No one ever got so frightened of regular metal-working, the kind he’d mastered long before my birth…but from the moment I’d first fastened my toddler hands around one of his tools, my inventions had always turned somehow into more.

“I’ll put the icebox in my workshop,” I promised. “They’ll never see it. I’ll put some extra flowers in our window box, too. I’ll even make sure that they match and look good. I’ll—”

“Mia.” That was all that Dad said. But I’d seen that look on his face a hundred times across my life, from my very first lesson decades ago. It meant: You’re not paying attention. Start again.

So I dragged my head out of my burning memories, and remembered what I’d been thinking just before I’d been interrupted.

Sometimes, a challenge looked obvious but contained secret complexities behind that shiny surface…like a locked workshop hidden behind a respectable flowery window box.

Our neighbor didn’t bother with window boxes or any other such pleasantries to appease the respectable folks. His big black castle shouted exactly what he was: Wicked.

He’d sent his minions to attack me twice in a row, hadn’t he? Really, I should be grateful that the mob was coming to burn his ugly castle down.

But then again…I’d never seen a single minion twice. That was what had nagged at me earlier. If he wanted to overwhelm me with numbers, why didn’t he send the minions that I’d made strongest, the ones most likely to succeed? Instead, he sent mangled minions to my property each night, I fixed them…and then he went ahead and sent me even more badly-built minions right on the verge of breaking, even though he had to know what would—

Oh. Oh! My jaw fell open in outrage.

The sheer audacity of the man—!

“He did try to invite you over and be sociable about it,” Dad said mildly.

“Ha!” I shook my head, still stunned. “You know I’m not interested in socializing with neighbors. That’s why we moved here in the first place.”

I’d learned the hard way that it was never safe to reveal my own truths to the respectable folk around us.…

But my own closest neighbor nowadays didn’t even pretend to be respectable—and despite everything that I’d assumed, he actually did care about those poor creatures he was stewarding, after all. Had he even been the one who had built them so badly? All I knew was that he was looking after them now…even when that meant sending them to a cranky, unsociable neighbor to be fixed.

“I can’t.” I whispered the words. Then I repeated them, my gaze jerking back to my father. “I can’t! After the last time I let other people see…”