Delaney and Jenna sat at the lunch table with the fortune cookie like it was waiting for one of them to to open it, Jenna had taken it from her families take-out last night and it was still in plastic wrap and slid it across the table with a face like she was giving away something large and important.

"Go ahead, open it, it won't bite you," Jenna said.

Delaney picked it up and broke it apart, pulling out the little strip of paper in the same way that she always did, already expecting something generic. Something about patience or prosperity, yet instead it said: You aren't who you think you are, which was weird.

She stared at it for a second, then laughed and flipped it around so Jenna could read it.

"Okay that's kind of creepy," Jenna said.

"It's just a fortune cookie," Delaney said, then without thinking any more about ot she put the paper in her jacket pocket. But she did keep thinking about it and the words remained in her mind like a splinter, small and unseen but painful whenever she turned the wrong way.

The school day passed, which had been busy but also somehow loud and unremarkable, her friends and the rest of her classmates went on their way as the last bell had rung. Delaney had gotten into the rhythm of an afternoon, knowing she had a job that she need to go to.

The Blakes lived next to Delaney, and their three‐year‐old son, Archer, was constantly trying to make every room in the house resemble a tornado had gone through it. Delaney had been babysitting Archer for almost 15 months, so she was very much used to it. In fact, she enjoyed it, there was something refreshing about a child saying what he wanted something, and meaning it. If only more adults were like him.

As needed for dinner, Delaney fed Archer the mac and cheese his mother had prepared, wiped his face twice which was because he wanted to wear it, too, and spent close to an hour and a half playing with his plastic dinosaurs on the floor of the living room with him. Delaney liked how Archer to express himself, and when it was time to clean up his toys, Delaney counted the toys, making a game of it, and Archer enjoyed helping to clean, which was an incredible since he no longer complained about it.

The afternoon was fine. Normal. But the strip of paper in her pocket didn't feel normal, and she couldn't stop thinking about it in the background of everything else.

She was home by six, and her mom wasn't back yet. Peggy Kennedy, her grandmother, was in the living room in the chair she had claimed when she moved in four years ago after Delaney's dad died. She didn't look up when Delaney came in.

"Your mother's late again," Peggy said.

"I know," Delaney said.

"The dishes from this morning are still in the sink."

Delaney put her bag down and went to wash them without saying anything else, because that was easier. The kitchen felt different when her mom wasn't in it. Smaller. Peggy's presence had a way of filling the rooms she wasn't even in.

Juliette Kennedy came home at seven-fifteen still in her work clothes and pulled the leftovers from the fridge and ate them standing over the sink. Delaney watched her from the hallway for a moment before she came in. Her mom's hands looked tired, which was a strange thing to notice about hands, but it was true. They moved slowly.

They talked for a little while. About Delaney's day, about nothing important, the way they did when they were both too worn down to get into anything real. It was still good. Delaney would take it.

Peggy appeared in the doorway at some point and said something about the state of the house and what Delaney's dad would have thought about it. Delaney's mom went quiet in the careful way she always did and then Peggy moved on and the kitchen felt like it could breathe again.

Later Delaney went back to the Blakes to finish out the evening while Mack and Lydia went to dinner. Archer was already getting sleepy. She got him through his bath, into his pajamas, and had him down by eight-thirty. Then she sat in the quiet of their living room and did homework until Lydia texted that they were on their way.

She was back home by ten. The house was dark except for the kitchen light. Her mom had gone to bed. Peggy's light was off.

The washing machine had run over while she was gone. Not badly, just a little water on the laundry room floor and a towel that had been sitting in the drum too long. Delaney wrung it out and took it to the backyard to hang on the fence so it would dry overnight. The air was warm the way that nights are, heavy and close, and the yard was dark.

She was reaching up to hang the towel when she saw it.

A light on the fence post. Small. Blue and warm at the same time, which didn't make sense, but there it was. She went still and stared at it and it hovered, just sitting there, and she couldn't figure out what she was looking at.

Then the phone rang inside the house, her mom's phone cutting through the dark, and whatever it was vanished. Gone. Not hiding, just gone.

Delaney stood there with the damp towel in her hands and the fence post empty in front of her.

She went inside. Locked the back door. The fortune strip was still in her jacket pocket. She'd forgotten about it entirely.

The story hadn't.

The next evening Delaney was in the backyard again. She told herself she was just getting some air, which was technically true. She also stood near the fence post and looked at it more than a person with no reason to look at a fence post should.

The light came back.

It appeared the same way it had the night before, settling on the post like it had always lived there, that same blue warmth that didn't make sense as a combination. Delaney stayed still this time. She didn't reach for it. She just looked.

And then it wasn't just a light.

He was about the size of a hamster, round as a ball, and blue, the kind of blue that a gas flame is, deep and certain. He had ears like a baby rabbit, soft and tipped forward, and small tufts of green growing from him that looked less like fur and more like leaves, like something living. His eyes were enormous and they blinked at her like she was the unusual one in this situation.

Delaney's first thought was that someone's exotic pet had gotten loose.

She reached toward him slowly, the way you'd reach toward an animal you didn't want to startle. He watched her hand come closer and then he cleared his throat.

It was a real throat-clearing. Small and deliberate.

She pulled her hand back.

"I am not a pet," he said. His voice was higher than she expected, formal in a way that felt almost old-fashioned. "My name is Bokopawa."

Delaney stared at him. "Are you a bug?"

He looked offended in a way that was impressive considering how round he was. "I am a jiimarian."

She had never heard that word in her life. She turned it over in her head and it didn't connect to anything. "A what?"

"A jiimarian," he repeated, as if the second time should clear things up. When it didn't, he seemed to recalibrate. "Some would say sprite, though I find that term imprecise."

She had also never really heard the word sprite used to describe something real. She thought about it. "Okay," she said finally, because she didn't have a better response.

Bokopawa straightened himself, which was something to see given his shape. He had the manner of someone about to deliver information they considered very important, precise and unhurried, and he looked at her with those big eyes without blinking.

"I have been assigned to you," he said. "You have something sleeping inside you. It is time for it to wake up."

Delaney looked at him for a long moment. "What does that mean?"

"You got it from your dad," he said simply.

She went still. Not the careful still of trying not to startle an animal. A different kind. The kind that happened when something landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to land.

Her dad had been dead for four years. Cancer, when she was twelve. The kind that moved fast and didn't give anyone enough time to adjust to what was coming. He used to call her his girl, said it the way people say things they mean completely. She still heard it sometimes, in the quiet.

She opened her mouth and didn't know which question to start with. There were too many. She picked one. "What do you mean my—"

The phone rang inside.

Her mom's phone, loud through the kitchen window, cutting right through everything. Delaney's head turned toward the sound without meaning to, just reflex, and when she looked back at the fence post Bokopawa was gone.

Not hiding. She could tell the difference somehow, even though she'd known him for about four minutes. He wasn't behind the post or underneath the fence. He was just gone.

There had been something like a ripple in the air where he'd been, there and then not, like a door she didn't see opening and closing.

Delaney stood in the backyard in the dark and held the question she hadn't finished asking.

After a while she went inside. Her mom was still on the phone, turned toward the kitchen window, her voice low. Delaney went to her room and sat on the edge of her bed.

She didn't know what a jiimarian was. She didn't know how something that small could look at her that seriously. She didn't know what was sleeping inside her or what waking it up meant.

She knew her dad was gone. Had been gone. That part wasn't new.

It just felt new tonight.

She didn't sleep well. She lay in bed too long with the lamp on and at some point remembered the fortune cookie strip in her jacket pocket. She got up and dug it out and read it properly under the light.

You aren't who you think you are.

She put it on her nightstand and stared at the ceiling until she fell asleep.

School the next day was noise she moved through. She sat through her classes and wrote down what she was supposed to write down and answered when she was called on, but the background hum of everything was still going. Bokopawa. Her dad. That word she'd never heard before. The way he'd said it like it was the simplest fact in the world.

