WAYNE USED HIS CREDENTIALS and company friendships to get his pickup truck through the back gate between Main Street and Tomorrowland, which in 1955 amounted to a single security booth manned by an old guy named Fred. The Ford lumbered onto park property, slipping past attractions with a muted rumble of the engine. The castle stood dark, its broad shape materializing out of empty sky.

It began raining before the truck pulled to a stop beside King Arthur Carrousel. Though it was light at first, the rain seemed to contain the anger of the six teens, and soon it was coming down in torrents.

There were no hugs or handshakes between Wayne and the others, only a grimace, a shared feeling of past memories and lost opportunities. Wayne did stop to wipe the rain and tears from Amanda’s face in a caring, loving way—a mannerism that would carry through the decades to come and still be there sixty years later, if and when they met again.

When the truck had gone, Philby addressed the group.

“We all know what this means, right?” He looked from stricken face to stricken face. “We’ve stopped Hollingsworth. Maleficent and the others will never be OTs.”

“Which means we’ll never be Keepers,” Willa said, interrupting. “How sad is that?”

“It’s true,” Philby said, disappointed Willa would remind everyone of the possibility that they might be strangers upon their return. They needed all their focus now. “There’s a chance that if and when we make it back to the present, we were never needed as DHIs. That Wayne never created us, never crossed over Finn that first time. That we never met. So I guess, this could be good-bye.”

Amanda said, “Good-bye happened back in the hotel dining room. It all ended there.” She sniffed and Jess threw an arm around her.

Now, as she had then, Amanda knelt beside Finn’s body, which was covered in a white sheet, just as it had been when Maybeck carried it from the hospital morgue to the truck. The Keepers and the Fairlies had agreed not to pull that sheet back. Maybeck and Amanda had already witnessed what Finn had endured. They didn’t want anyone else to share that burden.

“We could stay,” Willa said, grasping Philby’s hand and squeezing it bloodless. “Why don’t we just stay?”

“Because we aren’t from here. We’ve already changed so much. Who knows what damage we might do to the present—or the past, for that matter! This isn’t our place. We owe it to the lives of everyone else to get out of here. Besides,” Philby said, “what if Charlene’s right?”

Charlene, arguably the least academic of the Keepers, had been the one to present a theory of quantum physics that had taken Wayne and Philby a good measure of time to comprehend. But once they’d processed it, they’d grown excited and demanding. She, too, knelt by Finn, her hand on the sheet covering his bare chest.

“I think,” she said, “that if we’re going to try this, we should all be connected, all touching him. He kept us together. He never liked to be called the leader, so I won’t call him that now, but we all looked to him. We Keepers all became who we are because of him.”

“We Fairlies, too,” said Jess, struggling not to burst into another bout of tears. “We’d never have been here without Finn.”

“‘All for one,’ and all that,” said Maybeck. For once, there was not a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “I’m in.” He kneeled, taking hold of Finn’s foot. “Whitman, listen to Charlene, would you?” His voice broke. “Don’t be so wickedly stubborn. Let her be right.”

Philby and Willa joined the others, forming a circle around Finn’s prone form. “If the past no longer exists…” Philby said.

“…then there’s only the present,” Charlene completed the thought.

The carousel music sounded.

“They’re playing our tune,” Maybeck said. The huge wheel began to rotate; the horses started to move up and down in steady rhythm. “Somebody click their heels three times, for cripe’s sake.”

“I’ll do even better,” Philby said, withdrawing what looked like a mousetrap tangled with a hundred colorful wires. Beneath was taped a phalanx of batteries.

At the very center of the device was a single black button.

Philby pushed it.