At East Amity High School, it was as though the reverie had never happened. Kane drifted through the sunny halls of laughing, clueless students. His eyes were glazed with the memory of a fantasy none of them knew about. He saw familiar faces from the reverie, now scrubbed of blood and grime and ash. He saw the slow pulse of red light every time he closed his eyes. As though acting as a reminder, the black whistle’s cool metal bit into his palm, assuring him it had all been real, that just because the nightmare had ended didn’t mean it had never happened.

Kane skipped homeroom, instead wandering out to the athletic fields. The locker rooms were open for cleaning. They did not lead to a subterranean city. The football stadium itself did not have a moat of magma. Nothing nefarious skittered in the wavy heat rising from the track.

The mystery of the loom, and the mission Poesy had charged Kane with, followed him everywhere. Was the loom a thing you summoned, or a thing you found? If it was as powerful as Poesy said, Kane was not eager to confront the person who kept it hidden, and decided all he could do was wait and see (and hopefully not die in the meantime).

Finally Sophia texted him back: Busy. Over your shit. We’ll talk when I get home.

And so Kane panicked quietly for the next few hours. Bio class came and went without a word passed between Adeline and Kane. In gym, he only got close enough to Elliot to verify the bruise on his cheek. Then Kane sat in the bleachers and watched Elliot act like an idiot with his friends. They never once made eye contact. There was no sign of Dean Flores whatsoever.

Then, at lunch, Kane had just finished loading up a tray full of food when he turned to find Ursula right behind him. She looked like she was working up the nerve to say something.

“Hi,” was all she managed. Her wide, asking eyes panned over the flannel—her flannel—which he still wore, then back up.

He walked past her and ate lunch by himself, passing the whistle between his palms like nothing had ever happened. Like everything was nice and normal.

Biking home after school, Kane regretted ignoring Ursula all day. He wasn’t sure why. She’d lied. She was worse than Elliot and Adeline. So why was he mad at himself for shunning her?

In part it felt like unreleased potential. All day he had silently rehearsed what he would say to the Others, entire monologues of grief and guilt and acidic words for what they’d done, but with the exception of Ursula at lunch, they’d stayed away, depriving him of the opportunity. So all that acid had nowhere to go. It burned and boiled in Kane, joining with the thousand other things that he had never had the guts to say.