“Kenneth!”

  From the direction of the approaching car, a woman’s voice pierced through the engine’s roar. Lucy hadn’t heard this voice before, but she had a sneaking suspicion as to this woman’s relation to Kenneth.

  Lucy, Ricardo, and Kenneth all stood frozen as the headlights drew closer and the engine grew louder. On top of the car’s incessant noise, Lucy’s heart pounded in her ears. The stale air grew heavy in Lucy’s throat and a cough wracked her body, as if she were already breathing in the exhaust fumes.

  As her heartbeat continued to thunder over everything, Lucy realized that if her assumptions were right, then what was bound to happen next, based on what was depicted in the third of the stained glass windows, would be absolutely catastrophic.

  Especially for Kenneth.

  “Mom?”

  With just that single word that left Kenneth’s lips like a firefly escaping a jar, Lucy’s suspicions were proven right. She and Ricardo exchanged looks, and it was clear both of them had the exact same idea about what was inevitably fated to happen next.

  “Stay right there!” A man’s voice roared over the engine. It had to be Kenneth’s father. “We’ve been looking all over for—”

  The whole time his father spoke, the sound of another engine gradually rose from the opposite direction, melding with the sounds of Kenneth’s parents’ car to become one large impenetrable block of noise that encased the area in the fated moment both vehicles were heading towards.

  Lucy wanted to turn around, but the first car had already come close enough to show the bewildered look on Kenneth’s father as he whipped his head back from gazing at his son to find what was barrelling straight for him.

  Kenneth’s mother shouted, incomprehensible words reduced to mere tones of shock and terror and desperation, his father’s cursing from fear-turned-frustration scarily clear to Lucy’s ears as he turned the steering wheel as fast as he could.

  Their car veered to the opposite side—but that did little to avoid the other car’s bizarre trajectory. Anger shot through Lucy’s veins, for it had to be a case of drunk driving, but as much as this anger distorted and reddened Lucy’s world, it did nothing to stop the two vehicles’ momentum.

  It happened in an instant. Horns honking, the blinding light rapidly dimming as the two opposing sets of headlights blocked each other, the deafening cacophony of crunching and shattering, the way the entire world quaked in recoil as the two metal beasts clashed and instantaneously disassembled one another, melding together and becoming naught but a lifeless husk of metal and rubber feeding the enormous conflagration that singed the air and roared with unforgiving light and heat.

  No one moved save the wavering, towering flame, and no one broke the still evening silence save the incessant crackling and simmering.

  Lucy was rooted to the spot, feeling like a candle that could do nothing but feel her sense of self and agency melt into a useless puddle. She wasn’t sure if she had turned around, or had even moved her gaze, but she was suddenly hyper-aware of Kenneth’s face, the orange and red light carving scars of brightness and shadow into his young face, his mouth parted to let his voice evaporate into the smoking air, his eyes wide as his retinas were burned through multiple layers inside and out by everything he had just seen and would always see, now and forever, in dreams and in waking.

  There came a barely-audible thud as the boy sunk to his knees. Though his body had stopped wandering down the endless road, Lucy could see in his face that his mind had become untethered from whatever was holding it down, scrambling off in every direction to every corner of the world with only the intention to flee as far as possible from this inescapable flame.

  Everything played in blurred slow motion to Lucy, perhaps from the sweltering heat and thick smoke that coiled in through her nostrils, or from the effusive, suffocating emotions that seemed to radiate from Kenneth and push down on everything in this memory-scape like gravity’s wrath. She was vaguely aware of Ricardo shouting something, of him dropping down to his knees before Kenneth and reaching out to grab the boy’s shoulders.

  “My fault.”

  Everything went eerily silent the moment Kenneth uttered those words, as if all the noise had been deleted from existence. Then it all came back in a deafening rush, heightened even further by how the flame began growing at an alarming rate. Very soon it engulfed Lucy’s entire vision so that the world before her was nothing but the chaos of flickering fire.

  This was the third and final of the stained glass windows.

  And just like in its depiction, everything else had melted away. The sky, the field, and the road were gone. Ricardo and even Kenneth were nowhere to be seen. Lucy lost all sense of where she was, of where her body started and ended, so that she too was nothing more than firewood to the all-consuming flame.

  Heat.

  Light.

  Roaring.

  Crackling.

  Simmering.

  Flickering.

  The overwhelming truth that nothing built could last, nothing proud could remain, when it could all be burned down by a primal force so total, so unfeeling, so absolute in its destructive judgement.

  “…a dear and fetch me some…”

  A voice pierced the cosmic roar of fire. Lucy’s entire being shuddered as she was brought back to a sense of awareness as an independent entity. It wasn’t so much the suddenness of the voice that was so startling, but the fact that it was immediately familiar.

  Yes, even after all that had happened, all it took was one word to recognize the queen’s voice.

