Kade ignored her. “It’s nice to meet you, Rini. I just wish it were under slightly better circumstances. Will you come back to the house with me? I manage the school wardrobe. I can find you something to wear.”

“Why?” asked Rini peevishly. “Are you insulted by my vagina too? Do people in this world not have them?”

“Many people do, and there’s nothing wrong with them, and also that’s your vulva, but it’s considered a little rude to run around showing your genitals to people who haven’t asked,” said Kade. “Eleanor is in the house, and once you’re dressed, we can sit down and talk.”

“I don’t have time to talk,” said Rini. “I need my mother. Please, where is she?”

“Rini—”

“You don’t understand!” Rini’s voice was an anguished howl. She held out her left hand. “I don’t have time!”

“Huh,” said Nadya.

That was the only thing any of them said. The rest were busy looking at Rini’s left hand, with its two missing fingers. They hadn’t been cut off: there was no scar tissue. She hadn’t been born that way: the place where her fingers should have been was too obviously empty, like a hole in the world. They were simply gone, fading from existence as her own future caught up to the idea that somehow, someway, her mother had never been able to conceive her, and so she had never been born.

Rini lowered her hand. “Please,” she repeated.

“This changes things,” said Kade. “Come on.”

*   *   *

RINI WAS TALL and thin, but many of the students were tall and thin: too many, as far as Cora was concerned. She didn’t like the idea that people who already had socially acceptable bodies would get the adventures, too. She knew it was a small and petty thought, one she shouldn’t have had in the first place, much less indulged, but she couldn’t stop herself from feeling how she felt. Rini had the fashion sense of a drunken mockingbird, attracted to the brightly colored and the shiny, and that, too, was not uncommon among the students, many of whom had traveled to worlds where the idea of subtlety was ignored in favor of the much more entertaining idea of hurting people’s eyes.

In the end, Kade had coaxed her into a rainbow sundress, dyed so that the colors melded into each other like a scoop of sherbet in the sun. He had given her slippers for her feet, both in the same style and size, but dyed differently, so that one was poppy orange and the other turquoise blue. He had given her ribbons to tie in her hair, and now they were sitting, the five of them, in Eleanor’s parlor.

Eleanor sat behind her desk, hands laced tight together, like a child about to undertake her evening prayers.