Kartal takes her fingers off the globe and tucks a stray piece of her black hair into the braid that wraps around her head. “And have you read Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel? The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, it’s called. It tells of an ill-fated Antarctic voyage where four shipwrecked survivors wind up adrift on a raft and, of all things, decide to eat the cabin boy, named Richard Parker. Well, in 1884, the ship Mignonette sank, leaving four survivors. They, too, decided to eat the cabin boy to survive. And what do you suppose his name was? Richard Parker. I can’t help but wonder if they were Poe fans.”

I’ve never really been one for history, and I was kind of dreading this class because of my meeting with Conner, but I think I’ve just changed my mind. Maybe that tutoring from Ash and Layla won’t be so bad.

Kartal looks directly at me. “Strange things also happen on purpose,” she says before breaking eye contact. “During the Middle Ages, King John of England wanted to build a highway right through Gotham. And the residents were required to pay for this highway themselves. At the time, madness was considered contagious. So the good people of Gotham decided to fake insanity to discourage people from wanting to pass through, trying to eliminate the need for the highway they didn’t want. A whole town gone mad.” She smiles. “Would anyone like to tell me where I’m going with this?”

“There’s something about coincidences that people are attracted to,” Nyx says, and she sounds annoyed by it. “The stranger the coincidences are, the more people want to believe them. An entire town gone mad is a good story; people will actually go out of their way to verify it rather than examine the motives.”

I take a better look at Nyx. I can’t help but feel like this particular conversation is somehow related to the murder.

“Absolutely true,” Kartal says. “Anyone else?”

“It’s easy to talk people into believing coincidences and into not believing them,” Aarya says.

“Explain,” Kartal says.

Aarya leans back in her chair. “If the coincidence gets reinforced, people will attach to it and expand upon it. They’ll try to understand every last detail about what makes it so strange and believe it even beyond reason. However, if the coincidence is argued against, it will forever be clouded with doubt, whether it’s real or not.”

“I quite agree,” Kartal says. “Which makes orchestrating one of these events extremely risky, but glorious if you can pull it off. Now tell me: Which story isn’t like the others?”