  The endless flames stopped wavering, then drew in together, congealing and moulding into the figure of a woman: the queen’s figure. Where there was darkness in the fire’s absence, a new environment quickly faded into view. A standard American living room, with couches and chairs surrounding a television box set. The queen—or the woman the queen was based on—reclined lazily on the biggest couch, which Lucy quickly recognized as her “throne” from earlier. The living room and the house in general was spick-and-span, with cupboards and side tables and lamps all shining with the sheen of well-maintained cleanliness. By contrast, the small area on the floor in front of the woman’s couch, just below where one of her arms languidly hung down, was a mess of mostly-finished bowls of food and bags of snacks.

  Looking at the sheer mundanity of this setting, a placid calm fell over Lucy, and she felt as if she were in a trance. But all too suddenly, images flashed in her mind, of metal twisted and bent, of enormous plumes of fire and thick smoke, of Kenneth’s face taking in the incident that would forever change him.

  Sweat stung Lucy’s skin, as if the scorching heat from the fire was still in the air. But Lucy fought to steady her ragged breathing. The fire was gone, for now, and she was in a completely new situation. Now was not the time to wallow; she needed to press on and find out what to do.

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  “Worthless child. Did you hear me?”

  The woman had been staring with bloodshot eyes at the television screen, but now her gaze was directed off to the side, where Kenneth stood with his trembling hands clasped and his entire figure caved in to make himself appear even smaller. He appeared to be older than he was a moment ago, closer to the age he was when Lucy and the other Dream Knights had met him in his Dream.

  “Y-yes, Auntie?” Kenneth squeaked.

  Auntie. So she was Kenneth’s aunt all along. It made sense with how Lucy remembered the queen mentioning Kenneth’s uncle.

  “Don’t say ‘yes’ to me when you clearly didn’t listen to a word I said!” Spit flecked from the aunt’s mouth as she shouted, veins bulging in her neck in an expression Lucy recalled all too well. “But because I’m a gracious person, I’ll repeat myself. Be a dear and fetch me the corn chips at the top of the pantry.”

  “A-at the top?” Kenneth’s hesitation made it clear that he probably couldn’t reach it.

  “Yes, your ears work! Now hurry, I don’t have all day!”

  After letting out a gasp of fear, Kenneth wobbled in place for a moment before scurrying off toward the back of the living room, which had a doorway leading into a kitchen.

  “Let’s follow him.”

  Lucy nearly jumped at the sound of Ricardo’s voice; she had been completely unaware of him standing a few feet beside her. Once the shock wore off, she understood that Ricardo was just as perplexed as she was about this whole situation, but that regardless of circumstance protecting Kenneth was always top priority.

  Lucy nodded to him, but she remained standing in front of the queen as her curiosity got the better of her. She raised her hand and waved it. The queen briefly glanced at it, but otherwise paid it no heed and resumed watching her show.

  Lucy looked to Ricardo, who seemed cautious but understood what Lucy was trying to test. She walked up closer to the queen, blocking her view of the television.

  To Lucy’s surprise, instead of fuming with rage, Kenneth’s aunt merely gave a surprised look, then tried to crane her neck around Lucy. She gave up, sighed, and looked up at Lucy with a disappointed but surprisingly polite expression. “Miss Lockhart, my dear, would you mind stepping to the side a little? I can’t see my show.”

  This time when Lucy looked back over shoulder at Ricardo, he matched her wide-eyed look of incredulity. She looked again at Kenneth’s aunt, seeing her smile without any mirth or ill intention, and despite everything that had happened with the queen, Lucy found herself doing as she had asked and taking a step to the side.

  “You…you know who we are?” Lucy wished she had found a way to word that question more naturally, but the strangeness of these circumstances won out in her mind.

  “My, my, are you joking with me?” Kenneth’s aunt gave a laugh, lighthearted but tainted by the identical tone to the queen’s sneering guffaws. “You may have just started here yesterday, but I appreciate having you entertainers here to liven up the space.”

  “Entertainers?” Ricardo’s voice was halfway between an exclamation of disbelief and a barely-restrained laugh of uncomfortable acknowledgement.

  “Oh yes,” said Kenneth’s aunt, “there’s no need to be shy about your profession. I certainly wouldn’t have the gall to wear that sort of get-up!” She laughed again, reaching down into one of her snack bags and pouring a handful of party mix into her mouth. The ensuing crunching sound seemed to reverberate all throughout the living room.

  “Sorry,” said Lucy. “We wish we could…entertain you right now, but we just need to check something.”

  Kenneth’s aunt, still chewing with her eyes glued to the television, raised her hand and waved dismissively. “Sure. You don’t need my permission for any of that. Just make sure you’re all happy and well so you don’t end up like your predecessor.”

  “Predecessor?” The word was specific and ominous enough to make a chill run down Lucy’s spine.

  “Oh yes, didn’t I tell you? We had another one of you entertainers before, a pretty little thing even though she was a mother of three. Even the boy took a liking to her.”

  Lucy and Ricardo exchanged glances again, and Ricardo mouthed what they were both thinking. Keilani.

  “Such a shame,” Kenneth’s aunt continued, rustling the party bag’s plastic as she scooped up more for her endless nourishment. “About the fire, I mean. The cops said she started it on purpose. Wanted to go out in the most excruciating way possible, I suppose.”

