The bailiffs brought me food that I didn’t eat and water that I didn’t drink, and doctors came in to check on me. I didn’t talk to them unless they talked to me. I felt as if I’d talked enough to last several lifetimes.

Eventually, I stopped counting and started to think. In my head, I ran through everything I had said on the witness stand. I tried to separate the memories: times I was aware, times I wasn’t, to see if it was possible to draw a line between when I was a doll and when I was a person.

I couldn’t. The line was blurred, and it wiggled through the past.

Laying there with the monkey and with my own thoughts and memories, I thought about Zach too. Zach had told the truth, as always: who I was wasn’t who I’d become. And now that the trial was over, I didn’t have to stay this way anymore.

If I was going to die, I wanted at least to die as myself, not as who I was made to be.

Closing my eyes, I pictured myself as the girl that I’d become, the one that Zach knew. I let the magic run through me, shaping me, transforming me. I chose my face, my hair, and my green eyes. And then I lay on the bed and let the vision sweep over me.

The Storyteller and the Magician sit on either side of me. Each holds one of my cloth hands. There are stars spread over the sky, and a pale-gray cloud covers half the moon. The Ferris wheel is silhouetted against the sky. It’s motionless.

“I feel old,” the Magician says.

The Storyteller kneads my cotton knuckles with her gnarled fingers. I think it calms her. “Do you want to stop?” she asks him.

He sighs. “Some days, yes.”

“The audience threw roses,” the Storyteller says. “You changed them into birds. Rose birds whose perfume smell wafted through the tent every time they flapped their wings.”

The Magician smiles. “That was lovely.”

“It was,” she says.

They fall silent.

I think it would be nice to talk. Straining, I stretch my mouth. The threads that tie my mouth strain. I press my fabric lips together, and the threads lie limp. I try to open my mouth again.

“You add beauty to the world,” the Storyteller says. “People need that. They come into your tent expecting a trick, half wanting to see a fraud and half wanting to believe. You show them magic, and they leave full of wonder.”

“Sometimes I feel that it’s not enough.”

The Storyteller drops my hand and rises. She holds out her hand to him. “Make me something beautiful.” He leans toward me, breathes in, and then takes her hand. As he rises, green sprouts burst out of the ground. They shoot upward and wrap around the tent poles. Buds blossom and then open into burgundy roses. A trickle of water falls over the side of the wagon, forming a pool with water lilies.

Holding each other close, the Magician and the Storyteller dance.

I want to dance too. I want to tell them so. I push my lips together and wiggle them side to side, loosening the threads.

As they sway and spin to the sound of crickets and the night breeze, the Storyteller says, “Once upon a time, there was an empty boy, and the emptiness ate him inside until one day, he met a girl who knew how to fill him …”

I stretch my mouth again, and the threads snap one after another.

Hearing the snaps, the Storyteller and the Magician stop and look at me. They study my cloth face and button eyes. “Some would see her as an abomination,” the Magician says.

“Is that what you see?” the Storyteller asks.

He shakes his head and smiles. “I see beauty, wonder, and magic. I see the best of us. She is the ‘something beautiful’ we made together.”

The Storyteller smiles too, showing her crooked, stained teeth. “She could be. I’ll sew her a new dress, silk maybe. And I will give her glass eyes. Marbles or sea glass. I think perhaps they’ll be green. She’d look pretty with green eyes.”

The threads have snapped. I open my mouth. It widens freely. Carefully, I curve my lips, threads dangling, into a smile. “Thank you,” I say.

I went calmly with Malcolm when he came to claim me. I brought the monkey with me.

Malcolm led me back to the courtroom, which was again filled with the same people. Zach, though, wasn’t there, I noticed immediately, nor was Aunt Nicki. But Aidan, Victoria, and Topher were. And of course the Magician.

Malcolm led me to a table across the aisle from the Magician. He squeezed my shoulder. And then he left the courtroom. Gone, just like that. He left me alone. I never thought he would do that, and I suddenly felt fear squeeze my insides, my human stomach and lungs. I wanted to call out after him, but I didn’t. Half the eyes in the courtroom were on the Magician; the other half were on me.

And suddenly I realized I’d lied to myself. I wasn’t ready to die.

The judge banged his gavel. He listed the crimes—illegal use of magic across worlds, false identification, performing with an illegal license, and myriad other infractions. Then he paused and said, “Murder in the first degree.” And he began to list the names.

The list went on and on.

With each name, I remembered a face or a moment—all the talking that I had done had jogged loose the pictures in my head. I closed my eyes and let the images come, all the photos that I had identified in the tablet and Lou had then pinned to the bulletin board, all the boxes that had hung in the wagon, all the magic that swirled inside me.

The judge continued, and, caught in the memory of faces, I didn’t hear his words.

But I heard the intake of breath, the sudden stillness that spread over the courtroom, as the jury leader spoke the verdict. “We find the defendant guilty as charged.”

As one, the audience exhaled.

Guilty as charged.

The words echoed around the chamber.

I was led by a bailiff to a side room and instructed to wait. The court was in recess. I sat on a bench in a dull gray room and didn’t move, didn’t speak, and didn’t think. When it was time for sentencing, the bailiff led me back to the courtroom. Everyone had reassembled. I felt the Magician’s eyes on me. I didn’t look at him. Instead, I looked again for Zach. I didn’t see him or Malcolm or Aunt Nicki or Topher …

In the crowded courtroom, I felt alone.

The judge banged his gavel. “Sentencing is as follows: life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, this location with no possibility of extradition.”

The courtroom erupted in shouting. I heard shouts for the Magician’s death, loud anger. Several jumped to their feet. The bailiffs rushed forward.

The judge banged his gavel harder. All around the courtroom, the bailiffs pushed people back into their seats. Slowly, the courtroom stilled.

“His belongings will be destroyed, including the doll known as Eve, who was created through his deeds. All records from this case will be sealed to prevent these crimes from ever being repeated. This court is adjourned.”

The gavel banged again.

And the words sank in.

The Magician would be imprisoned.

I would be destroyed.

As the courtroom erupted again in shouting, I wanted to fly away as fast as I could … or transform into a knot in the wood and hide … or change into a beetle and scurry away. I’d only have one chance—

Electricity shot in an upward lightning strike toward the fluorescent lights. It hit three, and they exploded in a shower of glass and sparks. All the other lights flickered off, and people screamed.

I hadn’t done it.

I looked to where I knew the Magician was, though I couldn’t see him in the sudden, complete blackness. He couldn’t have done it either, I thought. He had no magic of his own, and he hadn’t drawn from me in days.