Previously

Alexey wandered the abandoned, sunken hallways of Keleykh Lower School in the darkness. There was no moonlight, but the oil slicks he stepped in here and there seemed slightly phosphorescent, their rainbow webbing dimly visible despite the lack of any incident light. He had been trying to find his way out for more hours than he could count. In corners, in doorways, and submerged in especially deep puddles of oil were unidentifiable corpses, mummified as though dredged from western Siberia’s numerous bogs. Alexey longed for a clean breath. Besides the stink of the oil, the air was full of lint and ash. Each breath choked him.

He knew for a fact that he was the only living creature left. He held, in his mind, the power to resurrect one, and only one, of the bodies. He thought of his friends. He thought of Sofia. He thought of Xenia. But none of them were in the Lower School. Alexey wanted nothing more than to find his way out, crawl onto the tar-laden streets, and seek them out. He was growing very, very cold, however, and had little life left in his steps.

Rounding a corner, he ascended a staircase. The wooden handrails were blackened with creosote tar, which had collected enough dust that Alexey, motivated in no small part by overwhelming fatigue, decided that the rails weren’t too sticky to use. Looking back at where he’d come from, Alexey discovered what sort of dim light source had been illuminating the oil’s sheen: a tungsten-filament lightbulb, choked and flickering, buried under enough dust and lint that its very light seemed gray. Swiveling his head further revealed that the lightbulb was the source of the buzzing, grinding noise that made his heartbeat violently pound on the insides of his skull.

Alexey stumbled over a missing stair, and fell into an ink-black void in the stairs that he’d failed to notice while distracted by the bulb. He fell through nothingness, hoping he’d finally found the way to the sky, and would finally start seeing stars. The atmosphere in the void was perfectly clean, but too thin, and no matter how deep the breaths he took were, he couldn’t get enough air.

“Alexey?”

Oh, no.

“Thank you for resurrecting me, Alexey. You can’t know how deeply I appreciate it.”

The words filled his ears with cold, flowing, mildly sweet glass. Alexey opened his eyes, not having realized he’d been keeping them shut. He found himself kneeling in the grand atrium of Lykov House, the home of the Sump. He had been here so many times before, attending parties, dances, speeches, and ceremonies, worrying about whether he’d had more than his share of hors d’œuvres. Today, neither sunlight nor moonlight came down through the panelled glass skylight dome, and its windows appeared to be piled deeper with snow (or perhaps ash) than he’d ever seen. Where Alexey knelt, there was a fanciful abstract design on the ground evoking perhaps the Sun, assembled from heavy blocks of variously colored dimension stone that stretched into the ground to a depth of a meter or more, cut to shape. He had one day idly determined that it was mainly granite and some marble, and awaited the day when the marble blocks would show visible dents from so many people’s feet, while the granite blocks wouldn’t, making the floor inconveniently uneven. It had been his earliest private mental rebellion in the Sump, an odd wish to see it humbled in even so small a way, for reasons he couldn’t place at the time. The Sump had certainly affected humility often enough already.

Standing at his podium that broke the marble backbone stairway of the house in two like a rock ledge jutting out of a waterfall, and lit solely by the two ponderous gaslights flanking said stairway that served as the atrium’s hearth, was Pyotr Ivanovitch Lykov, graciously thanking Alexey for having the kindness to save his life. Pyotr was a man of many titles, including (an animal squirmed in Alexey at the thought of this) that of Alexey’s aspiring surrogate father, but standing at the podium gave him one title above all others: the supreme leader of the Sump. The man with the drum of human skin, the man who will save the entire world singlehandedly, the man whose shamanic might matched that of the rest of Keleykh combined. The man who knew everything, most of all your thoughts, and could be anywhere in any form. He was wearing a relaxed smile, and a rather unassuming buttoned white shirt and comfortable work pants. He extended an open hand, of uncertain purpose considering that Alexey was at least twenty meters across the room.

“Hey, it’s gonna be okay. You made the right choice. Why don’t you get up?”

Alexey did rise, distracted with the thought that he could be so evil as to choose this man over his friends. He walked in the direction of the stairs, potentially to meet Pyotr up close. But as he walked, he frowned, and came to a halt. The closer he got to Pyotr, the more the invasive buzzing receded. Standing nearly at the foot of the stairs, he had to listen for the noise to even notice it.