Jenna noticed something was off by second period and asked about it at lunch. Delaney said she was tired. Jenna let it go for about ten minutes and then asked again with more specificity, because that was what Jenna did. She didn't let things alone.

Delaney didn't know how to start the sentence. Hey, something the size of a hamster showed up in my backyard and told me I have something sleeping inside me and it came from my dead dad. She couldn't find an entry point that didn't make her sound like she needed to talk to someone professionally.

"I'm just off today," she said.

Jenna looked at her. "Okay," she said, the way people say okay when they mean we're not done with this but I'll wait.

At home, Peggy was on the phone in the living room, her voice doing the thing it did when she was talking about money or arrangements. Delaney caught pieces of it walking past. Something about the house. Something about what was owed. She slowed down without meaning to.

Peggy glanced at her and covered the receiver. "You need something?"

"What arrangements?" Delaney asked.

Peggy smiled. Not warmly. "If you leave now, you get nothing." Then she went back to her call like Delaney had already left the room.

Delaney stood there a second longer than she should have, trying to figure out what that meant and who it was meant for, and then kept walking. It didn't entirely feel like it was about her. It also didn't entirely feel like it wasn't.

Her mom had already left for work. Cold coffee cup in the sink. A note on the counter that said home by eight, love you.

She went to the Blakes' in the afternoon and Archer was in one of his moods where he wanted to run everywhere and touch everything, so she let him. She chased him around the backyard until he ran out of energy and then they came inside and she put on his show and folded laundry while he watched it. He climbed up next to her on the couch after a while and fell asleep against her arm with his show still going.

She thought about her dad while Archer slept. His laugh, which was always a little too loud for whatever room he was in. The way the hospital smelled at the end, that specific antiseptic heaviness. The way he would call her his girl, not like a nickname but like a statement. Certain and steady. She'd never questioned it because there was nothing to question. He was her dad. That was the whole of it.

Whatever Bokopawa had meant, he was wrong. Or he didn't understand. He was very small and shaped like a ball and called himself something she'd never heard of. He didn't know her dad. He couldn't.

She told herself that while she walked home in the dark.

Bokopawa was on the sprinkler head in the Blakes' backyard, and she nearly walked past him. He was still, which made him easy to miss. She stopped.

"You left," she said.

"The phone rang," he said, as if that explained it completely.

She looked at him. He looked back at her with those big eyes, patient and unbothered, like he had nowhere else to be.

"What did you mean," she said, "about my dad."

"I meant what I said."

"My dad is dead."

He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone who didn't know what to say, more like someone choosing their words carefully. "The magic came from your dad," he said. "That is what I know."

"That's all you know?"

"Yes."

She crossed her arms. "That's not very helpful."

"I understand," he said, with great dignity.

She stood there trying to come up with a question he might actually be able to answer. He waited. He seemed prepared to wait for a long time, which was annoying in a way she was starting to suspect was just how he was.

By the time she went inside she was no closer to understanding anything. But she was also, somehow, less alone with it than she'd been the night before. She didn't examine that too closely. She just went to bed and left the fortune strip where it was on the nightstand, face up.

Three days later Delaney was at the Blakes' when it happened.

Archer had gotten into his juice and knocked the cup off the coffee table and it went everywhere, soaking into the rug and his pants and the corner of a pillow, and she grabbed the dish towel off the kitchen counter and was crossing back to the living room when the light changed.

It didn't go out. It didn't flicker. It moved. Like it shifted toward her, or she shifted toward it. She stopped walking and looked at her hands and the light from the overhead fixture was bent around her fingers, curled there softly, like it was warm. Like it recognized her.

She stood very still.

Archer looked up from where he was sitting in the wet spot and clapped. "Pretty," he said.

She breathed out slowly. The light stayed. She moved her fingers and it moved with them, not like she was controlling it, more like they were moving together. Then she became aware of what she was doing and it faded, just went back to being regular light coming from a regular fixture on the ceiling.

She cleaned up the juice. Archer let her change his pants without arguing, which was unusual. She got through the rest of the evening on autopilot, just doing the things she always did, except she kept looking at her hands.

When she got home she sat on her bed and turned her lamp on and off a few times to make sure it was working right. It was. She held her hand in the light and tried to make it do the thing again. For a long time nothing happened.

Then it did. Faint, and only for a second, but the light moved toward her palm like it was leaning.

She pulled her hand back fast.

Bokopawa came through the ripple in her window that night, stepping out of the air like it was a door he'd opened from the other side. He settled on her windowsill and looked at her and she looked at him and said, "Something happened today."

She told him about it. He listened the way he always listened, with complete seriousness, like nothing she said would be wasted on him.

When she finished he said, "That is your light manipulation."

She repeated the words back to him.

"All mages have it," he said. "It is always the first to wake. It has been sleeping inside you since you were born."

She sat with the word mage for a moment. It was a word she knew, from books and movies, and it had never once applied to her before. "What else can I do?" she asked.

"There are two more abilities that belong to you. They will come when they come."

She didn't love that answer. "Can you just tell me what they are?"

"They will come when they come," he said again, calmly and with finality.

"That's the same thing you just said."

"Yes," he agreed.

She called him obstinate. She regretted saying it immediately only because it gave him the opportunity to say he preferred the word methodical, and then they spent five minutes on whether those words meant the same thing, and they did not resolve it.

She practiced after he left. Not for long, and not with any kind of plan. She sat with her lamp on and held her hand near it and let the light do what it seemed to want to do, which was gather toward her. She learned quickly that too much concentration made it stop and too little meant nothing happened. It wanted something in between. Something loose.

It was strange and it was hers and it had apparently been there her whole life without her knowing it.

She turned off the lamp eventually and lay in the dark and thought about her dad. Bokopawa kept saying the magic came from him. She turned that over slowly. Maybe it was something he had too, something he never talked about because he didn't know what to call it. Maybe the light bent for him in quiet moments and he thought he was imagining it. She hoped he knew about it. She hoped it felt like this — strange and warm and oddly like coming home.

She fell asleep still thinking about it.

There was a version of home that existed before Peggy moved in, and Delaney remembered it without being able to say exactly what was different. Just that it was. The rooms were the same rooms, the furniture mostly the same furniture. But the air had changed.

Peggy Kennedy had moved in four years ago, right after Delaney's dad died, which was her son. Delaney knew that. She knew it mattered and she tried to hold onto it when things were hard because grief made people difficult sometimes and she didn't want to be unfair. But Peggy's grief had a quality to it that was less sadness and more agenda, always angling toward something, always measuring the room to see what she could get from it. She had opinions about the house and the money and the way things were run, and she shared them without being asked and without softening them.

It was a Tuesday when her mom came home to find the kitchen reorganized. All the cabinet contents shuffled around, things moved to different shelves without explanation. Her mom stood in the kitchen doorway for a long moment with her work bag still on her shoulder and said nothing.

Peggy came in from the living room. "It made more sense this way," she said. "You'll see."

Delaney heard the argument through the wall later. It was quiet, the way her mom did things when she was too tired to be loud, but Delaney knew the shape of it. Her mom didn't have the energy to fight this and Peggy knew it and used it. That was what got Delaney, more than anything else. Not the arguing, but the way Peggy seemed to count on her mom's exhaustion like it was a resource.

She didn't bring the argument to Bokopawa that night. She brought the weight of it. There was a difference.

He was on the fence post, which had become his spot, and she sat on the back steps and told him about Peggy. Not about the magic or what she was still figuring out about herself. Just about the grandmother who had arrived with her grief and her calculations and never quite left either behind. Bokopawa listened with the same complete attention he gave everything, which was something she'd started to rely on without meaning to.

He didn't have answers. He wasn't built for this particular kind of problem. But he was there, which was its own thing.

After a while she asked him to show her the portal again.

