never going to tell me the truth?? Dad, how could you do this to me?!

She raged even after sending the message, charging up and down her room and rumpling all the carefully laid bedsheets Junghee had prepared. Rio whimpered in the corner, waiting for the storm to pass.

It wasn’t long before a butterflymail fluttered in front of Aria’s face. She reached out for it, almost crushing it in her haste.

Immediately, her dad’s voice filled the room, trembling, stuttering, and full of emotion.

“Oh, my dear, dear Sparkler, this is not how I wanted you to find out. I wanted to tell you before you left, I swear I tried at the airport… but I just couldn’t bring myself to utter the words.”

Aria clenched her fists. He should’ve tried harder.

“But I’m afraid you’re right. I haven’t been entirely honest with you. It’s true that I’ve been to the kingdom before. I was so young, invited to get a rare peek into the kingdom as part of a special exchange program in my anthropology department. To study their ways, to document their methods. And there, I met your mother and fell deeply in love with her.”

His voice shook, as if, after all these years, he was still moved by the sheer memory of her mother.

“Oh, Sparkler, you should’ve seen her. She was a sight to behold—so radiant, so alive, so hungry to see the world. But she felt trapped in her gilded cage in Royal Hanguk. Locked into a duty she didn’t want. Confined within the borders of a kingdom she was never to leave. And when my assignment was over, I couldn’t bear to leave her behind. To leave a part of my own heart behind. So I asked her to marry me.”

He chuckled and his entire voice lifted, sounding euphoric.

“Then we had you, Sparkler, and it felt like the world had carved out a chunk of itself just for us. We were so very happy, so insanely happy, and every minute was a blessing with my two beautiful girls.”

His voice hardened, and Aria felt a chill run down her spine.

“But the world was cruel. And discrimination against dreamslingers in Almiro was much greater than your mother could’ve imagined. You have to understand, she’d grown up in a world where dreamslingers ruled the kingdom. She didn’t know how to reconcile the ignorance. The hate. And over time, her new life bled her, drop by drop, until there was nothing left of her anymore. Soon, there was nothing left of the woman she’d once been.”

He began to cry, openly revealing the cracks of grief still deep in his chest.

“In her despair, she wrote to her childhood best friend, the king, wishing for a better world for her and her family. And that’s when he had the idea for the world tour, in the hope that the exercise could engender awareness and understanding, maybe even acceptance of dreamslingers in places like Almiro. But we know how that turned out….”

He cleared his throat, as if coming back to himself.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The world is a cruel place, Sparkler. There is no changing the inhumanity of humans. And you may judge me for my decisions, but you must know everything I have ever done has been to protect you. To shelter you from the hate and ignorance of society. I failed your mother, but I refuse to fail you. And while I had to conceal a part of you to keep you safe, I am not sorry for it.”

He became more harried, as if suddenly remembering something.

“But you must understand, there is so much happening that is beyond us. Much, much bigger than you realize. I’m begging you. Don’t do anything rash. I can only imagine how you must be feeling right now, but now’s the time to remember everything I taught you. Restrain, contain, maintain. Stay out of the limelight and wait for me. I promise I will explain everything in time. Trust me. Please.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, IT was the Harvest of Service, an important quarterly event in the League’s calendar. It was when all trialeers, Fellows, and second-year Novices trekked to the Asleep to harvest dream flora and fauna for the dreamtrades. Apart from the actual Endearing, it was the only time trialeers were excused from the Pause and permitted into the real Asleep.

It was supposed to be a time of community spirit, to give back to the people of the kingdom. But it was hard for Aria to get into the right mindset. Not when she’d lived through a ground-shattering earthquake—the aftershocks of which were shifting the very foundations of her world from underneath her.

She still couldn’t get her head around it all. She hailed from a long line of royal mudang. Her mom was a dreamslinger who was responsible in part for the Great Outburst. Her dad was a compulsive liar. And her aunt apparently hated her for having the gall to be Ko Iseul’s daughter.

Aria wanted to talk to her friends about it, but of course, they didn’t know her true reason for being here, and the guilt was eating her up inside. Plus, Lion was the freaking prince, and she was still reeling from that. And now, thanks to the king’s explicit orders, she was forbidden from telling Tui about it. It was all just a colossal mess.

The one upside to all of it was Rio. Since she’d opened up to her seedling, their relationship had started to warm. The bond was still growing—after all, one hug wasn’t enough to heal all previous hurts. But it was a start.

By the time Junghee dropped Aria and Rio off at Central Palace, the royal courtyard was bustling with people. Aria passed by a group of Novices as she searched for her gajok and overheard the older teens talking about their changing sleeping patterns.

“I only slept three hours last night and I feel amazing,” one said as his adolescent sapling groomed its leafy fur. “Maybe even better than when I was sleeping entire nights.”

“I can’t believe we won’t be needing to sleep at all soon!” another exclaimed.

It still boggled Aria’s mind that fully-fledged Fellows had access to a full twenty-four-hour day. They had so much time.

She finally joined her cohort near the four stone statues from the lantern ceremony as guards began lining the perimeter, some even perching on the sloping roofs overlooking the rows of floating recliners.

“Mōrena, Aria!” Tui sang out, as Tweak and Echo ran to give Rio a good slobbery morning lick.

“Morning,” Lion said sheepishly.

“Hey,” Aria managed.

“Welcome, all, to the last Harvest of Service of the year!” the king greeted everyone from the throne hall. “I know you are all busy, so it is with much gratitude that I welcome you here today.”

Aria stared at the Royal Mudang—her aunt—who was standing dutifully next to him, as rigid and unwavering as ever. She wondered if the woman ever let her hair down.

“Now remember, as always, this is not a race,” the king continued. “Please leave your gajok rivalries at the gate. This is about community, about giving, and about taking a moment to appreciate the wonders of the Seasons. So please do stay safe and return as many times as necessary throughout the day to unload, refuel, and freshen up. The dreamtrades of the kingdom are grateful for your service.”

The king took his seat on the floating recliner inside the throne hall. And, taking his lead, the courtyard of dreamslingers dispersed to each find an empty seat.

“Don’t forget to knot it tight,” Sang-Gung Mama reminded Aria’s gajok as the matron handed out baskets, as well as red string that trialeers had to use to tie themselves to their seedlings. While Fellows and Novices were trained to travel to the Heartsglade on demand, trialeers weren’t yet endeared to their dream guides. That meant they’d have to literally tie their fates together to ensure their bonds would remain intact in the Asleep. It also meant they’d need some external help to get there in the first place.

Sang-Gung Mama double-checked everyone’s knots before she sprinkled slumberdust over their heads. As the fine sweetcorn-scented powder wafted over her, Aria thought she could hear a sweet lullaby in her ears.

“Toasted cradlecorn,” the matron confirmed. “It will help you cross over to the Asleep. See you at the Heartsglade.”

Aria tugged on the red thread connecting her to Rio, checking it was intact, and then reclined her floating chair before closing her eyes.

When she opened them again in the Heartsglade, the Head Scholars were already leading the Fellows and Novices toward their respective Seasons, while the four palace matrons were gathering the cohort as they materialized inside the circular grove of trees.

“Welcome to the real Asleep,” the palace matron from Summer Palace announced. “I’m pleased you’re all here to participate in the Harvest, but I have to remind you that your presence here in advance of the Endearing is an exception. And that comes with rules and consequences.

“We will not be leaving the twenty-minute radius of the Heartsglade under any circumstances. No trialeer is to approach their Season’s sea or archway. Any attempt to enter an archway or sea will be met with immediate expulsion from the Trials. Is that understood?”

The cohort nodded anxiously.

“Good. Now we’re going to split into gajok groups to do the first consignment, so get your baskets ready and don’t dawdle. Stay close to your respective Sang-Gung Mama.”

Aria, Tui, and Lion shadowed their matron as she led their gajok to forage for giggling mushrooms in the foggy valley. Aria remembered Junghee mentioning that the fungus was often used by dreamchemists and dreamcafés because of their mood-enhancing properties.

Grateful for the distraction, Aria lost herself in the art of picking the tittering fungi. So much so that she almost didn’t notice when Tweak let out an impressive burp and Tui got up to stretch her neck.

“Hey, where’s Rio?”

“She’s right here.” Aria’s eyes adjusted as she gazed up from the musty soil, only to realize her dreampanion was no longer behind her.

She bolted up to her feet. “Wait, she was right here, a second ago.”

“There she is!” Lion whispered as Echo pointed his snout toward the mouth of the creek ahead, where a coral tail stub had just disappeared into the bordering trees.

Aria gasped. “Where is she going?”

“Quick, chase after her,” Tui said, being careful not to attract the attention of their gajokmates. “We’ll cover for you. Get her before she reaches the sea.”

When Aria finally caught up to her seedling, Rio had almost reached the end of the woodlands—the last landmark before the boundary of the twenty-minute radius, where the land abruptly gave way to the East Sea of Poisonous Plants. By the time Aria had wrangled the dragon back under control, she was furious. And so was Rio.

Why don’t you trust me? Why won’t you let me go where I want to go? Rio’s eyes demanded as Aria clutched her tight around the neck. You’re such a party pooper!

“Why can’t you be like all the other seedlings?” Aria demanded right back, unable to hide her disappointment. “And here I thought we were getting somewhere!”

Rio huffed and turned her head away, the two of them in a stalemate.

We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.

Aria froze.

We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.

Rio’s ears twitched, as if hearing it, too. And Aria shivered. They’d been going to the simulation Asleep for so long, she’d forgotten how strong the lure of the sea was in the real Asleep. They were so close and she could hear it calling to her, demanding she jump in.

“Let’s go back,” she whispered to Rio.

This time, her seedling didn’t argue.

When Aria returned to the valley, her gajokmates were already packing up, needing a trip back to the Awake to unload. No one seemed to notice she and Rio had been missing, but she wasn’t keen to risk Rio going AWOL again and potentially getting her expelled. She took the opportunity to tell her palace matron a little white lie.

“I’m not feeling so good, Sang-Gung Mama,” she said, cradling her head. “I’ve got a splitting headache, I’m nauseated, my body aches, and I think I’m coming down with a fever.” She knew the side effects trialeers sometimes felt from sudden overexposure to the Asleep. Tolerance had to be built over time.

The matron nodded sympathetically. “We’re just about to deliver a load, so why don’t you and your seedling retire to your bedchamber.”

It was exactly what Aria wanted to hear.

“Good call, Aria,” Lion whispered when they returned to the floating recliners with their full baskets. Echo gave Rio a stern You should know better look.

“Yeah, nah, better to play it safe than sorry,” Tui agreed as Tweak gave Rio a squeeze with her long tail. “Go lie low.”

ARIA AND HER SEEDLING WERE both sulking at each other when they trudged to the Library of Scrolls. Aria knew she’d go wild being stuck inside her bedchamber for the rest of the day. So she figured she’d use the time more wisely. There was something the mudang had said about her mother that’d been replaying in her mind.

You know, it was her fault our mother died of heartbreak. Because of her unyielding obsession with the Touch of Death.

The words Touch of Death had snagged on something in Aria’s mind, and she intended to figure out why. After all, when else would she get an entire royal library to herself? There had to be some benefits of being the only dreamslinger not at the Harvest.

“It is not displeasing to see you here, although it is somewhat of a surprise,” said Librarian Yong, aloof yet charming as always. “Were you after a snack?”

She tipped her pink cowboy hat back as she carefully watered her snackpan tree with a pink spray bottle. Rio wagged her stub expectantly.

“I’m actually here to do research about something called the Touch of Death. Have you heard of it?”

The librarian froze mid-spray. “I have said this before, Trialeer Love, but I have never met someone with such an extensive list of restricted research topics. I pride myself on being a good librarian, and your impossible requests frazzle me something chronic.”

She seemed to think through something, as her eyes darted between Aria’s feet and the locked cubbies of gravitygrass shoes behind her desk. Then, finally, as if coming to a decision, she plucked a plump snackpocket off her tree and hurled it toward the wall of shoes like a football.

“Uh, was that really necessary?” Aria asked, her brow raised.

Rio, on the other hand, barked excitedly before flinging herself toward the flying snack, colliding headfirst with the glass cubbies. With the impact, one of the cubby holes opened ajar… right along with Aria’s jaw.

“It seems I suddenly have some urgent business to attend to,” the librarian announced so abruptly that she sounded more robot than human. “I will now take my leave, and return in half an hour.”

Aria’s eyes widened.

The librarian mimed looking at the watch she didn’t have. “Oh, look at the time. I really must be going. Will you stay here until I return? During which time you will not be searching for the section on the Holy Trine materials on level ten. Especially not the eyewitness testimonies.” She let out a few fake coughs. “Now I must take my leave to attend this very important meeting. When I return, certain items in the library will not need to be returned to their rightful positions because they will never have been moved in the first place.”

She very melodramatically “snuck out” of the library, looking like she was in some kind of ancient comedic black-and-white film.

When she’d disappeared out the doors, Aria turned to Rio with a look of disbelief. “Did she just do what I think she did? She’s just so incredibly subtle, it’s amazing.”

Rio paid no attention to Aria, too lost in ravaging the snackpocket she’d chivalrously caught mid-flight.

Aria stared at the open cubby and paused. Accessing restricted scrolls was not “staying out of the limelight” as her dad had urged. But then again, did she really need to listen to someone who’d lied to her her entire life?

