“I don’t know which of us is Three,” said Freddy with perfect truth, though if she’d known, she would have lied.
She hadn’t had time to think much about Mika’s story, but she’d never put it entirely from her mind. There was something really strange about the Three situation. Okay, the entire thing with Josiah and Cuerva Lachance was strange, but Freddy had needed to recalibrate her strangeness meter over the course of the past year and a half. Even by her new standards, she could sense something wasn’t right.
The story had made Josiah really uncomfortable. She’d never seen anything do that before. Also, the old versions of Cuerva Lachance and Josiah hadn’t been there when the story had started. They could have walked out of the darkness, but Freddy had been watching, and she didn’t think they had. Cuerva Lachance was the sort of person who habitually appeared out of thin air. Except when he was time travelling, Josiah wasn’t.
She thought maybe she had been listening to a more or less true story about them being born. She thought it was something neither of them had wanted her to hear. She didn’t know what to do with either of these ideas.
“Oh well,” said Cuerva Lachance cheerfully. “Do we have something soothing to feed the supervillain? I’m not sure how long he’s going to exist, and I expect he’s hungry by now.”
“You didn’t buy anything soothing,” said Josiah. “You bought lots and lots of sugar.”
“That won’t help in this case.” Cuerva Lachance pursed her mouth thoughtfully. “Spider plants!”
Everybody looked at her.
“This kitchen needs spider plants,” she said.
“If you say so,” said Josiah 2, rubbing violently at his forehead.
Someone knocked on the back door.
It was almost four. Freddy and Josiah stared at each other for three full seconds, then dived under the kitchen table. It wasn’t really the right thing to do. Freddy decided later that they had both panicked in the same way.
“If it’s the stepbrother,” said Josiah 2, “I’m going to put him at the top of the ‘Three’ list.”
But when Cuerva Lachance opened the door, it was Mel’s voice they heard. “Hi. I was wondering if my sister was here.”
Josiah glanced at Freddy, who was racking her brain. Where had she been on Friday after school? She couldn’t remember. It had been too long ago, and she hadn’t been doing anything important.
“Why would you wonder something like that?” said Cuerva Lachance. “Has your sister made friends with Josie? I would be completely shocked to hear it. Do you think this kitchen would be better with spider plants in it?”
“Sure,” said Mel. “Freddy? Is that you hiding under the table?”
She didn’t seem to have seen more than one of the Josiahs, which was really the only good thing about this situation. Josiah slid around behind Freddy, who said, “I thought you were going to be Roland. He’s been bugging me about hanging out with Josiah.” Was that true, though? She thought maybe Roland had only started behaving strangely later on.
“No, Roland’s watching TV,” said Mel. “You can come out now.”
“I can’t,” said Freddy. “I like it under this table. It’s peaceful. I’ll be back later, okay?”
“Goodbye, little fat one!” said Cuerva Lachance. She shut the door in Mel’s face, cutting off her, “But why can’t I—?”
They all waited, Freddy holding her breath. After a moment, they heard Mel move heavily away.
“We’re going to have problems with the ducklings,” said Josiah 2 as Freddy and Josiah emerged. “That one’s far too curious. And the stepbrother saw me talking to Cuerva Lachance at school.”
Freddy looked at Josiah, who shrugged. She said, “Why is that bad?”
“She was invisible at the time,” said Josiah 2. “We were in that courtyard where the Deaf kids go to smoke. It was a whole epic invisible argument.”
“I get silly when I’m invisible,” said Cuerva Lachance. “It’s possible I knocked him into a tree, and I may have turned him upside down at some point. I’m not sure how much the big awkward one saw, but there was some.”
Freddy said warily, “What was the argument about?”
“You,” said Josiah 2. “All of you. Three. I don’t know how much he gathered. I’m sure he was only there for a couple of minutes, and he couldn’t have seen much even just of my side of the conversation, but it was enough to make me seem sinister.”
“Have you ever thought of gathering us all together and telling us the truth?” said Freddy.
Everybody turned towards her in amazement. “Why on earth would we do that?” said Josiah 2.
“It seems more practical than what you’re doing now,” she pointed out.
“It’s not,” said Josiah. “Don’t you remember how you reacted when you found out? It’s better to ease people into these things. Besides, whichever of you aren’t Three don’t need to know.”
“Except you, if you aren’t Three,” said Josiah 2, “since you know already, unfortunately.”
“You’re making it all unnecessarily complicated,” said Freddy.
“No, we’re making it necessarily complicated,” said Josiah, and the others nodded.
Freddy bit back the words she really wanted to say. It would be better if she let this drop. It was another clue. There was something about the Three situation she wasn’t understanding yet.
*
The house calmed down after that. The bathroom reappeared, and if the third floor really had turned into a portion of outer space with a floating supervillain in it, it had gone back to normal by early evening. Chairs and spider plants were popping up all over the place, but the weirdness seemed limited to them. The calm lasted all through the rest of Friday and the whole of Saturday. Freddy thought the Josiahs were doing something, though she couldn’t tell what. When she asked, Josiah 2 said loftily that he was “asserting logic.” It was eminently unclear what this meant.
On Sunday afternoon, Freddy heard someone playing the piano and walked into the living room to say hello to Cuerva Lachance. The problem was that it was Loki at the instrument.
There were, by this point, a lot of chairs in the room. Freddy stood in a sea of them and stared at the Viking warrior pounding out a swing version of something Freddy thought may have been written by Beethoven. If this was the old version of me, she thought, my brain would be shutting down right about now.
It wasn’t the old version of her. She crossed her arms and cleared her throat.
Loki finished with a flourish and turned to her, beaming. “Curly-haired one! I just left you. Your headache has gone, I hope?”
“It’s been gone for more than a year,” said Freddy. “Are you looking for Cuerva Lachance?”
“Not particularly,” said Loki. “We’ll bump into each other eventually. There’s no need to go around actively looking for anyone.”
One of the Josiahs rushed into the room. Freddy hadn’t yet seen either today, and it took her a moment to identify this one as Josiah 1. “Don’t let him into the kitchen!” he gasped.