He looked pleased about being asked, though he maintained his composure about it. He hopped off the fence post and there was that ripple in the air, there and gone, and he stepped through it and came out three feet to the left, unbothered and serene.

"Can I do that?" she asked.

"Every mage has two abilities beyond light manipulation," he said. "Yours have not woken yet. They will."

She asked him again about her dad. She couldn't help it. Every time they talked it was sitting at the edge of the conversation waiting to be asked.

He said: "You got the magic from your dad."

"I know," she said. "But what does that mean. Did he know about this? Did he know about you?"

Bokopawa was quiet for a moment. It was the honest quiet, she'd learned, the one that meant he was about to tell her the truth rather than something careful. "I know the magic came from your dad," he said. "I do not know more than that. I don't know what he knew. I don't know what he was like." A pause. "I don't really understand what dads are."

He said it plainly, without apology, because it was just fact. He wasn't human. The concept didn't have the same shape for him.

Delaney looked at him for a second and almost said something and then didn't. She thought about her dad reorganizing the living room when she was nine to make space for a big puzzle table she could leave things out on. About the way he'd taken two buses to get to every school thing she ever had because he didn't drive. About calling her his girl.

Bokopawa didn't know any of that. He knew magic. He knew it was hers and where it came from in the most basic sense, and that was the whole of what he had.

She went to bed that night with more questions than she'd started with. That had become the pattern. She was getting used to it.

Peggy Kennedy died on a Tuesday. Heart attack, which was apparently the way she'd always been likely to go according to a doctor nobody had thought to consult before. The call came in the morning while Delaney was getting ready for school. Her mom answered it in the kitchen and Delaney stood in the hallway listening to the silence between whatever the person on the other end was saying.

She watched her mom hang up and stand there with her hand still on the phone.

"Grandma Peggy?" Delaney asked.

Her mom nodded.

There was a pause where Delaney waited to feel something specific and didn't. She felt something, just not the shape she expected. More like the feeling of a door closing on a room you were never fully invited into.

They cremated her. There was no service. It felt like the right size for what she was to them and neither of them said that out loud, but they both knew it.

What came after was practical. Peggy's room had to be cleared. Her mom took an actual day off work, a real one, not the kind where you're answering emails from the couch with one eye on your phone. She changed into old clothes and came out with a look on her face that meant let's just get through it, and they started on the room together.

There was so much stuff. Bags of it. Things that had meant something only to Peggy and now meant nothing to anyone. Decorative objects that had no clear purpose. Clothing in colors Delaney had never seen her wear. A basket of magazines from several years ago. Her mom held up a ceramic rooster at some point, large, painted in browns and reds and deeply serious-looking, and they both stared at it.

"She never said anything about a rooster," Delaney said.

"She never said anything about a lot of things," her mom said.

They made piles. Donate, trash, trash, donate. Her mom put on music from her phone, something old she liked, and the work went faster once they stopped thinking about it too hard. Somewhere in the middle of it the ceramic rooster ended up in the trash pile and something about that struck them both as funny in a way that was guilty for about two seconds and then just funny.

They saved anything that had belonged to Delaney's dad. There wasn't much, which itself said something about Peggy. A small stack of photographs, some of which Delaney had never seen. A letter in an envelope, sealed, addressed in handwriting she didn't recognize. Her mom set it in the pile without opening it, her face careful and still. She found a box for the photographs and the letter and the few other things, and she taped it closed and wrote Delaney's name on the side in marker.

She handed it to Delaney without explaining it. Delaney held it and didn't ask.

Four trash bags and three donation bags later, they loaded everything into the car for the curb and stood in the empty room for a moment. It looked bigger without Peggy's things in it. Cleaner.

They drove to get ice cream because they had earned it. They sat in the parking lot in the car with the windows down and ate it and talked about nothing in particular and did not talk about Peggy once.

When they got home her mom stood in the hallway and went quiet. Not sad-quiet. Something else. The kind of quiet that happens when a weight has been set down somewhere and your body is still adjusting to not carrying it.

She didn't say anything. She just breathed.

Delaney put the box on her shelf in her room, next to her books. She'd look through it when she was ready. Not tonight. Tonight the house felt different in a way that took some getting used to, and she wanted to sit with that for a little while before she did anything else.

Life came back the way it always did, indifferent to whatever had just happened. School on Monday. Babysitting Tuesday and Thursday. The ordinary machinery of being sixteen.

The situation with Jenna and Fiona had been building for two weeks before it actually broke open. They'd been best friends since middle school and whatever had happened between them, Delaney only had pieces of it, which made the whole thing harder to navigate because everyone expected her to know. They both texted her separately. They both framed it differently. Jenna wanted Delaney to know her side and Fiona wanted the same thing and Delaney was standing in the middle of it trying not to pick a direction.

By Wednesday it had reached the stage where the lunch table had rearranged itself and people were sitting in formations that meant something whether they meant to or not. Delaney sat in the same spot she always sat in and tried to make that a neutral statement.

It wasn't.

"You sat with her yesterday," Fiona said, in the way that wasn't a question.

"I sat in my seat," Delaney said.

Fiona's expression said that wasn't the point. Delaney knew it wasn't the point. She was just tired of the whole thing and didn't have a better answer.

Then there was Bart.

He'd been in her English class all semester and she hadn't paid much attention to him, which in retrospect was an oversight because apparently he had started paying attention to her. He asked to borrow a pen on Thursday, which was a thin premise since there were pens in the classroom, and when she handed it to him he smiled at her like it had worked perfectly.

She thought about it more than she intended to on the walk to babysitting.

What she thought about less was Eve, until Eve made herself hard to ignore. Eve was Bart's ex-girlfriend and had the manner of someone who kept close track of what had previously belonged to her. She was the kind of pretty that came with knowing exactly how pretty it was, and she had opinions she shared through looks rather than words, at least to start. She looked at Delaney in the hallway on Friday the way you look at something that has appeared in the wrong place.

Delaney wasn't sure what she'd done exactly, other than exist near a boy Eve used to date.

She told Bokopawa about it that night while she sat on the back steps. He was on the fence post in his usual spot and he listened with the focused attention he brought to everything.

"The Fiona situation," he said, "is a conflict of loyalty?"

"Kind of. It's more like, they had a fight and now everyone has to pick a side."

"And you don't want to pick a side."

"I don't think it's my fight."

He considered that. "And the boy."

"He's just a boy."

"And the other girl."

Delaney sighed. "She's a problem I didn't ask for."

He asked a few more questions, some of which were a little off in the way his questions sometimes were when he was working with incomplete information about how humans operated. He asked if Delaney could simply explain to Eve that she had no claim on the boy, as if that was a conversation that went smoothly in practice. She told him it didn't really work that way.

"Why not?" he said.

"It just doesn't."

He accepted that in the way he accepted things he didn't fully understand, which was with dignity and without pushing it.

At the Blakes' that afternoon Archer had been feral in the best way, full of energy from being inside all morning, and Delaney took him out back and chased him around the yard until they were both winded. He thought this was the funniest thing that had ever happened. She let herself just run without thinking about lunch tables or girls with sharp looks or boys with convenient pen shortages, and it felt good to just be moving.

He fell asleep on her shoulder on the couch afterward, his weight solid and real, and the house went quiet around them.

The Jenna-Fiona thing would work itself out or it wouldn't. Eve would find something else to focus on or she wouldn't. Bart would turn out to be interesting or he would be a boy with a borrowed pen and nothing else.

None of it felt that important with a sleeping three-year-old on her arm and the evening settling in around the edges of the windows.

She had been moving the box to different places in her room for a week before she actually opened it. First it was on the shelf, then on her desk, then on the floor next to her bed like she was planning to get to it in the night. Finally on a Saturday afternoon when her mom was at work and the house was quiet, she sat on her bed and cut the tape.

