Jill blinked at her, eyes going wide and shocked. “The Master—”

“Isn’t here, Jill. We’re on the stairs. You remember the stairs?” Jack waved her arms, indicating everything around them. “The Moors kicked us out. We’re going back.”

“No! No!” Jill leapt to her feet, attempting to fling herself downward.

Jack was faster than she was. She hooked an arm around her sister’s waist, jerking her back up and flinging her forward. “Yes!” she shouted.

Jill’s head hit something hard. She stopped, rubbing it, and then turned, in slow confusion, to touch the air behind her. It lifted upward, like a trapdoor—like the lid of a trunk—and revealed a small, dusty room that still smelled, ever so faintly, of Gemma Lou’s perfume.

“The stairs below me have gone,” said Jack’s voice, dull and unsurprised. “You’d best climb out before we’re pushed out.”

Jill climbed out. Jack followed.

The two stood there for a long moment, stepping unconsciously closer together as they looked at the room that had belonged to their first caretaker, that had once been so familiar, before both of them had changed. The trunk slammed shut. Jill gave a little shriek and dove for it, clawing it open. Jack watched almost indifferently.

Inside the trunk was a welter of old clothing and costume jewelry, the sort of things a loving grandmother would set aside for her grandchildren to amuse themselves with. No stairway. No secret door.

Jill plunged her bloody hands into the clothes, pawing them aside. Jack let her.

“It has to be here!” Jill wailed. “It has to be!”

It wasn’t.

When Jill finally stopped digging and bowed her head to weep, Jack put a hand on her shoulder. Jill looked up, shaking, broken. She had never learned the art of thinking for herself.

I made the right choice, and I am so sorry I left you, thought Jack. Aloud, she said, “Come.”

Jill stood. When Jack took her hand, she did not resist.

The door was locked. The key Jack carried in her pocket—the key she had been carrying for five long years—fit it perfectly. It turned, and the door opened, and they were, in the strictest and most academic of senses, home.

The house they had lived in for the first twelve years of their lives (not the house they had grown up in, no; they had aged there, but they had so rarely grown) was familiar and alien at the same time, like walking through a storybook. The carpet was too soft beneath feet accustomed to stone castle floors and hard-packed earth; the air smelled of sickly-sweetness, instead of fresh flowers or honest chemicals. By the time they reached the ground floor, they were walking so close together that it didn’t matter if their hands never touched; they were still conjoined.