“Down here!”
Footsteps stomped up from the basement, and Ursula rushed in holding a battered muffin tin. She casually popped out its dents with her bare thumbs. When she hugged Kane he could smell the vanilla in her hair. Adeline was with her, and by the looks of it she’d been helping all evening. Flour smattered her arms like dusty bruises, and instead of hugging Kane she simply gave him a cool nod.
That counts, Kane thought. Twenty-four cold glances from Adeline.
“Dad and the boys are home but we should be fine in here,” Ursula said.
They sat at the kitchen table, among stacks of cookies and bowls of scraped-out frosting. Elliot and Adeline seemed anxious to hear what Kane had to say but Ursula was desperate for anything else.
“I made apricot scones today,” she said. “I don’t even like apricot. Does anyone want to try one? Oh, wait, actually try this batch instead. Elliot, do you still keep kosher? I can pull out the ingredients if you want to look at them. I’ve learned it’s important to ask beforehand, because one time a girl on the field hockey team said she was a celiac, which I thought was a hobby. Anyhow, I almost poisoned her. But kosher is different, right?” Elliot nodded. “Right, well then, let me find a plate. You might have to clean one yourself. Dad and Gail have been using paper ones, I think, which makes me feel bad. I guess this is a big mess, isn’t it?” No one confirmed this outright, but Ursula explained anyway. “My mother and I used to bake when my father had shifts with the fire department. Always calmed me down. Probably a focus thing? I don’t know. It’s a habit. After she died I didn’t bake for years, but this past year got me back into it. Don’t know why.”
Ursula had told Kane that her father was remarried, with two new kids. Toddlers. He could hear them elsewhere in the house, clapping and singing. Their mother, Gail, was a nurse, and she worked nights.
“Kane,” Elliot said finally, “don’t worry. We’re not mad. We just have a lot of questions.”
He didn’t expect that. He didn’t know what to expect anymore.
“I’m a little mad,” Adeline said, smirking. A joke. She went on. “I had ballet at the conservatory last night and jeez, Kane. Your sister. She is persistent. She nearly did all of warm-ups with us, trying to get my attention.”
Kane sat up straighter. He had totally forgotten that Adeline and Sophia both went to classes at the conservatory associated with the university.
“Don’t worry,” Adeline said. “I’m not messing with her head. She’s smart. She knows what’s real, what’s not. I keep telling her to ask you all her questions, but it sounds like that’s not going great for her.”
It was exhausting finding new ways to evade Sophia now that she’d come out of her stupor, the reverie fully cemented in her memory. Kane shrugged. “I don’t want her any more involved in this than she has to be. She never should have gotten caught in a reverie.”
“Then we’ll leave her out of it,” Adeline said. “But we need to talk about what happened. Helena is gone. Same as Maxine. And I think we know who to blame. I think you can tell us all about who’s to blame.”
Kane took a deep breath. He was shaking. In an effort to comfort him, Ursula slid a ceramic plate of scones toward him, real slow. It reminded Kane of a detective sliding gruesome photos across a metal table toward the person they were interrogating. He took another deep breath, then two more, and then he talked for a long time.
He told them about his first conversation with Poesy, in which she promised Kane safety from the police in return for his cooperation. So far, that had been true. He told them about the invitation that had appeared in his journal, and the strange furniture that had appeared in the abandoned library, and the conversation he could barely recall beneath layers of floral vapor that curled the edges of his memory. He told them about Ms. Daisy the Doberman, and as he did he realized the dog, like everything about Poesy, shifted forms. Ms. Daisy was a dog, but she was also Poesy’s pet nightmare, the Dreadmare, which he now recognized as the same many-legged shadow that guarded the old mill from him and Sophia, and then followed him on his walk home.
There were things Kane did not share. He did not tell the Others about Dean, who he could not fit into anything so far. He did not tell them the reason Poesy had come to East Amity: the loom. And he did not feel bad about it. Poesy had been miraculous for Kane, an advocate and a mentor when everyone else who loved him had treated him as a liability or a prop. Poesy had given Kane knowledge, insight, and tools to understand the reveries. She had kept her promise, and she had saved them all, using just a teacup and a well-manicured nail.
Kane knew power when he saw it, and Poesy was power. He also recognized Poesy’s violence, but wasn’t her violence used to dismantle something far more dangerous and malicious than herself? Helena’s world had tried to kill them, and if Poesy had not retaliated with force, Helena’s world would have succeeded. Kane didn’t think he could trust the Others to understand this cost of survival. He wasn’t even sure he understood it himself. What he did understand was that he had called upon Poesy for help, and she didn’t deserve betrayal for showing up and saving them on her own terms.
Whatever wrong she had committed, it was on Kane to right it. But had she committed a wrong?
“I have some questions,” Elliot said at the end of Kane’s story.
“Same,” Adeline said. The way she looked at Kane made him wonder if she could trace the outline of all the memories he had omitted. He took care not to look her in the eye.
“Same,” Ursula said through a mouthful of scone. “Like, was she really tall? I saw a drag queen once who was like, eight feet tall. It was the hair.”
“Nine feet at least,” Elliot said. “What does she want, though? She’s got to have a goal for showing up. Is she after the reveries? She turned it into a charm. She clearly had a few on her bracelet, already. Is she some kind of collector?”
Kane had thought about this. She had said she would fix what happened with Helena, implying she had a plan to undo all the twists the Others had caused. This spurred Kane’s own question.
“Why do you guys give the reveries back?” Kane asked. “If they’re so dangerous, wouldn’t it just be easier to keep them? Or erase them completely?”
Ursula and Elliot looked to Adeline. She rolled her lips together, like she didn’t want to say. “We thought that once. We didn’t know better. It turns out, when a person is missing such a big piece of themselves, they’re not themselves anymore. They become…hollow. Same shape, but nothing keeping them going inside. It only took us a few accidental hollowings before we figured out you have to give the reverie back, all of it, or you might as well just kill a person.”
“Who did that happen to?” Kane asked.