There were photographs on top. Some she recognized. Her dad at what looked like a cookout, younger than she'd mostly known him, laughing at something off-camera. Her parents together in a picture she'd never seen before, her mom looking like herself but earlier, and her dad with his arm around her looking at her instead of the camera. She held that one for a while.

There was the letter in its envelope, still sealed. She put it aside. That wasn't hers to open yet, maybe not ever.

There was a watch she recognized, he'd worn it sometimes on weekends. A couple of books, paperbacks with the spines bent back from being read more than once. A folded piece of paper with handwriting so cramped and rushed she couldn't make it out, more like someone thinking on paper than writing a note to be read.

And a photograph she hadn't seen before. Her dad, young in it, younger than the cookout photo, maybe mid-twenties, standing somewhere outside with a look on his face that was uncomplicated happiness. Not smiling at a camera, just actually happy in a moment. She didn't know where it was taken or who had taken it.

She set it on her nightstand next to the fortune strip and looked at them both.

Bokopawa had said the magic came from her dad. She'd been turning that over for weeks now. She didn't think her mom was hiding anything, that wasn't something she could picture. Her mom moved through the world in a way that was completely solid, completely human, had zero feeling of anything under the surface that wasn't exactly what it appeared to be. If she knew about magic she would have said so, because that was how her mom was.

But maybe her dad hadn't known what to call it. Maybe the light bent for him too, in small quiet ways, and he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Maybe he was the kind of person who had that in him and just moved through life not knowing. That thought made her feel close to him, which she hadn't expected.

She closed the box and put it back on the shelf.

School on Monday had new developments. The thing that wasn't supposed to be repeated had been repeated, loudly, in the wrong hallway, and now the Jenna-Fiona situation had taken on a new shape. Delaney found herself in it before she'd agreed to be, standing in the middle of a conversation she hadn't started and being asked what she thought.

She said what she actually thought, which was the true and direct version, and it landed badly with one person and well with another and the geometry of the whole thing shifted. She spent the rest of the day recalculating. It was exhausting in a way that snuck up on her.

Bart held the door for her between third and fourth period. She said thank you. He said sure. He was looking at her like she was something he'd been thinking about, which she noticed and then noticed she'd noticed and that was its own problem.

On the walk to her next class Eve appeared beside her in that way she had, like she'd been there the whole time and Delaney just hadn't seen her.

"Cute jacket," Eve said.

It wasn't a compliment. Delaney knew that. She said thanks anyway and kept walking.

"You know he's not actually interested, right," Eve said. Still that same light tone. "He does this."

Delaney didn't say anything because she didn't have the energy for whatever this was.

"Just so you know," Eve said, and turned off into a different hallway.

Delaney kept walking and filed it under things to think about later, alongside everything else she was currently filing. She had a full system going at this point. Magic, her dad's photographs, Bokopawa's careful incomplete explanations, Jenna and Fiona and the lunch table arrangements, Bart and his borrowed pen and Eve and her non-compliments.

She was sixteen. She was managing.

Bokopawa was different that evening in a way she registered before she could name it. He was on the fence post where he always was, but he sat with a kind of purpose, not settled in the casual way he usually was. His big eyes found hers right away when she came out.

"I need to tell you something," he said.

She sat on the back steps. "Okay."

He was quiet for a moment, which was unusual for him when he already had the words. She waited.

"You should plan on meeting other mages," he said.

She looked at him. "Other mages."

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Enough," he said. "I cannot tell you a specific number. But you are not the only one. There are others, and eventually your paths will cross."

She turned that over. She'd been thinking of all of this as hers specifically. Her light. Her jiimarian. Her strange inheritance from a dad who was gone. The idea that there were others out there doing their own version of this was something she hadn't made room for.

"Do they know about me?" she asked.

"They will. In time."

"Are they like me?"

He considered the question with his usual care. "All mages have light manipulation," he said. "All mages have a jiimarian. But no two jiimarians look the same." He glanced at himself briefly, with what she'd come to recognize as quiet satisfaction about his own existence. "And no two mages are the same. Your abilities are yours. Their abilities are theirs."

She thought about that. "Could they tell me more about where my magic comes from?"

He didn't answer right away. "That would be a good reason to meet them," he said finally, which was the most forward-facing thing he'd ever said to her. It sat in the air between them like something she could pick up and carry.

She asked about her dad again. She always did. She couldn't stop herself.

He was quiet in the specific way she'd learned meant he was being honest rather than careful. "I know the magic is yours," he said. "I know it came from your dad. I don't know your dad. I don't know what he knew or what he was like." A pause. "I don't really understand what dads are. I understand what magic is and where it moves. That is what I know."

He said it without apology because it wasn't something he was ashamed of. It was just true. He wasn't human and the word dad didn't carry anything for him. He wasn't holding back from her. He just genuinely didn't have more than what he'd given her, and she had finally stopped waiting for him to produce something he didn't have.

She looked at him sitting there on the fence post, blue and round and formal and strange and entirely himself, and thought that for someone she'd known for a handful of weeks he'd become one of the more reliable things in her life.

"He was the best one," she said. Her dad. Not as a defense or an explanation, just as a fact she wanted to say out loud.

Bokopawa looked at her steadily. "Then you were lucky," he said.

She didn't argue with that. She sat with it instead, because it was true. She had been lucky. Four years of missing him hadn't changed that, and whatever she was going to find out about where she came from and what it meant hadn't changed it either. He had been her dad completely and without condition, and she had known that in her bones even if she hadn't had words for it.

The yard was quiet around them. Somewhere down the street a dog was barking at something. The sky was doing its Florida thing, still holding heat at this hour.

"Other mages," she said again, more to herself.

"Yes," Bokopawa said.

"Do they have any idea what they're doing?" she asked.

He paused. "Some more than others."

She laughed a little. He looked like he hadn't entirely meant that to be funny, which made it funnier.

She went inside eventually and stood in the kitchen for a minute looking at nothing. Her mom's shoes were by the door. The light over the stove was on, the one her mom left on because she didn't like coming home to a fully dark house.

Other mages. Her dad's magic, sleeping in her her whole life. A blue creature on a fence post who didn't know what fathers were.

She was just going to have to keep going and find out.Bokopawa was different that evening in a way she registered before she could name it. He was on the fence post where he always was, but he sat with a kind of purpose, not settled in the casual way he usually was. His big eyes found hers right away when she came out.

"I need to tell you something," he said.

She sat on the back steps. "Okay."

He was quiet for a moment, which was unusual for him when he already had the words. She waited.

"You should plan on meeting other mages," he said.

She looked at him. "Other mages."

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Enough," he said. "I cannot tell you a specific number. But you are not the only one. There are others, and eventually your paths will cross."

She turned that over. She'd been thinking of all of this as hers specifically. Her light. Her jiimarian. Her strange inheritance from a dad who was gone. The idea that there were others out there doing their own version of this was something she hadn't made room for.

"Do they know about me?" she asked.

"They will. In time."

"Are they like me?"

He considered the question with his usual care. "All mages have light manipulation," he said. "All mages have a jiimarian. But no two jiimarians look the same." He glanced at himself briefly, with what she'd come to recognize as quiet satisfaction about his own existence. "And no two mages are the same. Your abilities are yours. Their abilities are theirs."

She thought about that. "Could they tell me more about where my magic comes from?"

He didn't answer right away. "That would be a good reason to meet them," he said finally, which was the most forward-facing thing he'd ever said to her. It sat in the air between them like something she could pick up and carry.

She asked about her dad again. She always did. She couldn't stop herself.

He was quiet in the specific way she'd learned meant he was being honest rather than careful. "I know the magic is yours," he said. "I know it came from your dad. I don't know your dad. I don't know what he knew or what he was like." A pause. "I don't really understand what dads are. I understand what magic is and where it moves. That is what I know."

