Tess gaped at the object on Miss Ackerbee’s desk as Violet trembled in the midst of her hair. She wanted nothing more than to get up, walk out of the room, run up the two flights of stairs to her own snug dormitory and pull her blankets over her head.

“I don’t…,” she finally managed to say, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“My girl, I hardly know what I mean myself,” said Miss Ackerbee with a sigh. “All I know is this object is somehow inextricably tied with you, and that you are an extraordinary girl. A most extraordinary girl indeed.”

“Am I?” Tess was dazed. She’d never imagined she was extraordinary, and wondered how extraordinary people were supposed to act. Probably, she thought, they weren’t supposed to go about with one sock down and their glasses smudged, and she wondered if Miss Ackerbee mightn’t be mixing her up with one of the older girls.

Then Miss Ackerbee began to speak again and Tess did her best to focus.

“When you were very little, Tess, you used to disappear. Just—vanish, like that, out of the blue. You’d only be gone for five or maybe ten seconds at a time, but it was enough to make my heart skip.” Miss Ackerbee gazed at her with steady brown eyes.

Tess blinked at her. “Um. Miss Ackerbee, I don’t think that’s—”

“Possible?” Miss Ackerbee finished Tess’s sentence. “I didn’t think so either. Not until I met you, at least.”

“But where did I go?”

Miss Ackerbee licked her lips and took a deep breath. She stared at her desk and it looked to Tess like she was trying to find a pattern in the swirl of knots in the wood. Finally she looked up. Her kind face was earnest, as though she hoped Tess would believe what she was about to tell her.

“The night you came to us, I was here. In this parlor. Drinking a cup of cocoa. The entire house was asleep and I was standing by my window, gazing out at the river and indulging in a bit of thought.” She smiled at the memory. “And then, out of the blue, a shimmering circle appeared in midair—just for a second, you understand. Had I blinked at the wrong moment, I would have missed it. It hung right in front of the door before winking out of existence again. But it was there long enough for me to see.”

“See what?” Tess asked.

“A man. Young and thin, and frightened. He looked up at the door of Ackerbee’s. Snow was falling all around him. And then he was gone. The next thing I knew, there was a wail. I put my cup down on the windowsill and ran to the door—and there you were in the porch, wrapped in this blanket.”

“And where was the man?”

Miss Ackerbee smiled, but there was sadness beneath it. “He wasn’t there, Tess. And all around you was snow, tiny flakes in your blanket and even one on your baby eyelash, which I wiped away.” Miss Ackerbee rubbed her forefinger with her thumb, as though reliving the moment. “Except it wasn’t snowing that night. Not in this world, at least.”

Tess fought to understand. “You said that before—‘this world.’ What does that mean?”

“I think,” Miss Ackerbee began, speaking carefully, “that you have the ability to move between our world and other worlds, Tess. I’m not sure how, but that’s my theory.”

“Other—other worlds?” Tess scrunched up her face. “Like—different planets?”

“No, I don’t think so. Other versions of this planet is what I mean. Different realities might be a better way of putting it, perhaps.”

Miss Ackerbee lifted the blanket off the pile of paperwork, opened the topmost folder and began to flip through some documents until she came to a collection of letters, speaking to Tess all the while. “When you were very small and your extraordinary abilities began to appear, I made some discreet inquiries of a scientific nature. Over the course of making those inquiries, I made a friend who, until a few years ago, was a professor of physics in a university in Ostravica.”

She glanced at Tess and smiled. “Several years ago he wrote to me about an idea he was working on, something he was calling the many-worlds theory, which basically means, as far as I understand, that all possible versions of our world might exist simultaneously. They don’t interact because they can’t—or at least that was his thinking at the time.”

Miss Ackerbee sifted through the letters until she found the one she was looking for. “Here we go. Could it be true, then, to say that everything which could exist, does exist somewhere? That every choice made creates a ‘branch,’ in effect, where both outcomes can come to independent fruition, entirely unknown to the other? It would mean an almost unimaginable abundance of universes, but who is to say such things cannot be true?” She looked back at Tess. “Such things can be true, Tess. You are the proof.”

