After Kenneth’s aunt proclaimed those words, the kitchen suddenly rose in temperature, and a crackling sound rung out through the air. On the counter top, four pans had burst into flames, though curiously no smoke wafted out of the flames’ brightly burning bodies.

  Lucy’s breath hitched in shock, but she found her voice upon bringing her gaze back to the aunt’s sneering face. “That can’t be true.”

  “Oh? And what makes you so sure?” She laughed again, the light from the fire burning behind her casting a cruel shadow over her the front of her figure. “The boy himself can attest to it.”

  “It’s true,” Kenneth said, his voice louder and clearer than the mumbles he was giving before. “I’m the killer.”

  Lucy and Ricardo both gasped. It wasn’t just the familiarity of the phrase from when he was repeatedly apologizing to the queen, but the way in which he had spoken it. His words were steady and even, showing no hesitation, and where sadness and regret would be expected to tinge his words, there was only the simmering flame of whole-hearted acceptance.

  “Kenneth…” Ricardo hung his head, grimacing as he balled his fists. He looked back up at Kenneth’s aunt with a fierce snarl, the angriest Lucy had seen him yet. “How could you convince him of such an obvious lie? It’s not like he was the one behind the wheel of that other car!”

  “Tsk, tsk.” The queen clicked her teeth while wagging her finger at Ricardo. “Your perspective is too narrow, too in the moment. But who could blame entertainers who always have their minds on spectacle?”

  Kenneth raised his fists as he got into a fighting stance, glaring daggers at Kenneth’s aunt. “Oh, we’re more than just spectacle, lady?”

  “What a bore.” Kenneth’s aunt waved her hand dismissively and looked at Ricardo with little more than an expression of lax annoyance. “I’m answering your question, so why don’t you pipe down? Now, to that, I say: it isn’t complicated. You just need to consider why the boy’s parents were out on that road in the first place.”

  “Why they were there…” Lucy’s mind flashed to those fleeting few seconds before the crash, when Kenneth’s father had shouted what would end up being his last words. “They were looking for him.”

  “Excellent recollection!” the aunt proclaimed, sweat running down her cheeks from the ignited pans that continued to burn behind her. “If I were you a teacher and you were my pupil, I’d give you a gold star!”

  Lucy cringed, repulsed at how disgustingly gracious this woman was making herself sound despite standing not five feet away from the boy she showed zero mercy to. And besides that, the thought of studying under her as a teacher was enough to make Lucy’s skin crawl.

  “Yes, Miss Lockhart is correct,” Kenneth’s aunt continued in a didactic tone. “If Kenneth hadn’t run away from home that evening, his parents wouldn’t have been driving down that road at that time. They would have never even met that other driver.”

  “Kenneth…was running from home?” Ricardo said with a blank gaze at the boy.

  Lucy was equally taken aback. She had thought that Kenneth walking along that endless road was more abstract and metaphorical, perhaps representing the typical childhood yearning for freedom, or the waylessness of wondering what life would be like after growing up. But if he had actually been wandering along the roadside on the outskirts of town, that raised many concerning questions about Kenneth and his previous circumstances.

  “Correct!” Kenneth’s aunt proclaimed with discordant glee. “This child was blessed with parents who spent every waking second working for his betterment. And how does he repay their efforts? By high-tailing it out across the fields like some boorish donkey!”

  Lucy looked at Kenneth, who remained silent and maintained his neutral, non-emotive expression. What could have led him to do that, assuming the queen was telling the truth?

  “He got far,” said Kenneth’s aunt, “in the hour it took for his poor mother and father to notice. But on a country road, it’s easy to spot a lost child. What a pointless effort! Unless…”

  Kenneth’s aunt stopped, her voice fading away insidiously like a poison vapour melding with the air. The fires behind her burned more violently to make the shadow over the front of her figure more drastic. She gave a low, closed-mouth chuckle while granting a cruel smile to her nephew. Lucy’s skin grow slick with sweat both from the climbing heat and from the portentous suspense in the aunt’s manner.

  “Unless his goal was to lead them right to that brain-dead driver,” Kenneth’s aunt stated simply, as if this were the logical conclusion based on Kenneth’s lifetime of character. “Brutally efficient, isn’t it? Have them go out of their wits searching for him, then right when they find him and have a taste of relief, lead them into that brazen car to shear their lives short like bothersome weeds.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Lucy spat, furiously wiping the sweat off her brow. “It’s not like Kenneth called that driver, or made them drive that way.”

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  “Again, you entertainers are too narrow-minded! Don’t you see how the very act of setting the cogwheels of fate in motion led to such an untimely demise? This boy may not have commanded all the parts, but in the end, he got exactly what he wanted.”

  Again, Kenneth showed no signs of being perturbed nor being in disagreement. Instead, in a movement that was so slight but did nothing to soften the devastating blow it would have on Lucy’s heart, he nodded. Just how thoroughly had his aunt convinced him of his made-up wrongdoing?

  “You’re messed up,” Ricardo said with unfiltered vitriol, pointing his fist at her. “Because of what you want him to believe, you think it’s all right to treat this little boy like a damned slave?”

  “Slavery? How accusatory! Slavery would imply that his current treatment is undeserved. But I’m no tyrant. I’m merely instilling the child with corrective behaviour.”

