Adeline stalked off through the rain. Kane groaned, his exhaustion dousing his smoldering grudge. Before, when they had summoned the doors, he had felt that elusive comradery with the Others. Adeline had inspired it, again. They could have left him to save Sophia alone, but they were all here. Except Dean. Kane had done a good job driving him off, already. He couldn’t afford to do the same to Adeline. He knew she was right.
Kane found her huddled against a cracked pillar, soaking wet. Seeing him, she wiped at her cheeks and started pulling sections of her hair into a side braid.
“I’m sorry,” Kane offered. She ignored it.
Kane tried again. “Don’t worry, you still look pretty.”
Adeline’s laugh was frosty “That’s what you think I care about? Looking pretty? Spare me, Kane, seriously. Pretty is the last thing I care about, but you wouldn’t know that, would you? No, because you’re too busy reducing everything I’ve done this past month to pettiness and spite. Fuck pretty.”
Kane’s mouth fell open.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “When you first recruited me to the Others, Elliot and Ursula still thought I was this superficial queen bee, and it took months of backbreaking work on my part to undo that impression, to prove that I was, in fact, a person with real thoughts and real feelings and—heaven forbid—substance. But I never had to prove that shit to you, Kane, because you used to know what it was like to be misunderstood by everyone, avoided and discarded for the way you look or act.”
Kane’s knees were weak. Here it was again: the feelings people had for the person he used to be, bruised with loss and turned to anger with who he was now. Kane yearned to fold right then and there, to give up, but Adeline was still speaking.
“You think just because you’ve faced trauma you’re excused from treating people with compassion? You think just because your sister is in trouble, you get to opt out of being a leader? Well, Kane, guess what. I’ve got sisters, too, and they might be next. We all stand to lose people if we don’t stop Poesy.”
She took a long breath. Adeline’s next words were smaller. “And I care about Sophia, too.”
The rain softened, and all Kane could hear was the breath they shared.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting that you don’t know me anymore, either.”
“It’s okay,” said Kane.
“It’s not. I can do better. We can all do better.”
Kane nodded. He felt real tears join the water dripping down his face. “I’m afraid of failing again,” he said.
Adeline stepped toward Kane. “Then we won’t fail,” she said. “We’ll be better than we were.”
“I’m sorry,” Kane said. “For all the blame.”
“I know. Me, too.”
When Sophia’s headlights found them, Adeline and Kane were holding hands. They broke apart quickly as Sophia rolled up atop some sort of hovering motorcycle that looked like a Jet Ski. Another bobbed behind her.
She was in a hurry now.
“Rain’s clearing up. They’re here. We’ve got to boogie,” she said to Kane.
“Wait! What about me?” Adeline whined. It was very convincing.
Sophia slid from her hovercycle. “What about you?”
“I’ve seen too much,” Adeline said. “They’ll hurt me.”
“If you know they’ll hurt you for seeing,” Sophia said, “then you already know the fragility of the lie they’ve trapped you in. It’s too late for you, no matter what. You’re already waking to the truth.”
Adeline set her jaw. The perfect impression of a brat.
“Or,” Sophia whispered, circling Adeline, “perhaps you wake yourself up in time to save yourself.”
Adeline followed Sophia with just her eyes. The next words barely fit between the two girls.
“How do I wake up?” asked Adeline.
“You pay attention,” Sophia said.
“Pay attention to what?” asked Adeline.
“You pay attention to what you know, not what they say.”
“I know…” Adeline faltered. She wasn’t acting now. Her eyes were trapped by Sophia’s imploring stare. Her lips pinched, pulled, frowned.
Had Sophia made Adeline…bashful?
An aircraft swooped down from the night sky, then another, their lights finding the trio quickly.
As the spotlights tore open the dark, they found Adeline pressed to Sophia, their lips locked. There was a force to the kiss that magnetized Sophia and sent gleeful static through the reverie’s fabric. Kane gasped. Actually gasped.
Adeline broke off the kiss, saying, “Now you have to take me. If you leave me, you kill me.”
Sophia uncuffed Adeline. “Then you’d better keep up. Both of you, get ready.”
Kane took one hovercycle, and Adeline slid on the back of Sophia’s. They maneuvered to face the ship that had just landed. From its hull slid a ramp, and out poured soldiers sporting large guns. Then came the music. A soaring string overture Kane recognized from his mom’s record collection of girl group music from the fifties.
Kane didn’t know how to drive a hovercycle, but he thought it might begin with the big green button in the shape of an arrow. His hand hovered over it, ready.
The soldiers fanned out, keeping in time with the beat. One opened an umbrella for their leader, who stepped down the ramp daintily. She was a woman in a tweed suit, the narrow skirt allowing her only small steps. She was perhaps in her sixties and immaculately composed. Her femininity cost her no authority, and it was clear she scared Sophia.
“Miss Smithe,” Sophia whispered, her eyes locking with the woman’s white glare.
Kane realized this was a projection of Sophia’s real-life nemesis: Headmistress Smithe of Pemberton’s School for Girls, a beacon of antiquated thinking according to Sophia. The reverie began to make sense.
“That’s right,” said Miss Smithe silkily. “The Bright Hand has plagued my Committee long enough with your juvenile pilfering. I thought I would personally attend your capture.”
Sophia stood in the seat of her hovercycle. “The rebellion will never die! History can never die!”
“Tsk tsk,” said Miss Smithe. “A little girl, playing at archivist, but if she had any talent for history she would recognize the erroneous ways of the world she wishes to resurrect. The truly liberal are the truly misguided, for there is no bastion in a world without Holy Society. You know this. You’ve heard of the Doom that lays beyond Everest’s lights. It is the Doom that we, the Committee, hold at bay so that all citizens may thrive.”