“Why did you…?” asked Alexey.

“That’s not a question,” observed Pyotr mildly.

The two men stared at each other. Alexey took a step back. The gaslights flickered.

Pyotr frowned. “What’s wrong? It’s just me. I don’t bite,” he joked.

Alexey thought about the people he’d wanted to bring back, and came to a realization.

“Her name was Xenia,” he said, as much to himself as to Pyotr.

The reputed mind-reader was genuinely confused. “…who?”

“The girl you killed. Her name was Xenia, and she was my friend, and you killed her.”

“You’re not making sense, Alyosha. Who do you think I killed? You know me. You know what I stand for. I’m always trying my hardest to save everyone, not kill them. You are too, I know you are. You’re an incredibly strong and smart person, Alyosha, and as two of the most rational people in Keleykh, we can talk this out. But please don’t tell me I killed this ‘Xenia’. I have never known a Xenia and never killed anyone.”

The gaslit hearths went out entirely. The skylight dome’s window panes creaked under the weight of whatever it was they were holding back. The buzzing returned to Alexey’s ears, loud enough that a part of him reflexively started worrying about long-term hearing loss. He noticed he was still covered in the tar and oil he picked up at the school. Had it always been so thick?

“You do not. Call me that. Only Artemis is allowed to call me that. You do not kill my friends and then call me ‘Alyosha’.”

Pyotr started to get more of a clue of what was going on. The name “Artemis” rang a disappointing bell. “Ah, ‘Artemis’… do you still keep in touch with him? He is sorely missed at the Sump,” he probed cautiously.

“Artemis knew her, too. First, Xenia’s friend, who died before she could even be named, killed herself, thanks to you and Katya. I really, really thought Xenia would pull through. She was so smart and sane, you know? Me and Artemis looked up to her. She was the one who pointed out the problems with the Sump to us in the first place. And she…” Alexey trailed off, confused. He wanted to say something about how Xenia was responsible for both him and Artemis discovering their true identities, but while it had made sense for Artemis as a trans person, he had trouble putting into words what Xenia had contributed to his own identity. “She was your strongest opponent. She took everything she learned from you and tried to use it to break your poisonous, treacherous, extremely fake power. But… I don’t know what happened. Or no, I do, and Artemis does too, because we all hate ourselves on a level you can’t even comprehend, in the same exact way, and it’s your fucking fault. And so Xenia—”

Pyotr snapped. “Oh, I’m sorry, you have serious mental health issues and you decided to blame me? I take back what I said about your rationality, Alexey, you have to be really… special to think it makes any damned sense to make your obvious mental illness my responsibility. I didn’t raise you, I didn’t own you, and I certainly didn’t abuse you in any way, so if you decide to use the word ‘traumagenic’ even once—”

Alexey lunged at Pyotr and grabbed him by the neck, toppling him off the podium and slamming his head on the marble steps. Pyotr, dazed, didn’t immediately think to fight back. Alexey’s fingers left black handprints on his throat, and crude oil dripped down onto his clean beige pants.

“She became insane, is what happened! If I talk to any trans person who you haven’t touched, they will have normal, sane self-doubts, like their face or their hair or their shadow!”

The skylight window panels caved in, and petroleum soot and ash, interspersed with acicular nitrogen snow, poured into the room in a roaring blizzard colder and heavier than any earthly snowstorm, as though the weight of the whole dead and frozen world were being forced through those little perforations in Lykov House’s dome. Alexey’s voice rose to a hoarse and broken scream, shouting over the buzzing that was now making the whole building vibrate violently.

“Then along comes Xenia’s friend with some nonsense about how the shoreward half of her shadow soul is irrevocably male, or something, and kills herself, and Xenia buys it and drowns herself in the Furrowed Sea! WHO DO YOU THINK SHE GOT HER METAPHYSICS FROM, PYOTR IVANOVICH? DOES ANY OF THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? And Artemis and I are the same way! We have not only our normal doubts, we then have this insane disease of our reasoning ability you have forced upon us! And you, you won’t take your own advice and listen to a fucking—”

The blizzard buried them both, ending the nightmare.

