There are small and easy ways to break a child. I know most of them—making promises you never keep; saying everything will be fine when it never is; giving a Popsicle to one kid and not the other; saying you love them and then pinching their arm hard enough to bruise; never bothering to look at them at all; kissing their forehead at night and telling them you’ll never leave and then dying.

I’m sure other ways exist.

People like to say children are resilient. And they are. Their blood’s like glue. Wound them, and their body puts itself back together again. But it’s not like a scab that breaks off eventually and leaves the skin unmarred. It’s more like a china doll. Even if it looks whole again, there’s still that layer of glue there—evidence you can point to—even when no one else looks close enough to see it.

At this point in my life, I’m more glue than flesh.

But this is a new breaking. My skin burns so hot that all the glue holding together every single wound melts, and all my broken parts slowly slip out of place, falling on the hard ground and cracking into more fragments than can ever be put back together.

I stumble, because my feet feel like nothing but dust, and catch myself on the white marble walls veined in blue to match the festivities.

They lied to me. They all lied to me.

It’s not even about Xander and Aristelle being together, because my ridiculous vampire-forgiving heart was pulling me somewhere else anyway. It was about him pretending to want me. Tricking me. How much of it was a trick? Diantha and Reina laughing with me over dinner? That day at the beach? How much of it was an illusion?

It was like getting to paint a room a different color and then realizing that paint isn’t permanent and neither are you.

Suddenly, it is all very clear to me. I may not be able to trust Lucius, but what he said about my troupe was true.

They knew who I was.

I reach the crevice with the stone nymph and slide into it, letting myself pool onto the floor. Today the base of the statue blooms with unnatural twilight-blue roses. Fake. Like everything else. I force the pieces of myself upright and dig my fingers into the stems, yanking the imposters. Real magic doesn’t exist. Just because the strings are invisible, it doesn’t mean they’re not there.

The flowers die and turn the color of dried blood as I pull them free.

And then they grow back.

Once you see through one illusion, another always pops up.

I give a strangled cry and keep pulling, scratching away at the magic. Each time, the statue looks magic-free for five seconds before the illusion comes back like a flesh-eating rash that’ll leave nothing but bones.