If he’d been asked ten minutes ago how he’d react if the Iridescences knocked on the door, Kai would have seen himself flying down and spitting in their eyes, secure in the knowledge that he had Colwyn and his nieces backing him up.  But when it actually happened, it was like running into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour.  The only reasonable reaction- the only possible reaction- was to fly away and hide in the furthest, darkest corner of the house.

He just couldn’t stop shaking.

It couldn’t be right for them to be in Dovecote Gardens.  Nothing good could come from them being here.

Kai was in a house that contained the Iridescences.  He’d been in a house that contained the Iridescences for most of the last fifteen years, but this time it felt like the end of the whole damn world.  And so much for spitting in their eye- one look at them had been like gazing into the eye of a massive tornado.  Kai couldn’t stop them from whatever they were about to do any more than he could stop the wind from blowing.

But the Iridescences were right here in Dovecote Gardens.  Colwyn wasn’t actually here, and Jeanette didn’t know what she was dealing with.  He had to do something.

He was small, but not too small to light a match, if he could find one.  If he could move.  If he could just stop shaking.

(To be continued)

At the moth’s instruction (and how it pained him to even think those words), Onrey lifted up the wicker horse’s head from the debris on the ground, and hung it back on the wall.  The moth fluttered up to sit on the nose.  “I think this is how they said to do it…  Alas, young queen, passing by / If this your mother knew / Her heart would break in two.”

Those words resonated with Onrey more than he would have liked.  If his own family knew what had happened since he set out, that he’d been beaten in a fight and forced to rely on the aid of something as pathetically small as this moth, what would they say?  But he had no time to dwell on it, because as soon as the words were out, the horse’s mouth began to move. 

The eyes- just glass a moment ago, but now alive- fixed on the moth, and a gasp came out of the wooden mouth.  “You’re Kai Domino, aren’t you?”  Onrey had never heard Colwyn Ballantine’s voice before, but he knew immediately that he was hearing it now.

“I am, yes,” said the moth, “I’m sorry about…”

Onrey gathered up the tattered remains of his confidence, and cleared his throat.  “I’m Onrey Tavin, and we have matters to discuss.”

The horse- Ballantine- went quiet for a moment, and seemed to be sizing him up.  “Alright,” he said eventually, “But first, do either of you know where my nieces are?”

“They’re fine,” said the moth, “Or they were last time I saw them, anyway.  As far as I know, they’re still on their way to Opal Hill.”

“Well, that’s something.  Has the house been broken into?  I know the horse’s head was knocked off the wall somehow…”

“There was a guy…”  The moth made an irritating whine to indicate that he was uncertain.  “He said he was the girls’ dad?  He broke the lock and threw a bunch of furniture around, looking for…”

Onrey was not going to leave it to the moth to tell the story of his humiliation.  “His name was Joe Warbeck, and he beat me half to death for questioning his manners.”  He practically spat the words.  “Friend of yours?”

The moth eyed him nervously, then turned back to Ballantine.  “Actually, I should probably just let this guy tell it.”

Ballantine didn’t voice any objection, so Onrey got straight to the point.  “Your nieces trespassed on my family’s property and told a pack of lies in order to escape.  And when I came here to ask for an explanation, I was set upon by this Joe Warbeck.”  He stared into the horse’s glass eyes, waiting to see how he responded.

“I see.  Where is he now?”  No hint of an apology.  Onrey didn’t know why he was still surprised, at this point.

The moth spoke right across him.  “We don’t know.  He ran away after knocking this guy out.”

Once again, Onrey restrained himself from crushing the loathsome little insect between his fingers.  “Mr Ballantine, I came here today because our two families should have spoken face-to-face a long time ago.  We demand that you restore the use of the paths to us.”

Ballantine blinked.  “What?”

“You seem to feel that only you and your family deserve the right to travel from place to place.  Why should that be?  Why should the rest of us have to pass through Dovecote Gardens just to communicate?  Is it truly just so you can grow fat off the profits?”

Ballantine shook his head.  “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.  Are you saying that you think…?”

A knock at the door interrupted them.  Onrey had closed it before picking up the horse’s head, but the thing was still barely hanging on its hinges.  Even so, somebody felt the need to knock.

“Oh,” said Ballantine, “I don’t suppose one of you could answer that?”

Onrey spluttered.  “I’m not your doorman!”

The moth flew up and tsked at him.  “Alright, you drama queen, I’ll do it.”

