Last time on the Summoning, Chloe is just as bad as Derek! Maybe now she’ll realize how wrong it was to blame him just because he hurt her for reasons that were completely under his control.

it was older and decent enough, but not fancy. No pawn- and porn shops, but no bistros and baristas either.

Uh. Are those two things that usually go together? Because I’ve seen pawnshops on occasion in perfectly respectable if not particularly expensive areas.

Derek suggests that when she and Simon escape, they head to the factory area with the abandoned warehouses, because when I think of what empty areas kids might hide in, abandoned warehouses sure aren’t my first guess.

Chloe once again suggests Derek come with and Derek once again says no way. For some reason no one suggests the third obvious thing, which is that Derek leaves at the same time to confuse things and split up any efforts to find them. If Derek makes himself obvious, they’ll end up collecting him and Chloe and Simon can be off running in the opposite direction.

Derek then makes another argument – he already knew how to disable the alarm, so if he wanted out, he could get out. That doesn’t exactly follow, since even without knowing how to disable to alarm, if any of the kids literally just needed to run out of the house they could probably do so. The issue is getting collected later.

Simon had said he was afraid that if something went wrong, Derek might just let it. He’d already decided he belonged at Lyle House. Would he leave even if he was in danger?

See, that’s really not as good an argument as it seems. Derek currently believes he’s not in any danger. As long as he thinks he’s safe there, he doesn’t have any excuse for leaving. If that changed, his opinion might change with it. I’m willing to believe Simon on this because Simon knows Derek, but this is really badly put.

Simon should have made it clear that there’s reason to assume Derek won’t change this opinion even in the face of changing facts. We get a glimpse of this in how Derek won’t change his mind about things, but not much, because he’s portrayed as not wanting to actually admit he’s wrong but still willing to change his mind with new facts and just not mention the fact he was saying something different earlier. What should have happened is Derek getting established as the sort of person who really doesn’t like to reevaluate choices. Once he’s made a decision, it takes a lot for him to be willing to reconsider it in light of new information. There are people like that.

There does seem to be some suggestion that Derek might also stay because he doesn’t care he’s in danger, but that’s actually not a very good argument here because Simon’s in danger. No matter how bad Derek feels, even if he thinks he deserves to get killed, he also seems protective of Simon. If Simon is on the run, he’s in danger, and if Simon is caught and brought back, he may also be in a lot of danger if it turns out the place is evil. In both cases, Simon’s chances are better with his linebacker brother. So, if Derek finds out the place is a slaughterhouse, he would have an altruistic reason for escaping, warning his brother.

We jump to the morning, as Chloe and Derek evidently made it back fine. Tori’s really not on the ball tonight, is she? Her super tattling powers alert her to Chloe’s quiet attic conversation but not the two of them running all over the place and then leaving the building entirely?

Chloe asks Rae if Liz left anything behind. Huh, she’s sure being proactive. We’re down to the last ten or so chapters, so I guess the author’s finally realizing we’re running out of space.

“Just a shirt of Tori’s. I didn’t bother giving it back yet. Not like Tori’s in any rush to return that green hoodie she borrowed from Liz. I saw her wearing it the other day. Why? Did Liz finally call?”

So Tori’s running around in a shared piece of clothing of Liz’s. I was pretty upset by the whole bashing Chloe’s head in and tying her up in the crawlspace thing, but poor Tori, she must really miss Liz.

In fact…

“So you didn’t do the laundry.”
“That’s what I said.”
“But I want—”
“Your shirt. Got that part. So wear it. It’s brand-new.”
“Yeah, and other people probably tried it on. That’s gross.”

Tori is normally disgusted by the entire concept of other people wearing the same clothes as her, but she was swapping clothes with Liz enough that there was enough borrowed clothes for the thing forgotten in Liz’s room to actually be Tori’s.

The obvious next move is to go ask Tori for the sweater, but instead Chloe just drops the entire idea yet again. Guess the author doesn’t want to give us too much actual plot at once.

Rae then gets justifiably upset that Chloe’s planning an escape without taking her. Yeah, she has been totally missing from the storyline, hasn’t she?

Chloe doesn’t even try to deny that taking Rae was never in the cards. Instead she ignores Rae’s side of the conversation and says she was going to tell Rae about the crawlspace and that’s what she forgot about.

“What if I met the club requirement? Would that snag me an invite?”
“What?”
“Your club. The special kids. The ones with superpowers.”

Okay, I know Rae has been doing better than most at reading the script, but this is really pushing it.

We then find out Rae knows Simon can do magic because she saw him make the boy who used to be there go flying into a wall when he wouldn’t stop hassling Derek and WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU BRING THIS UP BEFORE.

I’m going to go with because it’s a plot hole. This whole scene seems like the author forgot Rae just like Chloe did and is now doing a patch job.

That’s why I wanted to see Simon’s file.

I’m pretty sure we were told Brady left months ago.

Chloe does not, of course, explain.

“Well, as you saw, Simon doesn’t have a file. He’s here because of Derek. Their dad disappeared and Derek was sent here because of his problem, so they put Simon in the same place.”
“How’d their dad disappear?”
I shrugged and pulled out a shirt. ‘They haven’t said much about it. I don’t want to push.”

I referenced this earlier when the bit about different rules for supernaturals came up. I’m not sure if that’s what’s actually going on – Chloe has shown a very consistent disregard for Rae – but it does echo that idea of it being okay to do anything if it’s to protect the ingroup of “real” people. Not only is Chloe failing to fill Rae in on things, but they’re actually things that may be endangering her as well as the supernatural kids. There’s no reason someone killing supernatural kids would balk at experimenting on regular ones, and if you’re trying to learn about the power, surely figuring out how to cause it in people who don’t have powers would be one line of investigation.

Then Rae says that actually she’s supernatural too! She can burn people.

Oh my god she actually did that to Tori and then pretended she didn’t. No wonder Tori’s such a mess if she’s stuck in a place full of people who can do things that don’t make sense and then they immediately deny and oh it’s just Tori being crazy again!

But where’s the proof? She felt like she’d been burned and there was a red mark, but it wasn’t like I set her shirt on fire.” She grinned.

This is disgusting.

…

Chloe still doesn’t tell. She wants to consult with the penis owners first. Rae is fine with that. So I guess it really isn’t about supernatural vs not, it’s about how boys leech all the agency for themselves.

At least Rae has an excuse. She assumes it’s just about Simon and Derek’s past. But Chloe isn’t filling her in on the fact that now, five out of seven kids in the place are supernatural (and that’s assuming Tori doesn’t turn out to have powers, which at this rate…) when they’re normally at one in several dozen thousands odds, and also Liz is dead and also there are dead bodies of even more supernatural people in the crawlspace and also there’s some ward preventing ghosts from doing stuff that may have been put there to prevent the dead from alerting anyone to what was going on, come to think of it.