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our situation might have hit a new low. At the moment, I was actually more concerned about Wisty, whose eyes were scarily glazing over.
    The Matron swiveled her chair away from us to grab a couple of thick files off the desk behind her. A greasy, heavy ponytail hung down the back of her white nurse’s uniform like some enormous piece of seaweed or a dead lake eel.
    “Yes, ma’am,” said the guard. “‘Maggots’ is exactly right, only maybe a little too kind, if you ask me.”
    “I
didn’t!
” snapped the Matron. The guard cowered and did his impression of a dashboard-mounted bobblehead in a dune buggy.
    Then she heaved herself to her massive feet with a weary grunt. “You know why you’re here, instead of some namby-pamby jail?” she asked.
    “No, sir,” I said, clearing my throat.
    “Funny boy.” Her eyes narrowed to gleaming slits. “This is a
dangerous
place,” she said. “For
dangerous
criminals. But keep in mind that your cheap tricks won’t work in here, my pretties!”
    Did she actually just call us “my pretties”? Did I hear her right?
Maybe there
was
a reason I was in a psychiatric hospital.
    “The New Order’s had this place spellproofed.” She gloated, and then her expression changed and she began muttering to herself. “I don’t know what they think I’m going to do with any more of this filth, though.”
    The Matron led us down the hallway to a thick wooden door with a wire-glassed window. She unlocked it, and the guards very roughly pushed us inside. They removed our chains and tossed our meager belongings—one drumstick and one empty book—on the floor behind us.
    “Welcome to death row,” she said as she slammed the door shut and locked us inside.

Wisty
    “A LITTLE CREEPY, huh?” I said, trying to make it sound like this place wasn’t much worse than a haunted mansion at a kiddie theme park.
    “Uh, not as creepy as
you,
” said Whit. “I hate to break this to you, sis, but… um, you’re glowing.”
    Glowing?
Does not compute.
Does not compute.
    “Huh?” I said, deadpan. “What do you mean?”
    “What part of ‘you’re glowing’ do you not understand?” he asked.
    “The part where I’m glowing,” I said. “How could—”
    I looked down and saw that my skin, my clothes, the air about an inch around my body, were suffused with a thin, faint, greenish light—enough to see by.
    “Have you been playing in toxic waste lately?” Whit made an unfunny.
    I held my shaking hand out and examined it. It started to get so bright I had to turn away. The whole room lit up—the dark, grime-filled crevices, the piles of medical waste, the bedpans, the holes in the baseboard that could easily accommodate rats.
    “Ugh.” Whit winced. “Do me a favor and hit the dimmer switch.”
    “I don’t know if I can,” I said, my voice cracking a little.
    Except for my flighty flower-power first name, I’d mostly escaped freakishness in my life. Didn’t have to wear hideous hand-me-down clothes from an older sister. Never the last one picked for a team in gym class. Never called four eyes, metal mouth, or fatty. Now I was an official freak, three times over. A witchy flamethrowing radio-active freak.
    That’s not great news for a fifteen-year-old, let me tell you.
    I suddenly welled up with tears, desperately needing my parents. “Mom? Dad?” I whimpered. The echo of their names hit my ears cruelly.
    Whit got that annoyingly worried look on his face again. “Wisty…”
    “Shh,” I hissed, crying now. “Mom… told me about
everything,
Whit. She told me about the birds and the bees, like, way before any of my other friends’ parents did. How she and Dad fell in love—very romantic. And Dad—he told me about his most embarrassing moments in school. And how proud he was of you, and me, and… and he was never afraid to say ‘I love you’ like the other dads.” I sucked in a tortured breath. “But
why
didn’t they tell me about all of
this?
”
    Whit came close and