“Oh!” Rini held up her right hand, the one that still had all its fingers and had yet to start fading from existence. There was a bracelet clasped around her wrist, the sort of thing a child might wear, beads on a piece of string tied tight to keep her from losing it. “The Fondant Wizard gave me a way for back-and-forth, so I could get here and find Mom and tell her to stop doing whatever she was doing that was making me never have been born. I’m supposed to be sneaking through the Treacle Bogs right now, you know, to look for threats along our western border. Important stuff. So if we could hurry up, that would be amazing.”

Silence followed her words, silence like a bowstring, stretched tight and ready to snap. Slowly, Rini lowered her arm and looked around. Everyone was staring at her. Christopher was swallowing hard, the muscles in his throat jumping wildly. There were tears in Nadya’s eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“Why did you leave her here?” Kade’s voice was suddenly low and dangerous. He stood, stalking toward Rini. “When Sumi got to the school, she was a mess. I thought we were gonna lose her. I thought she was going to slice herself open to try to get the candy out of her veins, and now here you are, and you have something that means you can just … just come here and go back again, like it’s nothing. Like the doors don’t even matter. Why did you leave her here? Why didn’t someone come and get her before it was too late?”

Rini shied back, away from him, glancing frantically to Christopher and Nadya for support. Nadya looked away. Christopher shook his head.

“I didn’t know!” she cried. “Mom always said she’d loved it here at your school, that she made friends and learned stuff and got her head straight enough to know that she wanted it to be crooked! She never asked me to come get her sooner!”

“If she had, you might never have been born,” said Eleanor. She cleared her throat before saying, a little more loudly, “Dearest, please don’t torture our guest. Done is done and past is past, and while we’re looking for a way to change that, I think we should focus on what can still be done, and what hasn’t already been omitted.”

“Can those beads take us anywhere?” asked Christopher. “Any world at all?”

“Sure,” said Rini. “Anywhere there’s sugar.”

His fingers played across the surface of his bone flute, coaxing out the ghosts of notes. No one could hear them, but that didn’t matter. He knew that they were there.

“I think I know a way to fix this,” he said.

*   *   *