Onrey would have liked to have seen how the moth planned to open a door that was a thousand times his size, but, after a moment’s reflection, he decided to walk across the hallway and open it himself.  It was not done to wait around while others did things for you.

He opened the door to see one of Colwyn’s nieces- the one with the long hair, the one who’d lied to his father’s face when he’d asked them to catch the rocfinch- flanked by two tall, silver beings whose heads looked as if they were topped with tree-branches.  Opal Hill, he remembered from his father’s notes.  Each of these people was actually five or six siblings combined.

Before he could say anything- a greeting to the Opal Hill folk, an admonition to the girl- Onrey heard a voice from behind him.  “Jeanette?  Is that you?”

The girl’s face lit up.  “Colwyn!”  And she strode past Onrey as though he wasn’t even there, straight up to the horse’s head on the wall.  Her companions stayed where they were, as if rendered speechless by her behaviour.  “Right,” she told her uncle, “Before we say anything else, tell the Finery family where you are right now.”

“Hm?”  Ballantine glanced over at the Opal Hill folk in the doorway.  “Oh, I see.  I’m in the Iridescence family’s attic.  They’ve been keeping me here for two or three days.”

Onrey blinked.  That certainly changed things. 

“See?” said the girl Jeanette, looking over at her friends, “What did I tell you?”

One of the silver beings said, in a voice as deliberate as it was furious, “What on Earth is going on here?”

“Are you saying that’s Colwyn Ballantine’s voice?” asked the other.

“I am saying that!” said the girl Jeanette, with an impudent grin.

“Where’s the evidence?” demanded the furious silver being, “The pictures of your brother?”

“Oh, right.”  The grin widened.  “I don’t actually have a brother.  I just made that up so you’d let me into your house.”

The silver being looked about to say something, but had to stop for breath on the way.  So Onrey spoke instead.  “Quite good at lying, aren’t we?”

If he’d been expecting shame, then he was disappointed.  “Pretty decent, yeah.”

The other silver being- the one who’d asked about the horse’s head- tapped their fingers on the doorframe.  “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what…”

They went silent, and looked up.  A huge, dark shadow had descended over the entire house.

(To be continued)

The space behind the door was pale, half-finished, and smelled of sand, and as they walked through it, Rube talked continuously so that she wouldn’t panic.  (She almost thought, “so that Sally wouldn’t panic,” but then she decided to be honest with herself.)

“I don’t think they’ll notice we’re gone unless someone points it out,” she told Sally, “Think about it- they know the three of us are sisters.  And they can… merge with their siblings.”  They rounded a corner.  “And they probably know that humans can’t, but if no-one reminds them, their minds will just fill in what they expect to see, right?”

“Right,” said Sally, with a look on her face as if she was humouring a lunatic.

“It’s like that thing where you try to read a paragraph, and all of the words have the first and last letter in the right place, but the rest of the letters are mixed up, but you can read it and understand it anyway.  You see what you expect to see.  That’s why…”

She broke off.  Up ahead of them, in the inside wall, was a door.  It was hanging slightly ajar.

“We need to be quiet when we walk past,” Rube told Sally, nodding towards it.

Sally shook her head.  “I don’t think it goes back into the living room…”

She was right.  The door looked as if it had warped and swelled over the years s that it could no longer close properly, and as they got closer Rube could see through the gap.  It looked like there was a set of steps.  They went down rather than up, but they went somewhere.

Rube opened the door fully, and glanced at Sally for confirmation on what they were going to do.  She didn’t really need to, though.  They hadn’t come this far not to check everything out.

So they descended into the Iridescences’ basement, Rube fighting every instinct that told her what a bad idea it was.  She couldn’t even see what was down there.  A beige curtain, made out of some kind of thick, heavy material, hung over the bottom of the stairs.  When Rube touched it so she could move it aside, it had a grubby, greasy feel to it, as if it had been there gathering dust for decades on end.

On the other side was a hallway, and Rube was unnerved by how featureless it was.  The walls, in the same shade of grey as the scuffed tile on the floor, looked as if they had been made out of the same cardboard as cheap egg cartons, all rough and knobbled, looking as if it would fall apart if it got even slightly damp.  There was light, enough to see everything clearly, but no matter how much they looked around, they couldn’t find the source of it.  No bulbs, no windows, no anything.

At the end of the hallway, there was a bend that led into another.  And halfway down that hallway, jutting out of the wall, was a huge skeleton.