The five kids sat around the small, plain wooden table located in Shtchavel House’s kitchen, having breakfast. The actual dining table was only a room away, but everybody felt some sort of paranormal compulsion that if they were to use that table, they would have to put their whole hearts and souls into making sure that the food contained more than two ingredients, and that immediately after the fact the dishes were washed and the tablecloth was laundered, a sort of inherited intergenerational trauma that ensured that nobody would ever feel up to using that room. The two ingredients they had settled on for the day were rice and fermented red bean curd, brought from the matchbox house. Sofia had watched Artemis pack it into the trunk, explaining that it’s cheap, keeps well, is easy to make, and has a texture that nobody in their household finds especially objectionable. This was memorable to Sofia, because it was both her first and currently the longest conversation she’d had with Artemis, despite being twenty seconds of small talk made while packing as fast as possible.

Sofia had woken up with a very, very bad feeling this morning. She didn’t know why she didn’t realize it before, but in the clarity of the morning light, she remembered: the biggest threat to her new friends wasn’t even .….….. .……..……………..….… . ……. .…… ………. …….……..…. …… … … . .…. ..….…. .…. ………. . … … ..… . …… … ………. . . ……. .….…….…..… … … …………. ……. . … ………. … .……….… . … .………… …………… …..…… ….…. .…… … ….…..…… …. . …… . … . …. …. … ……… .……….……… ….. . . .……………… … ….… … . …..… … … .……. … …… … ………….… … .…… … .…… …… ………… … … … .. .. . . … ..….….……. . .. ……… …… .……. …………. .. ………… ….… .…… .……. . …one of them would have to die today. It was only a matter of who. And Sofia was going to have to kill them.

There were seams in her thoughts. Memories and knowledge that seemed to come from nowhere. She struggled for lucidity. Was she having a nightmare? She only needed to spot a single inconsistency to confirm it. Perhaps the single most common kind of idol at Shtchavel House was for spirits trained to give the house’s residents useful, prophetic nightmares, so that the Ryzhayas might hone their political, martial, and shamanic prowess even as they sleep. Spirits typically did not even need to be asked to do this; they were more than eager to help all of Keleykh with the toughest nightmares they could invent. Generations of shamans stretching back to the time of myths noted that this was a very comforting phenomenon, implying that most of Keleykh’s spirits cared deeply and sincerely about the well-being of humans.

Growing up, Sofia had been taught to resist the urge to seek lucidity in these dreams, because it would ruin their utility as training scenarios. But she had never been good at that, and instead learned to scrutinize her every thought and sensation for connections and implications, waking or otherwise. She had accidentally uncovered a critical improvement on the traditional dogma: trying to become lucid forced the spirits to come up with ever more realistic and elaborate scenarios, and meanwhile, she was forced to become ever more analytical and self-aware. This sort of induced arms race was already used to train sprits against each other, a practice these days labelled “adversarial learning”, but as far as Sofia knew, she was the first person who had made their own self a highly effective training partner. She supposed humans were collections of spirits themselves, and there’s no fine line that distinguished them from the more primordial minds bound up in wooden or stone idols instead of cages of flesh.

While an awake Sofia would have been happy to ponder this topic at length and contemplate adding her own dissertation to the great Shtchavel House library, asleep, she was absorbed in the central problem of every nightmare: how could she tell it was a nightmare? The spirits could read her thoughts and create fake memories to answer her questions in plausible ways, but they were either too afraid or too stupid to change existing, real-world memories. So, often, she could just—

The food. She had watched it get packed into the trunk with her own eyes. And then seen and discussed at length both how the trunk was empty and how it became so.

The spell was broken. “I don’t need to kill anyone,” said Sofia out loud, hoping her nightmare’s author was listening and becoming suitably embarrassed. “This is a nightmare. Why would we be having breakfast when we don’t have food? You did read that memory, didn’t you?”

The author in question had, in fact read it, and hastily elected to ignore it so that it could build a more compelling narrative. It guiltily slunk out of Sofia’s dream, resolving to respect Sofia’s ability to piece together her recent personal timeline more in the future.

Sofia noticed a sixth person at the table, and was violently taken aback by the intrusion. “…who the fuck are you?”

It was a somewhat bedraggled-looking man, his skin and clothes mottled with oil stains the color of char. He rubbed the back of his head wearily, and then made a cup with his hands, bracing a black-bearded chin against it in a slouch. “I could say the same to you,” he replied. “I’m an… old friend, of Alexey’s. The last time we saw each other, he wasn’t doing so well, so I tried to reach out into his dreams, and I… I ended up here instead. What is this? Who are you? You’re dreaming about Alexey, but you aren’t him?”

