The Oracle's eyes fixed on me.

"I'll give you two a moment," she said.

Her face slid back into the shadows, leaving behind only water rippling with darkness.

Lily, who had been distracted from her wait for Evan by Imogen's appearance, looked between Imogen and me and seemed to slink back. She held up her phone.

"Evan is almost here," she whispered. "He drove too far. I'll be back."

I heard her footsteps disappear down the sidewalk along the edge of the darkened park. And then it was just the two of us, staring across the empty ground at each other. The gentle burbling of the fountain laced through the air around us.

"She chose you," Imogen said, her voice as dull as her eyes.

My feet moved me toward her before I could think about it.

"Imogen," I said. "Oh my god. Are you okay?"

She didn't blink, just stared at me with that blank expression.

"She chose you," Imogen said again, the slight inflection barely enough to make a dent in her flat monotone.

"So? I don't know what she's talking about," I said. I reached out a hand but didn't dare touch her. "Gen, what's wrong?"

"Not the Oracle," Imogen said. "The Faerie Queen. She chose you."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah."

We stared at each other for a long moment. Her jaw twitched, just once.

"What are you doing here?" I said.

"The Oracle called me," she said.

"Why?" I said.

She blinked, but she looked into the distance as though I might have not been there at all.

"Why did she call you?" I demanded.

She was silent a long moment, and then, with a wave of heat like someone had opened a furnace, her eyes snapped to mine, fully conscious and blazing. I jumped back as though I'd been burned.

"Someone had to choose me," she hissed.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Hot faerie anger rolled off her. I let it engulf me.

"People do that all the time," I said.

"Lucas," she said, and the name tossed off her tongue like it meant nothing. "Yeah, great. I get the Humdrum boy. You get our kingdom."

Her jaw twitched again. I saw her hands in my peripheral vision, clenched into white fists at her sides.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"Are you going to hit me?" I said. "Just because someone picked me over you for once in our lives?"

Imogen Dann had the spoiled little rich girl act down to a science.

"You're lucky if I don't," she said.

"I don't care if you do," I said.

I felt my own anger rise off my skin like scalding steam. Her magic sparked gold outside the frame of my glasses. It sputtered and showered down on us with a feeling like hot pinpricks.

"The world isn't about you, Imogen."

"You've made that perfectly clear," she said.

"I've made that clear? I've made that clear?"

I could hear my voice rising into hysterics, but I couldn't stop it. I wanted to scream into her face just to make her hear me. Suddenly, it didn't matter that the Oracle was watching.

"I have lived in your shadow since we were nine," I said. "When Queen Amani asked me, I said no, because I've had the spotlight so little that I don't even know what to do with it. And I'm the one with the problem?"

"I don't care about the Faerie Queen," Imogen said.

A laugh barked up from my throat. She was about to knock me over with the worst spell in her arsenal, judging from the way the magic gathered around her. I threw my hands up and threw out a pulsing white shield. It was only visible outside my glasses, leaving the center of my vision as two dark rectangles framing Imogen's flushed face.

"You just care that she didn't see how special and magical and sparkly you are first," I said.

Imogen's lip trembled, her fury turning her face into a mask with hot red cheeks.

"You lied to me," she said.

"Now you know how it feels," I said.

"You lied to me first," she said.

I opened my mouth to tell her she was crazy and needed to get off her damn high horse. And then I remembered.

She was right.

I silently counted back how many months it had been in my head. With each number, my stomach got a little heavier until I couldn't quite breathe.

The shield around my body rippled and dispersed, white membrane pulling apart and dissolving into nothing.

"You lied to me," Imogen whispered.

There was nothing to say, so I didn't try. I just stared at her.

"I thought you were being weird," she said. "And I thought it was just your parents freaking you out. And then everything happened with Lucas and it was way too fast." She took a step toward me. "You know how I am with guys, Olivia." As if it was my fault, as if I should have seen her coming. "And I tried to tell you, I swear to Titania. But then you flipped out at me and I didn't know what to do. You wouldn't freaking text me. You've never been mad enough that you wouldn't text me."

Any reply I might have made was a ball in my throat.

Had I really not told her?

I remembered thinking that it was complicated, and that Amani had asked for privacy.

"She told me not to tell anyone," I said, but my voice was even weaker than my words.

Yes, Amani had asked for secrecy. But now, staring at Imogen, it hit me as if all the cold water from the Oracle's Fountain was crashing over my head at once: She hadn't meant this. I could have at least asked.

I cleared my throat and tried again. The words struggled to get out.

"I didn't want you to be disappointed in me for saying no," I said.

For some reason, this truth was harder to admit than the comfortable excuses I'd given myself for months. Everyone was always disappointed in me. Adding Imogen to that list would have made me worse than nothing.

"And then the Oracle told me," Imogen said, like I hadn't spoken. "I stopped at this one after work one day. I wanted to talk to her about you, because you are the one person who is important enough that I would bother the goddamned freaking Oracle over you not talking to me."

Her words sounded almost as strangled as mine. And while her face seemed still and under control, I saw her jaw twitch, and I saw her eyes flinch. She could pretend not to feel it, but I knew her better than that.

