Deep Betrayal

Pavati, for that matter. Calder might be mad about my newfound listening skill, and that scared me a little—he’d probably be even madder when he learned about the rest of my breath control experiments—but there was no denying that I could serve a valuable purpose.
    Dad and Calder might not be able to find Maris to warn her about Jack, but I could. Or at least, I was pretty sure I could if Calder would let me. If I could find Maris, if I could reason with her that there was no more room for death, maybe no one else would have to die.
    Reason with Maris. Yeah, I hated to think what Calder would say about that.
    “Lily!” Mom’s voice called up the stairs.
    Why was it I could never get five minutes to put a solid thought together? “What?”
    “Could you come down here? Sophie has something she wants to do for us.”
    “Yeah, I’m kind of busy,” I hollered back.
    “It will only take a second.”
    I tossed my book to the end of the bed and protested by clomping down the stairs more loudly than necessary. Mom was sitting on the couch. Sophie was standing in front of herwith a poster leaning up against a chair. Rainbow beams of light circled the room.
    “What’s all this?” I asked.
    “Your sister is going for her Science Investigator badge, and she’s giving her presentation to her troop tonight. She wants to practice on an audience.”
    “I was kind of in the middle of something,” I said, glancing back toward the stairs and the solace of my room.
    “Sit,” Mom said.
    I barked once and found a seat on the floor by Mom’s feet.
    Sophie smiled and cleared her throat. Her blond curls bobbed at her shoulders.
    “Have you ever wondered how a rainbow works?” she asked, her voice bubbling over with a forced enthusiasm. I immediately picked up on the intonation she’d stolen from kids on TV. It made me want to say, “No, I never did!” but I kept the sarcasm to myself.
    “ I did,” continued Sophie, answering her own question, “and that’s why I did my science project on rainbows. Tonight I’m going to demonstrate for you the science behind rainbows, using this .” She held up a pear-shaped crystal hanging from an invisible string. It spun in front of her face, casting red, blue, and green squares around the walls.
    “A crystal is a prism, and because it has all these different cut sides, it bends light. Here’s what happens:
    “Light travels at different speeds when it goes through different things, like the air or the rain or this crystal.” She glanced down at her notes.
    “Think of it like this: You move differently on different things. You move one way when you’re walking on an icysidewalk. You walk a different way on a sandy beach. And you walk a different way when you’re pushing something. If you pushed a baby stroller through sand, sometimes the wheels get caught and you go sideways.” She demonstrated, lurching her body around, which made me laugh. Mom slapped me on top of the head.
    Sophie wasn’t rattled. “That’s what happens with light. When light is going through the air, it’s white. But when it goes through something else, like raindrops, or this crystal, it changes speed and bends and goes sideways. Different speeds and different angles make different colors.”
    She put the crystal down, consulted her notes, and then picked up the crystal again. “Sometimes, like in this prism, the light bends twice, and that’s why you can see more than one color at once. That’s what happens in rainbows, too. All those raindrops act like thousands of prisms that separate all the colors out of the white light, all at once.”
    Then she bowed, and Mom clapped like her baby had won an Academy Award. I clapped, too. It was actually pretty decent. Sophie blushed as Mom went to check the clock.
    “Mrs. Larson will be here soon to pick you up,” Mom said. “Make sure you have everything you need.”
    “So you think it was good?” Sophie asked.
    “Actually,” I said, “it was. I am very, very impressed.”
    “You gave me the idea,” she said.
    “I did? How?”
    Sophie smiled and didn’t say anything more. She threw her notes and the prism into her backpack, carefully rolled up her poster, and raced out the door.
    Before I could give her any more thought, the phonerang. It wasn’t on the charger. The muffled sound came from under the couch cushions. I dug around, finding it just in time.
    “Hello?” I huffed into the receiver.
    “Lily? Oh, good! I need a huge