Kane twisted around and gave her a hard look. Sophia, since learning about the Others, had adjusted into an outright asshole. After that first night, she’d had so many questions—questions Kane refused to answer. Now she was making him pay. He didn’t care. He’d told her he couldn’t keep her safe if she knew more than she already did, and she hated that. Go figure that the moment Kane started finally acting like an older brother was the point at which Sophia went from simply resentful to outright hostile. When guilting him didn’t work, she turned to threats of exposure, and when that clearly wasn’t going to work, either, she went full-blown brat. Always, she leveraged their parents.

“You’re a dick,” he told her.

She winked.

Kane turned to look out the window, gazing at the changing trees. Their beauty made him feel worse. He reminded himself that autumn, for all its cozy brilliance, was actually a flamboyant sequence of decay. And there was more melodrama where that came from, all of it dripping through Kane with nowhere else to go.

There was one bit of brightness that Kane couldn’t shake, though. Adeline had told him something amazing: Poesy may have been the true culprit behind the unraveling of Maxine Osman’s reverie. If that were true, and if she’d been taken in just like Helena, then she lived.

She lived.

“What happened in school?” his mom asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then what?”

Oh, you know, I fell into the path of an omnipotent, dream-harvesting drag queen, and now a pair of queer elders have been quarantined in the form of kitschy jewelry, and even though we’re all a lot safer for it, my friends hate me!

“Everything is fine,” he told her.

His mother sighed.

“You’re not sleeping,” Sophia piped in from the back seat.

“How would you know?”

“I can hear you stomping around at night.”

Oh, actually I’m asleep, but I’m having such vivid nightmares that I wake up floating, because a fun new thing about my uncontrollable reality-bending magic is that I now sometimes levitate myself and objects nearby!

“I’ll be quieter,” he said.

Forcefully, the subject was changed to Sophia’s day, which had been—as always—particularly eventful. She told an elaborate story about how Headmistress Smithe had announced a required fall seminar that would cut into elective hour, which Sophia reasoned was exactly the sort of maneuver the vindictive Headmistress Smithe had been concocting ever since Sophia managed to finagle two electives in a row at the beginning of the year, both of which she spent practicing viola anyways.

This is why Kane didn’t want her involved. Everything about her was a plot twist. He tuned out her story, only tuning back in when his mother threw some cash in his lap.