“I wish.” He reached for her hand, peeling back the fabric of her glove until he’d exposed the star-shaped scar he’d accidentally given her when he’d healed her abilities. “This time I know to administer the injection into your leg, so I shouldn’t leave another mark like this. But… it still needs to be an injection. That’s the fastest delivery method, and with allergies, every second counts.”

Sophie wished she could argue.

But she’d felt how close it came the other times when they’d triggered her allergy.

There was zero margin for error.

“I’ll have Elwin and Livvy with me for any emergencies,” Mr. Forkle promised, pulling her glove back into place and releasing her hand. “And I think it might be wise to have Mr. Sencen and Mr. Vacker there as well, since they both have ways of keeping your mind and emotions steady and focused. And if there’s someone else you’d like to have there—like perhaps your parents?—that can be arranged. But know this: No matter what, I will keep you safe. That’s my job.”

“No, that’s my job,” Sandor corrected. “And if you think I’m going to let you—”

“It’s Miss Foster’s decision,” Mr. Forkle interrupted.

Sophie snorted. “Right. Just like it was my decision the day you reset my abilities. I could either stay malfunctioning, or risk my life to fix everything—and bonus: It was the only way I’d be able to heal Prentice and Alden. That’s not much of a choice, is it?”

“It is,” Mr. Forkle insisted. “And this time it’s even more so. You’ve managed just fine with the way your inflicting currently operates.”

“Have I?” Sophie asked, thinking of all the times her vision had cleared to reveal her friends writhing in pain or unconscious around her.

The Neverseen had even started counting on it when they planned their ambushes, letting her take out her bodyguards for them—although that raised another question.

“Is the ability even worth it?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper. “The Neverseen always wear those caps to block me.”

“Actually, that would be one of the biggest advantages to resetting your ability,” Mr. Forkle corrected. “The red beam is designed to target the heart, not the head. The Neverseen would have no way to shield themselves from that kind of attack, and the blow would be infinitely stronger because the emotions are so much rawer and more vulnerable there.”

Sophie sighed.

That would be a significant improvement from what she could currently do.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Forkle said, clearing his throat. “I realize this is probably the last thing you feel like enduring. I haven’t forgotten how much you’ve already been through. It’s also my fault. What Livvy and I did to reset your brain clearly went awry.”

“Clearly,” Sophie muttered, “considering I almost died.”

“Yes, you did. I still have nightmares about it sometimes.” He stared at his hands, wringing his fingers back and forth. “It was me with you that day, in case you were wondering. Not my twin brother. It’s why I was chosen to be the one to reset your abilities the second time—everyone felt I had ‘experience’ with the situation—though truthfully, both times I’ve never felt so out of my depth or terrified in all of my life.” He cleared his throat again. “That first time, when I heard the screaming and saw what was happening, I hailed Livvy for help immediately. Then I carried you and your sister into my house, hoping no one else in the neighborhood had noticed anything. By the time Livvy got there, I’d already erased both of your memories—but of course, I had to erase another from your sister when her sedative wore off not long after Livvy’s arrival. I hadn’t wanted to overdo how much I gave her, considering she was so small and had just been through such an exhausting trauma. But I clearly underestimated—the first of many mistakes I made that day.”

“I’m assuming the second mistake was when you gave me limbium?” Sophie guessed.

“Actually, that was the third. The second was before Livvy came up with the idea of limbium. I grew impatient and gave you a half dozen other medicines I thought might help, and ended up making you vomit all over yourself.”

Sophie cringed. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“That was my thought too. And then we gave you the limbium, and I got to discover exactly how dire things could truly get. You started making a horrible sound as your airway closed off, unlike anything I’d ever heard before, and then your whole body was convulsing and I just… froze. If Livvy hadn’t been there, I don’t know what would’ve happened. I might’ve lost you. She was the one who kept you breathing and suggested we rush you to the nearest human hospital. Her reasoning was flawed—though we didn’t know it at the time. She suspected our treatments were negatively reacting with some human toxin or virus that you’d been exposed to, which sounded logical enough. And it got you to the place that saved your life, which was all that mattered. Then Livvy had to go, so no one could wonder who she was or how she knew you, and your human parents arrived, and I just sat there, watching you hooked up to those horrible machines, hoping nothing irreparable had happened. And when you woke up…”

His voice choked off, and he dragged a hand down his face, lingering on his eyes.

She couldn’t tell if that meant he was crying.

Part of her was glad she couldn’t tell—her world made so much more sense when Mr. Forkle was a strong, reliable presence, even if his stubbornness drove her crazy at times.

“When you woke up,” Mr. Forkle continued, his voice steadier this time, “it felt like one of those ‘miracles’ that humans are always going on about. You were you. Your inflicting had been switched back off, and everything else seemed fine. And you and your sister both had no idea what had happened between you.”

“Wait,” Sophie had to interrupt. “Aren’t you always saying that abilities can’t be switched off once they’ve been triggered?”

“For ordinary elves, yes,” Mr. Forkle agreed.

Sophie groaned, knowing this was going to lead to another “let me explain how very weird you are” speech.

And sure enough, he told her, “In your case, I made your genes slightly more flexible in certain ways. That way, if something we’d planned needed adjusting, we’d have the option of doing so—which has been both an advantage and a disadvantage. I often wonder if that flexibility is the reason we’ve had to reset things in your mind.”

He tilted his head and sighed in a way that seemed to say, It’s so challenging experimenting on someone. Which definitely helped Sophie choke back any fuzzy feelings she might’ve been fighting when she’d thought he was crying.

“Anyway,” Mr. Forkle said, moving the conversation back to what they’d been discussing. “I swore I would be a thousand times more vigilant from that moment on to ensure that nothing like that ever happened to you again, and yet, somehow I still managed to misunderstand the role that the limbium had played in your allergy until it happened again. And I didn’t anticipate any problems when I triggered your inflicting, either. So imagine my horror when I heard Mr. Dizznee’s account of how your inflicting had operated in Paris and realized our enhancements to the ability had somehow been switched off. I’d hoped the problem was connected to all of the other glitches you were experiencing during that same time, and that once I reset your abilities, all would go back to the way we originally designed it. But it didn’t recover as well as your other abilities. And now, here we are.”