His eyes look around the wall of teddy bears as if he’s searching for words, and suddenly I’m imagining thousands of men dating my mother. I clamp down on the image to stop from hyperventilating. “What does that mean?”

“It means—it means that I planted her kindness and empathetic world view like a seed in the pockets of thousands of young people,” he says, his eyes bright. “It means that Mireille could continue to spread her goodness for centuries to come.”

A high-pitched ringing spirals into my ear canals, deeper, deeper still—the room’s plush walls expanding and contracting like lungs around me.

I may not have known my mother well.

But even I know that there’s nothing she would’ve hated more than being translated into lines of code and shunted off into boxes the size of a pocket for a miserable eternity. She wouldn’t want to be reduced to code, her humanity boiled down into nothing but predictable observations and empty compliments.

“Oh,” I say, the word a noise that drifts and pops some ten inches from the top of my head. I try to break into an awkward smile to cut the silence, but my lips taste bitter, and I remember I don’t want to smile. The smile would only be protection.

He’s grinning at me now, though, his little incisors showing, and the sugary contents of my stomach flood the back of my throat in an acidic rush.

Teddy wanted to capture Mama for himself. So he did.

“The first version of the Pocket Girlfriend wasn’t entirely successful, so I had to include some of her magic—” He pauses, notices my own glacial expression. “Hey, what’s wrong?” He blinks at me as I say nothing. “Tai?”

Teddy watches me like I’m something he can sweetly, tenderly fold into nothing, and the bears are closing in, the blind ones and the ones with glassy, beady eyes.

Could he have physically captured her? Trapped her in one of these many rooms? A voice whispers in my head. A voice that sounds like my sister.

Only a controlling psychopath would do that, I think dismissively, before clapping a hand to my mouth, sticky with tea.

My wish is your command, T, I hear Teddy say, when really he just stares and stares in silence, his expression more chilling with each passing second.

I wish that I were big and burly. I wish I could back him up against the wall and squeeze the truth out of him. But he’s four times my size, muscled shoulders surging with every breath. His eyes glazed with self-satisfaction and the unapologetic awareness that his world view can be the only one.