The rescue arrives by dark, exactly as promised. The town doesn't keep the appointment.
While Guthrie and Jonah walk a burned main street calling a number nobody will answer, Mary wakes a night's march away — carried out of the one place he knew to look. And the strange girl who saved her offers the only comfort she has, which is not comfort at all. It's the truth. Two fingers to the forehead, and Mary goes where the rules are kept: a sky of silent lightning, a floor of still glass, and below it, drifting slow as lamplight, the ones who understood everything — one of whom is watching her.
Then Hannah tears a window in the world, and on the other side of it, small and gray and real, is Jonah.
Some doors only open one way. Some words arrive anyway.