Sofia hadn’t spent her whole life overthinking her nightmares for nothing. She connected the dots before he even finished talking, more than confirmed by the description her mother had given her of this man’s appearance. “You’re Pyotr Ivanovitch Lykov,” she said, with amazement in her voice. “You ordered a hit on Alexey. And me.”

“No, seriously, who are you?”

She had, on occasion, practiced grinning evilly in the mirror. This man deserved her best.

“I am your nightmare,” she said with as much smugness and menace as she could muster, and a display of her incisors.

Pyotr started laughing helplessly, in a series of wheezes and undignified snorts. He leaned on the table to try to catch his breath, but this caused his chair to break underneath him and dump him on the floor, still wheezing. Some dust got into his sinuses, and the poor man, once he caught his breath, immediately sneezed, which caused him to break into a new fit of giggles. Once he was done, however, he stood up gracefully, wearing a menacing grin of his own, which froze most of the humiliation Sofia had been building throughout his antics into icy fear.

“You should really consider a career in comedy instead of dark magic. That was gold,” Pyotr said with apparent sincerity. “Anyway, though, I’ve got to point out one thing: this is your nightmare, mysterious Ryzhaya girl. What was its premise, again? That you had to kill one of your little group to feed some creature out for your blood, or something?”

Of course Pyotr Lykov would be able to read the mind of a dreamer. Sofia swore her mother had even specifically warned her about it. Had he done it slowly? Or had he pretended not to know what was going on, to try to hear Sofia identify herself in her own words?

“So, let me make a suggestion.” He pointed at her. “I bet you’d feel better about that sacrifice than killing any of your friends, right? Well, good news. It’s on the table. You, and you alone, are cordially invited to Lykov House, at your leisure. I think we’ll have some very interesting things to talk about, Sofia Pankratyevna Ryzhaya.”

The abomination hunting her friends appeared behind Sofia. She had just turned to look at it—glimpsing a vaguely human torso with a hard-to-count number of many-jointed hydraulic limbs, no head, and a trademark sheen of creosote—when it everted its stomach through its abdomen and swallowed her whole.

Pyotr shrugged.

Artemis was the first to awaken, somewhat uncharacteristically late for her, an hour before noon. She decided to take a stab at lighting the other three hearths herself; she’d apologize to Sofia later, in a warm house. A part of her was worried that Sofia would turn it into a reason to feel bad about herself, feeling like she’d let everyone down by going to sleep, but Artemis reasoned that even so, stoking the hearths as soon as possible was the healthiest course of action in multiple respects.

She gently stood up to go get the matchbox from the doorway, but her first step off the skin she had been sleeping on creaked loudly.

“…good morning,” said Tosha quietly, eyes still closed.

“Hey,” said Artemis, “Wanna come keep me company while I go light the other fireplaces?”

Tosha looked in Artemis’s direction and frowned. “Sofia told Alexey not to do that.”

“She’ll get over it when the house is toasty.”

“I really don’t want you to do it. I think it’s a bad idea. I’ll just lie here.”

“Well, suit yourself.”

Luckily, their conversation hadn’t visibly disturbed anyone else. There were no heavy sleepers in this clique, but everyone was tired from yesterday, and anyone who’d gotten pulled some of the way back to the waking world was polite enough to fail to show it. Artemis grabbed the matches Sofia had left by the fire, and went upstairs.

Seeing Shtchavel House in daylight, even dimmed as it was by curtains and dust, gave Artemis a much clearer view of it. She counted the number of idols and books on a random bookshelf: about twenty idols, and thirty books. Call it an even twenty-five. Then multiply by the number of bookshelves in the hallway, eight… multiply by the number of storeys above the ground floor, two… and that would make a total of four hundred each of books and idols in the two hallways, not counting the fireplace mantels. Artemis selected a document at random from one of the shelves, curious. It was a small, dusty, hardcover book, forest green with a gold trim. Das sibirisch Teertier, by one Johannes Praetorius. She found it bookmarked with a note in barely legible handwritten Russian, reading, “The Siberian tar animal, Johannes Praetorius Zeitlingensis posthumously, 1681. First known scientific treatise on abominations. Use German translator.” Artemis reshelved the book.