He said it without apology because it wasn't something he was ashamed of. It was just true. He wasn't human and the word dad didn't carry anything for him. He wasn't holding back from her. He just genuinely didn't have more than what he'd given her, and she had finally stopped waiting for him to produce something he didn't have.

She looked at him sitting there on the fence post, blue and round and formal and strange and entirely himself, and thought that for someone she'd known for a handful of weeks he'd become one of the more reliable things in her life.

"He was the best one," she said. Her dad. Not as a defense or an explanation, just as a fact she wanted to say out loud.

Bokopawa looked at her steadily. "Then you were lucky," he said.

She didn't argue with that. She sat with it instead, because it was true. She had been lucky. Four years of missing him hadn't changed that, and whatever she was going to find out about where she came from and what it meant hadn't changed it either. He had been her dad completely and without condition, and she had known that in her bones even if she hadn't had words for it.

The yard was quiet around them. Somewhere down the street a dog was barking at something. The sky was doing its Florida thing, still holding heat at this hour.

"Other mages," she said again, more to herself.

"Yes," Bokopawa said.

"Do they have any idea what they're doing?" she asked.

He paused. "Some more than others."

She laughed a little. He looked like he hadn't entirely meant that to be funny, which made it funnier.

She went inside eventually and stood in the kitchen for a minute looking at nothing. Her mom's shoes were by the door. The light over the stove was on, the one her mom left on because she didn't like coming home to a fully dark house.

Other mages. Her dad's magic, sleeping in her her whole life. A blue creature on a fence post who didn't know what fathers were.

She was just going to have to keep going and find out.

Everything was humming, just under the surface, in a way that had started to feel normal.

The Jenna-Fiona thing had cooled to a simmer. Nobody had fully resolved it but the temperature had come down, and Delaney had landed somewhere in the social geometry that was slightly different from where she'd started. Not worse. Different. She'd said the honest thing in that hallway and it had cost her something small and gained her something else, and she was still figuring out what both of those things were.

Bart had made her actually laugh in English class on Thursday, something about the way he annotated the reading that was accidentally funnier than it was supposed to be. She hadn't meant to react but she did. He looked satisfied about it in a way that was annoying and entirely unpleasant. Who knew someone could be so weird for reasons she could explain to herself, but she wished he would leave her alone.

Eve had not backed off. That was just going to be a thing for a while, Delaney was accepting that. She'd done nothing wrong and it didn't matter and Eve was going to keep looking at her like she'd taken something. Fine. Delaney had bigger things going on.

Archer had started calling her Mara-mara. Nobody knew why. Not Archer, who couldn't explain it when she asked, not his parents when they tried to find the logic. He just did it and seemed very certain about it. She didn't mind.

Her mom had been lighter since Peggy. It wasn't something she talked about, just something that showed in small ways. She sat down to eat now instead of standing over the sink. She came home and took her shoes off in the hallway and just paused there for a second before she came into the rest of the house, like she was setting something down before she came in. The kitchen stayed the way she left it. The evenings were quieter in a way that was actually quiet instead of the held-breath kind of quiet that had a person in it.

Delaney watched her mom from doorways the way she always had and what she saw now was different. Not the exhausted woman moving through a house that had something pressing in it. Just her mom, carrying things, the way people did. She didn't know all of what those things were. She was starting to understand that she didn't know the shape of everything her mom held, and that was true in more than one direction.

She practiced her light manipulation in her room at night with the door closed. It was getting easier, more like something she did than something that happened to her. She could pull the light from the lamp across the room slowly or fast, she could make it gather in her palm and hold it there, she could let it go all at once. She had to be careful about the bulb because if she pushed too much the light flickered in a way that would be hard to explain to anyone who came in.

She was learning what it wanted. Loose attention, not tight. Like holding water, where gripping harder was the wrong instinct.

Bokopawa came through his portal some evenings and sat on her windowsill and watched her practice without saying much. She'd learned his expressions well enough now to read the quiet approval in the way he held himself, the slight settling that meant she was doing something right. He didn't say it directly. She could tell anyway.

She thought about other mages. She didn't know what that would look like, when it happened, just that it would. Bokopawa had said it with the kind of certainty he didn't apply to things he wasn't sure about. But Bokopawa was full of certainty and self-assurance that she was not, and wished that she was.

She thought about the box on her shelf with her dad's things in it. The photograph of him young and uncomplicated-happy somewhere she didn't recognize. She'd take that out again soon. She wasn't ready for the letter yet. She'd know when she was.

She thought about the fortune strip on her nightstand, which she'd moved twice and put back both times. You aren't who you think you are. She used to read it like a warning, like something meant to unsettle her. Now it felt more like a door that was already open.

She didn't know who was on the other side. But she had light in her hands and a blue jiimarian on her windowsill and she was starting to think she'd been getting ready for this longer than she knew.

Bokopawa shifted on the sill. The lamp glowed steady.

She was ready to find out.

Jenna snapped at her on Tuesday over nothing. They were at Delaney's locker and Delaney asked if she wanted to split a snack from the vending machine, the same dumb question she asked most days, and Jenna said "I don't have money for that, obviously" in a tone that didn't match the question at all. Then she caught herself almost immediately. "Sorry. Bad morning."

"It's fine," Delaney said, because it mostly was, except it sat there a little wrong for the rest of the day.

Allen found her between classes and asked if she'd noticed it too. The shortness. The way Jenna had been glued to her phone for weeks now, flipping it face-down the second anyone got close enough to glance at the screen. "She's not even like this with everyone," Allen said. "It's worse around Fiona."

"They had that fight," Delaney said.

"This isn't that fight anymore," Allen said. "This is something else stacked on top of it."

Delaney didn't have a good response to that, so she just said she'd talk to Jenna, and meant it, and then didn't get around to it because the day kept moving and there wasn't a clean moment to bring it up.

Bart caught her by her locker at the end of the day, easy and friendly the way he always was. "Walk with me to fourth?"

"I've got to find Jenna," she said. It wasn't a lie. It was also the fastest way out of the conversation.

He didn't seem to register the brush-off as a brush-off. He just fell into step a few feet behind her anyway, talking about something from class, and she let him talk because telling him to stop felt like more effort than it was worth.

Babysitting that evening was a relief in the way it always was. Archer had a cold-adjacent burst of energy and decided, for reasons known only to him, that one of his mom's shoes belonged in the freezer. Delaney didn't notice until Lydia texted asking if anyone had seen her left sneaker, and it took a genuinely embarrassing twenty minutes of searching before Delaney opened the freezer for a popsicle and found it sitting next to the frozen peas like it had always lived there.

"Why," she asked Archer, holding up the shoe.

"Cold feet," he said, like this explained everything, and went back to his blocks.

She laughed about it the whole walk home, which felt good after the day she'd had.

Bokopawa was waiting on the fence post when she got back, and he mentioned, almost like an afterthought tucked between other things, that it might be time soon for her to meet others like her. He didn't say more than that. She didn't push. Her mind was still half on Jenna's face that morning, sharp in a way she hadn't seen on her before, and she let the comment about other mages drift past without grabbing onto it the way she normally would have.

She went to bed thinking about the freezer shoe instead. It was easier.

Eve had moved past looks. By Wednesday there was a rumor circulating that Delaney had said something ugly about one of the girls in Eve's group, which Delaney hadn't, and which she only found out about because Jenna, distracted as she'd been lately, still texted to ask if it was true.

It wasn't. Delaney said so. The group chat she'd been in with some of those same girls went quiet on her after that, not a dramatic exit, just slow and total, the kind of freeze-out that's worse for being so polite about it.

Eve was suddenly always near Bart in the hallway whenever Delaney was anywhere close, laughing loudly at things, touching his arm, performing something that was supposed to look like easy familiarity and mostly looked like effort. Delaney didn't care about Bart enough to feel anything sharp about it. What she felt was tired.

