“Uh-huh.” She nodded quickly. “There’s a strange girl in the turtle pond and she says she’s the daughter of someone I’ve never heard of, but who Nadya says is dead, so I think we need an adult.”

“If you need an adult, you should be looking for Kade, not Eleanor,” said Christopher. He started toward the door. “Who’s the dead person?”

“Someone named Sumi.”

Christopher’s fingers clamped down hard on his bone flute. “Walk faster,” he said, and Cora did, following him up the steps and into the school.

The halls were cool and empty. There were no classes in session; the other students would be scattered across the campus, chatting in the kitchen, sleeping in their rooms. For a place that could explode with noise and life under the right circumstances, it was often surprisingly quiet.

“Sumi was a student before you got here,” said Christopher. “She went to a world called Confection, where she pissed off the Countess of Candy Floss and got herself kicked out as a political exile.”

“Did her parents take her away?”

“She was murdered.”

Cora nodded solemnly. She had heard about the murders, about the girl named Jill who had decided the way to open her own door home was to cut away the doors of as many others as she deemed necessary. There was a certain amount of horror in those tales, and also a certain amount of shameful understanding. Many of them—not all, not even most, but many—would have done the same if they’d had the necessary skills. Some people even seemed to possess a certain grudging respect for what Jill had done. Sure, she’d killed people. In the end, it had been enough to take her home.

“The person who killed her wasn’t a friend of mine, not really, but her sister kind of was. We were … Jack and Jill went to a world called the Moors, which was sort of horror movie-y, from the way they described it. A lot of people lumped me in with them, because of Mariposa.”

“That’s the world you went to?”

Christopher nodded. “Eleanor still can’t decide whether it was a Fairyland or an Underworld or something new and in-between. That’s why people shouldn’t get too hung up on labels. Sometimes I think that’s part of what we do wrong. We try to make things make sense, even when they’re never going to.”

Cora didn’t say anything.

The hall ended at the closed door to Eleanor’s studio. Christopher rapped his knuckles twice against the wood, then opened it without waiting to be asked.