Before . . .

But June didn’t like to think about before. Didn’t want to, didn’t need to. Dying might not have stuck, but her death itself had been real enough. No point in prying open that coffin.

June—that wasn’t her real name either, of course. She’d buried that with the rest.

The only thing she’d kept was the accent. Kept was a strong word—

the stubborn thing didn’t want to go. A wisp of home in a foreign world. A memory, of green, and gray, of cliffs and ocean . . . She probably could have shed it, scrubbed it out along with everything else that made her her. But it was all she had left. The last thread.

Sentimental, she chided, quickening her step.

Eventually June stopped shifting, and simply followed in the stranger’s wake.

It was strange, the subtle way other people veered around him, leaned out of his path.

They saw him, she could tell by the way they shifted, sidestepped.

But they didn’t really notice.

Like magnets, thought June. Everyone thought of magnets as having pull, attraction, but turn them around and they repelled. You could spend ages trying to force them together, and you’d get there, almost, but in the end they’d slide off.

She wondered if the man had that effect on the world around him, if it was part of his power.

Whatever it was, she didn’t feel it.

But then again, she didn’t feel anything.

Who are you? she wondered, annoyed by the man’s opacity. She had been spoiled rotten by her power, by the easy knowing that came with it. Not that she saw everything—that would be a short road to long madness—but she saw enough. Names. Ages. Memories, too, but only the ones that really left a mark.

A person, distilled into so many bites.

It was disconcerting, now, to be deprived.

Ahead, the man stopped outside an apartment building. He stepped through the revolving door into the lobby, and June stood in the shadow of the building’s eaves and watched him get into the elevator, watched the dial ascend to the ninth floor and then stop.

She chewed her lip, thinking.

It was late.

But it wasn’t that late.

June turned through the wardrobe in her mind. Too late for a delivery, perhaps, but not a courier. She selected a young woman—

more disarming, especially at night—in navy cycling gear, scooped up an undelivered envelope from the lobby, and pushed the call button on the elevator.

There were four doors on the ninth floor.

Four chances.

She put her ear to the first door and heard the dead silence of an empty apartment.

The same with the second.

At the third, she heard footsteps, and knocked, but when the door swung open she was greeted not by the man in black, but by a girl, a

large dog at her side.

The girl was on the small side, with white-blond hair and ice blue eyes. The sight of her caught June off guard. She was twelve, maybe thirteen. Madeline’s age. Madeline belonged to the Before— before, when June had had a family, parents, siblings, one older, three younger, the youngest, with those same strawberry curls— “Can I help you?” asked the girl.