“Clever,” he said. “I like this. I can breathe again.”

She nodded and looked down, suddenly self-conscious.

Alex looked out over the sea and thought of Lani and Samheed again, wondering where they could be, and if they were alive. He had to believe they were okay’he couldn’t handle anything more than that right now. His throat tightened and he moved his eyes to the place where Simber had gone down, well beyond the edge of low tide. There was no way to get to him, Alex knew. And there never would be.

Alex couldn’t get the image out of his head’Simber’s downward crash into the water. The scene had been in his nightmare last night, and it lurked in the back of his brain whenever he had a few extra minutes to think. “We’ll go togetherrr, as always,” Simber had said as they’d left the silent island. “I won’t leave you.”

Alex covered his face with his hands, overcome. He didn’t know what would happen now. All he knew was that Simber was made of sand. Sand dissolved in water. Even if Alex could bring back Artimé, he didn’t think he’d ever see Simber again.

Mr. Today had once said the giant statue was “virtually” indestructible. Simber had taken many hits with bullets and other weapons, and they bounced right off of him, or at worst left a tiny mark. But “virtually”’that meant there could be a way to destroy him. And if so . . . well, he’d never seen Simber venture near the water. Alex remembered how the great statue would hover forever above the water, but was careful never to let his wings touch. And maybe now Alex knew why.

He couldn’t bear to think of it. Simber, gone forever, his body dissolved like a sugar cube in tea, sandy bits of him sloshing around at the bottom of the ocean.

And here Alex sat with nothing. Aaron was ready to pounce on them when they got desperate enough, and all of Artimé looked to Alex to fix everything, to restore the world. Alex had not one single clue how to do it. All of Mr. Today’s books were gone. When Alex failed to fix things, what would happen to them all? Would they turn to Aaron to be slaves in exchange for food and a place to sleep?

Alex had no doubt some of them would.

“Please help me,” he choked out in a whisper. “Anybody.”

When his shoulders began shaking, the Silent girl put her hand on Alex’s back to comfort him. After a while Alex sniffed and looked up, eyelashes wet.

He pulled the package from his pocket and looked at it, wondering what Aaron could have possibly found to torture Alex with. He took a deep, shuddering breath and unrolled it, reached inside, and pulled out something lightweight and soft and brightly colored.

It was Mr. Today’s robe.

In a Very Small House

Just past midnight at a table in a very small house in Quill sat Gondoleery Rattrapp, thinking for the umpteenth time about how she had once been magical, and then wasn’t for the longest time, and then was again for a few short months. And now, because the man who created the magic had died, she had lost the ability once more. And here she sat, puzzling over it, because something clearly wasn’t right.

She studied the components as she had done many times recently, and tried them out on a skinny stray dog she’d captured in a trap in her backyard.

“Die a thousand deaths!” she cried, flinging a metal clip at the dog, but the clip bounced off the dog’s back. He came up to the woman and licked her hand.

She pushed him away and picked up a clay heart. “Heart attack!” she said, throwing it at the mutt. It struck his side and did nothing, though he whimpered a bit and recoiled at the sting.

The woman scrunched her eyelids tightly together.

She scrunched her fists, too, and dragged her arthritic knuckles along her eyebrows, stopping them at her temples and pressing in hard. This wasn’t right. Not at all.

“When I was a girl,” she said softly, trying hard to remember the creakiest of thoughts from a very, very long time ago. Trying to remember how things were back then. “When I was a girl.”

She opened her eyes and looked at her hands, and at the useless components. She looked at the dog, who whined at her, and then she stood up. “Go on,” she snapped. She opened the door and shoved the dog outside. “Run off now.”

The dog stopped to lap water from the bucket that had been recently filled on the woman’s front step.

“Get!” she said, kicking at the dog, and the dog got.

And then the woman looked at the water in the light of the moon.

She dipped her hand into the water and lifted it up, watching it drip from her fingers to the dusty step. “When I was a girl,” she whispered, staring as the water made a stain in the dirt.

She looked up into the sky at the thousands of stars that twinkled above. She hadn’t noticed them in years. All she knew is that there were no clouds’there were almost never clouds in Quill.

She looked at the water in the bucket again, and the element seemed to whisper to her. “When I was a girl,” it said.

The old woman looked around, but there was no one anywhere to be seen at this late hour. She cupped her hand and dipped it into the water to take a drink of it. It was warm. Warm, like the rain had been on a hot summer day on Warbler Island, more than fifty years ago. She’d been on the jutting rocks, on a plateau halfway up to the peak, playing with her friends who were magical too, but there was no Marcus Today there. She was sure of that. She remembered the fun of it, standing on the slick stone as rain poured in sheets around her and her friends. How they’d shrieked and danced in it.