Sally was the one who screamed first, which at least meant that Rube felt less embarrassed later.  It was understandable, though- that thing had practically leapt out at them.  It towered over them, taking up half the hallway, its fangs and empty black eye sockets reminding Rube of that close-up photo of a spider in her old Biology textbook.

Sally, her hands still clutched in front of her chest, let out a sheepish laugh.  “Do you think it’s an elephant?”

“Maybe?” said Rube, “Or a mammoth?”  She eyed the skeleton warily.  They were in a new place, after all, and they didn’t know all the rules yet.  Rube couldn’t be completely certain that the skeleton wouldn’t suddenly roar into life.  “But what’s it doing…”

She broke off.  She’d heard something.

There were footsteps coming towards them.  Rube and Sally turned to the other end of the hallway, beyond the skeleton, just in time to see someone put her head around the corner.  A girl about Rube’s age, with hair the same shade of blue as her skin.

(To be continued)

By the time the door clicked open, Sally felt as if she’d been waiting in there for hours.  She probably hadn’t.  It was just that worry tended to stretch time out as far as it could go, especially when there wasn’t anything else to do.

Sally had hoped that she’d open the door and immediately find a staircase leading to the attic, but instead she found… well, the inside of a wall.  A thin, uneven-looking corridor that seemed to stretch most of the way around the outside of the house.  Not that Sally had seen all of it,.  She’d decided to duck round the first corner and wait there, so that if the Iridescences followed her in, they wouldn’t catch her straight away.

Not long after that, Sally realised something unpleasant: she didn’t know whether or not her sisters knew where she’d gone.

They probably did.  Even if Jeanette had been too absorbed in her story to notice Sally leaving, Rube definitely would have.  Mum had told Rube that she was in charge, and when you said that to someone like Rube, they took it seriously.  It became a massive, crushing weight of a responsibility.  Rube definitely wouldn’t have let Sally disappear without checking where she was going.  She’d have known.

But Sally didn’t know for sure.  She hadn’t checked.

When Sally heard the door open, she instantly stuck her head around the corner (completely blowing her cover if it turned out to be one of the Iridescences, but at least she’d still have a head start).  It was OK.  It was Rube.

Sally mouthed her name (she didn’t know how much the Iridescences would be abe to hear from outside, and she didn’t want to risk it) and beckoned her over.  Rube gave her a brilliant smile and ran up to meet her.

“I am so sorry!” she whispered as soon as she got there, “I had to wait for Jeanette to get them to go past the door…”

Sally waved this aside (though it did make her feel better to know that she might have actually been waiting a long time).  “Did Jeanette see which way you went?”

“Yes.  We didn’t talk, but…”  Rube stopped, held up a finger, and bent over with her hands on her knees, breathing heavily.

As she waited for Rube to talk again, Sally looked down the long corridor, trying to see if she could spot anything down at the far end, where she hadn’t been yet.  If they followed it long enough, they’d find the steps to the attic.  Because they had to.  Sally wouldn’t accept anything less.

(To be continued)

“First of all, his name’s not really Kai Domino,” said Jeanette, “He’s called Michael Warbeck, and he’s our brother.”

The Iridescences sat on the sofa, completely dumbstruck.  For some reason, they weren’t in their silver tree form- instead, they were five separate people in various shades of blue and purple.  The Finery family had stayed a tree.  Maybe they had to when they were at work.

“I’ve known that him and Colwyn were up to something for a while,” continued Jeanette.  Sally had never known that Jeanette was so great at lying.  She didn’t know if she was making it up as she went along, or if she’d been rehearsing it the whole journey here, but she hoped she could keep it up.

“Well,” said one of the Iridescences, a thin royal-blue woman with curly hair piled up on her head, “I suppose our only question is whether or not we can believe any allegations from such a family.”

One of her brothers turned to her.  Turned on her, Sally thought.  “We’ve known Ballantine was no good from the start.  What more do you want?”

“An explanation for how these girls decided to sell out their family so easily?”

“Some family.  They’re doing us a favour, Pin.”

Sally looked up at the ceiling.  It was flat.  The whole house was designed as one big room, with stairs and decking around the edge of the walls making up the second floor.  The room tapered up like a rocketship, but the ceiling was flat.  Even though, from the outside, there had been that little bump on the roof.

From his prison?  In, what, the Iridescence family’s attic? 

Probably, thought Sally.

