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every rule that has been laid out for your own protection and the protection of the Key World.”
    â€œI’m sorry.” I slid lower in my chair. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
    â€œYou never do,” my mom said. “You rush in and trust that your gifts will be enough to get you out of any mess you create.”
    I poked at my bowl. I’d screwed up, but I’d also saved us. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?
    â€œIt was a neat trick,” Monty said. “Getting out of there. You should give her some credit.”
    Gratitude rushed through me. Monty understood.
    â€œShe wouldn’t have needed a trick if she’d followed the rules,” Mom replied. “Addie made it through five years of training and we never once saw this kind of behavior.”
    No, of course not. I’d figured out a long time ago that I couldn’t beat Addie at her own game, so I stopped trying.
    My father added, “Cleaving can’t be handled by one person. The protocol mandates three Cleavers to manage it safely.”
    â€œHogwash,” said Monty. “They send three Cleavers so no one knows who cut the last string. Keeps ’em from feeling too guilty.”
    â€œWhy would someone feel guilty?” asked Addie. “They’re only Echoes.”
    Monty shook his head in disgust.
    â€œA faulty cleaving causes more harm than good,” my father said. “It leaves the Key World weak.”
    There was no greater crime than damaging the Key World. My voice sounded very small when I said, “We can fix it, right? We don’t have to report it?”
    I thought about the stories I’d heard, Walkers stripped of their licenses, forced to live like ordinary people, never again venturing outside the Key World. Walkers who vanished altogether, sent to an oubliette.
    Oubliettes were prisons, hidden behind rumor and speculation. The story was, to contain the worst of our criminals, the Consort had played with the fabric of the multiverse. They’d created worlds no bigger than a jail cell, severing them from the Key World and Echoes except for a single thread. A world with all possibilities eliminated, impossible to escape. No one had ever come back from an oubliette, so no one knew the truth.
    But I’d been reckless, not malicious. I wasn’t even seventeen—surely the Consort wouldn’t want to sentence a teenage girl to lifein a prison world. Even so, I wasn’t eager to test the theory. “Dad, please. We can’t tell the Consort.”
    Regret tempered the firmness in his voice. “We already have.”
    â€œYou’re supposed to be on my side!” I’d expected that kind of betrayal from Addie. But not my parents. Not my dad.
    â€œWe are. A cleaving that big can’t be covered up, and it’s better to admit what you’ve done. Take responsibility for your actions,” he said.
    â€œIt was an accident!”
    â€œThe Consort has rules, Del. If you want to be a Walker, you have to prove you can follow them.” My mom’s frown made it clear she wasn’t willing to bend the rules for me. Addie’s penchant for the straight and narrow was as genetic as our ability to Walk.
    I wanted to remind her it wasn’t rules that had saved our lives today, but the breaking of them. And that I wasn’t going to be an Echo of my sister, no matter where we Walked. I didn’t say any of those things, though, because my mom would never truly hear them.
    Monty had dozed off, crumbs scattered across his cardigan. Addie toyed with her necklace, pretending not to listen. My dad’s hand laced with my mom’s in a silent gesture of support.
    I was on my own.

CHAPTER SIX
    Counterpoint is the combination of two independent melodic lines into a single harmonious relationship.
    â€”Chapter Five, “Composition,”
    An Introduction to Music Theory
    G O BACK TO the part about the