I knew us better than that.

"I tried to talk to you," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "At my sister's wedding, which you were not there for, which you did not help me with. You knew how stressed out I was about that wedding, Olivia. You knew that. And so you just skipped all the time leading up to it and showed up in time for cake."

"I came to apologize," I said.

She words cut over me. "So I went to the Oracle to ask about you," she said. "And she said you were probably just stressed because of Queen Amani. And I asked her what she was talking about, and she said she'd assumed you'd told me. Even the Oracle made that mistake. Even the Oracle assumed you would tell me about something like that."

Neither of us could keep the tears from rising. We stood there staring at each other like a bunch of weepy babies, and I fought the water back into my eyes.

The Oracle, Lily the ocean princess, Queen Amani's palace hidden behind Oregon's tallest waterfall—there was too much water everywhere, too many glimmering waves threatening to crash over me. I fought to breathe. But there was no breathing, and there was no thinking straight. There was just me, messing up.

I bit the inside of my cheek. The pain gave me something to focus on, and I forced myself to take a big enough breath to squeeze out the words.

"I'm so sorry," I said.

Imogen looked up at the trees shifting darkly above us, then swallowed and looked back down at me.

"I don't care," she said.

I wrestled with my face, trying to keep it from crumpling. And then my head jerked up, and Imogen's snapped to the side, because there were footsteps running toward us. I bit hard on the inside of my cheek and waited for whatever Glimmer was running to catch the Oracle while she was still awake for midnight. Let them have the Oracle and her horrible advice. I was done.

But it wasn't a Glimmer. It was someone who shouldn't have been there at all.

Lucas jogged into sight, his hair flopping and his figure looking even lankier than usual as he ran. He saw us and ran down the steps, relief all over his face.

"I'm so glad I found you," he gasped. He grabbed Imogen by the shoulders. "What do you mean, Have a good life?"

She wouldn't meet his eyes. Her face looked too skinny. I wondered if she'd been eating. She dieted too much when she was stressed.

"I meant it," Imogen said. Her gaze flickered to me for the briefest second before landing back on him. "You're a good guy. You deserve to have a good life."

"What do you think you're going to do?" he said. "You're scaring me. Stop scaring me."

"I'm not suicidal," she said, voice dull again. "I'm just done."

"Done with what?"

I edged away. This felt too private.

"Done," she said. "With us, with you, with school, with my 'normal' life. Normal is shit. You can have normal." She looked suddenly up at him, her gaze hot again. "I'm sick of that. I'm finished."

Lucas pulled her close, crushing her in a hug that she didn't return.

"Don't be done," he said, and he sounded way too vulnerable and upset. I wanted to comfort him but knew that would only make it worse. I stepped back again.

He looked over at me. An edge of confusion entered and then left his expression.

"Hi, Olivia," he said.

I nodded. I didn't trust myself to speak.

He turned back to Imogen. "What's going on?" he said. "Come on. You can talk to me."

She laughed, totally without humor. "I can not talk to you," she said. "Good Titania, the levels on which I cannot talk to you make my head spin."

His eyebrows drew up as though they were trying to recoil and protect themselves. He held her at arm's length and tried to look into her evasive eyes.

"Could you maybe just try?"

"No," she said loudly, staring at him as though trying to explain something to a slow toddler. "It's illegal for me to talk to you, Lucas."

"How are you here?" I said. The Oracle's Fountain was alive. No Humdrum should have been able to step onto this block.

He shrugged one shoulder. "I drove," he said. "My mom's car."

It wasn't what I'd meant, but I couldn't explain what I'd meant. Especially not in front of the Oracle. Imogen was right. It was all kinds of not permitted. I ran a hand all over my face. Tension dispersed and tingled all across my skin.

Imogen carefully, firmly, pulled Lucas' hands off her shoulders.

"But you know what?" she said. "Screw it. Screw all the secrets."

She dropped his hands to his sides and turned back to me. She stared at me, eyes harsh in the darkness, and opened her mouth. But she couldn't seem find anything to say, because I wasn't worth the effort. She closed it again and shook her head if she could brush me off like an annoying fly.

She straightened her shoulders and walked toward the Oracle's Fountain, where the water rippled quiet and black.

"I'm ready," she announced.

I didn't even have time to yell before the black curtain parted. Instead of revealing the Oracle's face, it opened onto a long dark tunnel that disappeared into the heart of the fountain.

I couldn't move quickly enough. Before I could force my feet to move, or even force myself to realize what was happening, Imogen had stepped into the pool. She turned to look over her shoulder. Our eyes met for a long, silent second. Her blush-blond hair glinted in the soft reaches of the streetlamp and her eyes flashed their reflection.

And then she was gone.

I ran forward, hand outstretched, as the water closed over her with a roar.

The scream that hadn't been able to claw its way up my throat finally erupted into the night. I threw myself into the icy fountain and clawed at the place she'd disappeared. Solid stone met my hand behind the icy curtain.

The Fountain slept, and Imogen was gone.