“I didn’t want to sell them out,” said Jeanette, trying to look anguished, “I just saw how their behaviour was getting out of hand, and…  Well, you’d be doing us a favour by helping us stop them, to be honest.”

So, there was an attic up there, somewhere.  But how were you meant to get there?  The only stairs Sally could see led up to the decking, which was only about halfway to the ceiling.  Maybe there were more stairs behind some of those screens up there? Or… wait. There had been something weird next to the front door, hadn’t there?

Sally looked to her right, to see the door they’d come in through.  There was another one in the same wall, maybe ten metres away from it.  But Sally remembered what the front of the house looked like, and there definitely hadn’t been another door on the outside.  The only place that door could lead was inside the wall.

The man who’d spoken before turned to the Finerys and said something aggressive and triumphant in their language.  Like, I hope you’re listening to this.  The Finerys gave a skeptical hum.

Nobody was looking at Sally.  Inch by inch, she slid to the edge of the sofa they were on and dropped to the ground.  Nobody saw.  They were all focused on Jeanette, who said, “The only problem is, we don’t know where either of them are right now.”

One of the Iridescences- a thin mauve woman- made a strange honking sound.  It took Sally a few seconds to realise it had been a laugh.  “Not much use then, are you?”

Sally shuffled sideways so that a big houseplant blocked her from everyone else’s view.

“Maybe not.”  Jeanette looked down at the floor, doing her best to seem humble.  “But we could do with your help.”

Another honking sound.  “Right!  And we’ve just been sitting here doing nothing, waiting to help you!”

Jeanette rewarded this with her very best cringe.

Sally moved through the room on her knees, trying to hide behind everything she could.  Jeanette was doing a good job of commanding everyone’s attention, but she couldn’t rely just on that.  You never knew when people would get bored.

The curly-haired Iridescence sister cut across them.  “You said you could prove that Colwyn was lying.  How can you prove it?”

Sally had reached the wall.  The door was just a little way down from where she was.  And as she looked at the area around it, she saw a hook on the back of a nearby bookcase, with a small key hanging on it.

“All you need to do is point me in the direction of some of the people who think they know Kai Domino,” said Jeanette, “I bet they shut up pretty fast when I show them some of Michael’s baby pictures.”

Sally eased the key off the hook, pinched between her thumb and ring finger.  If it made a noise, Jeanette would probably drown it out, but she still didn’t want to risk it.

The curly-haired woman snorted.  “No-one knows Kai Domino.   They’ve got a lot to say about him, but they’ve never actually met him.  Funny, that!”

Sally turned the key in the lock.  She’d worried that it might make that clunking sound that old locks did sometimes, but it didn’t.  Not so loud that they could hear it over there, anyway.

“Pin, shut it.   Where are those pictures?”

“Back at the house.  Dovecote Gardens.  You can come back with me, if you like, and then you can choose which ones I bring.”

Sally opened the door and slipped inside.

(To be continued)

After what seemed like hours, Joe Warbeck reached the top of the stairs.  The whole time, his surroundings hadn’t changed at all- smooth rock walls with circular lights every six feet or so.  And no hint at all of what he was actually heading towards.

It was funny to think of all this being on Colwyn’s property.  To be perfectly honest, Joe had never got to know him that well.  For years, Jackie had tried to make them be best friends, but Colwyn had always been standoffish.  One of those guys who was intimidated by people who told the truth.  He’d always come across as a spoilt rich boy, but Joe had never thought he’d be crazy enough to try and drill a tunnel into a mountain, like he was a Bond villain trying to build an underground lair. 

At the top there was a sign, at least.  It was pinned to the wall directly in front of the stairs, between two sets of double-doors.  The left side of the sign was in Chinese or something, but the right side read:

_{Underhill Towers}

_{First Floor:  Flats 101 – 110}

_{Second Floor:  Shops}

_{Third Floor:  Garden Centre}

_{Fourth Floor:  Flats 120-130…}

Joe laughed out loud.  What was this?  Flats, shops…  And in a mountain?  Was this Colwyn’s idea of a development project?  Was he trying to set up his own version of fucking Disneyland?  Where had he got the money for this?  He must have been in debt up to his eyeballs- even Jackie’s relatives didn’t have this kind of cash to throw around.  Whatever Colwyn had done to get all this probably hadn’t even been legal.

Joe had to go up and see this.  Maybe he could even take some photos.  The big, empty vanity project in the middle of public land… the papers would go wild about that.  Compared to that, the guy back at the house was nothing.

