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“Her mom is there now.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    â€œThey don’t know.”
    â€œCan we see her?” Sarah asked.
    â€œI can check with Deena.”
    There was a silence so loud it echoed. Then Haze said, “We don’t want to bother you. Butwe’d really like to go there now.”
    He was looking at the black-and-white picture of Bee so hard that he thought his glasses would shatter.
    Sarah glanced over at him. He looked different to her. Grown-up, suddenly, in spite of his pimples and bitten fingernails. She had a sudden impulse to touch his hand.
    Lew nodded. “I’ll arrange it,” he said.
    Â 
    â€œWe think we know who you are.”
    She opened her eyes. The boy was sitting at her bedside. His hair looked bluish black. Like a crow’s feathers. He wasn’t smiling. What was he doing here? She had been dreaming that she’d had another visitor before, a girl, with the same bluish black glow to her skin, who sang her lullabies. Had it been a dream?
    â€œB-b-bee?”
    â€œIs that my name? What a weird name. I don’t think that’s my name at all.”
    â€œDo you know where you are?” he asked.
    She wrinkled her forehead at him.
    â€œA hospital, Bee.”
    â€œI’m not going. There’s too much steel there.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with steel?”
    â€œI just don’t like it.”
    â€œBee,” he said. “I want you to listen. I’ve been doing some research, and I think I know what’s wrong.”
    â€œWrong. Wrong. Wrong. How do I know right from wrong? I come from a place where it isn’t the same.”
    â€œExactly. I think you’re from someplace else.”
    â€œUnder the ground,” she said. “Where the roots take hold and everything ends but also begins.”
    â€œI think you’re being poisoned.”
    Bee began to say the words with hardly a breath between them. “Bonnie she was and brewed beer in an acorn. Thus spake the lord of the castle. The Queen of Elphane has lost her daughter. A girl in a long green gown with roses for her eyes. We had something to ask of her and now pray tell where has she gone? To perish nimbly among the foxgloves, pretty maid?”
    He put his hand on her wrist. There was a tube going into the vein in her tiny arm.
    â€œIf I’m right, I think you were exchanged at birth. They stole Deena’s real daughter. And now that girl wants to get back. She’ll do anything to get her life back. She’s the doppelganger.”
    â€œWho?” Bee shrieked, thrashing in the bed, trying to sit up. “Who stole her away?”
    A nurse peeked around the partition.
    â€œEverything all right?”
    Bee, quiet now, just stared at her.
    â€œVisiting hours are almost over.” The nurse looked stern.
    He nodded and leaned in closer.
    â€œThey did. You know who they are. Better than I do. You know somewhere inside you. We have to remember. Maybe they can help us stop her.”
    She reached out with her free arm and touched his cheek. There were small red bumps there, as if his body were hurting itself from the inside out. Then she touched his throat where the Adam’s apple protruded roughly. She watched it move up and down under the light graze of her fingers.
    This comforted her, this touching. It was the only thing. But his touch was not for her. He was not hers. She thought of the girlwith the beautiful voice. This boy and this girl were meant to be together and she, the one he called Bee—she was meant to go back somewhere. But where?
    â€œTell me something,” she said. “Tell me something, strange lad with the crow’s hair. Something to help me remember.”
    â€œAnd pleasant is the fairy land,
    But, an eerie tale to tell,
    Ay at the end of seven years,
    We pay a tiend to hell,
    I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
    I’m feard it be mysel.”
    â€œWhat? What’s that?” Bee asked