“Something’s blocking me,” he says. “Every time I begin to feel my way to how you should be, something pushes me away.”

“It’s Del,” Lizzie says.

I’m sure she’s right, but I don’t really care.

“Never mind me,” I say. “Can you bring Geordie back?”

He nods. “I just need his body—or rather the changeling that he was turned into.”

Of course he does.

There was an accident, Honey says.

“I was carrying the bits and pieces in a pail,” I explain, “but I tripped and fell and the pail . . . the pail went over the edge . . .”

The doonie stares down at the jumble of red rock, all the way to where the pail lies far below.

“He . . .” I start, then I have to try again because the words choke in my throat.

I touch some of the dirt that’s still on the rocks where I fell. Moist and dark, when I was carrying it. Now it’s just dust.

“That’s all that’s left,” Lizzie says. “The rest went down the mountainside.”

Timony gives a sad shake of his head.

“Don’t say you can’t do anything,” she adds.

I look at the seaweed creature, but I can’t read an expression in its features and Geordie doesn’t speak in my head.

Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know if I could bear the hurt that would be in his eyes. The disappointment that I couldn’t even do this one thing right.

“Living creatures are different from things like clothes and food,” Timony says. “I need a substantial amount of the actual being to have anything to work with. I can make a semblance of him—better than what we have here. But I can’t bring him back without . . . ”

His gaze goes back to where I let the pail go tumbling down the mountainside.

“Please,” I say. “Please try.”

“Can’t you just make him a new human body?” Lizzie asks. “You know, the way you can make clothes and stuff out of nothing?”

The doonie shakes his head. “As I said, bodies are more complicated. You need the actual substance of the original to work with.”

“So . . . “ I say. “If we could gather some of it up . . .”

“Perhaps.”

“How much do you need?”

Timony lifts his hands and cups them, indicating more than we could ever gather together. The rocks below are way too steep, and how could we ever tell the difference between his dirt and the dirt that’s already there? It’s all dust now.

It’s not your fault, Geordie says.

I turn to the seaweed changeling. It doesn’t look like a monster anymore. But it doesn’t even remotely look like Geordie.

“How can you say that?” I ask him. “I was the one who was too stupid to be able to hang on to a simple pail.”

It was an accident.