He opened up one of the doors, and saw, as he’d expected, another set of stairs.  He just about jumped them two at a time, he was so keen to get up there.  On the second landing, there was a door that led to a corridor with big windows on one side and a row of doors on the other.  He tried a couple of the doors, but they were locked.  Never mind.  The shops were on the next floor up, he remembered.

Halfway up the stairs, something unexpected happened- Joe started to hear voices.  There were actual people up there!  Who’d have thought?  So, either Colwyn had actually managed to sucker some people into moving in, or his creditors were up there keeping an eye on the place.  Either way, it sounded like a lot of them.  This would be interesting.

It was an actual shopping centre.  A real one, like they had in every high street in the country.  Though, saying that, every single shop name was in gobbledegook again, and the people walking by were some of the ugliest he’d ever seen.  Protruding teeth, sunken eyes, not a chin in sight… the kind of people who looked like they had one set of great-grandparents each.  Maybe Colwyn’s project wasn’t setting up his own Disneyland, but breeding a whole village of mutant mountain people.

Joe went into a newsagent… or at least, that’s what it looked like.  Newspapers near the front, anyway.  He took a look at the front pages, but obviously they weren’t in English.  Nobody he recognised in the pictures, anyway.  There wasn’t a queue at the moment, so he could go right up to the cashiers and get an idea of what this place was actually about.

They weren’t any prettier than the rest of the mob.  A man who looked as if he’d never been out in daylight, and a woman with hair so thin and lank that it was practically see-through.  Joe walked up and tapped on the desk.  “Alright?”

The cashiers looked at each other, and then the woman did her best to give him a smile through those teeth of hers.  “Good evening!  How can we help you?”

“Well, you can tell me what this place actually is, for a start.”  He looked from one to the other.  “Come on.  What’s he up to?”

“Who?” asked the woman.

(“It’s a newsagent,” mumbled her friend.)

 Joe laughed.  “Who else would I be talking about?  Colwyn!”

The woman blinked at him.  “Colwyn Ballantine?  From Dovecote Gardens?”

 “For God’s sake…  Yes!  Him!”

The two of them looked at each other again.  It was as if they couldn’t do anything without checking in with each other every thirty seconds.  Then the man cleared his throat.  “Um, we don’t know much about him, I’m afraid.  There’s an Information Centre on the seventh floor- they might…”

 Joe laughed, and shook his head.  “You don’t know your own landlord?  Jesus.”

The cashiers frowned.  Clearly, Joe had spoken out of turn.  Hadn’t he seen that expression a million times when he was married to Jackie?  The man leaned forward.  “Look, I don’t know what Colwyn’s been telling you, but you’ve got completely the wrong idea.  He’s not…”

“Oh, come on!”

“Look, I know you two are probably friends and everything, but…”

Joe nearly jumped backwards in shock.  “We’re not friends!  Do I look like I’d be friends with somebody like him?”  The assumptions people made.  Joe didn’t think Colwyn had any friends.  Too keen on himself to have room for anyone else.  “Look, call him what you like- I just want to know what he thinks he’s doing with this place.  Because if he thinks…”

All at once, Joe stopped.  He’d just seen something move in the back of the shop.

He hadn’t taken a proper look in that direction before, but now that he did, he saw that there was no back wall where you’d expect it to be.  There were a few rows of stalls, and then it seemed to open up into a much bigger space.

Joe went a bit closer, and saw that there was a kind of balcony at the end there.  Beyond it was a kind of scaled-up version of the newsagent- floor about fifty feet below, news stands the size of car parks, papers you could use to keep the rain off an entire building.  And moving around the aisles, as casual as can be…

They were…

There was a word that Joe didn’t want to use.  Because it was impossible.  He was dreaming.  This was all a big joke.  There was no way that…

He was back at the front of the shop before he’d even noticed himself running.  He’d knocked over one of the magazine stands on his way there.  “What the fuck are you keeping back there?!” he screamed at the cashiers.

They didn’t look at each other this time.  Instead, they just stared at him as if he was mad.  “That’s the Dahut section,” the woman explained slowly, as if she was speaking to a child, “If you don’t want to go in there, it’s fine.  There’s a till right here.”

