The wave of water was slowed when it hit the narrow doorway. It crested and poured into the dining room, a frothy white head of bubbles at its top. Colin and Jonathan braced themselves as it hit their backs. Some of the boys who weren’t ready were knocked off their feet and sent tumbling head over heels in the water.

The water pouring in from the doorway leveled out as the water in the room rose, until it all stood flat, above their knees. And still slowly rising. The boys regathered themselves, coughing and rubbing the water out of their eyes.

Sebastian had never lost his footing. He still stood with his sword, eyes on Jonathan.

“We were just about to leave,” he said.

“Where were you guys going?”

Sebastian looked him in the eye.

“We were coming to find you.”

“Really?”

Sebastian shrugged and nodded.

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Sebastian shrugged again, then squinted and looked closer at Jonathan. “Jesus! What is that thing on your shoulder?”

“It’s a rat. Don’t worry about it. We gotta go. Quick. Or we’re all gonna die.”

“Go where?”

“To the lighthouse.”

“What lighthouse?”

“I’ll explain as we go. We’ve gotta move.”

Jonathan started to brush past him, but Sebastian put a hand out and stopped him. Forcefully.

“Easy, Johnny. I didn’t want to get blamed for you dying. Doesn’t mean I want you in charge. We decided to stay here, where it’s safe.”

“It isn’t safe here, Sebastian. This whole place is going under. The water’s rising. And the island is sinking. We’ve got to go. Up.”

“Up? It’s safer down here,” Sebastian insisted.

“What if the tower blows over?” Gerald asked.

“What if lightning hits it?” Francis demanded.

“Going up is our only choice!” Jonathan insisted. “It’s the only way to save ourselves.”

“You can’t trust him!” Benny’s voice was ugly and hissing. “You know what he’s here for!”

Lightning flashed through the windows. The wind was a roar, swirling around them. Jonathan saw the boys’ faces harden at Benny’s words, saw the doubt flicker in their eyes.

“You’re wrong, Benny!” Jonathan said, his voice rising with the pounding of his heart and the raging of the storm. “You can trust me! My sister … she … she did die in a fire, and … but …” Jonathan stopped, his voice choked by tears.

“But you didn’t thtart it,” Colin finished. “Did you?”

“Stop it, Colin,” Jonathan said.

But Colin didn’t stop.

“You told me, Jonathan. You told me she took your matcheth.”

Jonathan swallowed. Took a choking breath. He looked into Colin’s face. Colin’s eyes widened.

“Oh,” he breathed. “It wath her, wathn’t it? Your thithter thtarted the fire.”

“Shut up, Colin.”

“And you took the blame. You let them think it wath you. Becauth—”

“Because it’s my fault!” Jonathan interrupted, shouting. “They were my matches! She learned from me!” Jonathan’s voice broke off, his shoulders shaking with sobs. Ninety-Nine’s claws dug in harder to stay on. Jonathan closed his eyes against his tears and lowered his head. “It’s my fault.”

He heard, through the storm and his own sadness, the sound of someone splashing toward him. Two hands, gentle as birds, came to rest on his arm. They worked at the buttons of his sleeves, then pulled the fabric up to his elbows. Jonathan didn’t fight.

“How did you get the thcars?” Colin asked.

Jonathan didn’t answer.

“How did you get the thcars?” Colin asked again. Then, in a whisper so low only Jonathan could hear it, he added, “Tell them, Jonathan. If you tell them, they’ll believe you. They’ll follow you. You can thave them.”

Jonathan took one breath. Then two. He opened his eyes. He lifted his head.

“I didn’t start the fire,” he said. The words came out scratchy and faint. He cleared his throat and started again, his voice ringing clear into the faces of the lost boys around him, and into his own ears. “I didn’t start the fire. I woke up. And I heard her screaming. And I ran downstairs. But … the fire was too big. Too hot. I couldn’t get to her. I tried. I tried so hard.” He held up his arms. The scar tissue, twisted and tough, flashed whitely in the lightning. “I tried until the firefighters got there and dragged me away. I did everything I could to save her.” He realized he was shouting, as much to himself as to the watching boys. “I did everything I could!”

Tears joined the seawater on his face. Warm tears, clean and true.

Walter walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s okay, man,” he said. “It’s okay.”

Jonathan took a long, steadying breath. He nodded a thank-you to Walter, and to Colin. Then he looked up at all the other boys. The Scars.

“We’ve got to get to the only part of this place that’s built on rock. The only part that isn’t going to wash away. We’ve got to get to the old lighthouse.”