She slipped the rubber pumps on before she could change her mind. They were two sizes too small, and the heels pinched painfully, but it was too late to back out now. Wincing, she chose one of the trampolines around the edges of the library.

She and her friends had already used the gravitygrass trampolines a lot while studying, and she’d actually gotten quite good at it. The trick was to let out one deep exhalation before leaping up and to try to hold your breath as you levitated. It allowed you to remain steady as you perused the stacks. But she’d never managed to jump past level eight—her head just bounced off the clingfilm-like layer like a soft cloud.

Letting out a deep breath, she bent her legs and jumped. The blurry layer above level seven parted as her head bobbed higher than she’d ever reached. And in a well-practiced motion, she raised her hand, palm side down, stopping herself right in front of the restricted scrolls.

“Level ten!” Aria yelped excitedly.

Her exclamation made her wobble, but she managed to regain her balance as she skimmed a collection of scrolls about the Asleep’s geography, about the forbidden Beyondash (the area beyond the Ash Frontier, from which no Fellow had ever returned alive), about the history of notable heritage families, and then about… the Holy Trine. Her heart raced.

During which time you will not be searching for the section on the Holy Trine materials on level ten. Especially not the eyewitness testimonies, the librarian had said.

She scanned the Holy Trine materials until she came to a subsection of scrolls titled Eyewitness Testimonies that had names assigned to them. Her eyes landed on one.

Ko Iseul.

Aria yelped, immediately grabbing it and returning to the ground. She opened it hastily, but the scroll was blank. The only thing inside was a dried water-lily pad, as if someone had used the scroll as a hiding place for pressed flowers.

Her heart dropped… until she remembered something Librarian Yong had said when teaching Aria to access the waterfiche system.

Water retains its history in its molecules, which makes it the most effective way of logging our historical records.

Aria glanced over at the pink spray bottle on Librarian Yong’s desk and got an idea.

“Hey, Rio, can you bring me that water sprayer?”

With cracker crumbs all over her snout and whiskers, the seedling obliged.

“If water retains history in its molecules,” Aria pondered out loud, “and this water-lily pad is dehydrated, then maybe we need to add back the water.”

She carefully laid the lily pad on the trampoline and sprayed it with a generous douse of water. Even Rio seemed interested as they both gazed down at the wet leaf expectantly.

“I see something!” Aria gasped as the leaf opened up, and the liquid formed a mirrorlike screen, in which a scene began to play.

There was a man. Aria immediately recognized his face.

“This is the last time I’m going to ask you,” said the king, his voice sharp and acidic. “Hand it over now.”

“My dear Ogu, don’t you see?” said the person whose memory this was, her voice silky yet fierce. “If you joined me, imagine the things we could do together. With the power of the Holy Trine behind us, we could change the world!”

Aria leaned farther toward the lily pad. She didn’t need to see her face to know whose eyewitness testimony this was. It was her mom.

“Hand it over, Iseul,” the king demanded, looking at whatever was in her mom’s hands. “Give it to me and I’ll let you leave. I do not want to harm you. This doesn’t have to be difficult.”

Her mom’s gaze lowered toward a glass globe in her hand, inside of which was a single suspended flower, shaped like a heart and as white as snow. A trail of red blood trickled from it, as if the flower itself was bleeding, and a shiver ran down Aria’s spine.

This had to be the Bleeding Bloom that Lion had mentioned in the underground tunnels. He’d said it was hidden inside the ancestral deity statues, and Aria herself had seen the blood dripping into the hourglass from the Devotion Hall. Legend had it that it was a gift from the Holy Trine, who so loved this kingdom that their blood continued to flow through the nation’s heart.

But why was it in her mom’s hands?

“You have always been so narrow-minded, old friend,” Aria’s mom lectured the king. “So trapped by your own self-imposed rules. Why must you fight it so? Let yourself be free.”

The king’s eyes flared. “Do you think everyone has the luxury to be as selfish as you? Without rules, we are nothing.”

“Without freedom, we are nothing!”

The king’s chest heaved. “What you’re committing is royal theft of the highest degree. The Touch of Death does not belong to you, nor does it belong to any one individual. It belongs to the kingdom. It is the blood of our ancestors that flows through our people. Return it at once.”

Aria frowned as understanding dawned on her. The Touch of Death was the Bleeding Bloom. They were one and the same. The mudang had said their mother had died of heartbreak, and that it was Aria’s mom’s fault. Because of her unyielding obsession with the Touch of Death.

Was Aria’s mom so obsessed with this bleeding flower that she’d try to blatantly steal it from the king? Was her mother a thief?

“I cannot return it, Ogu,” Iseul continued, calm but insistent. “Not when Aria is almost thirteen. I promised her the world, and I will not stop until I can give it to her. You can join me. But if you stand in my way, I will not hesitate to make an enemy of you, my old friend.”

Aria froze, as the words sank in. “Not when Aria is almost thirteen.” But her mom had died ten years ago in the Great Outburst. How could that be? Unless… Could her mom still be alive? Rio whimpered and moved in closer to Aria, as if understanding the severity of the realization.

“Do not mistake my compassion for foolishness,” the king snapped, calling upon his royal guards with a flick of his hand. “For I am king and sovereign of this nation, first and foremost. And I will protect my subjects with my life. Even if it means doing that which I must.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Iseul threatened as she watched the guards form a barrier around her.

“This is your last chance, Iseul,” the king said quietly, his eyes pleading and wet with tears. “Please don’t make me do this. Hand it to me.”

There was a pause, as if her mother was mulling it over. But the moment was gone in an instant. “No,” she announced. “I cannot give this up. I will not give up on my daughter, do you hear me? I refuse to give her a broken world!”

The king let the tears fall freely down his face. “Then you break my heart again and give me no choice.” He looked away. “Guards, do what you must.”

The guards closed in, and Aria screamed. There was a kerfuffle for the white flower. Her mother fought to keep it in her hands. She fought for her life. But there were too many of them, and only one of her. She went to grab her norigae but didn’t even get a chance to summon her dreampanion.

Aria slammed her eyes shut. She couldn’t bear to watch.

She heard the sound of shattering glass. A bloodcurdling cry. Then a dull thud.

“No!” she shrieked as Rio howled beside her.

She dared to open her eyes. The eyewitness view was skewed at an unnatural angle on the floor. The blood froze in her veins. That wasn’t just an eyewitness. It was her mom. The scene blinked a few times, and then went black.

Aria’s vision darkened and she stumbled back, feeling her fingers and toes go numb. Rio whined as she licked Aria’s face. But it was no good. Aria’s chest was clamped in a vise. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even cry. She was drowning inside her own body.

This was all a sick, sick prank. Her mom was killed in the Great Outburst when Aria was four. Not when she was almost thirteen, for trying to steal a sacred artifact. None of this made any sense.

Her body lost all feeling. The world darkened even more. Was she dying? Rio wailed in panic as Aria closed her eyes, her body shutting down. Surely, dying would hurt less than this.

“Shhh, Aria, you’re not alone. You’re going to be okay.”

Aria blinked weakly.

“Mom?” she whispered.

Rio crouched down and lifted Aria onto her back for the first time ever. Aria spun around to sink her head into her seedling’s neck, and felt a fleeting moment of comfort while the world crumbled around her.

“We’re here, Aria. It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

“MOM?” ARIA WHISPERED AGAIN, REACHING out for her.

“It’s Lion,” said the calm voice, ushering Rio toward one of the sensory decompression rooms in the Pavilion, with Aria on her back. Novices used the rooms to recover from their long trips to the Seasons.

“And Tui, too. You’re going to be okay, Aria.”

Echo and Tweak made deep rumbling noises as if to let her know they were here also.

“How did you know to find me?” Aria murmured.

Rio placed her carefully on a floating chaise longue.

“We were already on our way to check up on you, because we had an ingenious idea for the Endearing,” Tui explained. “But that’s when we ran into Librarian Yong, who seemed worried about you.”

“I just found out that my mom—that my mom—” Aria couldn’t finish the sentence as the dam behind her eyes finally burst, releasing an avalanche of tears down her face. “She—I can’t believe she—”

“We know,” Tui said softly. “We heard enough to understand what you’ve learned. Who your mom really was.”

“And what happened to her,” Lion whispered. He hung his head and a fat tear fell from his face. “Aria, I’m so sorry for what my abo-mama did to your mom.”

Aria shook her head. “My mom made a choice. And your dad did what he had to do.”

The shock and grief finally caught up to her then, and it all cascaded out of her like a landslide. Her body convulsed violently as she cried and cried until there were no more tears to cry, and then she cried some more. Rio licked them all up, whimpering in solidarity beside her.

When the tears finally dried up, Aria wiped her face. And she hardened herself.

“Why do you think she wanted the Bleeding Bloom?” she whispered. “Why did she try to steal it? Was it worth the price of her life?”

“And why do they call it the Touch of Death?” Tui asked. “Way to give it the most ominous name in the world.”

Lion shifted his weight, looking uncomfortable.

“Lion, what do you know?” Aria demanded.

He exhaled. “Down in the tunnels, I told you that the flower was the Holy Trine’s Gift to humankind, and that it bled from inside the statues. But that’s only part of the story. The full legend says that the Holy Trine gave humanity three Gifts before they departed from our world. One from Grandma Samshin, one from Gardener Igong, and one from Princess Bari. The Gift from Gardener Igong was the Bleeding Bloom. And that’s what’s hidden inside the statue of him in the Devotion Hall.”

He bit his lip. “Knowledge of the three Gifts was another thing the king decreed be kept secret from foreign trialeers—at least until the Trials were over, anyway. Royal Hangukites all know the legend.”

Aria’s mind spun, trying to piece all the various bits of information together. “Okay, but what does the Bleeding Bloom even do?”

Lion winced. “It grants a small piece of Gardener Igong’s very essence.”

“Gardener Igong is the God of Death…” Tui remembered.

“Which means the Bleeding Bloom has the power to… kill?” Aria asked.

Tui whistled. “I can see why they call it the Touch of Death now.”

Lion nodded solemnly. “It’s supposed to hold immense power—enough to destroy entire worlds if it falls into the wrong hands.”

I cannot give this up. I will not give up on my daughter, do you hear me? I refuse to give her a broken world! her mom had screamed before her demise.

It made no sense. If the Bleeding Bloom had the power of ultimate destruction, how did her mom believe she could use it to help Aria?

Lion continued to shuffle his feet.

“Don’t tell me there’s more,” Aria groaned.

“The Bleeding Bloom…” Lion started. “It’s what the anti-slingers have been trying to steal for years. It’s one of the reasons the kingdom has been so closed off from the world. To protect it.”

Aria frowned. “How do they even know it exists?”

“The world tour ten years ago wasn’t just about showing the world our powers,” Lion explained. “It was about information sharing, too. About pooling knowledge and sharing wisdom.” He huffed. “Not that it was reciprocated or anything.”

Tui’s eyes widened. “Wait, wait, wait, hold up the bus. Are you saying Aria’s mom was… an anti-slinger?!”

Lion got flustered. “I’m not saying she was, but I’m saying she was after the same thing as the anti-slingers.” He threw up his hands. “Look, I’m as confused as you guys! She was your mom, Aria, but she was my hero, too. And until seeing that water-lily’s-eye testimony, I didn’t know any of this. I thought she’d died in the Great Tragedy, like my mom.”

Aria remembered that’s what Nam Samchon had thought, too. The general public must not have known she’d tried to steal the Bleeding Bloom.

She shook her head fervently, trying to get a clearer picture. Had her mom’s time in Almiro changed her so much that she’d joined the anti-slinger movement? Her dad had said she’d been bled dry by the discrimination and hate, until she was no longer the woman she used to be. Could she really have been brainwashed by the anti-slingers to hate her own kind so? Like Maxwell Forsythe?

And then a question struck her over the head like a hammer. If her mom had been alive only a couple years ago, why hadn’t she come back for Aria? Why had she hidden herself from Aria this whole time? Why had she abandoned her own daughter?

Suddenly, anger surged through her like a jolt of electricity, and she felt Rio zing with fury beside her. The mudang was right. Ko Iseul, Ersa Loveridge, whoever she was—was only out for herself.

A new round of tears cascaded out of Aria as Rio made a deep howling sound. “I can’t believe it. My mom’s a traitor who abandoned me, and my dad’s been lying to me my entire life. I’m basically an orphan. I’m… I’m all alone.”

Tui took out a bunch of neon Band-Aids from her pocket and slapped two on each of Aria’s hands, and one on Rio’s forehead, too. Then she wrapped Aria in a tight hug.

“Well, that’s hardly fair,” Tui scolded. “Like Nam Samchon said, family aren’t just the people you’re born into.”

“Yeah, we’re family, too, remember?” Lion added, joining the hug, who was quickly joined by Rio, Echo, and Tweak.

Tui laughed. “Not every day you can say you have royal blood in the family.”

Aria’s head snapped up, and she stared between Lion and Tui. Come to think of it, Lion had spoken about his abo-mama earlier, and Tui hadn’t been surprised. “Does this mean you know about—? But the king said—”

“Abo-mama doesn’t always know best,” Lion said defiantly. Then he grinned. “Besides, I’m the Rising Sun of Royal Hanguk. I should be able to share my identity with whomever I choose.”

