THE BASEMENT ROOM that had belonged to Jack and Jill, before they returned to the Moors, and to Nancy, before she returned to the Halls of the Dead, belonged to Christopher now. He viewed it with a certain superstitious hope, like the fact that its last three occupants had been able to find their doors meant that he would absolutely find his own. Magical thinking might seem like nonsense to some people, but he had danced with skeletons by the light of a marigold moon, he had kissed the glimmering skull of a girl with no lips and loved her as he had never loved anything or anyone in his life, and he thought he’d earned a certain amount of nonsense, as long as it helped him get by.

He led the others across the room to the velvet curtain that hung across a rack of metal shelves.

“Jack didn’t take anything with her when she left,” he said. “I mean, nothing except Jill. Her arms were sort of full.” Jack had carried Jill over the threshold like a bride on her wedding night, walking back into the unending wasteland that was their shared perfection, and she hadn’t looked back, not once. Sometimes Christopher still dreamt that he had followed her, running away to a world that would never have made him happy, but which might have made him slightly less miserable than this one.

“So?” asked Nadya. “Jack and Jill were creepy fish.”

“So I have all her things, and all Jill’s things, and Jill was building the perfect girl.” He pulled the curtain aside, revealing a dozen jars filled with amber liquid and … other things. Parts of people that had no business being viewed in isolation.

Christopher leaned up onto his toes, taking a gallon jar down from one of the higher shelves. A pair of hands floated inside, preserved like pale starfish, fingers spread in eternal surprise.

Kade’s voice was frosty. “We buried those,” he said.

“I know,” said Christopher. “But I started having bad dreams after Sumi’s family took her away to bury her. Dreams about her skeleton being incomplete forever. So I … well, I got a shovel, and I got her hands. I dug up her hands. That way, if she ever came back, I could put her together again. She wouldn’t have to be broken forever.”

Kade stared at him. “Christopher, are you honestly telling me you’ve been sharing a bedroom with Sumi’s severed hands this whole time? Because boy, that ain’t normal.” His Oklahoma accent, always stronger when he was upset, was thick as honey.

Rini, on the other hand, didn’t appear disturbed in the slightest. She was looking at the jar with wide, interested eyes. “Those are my mother’s hands?” she asked.