“Elliot isn’t gay, Sophia.”
Sophia leaned away, as though she regretted pushing into this territory. “Not Elliot. The boy who took care of me during the reverie. I remember his eyes. They weren’t green, and they weren’t quite blue.”
“Sea foam,” he said, barely registering Sophia’s nod as the world around him washed away.
Sea foam.
The Slurpee fell from Kane’s hand, splaying its neon thickness across the aisle. He barely heard Sophia cuss.
Sea foam.
She was describing Dean. And, without knowing it, she was telling him exactly where to look for the rest of what he had lost.
Kane had no idea if this would work, but he had to try.
He stood in the wings of the auditorium where it was dark and cool. The empty space amplified the sounds of students going to class in the background. Shouting. Lockers slamming. Laughter. It was a period earlier than Spanish. None of the Others knew he was here. This had to be done alone.
Kane waited until the second bell to see if anyone entered the auditorium. No one did. He walked onto the stage—it was set up for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, full of watercolor trees and papery vines. He crouched in the middle, pulling out the red journal and a thick marker.
What would he do if it worked?
Hunched in the center of the stage, Kane drew a looping number eight on a fresh page.
Nothing happened.
Kane shook out his hands and rewrote the eight, just like he’d seen Dean do in Benny Cooper’s reverie, and arranged in shells on his bookshelf. All over his old belongings, he found eights.
Nothing happened. The auditorium was unchanged, its invisible crowd unimpressed. What had he thought would happen? Sparkles? A sudden, mystical wind? After the past weeks of magic and the supernatural, reality felt insufferably unengaging.
Kane tore the page from the journal, crumpled it up, and tossed it as hard as he could into the seats. This was so stupid. He rushed into the wings, already wondering if he should skip class and just go to the nurse, when he saw something in the auditorium flash.
Kane backed out onto the stage. There, standing in the center aisle, was the boy Kane had summoned, but not expected.
“Hello, Kane,” Dean said.
He stepped onto the stage and handed Kane the crumpled page. He had between ten and twenty freckles across the bridge of his nose. A necklace with a pendant in the shape of a chess piece—the knight, carved in obsidian—hung around his neck.
“I was wondering when you’d figure this out. Now, don’t do it again,” he said.
“The signal worked? How did you see it?”
Dean’s face was unreadable, his eyes as blank as a doll’s. They were the color of coastal sunlight chewed to froth by the lips of the Atlantic.
Sea foam.
Kane stumbled through what he’d prepared. “You know me, don’t you? I mean we know each other. You were one of the Others once, weren’t you? You have powers. You can see things other people can’t, and you look out for me. But only me.”
Finally something stirred in Dean’s eyes: resentment. When Dean brushed by, Kane caught his wrist.
“I have questions for you!”
Dean spun, grabbing Kane’s hand tight. “Don’t you know how dangerous this is?” he hissed. “Didn’t I make myself clear?”
Kane shivered. Nerves. The edges of the crumpled page poked into one palm, and Dean’s nails poked into the other.
“I just want to know who you are.”
“Forget about me,” Dean said.
“Evidently I already did,” Kane shot back.
Something shifted in those sea-foam depths. He had hit a nerve. Exposed something. Now Dean watched him with guarded eyes, as though the very sight of Kane hurt him.
Kane knew what he wanted to ask, but he also knew he would never believe a single word that came out of Dean’s mouth. Everyone lied. If he had learned anything, it was that words from mouths could be beautiful and deceptive, but mouths could tell you their truths in other ways. Kane wasn’t going to leave without that one truth. And so, beneath a paper moon and among the false forest of the stage, he kissed him.
And, taken by surprise, Dean forgot the strict rules that held him together, and kissed back.
There was applause from the ghostly audience, Kane imagined. When Dean tried to speak, Kane breathed the words back into his mouth, refusing their deceit, until Dean’s hands climbed over Kane in sure familiarity. Kane, hungry to know, took everything he could from the kiss—Dean’s truth and his pain—and when it ended, it was against Dean’s will. And that’s how Kane knew.
Kane stepped back, leaving Dean’s hand to clutch empty air.
“You love me,” Kane said. He couldn’t look Dean in the face, so he looked at his hands. Brown skin, smooth palms, perfect nails. The hands of a prince.
Dean didn’t deny it.
“What did you do?” Kane asked. “You were one of us once, weren’t you? Why don’t the Others remember? Did Adeline do this?”
“Not Adeline.”
“Elliot?”
Dean clasped his hands in front of him, then unclasped them, leaving them to twitch restlessly at his sides. “You.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You took everything from us.”
Kane’s throat felt straw thin, one molecule of air sliding into him at a time.
“Is this about my accident? About Maxine Osman’s death?”
“Accident.” Dean grimaced. “What happened to Maxine was the accident. What happened to you was on purpose. It was…” Dean searched for a word, his mouth working through his anger. “It was what you wanted.”
“Do you mean finding the loom?”
“The loom.” Dean wrapped his long arms around his narrow frame. “I thought that if we found it, we could be free together. But I was wrong.”
“Free from what?”
Dean circled Kane. Before he left the stage, he turned.
“You and the Others were never supposed to find out about me. Those were my orders. But I thought you were worth breaking every rule for, and I thought you’d do the same for me. I was wrong.”
Kane didn’t understand what Dean had said, but he knew enough about heartbreak to know what he meant. Kane had left him behind in a horrible way. For the loom? For power?
Dean pulled something from his jacket and tossed it to Kane.