The familiar snorted as Kaylin walked—quickly—to Mrs. Erickson’s side. She was now surrounded by children, only two of whom were crying. To her surprise, one of the two was Jamal.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, repeating the words as if they were a mantra from which he might derive some kind of peace.

Mrs. Erickson shook her head. “It’s all right, Jamal. You’ve been my friend for my entire life. With the exception of broken windows and dishes, you’ve never caused me a moment of pain.”

“You grew up.”

“Yes. And you didn’t. But I still think of you all as my best friends. And maybe the children we never had. I hoped, you know. I hoped that maybe my husband would stay, the way you had all stayed.”

“Don’t hope for that.”

“No, I grew to understand that. People learn new things, even when they’re adults. I’ve learned a lot of new things in the past week. It doesn’t matter whether or not you stayed because you wanted to, or because you had no choice. You kept a very lonely girl company—and you never left me.”

“It does matter,” Katie said. “You’ve been trying to figure out how to get rid of us.”

“No, Katie. I’ve been trying to figure out how to set you free. If I die—and old people do, eventually—I won’t be able to stay with you.”

Katie clearly wanted to say that they’d have each other; she even opened her mouth. But the words wouldn’t come out. She opened her mouth to try again, and this time, her mouth stayed open because this time, the doors Teela had slammed shut shattered.

Sedarias caught the splinters of wood that flew into the room in a whirlwind very similar to the one she’d been moments before. Wood bits hung in air, held by Sedarias in her not-quite-normal form. Nothing followed the shattering of those doors; nothing attempted to enter the room.

But the sound was louder, now—the clicking and moaning very similar to the underpinning of the Wevaran speech with which Kaylin was familiar.

Sedarias allowed all of the debris to drop in one motion; pieces of wood clattered to the floor. She had one hand firmly around Terrano’s; glaring at him, she dropped him as well. Teela had been right. Sedarias could reach Terrano far more efficiently than any of the rest of the cohort—strange, given that they were almost polar opposites when it came to personality.

Beside them both, between Sedarias and Kaylin, Severn finally fully unwound his weapon chain. Mrs. Erickson winced then, and looked away; what she had seen, what she could clearly still see, was too blinding to watch for long.