Jack swallowed a sigh. It would have been so much better, so much easier, if she’d been the one to go and speak with Eleanor. But if she had been forced to face her former benefactor, if Eleanor had looked at her with understanding—or worse, with pity—her narrow grasp on her composure might well have snapped. She had made excuses about becoming useless if she spent another second in that lacy abomination Jill thought suitable for an evening of body-snatching, claiming some indignities were simply too much to be borne.

The truth was simpler. She was reaching her limits. She couldn’t stand to face one more person who understood how much she’d lost.

“No,” she said, lowering her hands and turning to face them. “I’m so far from ‘all right’ that I doubt I could see it with a telescope. I never intended to come back here. This world is an affront to the scientific principles by which I live.”

“You mean the scientific principles that let your sister steal your body?” asked Cora.

Jack frowned, focusing on the blue-haired girl. “Have I said or done something to offend you?” she asked. “Did I dissect one of your pets before I left here? That seems unlikely, since you joined the student body after my departure, but stranger things have happened. Time-traveling doors could be a real, if vexing, phenomenon.”

Cora’s ears burned red. “No,” she said. “You just scared me with all that lightning. Someone could have been hurt.”

“She means me,” said Christopher. “I could have been hurt.”

“Ah,” said Jack. “I suppose pointing out that this was my room before it was Christopher’s, and that the density of my belongings remains such that the principles of resonance still identify it as my domain won’t buy me your forgiveness?”

“Since I have no idea what you just said, no,” said Cora. “You can’t go around electrocuting people. It’s not safe.”

“No one was hurt,” said Christopher.

“I believe she’s objecting to the possible, not the actual, which is something I can understand,” said Jack. “I spend a great deal of my time contending with the possible, and sometimes must reject ideas I was deeply infatuated with because they have the potential to do more harm than I care for. I’m sorry I frightened you. It wasn’t my intention. I won’t say I would have done anything any differently, because I barely had time to calibrate the lightning rod before the fact that I was touching it with bare fingers—bare fingers that technically belonged to someone else—overwhelmed me, and I passed out from the shock. Our escape was a narrow thing. I would have been my sister’s first meal in her new life had I remained where I was long enough to be taken, and so I can’t apologize for fleeing. Only for the consequences it carried.”