Tui stuck her tongue out at Lion. “Let’s be honest. I’m a little offended by how long it took you to tell me, but I won’t hold it against you forever. Juuust for a little while longer.” She shrugged good-naturedly. “Besides, the truth always reveals itself in one way or another, right?”

Aria’s deep-seated guilt ratcheted up at that comment. And she realized this was as good a time as ever to tell her friends her own truth. If they hated her for it, that would be Aria’s cross to bear.

“Um, on the topic of coming clean,” Aria started, twiddling her thumbs as her voice trembled, “I haven’t been entirely honest with you guys about who I am, or why I came to the Trials. And I want you to hear the truth from me.”

As they blinked at her expectantly, she told them everything. That her real name was Aria Loveridge. How she came to the Trials as a spy to save her dad’s career, and in a way, to avenge her mom’s death. But that somewhere along the way, things had changed. She’d met them. They’d become a family. And now she was here for the right reasons—to become a Fellow of the Royal League.

She thought it would be hard to be this honest, but the opposite was true. Tui and Lion listened patiently, without judgment, and the truth came gushing out. When it was all out, it felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders, even as she prepared herself for the worst.

“Look, I won’t lie. It’s not cool what you did. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s against the kingdom’s laws,” Tui eventually said.

Lion nodded in confirmation. “And it would’ve been nice if you’d come clean a long time ago.” He sighed. “But honestly, who am I to talk? It’s not like I’ve been honest with you guys, either.”

Tui raised her hand. “I’d just like for it to go on the record that I, on the other hand, have been nothing but honest from the outset.” She shrugged. “But still, I get it. You were working under impossible circumstances. If I were in your shoes, I would probably have done the same.”

Aria felt heat building behind her eyes.

“And for what it’s worth, I really like the name Aria Love,” Lion added.

Tui nodded. “After all, you did all this in the name of love, right? For your mom and your dad. And I dunno, considering everything you’ve just learned about your parents, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to be your own person. Not Ko Iseul’s daughter. Not Jack Loveridge’s daughter. Just you.”

Rio buried her head in Aria’s armpit, nuzzling her until Aria laughed and shoved her away.

“I think someone agrees,” Lion said with a grin.

“Well, I guess it’s only fair…” Aria murmured, “since I named you, Rio, that you have the final say on mine?”

Rio let out a satisfied snort and waggled her stub.

“Then it’s done. From now on, I will forever be known as Aria Love.”

“So then, Aria Love, are you finally ready to hear about the ingenious idea we had for the Endearing?” Tui said, her eyes sparkling.

“Oh?” Now that Tui was saying it, Aria remembered why they’d come to find her in the first place.

Lion raised his brow. “You do realize the third Trial is in two days, right?”

Rio’s ears perked up then, and Aria gasped. “Two days?!”

She’d been so caught up unraveling the shroud of secrets around her that she’d totally forgotten about the final Trial.

“But we’re not ready!” Aria felt flummoxed, looking over at her seedling. Their relationship was only just on the mend. And apart from earlier when Rio carried her to the sensory decompression room on her back, Aria had still not managed to mount the dragon, let alone practice flying. And with Rio’s stub, they’d need more practice than most to get off the ground.

The worry came crashing over her, and she reached out to grab on to Rio. At this rate, there was no way she’d be passing the Endearing. And if she failed, the rules stipulated that seedlings had to be returned to the Asleep. After everything she’d lost, she couldn’t bear losing Rio, too.

She buried her head into Rio’s neck. “No, no, no! I won’t let them take you from me!”

Lion tapped Aria on the shoulder, and when she turned around, there was a glint in his eye. “Well, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about. Tui and I have been studying the rules around the Endearing. And just after you left the Harvest of Service, we had a light-bulb moment.” His cheeks glistened with excitement. “We think we’ve found a way to make sure you pass the final Trial.”

“And you’ll be pleased to know,” Tui added, as Rio bumbled away to chase Tweak, hitting the table and throwing the lowlight lamp to the ground. “It doesn’t involve Rio having to be coordinated, let alone do any actual flying.”

Aria stared wide-eyed at her friends—no, at her family—and she found a surge of hope rushing through her. She had no idea what their idea was. But she trusted them. And if they were sure, then maybe, just maybe, she still had a chance to become a second-year Novice after all.

“NOW TAP ON THE SIDE of the chima like this,” Junghee encouraged Aria, as she demonstrated the specific drumming pattern that would activate her new hanbok design.

Aria copied the motion on the side of her dress. “Like this?”

Before she even finished asking the question, a tingle spread through the material. When she looked down, the full-length hanbok had transformed into a knee-length version, maintaining the traditional crossed collar but with a breezy, pleated wrap skirt. Aria repeated the drumming pattern, only for the dress to return to its full graceful length.

“It worked!” Aria exclaimed.

“It’s coated with shrinktipede saliva,” Junghee explained, triumphant. “I thought it might be a good hanbok to wear for the Endearing today. This way, you’ll be agile getting on and off Rio, and still be fashionable.”

Aria pulled her maid into a grateful hug. “I love it, Junghee. Thank you.”

Junghee pulled away and pretended to have something in her eyes. “If you don’t pass today, I’ll hunt you down and dress you in your sleep. And I’ll make it extra rash-inducing. Mark my words.”

Before Aria could respond, Junghee wagged her finger at Rio, who was still dozing on Aria’s bed. “And you, I’ll never make you a mermaid tail again!”

At that, the seedling bolted out of bed and gave Junghee the biggest puppy-dog eyes Aria had ever seen. The maid laughed and wrapped her arms around the dragon. “Oh, let’s face it, I’d make you eight and turn you into a merdragon octopus if you asked!”

Aria laughed, too. But only on the outside. Inside, she was terrified. And desperate. And…hopeful?

But instead of shoving the emotions down into herself, she allowed them to rise to the surface. Then, taking a big breath, she embraced the whole onslaught of feelings, letting them be what they were. Nothing more, nothing less.

And as she did, a word came to her. And she coined it in her mind:

BRAVSPARK (Noun) (Aria origin): The moment when you realize that fear and hope are two sides of the same coin, and that wanting something so bad it hurts just means you must be doing something right.

Before she could leave the bedchamber, two butterflymails arrived, fluttering eagerly in front of Aria’s face.

One was from Nam Samchon and Saemi, inviting them over for family lunch soon. Samchon’s belly laugh rumbled jovially as he declared he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so Aria and Rio had better pass the Trial today.

The second was from Librarian Yong, who claimed she’d discovered a way to make her snackpan tree grow new types of snacks. If they passed today, she’d allow Aria—albeit reluctantly—to test it with her favorite bung-o-bbang fish pastries.

Aria waited expectantly for something from her dad, despite how their last communication had gone. But nothing came. It made her heart fissure with a pain that was hard to describe, and for a moment she wondered if she could really do this.

She took off her lucky number eight pendant and placed it with her dad’s domino tile. Yes, she could do this. And she didn’t need these lucky charms. Today, she had Rio, and she had her friends. And that was all the luck she’d need.

As if reading her mind, Rio came to lick Aria’s hand, and she took a deep breath. “All right, girl, time for you to become a sapling, and for me to become a Novice. Let’s go.”

By the time Aria and Rio turned up at the slumbersanctum, the forty trialeers were all jumpy and wide-eyed, knowing that by the end of this Trial, their cohort would be half the size. Even Jina, who was normally full of misplaced confidence, was quiet in the corner with her henchman, Eugene, and their solar phoenixes.

“Welcome, trialeers, to the final Trial,” the king announced promptly, as the four Head Scholars and four palace matrons gathered each of their gajok together. “As you are aware, today we will travel to the Asleep to embark on the third and final Trial—the Endearing. For abundance of clarity, let me spell out exactly what will be required of you and your dreampanions today.”

He spoke over the deathly silent cohort. “In today’s Trial, we will test your ability to Journey through the threshold into your Season archway on your dreampanion seedling, whether that be running, swimming, or flying. Your task will be to return from your Season armed with your seasonbilities, which is, of course, the true objective of the Endearing.” He cleared his throat. “As you are untrained, your seasonbilities will be raw and untamed. But this is expected. As long as you can demonstrate the presence of a seasonbility, you will be deemed successful.”

Adebamgbe Bolaji, the Nigerian trialeer from Summer Palace, put up his hand. “What will happen if we fall off on the Journey?”

“If you were to fall off your solar phoenix as you are flying to your archway, Trialeer Bolaji, you will wake up and find yourself back in the slumbersanctum,” the king responded. “And you will be escorted home, as your time with the League will have come to an end.”

“And our seedlings?” asked Misha Mora Perez from Autumn Palace.

“They will remain in the Asleep, returning to whence they came.”

There was an audible gulp as the trialeers clung harder to their dreampanions.

“Those of you heading home today will revert to having recurring dreams of the Heartsglade, as you did before the Trials. Regrettably, you will not be able to control or wield any seasonbilities going forward. They will remain raw and unfiltered as they were before the Trials began,” the king continued. “For those of you who do pass today’s Trial, you will soon learn what we call lucid traveling with your dream guides. And unlike those heading home, you will learn to control and wield your seasonbilities as second-year Novices.”

Everyone winced. Way to spell out the divide. And the chances were as good as tossing a coin.

“If we fail, can we come back next year?” Mason asked hopefully.

“Yeah, can we return for another try?” Daxia echoed.

The king shook his head. “The League does not allow second chances—not because we don’t believe in them, but because the Asleep does not grant dreamers with a second dreampanion.”

Aria shared a startled look with Tui and Lion. So this was it. One try and one try only.

“Any final questions before we reconvene in the Heartsglade?” the king asked.

Tiare ran her hands down her two pigtails and cleared her throat. “What if more than twenty of us make it to our Season archways?”

“Good question, Trialeer Taina. We will be timing each of your Journeys. If there are more than twenty of you who pass, you will be ranked from quickest to slowest time, and we will take the top twenty.”

Panic gripped Aria’s chest, and Tui squeezed her hand. Aria was hopeful their plan would work, but would she be fast enough?

“Then without further ado, palace matrons, please prepare your trialeers for travel,” the king concluded.

Their Sang-Gung Mama helped tie their seedlings to them using the special red string, and then giving them each a tight hug, she wished them luck before sprinkling their heads with slumberdust.

“Hope to see you all as Novices,” she murmured thickly, as they all closed their eyes.

Autumn Palace was first up, and the king and Head Scholars led the forty trialeers toward the sea in the west. The archway was at ground level but far away from where they all stood, looking like an airport runway made of autumn leaves. Aria shivered. The West Sea of Floating Leaves looked beautiful, but the experience of falling through them into the empty abyss was anything but.

Head Scholar Tak and his harvest tiger, Kit, stepped forward with a clipboard and stopwatch.

“Let’s get this Trial on the road,” he announced, twiddling his mustache gems excitedly. “First up, Zahra Amini. Please approach the edge of the sea with your seedling.”

Zahra was as calm as a painting as Tui gave her a quick hug, and she jumped on the back of her harvest tiger, Rahi, and approached the edge.

“Good luck, trialeer,” Head Scholar Tak declared. “Please begin your Journey in three. Two. One!”

As he activated the stopwatch, Zahra’s tiger confidently leapt onto the leaf-covered runway and began running. Each footstep was as light as a feather, hardly denting the amber leaves that were floating on air. They were making good time toward the archway when Rahi’s footing suddenly slipped, making Zahra lurch dangerously off her seedling’s body.

Everyone gasped. Zahra screamed, but she managed to grab hold of her tiger before she fell, hanging on by one hand, even as her legs dropped below the leaves of the sea.

“No!” Tui yelped. “She’s slipping off!”

The seedling roared in panic, not knowing what to do. It spun around in circles, making things even worse for Zahra. Aria felt her body tense as she watched Zahra cling on to Rahi for dear life.

Just when Aria thought she couldn’t possibly cling on for a moment longer, Zahra took advantage of the momentum of her spinning tiger to hook her legs over its body. She quickly climbed back up to a sitting position, and against all odds, she was straddling Rahi’s back once more.

The cohort cheered loudly as Rahi sprinted down the rest of the runway, finally reaching the archway and disappearing through the threshold to Autumn with a glass-shattering sound.

Aria and her gajokmates held their collective breaths, waiting for Zahra to return. And just when Aria thought she’d go blue in the face, Zahra and Rahi sprinted back out of the gateway. Zahra threw her hands up in the air as if high-fiving the sky, and all the leaves from the sea came alive with the wind, creating a tornado of foliage.

Head Scholar Tak congratulated Zahra as she and Rahi returned to solid ground. “Well done, Trialeer Amini. You’ve kicked the Trials off to a rather dramatic start!”

Everyone congratulated her as the next trialeers from Autumn Palace took their turns attempting the Journey. Rihaan Munro, who was wearing an orange beret with his kilt, was next and returned successfully, despite squealing all the way. But the next handful of trialeers failed before Sarah-Jess Baek, a heritage trialeer, broke the streak by making it across. By the time the Autumn trialeers had all attempted the Journey, only five of them were left.

The mood was a heady, prickly thing, as the king led the cohort next to the sea in the north. The archway here wasn’t visible above the ice-capped body of water, as the trialeers would have to swim beneath the surface to reach it. Head Scholar Kim wheeled herself toward the edge, accompanied by her onesie-wearing frost turtle, and took the stopwatch and clipboard from Head Scholar Tak.