It wasn't really about Bart, she was starting to think. Eve had been the one who got left, and some part of her had decided that getting him back would undo that, like it was a math problem instead of a person. She wasn't cruel exactly. She was caught in something and couldn't see the shape of it from where she stood, going after the wrong kind of win.

Bart, for his part, kept being exactly present enough to be annoying and not quite present enough to call out. He was waiting by her locker more often than coincidence should allow. He knew her class schedule with a precision she hadn't given him. He was never anything but pleasant about it, smiling like he'd done her a favor by showing up, and when Eve made a scene about it once in the hallway he laughed it off in a way that somehow made it sound like Delaney should be flattered by the whole mess.

She wasn't flattered. She didn't think about him as anything close to a possibility, romantic or otherwise. He registered to her like static, a low hum of unwanted attention she hadn't found a polite way to switch off yet.

Jenna canceled on lunch with the group twice that week. The first time she said she had to make up a quiz. The second time she didn't give a reason at all, just didn't show, and when Fiona texted asking if everything was okay, Jenna's response came back fast and clipped in a way that didn't match the question.

"That was weird," Fiona said at the lunch table, more confused than hurt. "I wasn't even being mean about it."

"She's stressed," Delaney said, because that was the only explanation she had, even though it didn't feel like the whole one.

Allen caught her eye across the table. Neither of them said anything else about it. But the feeling had been building for two weeks now, quiet and persistent, that something about Jenna had shifted into a register none of them had a name for yet.

Archer had a cold, a small one, just enough to make him want to be held instead of chased around the yard. Delaney spent most of the evening on the couch with him curled against her side, his breathing thick and a little wheezy, watching the same cartoon episode twice because he asked for it again before he'd even fully woken up from dozing through the first viewing.

It was a soft evening. Easy in a way the last couple weeks hadn't been. She liked these moments more than she usually admitted, the stillness of a kid asleep against her, the quiet hum of a TV nobody was really watching anymore.

Her phone buzzed around eight. Jenna.

can we talk tomorrow. just us.

It didn't look like a Jenna text. No exclamation points, no the usual loose punctuation, nothing about it that sounded like her at all. Delaney sat with it for a second before she answered.

of course. everything okay?

The message sat there delivered and unread for the rest of the night. Delaney checked twice more before she left the Blakes', and then again once she was home, and Jenna never came back to it.

She told herself it was nothing. People went quiet sometimes. Jenna had been off for weeks and maybe tomorrow was going to be the conversation where she finally said what was actually going on, and that was a good thing, even if the lead-up to it felt strange.

Bokopawa was on the fence post when she got home, and he was different that night — more direct than his usual roundabout pacing. "You will meet others soon," he said. "It is being arranged."

"Soon like when?" she asked.

"Soon," he said, which from him was about as specific as it got.

She should have been more curious. Normally she would have pushed for more, sat out here peppering him with questions until he ran out of patient non-answers. But her stomach was still sitting wrong from the text, the flatness of it, the can we talk tomorrow that felt less like an invitation and more like a warning she didn't have the vocabulary for yet.

"Other mages," she said instead, mostly to herself, turning the idea over because it was easier than turning over the other one.

"Yes," Bokopawa said.

She went inside not long after. She meant to finish the conversation with Jenna before bed, type out something better than of course, everything okay, something that actually asked the real question. She fell asleep before she got to it, phone still in her hand, the message still sitting there unanswered on Jenna's side.

It felt ordinary. That was the worst part, looking back. It felt like an ordinary night where nothing had happened yet.

It was in the way people were standing in clusters instead of moving, the way conversations stopped when she walked past instead of continuing, the way a teacher she didn't have was standing outside a classroom with her arms crossed looking at nothing. Delaney got two-thirds of the way to her locker before she actually heard the words, fragmented, passed between two girls she barely knew.

Fiona didn't come in today.

Something happened.

She's dead.

Delaney stopped walking. The hallway kept moving around her, blurred at the edges, and she had the strange sensation of being the only still thing in a room full of motion.

She doesn't remember getting to her first class. She remembers sitting down and the teacher not actually teaching, just standing at the front of the room saying something about counselors being available, about being gentle with each other today, words that didn't attach to anything real yet because the whole thing still felt like a rumor that hadn't been confirmed.

Then a counselor came to the door and said Fiona's name out loud, plainly, like a fact instead of a rumor, and the room went a particular kind of silent.

Delaney pulled out her phone under the desk. She didn't know what she was hoping to find. A text from Fiona that would make this not true. A text from Jenna that would explain something. There was nothing from either of them, just her own unanswered message from the night before, still sitting there, of course, everything okay?, looking suddenly enormous on the screen.

She tried calling Jenna in the hallway between classes. It went straight to voicemail without ringing, which felt wrong in a way she couldn't name yet.

The school moved through the day in a kind of fog. Kids cried in the bathroom, some of whom hadn't even really known Fiona, performing a grief that didn't have anywhere honest to go yet because nobody had any real information, just the static of something terrible having happened. Teachers gave up on lesson plans. The office filled with parents picking kids up early who didn't need picking up, just wanted their hands on their children.

Allen found Delaney at her locker at the end of the day and just stood there for a second without saying anything, which was somehow exactly the right thing to do.

"Have you talked to Jenna?" he asked finally.

"No. Have you?"

He shook his head.

Delaney looked down at her phone again, at the message sitting there unanswered, can we talk tomorrow, just us, and felt something cold settle into her chest that she didn't have words for. Not yet. She didn't know anything yet, not really, not the actual shape of what had happened.

She just knew that yesterday and today weren't the same world, and she didn't know how to get back to the one she'd had this morning.

It came out in pieces over the next several days, each one worse than the last, the way bad news tends to arrive when nobody official is in a hurry to say the whole thing at once.

First it was just that Fiona was dead, which was already too much to hold. Then it was that it wasn't an accident. Then, lower, passed between people who swore they'd heard it from someone reliable, that Jenna had been there. That Jenna had done it.

Delaney didn't believe it at first, not really, not in the part of her that still pictured Jenna handing her half a fortune cookie at a lunch table months ago like it was nothing, like the strip of paper inside it was the strangest thing that was going to happen that day. She kept waiting for someone to walk it back. Nobody did.

A detective came to the school on the third day and pulled a handful of students into a small office one at a time, including Delaney. The room had a table and two chairs and a box of tissues that looked like it had been placed there specifically for moments like this one.

The questions were simple. How long had she known Jenna. How long had she known Fiona. Had there been tension between them. Had Jenna said anything unusual recently, anything that worried her.

Delaney answered all of it plainly. She didn't think to do anything else. Lying wasn't even a consideration, she didn't have the energy to construct anything other than what had actually happened, so she told the detective about the fight weeks ago, about Jenna being short and distracted, about the text the night before that hadn't sounded like her at all.

The detective wrote something down without changing her expression.

Delaney went home that day and sat with all of it the way you sit with something too big to actually hold, turning it over in pieces because the whole thing wouldn't fit in her hands at once. The lunch table. The fight that never resolved. The flat, strange text. Can we talk tomorrow, just us. She kept circling back to that message like it should have told her something, should have been a warning she could have acted on, even though she knew, somewhere underneath the guilt, that there was no way she could have known. Nobody had known. That didn't make the not-knowing feel any less like a failure.

She didn't hear from Jenna at all. Not a call, not a text, nothing. The silence on that end was its own particular kind of awful, worse, in some ways, than the facts coming out, because at least the facts were something to hold onto. The silence was just absence, stretching out with no shape to it.

Bokopawa found her that night sitting on the back steps doing nothing, just sitting, staring at the yard without really seeing it. He didn't ask her to explain. He settled beside her on the step, his small warm weight a strange comfort, and stayed there without saying anything for a long time.

It didn't fix anything. It wasn't supposed to. It just helped, the smallest amount, to not be entirely alone with it.

