The burnt orange light of the sunset shone through my window as I lay in my bed, too exhausted to move but too worked up to sleep. Mom and Dad were downstairs, watching a movie in the living room. My hands still stung from the five straight hours of scrubbing it had taken to clean all the maiam goop out of the entryway. I hadn’t even bothered trying to explain what had happened to the floor while they’d “blacked out,” which had gotten me grounded and sent to my room for the whole weekend.

My phone buzzed, and I wearily raised it above my face.

“You ok?” Ethan asked. He was confined to his own room in one of the only times my parents had ever punished—or had reason to punish—him.

“Fine,” I typed back.

“Really?”

“No.”

The phone went silent for a couple of minutes, then buzzed again.

“So what are we going to do now?”

I thought for a minute, then gave the only answer I could think of: “I don’t know.”

Grandpa Teddy…my heart felt like a burning ice cube. It couldn’t decide if it wanted to be hot with rage or cold with betrayal, so it settled on some kind of unnatural mixture of the two.

How could you do this to me? I thought, wiping the back of my arm across my eyes when tears started to leak out of them again. I loved you!

Loved? No, I had never stopped loving him, and that only made this even worse. The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that a part of me had known the truth the entire time. But I had kept that part buried deep, deep in my subconscious where I couldn’t hear it whispering. Can you blame me? Who in their right mind wants to think their sweet, kindly old grandpa might actually be a psychotic murderer?

I glanced at the corner of my room, where all the inhalers I still had were piled up, their canisters stomped flat. I didn’t know what I was going to do now. My duties as the Hunter were about to get a whole lot harder without Grandpa Teddy’s inhalers to recharge my laughter whenever I ran low. And I ran low a lot.

But I couldn’t bring myself to use them. Not now, or ever again. Just looking at them made my stomach turn over with nausea. The image of those poor people, torn from their lives without warning or explanation and forced to laugh themselves to death, was burned irreversibly into my memory.

Every puff I had ever taken from those inhalers was a life that had been stolen for my sake. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known. My soul was stained by the blood of the innocent, and nothing would ever change that.

My phone buzzed again.

“Jade is worried about you,” Ethan said.

I forced myself to sit up. She was right to be worried. I had been through a lot over the past four years, but this…this was something else entirely. For the first time in my life, I had no idea what I was going to do.

Nothing seemed to matter anymore. What was the point of hunting maiams now? Every good deed I did was vastly outweighed by the horrors Grandpa Teddy was putting people through. I just wanted to lay down and wait until the lack of laughter made me shrivel up into a gray, dried out husk.

But then I felt my eyes be drawn back toward the pile of smashed inhalers.

A life stolen for every puff, I thought again.

If I did nothing, I realized with a sickening lurch, then their deaths would mean nothing.

I closed my eyes, anger burning inside me. How dare he do this to me? How dare he? I knew it was selfish of me to focus on myself while I was safe and sound in my bedroom, but my feelings were right there, so easily within reach. I grabbed hold of them, letting the heat of my rage spread through my entire body, banishing the dull, empty apathy that had been threatening to take me over.

Mom and Dad were downstairs, blissfully unaware that they were a pair of hostages. Did Grandpa Teddy really think this would keep me in line? He had said it himself three days ago: I had a drive to help people that I was powerless to ignore.

I wanted to think he was bluffing, but I had seen the levels of heartless cruelty he was capable of in the laughter farms. Worse, I had seen the look in his eyes when he’d made those threats. He really was prepared to sacrifice his own family for what he was doing. It would hurt him more than I could ever imagine, but he would do it without a moment’s hesitation.

He knew that I wouldn’t take this lying down. He knew that I was going to keep fighting to help those people. And that meant he knew that, sooner or later, he was going to have to make good on his threats.

I stood up, pacing back and forth across my room. Grandpa Teddy had backed me into a corner, and the more I thought about it, the deeper in that corner I realized I was. There was no way I could protect my parents. I could take them to Jah Beryge, but Grandpa Teddy had already proven that he could get in there. And even if he couldn’t, he didn’t actually need to be able to touch them to hurt them. There was no way I could get Mom and Dad to stay in Jah Beryge without them asking questions, and if I answered those questions…

"If certain secrets become public knowledge, they have both been instructed to have a little accident,” Grandpa Teddy’s voice echoed in my mind.

I fought the urge to punch my wall and kept pacing. I couldn’t protect them, not from themselves. Not without trying them up and locking them in a room somewhere, and that would just cause more damage than I was preventing.

I paused, a horrible idea forming in my head—but you know what I say about bad ideas.

I pulled out my phone again and typed in a quick message. “Pack your things.”

“What?” came the reply.

“NOW!”

I grabbed a gym bag out of my closet and began piling clothes into it. Shirts, pants, socks, underwear. It was like I was getting ready to go on the world’s worst vacation. The last thing I took out was the Escher Cube, buried safely at the bottom of my underwear drawer. Keeping my fist wrapped around it, I pressed my ear against my bedroom door. Mom and Dad were still downstairs, laughing at whatever was happening on the TV. Then, moving quietly, I opened the door and crept down the hall.

“Are you ready?” I whispered, opening Ethan’s door and slipping into his room without knocking.

He and Jade jumped in surprise, and I eased the door shut again behind me.

“I…just need another minute,” he said hesitantly, sharing a look with Jade. “What are we—”

“Just do it,” I said.

I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. It hurt too much. But no matter what angle I looked at this problem from, I could only think of one solution. One way to protect the people I loved.

I had to get as far away from them as possible.

“Okay, I think that should be enough,” Ethan said, shutting his suitcase and looking at me. “Now can we know what this is about?”

Instead of answering him, I pulled out the Escher Cube and began to turn it. This was a pattern I had memorized years ago, and used on a weekly—if not daily—basis. The world began to slide around us, left and right, up and down, mimicking the movements I made in the ancient stone Rubik's Cube until…

Reality snapped back into place around us, and McGus toppled backwards out of his chair in surprise.

“WHAT THE F—”

I plastered a fake, but hopefully convincing smile on my face and spread my arms.

“Sleepover time!” I yelled.

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TO BE CONTINUED

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