He strokes my cheek. “Always remember: you are nothing without me.”

I’m not nothing, I think. I’m Eve.

And suddenly, it’s Malcolm with his arms around me, protecting me … or trapping me. I am in a meadow of delicate white wildflowers that bend and sway in the breeze. He holds me gently as he says, “Shh, shh; tell me who you are.”

I’m Eve, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t.

I was pinned to the wall like a butterfly in a display case. My beak was half-open, and I felt the shape of my paper wings splayed against the milk-blue fake sky. I saw the bedroom distorted through one flattened bird’s eye. The hat was all angles on a sea of quilt.

Beside the bed, Aunt Nicki bulged with her rounded limbs and torso, a three-dimensional person seen through my two-dimensional eyes. Malcolm was a vast bulk behind her. His eyes roved over the room.

I watched them test the window and check the closet. From the way Malcolm’s mouth moved and the way his chest pumped, I thought he must be shouting, but his voice was distant and muffled to my painted ears, as if he were underwater. The words slid into each other until they were indistinguishable. Only a few moments seemed to have passed since I fell into my vision.

Still shouting, he scooped the hat off the bed and hurled it across the room. It skittered over the wood floor and smacked lightly against the wall. I felt its impact a moment later, rippling through the wallpaper like a pebble tossed into a pond.

The hat was directly below me. It matched the description I’d given to the marshals—I’d told them about the black velvet—but I’d never described the wear that had eaten at the edges and roughened certain patches down to the threads. The more I studied it, the more certain I was that it was not the Magician’s hat. I remembered the true hat perfectly. It was as clear as my memory of the cards that the Magician used to lay on the red velvet table—ornate illustrations with medieval fairy-tale flourishes and, oddly, burn marks on the edges—and it was as clear as my memory of the Storyteller’s hands as she knit yarn with her hands and worlds with her mouth.

Stories used to fall from her plump, wrinkled lips, I remembered. She told beautiful stories about princes and princesses in magic castles or half-rat children scurrying through the alleys of a city on adventures. And then there were other tales, like from my visions, where the castles crumbled and the children didn’t leave the alleys alive. I hadn’t liked those tales.

I listened to the agents search the house. Their footsteps were sharp, heavy, and angry. They slammed doors, and I felt the reverberation of each slam. Through the walls, I could feel where each agent was—six of them, guns drawn and wearing bulletproof vests, in every room.

At last they left, and the house felt silent.

The silence sank around me. It permeated the walls. I felt as if the house were sighing, easing into the soil, relaxing. I breathed with it, slow and deep, if one could call it breathing. I sensed the other birds around me, a persistent tingling as if they were extensions of my paper skin. The light from the window moved across me, and I felt it only on one side. My other side was cradled against the wall, nestled tightly as if held by arms. I let the minutes slide away. Somehow, I slept.

Waking, I was certain I was alone, though I couldn’t explain how I knew. The house felt empty. Carefully, I peeled myself away from the wall. The glue hurt as it pulled, and I widened my beak in what would have been a scream if I’d had a voice. My fingers spread, and my wings expanded.

I poured myself into my memory of my body—smooth skin, golden hair, green eyes. I knew I had those correct. The rest … I wasn’t certain how tall I was or what exactly was the shape of my head or my chin. But it didn’t matter. I had my eyes, and that was enough.

I took a step toward the bed, intending to lie down before the vision overtook me.

I didn’t make it.

I am in the wagon.

Bottles clink together. Skulls rattle, their loose jaws opening and shutting as if they still have screams inside them. “Once upon a time,” the Storyteller says.

I clap my hands over my ears, though I know it’s a useless gesture.

She pulls my hands away. I am surprised at her strength. Her arms are so thin that she looks as though she could not bend a piece of straw, much less move my hands against my will, but she pushes them down as if I’d offered no resistance. She looks young today, a waiflike slip of a girl with cornflower-blue eyes and full lips.

“Once upon a time, a girl set out to find her fortune …”

“Where are we going?” I ask.

She grips my arms. “Once upon a time, a girl set out, and she was quick and she was silent and she was lucky and she was strong.”

Her eyes seem to blaze until the rest of the wagon dims. I feel the wagon slow as if it has reached its destination.

“I have done all I can for you and less than I should,” she says. “Someday you’ll forgive me, or you won’t.” I open my mouth to say I don’t understand, but she presses a red scarf over my mouth. Taking a needle, she sews it into my skin.

I cannot scream.

And then I am on the stage beside the Magician. He flips cards onto a table and hums to himself off-key. I cannot see the audience, but I hear them inhale and exhale, nearly as one. The lights above glare on the stage and prick my eyes. I look again at the cards. He has spread them on the velvet—the image of a blindfolded woman, a dead tree beside a tower, an owl with a snake in its talons. “Take one,” he says. I think he talks to me.

I try to reach for a card, but I am bound by ropes that crisscross my body in a pattern as intricate as a spiderweb. Only my fingers can twitch.

A girl walks out of the audience and onto the stage. She takes a card. It is an image of a blindfolded woman, but the eyes are the last thing that the girl loses. I close my eyes and wish I could close my ears too. There is screaming. And then suddenly, there isn’t.

I hear a soft snip. And then another. And another. I feel cool metal brush against my neck. Snip. Snip. The Storyteller is humming softly.

The ropes release and flutter to the ground. I look down. They lie around me in a circle, limp. I am standing before a silver mirror outside the wagon. The tent is behind me.

In the mirror, I look like the dead girl, but I know the mirror lies. My reflection does not have a red scarf sewn over her mouth; I still do. I feel the even stitches tear at my cheeks. In the polished silver, I also see the wagon and the Storyteller with her sewing shears in her hand. She’s middle-aged now, though her eyes are milky white and surrounded by wrinkles. She snips the scarf away from my mouth.

“Seek your fortune,” she says. “And don’t ever look back.”

She shoves me toward the mirror, and I melt into the silver.

Lying on the floor of the bedroom, I looked up at the cracks in the plaster ceiling. Every muscle shook, every nerve quivered, and my skin felt thick and bumpy. I lifted my hand in the air and studied it. It looked smooth and perfect.

I could feel a cramp in my left calf. Stretching my foot, I breathed in deeply. The air smelled like dried roses and lemon with a hint of mildew. I pushed myself up to a sitting position and listened.

Silence.

Even the air in the house was still.

The hat lay against the wall where Malcolm had thrown it—a vivid reminder that I couldn’t stay here. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the cell phone that Malcolm had used to track me to Zach’s and slid it under the bed. Feeling as wobbly as a just-hatched bird, I tottered to the bedroom door. I inched it open and heard nothing from the rest of the house. Moving as silently as I could, I crept through the hallway to the front door. Pressing my back against the wall, I peeked through the window next to the door.