While Elliot peeked into a tap-dancing class, Ursula and Kane sat on a bench, savoring the music from every angle. Ursula had made homemade granola, and it was great. She and Kane munched on it, comfortable being quiet together. Among all the tension, their friendship had become a fragile but surely growing thing, and Kane was thankful to have at least that.

“I wonder what it’d be like to walk around on your toes like that all the time,” Ursula said as the girls in the studio spun on their pointe shoes.

“Very tall,” Kane said.

“They look like flamingos.”

“Is that a good thing? Flamingos are birds, you know.”

“Yeah, but like—” Ursula tipped the last of the granola into her mouth, then crushed up the bag and tossed it toward a trash can. “They’re like, funny birds. Dinosaur birds.”

The bag missed. She stood to grab it off the floor.

“And dinosaur birds are somehow better?”

“No, dinosaur birds just aren’t native to Connecticut.”

The piano music cut off and the routine ended. Girls dressed in skirts and tights fled to the perimeter of the room to grab water and check their phones. Adeline pushed through the doors and walked right by them. After a beat, they followed her to the stairwell and out into the back parking lot.

“Welcome to my house,” she said, a sarcastic hand tossed up at the conservatory and the dumpsters they hid behind. “Thanks for popping in. What can I do for you?”

Kane hadn’t shaken the shivers from this morning yet. They’d rolled through him all day, fitful and jagged, and they skittered through his palms now. To steady himself, he reached into his backpack and pulled out The Witches.

Everyone looked at it, then at Kane.

“Who is Dean Flores?” Kane asked. “Don’t lie to me this time.”

Ursula, Elliot, and Adeline exchanged glances. They all looked back at the book, then Kane again. They were confused.

“He’s a new student at school,” Ursula said. “He’s a diver on the swim team—”

“I mean who is he actually?”

More glances. Adeline took a swig from her water bottle, then twisted to stretch something in her back.

Kane grew frustrated. They weren’t taking this seriously.

“Is he an Other, too? Was he?” Kane looked at Adeline. “You know, don’t you? You know something about him.”

If she did, Adeline betrayed nothing. She shrugged and began picking at her gossamer skirt blowing in the October breeze. “We don’t know, Kane. We were going to ask you the same thing when the timing was right. We think he might have something to do with your accident.”

“Why?”

“A hunch.”

“Tell me what you know,” Kane demanded.

“You called us all here. You first.”