I was still gnawing over it in mid-afternoon, well after I’d sent the last minion shuffling on her way, her skin blistering with temporary sunburn but her limbs permanently perfected. I’d seen different minions today than on either of the first two days; for all that the numbers thrown at me had grown each time, none of the minions I’d seen had ever returned to my property a second time. Something about that bothered me intensely. Instead of walking out my prickly tangle of thoughts or retreating to the sanctum of my workshop as usual, I planted myself on our own front step to stare at that ugly black castle and brood.

That was how I saw the townsfolk coming.

It was a flicker of movement in the distance that first caught my eye—a flicker that clarified into a large clump of people moving together…with torches flickering in their grasps.

I didn’t even realize I was moving until I’d already leapt to my feet, my heart doing its best to escape my chest.

Burning timbers.

And my father’s cry as that flaming beam had fallen on him, trapping—

“No.” The word came out like a vow…or a prayer. I forced air through my chest and blinked hard, focusing on the space around me here and now.

It was a new space. A protected space, because no one here knew us, not like the town where I’d grown up—or those neighbors whom I’d always thought I’d known, before torchlight had turned all of their faces into masks.

This time, we hadn’t given our respectable neighbors any reason to think we were different from them. I’d hidden everything about us too well.

The door opened behind me. Metal clanked as Dad stepped to my side, watching the procession in hollow-cheeked silence.

“We’re safe,” I told him, my eyes fixed on the line of torches. “They’re not coming for us.”

“I know.” He didn’t move.

His legs had to be paining him from so much time standing upright. The metal supports that I’d created might make it possible, but nothing I did could make it easy…or make it up to him for what had happened.

“You can go back inside now,” I told him softly. “Weren’t you working on a new puzzle in there?”

He shook his head, a sigh whistling through his teeth. “Mia…I don’t think that’s the most urgent puzzle to solve.”

My father hadn’t set his mind to anything but puzzles on paper ever since our old house had burned down. He’d never once blamed me for it, even though we both knew that my inventions were the ones that had brought those torches down on us that night, turning ordinary, respectable acquaintances into an angry, frightened mob.