It happened in the middle of the school day, which somehow made it worse, not at night, not somewhere private, but right there in the hallway between third and fourth period with everyone able to see.

Delaney was in her classroom when it happened, looking out through the small window in the door because something about the noise outside had pulled everyone's attention that direction. Police in the hallway. Not just one officer, several, moving with the kind of purpose that meant this wasn't a routine visit.

Jenna came out of a classroom three doors down flanked by two of them. She didn't look the way Delaney expected, not crying, not fighting it, just blank in a way that was somehow more unsettling than either of those would have been. She didn't look around for anyone. She just walked, between the two officers, toward the front doors, and the entire hallway went silent in that particular way crowds go silent when they're witnessing something they don't have a script for.

Delaney watched from the window until she couldn't see her anymore.

She didn't feel the things she thought she might feel. Not relief that it was confirmed, not satisfaction that something was finally happening, not even simple grief, not in that moment. What she felt was hollow. Like she had to go back and rebuild something in her head, not just what had happened to Fiona, but everything she thought she'd known about a person she'd called her best friend since middle school. None of it lined up with what she'd just watched walk out the front doors.

Allen found her in the parking lot afterward. Neither of them said much. They just stood there together not going anywhere, the kind of standing that doesn't need words attached to it, two people who'd lost the same friend twice now, once to whatever this turned out to be, and once to whatever had been sitting inside Jenna all along that none of them had seen.

"I keep thinking I should've noticed something," Allen said eventually.

"Me too," Delaney said.

"I don't think there's anything we could've noticed."

She didn't know if that was true. She didn't know if it mattered whether it was true. It was just a thing people said to each other when there wasn't anything better to say, and right now it was enough.

They stayed in the parking lot until the buses had mostly cleared out, not talking about much of anything, just present with each other in the wreckage of a friend group that had gone from four down to two within the space of a single bad week. It wasn't romantic, whatever was settling between them in that parking lot. It was something steadier than that, the particular bond of people who'd survived the same collapse and didn't need to explain themselves to each other to be understood.

Delaney walked home alone after Allen's mom picked him up, and the walk felt longer than it should have, the neighborhood looking the same as it always did and somehow completely unfamiliar at the same time.

Delaney went to Fiona's house on a Saturday because someone needed to help with the things that had to be done, and she'd been one of Fiona's closest friends even through the rough patch before everything happened. She called Fiona's mom, Carly, and asked if she could come by, and Carly's voice on the phone sounded like someone speaking from very far underwater.

Kevin answered the door when she got there. He looked like he hadn't slept properly in days, which he probably hadn't. He hugged her without saying much, and she let him, because it seemed like the thing he needed more than any words would have been.

They sat at the kitchen table with a laptop and a shoebox full of printed photos, and Delaney offered to put together a slideshow for the service. Carly's face did something complicated when she said it, grateful, and grateful in a way that hurt to watch.

They went through pictures for hours. Fiona as a toddler in a kiddie pool. Fiona missing a tooth in a school photo, grinning anyway like the gap was the best part of her face. Fiona at thirteen, awkward and unfinished-looking the way everyone is at thirteen, standing next to Delaney at some birthday party Delaney barely remembered until she saw the picture and the whole afternoon came back to her all at once.

Carly cried at one photo, Fiona at maybe six, asleep on Kevin's chest, and then laughed two photos later at one of Fiona covered head to toe in marker she'd drawn on herself as a toddler. Grief did that, jumped without warning between one thing and the next, and nobody in the room tried to make it behave any differently.

Delaney took the photos home and stayed up most of the night putting the slideshow together, picking music, sequencing the pictures so they moved roughly through Fiona's whole short life, trying to get it right even though there was no right, not really, just less wrong and more wrong.

Her mom sat with her while she worked. She didn't say much. She made tea neither of them really drank and sat on the other end of the couch with her own laptop open, not working on anything in particular, just there, the same kind of present Bokopawa had been on the back steps. It helped more than Delaney expected it to.

The funeral was a few days later. Delaney went with her mom. She wore the only black dress she owned and sat near the back because she didn't think she had the right to sit closer, even though Carly found her afterward and told her the slideshow was perfect, that it was exactly Fiona, that she didn't know how to thank her enough.

Delaney didn't have words for any of it. The room was full of people and somehow still felt too small for everything it was holding, a girl who should have had decades left, a family trying to find a way to keep standing, and a sixteen-year-old in the back row who kept thinking about a text message she never finished answering.

She held her mom's hand the whole way home and didn't talk much either. There wasn't anything left to say that the day hadn't already said for both of them.

A few weeks passed before anything felt normal again, and even then normal was a loose word for it, more like the rawest edge of everything had worn down just enough to function. School went back to its regular rhythm in the surface way schools do. Delaney kept babysitting. She kept doing homework. Underneath all of it the year sat heavier than it used to.

Bokopawa told her one evening, with none of his usual roundabout pacing, that it was time. Tonight.

He opened the portal in the backyard himself, the air rippling open in a way she'd seen him do a dozen times but had never gone through. He told her to step forward and she did, and the sensation wasn't like walking at all, more like being folded somewhere else in a single motion, there and then immediately somewhere different, her stomach lagging a half second behind the rest of her.

She came out into an unfamiliar backyard. Same kind of ordinary suburban yard as her own, just not hers, and there were four other teenagers already standing there along with four jiimarians that looked nothing like Bokopawa or each other.

A guy stepped forward first, easy and direct in a way that put her slightly at ease. "Soek," he said. "Soek Namgung." Beside him hovered something small, yellow, somewhere between a hamster and a sparrow, fluttering close to his shoulder. "This is Ausadap."

The others introduced themselves in a loose order she did her best to keep straight. Nkosi Otieno, warm and easy, his jiimarian a small pink creature that looked like a cat crossed with a dragon, hovering near his feet. Mateo Cuautli Gual, quieter, a red jiimarian with wings like a parrot's perched on his shoulder. And Mateo's younger sister, Catalina, who said her name and not much else, watching Delaney with a careful, guarded distance that wasn't unkind exactly but wasn't open either.

The last one, Chiara Lombardi, didn't step forward at all. She stood a little apart with her arms crossed, her jiimarian a small black dragonfly-lizard hovering near her, and she looked at Delaney with something complicated that didn't bother disguising itself as indifference. Delaney didn't know what she'd done to earn that look. She suspected, from the way Chiara's eyes kept flicking to Soek, that it had nothing to do with her specifically.

It was a lot of names and faces at once, and Delaney did her best to hold onto all of it. Soek was the one who actually talked to her like a person instead of a complication that had wandered into their group, asking normal things, how long had she had her jiimarian, what her abilities were so far, whether the light manipulation had been hard to get a handle on. She told him it had. He nodded like that tracked.

The group didn't stay long that first night, just long enough for introductions, a little awkward small talk, the kind of evening that exists mostly to establish that everyone now knows everyone else exists. As they were breaking apart, Soek caught her before she stepped back through Bokopawa's portal.

"You're behind," he said, not unkindly. "On the light stuff. I can tell."

"Probably," she admitted.

"I could help, if you want. I've been doing this a while."

She said yes before she'd fully thought about it, mostly because something about him made the offer feel uncomplicated, and stepped back through the portal into her own backyard with more names in her head than she knew what to do with yet.A few weeks passed before anything felt normal again, and even then normal was a loose word for it, more like the rawest edge of everything had worn down just enough to function. School went back to its regular rhythm in the surface way schools do. Delaney kept babysitting. She kept doing homework. Underneath all of it the year sat heavier than it used to.

Bokopawa told her one evening, with none of his usual roundabout pacing, that it was time. Tonight.

He opened the portal in the backyard himself, the air rippling open in a way she'd seen him do a dozen times but had never gone through. He told her to step forward and she did, and the sensation wasn't like walking at all, more like being folded somewhere else in a single motion, there and then immediately somewhere different, her stomach lagging a half second behind the rest of her.

