“Excuse me, excuse me.”
Adeline pushed through the crowd of stunned players, getting real low and in Kane’s face.
“Hey. Dream boy. You all right?”
Kane blinked at her. The cave was gone, the arena evaporated. Behind Adeline, dusk had come to East Amity, and the stadium lights blazed white against a ruddy sunset. She helped him up, and he saw that they stood before the congregation of rapt spectators, arranged in a minimized version of the reverie’s crowd. He saw the football players he’d recognized as barbarians. And farther back he spotted Mikhail and Ethan with the rest of the pep band, no longer dressed as guards. Off the side huddled the cheerleading team, as though caught mid-escape.
Kane swung around to face where the giant lobster god had been; he now looked up in the vacant smile of the empty goalposts.
“Hey! Everything okay?”
Off to the side, Ursula waved at them from the locker rooms.
“Elliot’s getting his car,” she called. She was dressed in her field hockey uniform (still charred). Kane saw that Adeline was transformed, too. She wore shorts and a loose mint shirt. Both girls appeared completely free of the wounds they’d sustained. Kane ran his hands over his own body.
He was unhurt and alive, and the only burns that remained were the ones around his head.
“Kane, hurry up and give it back.”
Adeline motioned upward.
Hanging in the air was the knot of light, glinting like a cut-crystal ornament. Kane reached out and it floated to him with noncommittal buoyancy, stopping just above his palm. It emanated the memory of fire, of blood, of bones ground to dust. It had a sound, too. Susurrant and gentle, betraying none of the violence it held.
“Take this part easy, okay?” Adeline said. “You have to give it back slowly. Freely.”
Kane looked at her, then back at the knot. “You’ve done this before?”
“Not personally.”
Luckily for both of them, the knot knew what to do. It drifted over the confused crowd until it found was it was looking for: a player on the bench. It sank into his helmet.
“I told you it was Ben Cooper,” Adeline called.
“What?” Ursula threw her hands up. “He seems so nice! I never took him for the misogynistic, tomb-raiding type.”
“More like womb-raider. He’s the one who tried to get with me at my birthday last year. He’s a creep-o, Urs. He just hides it well.”
“I thought you suspected John Heckles.”
Adeline threw out a mocking laugh. “Heckles? That idiot doesn’t have an imaginative bone in his body. He’s a refrigerator.”
“Refrigerators hold wonders!”
Kane didn’t understand the joking mood. All around them people were panicking, the vanishing of the reverie having dumped them back into their home reality. Someone began an unsure chant. Others cowered, as though the summoned god still loomed.
“You better go with Urs,” Adeline said. “Unless you want to lose your mind, too, no pun intended. I’ll be right along as soon as I clean up these memories. Can’t have that mess respawning again, can we?” She propped her hands on her hips and began counting the people around the field. Kane understood he was being dismissed and slipped through the crowd to where Ursula waited. She shushed him before he could ask her anything.
“I know,” she said. “We’ll explain everything. But first, are you hungry?”
Kane was incredibly hungry. He’d missed lunch, after all.
Ursula smiled. “You always are.”
“So what about werewolves?” Elliot asked. “Twice for werewolves, right?”
The Gold Roc Diner was a narrow, kitschy diner on the edge of East Amity, buzzing through all hours of the night like a neon satellite. The quartet sat at the back-most booth. Ravaged plates spread across the table, covered in streaks of ketchup and grease, except for Adeline’s; the crusts of her dissected sandwich had been stacked in a small tower. Kane stared at the tower. It was all he could do to keep himself from passing out from fatigue.
He had barely talked since they sat down. It was like he’d been jostled in a fundamental way, his mind falling out of alignment with his body by a fraction of an inch, and nothing was lining up. Perhaps alarmed by his silence, the Others just began telling him things. Right now, they were discussing all the past reveries they’d encountered.
Reveries, Kane thought. Plural. These have happened before, and often.
“Yeah I remember two werewolf reveries,” Ursula said.
“Three,” said Adeline, “if you count Barbara Weiss’s last year, during the school play.”
“Those were just giant wolves,” Ursula said.
“No, she’s right,” said Elliot. “It was still people turning into wolves. That’s three werewolf reveries.”
Kane absorbed this. He was way beyond doubt, by now. He was beyond everything, spinning in some elliptical orbit around the conversation.
“This wasn’t the first giant bug, right?” Ursula asked.
“Isopod,” Elliot corrected, but the girls ignored him.
“There were those giant lunar spiders,” said Adeline. “The ones that crawled out of the eclipse in that one reverie.”
“Spiders are arachnids, Adeline.”
“Elliot. I swear to God if you don’t cut that out.”
Ursula steered the conversation into a recounting of her favorite reverie, which was a story about rare dragons raised in ponds who were determined to make hats from lily pads. This devolved into a discussion of the merits of mermaids, a topic that deeply embarrassed Ursula for some reason. Elliot and Adeline smiled, and Adeline made as if she were telling Kane a salacious bit of gossip.
“You should have seen Ursula in a shell bra. You wouldn’t know it because she’s always in baggy hoodies, but Ursula has got great—”
“Adeline!” Ursula’s face went as scarlet as her hair. Adeline shrugged, still grinning.
“The point is, we’ve seen it all,” Adeline said. “And I do mean it all.”
The orbit of Kane’s mind returned to the dark star of his world, the gap in the night sky where something should have been. In their extensive debrief, the Others hadn’t brought up Dean Flores once. They didn’t know about him. It was as though he didn’t exist to them.
“What about ghosts?” Kane asked.
The table was silent in the face of Kane’s first words in an hour.
“Often,” Ursula said solemnly. “Especially around the holidays.”