“I—I don’t know what to say.” Tess’s mind was a whirl. Many worlds? It was too much to think about all at once, so she seized on the one thing Miss Ackerbee had said that she could fully understand. “Why can’t I do it anymore? The vanishing thing?”

Miss Ackerbee placed the bundle of letters down. “It stopped happening when you were about four, I think. Up to that point you might flicker in and out ten or twenty times a day. Only myself and Rebecca—Miss Whipstead, I suppose I ought to say—were aware of it, because we made sure one of us was with you all the time. We kept a log.” She glanced at the pile of paperwork again. “Date, time, length of absence. Just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“You didn’t come back,” said Miss Ackerbee simply, meeting Tess’s eye. “But you always did. And then you stopped.” She looked up, her gaze settling on Violet, who sat still as a stone on Tess’s head. “Which, incidentally, coincided with Violet’s arrival here at Ackerbee’s.”

“So now Violet is from some other planet too?” Tess said, her voice wavering. “I really don’t—”

“Violet is simply a spider,” interrupted Miss Ackerbee. “But she has one extraordinary quality—she was loved. By you. From the moment you saw her. And that was enough to keep you here.”

The girl cradled the spider close against her chest, thinking about the day they’d first met. She remembered the magician who’d come to Ackerbee’s to entertain the girls one rainy afternoon. How he had pulled cards out of sleeves, handkerchiefs out of hats, and made shilling pieces appear from behind Miss Ackerbee’s ear. Most of all, Tess had been transfixed by the spider living on his lapel like a colorful brooch. That spider had been Violet’s mother, whose clutch of babies hadn’t long hatched. The tiny tarantulas had been like walking jewels and Tess had fallen in love with Violet as soon as she laid eyes on her.

“Here you are then,” the magician had said, holding Violet out on the end of one finger, like a tiny black berry. “I’ll give her to you. Seems like you’re made for one another.” Tess remembered looking at Miss Ackerbee for permission, her dark eyes meeting the housemistress’s darker ones, and how Miss Ackerbee had nodded, smiling in bemusement at her odd little charge. Violet had crawled onto Tess’s shoulder that day and she’d never left.

Tess brought herself back to the present, lifting Violet until she could look into her shining cluster of eyes. They were as familiar to her as her own.

“And Violet was an anchor,” Miss Ackerbee continued. “A tether to this world that kept you from slipping out of it. Rebecca and I worried what would happen to you if anything happened to Violet, but we were lucky. She’s robust and you take excellent care of her.”

Tess blinked hard, trying not to embarrass herself by letting the tears behind her lids leak onto her face. “It’s a lot to deal with, I know,” Miss Ackerbee said, removing a handkerchief from her sleeve and sliding it across the desk. “And we don’t have a lot of time. The man—his name is Mr. Norton F. Cleat—will be returning in a few hours and he wants to take you with him.”

“Who is he?” said Tess, wiping her nose with Miss Ackerbee’s handkerchief before scrunching it up and handing it back to her.

“Why don’t you keep that one, dear. I have plenty,” Miss Ackerbee replied, waving the handkerchief away. Tess stuffed it into her pocket. “And as for our friend Mr. Cleat, well, I simply don’t know who he is. But I know his claim to you has to be a weak one, no matter what legal papers he can conjure up. Proving it, however, will take time—time that we don’t have at the moment.”

“But what does he want with me?”

“Nothing good, I fear,” said Miss Ackerbee, gazing at Tess with concern. “Which means we need to think about what to do with you.”

“Can I ask one more thing?” said Tess.

“Of course, dear,” Miss Ackerbee replied, her smile suggesting she already knew what the question would be.

“The man. The other one, I mean—the one in the circle in the air. Who was he?”

“It’s only my theory, Tess,” Miss Ackerbee replied, her voice measured and careful. “But I think—in fact, I’m fairly certain, because it could hardly be anyone else—I think that man was your father.”