I nearly lose my footing as I run, my own ankle turning. I look down and back and see it, a slick of bubble liquid. It trickles down another step.

I shriek behind me, “Stay still, Charlie! Grab your sister!”

He’s just blown bubbles. The wand falls slack onto the grass.

Blood drips in a stream down the stairs. It reaches me before I get to Avery. Her eyes are porcelain saucers, glassy, round, open. The glass she was clutching from the pitcher went straight through her neck into her head. Blood streams from her throat, her open mouth.

I swallow vomit, spit to the side, check for a pulse as I did with John, because I have the stubborn, fierce conviction that that’s what you do, you have to do it, have to try, even though she is dead. She is obviously dead, as quickly, unambiguously dead as John.

Avery. Avery. She is eighteen years old.

A bubble drifts onto the step and pops.

I’m wailing. I hadn’t realized it, only felt the scraping inside my throat. The noise has drawn Sally and Jo and Marit to the door. Marit makes a choked sound and flees back into the house.

Jo runs to me, shushing, drawing me away, running her hands over my hair over and over again like I’m her child.

I point past her at Avery. My fingers drip red. “Help her. Help her!”

“You know better,” Jo murmurs. “Now, shhhh, calm down, my love, think of the children.”

I do. I think of them. I turn to stare at them. The green lawn. The bright sea. Bubbles drifting away in the wind.

Charlie is covering Emma’s eyes with his hands while she fights to get loose. He has gone ghostly pale.

Emma breaks free, running for me, and I see dark wet blooming from the crotch of Charlie’s trousers.

On the steps behind me, I hear Sally sobbing, murmuring, “Oh, you poor child, poor child. Careful now.” She sits beside Avery and draws her head into her lap, her apron pooling crimson, then draws the glass out of her neck as gently as she might tweeze a splinter from Charlie’s foot. “You perfect thing. You angel.”

I pick up Emma and clench her tightly, away from the slick steps, those evil, insidious traps. I want to run with them, every muscle in my body is primed, but to where? Everything is a hazard. Every single thing on this cursed island is lurking, ready to strike.

That girl, oh God, that brilliant girl could balance on a toe, leap and land and twirl, but I stood there and watched her turn clumsy. I saw it take hold—choreography not her own, like she was a Judy puppet, dangling while Punch struck her down.

I reach for Charlie. He buries his face in my shoulder, all of him shaking.

It’s real. It is.

Four dead now. Four of seven.