“Maxine and Helena seem to be adjusting okay to being alive and like…back in reality, all things considered,” she was saying. “Maxine is working on a new series. Mythical creatures made out of gems. She and Helena keep asking Adeline to let them remember a little bit more. She’s mostly just been telling them stories. It’s so cute, the way they listen. They say they want to go back, but I told them they had to convince you.”
“I don’t think there’s much I can do. Those reveries resolved. There’s not much left.”
“What about the charms in Poesy’s sanctuary? Do you think all those reveries are safe there?”
Kane didn’t know. “I hope so. We have the only key.”
“That we know of,” Ursula added.
“Wow, you’re already sounding like Elliot,” Kane teased.
Ursula shoved him playfully. He threw a piece of candy at her, but it struck a small barrier and fell away.
“Cheater!”
Ursula laughed and strode ahead with her little brother, reaching into his bag for something else.
Kane watched her go. He watched Adeline and Dean chatting while Sophia and Elliot read the ingredients of a candy bar. He felt that strange, new feeling he was only just learning to embrace: contentment. It was immediately accompanied by melancholy, as Kane’s happiness often was. Moments like this were fleeting; they came together in graceful concert, like schools of silvery fish, and drifted apart just as quick. He always had the urge to capture them, to keep them replaying over and over—his own little reverie. His dream, arrested. But sealed off things that steep too long in the human mind are doomed to grow bitter. If the reveries had taught Kane anything, it was the worth of escaping outward, and how to unstitch the seam where fantasies met the wider world. For Kane, it was all about creating something new, something better.
Poesy was right. They were alike in their goal. Still, they were separated by their methods. And of course, taste. Poesy wanted a clean canvas for her masterpiece. Kane was content to work with what he had.
Increasingly, he realized he had a lot to work with already.
A hard candy struck Kane’s shoulder.
“Hey, Montgomery, get your head out of the clouds,” called Ursula. “Dad called to say the cookies are done. By the time we get back they’ll be cool enough to decorate.”
Kane blinked away the daydream and ran to catch up with his friends.