  “Corrective my ass!” Ricardo shouted, flinging his arm out in utter disbelief.

  The queen merely blinked at his display of hostility. She slid, like a large snake, over to Kenneth and placed her enlarged hands on his shoulders. Still, Kenneth showed no reaction.

  “Obedience,” she said, her smile wide and tapering into sharp points at either end. “Gratitude. Humility. All those important qualities he never showed his parents—that led to them going kaput—I beat into his stubborn mind day after day like force-feeding paper into a jammed printer so that one day the darned thing will get unstuck. Yes, one day, whenever I send him an image to print, he will reproduce it exactly as I envision.”

  She gripped the boy’s shoulders hard, eliciting a momentary tensing of the boy’s body as he involuntarily shrugged his shoulders, but he immediately dropped them back down to assume his perfectly neutral posture.

  Seeing this, his aunt was pleased, angling her head down so that she glared up through her brow at Lucy and Ricardo, her grin glowing savagely in the fire light. “For what is a naughty child but an empty husk, for us wise adults to reshape into a form the world needs?”

  Between the pretentious, self-assured tone with which the aunt said that, and the slick sweat and searing heat both stinging Lucy’s skin, Lucy couldn’t take it anymore. She drew her Ideal out of its sheath and pointed the shimmering blade at her adversary. “You mean what you need. Breaking him down so that all he does is follow what you say…do you not have a shred of empathy?”

  Kenneth’s aunt merely smirked. “You are the fools for empathizing with a dreg of society.”

  “You…!”

  Lucy let go of all conscious restraint. Nor did Ricardo make any effort to hold her back. In an instant, her Ideal was plunged right into the aunt’s abdomen, sliding in with the resistance of cutting through flesh. Alarm bells rung out in Lucy’s mind, for this was the first time had attacked a true human enemy, and staring at where the blade sunk into the aunt’s body made her feel weak. But she desperately brushed this aside as she glared up at the aunt’s face, focusing all her hatred on it.

  Kenneth’s aunt had her mouth open in shock, and she held this expression for some time—before breaking into laughter, grabbing Lucy’s blade, and shoving it back out of herself as if dislodging a mere splinter. “Attacking me is attacking the boy and what he believes. It’s pointless.”

  “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

  High up on the wall behind Kenneth’s aunt, an enormous cuckoo clock chimed out, an exaggerated bird caricature with bulging eyes popping in and out of the door compartment to croon the one word it was allowed to say.

  As discordantly comical as this was, the bird’s voice was accompanied by a creening hiss as the flames from the four burning pans rose higher.

  “My, my, look at the time!” Kenneth’s aunt exclaimed, clasping her hands before her chest with a look of unfettered delight. “It’s about time I serve the boy his daily meal of punishment!”

  “What?”

  The word had barely left Lucy’s and Ricardo’s mouths before Kenneth’s aunt took her hands off his shoulders, grabbed him by the legs and the small of his back, and hoisted him up into his arms, cradling him like a newborn infant. She flashed a grin at her two “entertainers” as she began stomping over to the counter top and its four raging fires.

  “Stop!” Ricardo burst forth like lightning, catching up to the giant woman and dive tackling her in the same manner as when he attacked the armoured troop that had injured Lucy’s arm. Back then, Ricardo had turned the tables and gotten right on top of his fallen foe, but this time his target didn’t so much as flinch as he grabbed hold of her right leg, no matter how much he pulled to try and make her fall backward. Kenneth’s aunt stopped, still standing perfectly upright, then raised her right foot and lazily shook Ricardo off. Ricardo landed on his back with a thud and a groan that sounded even worse than what Lucy was expecting.

  “Ricardo!” Lucy wasted no time going to his side and helping him sit back up. He panted and grit his teeth as he brought his torso up, ready to get back onto his feet and go at Kenneth’s aunt again—or so Lucy thought. The moment he was about to settle into a seated position, he yelped and squeezed his eyes shut, his face contorted in response to a sudden sharp pain.

  “Slow down, slow down!” Lucy pleaded. “I think you need to lay down for—”

  “I can’t!” Ricardo shouted through grit teeth. “She’s—she’s gonna fry him!”

  Despite his wishes, Lucy slowly lowered his body back down so that he was laying on his back again. Ricardo seemed to have regained some composure as he didn’t fight against it, though he continued to grimace in pain.

  Lucy looked down at him, sweating profusely, wishing she could do something to help ease his suffering, but knowing that Kenneth was about to go through something far more excruciating if she left his aunt unaddressed. She took hold her Ideal again, got up to her feet, and ran up to and around Kenneth’s aunt so that she was in between the giant and the relentless fires.

  Lucy hadn’t thought of a strategy. There were none she could think of. She knew, standing there in front of the aunt who laughed down at her puny sword, that attacking her again and expecting a different result was stupid and meaningless. She couldn’t put all her strength into overwhelming opposition the way Diana could, but in this situation, at the very least, she could use every ounce of her existence to understand the oncoming assault and act as a final barrier, even if it didn’t end up lasting long.

  “Would you like to join him on the coals as well?” Kenneth’s aunt asked, cocking her head as if inviting Lucy to tea. “Step aside and I might spare you yet.”

  Lucy shook her head. “I’m not budging. My friend is seriously hurt because of you.”