Kenya and Lark each took an arm and lifted Joanie out of the tub. They toweled off the water from her blue-white skin, the color of expensive cheese. Joanie was still shivering, but at least the effect now had a clear cause, and her eyes were her own again. Kenya ran the towel in a slow circle around the high-relief topography of Joanie's back. Joanie reached over her shoulder and took Kenya's hand. "Kenya," she said. "What happened?"

What happened was you took all the gunpowder despite knowing that it was for both of us and it was supposed to last weeks, and you ran out of practice without saying why, and you missed dinner, and you made me deal with Sarah and talk to Charlie, and I met the boy in the fucking tunnel, who is apparently still a thing, and and and

"You scared me, you Frankenstein-looking piece of shit." Joanie laughed, and Kenya squeezed her hand, lending her some warmth. Joanie laced her fingers through Kenya's.

"I don't look like Frankenstein."

"My bad. I meant Andre the Giant." Joanie pulled Kenya in for an embrace, and Kenya felt the strength in her arms, a power that made Kenya forget how weak she could be. She loved Joanie, but the conversation they needed to have about this wasn't going to feel like love.

Sarah brought in a spare set of scrubs. Joanie looked surprised to see her, but whatever she might have said, she kept it to herself. She said "Thanks" and took them into a bathroom to change.

Sarah waited until the bathroom door closed. "Do we know what did this?"

Lark shook her head. "I won't be able to get the full toxicology till tomorrow. But if you ask me, it wasn't gunpowder."

Kenya had found the empty silver box. It had been full that morning. "Trust me, it was gunpowder."

"What I'm saying is, she probably thought it was gunpowder. A friend of mine's a nurse at the ER. He told me last month a guy came in, tripping balls. Said he was in two places at once. He was here, in the real world, but he was also in a fancy office. You know what I'm saying? Purple wallpaper, the fireplace, the books. There were people there. But not Anthony. Somebody else."

Sarah scoffed. "How do you know it wasn't Anthony?"

"Describe Anthony."

"Big fat guy. Moustache. Old-timey clothes."

"He said he saw two men. One in a suit, one in a blazer. Neither one of them was a big fat guy." Lark licked a finger and rubbed at a blemish on the amethyst ring on her left hand. "Kenya. The gunpowder that Joanie took – did you have any of it?"

"No, it was new."

"And you got it through the usual channels?"

"Yeah – are you saying this was fake gunpowder?"

Lark's right hand went for the amethyst ring again. Her rings all clinked together as she scraped at the gem with a nail. "I think we should have this conversation with Charlie present."

"Who is Charlie, exactly?" Audrey was back. Kenya started to formulate a lie, hoping Sarah would beat her to it, but then Audrey saw the tub of water and the wet footprints on the floor. "Is she...?"

"She's okay." The look of relief on Audrey's face was almost more than Kenya could stand. Audrey had the luxury of loving a memory. She could feel relief, and nothing more, because she hadn't been in Joanie's life yesterday, and most likely wouldn't be tomorrow.

Audrey will taste only the sweet, not the bitter. When you have both it is better, true: richer, more complex. Your palate evolves. But still, sometimes you just want candy. You want the rush, damn the crash. You don't want something you have to think about, you just want something you can feel.

Joanie emerged from the bathroom, her calves sticking out of the bottom of the too-small scrub pants. Audrey rushed to her and wrapped her arms around her waist. "Audrey?" Joanie said, and Kenya felt a pang of jealousy over the guileless, joyful way she said it. Joanie bowed her head to kiss Audrey on her nest of black hair. They looked like a mother and her wayward child, reunited after a family tragedy.

Sarah jerked her head suggestively at Kenya. "I'm going to get her some coffee. To warm her up."

"I'll help." They left Lark to keep an eye on Joanie, though it didn't look like Audrey was letting her go any time soon.

Kenya followed Sarah to the break room, out of earshot. "What do you think? Counterfeit gunpowder?"

"Is that even possible?" Nobody really knew how gunpowder was produced – at least nobody who was willing to say. Kenya had heard it was made from Anthony Delmonico's ashes, which was as plausible as anything. The mushroom patch in the woods out behind the intramural fields probably played a role too.

"Maybe. For someone with the right resources." Sarah dropped two quarters into the snack machine and punched in D3. A Butterfinger fell from its perch. "Sounds like the dead boys to me. A declaration of war." Sarah retrieved the candy bar, unwrapped it, and took down half of it in one bite.

"'Declaration of war.' Give me a break." Kenya couldn't believe that the Nine Dead Men were behind this. For one thing, they were a glorified frat at best, whose main activities seemed to be coming up with ever-more-ridiculous secret oaths and codes, and drawing their stupid symbol on any flat surface they could find. Drug manufacture – much less gunpowder manufacture – was way beyond their capabilities. "I think Lark's right. We need to talk to Charlie about this."

