Jack stopped again, longer this time, before she was able to whisper, “She said I was only getting what I deserved, for trying to take eternity away from her. Even then, she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t have everything she wanted. There are rules. I tried to tell her, I did, and her Master told her not to listen, and she didn’t. Dr. Bleak threw the switch. He didn’t have a choice. There was no way left for us to win. And then the lightning—it had always been my friend before, it had always done what I asked of it, until I suppose I’d started to think of it as … as a tame thing, like a hound that knows its master. But it wasn’t tame at all. It bit me, it bit me over and over again, with terrible teeth made of nothing but light, and I was screaming, and I could feel the tethers that held me to my body breaking, until the room looked wrong, fuzzy and out of focus and wrong, and the eyes I was looking through weren’t mine, and I … I…”

Jack—calm, implacable Jack, the mad scientist who had stabbed her own sister rather than allow her to achieve her murderous goals, who had rarely been seen to be less than perfectly composed, dignified and serene—put her hands over her face and sobbed. Alexis put her arm around the slimmer girl’s shoulders and looked gravely at the assembled students.

“Jack can’t stay in her sister’s body,” she said. “It will break her. Maybe worse, it will destroy the Moors.”

Cora frowned. “She just said she went willingly. Why can’t she stay? If they’re twins, it should be pretty much the same as being in her own body. Right?”

“Jack has OCD,” said Kade. “She may never have seen a doctor to get a proper diagnosis, but she did her time with Lundy—you never knew Lundy; she died before you came back from the Trenches—and they figured it out. She can’t stand being dirty. She can’t stand things being out of place. Right now, for her, everything is out of place.”

“Before she passed out for the first time, she said it was like there were spiders under her skin, crawling all over everything,” said Alexis. “This can’t go on.”

“I guess I can understand why this is bad for Jack, but why is it bad for the Moors?” asked Christopher.

Sumi gave him a brief, pitying look before switching her attention to Alexis, and asking, “Did they kill Dr. Bleak before or after you ran?”