“Stop it,” Chichi said, growing serious. “Just turn around.”

Sasha and Orlu both turned away. Chichi stepped closer to Sunny as she looked around to make sure people were still more occupied with collecting the strange dust than watching her. Then she undid a few buttons on her shirt and opened the top. Sunny leaned forward to look. She gasped and stepped back.

“Sasha used some of the ants from the Mmuo Aku to close it up,” Chichi said.

“Is that what those stitches are?” Sunny asked, through her hands covering her mouth. Her eyes watered.

“Yeah, they have big and strong biting pincers,” she said. “You get them to bite down, then clip the body off with your nail.”

“That’s nasty,” Sunny said, disgusted.

Chichi only shrugged. “Better than dying. I remembered Orlu talking a few years ago about ants used for sutures.”

Chichi’s swift photographic memory had saved her yet again. As she lay there with the large wound on her chest bleeding and bleeding, she’d remembered what Orlu had told her. Then she told Sasha to find the ants. He’d turned around and found a large group of them at his feet, almost waiting for him. “They were waiting,” Chichi said. “I made them come and wait as soon as I could see them clearly in my head.” Sasha and Chichi’s natural gifts were always unclear to Sunny. But every so often, like now, she was in awe of their power.

When Sasha had rescued Chichi, swimming up through an avalanche of exploding insects, the opening to the wilderness just behind him, one of the Aku masquerade’s insects had struck. Chichi said that she felt it crawl into her shirt and that it was large. But she was so focused on getting out that she couldn’t do anything about it. It was big and it tried to cut out her heart. If Chichi hadn’t fallen on her chest just as they emerged and crushed it, she would have been dead. It turned out to be a giant brown sticklike insect with razor-sharp front legs. It had cut a gash beside Chichi’s heart that was two inches long. It wasn’t too deep, so it didn’t get to her sternum; the nasty bug was just getting started.

“And there was more,” Orlu said. Ekwensu had planned to deal with Sunny without any interference. Thus, when Orlu and Grashcoatah tried to get into the house, several of Ekwensu’s minions had attacked. They were shadowy and brilliantly colored spirits that could somehow affect the physical world, and they started with knocking Orlu off Grashcoatah’s back. Then they tried to push Grashcoatah to the ground as well. Orlu had hit the ground hard and lost consciousness for at least thirty seconds. When he came to, there was insanity happening right above him.

“Grashcoatah was like Spider-Man,” Orlu said. “He was hovering over me to protect me, and there were spiderwebs shooting from his fur! They’d wrap and wind around the spirits, and the spirits would fall wriggling to the ground and then dissolve, I guess, back into the wilderness.” He shook his head. “Sunny, you might have been able to see where they went because you can see both places. Grashcoatah was amazing.”