"We're not going to do that. I don't know Lark. I don't trust her. And if the gunpowder distribution chain has been compromised, I don't trust Charlie right now either."

"Jesus, listen to yourself. You just don't want to talk to Charlie because she's mad at you."

Sarah raised her right hand, like she was taking an oath, and shook it, letting her bracelets slide down her arm, away from her hand. They exposed a tattoo: thirteen tiny purple guns, circling her wrist.

Fucking Sarah had vomited on Kenya when they first met, and that was the high point of their relationship. Fuck her. Fuck her in the fucking eyes. "Are you seriously doing this?"

Sarah didn't respond. Instead she shoved the rest of the Butterfinger in her mouth and took her sweet time chewing it, without dropping eye contact with Kenya. She kept her right hand raised, the tattoo visible.

"Goddamn it, you're pulling rank on me right now?"

Sarah licked a stray smear of chocolate from her thumb. "The Creatures don't have ranks, Kenya. But we do have a code."

"I know about the fucking code." The fucking code. Nobody'd ever invoked the code on Kenya, and she'd never invoked it on anybody, because the code was so clearly a violation of everything the Living Creatures stood for. If Sarah wanted to talk about shit being compromised, maybe she should look into how that code became a thing in the first place.

"So are you going to honor the code, or break it?" She still had her hand up. That was the problem with the Princess: she liked all the bullshit a little too much. The pageantry, the mysteries. The fucking codes. She'd probably fit right in with the Dead Men.

"No, I'm not going to break the fucking code." There wasn't any point in fighting her now. Joanie was the priority.

"Good." Sarah lowered her hand, and the bracelets fell back into place with a burst of rapid-fire clacks. "So we're just going to hold off on telling Charlie anything until we have a better idea of what's what. I'll deal with Lark. You find out who or what Joanie saw while she was communing."

"Simple as that."

"Yep."

Kenya laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles. It had been a long night, after a long summer, and it sure looked like a long semester now loomed before her. There was no time now for anything but complete transparency. "You know I really can't stand you?" she said.

"I know!" Sarah broke out into a wide, disarming smile. "It's kind of obvious. But don't worry. I think we're going to be great friends before too long."

There was no future that Kenya could imagine in which that would be true. Every future she could envision was free of Sarah, free of Charlie, some even free of the Creatures altogether. She could even, in those dark circumstances that sometimes arose late at night, when her brain refused to take her to the house in Germany, imagine a future without Joanie – an impossible future that nevertheless held a certain forbidden allure. But there was impossible and there was impossible. A future of true friendship with Sarah was impossible.

Kenya turned toward the door, to return to Joanie, but Sarah said "Kenya, wait." She pointed at the coffee vending machine next to the snack machine. "Do you have a quarter?"

She still had the damn Butterfinger wrapper in her hand. Kenya just let it float right over her. She'd said her piece. She fished in her pocket for a quarter and handed it to Sarah.

She slammed it into the slot. "How does Joanie take it?"

"Black," Kenya said.

When they returned to the sports therapy room with the coffee, Joanie was sitting on a table, wrapped in dry towels, Audrey snuggled against her side for warmth. Sarah handed Joanie the coffee, and she drank nearly half of it at once despite the steam pouring from the cup.

Joanie winced as she swallowed. "I think I just burned my tongue."

Lark placed another towel around Joanie's shoulders. "Be careful."

Joanie took a smaller sip of the coffee. She looked up at Kenya. "Is anybody going to tell me what happened?"

"What do you remember?" said Lark.

"I was going to Thorn before practice. To see if Dr. Burton was there. I was going to give him some of my poems." Joanie stared into the black liquid in the paper cup. "After that, I have no idea."

Kenya filed that away. She'd seen Dr. Burton once or twice, when she was meeting Joanie after a class in Thorn. He always seemed a little too interested.

"That's okay," said Audrey. "It'll come to you when you're ready." She kneaded Joanie's shoulder through the double layer of towels. "We found you in the tunnel, if that helps."

"You found me in a tunnel?"

"You know, the one under the Founders' Garden. Me, Sarah and Alex. We followed you from downtown. You came into the Purple Room and screamed."

"I was in the Purple Room. I was in a tunnel." Joanie's shoulder jerked. Audrey pulled her hand away. "Was he in the tunnel?" Joanie's shoulder spasmed again. Coffee sloshed out over the lip of the cup.

"You mean 'the boy in the tunnel?'"

Joanie's hand clenched, and coffee shot out of the cup, all over her hand and her thigh in the thin scrub pants. Audrey jumped up to avoid the scalding coffee, but Kenya pulled the towel from Joanie's shoulders to soak up the coffee from her hand and her leg.

Joanie cried out in pain. "Look at me, Joanie," Kenya said. "It's okay. It's okay." Joanie looked not at but through Kenya. She was looking into the future, but what she saw, Kenya couldn't guess.