“Jesus.” Antella lurches back as I wipe my mouth on my shirt. “Don’t say a word. I spoke to your friend Saxim,” she whispers, rubbing my back. I almost flinch, then soften into her touch. “She was huddled by my gate like a hoodlum. She said you came to see your uncle, and something didn’t feel right.” Her mouth tightens into a wrinkled frown, and she holds a hand to my forehead. “So I called your uncle’s maid to check on the situation, and she informed me he had them make both of you a psychotropic tea. The nerve of it! He’s a man child, with no clue as to the consequences of his actions. Thank heavens I have a contact inside these walls.”

Her hand is warm, and for a second I know what it must have been like to be Linos, five years old, with a fever, his mother comforting him. I feel the hard knot of the glove in my bra, like bad tissue, and another round of sobs burbles up in me.

“Wh—why are you here?” I ask her, and the words feel like they’re coming out in strange, jittering loops.

“Sometimes, a child needs a mother,” she replies darkly.

NONI

When I arrive at Stökéwood after leaving the White Fox Club, something is wrong. The sky is a bizarre wash of bruised gray blues, sickly yellows and fire engine reds—as ominous as I’ve ever seen, especially in this early heat—but that’s not it. Call it the details—mismatched to reality as I know it. Tomí is gone. The gate is open a crack, as if someone left in a hurry, and I can’t manage to open it for the car. It’s locked that way. I squeeze through a gap between the gatepost and the fence, ripping my purple sweatshirt on the overgrown brambles. As I walk up the drive, I text Tai: I’m at Stökéwood. The gravel beneath my feet, deep as it is, picks up the reddish tone of the sky, and as it shifts, it looks like molten lava. I used to manage this climb with ease, but now my chest’s heaving, as if each breath’s polluted by unseen particles of soot.

And then I see it: the house I was born in. Stökéwood’s silhouette is framed in red, and it looks like an ancient temple that is burning.

It’s only a trick of the light, I know, but the halo of fire makes it look lit from within. It looks very much alive, a terrifying enough prospect, since I know how dead it really is. How dead it has been for most of a decade.

I hear beeping as soon as I enter. Low, insistent. A warning alarm.

“Tai?” My voice echoes through the chambers. The lights are off throughout the house.