  Lucy’s heart pounded in her ears, and her breath came slow and heavy as she stared at Kenneth’s aunt, at her laid-back posture, at the television screen reflected in her empty eyes, at the crumbs and salt that dotted her chin.

  “But if that’s what she wanted,” said Kenneth’s aunt, “who am I to judge?”

  She laughed again, the complete lack of remorse making her laugh of nonchalance into a wicked cackle. Who was this woman to make so light of such a horrifying death? She had known the victim and had done nothing to stop it, and here she was feeling completely content with the outcome. It was enough to make Lucy ball her fists and grit her teeth as she stepped toward the couch, but Ricardo grabbed her arm and stopped her.

  Lucy tried to wrestle out of Ricardo’s grip, but he turned her around and shook his head vigorously at her. Then he nodded off toward the kitchen, where Kenneth had gone.

  Ricardo began walking over, but not before holding Lucy’s gaze for a moment with a solemn, sincere face. Keilani needs to be avenged, his eyes said.

  Lucy exhaled, took one last glance at the aunt’s den of decadence, then followed Ricardo into the kitchen.

  Both of them were taken aback as soon as they stepped inside. The counter top and dining table were both several feet higher off the ground than they should have been, and were far too large. Even the sink looked more the size of a bathtub, and the drawers underneath it had knobs more befitting the hands of a fully-grown gorilla.

  Beside the sink stood Kenneth, peering through an enormous pantry doorway and gazing up at the top shelf that was at least a dozen feet above ground. Just as his aunt had said, a bag of corn chips lay right in the middle of it, the golden plastic seeming to shine with a strangely mocking air.

  Kenneth’s hands were raised high above his head, his arms shaking, and Lucy realized he was trying to grab onto the second shelf in order to literally climb his way up.

  “Kenneth,” said Ricardo as he and Lucy went to the boy’s side. “That’s dangerous. Stay here, we’ll get it for you.”

  Lucy looked at Ricardo. “You have a Feat that can help us get up there?”

  “Well, nothing for climbing specifically, but I think I can cook up an idea.” He smiled reassuringly, then rubbed the back of his head with a sheepish laugh. “Man, if only Kei were here…She’d get up there in no time flat.”

  “Yeah…” was all Lucy managed to say, but thankfully Ricardo nodded to cut the awkward silence short and then stopped off closer to the pantry shelves in order to think.

  As he did that, Lucy looked at Kenneth, who was staring at her with a worried but curious expression. She had his full attention, and now they knew his relation to the queen, so Lucy figured this would be the perfect time to finally get some questions answered.

  “Kenneth,” Lucy began, kneeling down to eye level with the boy, “why does your aunt order you around like this? Are you afraid of her?”

  Kenneth remained silent, his lip quivering slightly, but eventually he mumbled: “I have to listen to Auntie because I’m bad. Because she knows.”

  “She knows?” Lucy repeated, looking into his eyes. “What does she—”

  “I’ve got it!” Ricardo exclaimed, walking back to Lucy and extending his hand out in front of her. In his palm were four lengths of yarn, each one being knotted into a ball-like shape at the end. “You attach these to your shoulders and they grow into long arms. I normally use them to up my punching game, or I guess you could use ’em to hold more weapons. But we could also use them to monkey-climb these shelves more easily.”

  Lucy hesitated, but took two of the strings of yarn and stared at them. She wasn’t sure how to feel about growing more limbs in order to scale shelves, especially as she wasn’t particularly fond of spiders. But if Ricardo had thought this through after analyzing the situation, and she couldn’t think of any other approach, then this was the best shot they had.

  Just as Ricardo was about to demonstrate how to use this Feat of his, heavy thuds rung out through the air and the entire house shook. They were footsteps, accompanied by the roaring voice of Kenneth’s aunt: “Foolish, lazy boy! What is taking you so long?”

  Her shadow preceded her, looming large over the kitchen, and then she herself stepped inside and glared first at Kenneth, then the two “entertainers” at his side. “Miss Lockhart, Mister Luiz, might I ask you to not get mixed up in our family matters?”

  “Why is he so obedient to you?” Lucy wasted no time giving into both her curiosity and her anger. “What are you holding against him?”

  “Hmph.” The aunt said nothing as she walked deeper into the kitchen—her kitchen, which was appropriately scaled to her suddenly huge stature. She stomped up to the three of them, studying Lucy’s and Ricardo’s expression, then looked at the trembling Kenneth with a smirk. After watching her nephew shrink back, she looked to Lucy again. “If you’re really dying to know, I’ll let you in on the little truth that this boy has confided in only with me.”

  Lucy’s blood boiled staring at her, for her perfect resemblance to the queen was disgustingly apparent now, but Lucy’s throat went dry as she asked: “What truth?”

  She glanced at Kenneth, who now wore on his face that searching, desperate expression from the moment he had stared into the flames of the car crash. And in the aunt’s eyes, there was the violent flickering of fire as she gave a cruel smile.

  “It’s quite simple, really. This boy is the reason his parents are dead.”