Unfortunately, the first three trialeers never returned from their dive into the icy sea. And by the time it was Mason Hewett’s turn to dive under, the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife.

“Make a shrine of my cheeky smile if I don’t make it baaack!” he sang nervously to lighten the mood. “And make sure to get my good side!” But no one laughed. The stakes were too real.

“You’ve got this,” Zahra assured him, as she took off one of her bracelets and wrapped it around Mason’s wrist. It had the word IMPOSSIBLE spelled out with beads, just like the one she’d gifted Tui. “It might seem impossible, but remember—if you break the word apart, and make space for you to exist in there, it can actually spell I’m Possible. You choose which one it is.”

Mason flashed one of his full-watt smiles before giving Zahra a grateful hug. Then he shook out every finger and toe before jumping on the back of his frost turtle, Rico. As Head Scholar Kim counted him down, his turtle leapt into the frosty depths. Only a few minutes had passed when suddenly, a deep grumbling started from inside the frigid sea. It grew louder and louder until the thin ice shattered, and Mason and Rico exploded out of the water, riding an ice shard like a surfboard.

“Surf’s up!” he yelled victoriously.

This time, everyone did laugh.

Niko Horvat went next, his pink-and-blue braces flashing in his mouth as his teeth chattered with nerves. Mason must’ve broken the string of bad luck, because Niko passed, as did Susan Grace-Oh, a heritage trialeer, and another two trialeers from Winter Palace.

Before Aria knew it, two out of the four gajok had already completed the Endearing, and next up was Spring Palace.

“No need to be nervous, trialeers,” Head Scholar Bobby-Uma counseled them as she took the clipboard and stopwatch from Head Scholar Kim. “Just do as you have done in the trainings. Focus on you and your seedling and forget about everything else.”

Aria groaned. That was easier said than done, especially when she and Rio hadn’t once been able to complete the training exercise. She stood next to Rio, clutching her coral scales like a life raft as her fellow gajokmates attempted the Journey, one by one.

Tui volunteered to go first, and she made it look like she’d been doing this her entire life. Tweak leapt into the air as if she had jets in her feet, and they did a few graceful loop-the-loops as Tui yelled happily into the sky. They broke through the archway with a shattering sound, and when they came back out, Tui’s face was flushed and her eyes shining. She released her hands, and a shower of acid ejected from her palms like a fountain.

“Go, Tui!” Aria and Lion yelled as Rio and Echo jumped up and down with joy. Zahra and her harvest tiger cheered even louder.

Tiare was next up, and she even did a fancy cartwheel on the back of her dragon while suspended in the air, her white flower staying put behind her ear the entire time. Lion followed up with a valiant effort, and despite not looking nearly as graceful or stable as Tui or Tiare, he managed to showcase his strength by returning from the archway armed with enough power to control the entire sea of plants. He made the sharp-toothed plants tilt their heads from side to side like a marionette master, and the cohort cheered.

Jaxon Campbell was next, and he managed to overcome his fear of heights (and the structural integrity of his mullet mohawk) to succeed, albeit with a slower time. But then both Hiroto Günther and Kristina Ivanova fell into the sea, losing their one chance to become Novices. By the time it was Aria’s turn to attempt the Journey, she was starting to feel delirious and woozy, and frankly, sick to her stomach.

“Please step forward to the edge with your seedling, Trialeer Love,” Head Scholar Bobby-Uma encouraged her, hooking a streak of blue hair behind her ear.

Aria pulled on Rio’s neck. “We can do this,” she whispered into her seedling’s ear. “We don’t have to do it alone, and with our friends, we are capable of more than we think…Right?”

We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.

She felt the force of the sea luring her into its void. Although, for the first time, she realized that the pull wasn’t so much coming from the sea itself, but rather from beyond. Much farther beyond.

We’re here! We’re here! We’re here!

Rio’s ears perked and she huddled in closer to Aria, as if the seedling could hear the voice, too. And when Rio’s body keeled into her, Aria somehow knew, deep in her gut, that the call was coming from beyond the Ash Frontier—from the Beyondash, the place from which no Fellow had ever returned with their life intact.

WE’RE HERE. WE’RE HERE. WE’RE HERE.

Aria shuddered and pushed the voice away. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she knew right now was not the time to heed its call. Right now, she had a Trial to pass.

As Bobby-Uma pulled out the stopwatch, Aria took a deep breath and turned back to face her friends. She nodded to let them know she was ready. Tui and Lion immediately stepped forward, accompanied by their seedlings.

As the rest of the cohort watched in confusion, Tui and Lion helped get Rio into the harness that Junghee had expertly woven for her. Then, activating the shrinktipede function on her hanbok, Aria climbed onto Rio’s back without her dress getting in the way.

Her friends flanked her, each mounted on their own seedling, and they reached out to take hold of the handles on Rio’s harness. Unlike Aria, Rio trembled with giddiness, as if she couldn’t think of anything more fun than going for a ride in the sky, being carried by her friends.

As the three friends and three bloom dragons approached the edge of the sea, murmurs spread among the cohort. The king raised a brow.

“This is against the rules!” Jina argued, clambering forward to approach the king. “You can’t fly someone to their Season, that’s preposterous! You have to fly yourself! You must stop this!”

Before anyone could respond, Tui spoke up. “Well, Jina, if you’d actually read the rules you so devoutly follow, you’ll know that there’s nothing in there that prohibits a trialeer being flown with assistance.”

“But it doesn’t say you can, either!” Jina put her hands on her hips. “Just because it’s not written explicitly doesn’t mean it’s allowed. It’s never been done before. There’s no precedent for this!”

Lion nodded. “You’re right, it hasn’t ever been done before, because no one has ever thought of helping a fellow trialeer. That probably hasn’t crossed your mind coming from the Season of the Rule, but for us in Spring Palace, where kindness blooms at the dawn of all breath, we like helping each other out.”

Head Scholar Byun huffed in support of his niece and turned toward the king. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, please tell me you aren’t going to allow these trialeers to question your authority. I know you’re in Central Palace, but you have a solar phoenix, so you’re an honorary member of our Season of the Rule. You must not allow these trialeers to make a jest of the very foundation our League is built on!”

The king clasped his hands behind his back and frowned. But he didn’t respond. So Aria took the opportunity to speak.

“Your Majesty, you said before that the true objective of the Endearing is not whether we can make it to the archway, but whether we can harness the seasonbility our Season grants us. As long as I can return from Spring armed with my seasonbility, and be able to demonstrate it, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to have a helping hand.”

Head Scholar Bobby-Uma, who had been listening with interest, now nodded, allowing the edges of her lips to curl upward. “Your Majesty, you’ve always instilled in us the spirit of service and community. We are a people who care and look out for our own. And while our bonds with our dreampanions are what make us Fellows, it is the bond we share with one another that makes us family.”

She looked to the king with her piercing two-colored gaze. “As long as this camaraderie is expressed within acceptable rule boundaries, I don’t see why Trialeer Love should be penalized for embodying the League’s very values.”

Aria held her breath as they waited for the king to make his call. A muscle in his jaw twitched as he considered the question. He looked reluctant and severe, and Aria could almost see the conflict in his eyes.

He’d loved Aria’s mother so much that he’d organized an entire world tour for her, only for her to betray him. He’d been forced to execute her. And now here was Aria, the spitting image of her, serving as a chilling reminder of his actions, of his past, and of his long-lost childhood love. Aria didn’t envy the storm of emotions he must be feeling right now.

Eventually, he blinked as if awakening from his memories. And finally, he nodded.

“I will allow it,” he said simply.

Head Scholar Byun and Jina raised their arms in protest, but Aria squealed with triumph. “Thank you, thank you, Your Majesty!”

“You ready for this, Aria Love?” Tui asked, letting go of Aria’s hand to grab back on to the harness handle. “And you, Rio?”

Rio snorted excitedly, and Aria gripped the saddle tightly. “As ready as we’ll ever be.”

“We’ll take it easy for takeoff, then gain speed once we’ve found our balance,” Lion said as he and Tui clipped their seedlings onto Rio’s harness. They’d need both slingers and both dreampanions to carry the weight between them.

Aria looked up at the archway suspended in the sky. “It’s now or never.”

“Good luck, Trialeer Love,” Head Scholar Bobby-Uma declared. “Please begin your Journey in three. Two. One!”

Tweak and Echo leapt off the ground, lifting Aria and Rio between them. They grunted with the weight, and as her stomach dropped with the ascent, Aria clamped her eyes shut. Without her sight, her center of gravity shifted, and she slipped a little off Rio’s back. She yelped, but Rio shifted her body to center Aria again, while Tweak and Echo adjusted their flight to recalibrate their balance.

“Okay, we’re stable,” Lion said between grunts. “Now let’s fly!”

And suddenly, just like that, they were moving. Aria opened her eyes and gasped. She was soaring!

As the archway to Spring approached in the distance, Aria didn’t dare let go of her grip, but she did sit taller on Rio’s back, feeling the breeze whoosh through her hair. Aaaah! The violet of the Asleep sky came down to meet her, and she felt euphoric. So this was how Tui and Lion felt when they glided across the sky! She felt wild and free and more alive than she’d ever felt before.

“Get ready, Aria!” Tui shouted as they neared the archway. The threshold glistened in the light, inviting Aria in. “We’re going to first unhook you, then swing you back and forth a few times to create momentum. And then it’ll be up to you, okay?”

“Okay!” Aria shouted back as she activated her thighs, ready to leap with the momentum. “Rio, you ready, girl?”

The seedling belly-growled in agreement.

“One, two, three, swing!” Lion yelled.

“Whoa!” Aria held on tighter to Rio as they swung like a pendulum back and forth, then back and forth again.

We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.

“NOW!” Tui cried.

With the final forward push, they let go, and Aria and Rio went careening into the glistening threshold.

THERE WAS A GLASS-SHATTERING sound as they broke through the archway. And as soon as Rio’s feet slammed down on the open meadow of Spring, Aria’s senses were utterly overwhelmed.

She’d been in Spring before, during the pretrial. But this was different. Everything was heightened. She could almost taste the nectar wafting on the breeze. She could see every dewdrop on the green grasses beneath. She could hear the sounds of the strange and wondrous animals murmuring inside their burrows and scuttling up the trees. It was almost as if she was no longer visiting Spring, but rather was now a part of Spring.

Her fingers tingled, and when she looked down at her hands, they were shimmering like gold glitter. The tingle spread through the rest of her body, to the tips of her hairs and the ends of her toes. Aria dismounted, and when Rio turned to face her, Aria could see her own reflection captured in her dreampanion’s eyes. Her entire body was glistening incandescently, as if she was bathed in liquid sunlight. And she felt like her entire being had been jolted awake, as if every moment until now, she’d merely been asleep.

Rio took a step toward her, as if to ask, Are you ready?

Aria nodded. She didn’t know what for, but she felt ready for anything right now!

Rio took another step forward, then another, and another, until she crossed into Aria’s space completely. Aria didn’t know how it was possible, but their two bodies were superimposed over each other—as if the two parts of their one soul had finally met again.

Aria felt an explosion surrounding their bodies, and then a tugging of herself toward Rio, as Rio pulled toward her. A sticky warmth devoured her every pore, and it felt as if Spring were the glue that was melding them together. To merge them and make them whole again.

When Rio finally pulled herself away and stepped out of Aria’s orbit, Aria felt a sense of euphoria wash over her. They were no longer physically attached, but she could feel their bond. They were no longer two separate entities. They were fused. They were endeared.

As if feeling it too, Rio’s eyes went wide and watery. “We did it!”

Aria gasped. “Rio, I heard you! Like, I actually heard your voice. In my head! You talked to me!”

“I did, oh yes, I did!” Rio purred and rubbed her head against Aria’s shoulder. “I think we have a lot to learn about each other, and even more for us to learn together. But I trust you. And I want to be your dreampanion. Will you be my dreamslinger?”

Aria gripped her seedling tightly and felt the love surge in her chest. “Yes, I will, Rio. I will.”

“Okay, but promise me you will listen when I have something to say? You won’t try to control me, force me, or worse—ignore me?” The seedling gave Aria a dubious side-eye.

Aria lowered her eyes, remembering how she’d neglected her seedling for so long. And how she’d resorted to anger when Rio hadn’t done things her way, instead of really trying to understand why.

“I hope you know how sorry I am. I promise I will listen. I’m still learning, but I’m going to do everything in my power never to disappoint you again.”

“Oh, goody!” The seedling sniffed her hair, then licked it, plastering it against her scalp like wet glue. “It also wouldn’t go amiss if you wanted to give me lots of snacks. I do covet snacks, oh, I do! Echo and Tweak are good at sharing—they are great friends and I love them, too—but their slobber is not very delicious. Especially Echo’s.” The dragon shuddered.

Aria laughed, and it came from a deep, unbridled place in her belly. “I think snacks could be arranged.”

As if satisfied, Rio wriggled her tail stump. “Well, jump on, then, Ari-Ari. Let’s go back and show them what we can do.”

“Hey, did you just give me a nickname?”

“Do you like it? Ari-Ari. I just came up with it! I’m rather proud of it.”

Aria beamed. “I love it.”

With Aria on her back, Rio ran for the archway, which no longer had a sparkly glass-like film closing it off. It was open now, and went two ways, and Aria knew that meant they were now allowed to travel to Spring at their whim. Excitedly, Rio ran through the open gate… only to hiss loudly and skid to a stop.

