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“Just make sure you do it quietly.” I cast a nervous glance down the stairs. It was impossible to know where the genius’s mother slept.

“Eat a padlock quietly?” Alexandra grumbled. “I’ll do my best.” She gave it an exploratory lick. “It’s good brass. Bitter and astringent, with a smooth finish. This is going to take a minute or two.”

“You can’t go any faster?”

She shook her head. “It’s never a good idea to bolt a lock. They bind you up unless you pick at them.” She gave the thick brass shank a nibble, and nodded to herself. “Small bites for this one, or I’ll be constipated for days.” I waited impatiently while she gnawed away at it. To her credit, she did muffle the noise of grinding metal as much as possible by chewing with her mouth closed.

After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, she took a final bite that broke off the padlock. Even though I was waiting to catch it before it could clatter to the floor, I fumbled and nearly dropped it. I was so tired that my fingers barely felt connected to my hands.

The chamber behind the door was bare of any furnishings save for a single bed with a mound of blankets heaped on it. They looked like little more than a small lump in the middle of the genius-sized mattress. Gentle snores came from one end of the blanket mound. A pair of feet stuck out of the other. Feet that were by turns narrow, broad, long-toed, blunt-toed, high-arched, and flat.

Ilyana.

I padded softly toward the bed and climbed up the side. Moonlight filtered through a small barred window in the wall. Good; that would make things easier. I reached out to where I thought her shoulder might be and gave it a shake.

The fist that launched out of the nest of blankets struck me squarely in the face.

“Ow! Shit!” I reeled back and fell off the bed.

“Frogging hall-fire—Jules, is that you?” Ilyana sat up in the bed, blinking. “What are you doing here? And why did you grope my boop?”

“Thought…shoulder,” I said, clutching my poor, much-abused nose. The ring on her finger had left a small cut that dripped blood. “We’re here to rescue you.”

“We?” Her gaze flicked from me to my sister. “Who’s the look-alike?”

Alexandra was staring at Ilyana with her jaw open, pieces of half-chewed metal glittering in her mouth.

“This is my little sister Alexandra, who, uh…needs to finish eating that lock?”

She abruptly closed her lips and swallowed the remainder of the brass in a single gulp. I hoped the bigger pieces wouldn’t cause any blockages.

Ilyana raised a pair of eyebrows that squirmed into a succession of shapes and colors on her forehead. “Eating what now?”

“It’s a fairy gift,” I told her.

“Ah. Your sister, huh?” Ilyana took in Alexandra’s very masculine trousers and tightly bound chest. “Interesting sense of style. I like it.”

“Yes, well, that’s a long story. Alexandra, if you could get a torch from one of the stairwell sconces and…Alexandra?”

She was still staring at Ilyana, wide-eyed.

“Guh,” she said.

Ilyana sighed and hid her face behind a blanket. “There, you can’t see me anymore. Can we get the rescue going now, kid sister?”

Alexandra shook her head, snapping out of her trance. “That’s Ilyana? She’s…That’s…You didn’t tell me she looked like that.”

I wondered what she saw, what sort of beauty was enough to shock her to near-paralysis. I decided not to ask; if I did, I’d only end up learning what got my little sister hot and bothered. “Torch,” I said. Alexandra scuttled out of the room. “Sorry about that,” I told Ilyana.

“I’m used to it.” She dropped the blanket and turned a shifting smile my way. “Thanks for coming back to bust me out of here. Again. I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Oh. Um.” Her smile was causing an odd fizzy sensation in my stomach. “You’re welcome.”

“How’re you getting me out without waking the fuzz-pickers downstairs? Walking on our tippy-toes?”

“I can do better than that.” I pulled the mirror out of my pack. When Alexandra came back in, she tried to keep her eyes averted, but couldn’t resist peeking at Ilyana a few times. Much to my relief, doing so didn’t strike my sister senseless now that her initial startlement had passed. I took the torch from her and went over to the window.

I passed the torch in front of the mirror two times.