“Nons?” Tai asks, stirring on the sofa. “What time is it?” She blinks up at me, clearing gunk from her eyes with a closed fist. She sees me, script in hand, and shudders. “Shit. You found it.”

“You mean you found it.”

She clears her throat. “Mama had a secret tower in her bathroom—”

“I know,” I snap, and her blue eyes sharpen. “You’re telling me no one checked it?”

“Of course they did,” she whispers, as if we’re not in a giant, forgotten house all alone. As if the ghosts can hear. “She must have placed it there after that.” She swallows hard, her throat rippling under a choker necklace with a hanging sun charm. The skin beneath its rays is rubbed raw, like she scrubbed at it in her sleep. “She must have come back to leave it for us.” She stops, stares at me, and we both feel the weight of what she’s said. “You’re shaking.”

“Of course I’m shaking,” I reply, stiffening up. “Did you read it?”

“Listen,” she says, coming to her elbows. “Saxim recognized someone in it.”

“So you and Saxim both read it?” Bubbling fury ripples down my arms. And something hot and thick and poisonous like jealousy, too. Such a mistake.

“You weren’t answering my calls. You would’ve done the same.”

I feel that flaring at the back of my throat. We can’t fall back into those old patterns. I made that mistake before, and it meant I left this place when I shouldn’t have. It meant Tai was the one to find White Fox. The one to find her. I take a breath.

“So, what? Who did she recognize?”

She tells me that the gray-haired woman is Daria—that bigoted snake Daria—and how she contacted her through her website, on a lark.

I cross my arms. “As if contact pages really work.”

“They work if you’re a Foix Hammick, and the page owner is a leech who loves the sweet taste of our blood,” she says, holding out her phone with a limp wiggle.

And there it is. A time already set in black pixels, for tomorrow morning in Limatra.

I follow Tai up the creaking wooden stairs to our makeshift shared bedroom, with its spartan twin cots. I refuse to let go of the script, so she pushes her cot toward mine so we can reread White Fox together. I stop only when Tai’s gasps and murmurs of shock go silent, and I turn to find her face shining wet.