She’d never wanted to keep me in a cage. A woman without family, alone, without education, didn’t have many choices.

She’d just needed a little help. She’d never gotten it from anyone.

And Rowena, that stone-cold bitch, never once offered aid. I’d known that night I would one day kill the powerful headmistress at the abbey. But I still had questions, big ones, and I’d begun to suspect Rowena was the only one with those answers.

I knew what had broken my mother’s heart but I still didn’t know how we ended up where we ended up that fateful night I gained my freedom.

Outraged, horrified, Seamus had thrown my mom out of his car in the dark, twenty-two miles from home. She’d walked through the pouring rain, crying the entire way. He knew that because he’d followed her, arguing with himself, debating whether he should pick her back up and take her straight to the nearest psychiatric facility.

The irony: if he had, I’d have been found in my cage by social workers and freed from it. Placed in a center, or foster care, I would have vanished in no time, grown up, and gotten her out. Taken her home and taken care of her. She wouldn’t have died.

Seamus had driven away.

Then he’d gone one step further the next day and had her fired from her cleaning job, lodging a formal complaint of theft against her with his firm.

He’d said he wouldn’t press charges if she went quietly.

She had.

My mother always went quietly. She didn’t know any other way.

Word got around, after she’d been fired, that she wasn’t to be trusted, and others refused her employment.

We’d needed that job. And the many others she was never able to get again.

I didn’t kill him.

But I wanted to.

I didn’t because, like my mom, he wasn’t a bad person.

He was just the final erosion that started the landslide.

When I was thirteen I made a plaque for my mother’s grave that said:

Emma Danielle O’Malley

Weep not for the life she lost,

But the life she never got to live.

JADA

I’d once taken a vacation Silverside, about three years in.

The planet I’d christened Dada—because it wasn’t full-blown surrealism and Shazam’s nihilism had been getting to me—was a crazy, rainbow-colored world that made me feel as if I were living in the game Candyland.

Nothing on that planet was the right color, assuming you used Earth for a gauge, but after a few months on Dada, I decided Earth’s gauge was boring and wrong.

It was a small, lushly overgrown world with humid rain forests and pink oceans, dunes and beaches of powdery cerulean sand, and craggy burnt orange mountains. I’d explored that world from end to end, finding neither civilization nor ruins to suggest any had ever existed. It was paradise for me and Shazam.

Everything was edible.

The flowers had tasted like sweet and sour Gummy Bears and were massively high energy. The tree bark was varying flavors of chocolate. (I only peeled it away from fallen trees.) The water was pink lemonade and the plants tasted like fruit, even the leaves. The mushrooms—though they were the color and consistency of Hershey kisses—I hadn’t cared for. They’d been pretty much like those on Earth. Sautéed, breaded, or plain, mushrooms always tasted like dirt to me.

“I like mushrooms,” Dancer protested. “Have you ever tried a stuffed Portobello?”

Lying on my back next to him, I turned my head and narrowed my eyes. “I now find you completely suspicious and don’t think we can be friends anymore, Brain.”

He grinned. “Continue, Pinky. Tell me more about Dada.”

The plants were so large, with such mammoth, sturdy, coated leaves that Shazam and I had been able to pluck them from segmented stems and sail down pink rivers together, racing kaleidoscopic, flying fish. The sky was light lavender and, at dusk, it turned violet before settling into a deep purple twilight. True night never fell on Dada, beneath seven brilliant purple moons that peaked at intervals.

I had no idea how long I’d stayed on that planet. I’d counted it as four months. Four blissful, peaceful months that had undone a lot of the damage from the past three years. I’d arrived on Dada badly injured. I’d left ready to tackle anything, and a damn good thing, too, because the next world had been hostile and harsh.

“How did you keep track of time?” Dancer said.

“Sloppily,” I told him.

I’d had no watch and days Silverside unfolded in an unquantifiable blur, although I’d done my best to track it. Some planets had short nights, others felt like they lasted days, and on a few no sun ever rose. Those were the really bad ones.

Although I’d told people I’d been gone five and a half years, it was only a rough estimate. Still, I was pretty sure I was somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one.

“So, I might be a seriously younger man,” Dancer said, smirking. “You cougar, you.”

I snickered. Me, a cougar. Right. “Not in any way that matters,” I told him. Age didn’t exist when I was with him. He was just Dancer and I was just me. We were sprawled out on our backs on one of the counters in the physics lab, holding hands. I’d dropped by to stock up on food but had taken one look at the exhaustion in his face and ended up staying, searching for something to say that would make him light up, recharge.

He propped himself up on an elbow. “Tell me more about Shazam.”

I stared into those long-lashed, brilliant aqua eyes that I adored seeing light up with laughter and fascination, especially when they were turned my way. What deranged God would give him a damaged heart? I’d already told him how we’d met. So I told him why we had to leave Dada. “He ate all the fish. I think to extinction. The other animals found out and stampeded, chased us all the way to the exit portal I located shortly after we arrived. He was only gone an hour when he did it.” I frowned. “I’m not sure how he ate them all so fast. I think he has another form he never lets me see. Maybe more than one. There’s a lot about Shazam I don’t know. The whole hiding up in the air gig, he never taught me how to do it, though I pestered him relentlessly.”

And it would have proved invaluable if he had. Some worlds had shorted out my sidhe-seer gifts. Shaz had a theory those planets were heavily laced with some mineral my blood reacted to badly. I’d always felt sick on those worlds and been unable to freeze-frame. Those had been tough worlds to survive. I had no clue how ordinary folks got through the days.