She came out into an unfamiliar backyard. Same kind of ordinary suburban yard as her own, just not hers, and there were four other teenagers already standing there along with four jiimarians that looked nothing like Bokopawa or each other.

A guy stepped forward first, easy and direct in a way that put her slightly at ease. "Soek," he said. "Soek Namgung." Beside him hovered something small, yellow, somewhere between a hamster and a sparrow, fluttering close to his shoulder. "This is Ausadap."

The others introduced themselves in a loose order she did her best to keep straight. Nkosi Otieno, warm and easy, his jiimarian a small pink creature that looked like a cat crossed with a dragon, hovering near his feet. Mateo Cuautli Gual, quieter, a red jiimarian with wings like a parrot's perched on his shoulder. And Mateo's younger sister, Catalina, who said her name and not much else, watching Delaney with a careful, guarded distance that wasn't unkind exactly but wasn't open either.

The last one, Chiara Lombardi, didn't step forward at all. She stood a little apart with her arms crossed, her jiimarian a small black dragonfly-lizard hovering near her, and she looked at Delaney with something complicated that didn't bother disguising itself as indifference. Delaney didn't know what she'd done to earn that look. She suspected, from the way Chiara's eyes kept flicking to Soek, that it had nothing to do with her specifically.

It was a lot of names and faces at once, and Delaney did her best to hold onto all of it. Soek was the one who actually talked to her like a person instead of a complication that had wandered into their group, asking normal things, how long had she had her jiimarian, what her abilities were so far, whether the light manipulation had been hard to get a handle on. She told him it had. He nodded like that tracked.

The group didn't stay long that first night, just long enough for introductions, a little awkward small talk, the kind of evening that exists mostly to establish that everyone now knows everyone else exists. As they were breaking apart, Soek caught her before she stepped back through Bokopawa's portal.

"You're behind," he said, not unkindly. "On the light stuff. I can tell."

"Probably," she admitted.

"I could help, if you want. I've been doing this a while."

She said yes before she'd fully thought about it, mostly because something about him made the offer feel uncomplicated, and stepped back through the portal into her own backyard with more names in her head than she knew what to do with yet.

The lessons started that week. Soek came through a portal Ausadap opened on Tuesday evenings, and they worked in Delaney's backyard under the floodlight Mack had installed for the Blakes next door, which leaked just enough into her yard to be useful.

He was patient in a way that didn't feel performative. He corrected her without making it feel like a correction, just small adjustments, loosen your hand, don't grip it like that, let it want to move instead of making it move, and within a few sessions she could feel the difference in how the light responded to her. Less like wrestling something. More like asking.

Chiara showed up to a couple of the sessions uninvited, standing at the edge of the yard with her arms crossed, watching with an expression that said exactly how she felt about Soek spending his evenings teaching someone else. She never said anything outright. She didn't have to. Catalina came with her sometimes too, hanging back near the fence, polite enough when Delaney said hello but never warming past that, like she was holding a line on Chiara's behalf that Chiara hadn't even asked her to hold.

Delaney didn't bring any of it up. It wasn't her business to fix, and she had enough going on without adding someone else's jealousy to the list.

It was during one of the sessions, a few weeks in, that Soek mentioned something almost in passing while he was adjusting her stance. "Mage parents are the ones who unlock a kid's mana," he said. "That's how it usually goes. Magic recognizes magic early, most of us had it unlocked before we could really remember it happening."

"What do you mean unlocked," she said.

"Like, your magic doesn't usually just wake up on its own at sixteen. A parent who's a mage does it for you, when you're a baby, sometimes a toddler. If your dad was a mage, you'd have known a long time before now."

Delaney went still in a way she hoped wasn't obvious. "What if it didn't get unlocked though. As a baby."

"Then you're a late bloomer," he said, like it was simple. "Happens sometimes. Usually means something kept the parent from doing it early enough, they passed away too soon, weren't around, didn't know in time. It's rare, but it happens."

She did the math without meaning to, the numbers lining up in her head whether she wanted them to or not. Her dad had died when she was twelve. If he'd been a mage, if he'd been the one this magic came from in any way that mattered to how it worked, he would have had twelve years to unlock it in her. Twelve years where it could have happened early, the way Soek was describing, the way it apparently happened for everyone else in that backyard the night she met them.

It hadn't happened. It took someone else, something else, showing up four years after he was already gone.

She didn't say any of this out loud. She let Soek keep talking, adjusted her hand the way he asked, finished the lesson like everything was fine.

She walked him to the portal afterward and said goodnight like nothing had shifted, and then she went inside and sat at the kitchen table long after the house had gone quiet, running the same numbers over and over, hoping they'd come out different if she just did the math one more time.

They never did.

She thought about the box on her shelf. The letter still sealed inside it. Bokopawa had never once lied to her, she realized, sitting there in the dark kitchen. He'd told her the truth from the very first night, plain and literal, the way he told her everything.

You got it from your dad.

He'd just never said which one.

She waited at the table for her mom's car in the driveway, the porch light the only thing on in the whole house, and got ready to ask the question she'd been circling for weeks without letting herself land on it.

Her mom came in a little after eleven, keys jingling, the kind of tired in her shoulders that came from a double shift rather than anything emotional yet. She stopped in the kitchen doorway when she saw Delaney sitting there in the dark with just the porch light on.

"You're up late," she said.

"I need to ask you something."

Her mom set her bag down slowly, reading something in Delaney's face before a single word had actually landed. She pulled out the chair across the table and sat.

"Is dad my biological father?"

The question sat in the kitchen for a long moment. Her mom didn't flinch away from it and didn't rush to answer it either. She just looked at Delaney for a while, like she was deciding something, and then she said, quietly, "No."

Delaney had already known. Hearing it out loud still landed like something physical.

Her mom told her the rest slowly, in pieces, the way someone tells a story they've kept folded up small for a very long time and aren't sure how to unfold without it tearing. She'd been raped, before Delaney was born, by a stranger, someone she'd never seen before that night and never saw again afterward. No name. No face that stayed with her past those few terrible minutes. Just an absence where an answer should have been, which had made the whole thing harder to carry in its own way, because there was no one to direct any of the anger toward. Just the fact of it, sitting there with nowhere to go.

Her mom's voice cracked more than once getting through it, but she didn't stop, like she'd been waiting sixteen years to finally put all of this into actual words and wasn't going to lose her nerve now that she'd started.

"Your dad knew," she said. "Before we got married. I told him everything, because I couldn't marry someone and start a whole life with them carrying a secret like that. I thought he'd leave." She looked down at her hands on the table. "He didn't. He said it didn't matter to him, what had happened to me, or whose blood you'd end up with. He said you'd be his daughter the second you were born and nothing about how that happened could change that."

Delaney didn't say anything. She didn't know what there was to say yet.

"He never once treated you like anything but his," her mom said. "Not for a single day. That's the part I need you to understand most." Her voice caught again. "Losing him was already the worst thing. But some of what made it bearable, before, was knowing he was here, that he'd built this whole wall around the two of us. And then he wasn't here anymore, and I had to figure out how to be that wall by myself."

Delaney sat with all of it, the kitchen quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator, and didn't know how to hold the size of what she'd just been handed.

She went to her room eventually and sat in the dark for a long time, lamp off, the light inside her too tangled up in everything else to call up right now even if she'd wanted to.

Soek showed up a while later, not through a portal, just walking up the actual street, which she hadn't known he could do, hadn't known he even knew where she lived until he was standing there at her back door. He didn't ask her to explain anything. He just sat down on the steps next to her, quiet, present, the way Bokopawa always managed to be, and asked only the smallest, gentlest questions, letting her find her own way to the rest of it in her own time.

It was the first time since everything started, Fiona, Jenna, her dad, the dad she'd never known existed, that she let herself actually cry about all of it at once.

Soek didn't try to fix any of it. He just stayed.