Over the course of the next hour, Artemis fiddled with getting each hearth lit, paying a tax on the amount of matches she spent lighting each for her clumsiness. She had spent her whole life relying on coal and the handy storm kettle the group had lost, originally a British import she innovated to make it easier to light fires in the tundra, subsequently turned into the matchbox house’s most elegant fixture by her and Tosha. The last time she’d tried to light a wood fire had been an ill-advised attempt of hers to burn down the Sump’s headquarters along with herself, more than five years ago, and both her muscles and her mind strained against acknowledging the existence of that memory, leaving her bereft of any wood firestarting experience.

But light the first and second floor hearths she did. The fourth hearth, the one not in a hallway, turned about to be in the largest bedroom in the house. Artemis reasoned that this must be the Ryzhaya matriarch’s bedroom. She was reluctant to disturb it, having experienced a healthy dose of the taboo around it already, so she skipped it. Sofia would have something to light after all, as much as she had said she didn’t want to poke around in that room.

When she returned to the ground floor, Tosha and Vasilisa were already up, having a quiet conversation.

“…and I think I was gonna lock them out or something, but then the dream ended,” said Vasilisa.

Tosha nodded. “I ate rice.”

“For, like. The whole dream?”

“Someone wanted to take the rice away, but I didn’t let them.”

“For someone as into cooking as you are, you’d think you’d dream about, like, mapo tofu or something.”

Tosha shrugged.

Artemis took this as an opening to interrupt. “Hey guys. Good morning, Vasilisa. So, uh… tangentially relevant topic: we need to do something about food. And meds.”

It was finally Tosha’s turn to know something about magic. “Do the Ryzhayas not have spare food?” they asked. “They must feed all these idols somehow.”

“Idols are supposed to be fed with melted reindeer fat. Do you see any slaughtered reindeer here?”

Tosha shrugged again. “It’s a big house.”

“Yeah… no. There’s no reindeer fat here.”

“Could they have grains? We mostly used to just eat rice anyway,” spoke up Vasilisa, unintentionally hurting Tosha’s pride as the cook of the group, who nevertheless stayed silent.

“I looked around and couldn’t find anything, but I’d be really happy if you double-checked. But, why don’t we just go to the store?”

Vasilisa snorted. “Because that’s like the most obvious way to get killed ever? Come on. There’s guys out there looking for us.”

“They’re looking for Alexey, and all they want to do is kidnap, not kill.”

“Oh, like that’s better.”

“It is better! Kidnapped people aren’t dead!”

“Yeah, they just get their friends dead instead.”

Tosha intervened. “Please stop yelling. You’ll wake Alexey and Sofia.”

Artemis glanced at the remaining two sleeping figures. “It’s past noon. I’m not sure it’d even be healthy to keep them asleep.”

“Vasilisa, what do you think we do about food, then?” asked Tosha. “We can’t stay here if there isn’t any.”

“Well, I was thinking we should learn a little basic magic first. Enough to defend ourselves. Or pull off some kind of heist, maybe. Animals steal food all the time, so, maybe we could turn into foxes or something?” Her voice got a little smaller as she finished her sentence.

“Vasilisa, turning into an animal is, like, one of the hardest things a shaman can do. Most people can’t even do more than one animal, I think,” said Artemis. “It’s right up there with going to space or building a robot. Shamans usually learn to do one very hard thing, and this is one of those.”

Vasilisa looked crestfallen. “…whatever. Let’s just go then.”

“Okay, wait. First of all, I have to stress I’m not an expert. This is just what I picked up in the Sump, and they’re really unhinged over there. I dunno if I can trust them. Second of all, there’s plenty of other shamanic stuff we might be able to do. There’s probably at least one useful idol around here.”

“Should I wake up Sofia?” asked Tosha. “So she could tell us.”

“I kind of just want to wait for her and Alexey to get up on their own, so they can tell us. Is that okay?” said Artemis.

Both Tosha and Vasilisa nodded.

“Look, I admire your courage, I do, but this is a terrible idea,” said Sofia. “Artemis, you were part of the Sump, weren’t you? We haven’t talked about it much, but I heard how Nikolay Nikolaevitch talked to you. They know what you look like, and they are looking for you. Not to mention how incredibly loud your car is.”

