thrust to the side. “ ‘Here’s the names of the dead and also my hot ass.’ ”
Sloane couldn’t suppress a giggle. It came out so high-pitched, she clapped a hand over her mouth, embarrassed.
“Sloanie Sloanie Macaroni just made a girlie noise,” Albie said, eyebrows raised.
“Don’t you dare call me that,” she said.
“Don’t pretend we haven’t all seen you in those home videos Cameron made,” Esther said. “You may be into this tough-girl-don’t-give-a-fuck thing now, but deep inside you will always be the kid who did a dance to ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in a tutu made of tinfoil.”
Sloane cursed her late brother’s video camera and was about to respond when Matt spoke up. “I found Bert.”
Bert’s real name wasn’t Robert Robertson, of course. He had told them his real one in confidence a few months before his death so they could find him if they lost contact with him. But none of them thought of him as Evan Kowalczyk; to them, he would always be Bert.
They all moved to stand behind Matt and followed the line of his finger to a small name: EVAN KOWALCZYK, all in capital letters. She had no idea how Matt had found it among all the names, all the panels. It was like finding a particular tree in a forest of identical trees. Matt’s hand fell away, and Robert’s name disappeared into the wall again, blurring together with all the others.
All these losses—each one for nothing. A dark lord and his insatiable hunger.
“I wonder what he’d be doing now,” Matt said.
“Probably refusing to enjoy his retirement,” Ines replied.
Sloane turned toward the door before her expression gave her away. She didn’t want to tell them what she had read in the files she had gotten from the FOIA request, hints of a Bert she had never known.
“Let’s go,” Sloane said. “They’re going to start to wonder where we are.”
4
THE INVITATION to the gala was taped to their refrigerator: CELEBRATE TEN YEARS OF PEACE. As if the defeat of the Dark One had brought harmony to the entire world. It hadn’t, of course, but for the United States, at least, it had been a reason to withdraw from everything. A new era of isolationism, the headlines had called it. The reactions had been . . . mixed. One side had celebrated withdrawing troops from other countries but protested pulling out of international peacekeeping organizations. The other side had cheered the closing of borders but resisted the decreased military presence abroad. Regardless of where on the spectrum they fell, everyone had shared the same paranoia. No one knew where the Dark One had come from, which meant he could have come from anywhere. He could have been a friend or a neighbor, a refugee or an immigrant. Even Sloane’s mother had gotten a licensed handgun and practiced at the shooting range once a month, as if that had ever helped anyone against the Dark One, who had made guns collapse from within, like imploding buildings, warping and twisting the metal without even touching it. Sloane couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take ARIS to harness the same power for themselves. If they hadn’t already.
Sloane took her dress out of the closet and hung it on the door. It was a gold-beaded gown that looked like something out of the twenties. It would be heavy on her shoulders, so she didn’t intend to put it on until the last second. On a normal day, she wouldn’t have bothered with anything so fancy, but Sloane loved formal occasions—not that she would have admitted that to anyone. Earlier, she had even hidden in the bathroom to watch one of Esther’s Insta! beauty tutorials for winged eyeliner. If Esther ever found out, Sloane would never live it down.
The unfortunate formfitting nature of the beaded dress meant she had to find the item of clothing she most dreaded in the world: shapewear. The greatest wrangler of women’s minorly imperfect torsos since the corset. The last thing she wanted was to wake up to gossip websites showing increasingly zoomed-in pictures of the bubble of fat around her middle, speculating about the state of her womb. Pregnancy rumors had haunted her as long as she and Matt had been together.
She couldn’t find the shapewear in her underwear drawer or her sock drawer, so she turned to Matt’s armoire. Sometimes it got lost amid the sea of black boxer briefs that he favored. She dug around in the spandex, and her fingers brushed something