“What’s wrong with you?  There are…  That place has…”

Dragons.  There were dragons in that place in the back of the shop, standing upright, each one ten times the size of a man.  Shining scales in green, blue, red and gold.  Long claws that could rip a man in two with a flick of a finger.  And wings.  Somehow the wings had been the most disturbing thing of all.

There was a little bit of static from a gadget on the desk, and a rumbling voice came out of it.  Joe didn’t understand what it said.  He was too busy trying to imagine the creature that went with that voice.

The woman cashier pressed a button to reply, said something reassuring in whatever language they spoke, and then ended the call.  They had an intercom.  They talked to the dragons on an intercom.

“This is, what, some kind of experiment?” demanded Joe, “Government stuff?”  That was where Colwyn would have got his money.  He’d agreed to let this happen on his land.  And Jackie had sent their daughters off to stay with him.  Happily, without a care in the world.  Sent them into the lion’s den.

The man reached out to pat his arm.  “You need to calm…”

Joe grabbed the arm and twisted it back.  “You do not tell me…”  He broke off, breathing heavily.  In one quick movement, he moved back a couple of feet, grabbed one of the newspaper stands, and threw it at the desk.  “Those were dragons!  I want to know what this place is about, and I want to know now!”

He turned to pick up the next one- there was plenty of stuff to throw before he ran out- but, as soon as his back was turned, he felt the cashiers’ hands on his arms and shoulders.  He tried to shake them off, tried to kick out, but it was no use.  In ten seconds flat, they had him on the ground.

(To be continued)

The frog-lizard-thing took them away from the city centre and up the mountains that surrounded it.  They passed by endless crags of lumpy white stone, broken up by little rockpools full of animals Jeanette never got a good look at, until they arrived at a house surrounded by smooth white walls about twenty feet high.  The only part of the house Jeanette could see was the roof.  It looked as if it had a wide veranda like at Dovecote Gardens, but there was an extra bit on top that made the whole thing look like a weird, cream-coloured hat.

The frog-lizard-thing came to a stop and crouched down.  All at once, the jelly came unstuck from their bodies and receded.

“Come on, then,” said the Finery family, motioning towards the front gates.  They were metal, with bars arranged in gorgeously intricate patterns that probably made them all the more impossible to break.  The Finery family rang a bell on the wall, and another grey tree-person appeared on the other side.  The Finerys asked them a question in Opal Hill language (which probably wasn’t actually what it was called, but Jeanette had to work with what she had), and the other person said something back.  Jeanette might not have understood the words, but she was pretty sure she understood the tone.  Do you have an appointment?  No?  My clients are very busy and it would be most inconvenient to blah blah blah.

Jeanette stepped to the side to see if there was anything interesting around the corner.  The walls had been built high enough to keep out people from Opal Hill, so maybe they’d overlooked some way a smaller person could get in.  The wall seemed to be smooth all the way round- no holes, no cracks that could be widened into holes, no convenient crags you could use as footholds for climbing.  Instead of a fourth wall, it backed onto the side of the mountain.  Jeanette looked up at it- there was a kind of ledge up there.  Not low enough to jump down onto the roof from, but maybe low enough to climb down?  Could she be sure about that?  And could she be sure that there was any way down from the roof?

Behind her, the Finerys were still talking to the doorman (doorpeople).  Jeanette wondered if maybe it would be easier ton get in that way.  Her first thought was to tell the Iridescences that she knew where Kai Domino was, and make out that she was willing to betray him and hand him over to them.  She decided against this, though- Sally and Rube would probably get upset, and the Iridescences wouldn’t want to admit that they knew who Kai was in front of the Finerys.  So what else could she say to make them let her in?  Was there a way to drop hints about Kai in code?

Suddenly, she had it.  She marched back up to the gate, where the Finerys were still pleading with the doorpeople, and said, “Tell them I can prove that Colwyn and Kai Domino are lying about them.”

For a few seconds, the doorpeople and the Finerys both stared at her, dumbstruck.  Then the doorpeople nodded.

As they disappeared into the distance behind the gates, the Finery family glared at Jeanette.  “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It’ll get us in, right?” said Jeanette with a shrug.

The Finerys made an outraged spluttering sound and turned away from her.

Jeanette glanced back at her sisters.  They looked a little as if someone had hit them both round the head with a wooden plank, but they were a lot less horrified than they would have been if Jeanette had pretended to sell out Kai.  She’d made the right decision.

After a couple of minutes, the doorpeople reappeared.  “Alright,” they said, unlocking the gate, “Come on in.”

(To be continued)