“Do you ever write this stuff down?”

“No,” he said.

“You should.”

“It scares me,” he said. “I don’t mind talking about it with you, because you’re part of it, but the more I think about it, the more confused I get. Like, right now, while we’re talking, I’m fine. Magical truce, whatever. But when I stop talking? When I look off into the distance? And I can hear the wind, and the cold, and the dark? It gets blurrier. Especially if I shut my eyes. Like I come unanchored.”

“So keep them open,” I said. “Look at me. I’ll be your anchor.”

Or we’ll come unanchored together.

He nodded, rolled onto his back again. Our eyes locked. He smiled; so did I.

“Thank you, Ash.”

“I think . . . I’m seeing things too. Only when I look through my camera lens.”

“I told you,” he said. “Everything is changing. The balance is being upset. Something terrible is coming, and if we’re gonna stand any chance of stopping it, we need to see it clearly.”

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the book he held, only partly because I wanted to change the subject.

He handed it to me: Out of the Dark, by Helen Keller.

“Did you know she was a socialist?” he said.

“I didn’t know anything about her, except that she was deaf and blind and mute and I cried like a baby at that movie about her.”

“Back then, lots and lots of disabled people got that way because of accidents and diseases that only happened to them because they were poor. Children who’d lost hands in the factories where they were forced to work. Children who went blind from syphilis they had contracted at birth from mothers forced into prostitution. Helen saw that poverty was the real evil, and believed that the only solution was to overthrow all the powerful men who exploited people.”

This was the old Solomon. The kid so smart it was scary. Crazy, that he could coexist with the one who believed in sky whales.

“She was a revolutionary,” he continued. “Like you.”

“Would that be Princess Me, or Boring Me?”

“Both. There’s really only one. I saw what you were doing, down by the river.”

“What was I doing?”

“You were gunning for them. The bad guys. They were afraid of you.”

I ran my fingers through his close-cropped hair. I shut my eyes, but I could still feel Solomon’s on me.

“Solomon,” I said, “I remembered something.”

I told him what I remembered: seeing him up in the treehouse, caught in the middle of something. Me, falling. As I heard the words come out of my mouth I suspected it was a mistake, but I respected him too much to keep a secret from him.

Solomon’s eyes widened. He sat up.

“What?” I said. “Did you—remember—something—too?”