Freddy said, “What…?”
“We need to catch him,” said Mel. She headed down the hall after him. Not understanding, Freddy followed.
They chased Roland into the kitchen and out the door and into the lane and back to the house on Grosvenor Street, which Freddy hadn’t expected to see again so soon. They only caught up with him when he was pounding on the door. “Look,” said Mel, “this isn’t a good—”
The door opened. Josiah and Cuerva Lachance stood together in the doorway, looking surprised.
“I told you to stay away from them,” snarled Roland. “Look what you did!”
“Roland,” said Freddy, “you need to listen.” But he was turned away from her and couldn’t see her talking.
“She didn’t have any idea. You did that to her, and you didn’t even warn her,” said Roland. “She didn’t know what you were. You’re playing games with us, and all because you’re trying to get me to—”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Mel loudly, ramming into him hard enough to knock him aside. “I told you not to cover for me. I’m not a helpless flower.”
Roland glared at her in what looked like genuine bewilderment. “What are you—”
“It’s me,” said Mel to Cuerva Lachance and Josiah. “I’m the one you’re looking for.”
“Stop. You have no idea. It’s me,” said Roland. “I—”
“Come on,” said Freddy, moving into his line of sight. “They obviously know by now that it’s me.”
She’d caught on late, but she thought she could see what Mel was doing now. If Roland had been thinking straight, he would have seen, too.
“It’s not you,” said Roland. “It’s me.”
“You don’t have to be so self-sacrificing,” said Mel. “It’s me.”
“Cut it out, both of you. I already told you it was me,” said Freddy.
“You don’t understand,” said Roland.
“No, you don’t understand,” said Mel, “literally. Stop talking.”
“I don’t think anybody understands,” said Freddy.
Cuerva Lachance and Josiah looked from one of them to the other. They exchanged glances. Josiah quietly shut the door.
Freddy and Mel grasped Roland by the arms. Together, they towed him off the porch and through the yard and into the lane and back to their own house. When they reached the kitchen, Freddy shoved him down into a chair, and Mel stood in front of the back door so he couldn’t escape and yell at the dangerous magical neighbours some more.
“You’re crazy,” said Freddy. “You can’t go telling them you’re Three!”
Roland’s eyebrows were knotted up in a vicious scowl. To her shock, she saw tears in his eyes as well. “I don’t know what that is,” he said, his voice wobbling.
He was still mad at her, but there was something else wrong, too. Freddy sighed. “Roland, can we please just not be fighting any more? I haven’t been mad at you for over a year. I know that’s hard to understand—”
“You travelled in time,” said Roland. “So?”
Freddy said, “Why is everyone having such an easy time accepting this?”
“Because I know about them,” said Roland, and everything just seemed to spill out of him. Tears whisked down his cheeks. “I knew them when they moved in. I’ve dreamed about them my whole life. I mean … I had actual dreams about them. They weren’t always the same. I wasn’t always the same. I was lots of different people, and I could hear. When I woke up, I forgot what it was like. But I remembered doing it.”
He wiped furiously at his eyes. “I know impossible things happen around them. I can accept that. But in the dreams … I always felt trapped. I always felt hemmed in and trapped and angry. There’s some sort of choice, isn’t there? Both the options are wrong. They’re going to try to make me pick one, and I shouldn’t have to.”
Freddy said, “They want you to choose between them … an order-versus-chaos thing. I think they’re pretty powerful. It seems to have some kind of effect on … I don’t know. The way the world works? It’s subtle, whatever it is. But—”
“And you just go and play into their hands,” he spat at her. “I warned you, and you didn’t listen to me! You—”
“Shut up!” said Freddy. She leaned in towards him; he pressed himself back in his chair, eyes wide. “The next time you want to warn somebody about something, include details!”
“I thought it would’ve sounded stupid,” said Roland. To his credit, he had stopped snarling.
Freddy looked briefly at Mel, who shrugged. “Okay,” Freddy admitted, “maybe it would’ve. But you weren’t warning me. You were trying to get me to do what you wanted without telling me why.”
Mel moved around so Roland could see her. “You were both being unreasonable imbeciles,” she said, and signed, helpfully.
Roland said, “You don’t understand—”
“By this point, I understand better than you do,” said Freddy. “You can stop panicking. They don’t know which one of us it is.”
He blinked at her. “How can they not know that?”
“They’re not all-powerful,” said Freddy. “They’ve been trying to reason it out, but you haven’t given them the usual clues. Of course, now that you’ve stormed right up to their door and shouted it in their faces…”
“I thought they knew,” said Roland. He was gradually going pale again. “I thought they were playing games with me.”
“I hope we fooled them with our Spartacus act,” said Mel, “but we can’t be sure.”
Freddy had no idea what a Spartacus act was. It didn’t seem the time to ask. “You need to calm down until we can decide what’s really going on,” she said.
“I thought you said you knew,” said Roland. The tears were starting again.
“I know some,” said Freddy. “I can tell you if you—”
“No.”
She opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “What?”
“I said no!” Roland leapt to his feet, sending his chair crashing back against the kitchen cabinets. “I don’t want anything to do with them. I keep telling you to stay away from them! There’s nothing we can do about this but have as little to do with it as possible.”
“You mean run away,” said Freddy.
“If that’s what it takes,” said Roland.
“I don’t think that’s going to work,” said Mel. “Cuerva Lachance—”
“Don’t talk about her. Don’t talk about either of them.” He was still crying, but the anger was there, too. “I don’t like it that they can get into my dreams. I don’t want to give them a chance to force me to do anything. If you’d listened to me in the first place, I wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Freddy said, “Excuse me? How do you—”
“Just leave. Me. Alone,” said Roland. He blundered out into the hall, knocking things over as he went. A moment later, they heard a door slam upstairs.
*