In the kitchen, I wrap the last bit of cloth around the cut in Marcí's hand. Leavi would be better at doing this, but she seems distracted with her delusional friend. Which leaves me to figure out how to clean the gash without any sort of first aid kit.

Marcí thanks me as I step away, then adds, "I should have listened more carefully to that magician's warning, I suppose."

I wave my hand dismissively. "Anyone with a lick of sense could have guessed that, in this weather, you could slip on the snow-covered porch at some point this winter. I don't put too much stock in his 'magic,' and I suggest you don't either."

Marcí frowns, but I turn and walk into the living room. Leavi enters from outside, a troubled expression shrouding her face.

I raise an eyebrow. "What's up with you?"

She shakes her head, looking at the floor and keeps walking, but then pauses and turns to face me. "Sean?"

"Yeah?" I'm not sure why she felt the need to say my name—did she think I'd stopped paying attention that quickly?

"You're a rational person," she says.

"And?"

Staring off, she taps that necklace of hers, distracted or agitated. Then she walks forward and grabs my wrist. Surprised, I jerk my hand away. "What was that?" My query comes out much more demanding and angry than I meant it to.

She pulls back, hurt. "I just—" She doesn't finish the thought, shaking her head. "Come with me." She heads to the dining room, and I follow. She pulls a chair out to sit down in, pressing her hands against the dining room table. Then, apparently changing her mind, she pushes up to pace.

One, two steps. Turn. One, two, three steps. Turn. One step. Turn. I lean against the edge of the table and watch, waiting for her to speak. She doesn't say anything for several moments, and her erratic steps put me on edge. Unable to keep witnessing this perversion of pacing, I grab her shoulders.

"Leavi. What's wrong?"

Her eyes widen, and there's something in them that reminds me of the dog my neighbors in Xela had. It was corralled in a too-small cage, unable to do anything about its fate but still able to see an open, comprehensible world beyond. She takes a shaky breath, then forces out, "Strange things are happening, Sean." The serious tone in her voice lifts the hair on the back of my neck.

Already unsettled as I am, her words make me pause. "What?"

Something about her expression—a faked strength, concealing something—calls to mind a person who knows that their situation isn't right but doesn't want to admit it.

'It's okay, sugar.' The corner of her bottom lip slipped beneath her top one as she lightly bit it. She was lying.

'Mama...'

'It's all alright. Everything's gonna work out. It always does.' She stroked the back of my head, trying to comfort me. 'It always does,' she repeated softly, more to herself than me.

Three words I never thought I'd hear from Leavi break me out of my memories. "I don't know." She shakes her head. "I really, I just—" She shrugs her shoulders in an unconscious, distressed movement, and my hands slip away.

"I can't help if you can't explain," I say softly.

She closes her eyes. "Have you seen Aster cast?"

"No." For once, I'm not ridiculing her; I'm simply answering her question.

Her eyes slide back open. "He... he does impossible things, Sean."

Please don't have fallen for it, Leavi...

"I saw him make a cube change colors, which at first, I just attributed to some sort of chemical reaction or sleight of hand. You know what I'm talking about." Her eyes are eager for confirmation.

I nod.

Affirmed, she continues. "But then he did this thing, just a bowl of water and some green powder, and a book, and some blood—" She's rambling, and she seems to realize it. Shaking her head, she starts again. "He made the water show a picture of someone I knew from Erreliah. It was like a painting, Sean. A moving, perfect painting. A scene played out right in front of my eyes. I've never seen anything like it. And I know what you're going to say, that it was a hallucination, except it wasn't. I would have known, I've already gone through it all, and it couldn't have been."

"Okay. Okay. Hey. Calm down, alright? I'm sure there's some reasonable explanation." Everything has a reasonable explanation. That's why science works. I'm sure there's just something she hasn't thought of yet.

She nods, fingering her necklace. "See that's what I thought too, so I stole his materials. I wanted to see what the trick was. An experiment, you know?"

I pause. "On... yourself?" I'm trying really hard not to sound condescending.

"I know that's not proper procedure, but what else was I supposed to do? It's not like I had willing subjects at hand. And, anyway, you're the one who wanted to test unidentified substances with your tongue."

"Leavi, no textbook says that performing an on-the-spot experiment on yourself is a good idea."

She rakes a hand through her hair. "I needed to know one way or the other. I didn't know any other way to go about it. Besides, that's not the point. The point is what happened when I went through with it."

I sigh, trying not to argue with her. "What, then?"

She pauses now. "He has this book." Her eyes flick up to mine, nervous. "When I held it, I swear to you, Sean, it talked to me."

Involuntarily, my eyebrows shoot up. I manage to reign them back in and attempt to say in my least disbelieving voice possible, "It, um. Talked to you?"

"I'm serious, Sean!"

I raise my hands. "Okay. Okay. I wasn't saying you weren't. I just, um, well. What, exactly, did it say?"

She makes a frustrated noise. "You're making fun of me."

"No," I gently assure. I'm walking on eggshells. "No, I'm just trying to understand."

She looks around the room, refusing to meet my eyes, but says, "They helped me cast the spell."

"You cast something?" I can hear the dubiousness in my own voice, but I'm not sure how else to respond.

"Yes! Well, not exactly, because Aster says I didn't let the spell work, but it hurt. It made my nose bleed, Sean," she says, like this is incontrovertible proof of something. "Aster had to come finish it. And there was this strange pressure, like some foreign force was trying to take over my mind."

I'm worried about her. Voices? A foreign force trying to take her over? Magic? Either something is seriously wrong with her, or this Aster guy has done something with her head. I could almost believe that the powder she'd mentioned was some kind of drug.

Calmer now, I say steadily, "Leavi."

Here she looks up at me again, eyes wide, and cuts off her river of words. "What?"

I'm going to hope it's the powder. "Where's the green stuff?"

She seems confused. "With Aster," she says like it's obvious.

I nod. Setting a hand on her shoulder, I say, "Alright. Leavi, can I make a suggestion?" Her dark eyes watch me. "Stay away from him. At least when he's 'casting.'" I can't help the tint of doubt that seeps into the last word.

"You don't believe me," she realizes, hurt.

"I... don't disbelieve you. I just want to check all possible avenues."

"No. No, you actually don't believe me. You think I'm making it up."

"No," I say definitively.

Her face falls into her hands. "Skies, why wouldn't you think I'm making it up? You probably think I'm crazy."

"No," I say more forcefully. "I don't think you're crazy. I think that, perhaps, some things have happened whose explanation might not be immediately clear, but I don't think you're crazy. In general, I'm pretty certain you think too clearly to be crazy. But I do agree that something's going on." She stares at me for a minute. Not sure what conclusion she's going to end up coming to, I preempt it. "Can I have a blood sample?"

"What?"

"Can I have a blood sample?" I repeat. "And your hematester. There's a logical explanation to this. I'll find it," I promise.

She seems surprised, and for a moment, I'm not sure she's going to agree. But then she nods. "I'll go get it," she says quietly.