“Nor should you: it’s dreadful.” Jack’s eyes were dry. That made sense: death was as commonplace to her as breathing. Still, it was easy in that moment to hate her, just a little. This was all her fault. If she hadn’t come back to the school, if she had just stayed in the Moors where she claimed she belonged …

But that wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

“I didn’t come looking for someone to die for me,” said Jack, voice low and far too calm. It wasn’t serenity: it was rigid control holding her words in place, like shackles around every syllable. “I wanted help. I had nowhere else to turn. This was not my intention, and I will be sorry for it later, I will mourn our friends for all the nights of my life. First we have to secure those nights. If we fail, they died for nothing.”

“If we succeed, they died for nothing,” Christopher snapped.

“That’s not true,” said Sumi. She turned from her contemplation of the walls, bouncing on her toes, filled with the endless energy that had already made her the savior of a spun-sugar fantasyland, and would inevitably make her so again. “If we succeed, they died to save a world. Wouldn’t you have died to save Mariposa? I would have died to save Confection. The only reason I’m sorry Jilly-Jill killed me is because my death was useless. I didn’t save anything. I didn’t even save her. Let Kade be a hero again. It might not be what he wanted, but it’s what he earned, and people have to have the things they’ve earned for those things to matter.”

Christopher sighed, deep and low and defeated. “This isn’t fair.”

Sumi blinked at him. “Whoever said heroism was fair?” she asked. “It’s the unfairest thing of all. ‘Come away, oh human child, and learn to swing a sword for the sake of people who’ve decided the thing you’re best for is dying in their name.’ We were lambs for the slaughter, all of us, and if we survived this long, it’s not because we’re special. Come on. Let’s be heroes one more time.”

She spun on her heel and scampered down the corridor. Jack looked at Christopher, anxious and strained. Christopher shook his head.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s go save your world.”

They walked on in silence, and if they were privately relieved, they didn’t say so. Christopher plodded. Sumi danced, skipped, and spun, seeming to view this all as some great game. Perhaps it was a side effect of travel in Nonsense, Christopher thought, watching as she played a strange variant of hopscotch with the puddles on the path ahead of them. When even heroism was a game, nothing could be taken seriously, and even the most trivial of situations could end in violence at any time.