“You didn’t kiss her,” Cassie said. I could see her irritated fashion-model face in the light of her glowbean necklace. It was night, I’d asked her to the picnic table. “You had one job, Owen.”

  “She left. And she’s just a little out of my league, don’t you think?”

  “Onnne jo-o-o-b,” she sneered, quietly, so she wouldn’t wake Schmendrick, who was in a sort of front-facing backpack that allowed Cassie to carry her around and hug her whenever either of them needed it. Currently Schmendrick was zonked out, snoring in tiny snorts, buried in her mobile Cassie Nest.

  I thought it was adorable; it was decorated with purple fish and hearts, like the other items Schmendrick wore now and then. “Did you make that for her? It’s great.”

  She shifted carefully on the picnic table bench. “Don’t you try to change the subject. Schmen was like: why do you want him to bite her? I was like; it’s not a bite, sweetie, and he probably won’t because he’s a fool like Gary says, and she was like, I can bite her for you because I love you.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh, because she mimicked Schmendrick’s voice perfectly. “Exactly when are you going to start fitting in around here, Cassie?”

  She looked away, fighting a grin. “Shut up.” She stroked the little stretch of Schmendrick’s head that was visible.

  “She’s been teaching me magic.”

  “Yeah. She says I can’t learn because I don’t have a soul.” Her face wrinkled in annoyance. “I’m just meat but she loves me.”

  “She sure does.” I brought out the proximal phalanges. “Remember these?”

  “Finger bones. Mine. His.” She picked them up from the picnic table. “And you see sparks of us in them.”

  “Yes, it’s Harrigan’s mojo. I have this,” and I took the Spare Owen femur from the bench and set it on the table. “It had that spark in there. It was from an earlier version of me.”

  “Nice. Ever see Poltergeist, the original? That pool was full of actual dead people, real bones.” She frowned. “Imagine that. Living your whole life, just to end up as a body. In someone else’s movie. Just a body.”

  She was saying something, and I wasn’t getting it. “Scary movies are too much like real life for me. This is Harrigan’s thing he does; he has little tags in there, they tie in to his broken garbage computer, part of his way he brings people to life.”

  She raised her eyes. “Had. You said this leg bone had a spark in it. A tag.”

  “I used some of the tricks Schmendrick taught me. I … absorbed the tag. I remembered what happened.” I swallowed. “To the me that it belonged to.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  She looked at me, then at the finger bones. She stroked Schmendrick, hugged her.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I asked you to come out here and look at my collection of Human bones!”

  She grimaced, looked at the stars, back at me. “Maybe a little creepy.”

  “Don’t tell Schmendrick, she’ll kill me.” I looked at my hands, my arms, coated with green and red alien markings. They never stopped moving. “Holy crap, I’m so bizarre. I forget. Like a monster. Oh man, I’m so sorry…”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She smiled, and she was pretty, and I could see what Armand saw. A nice girl, a silly girl, one with a pregnant alien strapped to her belly. “I’m delighted you invited me to this soiree. Now I can use bones from a dead version of myself as fidget spinners.”

  “Not weird at all.”

  “Heavens no.” Cassie stroked Schmendrick’s long head. “I saw your bomb. You don’t want to kill any of us. The Campers, I mean…but I could deliver it myself. I’m a double agent. I could just do it, go over there, say hi, and …”

  “You’re one of my guys. No.”

  “You’re one of MY guys.”

  “No. Schmendrick would never forgive me, Cassie.”

  She smirked. “Crap. You checkmated me.”

  We watched one another in silence. Schmendrick snorted and snored more loudly.

  “I’m hesitant to ask, but…any urge to sleepwalk?”

  “Not even a little. Schmen’s guys keep an eye on me at all damn times. Following me to the bathroom, always asking me about it.” She took a deep breath. “Will I still be me? How does it work?”

  “This is Cassie Nillson Iteration 43. I can see, when I look at you, that you’re number 44. I’m pretty sure you’ll still be you, with another bit of memory you can access.”

  “Are you still you?”

  I nodded. “I’d been upstairs, talking with Ghost Sean about his experiences, and he was really down on Human people. Talking animals, he said.”

  “Sean said that? Just a little ironic, don’t you think?”

  “It made me think about him remembering past versions of himself. Past iterations. So I came down here, I grabbed it, with Magic like Schmendrick uses. I just…popped it in like a McNugget. And then I could.” I swallowed. “I could see what that Owen saw.”

  She inspected the finger bones on the table, the same way Mandy had checked out the Bomb. “What did you remember?”

  I flushed a little. “Ah…I died in a fight. Sean killed me, beat me up until I bled out. But I died biting out his throat, and that killed him. I remember that Owen thinking Ha, that’ll learn ya! as he died.”

  Her eyes were wide. “Think you proved Sean wrong about the Humans-are-just-animals thing?”

  “Oh, I’m never telling him.”

  “He already knows, doesn’t he?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. So…if you want, I can …” I trailed off, looking at the bones, at her.

  She picked them up again. Schmendrick started whistling her snores through her long nose.

  “Do it,” Cassie finally said. “And … give me Armand’s too, if you can.”

  It turned out that I could.