“People can change,” Melia said, still brushing her fingertips across the surface of the water. “We do it to people all the time.”

Eleanor looked at her in confusion. Melia’s expression was placid.

“Our parents don’t just make the Empty. We have all kinds of ways to turn people into useful things. But they have to have the right ingredients for what you need. Say you want to make a sword. You can’t make a weapon out of a gentle child. So either you find a violent man, or you change the child.”

“They turn people into swords?” Eleanor asked, aghast.

Melia shrugged. “Or monsters, or mirrors, or statues, or—”

“Keys?” Eleanor suggested, a chill running down her spine.

“Sure. Twins are good for that. You make one a lock and one a key. The lock is impossible to pick, or open with a copied key, because it always knows its twin.”

“Just about everything in this castle is made from bits of people’s personalities and emotions,” Ash said. “But these days all the villagers have inside them is dread and hopelessness. You can make good stones out of dread, and hopelessness makes good chains, but they’re not good for much else. That’s why they want to find a way to reach other worlds.”

“Did you know you can Empty worlds, too?” Melia asked idly. “Suck out everything from them, until they collapse in on themselves, and everything inside dies. Or you can leave just the shell, all Empty and gray.”

Eleanor thought of the gray world—the place where the People Who Look Away had taken all the cursed children of Eden Eld before them. Had they turned a whole living, thriving world into that terrible place? “That’s horrible,” she said with a shudder.

“Everything they do is horrible. That’s why we want to leave,” Ash said. “They’re making us learn how to Empty people, too. Even Thea will have to learn soon.”

Thea looked miserable. “They made me try once, and it’s way worse than having it done to you. You have to be a different kind of empty, to do that to a person.” A tear threatened at the corner of her eye, and she wiped it on her sleeve. Eleanor’s heart squeezed.

Ash sat beside Eleanor on the bench. The kitten-of-ashes jumped down, trotting away to investigate a flower. “We want to change our fate. And you’re the best chance we’ve found of doing it. Will you help us?”

Maybe this was how it all began. How the People Who Look Away got into Eleanor’s world to do their wicked deeds.

Or maybe that was how they stopped Mr. January—not by defeating him, but by saving him. She had to believe that Ash was right. That they could change their fates. Because if the People Who Look Away could have a different future, Eleanor and her friends could, too.