“Oh, right,” Aria muttered as they looked down from the lip of the floating archway in the sky. The East Sea of Poisonous Plants loomed below. “We still can’t fly.”

Rio paused before huffing excitedly. “We might not be able to fly, but we can slide down!”

Rio surged with energy, and Aria felt like her body was charging with electricity. She was a live wire, and the power came in wave after wave, filling each molecule of her being with a sherbet-like fizziness. Just when she thought her skin would surely burst, Rio called to her.

“You all charged up, Ari-Ari? Now, let’s build a slide! I love slides!”

Aria had no idea how Rio was expecting them to build a slide—let alone one that would deliver them all the way back to the ground. But she recalled what they’d learned in the briefing about seasonbilities. She needed to form a sphere with her hands to hone the energy surging between her and her dreampanion. Then she was supposed to just… let it go. Apparently, the result would take care of itself.

Aria frowned. “But…how?”

“Come on, Ari-Ari!” Rio whined. “Don’t you trust me?”

This time, Aria didn’t hesitate. “I trust you completely. Okay, then, here goes nothing!”

She formed a sphere with her hands, and gathering the torrent of energy inside her, she released it out toward the sea.

There was a collective gasp from the cohort below as Aria’s seasonbility began to manifest. The earth beneath the East Sea of Poisonous Plants awoke as if being called to duty, and the soil rose up to build a grooved construction in front of their eyes. It began at the lip of the archway in the sky and twisted around a few times, gliding all the way down to solid ground, where the rest of the cohort awaited.

“It’s an actual slide!” Aria exclaimed, giddy with excitement. “Rio, you built an actual slide!”

“No, we built it. Together!” Rio whinnied like a horse before leaping on. “First one down gets all the best treats! Or rather, last one down has to eat all of Echo’s slobber snacks! Ewww!”

Aria immediately jumped onto the slide after Rio, and it was only when they both safely dismounted on the ground that the earth started to dissipate, returning to the poison sea.

The king studied Aria curiously as Head Scholar Bobby-Uma beamed with pride. “That’s the most creative seasonbility demonstration I’ve ever seen, Trialeer Love,” she declared.

Aria let the pride settle into her chest as her friends came over to pull her and Rio into a hug.

“ROAR!” Lion said, positively shouting.

“CHIRP!” Tui yelled, even louder.

Aria grinned and hugged them back.

“SNORT!” she echoed.

“I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE,” whined Niko as the twenty-one successful trialeers loitered in the slumbersanctum back at the Pavilion, awaiting the final rankings. “This waiting is torture! How long could it possibly take to rank our Journey times?!”

“Try moving—it helps me,” Misha suggested as she started doing cartwheels around the edge of the room.

“I can’t believe after all that, one of us is going to be cut,” Tiare whispered. She looked around the room, shivering. “We look decimated. Just this morning, there were twice as many of us. And now poof! Nineteen of us. Just gone.”

“And another one of us about to go.” Zahra frowned. “We all passed the Endearing, fair and square. It doesn’t seem right that someone will have to go home, just because of some arbitrary number of Novices they’ve decided to take on.”

Aria huddled with Rio, stroking her coral scales, too scared to really let out a proper breath, let alone join the conversation. One trialeer in this room was going to be sent home. She knew she was as likely to be on the chopping board as anyone else.

“Thank you for your patience,” the king announced as he and the four Head Scholars finally entered the slumbersanctum. “We now have our ranking list by time of Journey.”

Everyone sat up to attention, huddling closer to each other, as if their bodies could form a physical barrier against the loss of one member.

The king stood rigidly before the cohort as the four scholars lingered behind him. He cleared his throat. “After a scrutinizing look at the Journey times, we regretfully announce that the last trialeer leaving the Trials today will be… Zahra Amini.”

Aria blinked as Lion stilled to a stone beside her. It was as if the freeze button had been pressed on the entire cohort. No one even gasped out loud. It was only when Zahra and her harvest tiger, Rahi, abruptly stood from their huddled position that time finally caught up with them again.

“That’s totally ridiculous!” Tui now cried, voicing what everyone was thinking. “Zahra can’t be the one to leave! She was the first to complete the Knowing, the first to sprout, and the first to unfurl. Against all odds, she managed to climb back onto Rahi today and complete the Endearing. No one would’ve been able to do what she did. How could it be her?”

The twenty trialeers all called out Yeah! in agreement as Head Scholar Tak raised his hands.

“It pains me to have to defend this decision, because Trialeer Amini has, indeed, been a model trialeer.” He winced, and even his mustache gems seemed to lose their luster. “But it was agreed only the top twenty times would be chosen. And her time was the slowest.” He gave Zahra a sympathetic look. “I am afraid the slip in balance during the Journey today has cost you more than time.”

“No!”

“This isn’t right!”

“This can’t be happening!”

The cohort cried out in dissent. But palace guards had already come to take Zahra away, and Head Scholar Tak looped a strange shimmering collar over the tiger’s neck. Seeing her dreampanion be seized, Zahra’s calm exterior finally cracked.

“No, Rahi!” she cried as the guards started pulling her away. Her seedling roared, trying to run to Zahra. But the shimmering collar kept the dreampanion frozen in place. The tiger’s eyes widened in fear as she watched her dreamslinger get farther and farther away, and it felt like they were physically ripping a third of Zahra’s soul from her. Aria felt a piece of her own heart rip inside her chest.

“Tell them to stop, Ari-Ari!” Rio pleaded to her in her mind. “This is too cruel! They are endeared. They cannot tear this bond. It is sacred!”

“No, no, no!” Mason cried out loud, as Zahra was removed from the slumbersanctum’s doors, crying and shouting.

“She was the best of us!” Tui yelled.

Tui and Zahra had fostered a special bond during the Trials. They were both confident high achievers, sharing an understanding about their duty to their people waiting back home in New Zealand and Iran.

As Head Scholar Tak dragged away a resisting Rahi, Lion hung his head. “This is all my fault. It’s because of me that Abo-mama only allowed twenty Novices to pass.”

“It’s not your fault,” Tui whispered, even as she let a tear fall down her cheek. “It’s thanks to you that we’re even here.”

Tui was right. This wasn’t Lion’s fault. Still, outrage boiled under Aria’s skin. She thought of how rigid the king had been toward her mom in the water-lily’s-eye testimony, too. And she clenched her fists. She could understand why the king did what he did, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t room for change.

“Not today, but I promise when the time is right, we’ll do everything in our power to help Zahra,” Aria murmured to her friends. “We’ll find a way to bring her back. Her and Rahi.”

“But how?” Tui asked. “You can’t re-endear yourself to a severed dreampanion. It’s impossible.”

Aria pointed to the friendship bracelet around Tui’s wrist. “I don’t know, but like Zahra said, if you break the word impossible apart, it can spell I’m Possible. We just need to make room for hope.”

She remembered Maksym at the Knowing, being sent back to a home where dreamslingers were being locked up. Or Antoni Kowalski, who, if not for Maxwell Forsythe’s anti-slinger tirade, might still be standing with them today. Not to mention all the others that they’d lost along the way. She thought of her friends back at Resthaven, who didn’t even know what the League was capable of doing for them.

She realized now she really did mean what she’d written in the Knowing exam. The League should be helping all dreamslingers to succeed, not just a chosen few. And if the League wasn’t going to be more inclusive, then she and her friends would have to change the League. From the inside.

Tui nodded defiantly. “Once we’re trained and capable, there won’t be an end to what we can do to shake things up around here.”

Rio, Echo, and Tweak growled in support. And Lion puffed up his chest, his regal background shining through. “You guys are right. First, we focus on getting inducted and trained. Then we plan the League takeover. After all, I am the Rising Sun of this kingdom.”

It should have been a celebratory moment as the twenty remaining trialeers—no, twenty pre-inductees—basked in their glory. But the mood was solemn as the cohort made their way to the Devotion Hall to pay respects to the Holy Trine. The mudang demanded that they give thanks to the spiritual ancestors of the kingdom for allowing them to pass the final Trial.

Aria kept her distance from the mudang—whose injuries seemed to be healing well—as she stared at the statue of Gardener Igong. The Bleeding Bloom was hidden somewhere inside all that marble, and Aria couldn’t stop seeing the scene of her mom and the king play out in her mind’s eye. Could her mom really have been brainwashed by the anti-slingers? Was that really the reason she’d risked—and lost—her life for the ancient relic?

A high-pitched alarm suddenly sounded inside the Devotion Hall, and the cohort all covered their ears.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten rid of my earmuffs so soon!” Lion cried.

Aria and Tui shared a look. This sound wasn’t new to them. It was the same alarm used during the lockdown drills the king had enforced after the Chuseok attack.

The mudang, wincing, called the cohort to attention over the noise. “Pre-inductees! This is not a drill. The kingdom is now in lockdown. Someone help me with the doors!”

There was a flurry of activity as the pre-inductees and their seedlings flitted between full-on panic and helping the mudang. Aria was helping Tui and Lion secure one sliding door when a blue butterfly fluttered at her cheek. It looked harried. Urgent. She reached out for it.

“Meet me outside NOW,” a familiar voice sounded in her head. “Quick. We don’t have much time!”

Rio nudged her side. “What is it, Ari-Ari?”

“It’s… It’s my dad,” she whispered to her bloom dragon. “He said to meet him outside, but—”

Surely, her dad couldn’t be outside here. As in here at the Devotion Hall. In the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk.

Before she could tell her friends where she was going, she pulled on her seedling. “Come on, Rio. We gotta go find him.”

ARIA RAN OUTSIDE INTO THE empty courtyard of Central Palace.

“Dad? Where are you?!”

Rio barked and loped toward the little stone bridge overlooking a man-made stream. “I smell someone strange over here, Ari-Ari!”

Aria ran over as the familiar sight of home scrambled to his feet, propping himself up with the wooden cane that had Aria’s crocheted cozy wrapped around it.

“Sparkler?”

“DAD!”

In that moment, Aria forgot all about the lies and the secrets, and how furious she was with him. All she knew was that her dad—her dad—was here. She leapt into his arms and hugged him so tight, she couldn’t tell where she ended and he started.

“Oh, Sparkler, my baby girl,” he murmured, burying his head in her hair. “God, I missed you so much.”

Rio nudged Aria in the side, and Aria pulled back from her dad and wiped her eyes. “Dad, this is my seedling—well, soon-to-be sapling, Rio. She’s a bloom dragon.”

Her dad’s eyes widened in equal part fear and awe as he took in Rio’s formidable form. She was still young, still not fully grown, but she was big enough to rip a person to shreds if she wanted. Her tail stub twitched as she gazed longingly at his walking cane.

“Whoa,” he breathed. “I don’t know if you know, but your mom had a harvest tiger. Her name was Sol.”

Aria exhaled sharply. At the mention of her mother, her anger toward her dad came rushing back to her. She stiffened and took a step back.

“Why are you here?!” she demanded, as Rio growled. “Are you following in Mom’s footsteps and becoming an anti-slinger?”

His eyes widened. “What? Ersa wasn’t an anti-slinger!”

“Then why?” Aria put her hand on Rio for strength. “Have you come to steal me away from the League? Well, I have news for you. I don’t want to leave. I want to be a Fellow of the Royal League.”

Her dad winced. “I promise to tell you everything later. No more lies. But for now, I have to keep you safe, and there’s not enough time. We can’t stay here. They’re coming. We have to run.”

He grabbed her wrist, but she shook him off. “Who’s coming? The anti-slingers?”

He nodded nervously. “They’re coming through the tunnels as we speak. We have to get out of here before they get to the Devotion Hall.”

“How do they even know there are tunnels that lead to—” Aria’s blood froze. She narrowed her eyes at her dad. “You—you told them? You sold my intel to the anti-slinger movement?!”

Aria felt such a surge of betrayal move through her, she thought she could see red. Then her brain whirred painfully, doing the math. She gasped. “And the mudang. She was attacked at Chuseok after I wrote my report to you mentioning her. That was you, too, wasn’t it?”

She’d written that the mudang had chased her and her friends out of the underground tunnels when Lion had taken them down to see the bloody hourglass. The anti-slingers must’ve injured her to remove her from the equation. So she wouldn’t find them sneaking through the secret tunnels.

His green eyes reddened, and he grabbed Aria’s wrist again. “Sparkler, you don’t understand. There are powers so much bigger than us at play here. I had to do what I had to do. To keep you safe.”

“You made me put my friends in danger!” Aria screamed, trying to free herself from his grasp.

“Don’t be naive, Aria,” he snapped, ignoring Rio’s warning growl. “The anti-slinger movement back home is growing in power and public support. Don’t tell me you haven’t figured out how the commissioner aligns himself.”

Aria remembered the cold indifference of the head of the US Department of Dreamslinger Relations as he shipped Aria off to the Annual Trials. How easily he threw her dad’s National Dreamslinger Home Rollout Initiative to the curb, and how hungry he was for intel about Royal Hanguk. Her dad was right. She should’ve known. Of course he was part of the anti-slinger movement.

“There’s a precarious balance to uphold in order for us to continue pushing for dreamslinger welfare back home. We have to play the game, or else we’ll be squashed. Do you hear me?” His eyes were wild now. “I had to give them something in exchange for your safety. That’s all that matters.”

