I close the distance between us and hug him as tightly as I can, my head pressed into his lower chest, because I’m still a child’s size.

“This is weird,” he says. “When I look at you, you’re just a kid, but when I feel you, it’s like you’re an adult. You know, taller and everything.”

I step back from him and look up into his face.

“Really?” I ask.

He nods.

“It’s what Del has done to you,” Timony says. “Geordie sees the illusion, but he can’t feel it.”

I look around at the others, my gaze settling on Honey.

“Do you see through it?” I ask.

She shakes her head. But only because you don’t.

“So is it real, or not?”

“I think it’s both,” Timony says. “Just as the world inside your head doesn’t exist, yet at same time, it does.”

“This is too weird.”

I turn away and give Geordie another hug. I’m being greedy because I know what’s still to come, even if no one else has figured it out yet. And then I tell a little white lie.

“We need to have a long talk when this is all over,” I say to Geordie. “You know, about you and me.”

It’s not a complete lie because if there is an after, I’m definitely going to want to have that talk.

“I know,” he says. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“What do you mean when this is all over?” Lizzie asks. “Aren’t we done here? And talk about anticlimactic. Not that I’m complaining, but after all our struggling, just like that, everything’s okay.”

I don’t know where she gets the “just like that.” Has she so quickly forgotten the Del-world inside my crazy head, and what we had to go through in it? It had taken Honey to rescue us. Timony to restore her and Geordie. The crow girls to bring in their wildlife troops to find all the bits and pieces of Geordie’s changeling self. And these crow boys that Maida and Zia mentioned—they’d killed the bogans that had caused all of this.

That didn’t seem like much of “just like that” to me. But I understood what she meant.

“Everything is okay, right?” she adds.

Then she turns to me and her hand goes to her newly-restored mouth.

“Oh, god,” she says. “I was so totally not thinking.”

“I understand,” I tell her. “There’s been a lot going on.”

“I think you can be restored, too,” Timony says.

“How so?”

“I think when you return to your own world again, the spell your brother put on you will no longer have power over you.”

“Would that have worked with Lizzie and Geordie, too?”

He gives a slow nod. “Probably. If you’d had all of Geordie’s changeling parts in one place.”