Tosha had woken up Sofia, then gone back to sleep next to Alexey, leaving Artemis and Vasilisa alone to persuade Sofia for help. She awoke uninclined to chastise anyone for help or worry too much about being a bad host, so Artemis was vindicated in the issue of the lighting of the hearths.

“It’s a normal amount of loud for a car,” protested Artemis. “You guys just aren’t used to them.”

“Regardless. You can’t go, because you’ll die or get kidnapped. I feel like I’ve said ‘die or get kidnapped’ enough times by now that it needs a word. Is there a word for it?”

“What if I go?” said Vasilisa. “I mean, I’d study some magic first, but like, I’d go tonight.”

“Magic isn’t something you can just study for an afternoon and apply immediately,” said Sofia. “But it’s a better plan than Artemis’s, at least.”

“Vasilisa, I’m not going to let you just go on your own, no matter what,” said Artemis. “I… I’m not just bragging, but I’m better in a fight than you, you know that, right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Vasilisa, still a little hurt. “Your leather getup is armor or whatever.”

“It was good enough for the Mongols,” shrugged Artemis.

“What about Tosha?” asked Sofia innocently, inviting the other two to stare at her. “Is he good in a fight?”

“No,” said Artemis, at the same time as Vasilisa said, “Hell, no,” internally appreciating the fact that this time she wasn’t on the receiving end of the double denial.

“Tosha isn’t good in a grocery store,” said Artemis. “They’re not really the going-outside type. They’ll just get lost and scared.”

“And in a fight, he’ll be super extra scared,” emphasized Vasilisa. “Screw that.”

“So… what does Tosha do around here?” asked Sofia in her confusion, instantly regretting it.

Artemis narrowed her eyes and gave Sofia a stern, pointed look. “Tosha is our friend,” she said, with venom. “They don’t need to do anything around here. This is a house, not a company.”

“But also he cooks,” said Vasilisa, trying to help the case. “Mostly rice and tofu, but it’s good.”

Artemis rolled her eyes at her. “They don’t need to cook for us, though. They just do it because they’re nice.”

Sofia, having grown up in a household where utility was equated to a right to live, couldn’t unlearn her entire upbringing in one reprimand. But she was no island, and this wasn’t the first time she’d heard that the average person doesn’t expect everyone they meet to immediately justify their existence somehow. She didn’t expect anyone to do so, either, unlike most of her family. Yet, what did it matter? She’d asked the question anyway.

“Okay, sorry. I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.

“How did you mean it, then?” asked Artemis with no less intensity than before.

“Just… I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t expect Tosha to do anything, necessarily. I just wanted to know if he can, because people… usually can. Do things, that is,” she finished lamely. “I’m sorry.”

Her friends were silent. Vasilisa was about to change the subject, but—

“So, by the way, is he a ‘he’ or a ‘they’?” asked Sofia. “Because you said ‘he’, but you said ‘they’,” she said, pointing at each girl in turn, “Which was confusing but I think I get it?”

“Either one,” said Artemis, still a little icily. “Thank you for asking. It’s important to ask.”

“…but he’s called Tosha? Why not a gender-neutral name?”

“That’s their call,” said Artemis, rolling her eyes again.

“Right, anyway, guys. Artemis, are you leaving or not?” asked Vasilisa, hurrying before they started a new topic without her.

“Yes,” said Artemis.

“No! Come on!” said Sofia. “What are you going to do? Try to run them over with your stupid car again? Because it worked so well last time?”

“I’m not taking the car. I’ll walk.”

“That’s even dumber,” said Vasilisa. “Sofia’s right. Fuck off, Artemis, and let me do this. Actually don’t fuck off. You know what I mean.”

“I’ll do it,” said Sofia. “The Gvezdins didn’t recognize me at all,” neglecting to mention that Pyotr himself, who was in league with them, had learned her identity through her dreams and assuredly disseminated it by now along the appropriate channels.

Artemis didn’t even want to bother addressing this line of thought. “I’m going, and you can’t stop me. Sofia, do you have any idols that can help disguise me?”

“…I mean, the CO poisoning ones can remove memories or make people unable to recognize faces, but none of them are trained for that,” said Sofia, despite herself.

“What about one that I can use on myself?”

“…uh. Give yourself a disease? Let me think a moment.”

The two girls waited patiently.

“I’ve got it,” said Sofia, a new grin on her face.


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