Aria clenched her fists as steam started billowing from Rio’s nostrils. She might not have seen it before, but it was so clear now. Lion said the anti-slingers had been wanting the Bleeding Bloom for years. And because of her report to her dad, she’d inadvertently told them where it was and exactly how to find it.

Come to think of it, hadn’t Commissioner Reid studied the dahlia in the vase on her dad’s desk, before reaching out to crush it in his hand? He’d even mumbled something about bleeding flowers. Maybe the Bleeding Bloom had been his target all along.

Rio bared her teeth at Aria’s dad, making him finally loosen his grip. And that was all the time Aria needed to make a run for it.

“Aria, NO!” her dad’s voice boomed.

With Rio right behind her, Aria sprinted toward the Devotion Hall, slipping back through one of the final open doors as a barrage of new voices sounded from inside.

“Aria!” Lion’s voice cried out from behind her. “Get out of here while you still can!”

Aria looked around, bewildered. In the time she’d been outside, the Devotion Hall had been ambushed by masked soldiers in heavy black combat gear. They were carrying guns and weapons, and they’d trapped the mudang and the entire cohort inside a strange cage. Aria ran up to the pen and grabbed the bars, only to hiss in pain and step back.

“It’s some kind of laser,” Tui explained from inside the barred prison, raising her burned hands to illustrate. “Don’t touch them! And don’t let them get to Rio!”

That’s when Aria saw the frozen statues around the hall. Except they weren’t statues at all. They were… dreampanions. She gasped when she saw Echo and Tweak, both frozen mid-hiss, their whiskers still with fury. The intruders had somehow frozen the entire cohort’s seedlings. Rio whimpered.

Aria turned toward the soldiers, only to see one of them coming for her. Rio got to him before he reached Aria, and the seedling sank her teeth into his arm. He howled in pain and raised his other arm. Then he pointed his weapon at Aria.

The world blurred out of focus as Aria looked into the barrel of the gun. The soldier cocked the hammer. And then everything seemed to move in slow motion. Her friends screamed from their laser cage. Rio shrieked and ran for her.

But before the dragon reached Aria, a body leapt in front of her.

When time caught up with her again, Aria looked down to see her dad on the ground, his cane discarded on the floor, clutching his bleeding arm. The bullet had gone right through him.

“Dad!” she cried, falling to her knees. “You already have a bad leg. You trying to lose an arm, too?!”

The armed soldier grunted and raised a metal baton their way, some kind of high-tech device. Immediately, a laser cage surrounded them on all sides, trapping Aria, her dad, and Rio inside.

“We’ve already wasted enough time,” one of the armed soldiers shouted, pointing at the three statues of the Holy Trine. “Get started!”

Aria ripped the long ribbon off her jeogori and wrapped it around her dad’s arm. Then she watched in horror as the intruders used various forms of ballistics to begin blowing up the statues.

They began with the statue of Princess Bari, before moving on to Grandma Samshin. They blew them up bit by bit, piece by piece, as the mudang shrieked and cursed from the other cage. Aria realized in her report, she’d never specified which of the three statues the Bleeding Bloom was in—just that it was hidden inside one of them. She hadn’t known then it was inside Gardener Igong.

“Blasphemy!” the mudang cried. “May you be cursed by the Holy Trine for generations to come!”

By the time they got to the statue of the God of Death, Aria understood.

We can’t let this disease spread. We need to nip it in the bud before it festers and rots and ruins all of society, Maxwell had said in the Nursery as he cut down the dreampanion plants. The world doesn’t need any more of our genetic curse. We need to cleanse the world of our dreamslinger filth!

The anti-slingers wanted to use the ultimate destructive power of the Bleeding Bloom to kill all dreamslingers. They wanted to wipe dreamslingers from this world.

As voices started growing from the courtyard outside the Hall, Aria turned to see the intruders using their devices to construct metal walls as thick as bank safes over each door. There was no way, not even with seasonbilities or nightjoys, that anyone could penetrate that—not fast enough, anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Aria whispered to no one in particular, as the soldiers reached the outer edge of the Bloom, its heady energy glowing powerfully from the exposed marble of Gardener Igong’s mutilated body. “This is all my fault. I should never have come to the League. I should never have entered the Trials.”

With a grunt of triumph, one of the soldiers reached in to pull out the white heart-shaped flower floating inside the statue. But as soon as they did, their eyes began to bleed. The blood flowed and flowed, filling their mask. They screamed and pulled their mask off, but the blood continue to pour out of their eyes, until there was no blood left in their body. They crumpled to the floor, crimson pooling around them, drained of their very life source.

Aria gasped with horror. She could see now why it was referred to as the Touch of Death.

“They don’t know how to transport it,” her dad whispered, wincing from the pain in his arm. “They don’t realize it’s too powerful and too lethal for human hands to touch.”

Just then, there was a resounding explosion that blew Aria’s ears out and sent debris flying through the hall. Rio leapt over her protectively. When Aria’s ears stopped ringing and she peeked out from Rio’s shelter, she saw the barricaded doors had fallen like sheets of paper.

And through the opening entered a woman. Tall, elegant, and striking in a fierce, intimidating way. She had no norigae or dreampanion, but she opened her hand and conjured an orb directly in her palm. It wasn’t violet and sparking with golden electricity like the nightjoy orbs. Hers was icy white, with a dense fog swirling inside.

She slung the orb at the air above the soldiers, releasing a sheet of rain, and immediately, the masked intruders fell to the ground like dolls. She conjured another two orbs, slinging them simultaneously at the laser cages, releasing Aria and her friends from their prisons.

“I detest cages,” she mused.

Finally, she slung a fourth one at the dreampanions, releasing them from their frozen state.

Aria’s dad moaned from the ground, and the mudang snarled as the king and the four Head Scholars rushed into the Devotion Hall, surrounded by a troop of palace guards.

But Aria couldn’t take her eyes off the woman. Because as the woman walked toward her with a commanding grace, Aria knew exactly who she was.

“Hello, my darling daughter. It has been much too long.”

Aria felt the world tremble underneath her as the light scent of citrus and white musk enveloped her.

She swallowed.

“Mom?”

“I—I SAW YOU DIE.” Aria whispered, remembering the eyewitness testimony she’d seen in the water lily. “How are you alive?”

The woman smiled, and it was an intense, staggering thing. “Impossible things are made possible every day.”

Her dad, the king, and the mudang all stared at her mom, and the tension was so palpable that Aria could almost reach out and touch it. To Aria’s surprise, it didn’t seem to be her aliveness that marred their faces with shock, but rather the fact that she’d had the gall to show her face here.

But none of that registered for the woman. Ko Iseul, Ersa Loveridge, whoever she was, only had eyes for Aria as she took another step toward her daughter.

“But I don’t understand… How are you here?” Aria pointed at her mother’s hands, with which she’d summoned mysterious powers without a dreampanion. “How are you doing any of this?”

“There are many wondrous, impossible things beyond your realm of understanding, little one,” her mother said. “And I want to share it all with you.”

“Don’t fill her head with sweet nothings, Ersa. I’m warning you,” spat Aria’s dad, still clutching his bleeding arm.

Rio whined, and Aria held her seedling close. She couldn’t understand what was happening. Was her mother really here right now? Or was this some kind of cruel joke?

The mudang began shouting curses at her mom as the king called for the guards, and it felt like a replay of the gruesome scene from the water lily. Aria tensed, fearing the worst. But this time, things played out differently.

Her mom conjured a ghostly orb in her palm and hurled it at the guards, the king, and her sister. A fog misted over their shoulders, and they stilled as if suspended in jelly. They were still breathing and blinking, but it was so slow, they might as well have been frozen in time.

The rest of the cohort gasped, and Aria stumbled back, scared.

“Don’t worry, they will be fine.” Her mother gazed over the cohort of pre-inductees. “And I won’t harm any of you if you don’t give me reason to. I merely don’t like it when people talk over me.”

Aria glanced at the Bleeding Bloom, pulsating from inside the statue, half dug out as if it was about to be scraped from its chest cavity. “You had my entire life to come find me. To be my mom. And yet you come now, just when the relic you so desperately want is ripe for the taking.” She steeled herself. “You’re not here for me. You’re here to steal the Bleeding Bloom.”

“It is one and the same, my daughter. You will see.”

Aria narrowed her eyes. “So you are an anti-slinger, is that it? You’re so brainwashed that you want the Bloom to destroy all of dreamslingerkind?”

The woman laughed, a spellbinding sound, like wind chimes tinkling in the breeze. “Oh, you could not be farther from the truth. I am not an anti-slinger, my little one. I am a freedom slinger.”

“A what?”

Her mom began singing, and her dulcet tones burrowed into every crevice of Aria’s heart, note by note.

“Fly, free bird, fly

Fly, free bird, fly

Don’t let them clip your wings

When you were born to soar

Fly, free bird, fly

Fly, free bird, fly...”

Before Aria knew it, she was singing with her, finishing the lullaby on her own.

“…For there, beyond the gray

You’ll find a new door

My wings will guide you home.”

Her mother’s eyes softened. “After all these years, you remember the song.”

She bent down to stroke Aria’s cheek, and Aria whimpered, leaning into her touch. “You were four when it happened. And I knew in that moment that I couldn’t bring you up in a world so full of ignorance and hate and fear and weakness. You had as much probability of having the gene as not, and I knew then that I couldn’t take any chances. Not if I wanted to give you the world.”

She hooked a loose lock of hair behind Aria’s ear, and the citrusy musk scent washed over Aria. “But I couldn’t raise you in Royal Hanguk, either—not in this gilded cage that clips our wings. I had to find another option.”

Aria pulled away from her mom’s intoxicating touch. “Then why did you leave me behind?” she demanded. “Why not take me with you?”

Her mom grimaced and faced her dad for the first time since entering the Devotion Hall. “Because we had an arrangement. One I agreed to, and despite what you may have heard, I always keep my word.”

Aria’s dad used his cane to stand up, wincing with the pain. “I couldn’t bear Ersa taking you away into a world of danger and uncertainty. You were just a baby. It wasn’t right! You deserved stability. Safety. A home. So we agreed that I would raise you as a normal child in Texas until you turned thirteen. And if you ended up being a dreamslinger, your mom could come for you then. If not, you would stay with me.”

“It gave me the time to dream up a world that was good enough for a daughter of mine,” her mother conceded. “I didn’t want you to merely survive, like your father would have you believe. I want you to truly spread your wings and fly. To thrive.”

Aria turned to her dad. “So that’s why you’ve always been so obsessed with your work on dreamslinger welfare. Even before I was confirmed as a carrier. Because you wanted me to have options.”

He nodded as a tear streamed down his cheek. “I’d hoped that even as a dreamslinger, you might decide to stay. To choose to be safe and out of harm’s way.” He lowered his voice. “To stay with me.”

He looked at his wife then with a wistful expression in his eye. “I lost the love of my life. I couldn’t bear to lose you, too, Sparkler.”

A surprising anger surged in Aria, and Rio bristled in solidarity beside her. “Don’t you dare put this back on me. As if I had a choice in the matter. I am not some consolation prize. And I’m not a reward for all the work either of you have put in. I am a person. I am my own person!”

Her mother gazed down at Aria and beamed, a look of pride on her face. “You are every bit as fierce and strong as I knew you’d be. You have outgrown the prison walls of Resthaven—you know this already. And you’ve had a taste of power through the League. But do not be fooled. This place is no better than Resthaven. They will stifle your ideas, lock you in boxes, and punish any attempt to to stretch the League’s boundaries.”

She opened her palm and summoned an ivory orb. “I can offer you something more. Something revolutionary. Freedom slingers are and will always be free agents, not bound by the rules of a king or a society. Freedom slingers will rebuild the world with us at the helm.”

“But what about non-dreamslingers?” Aria demanded. “Dreamslingers are just a minority. What about the rest of the world?”

Her mother blinked. “What of them? Why should we bend to fit a world we have already outgrown? Why should we compromise when all they want to do is control and oppress us?”

She pointed to the soldiers still discarded like dolls across the floor, as if to illustrate her point.

“But anti-slingers are not the rest of the world. They are a minority, too,” Aria argued.

Her mother shrugged. “The point still stands. Why must we bend and fold when we are the stronger species—when we could rule?”

She offered Aria her hand. “I promised to give you the world, little one. A world in which we could truly be free. And I’m here now. So come with me and know true freedom.”

The cherubic face of the Knotmaster appeared in Aria’s mind, and she remembered what he’d said.

You will have to make a big dethishun thoon. Jutht remember there ith alwayth another opshun.

Aria looked at her dad and her mom, and her mind swam with conflicting emotions. Her dad had always taught her to value the most vulnerable in society—to value peace above all else. But at the same time, her mom wasn’t wrong.

It was her dad who said the world was a cruel place. And if there was no room for people like her to live in peace and with pride, then could she really blame her mom for her lofty aspirations? Would it be such a bad world for dreamslingers—the more powerful species—to rule over the world? Maybe they could re-create the world to be one of peace and compassion between dreamslingers and wider society. They could start afresh.

She faltered.

Rio buried her head in Aria’s side and purred so loudly, it vibrated into Aria’s bones. The seedling looked at her—really looked into her—and in that moment, Aria found her way back to Rio. Back to herself.

There were lots of questions, lots of unknowns, and there were no perfect solutions. But for now, what was true in Aria’s very soul was that she couldn’t give up on Rio. And she couldn’t give up on her friends. They were what was real. The ones she chose. And they were worth more than an empty promise from a mother who was never there.

