“So,” asked Nick, who knew more than anyone that every Everlost fortune was true, “was your last fortune a good one, or a bad one?”

Isaiah raised his eyebrows. “At first I thought it was bad, but maybe it’s turning halfway decent.”

“What did it say?”

Isaiah gave him the slightest hint of a grin. “It said ‘Embrace the bittersweet’.”

The feast took some time to arrange, and since all the ripping effort was Zin’s, it exhausted her—but she was a trooper. Nick had her rip a smorgasbord of edible items from dozens upon dozens of restaurants, markets, and homes.

“Why cain’t I go to some big ole’ banquet hall,” Zin asked, “and rip all the food from there?”

“That would be easier,” Nick admitted, “but it would also be obnoxious. If we have to steal hundreds of meals from the living, we should spread it out—so that no one feels the cost of what they’ve lost.”

It was obvious that Zin cared little for the living and their loss. The concept of “responsible ripping” was foreign to her. Fortunately, in her many years in Everlost, her designs were never so grand that her ripping created major problems for the living. Unless you count all the missing artillery.

In the end, Zin did what she was told, and asked if this earned her a raise in her military rank. Nick told her a good soldier never asks.

It took three days, working round the clock, to rip enough food to feed the Afterlights of Atlanta, but it was worth the effort. Nick had to admit, when they gathered for the meal, he’d never seen a group of Afterlights so joyful and so content. Whether he got his militia or not, he was glad to have done this.

When all was said and done, and everyone had eaten until they were satisfied, Isaiah asked for volunteers for Nick’s army. “Someone’s gotta stand up to the Sky Witch,” Isaiah told them. “And we gotta do our share.”

Nick had asked for fifty—and he ended up with almost eighty—which posed a logistical problem, since the train had only an engine, a parlor car, and a single passenger car. That’s when Zin, to everyone’s amazement, had ripped her first train car from the living world.

Isaiah was true to his word, and just before they left, he gave them pretty good intelligence as to where they could find friendly Afterlights, and which ones should probably be avoided. He also gave Nick a word of friendly, heartfelt advice.

“You need to remember who you were,” Isaiah told him. “Because more and more you got that mud-pie look about you. There’s more chocolate on your shirt—it’s even getting into your hair now. I gotta say, it worries me.”

“We can’t choose what we remember,” Nick said, repeating what Mary had once told him, “but I’ll try.”