Sumi rolled her eyes.

“I know, I know, panic is fun, but sometimes revenge is better,” she said. “Choose revenge. Choose better. I brought you gloves.”

“They’re yours,” said Kade hastily. “I saved your clothes after you left. Most of them will need a little alteration, but no one else has ever worn them. Only you.”

“Only … if I wear them now … someone else is wearing them.” Jack’s voice was cracked and unsteady: she sounded like she was teetering on the verge of some vast, unseen abyss. She turned her head, viewing the others through a bridal veil of loose blonde strands. “I don’t know where she’s been I don’t know I don’t know I—”

Sumi slapped her.

It wasn’t a hard slap as such things went, but it was hard enough to echo through the room. Alexis stiffened, starting to step forward. Jack’s hand against her arm stopped her. She looked at the smaller woman, expression questioning. Jack shook her head.

“No,” she said. Then, more loudly, she repeated, “No. That was quite enough violence for one day. Thank you, Sumi. How is it you’re not dead? Am I seeing ghosts? If that’s a side effect of what’s been done to me, I’m going to be even more displeased than I already am.”

“Who talks like that?” muttered Cora. “And I realize this is far from the weirdest thing happening here, but Christopher, why do you have a metal table?”

“Technically, I don’t,” said Christopher. “It’s Jack’s. I mean, it belongs to her. I just put a tablecloth over it because it’s creepy.”

“A good autopsy table isn’t creepy, it’s essential,” said Jack. She squinted at him. “Christopher? Am I to assume this is your room now? Who’s your verdigrised friend? I don’t recognize the voice.”

Seeming to relax for the first time since she’d carried Jack through the door, Alexis tapped her arm and signed something. Jack rolled her eyes.

“Of course I’m missing my glasses,” she said. “My sister—may the Drowned Gods devour every scrap of meat clinging to her barnacled bones—stole them when she stole my skull. You’re all quite blurry at any distance.”

“I’m Cora and I’m very confused right now,” said Cora.

“Then you clearly belong with this student body,” said Jack. She leaned against Alexis as she pulled the box of gloves closer. “Have there been any other miraculous resurrections since my departure? I do like to keep up on the latest gossip.”

“Everyone else who was dead is still dead, so far as I know,” said Kade. “Nancy’s door came back for her. She’s gone to the Halls of the Dead.”

“We left Nadya there when we went to find Sumi’s ghost,” said Christopher.