“No,” she said, with her heart in her throat. “I don’t want what you’re offering. I refuse to be part of it. It would spell the end of the world as we know it.”

Her mother was thoughtful, as if considering Aria’s words. “And would that be such a bad thing?”

She leaned down and placed a kiss on Aria’s forehead. “I am not an unreasonable person, little one. And after how long I have made you wait for my arrival, it is only right that I return the favor. I will give you the time you need to consider my offer.” She conjured an orb in her palm, but this one was empty. “And when the time is right, I will come find you again. It is my deepest desire that you will be ready to join me then.”

The woman slung the empty orb toward the dismembered statue of Gardener Igong, only for the globe to envelop the Bleeding Bloom. It flew back into her hands with the Bloom trapped in its center.

“I will see you soon, little one.”

And with one final look at Aria, her mother turned and disappeared.

THE MOOD IN THE KINGDOM was solemn after the double attack. If it wasn’t enough of a blow to the League’s pride that anti-slingers had ambushed their borders, the fact that one of their own had stolen the Bleeding Bloom was enough for the League to hang its head in shame. Then there was the fact that no one knew why the Bloom had been stolen, or what exactly Aria’s mom intended to do with it.

Aria had assumed that once the king found out it was her fault the anti-slingers knew about the underground tunnels and the Bloom’s hidden location, her pre-inductee status would be revoked. But despite his predilection for rules and order, he’d given her a free pass. Perhaps his guilt toward Aria’s mother had something to do with it. Or maybe his son’s quest for openness had rubbed off on him a little.

“It is water under the bridge now,” he’d said to Aria when she confessed. “And in times of crisis, as we are facing now, we need to come together, not tear ourselves further apart.”

So great was his mercy that he even extended an invitation for Aria’s dad to stay a guest of the kingdom for a while longer, albeit with a palace guard watching his every move, twenty-four/seven. Having failed their Bloom-retrieving mission, there was no knowing what the anti-slingers—and therefore, what the Commissioner of Dreamslinger Relations—might do next. It wasn’t safe for Jack Loveridge to return home. Not yet.

Aria’s anger and disappointment toward her dad was still so fresh that their interactions were awkward and stilted. Still, when Aria spotted him in the audience the following week at the cohort’s induction ceremony, looking uncomfortable and out of place, something shifted just a little in her chest.

He was here. For her. And while it didn’t make up for all the years of lies and secrecy, it was a start.

The ceremony was being held on a floating stage set up on the lagoon, next to the Pavilion. Aria and her cohort sat up front with their soon-to-be saplings, while family members sat in the audience behind them, the sky full of celebratory floating lanterns. Saemi waved excitedly from her seat next to Nam Samchon, Librarian Yong, and Aria’s dad, along with his palace guard escort.

The king, the mudang, and the four Head Scholars took the stage, and Aria put on a brave face. Her mind was a muddle of thoughts and feelings she couldn’t quite wade through, but for tonight, she was going to focus on the ceremony. After all, she and her friends had earned this. They’d worked hard, and they were finally going to become Novices.

“Annyeong-haseyo, and welcome all to this year’s induction ceremony,” the king announced as he took center stage. “This has been an exceptionally unique year, in that we have received a cohort of trialeers who have traveled from near and far, and from all corners of the world, for a chance at becoming a Fellow of the Royal League of Dreamslingers.” He paused. “We have also experienced exceptional pain this past week, having had our bleeding heart stolen from our kingdom’s chest.”

A heavy blanket of silence draped over the ceremony as the king braced himself, as if being this open and vulnerable was something he had to physically fight to achieve.

“I had to keep some knowledge restricted during the Trials, in order to protect this kingdom. But now that you are all about to be welcomed into the fold, I feel it my duty to share the legend with you all.”

As the audience shuffled anxiously on their seats, the king continued.

“As many of you will by now know, the first of the three Gifts the Holy Trine left for humanity was the Touch of Death. It was embodied in the form of the Bleeding Bloom, gifted by Gardener Igong, the God of Death himself. But the second Gift was the Breath of Life, gifted by Grandma Samshin, the Goddess of Birth. And the third, the Path of Eternity, gifted by Princess Bari, the Goddess of Dead Souls.”

He took a deep breath. “The Bleeding Bloom was the only relic we held here in the kingdom. And that relic has now been taken from us by the freedom slingers.” He paused, as if to gather himself. “Regrettably, we don’t know what form the other two Gifts take, or where in the world they might be hiding. After all, the Holy Trine’s three Gifts were for all of humanity, not just for Royal Hanguk. But it is our duty, as the carriers of the legend, to ensure the Gifts do not fall into the wrong hands.”

As a nervous murmur spread through the crowd, the king went on.

“Which is why it is in times like these that we must step up to the plate and come together as a League to find a way forward, as we have always done. We will retrieve our Bleeding Bloom, and we will ensure the other two Gifts remain out of evil’s way.

“It is precisely why the names I am about to call carry extra weight tonight. Because they belong to those who have given blood, sweat, and tears to earn a place as a Novice in our coveted ranks, and who will continue to pledge their service to our kingdom. It brings me the utmost honor and pride to now formally induct them into our Royal League of Dreamslingers.”

As the crowd cheered with emotion, the king invited every trialeer forward, gajok by gajok, one by one. He started with Winter Palace, and Aria warmed as her friends’ names were called out.

“Niko Horvat, Canada, Winter Palace, Season of the Wise…

“Mason Hewett, United Kingdom, Winter Palace, Season of the Wise…

“Susan Grace-Oh, Heritage, Winter Palace, Season of the Wise…

“Joonho Kang, Heritage, Winter Palace, Season of the Wise…

“Vittoria Schneider, Italy, Winter Palace, Season of the Wise…”

As the trialeers each went up to the stage to be inducted, Aria pondered the question of the three Gifts. How were they going to get the Bleeding Bloom back from her mom? And how were they going to learn what the Breath of Life and Path of Eternity were? It seemed like an insurmountable problem, and if the Bleeding Bloom was anything to go by, one with possibly catastrophic consequences.

The king went on to call out each of the successful names from Autumn Palace.

“Rihaan Munro, Scotland, Autumn Palace, Season of the Just…

“Sarah-Jess Baek, Heritage, Autumn Palace, Season of the Just…

“Estevão Oliveira Alves, Brazil, Autumn Palace, Season of the Just…

“Misha Mora Perez, Chile, Autumn Palace, Season of the Just…

“Blessica Agwa Garcia, Philippines, Autumn Palace, Season of the Just…”

As the Autumn Palace Novices were inducted into the League, Aria felt Tui slump beside her, and she knew they were both feeling the heavy absence of Zahra. She was the best of them, and it wasn’t right that she’d had her chance ripped from her for something as ridiculous as a man-made technicality.

The king continued by calling out the names of Summer Palace.

“Jina Jeong, Heritage, Summer Palace, Season of the Rule…

“Eugene Cho-Fisher, Heritage, Summer Palace, Season of the Rule…

“Daxia Hsu, Taiwan, Summer Palace, Season of the Rule…

“Adebamgbe Bolaji, Nigeria, Summer Palace, Season of the Rule…

“Hakan Aydem, Turkey, Summer Palace, Season of the Rule…”

And when Jina was met with a roar from a large heritage contingent in the audience, and she practically beamed like a light bulb, even Aria had to smile. Despite all that she’d done to make life unbearable, Aria understood where Jina was coming from, at least as far as her distaste for foreign trialeers went. People like Aria had come out of nowhere to take precious spots from heritage folk who’d been preparing for the League their entire lives. That must’ve been a hard pill to swallow.

Finally, it was Spring Palace’s turn, and Aria cheered at the top of her lungs as the names of her gajok were called out, one by one, inviting them to the stage.

“Tiare Taina, Cook Islands, Spring Palace, Season of the Kind…

“Jaxon Campbell, Australia, Spring Palace, Season of the Kind…

“Tui Walker, New Zealand, Spring Palace, Season of the Kind…

“Lion Lee-Hendrick, Heritage, Spring Palace, Season of the Kind…”

The king cleared his throat. “Or rather, His Royal Highness Lee Saja, also known as Lion Lee-Hendrick, the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Royal Hanguk.”

There was a splutter of shock amongst the international trialeers as the heritage community seemed to breathe out a universal sigh of relief. They were finally released from being sworn to secrecy.

“Aria Love,” the king finally announced when Lion returned from the stage, a long cloak with a hood now draped over his shoulders, and a scroll with his dreampanion’s official Korean royal name clutched in his hand.

“You’re up,” he whispered to Aria.

“Congrats, Your Royal Highness,” Aria teased before she and Rio made their way onto the stage.

“Well done, Trialeer Love,” the king declared, for all to hear. “You have successfully passed the three Trials, and it is my honor to now induct you into the Royal League of Dreamslingers.” He nodded toward her seedling and said the same words she’d heard him say to all her gajokmates. “Before we proceed, I invite you to house your dreampanion inside your norigae, as a symbol of your successful Endearment.”

Aria nodded and turned to Rio. “You ready, Rio girl?”

Rio’s whiskers billowed. “Oh yes, Ari-Ari. I am, I am!”

Aria held up her endless-knot norigae, and chanted, “Suri suri masuri.”

Nothing happened.

She cleared her throat as heat rose to her cheeks. “Suri suri masuri,” she said louder and slower this time.

When Rio still didn’t respond, Aria turned to face her… only to see that her seedling had been distracted by an errant piece of dust floating past. Her tongue was sticking out, bobbing her head up and down in an unsuccessful bid to trap it in her mouth.

The king raised an eyebrow at Aria, and the audience tittered, amused by the seedling’s actions. Aria felt her cheeks get even hotter.

But instead of feeling exasperated or frustrated as she would’ve done even a week ago, she turned to her seedling. “Hey, Rio, you okay, girl?” She offered her patience and compassion, since she was, after all, from the Season of the Kind. “What can I do to help you do this?”

Rio finally caught the errant piece of dust on her tongue, and she let out a gleeful hiss in triumph. “Oh no, that’s okay, Ari-Ari. Thank you for asking! I’ve caught my dust ball, hooray! So I’ll jump in the norigae now. Okay, byeee!”

And before Aria knew what was happening, her bloom dragon had vanished into thin air. Aria gripped her tasseled charm, which was now warm and heavy with the presence of her dreampanion housed snug inside. Aria chuckled to herself. Her dragon was a strange delight.

“Congratulations, Trialeer Love,” King Ogu announced as he handed Aria a scroll. It glowed as she took it from him.

“Your dreampanion’s official Korean royal name is Gaeha,” he declared as she scanned the name inside the scroll. “Meaning to unleash the river.”

Aria hugged the scroll to her chest. “Thank you,” she whispered. “It’s perfect.”

“Then it is with the power bestowed upon me by the Holy Trine and the Four Seasons, as the King of Royal Hanguk and the Principal of this League, that I now induct you, Aria Love, as a Novice Fellow, and you, Rio Gaeha, as a dreampanion sapling, of the Royal League of Dreamslingers. You were born an exception. So may you rise to be exceptional.”

Head Scholar Bobby-Uma stepped forward to hug Aria, and when she pulled away, Aria’s short, fur-lined cape had grown to become a beautiful long hooded cloak draping over her shoulders. It still didn’t have the inner satin lining of the full-blown Fellows, but regardless, the daisy shimmered brilliantly with pride.

Rio, we did it! she said in her mind to her now-sapling as her friends whooped and cheered from the audience. We actually did it!

As she walked down to rejoin her friends, with her long cloak billowing and the scroll clutched tightly in her hands, Aria realized how apt Rio’s royal name was. Because while she still felt mixed up about everything she’d learned about her mom and dad, she knew now for certain her place was right here in the League. She had her Novice year of training to focus on, and she couldn’t wait for her and Rio to begin growing their pride of nightjoys.

Not just that, she could feel, in her heart of hearts, that she and Rio Gaeha, along with their friends, were going to unblock some stank old rivers around here, and let fresh water flow into the League. Maybe starting with the business of next year’s Trial. And of course, bringing Zahra back.

The thought filled her with both fear and hope—with a strong dose of bravspark. And despite being overwhelmed with the emotion, she realized with anticipation that she couldn’t wait to get started.

“DO YOU LIKE IT?” JUNGHEE ASKED, admiring her newest version of the windweed hanbok Aria had just tried on. “I promise it won’t burn your legs this time… I think?”

Aria gave her maid an unconvinced look. “Are you sure I can’t just wear the floating-head hanbok? I still think that would make the best Halloween costume.”

It was late December, and the kingdom was getting ready to observe Dongji. Aria was wary about trying yet another of Junghee’s superspeed-giving hanbok, especially after it had billowed smoke and scalded her skin the last few times. But Junghee was a persistent kind of person.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Junghee huffed. “It’s not a costume. It’s couture.” She pushed Aria and Rio toward the door and checked there was a good smear of red-bean paste above the exit before ushering them down the stairs. “And if it makes you feel any better, I’m wearing one, too. So if we burn, we burn together!”

