“What are you saying?” asked Kade.
“Girl talk,” said Sumi. “Pure nonsense. None of your business.” She kept signing.
Finally, slowly, the stranger took her hand away from the Wolcott’s hair. The Wolcott whimpered and burrowed closer, pressing her face deeper into the stranger’s apron. The stranger started signing, more slowly than Sumi—which wasn’t saying much. Some hummingbirds were slower than Sumi.
Sumi wasn’t moving now. She was watching, eyes sharp, expression sharper, occasionally interjecting a rapidly signed reply. Finally, she nodded. “It’s nice to meet you, Alexis,” she said, and looked to Kade. An unforgiving coldness had settled over her in the last few moments, a coldness befitting a girl who’d saved a world, and died, and risen again, all before she had the chance to turn eighteen.
Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children was an island of misfit toys, a place to put the unfinished stories and the broken wanderers who could butcher a deer and string a bow but no longer remembered what to do with indoor plumbing. It was also, more importantly, a holding pen for heroes. Whatever they might have become when they’d been cast out of their chosen homes, they’d been heroes once, each in their own ways. And they did not forget.
“Her name is Alexis,” said Sumi, voice artificially calm. “She’s here because she hopes we can help Jack; because she doesn’t think anyone else can.”
“So that is Jack, then,” said Kade.
“Yes, and no,” said Sumi. “This is Jack, but she’s in Jill’s body. Jill stole hers and ran away with it.”
There was a pause as everyone took this in. Finally, faintly, Cora said, “Oh. Is that all?”
3 WINDOWS OF THE SOUL
KADE YANKED THE wardrobe open and started digging through its contents, scattering clothes in all directions. Sumi perched atop a nearby stack of books, watching him. He grabbed a waistcoat, discarded it, and reached for a vest, muttering about whipstitches and adjustable clips. Sumi cocked her head.
“Why is it so important for you to find something that fits her, when she’s still wailing and crying and snotting all over everything?” she asked. “You call me the nonsensical one, but right now it feels like you’re putting the frosting before the fire.”
“Clothes matter,” he said, draping the vest over his arm and reaching for a pile of neatly folded blouses. “Clothes are part of how you learn to feel like yourself, and not someone who just happens to look like you. Don’t you remember what it was like when someone else decided what you were going to wear?”
Sumi shuddered—not as theatrically as she normally would have. This wasn’t something to be seen. It was something she felt all the way down to her bones, which were the only remaining part of her original body.
“My parents,” she said. “They were like Nancy’s but the other way around, chasing monochrome instead of spectrums. They didn’t understand. Thought if they threw enough gray and gray and gray at me, I’d forget I’d seen rainbows and learn how to be their little sparrow-girl again. She died in Confection and I rose from her ashes, a pretty pastry phoenix. I need my color. It keeps me breathing when I see me in the mirror at midnight.”
“Exactly.” Kade slung a measuring tape around his neck and grabbed a stack of charcoal trousers. “Jack is literally in someone else’s body. That’s got to be like dysphoria squared. She’s scared and confused and she needs to be anchored. Get that shoe box for me, would you?”
Sumi picked up the box. “Is it full of bees?”
Kade eyed her. “I don’t want to know why you think I’d have a box of bees up here. No, it’s not full of bees. It’s full of gloves. Jack’s gloves. Jill always had less muscle mass than her sister, so I’m guessing I’ll need to do some alterations on the rest of her clothing if I want it to fit her correctly, but the gloves? Those should be fine.”
“That will help,” said Sumi, looking approvingly at the box. “Jack doesn’t like it when the world touches her.”
“I know. Come on. I don’t want you up here unsupervised.”
Sumi dimpled, looking young and innocent and terribly dangerous all at the same time. “What could I possibly do that would be so awful?”
“Everything. Every moment of the day. Since you were born.” Kade waited in the doorway until Sumi flounced past him, then closed the door as he followed her.
They’d have to involve Eleanor eventually. She liked it when the students were self-sufficient, and didn’t believe in coddling them; after all, they’d seen wonders beyond their apparent ages, had fought monsters and saved kingdoms. Surely they could go about their business without being smothered by the nearest available adult. She’d still want to know that Jack was back, and that something terrible had happened in the Moors. She’d want to help.
Or she would have, once. Eleanor had been less and less invested in the daily operation of the school since Lundy’s death. All the current teachers were adults who thought they worked at some sort of strange boarding school for the children of eccentric hippies: they didn’t know about the doors, or the wonders they concealed. Eleanor continued to handle student intake, and had taken over Lundy’s daily therapy sessions, but she was slipping.
Eleanor had started the school because she didn’t want other children to suffer the way she’d suffered when she returned from her own Nonsense world and ran up against the disbelief of the people who should have been most willing to believe her. Strange as it was to consider, she’d been young once, quick and bright and flexible-minded, ready to handle any challenge … except for exile. So she’d opened a school, with the goal of getting it as stable as she could before senility softened her mind and she went back through her own door. Before she went home.
Kade had always assumed there’d be someone to take over when that happened. Not Lundy, maybe, whose own journeys had left her a brilliant woman trapped in a body growing younger every year, but someone adult and capable. Someone who’d understand why it was so important, and who’d be willing to keep Kade on, keep teaching him everything he’d need to know to eventually step up as headmaster. And of course, there was college to be considered, courses in education and business and …
And he wanted to involve Eleanor in this latest potential crisis, and he didn’t want to involve her at all, because that theoretical adult had yet to appear. What if she decided this was the last thing she could handle? What if she left him, unprepared and alone, to take over running the school?
The thought made his heart beat too fast and his chest feel too tight. Panic attacks aren’t supposed to be contagious, he thought sourly. If he went too far down the metaphorical rabbit hole, he’d need to take his binder off in order to get his breath back, and he wanted that even less than he wanted to talk to his great-aunt.
Sumi followed him down the stairs from the attic to the main floor and along the hallway toward the basement, uncharacteristically quiet. When they reached the basement door, she reached out and placed a long-fingered hand on his arm, stopping him.
“There’s enough air for everyone,” she said, voice soft. “No one’s going to take it away from you.”