The Pavilion banquet hall had been decked out in true Dongji spirit, which to Aria looked like Halloween decorations, but heavy on the ghosts. Well, Halloween plus ghosts, plus a generous helping of over-the-top, red-bean-themed paraphernalia. Dongji, also known as Winter Solstice, was the longest night of the year, which, per Korean tradition, meant more time for malevolent spirits to roam the human realm. It was why all doors in the kingdom were painted with red-bean paste (which looked like blood) to ward the ghosts away. It was also the day everyone enjoyed patjuk—a hearty, sweet porridge also made of red beans, which tasted rich and chocolaty.

Aria walked into the hall and saw Nam Samchon and Saemi waving from a large floating table that was filled to the brim with delicious banquet food, including steaming bowls of festive patjuk. They waved her over.

“Over here, Eonni,” Saemi said, patting the hovering chair next to her. “We saved you a seat.”

“You must try this japchae,” Samchon mumbled with a mouth full of shiny glass noodles tossed with strips of colorful vegetables and meat. “It’s delectable!”

He coughed as a piece of food got stuck in his throat, and Aria laughed. “Let me get you a drink. I’ll be back.”

Delicious, mouthwatering smells wafted from each packed table as she headed toward the long drinks table at the back of the hall. She passed Lion, who was deep in conversation with his dad, the king, and then past the mudang, who was lighting incense at the altar of food offerings. The shaman scowled at her niece’s presence.

Mustering up the courage, Aria turned back toward the mudang. There’d been something she’d been wondering for a while now, and today seemed a good a time as ever to ask.

“Your Royal Holiness,” Aria started, approaching the shaman. “Can I ask you something?”

The mudang glowered. “Would you refrain if I asked you to?”

Aria took that as an invitation to continue. “The day of the Knowledge Trial, I saw you twisting the reeds on your shaman flags as I approached judgment. You were chanting….” Aria swallowed thickly. “Were you the reason a leaf wouldn’t fall from the Tree of Judgment?”

The shaman scoffed, but she didn’t deny it. “How dare you speak of things you do not understand!”

“What about my flickering lantern?” Aria demanded, recalling how her lantern had struggled to decide on a dreampanion before finally placing her in Spring Palace. “And my norigae that’s so old and different from everyone else’s? Not to mention Rio. She’s the only bloom dragon without a tail. Did you have something to do with all that, too? Because you didn’t want me to succeed in the Trials?”

Perhaps it was foolish to be so frank with the mudang, but Aria had gone long enough entertaining these questions, and she needed to know.

“Why would I interfere with such a trivial thing as your performance in the Trials?!” the mudang spat, her eyes burning with fury. “I’ve had enough of this conversation, you insolent child!”

She turned back toward the altar, but not before she shoved a piece of paper in Aria’s hand.

It looked like it was ripped out of a journal, but there were no words on it. It was just of one symbol, drawn over and over again.

It was the symbol of the dragonfly, with a single pair of wings and a dot inside each wing. The same one she’d seen in the mudang’s bound journal when Aria had snuck into her office.

“What is this?” Aria asked, confused.

“My ancestors—” She winced. “Our ancestors keep sending it to me,” the mudang snapped, sounding royally annoyed. “I keep telling them to stop, but they refuse to take heed of my requests.”

Aria frowned. “But what does it mean? And what does it have to do with me?”

The mudang flung out her hands in exasperation, almost throwing a bunch of lit incense sticks into the air. “Well, that’s your problem, isn’t it! Figure it out so it’s no longer mine!”

With that, the shaman stalked off, her wide sleeves billowing behind her.

“Oh-kay, then. Nice to see you too, Imo,” Aria mumbled, shoving the piece of paper into her pocket. Her aunt was one madly obtuse, and rather frightening, woman.

Remembering she was trying to get a drink for Nam Samchon, Aria continued to make her way to the drinks table, passing the pink-hatted Librarian Yong, who was sitting happily by herself digging into a bowl of red-bean porridge, and the Head Scholars, who seemed to be playing an animated tabletop game with tiny red cards. She even passed a familiar face whom she recognized as Tae—the royal slinger who had walked into the live-streamed signing at Resthaven all those months ago. He waved. Wow. That felt like a lifetime ago.

“Hullo! Earth to Aria!”

Aria blinked to see Tiare waving her hand in front of her face. “I said, do you want some blood punch? They call it blood, but it’s just watermelon.”

“Sorry, Tiare,” Aria murmured. “Yes, I’d love one, thanks.”

“It’s really good,” Daxia said, chewing on the little tapioca pearls in the drink. “Did you know bubble tea was invented in Taiwan? Makes me so proud!”

“Yeah, but can they do this with their balls?” Jaxon asked in his thick Australian accent, as he attempted to blow his straw full of chewy boba above his head. The bubbles rained back down on his mullet mohawk, getting all stuck in his hair. “Nooo!” he cried. “Not the hair!”

Daxia smirked, and Tiare just shook her head.

“Oi, you lot, make yourselves useful and hand these out before the karaoke starts, eh?” Tui strode over and handed the group some colorful bracelets that spelled out the word impossible. “Mason and I just finished making them.”

Mason was right behind her, his hands also full of friendship bracelets. “We made one for everyone in our cohort. To remind us of the promise we made to bring Zahra back.”

Tui nodded. “Like Zahra said, if you break the word impossible apart and make room for you to exist in there—room for hope—then it can actually spell I’m Possible. We’ll find a way to bring her back. And maybe the others, too.”

Tui wrapped one around Aria’s wrist, and the friends shared a knowing look, as something messy but real settled in Aria’s chest.

“Isn’t it divine?!” Nam Samchon exclaimed, when Aria finally delivered his drink, and he promptly shoved a piece of kimchi pancake in her mouth. It was savory and slightly tangy, and absolutely delicious. “Here, try a bit more!”

As she chewed on another bit of pancake, the karaoke started, and Aria watched Tui belt out a screechy rendition of “Girl on Fire” while Tweak and Rio danced next to her. Lion sat happily next to Aria, knitting something for Echo, while said sapling raced around the banquet hall scavenging for bits of fallen food. And Aria felt a flutter in her chest.

The Knotmaster had called out to her after giving her the norigae. I see you! he’d exclaimed. At the time, Aria had wondered if he had known about her ulterior motives as a spy. That he could see she didn’t belong here. But now she wondered if what he really meant was the complete opposite. That he could see the real her.

“Everything okay?” Lion asked, as he looked up from his knitting.

Aria nodded. “I’ve laid out my first tile. And everything else will come tumbling after.”

“Come again?” Lion asked, confused.

Aria smiled as Tae walked past with his friends. “I guess I just realized it really is my choice whether I rise to be exceptional or not.”

Lion gave her a crooked smile. “A little late to the party, but I’m glad you got the invite, Aria. It wouldn’t be the same here without you.”

As Aria sat there, surrounded by the smells and sounds and warmth of the evening, she realized that despite it all, she was happy. And come what might, for now, that was enough.

As she let Tui drag her up to the stage to become a backup dancer, it dawned on Aria that somehow, against all odds, she had found a place in which she truly belonged.

She had found her family.

Aria had found a home.

THE END

Writing the acknowledgments of a book is simultaneously one of the easiest and hardest parts of my job. On one hand, how wonderfully satisfying to thank all the people who have helped bring my story into the world. Yus! Yay! My gratitude knows no bounds! On the other hand, due to the nature of publishing time frames, I am currently writing this a year out from the book’s release. This means there are so many people who will be crucial in the birth of Dreamslinger that I haven’t even met yet. I would need a time machine (anyone got a spare??) to accurately acknowledge all the precious souls involved in magicking this book into existence and getting it into the hands of readers.

So working under the aforementioned limitations of the space-time continuum (ruuude), I will strive to include as many of the treasured folks who have worked—and who will work—valiantly in my corner to bring Aria and the world of dreamslingers to life.

Firstly, to Jodi Reamer for always having my back—not just in the bookish ring, but even on the mean streets of Manhattan when your author goes rogue and starts climbing on public monuments almost getting herself arrested (I swear I was just trying to get a better view!). Warmest hugs also to Anqi Xu, Alessandra Birch, and Cecilia de la Campa for being fountains of awesomeness.

To Rebecca Kuss, whom I adore with all my heart and brain matter, you are truly one in a million, and I am so lucky to have called you my editor. In fact, I will steal from the card you gave me when we finally met in person: You’re a dream(slinger) come true! Thank you for embracing all of me, especially the unrelenting deluge that is my mind. A special squeeze for Stephanie Lurie and Ash I. Fields—it’s an honor to have you in my corner. And a very very special hug and thank you to Anuoluwapo Ohioma, my knightness in shining armor, for welcoming me with open arms at a moment’s notice.

My awestruck gratitude to Zareen Johnson for your design genius, and to Jessica Fong for your artistic magic. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I hope people do judge Dreamslinger by its stunning face☺. A huge thank-you also to our cartographer, Virginia Allyn, for the incredible maps.

A humongous, monumental, gigantuous thank-you to my US Disney team, including managing editors Sara Liebling and Iris Chen; Meredith Jones, Guy Cunningham, David Jaffe, Jill Amack, Lisa Geller, and Mark Long in copyediting; Andrea Rosen, Vicki Korlishin, Michael Freeman, and LeBria Casher in sales; Holly Nagel and Danielle DiMartino in marketing; and Crystal McCoy and Daniela Escobar in publicity. To Ash, as well as Dina Sherman, Bekka Mills, and Maddie Hughes from the school & library marketing team, can we go back to the San Antonio River Walk and have another chilled margarita, pretty please?

Over in the UK, my warmest thanks to Ruth Bennett, Talya Baker, Aimee White, and the rest of the team at Piccadilly Press. A cheerful g’day to my Aussie team at Allen & Unwin; and to all my other foreign publishing teams that I have yet to be connected with—thank you for helping Dreamslinger reach readers all over the globe. A special kia ora to Catherine O’Loughlin and Olivia Win-Ricketts in the editorial team, Becky Innes, Sacha Baillie, and Summer Pritchard in the marketing and publicity team, and the rest of the Penguin Random House whānau in my very own Aotearoa New Zealand. I can’t wait to meet you all in due course!

A melodic shout-out to Rachel Hamilton (also known as the talented musician Bridges) for adding the literal music to Dreamslinger (and to our wedding!). Aria’s lullaby is everything I’d hoped it would be and more, and your music is a gift to this world.

My warmest hugs to the wonderful kaiako in the Tuakana room—Glenda, Gretchen, Naseem, Stacey, William, Kay, Nicky, Mel, and everyone else at HPELC for being a home away from home. To Roimata Kurariki, for helping us make our home feel like a home. And to the lovely staff at Café 719 and Catalina Café, as well as the librarians at Whangaparāoa Library, for providing an office away from home. (How many times can I use the word home in one paragraph?)

A special thank-you to the real-life Mason Hewett, sunshine personified, and my first young reader for Dreamslinger. Thank you for Land, who now resides on my bookshelf and tells me off when I procrastinate.

They say writing is all about rewriting, and it’s true. I am so grateful for the critiquing brain power of Karah Sutton, Sarah Suk, and Jenna Lee-Yun, whose insightful feedback took this story to the next level. Particular thanks also to J. Elle and Rachael King for your publishing advice and friendship. And of course, an evergreen group hug to my constants, my dear kimchingoos—Sarah Suk, Jessica Kim, Grace Shim, and Susan Lee. BTW, every person I’ve mentioned in this paragraph is an uber-talented author—go get their books!

This book would never have been written if not for my generous and caring family. I send endless gratitude in particular to my parents and my sister Ally, who, despite their own busy schedules, health, and life priorities, have always been on hand to be our village. As my mum says, I must’ve saved a nation in a past life to deserve such good fortune in this one.

To my spudman hippocampus, my best friend and the love of my life, for whom no amount of gratitude could ever be enough. How did I get so lucky to be your wife? (Probably that nation I saved.) Also, cough cough, you should probably start charging me at this point for your in-house editorial services… Mates rates, though, right?

To my dear little mandu—watching you grow into your own unique person is the biggest joy of my life. The other day, I watched your eyes sparkle as you clutched your new library books to your chest, and my heart almost exploded. You also reminded me that you have written way more books than me already when you’re only a kid and I’m “sooo old.” Geez. Who taught you to have so much spunk, anyway?

Finally, to all the real-life members of the Dreamslinger League—welcome to the gajok!! We are going to have so much fun☺. I wrote this book for those of us who have felt at times like exceptions to the rule. I hope Aria can inspire us to remember that we do, in fact, have a choice in the matter. May we all rise to be exceptional. And to everyone who has reached out via email, social media, snail mail, or in person to share a moment with me—thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hope you enjoyed Dreamslinger. Now, get comfy and buckle yourselves in.

Because the adventure is just beginning.

Always,

Graci xx

GRACI KIM is the New York Times best-selling author of The Last Fallen Star, The Last Fallen Moon, and The Last Fallen Realm, otherwise known as the Gifted Clans trilogy. A Korean Kiwi diplomat turned author, Graci writes about the magic she wants to see in the world. In a previous life she was a cooking-show host, and she once ran a business that turned children’s drawings into cuddly toys. When she’s not lost in her imagination, you’ll find Graci drinking flat whites, eating ramyeon, and most likely hugging a dog (or ideally, many). She lives in New Zealand with her husband and daughter. Follow her on Instagram @GraciKimWrites and find her at GraciKim.com.

ALSO BY GRACI KIM

GIFTED CLANS TRILOGY

The Last Fallen Star

The Last Fallen Moon

The Last Fallen Realm