His words hung like a tattered flag in the windswept room.

“He’s telling the truth,” a deep voice interjected. They all turned and looked to where Patrick sat, still tied to his chair but now atop one of the dining room tables. “About the lighthouse. There did used to be one here. Going way back now, to the old sailing days. It’s built on the stones, indeed.”

Jonathan looked at Sebastian.

“We need to go, Sebastian.”

Sebastian’s jaw was clenched. His chest was heaving with shallow breaths. He looked down to the water around his thighs, then up at Patrick.

“What about your boat?” he asked.

Patrick shook his head.

“No way. Too late for that. I barely made it out here, and the storm’s only gotten stronger.”

Sebastian bit at his lip. His eyes cut to Jonathan. He nodded.

Jonathan blew out a deep breath. He nodded back. Then he turned to Roger and Gregory.

“Cut him loose,” he said. “And all of you, follow me.”

Without waiting for an answer, Jonathan waded through the waist-deep water past Sebastian, past the waiting boys, toward the staircase that led up toward Sebastian’s room. The Admiral’s room. The lighthouse.

Colin followed him. Ninety-Nine clung to Jonathan’s shoulder.

When he got to the stairwell, he stopped and turned. The boys were filing after him. All of them. They looked lost and frightened in the raging wind and the flashbulb lightning. They were drenched and exhausted and terrified. They needed to be saved.

Sebastian was up on the table. Sawing at Patrick’s ropes with his sword. He didn’t look terrifying. He looked like a confused kid, finding his way through the dark.

Jonathan felt something bump him, and looked down. It was a piece of the ruined Sinner’s Sorrow, bobbing in the water. Several more pieces floated around him. He picked up a piece.

“Everyone grab a piece,” he said. “We’re gonna need the wood.”

The storm was like a beast hammering at Slabhenge. Even running up the stone stairwell, they could hear it outside, through the walls, howling to be let in.

Jonathan ran past the doors to the grown-ups’ rooms, past the locked door to the Admiral’s office, to the far, dark end of the hall. The end of the hallway was a curved wall, crumbling with age. It was made of a different stone than the rest of Slabhenge. Bigger blocks of grayer rock, rock that looked even older than the rock Jonathan had grown used to being surrounded by.

In the curved wall of ancient stone was a door made of tremendously thick slats of dark wood bound together with rusty iron. The door looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. Instead of a knob, it simply had a metal latch, like a pirate’s treasure chest, that connected to a bolt on the stone wall. Jonathan yanked on the latch, and it opened with a protesting creak of rusty metal that had been wet and unused for too long. He pushed on the door and it swung slowly open.

Beyond the door was a round stairwell, leading up in one direction and down in the other. Its walls and stairs were made of the same gray rock. The air smelled stale. Dusty. Forgotten. It was even colder in the stairwell than it was in the rest of the school.

The boys piled up behind Jonathan.

“Up,” he said. “We’ve got to go up.”

They raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Round and round the stairwell spiraled, up and up through dank darkness, with all the dark world raging outside the walls.

Jonathan reached the top breathless. Colin was behind him, then the rest. Sebastian was the last, behind Patrick.

The top of the tower was a round room. On all sides were windows, sturdy double-paned glass crisscrossed by metal bars. The lightning filled the sky all around them. They were surrounded by the storm, teetering in the angry heavens. On all sides were windows to the black clouds and whipping wind and sideways rain.

In the middle of the room, on a raised stone landing, was a great black iron bowl, big enough for Jonathan to have stretched out and lain down in. A massive curved mirror stood on the far side of the bowl, mounted on a mechanism of gears and bars and wheels that circled the bowl. To Jonathan’s right was a large metal handle.

“The lighthouse,” Jonathan whispered. “Just like he said.”

The boys stood in silence, looking out the windows at the hurricane that raged all around them, inches away. It was almost deafening.

They could see all of Slabhenge when the lightning flashed. The courtyard, flooded now halfway up the windows into the dining room. The boat still rocked between the walls.

They could see the roof that covered the rest of the school, rising and falling with the confusing ramblings of the mazelike building. They could see the other towers poking stubbornly up into the black skies.

“Look!” Miguel shouted over the storm. “Look at the towers!”

They all crowded to the windows.

“What?”

“What about them?”

“There’s only three! One’s missing!”

They all looked and saw it then. The far tower was gone. Simply gone. They could see where the stone walls led to the space that it should occupy, but the walls stopped in a jagged, sawtooth break. A loose pile of stones was all that remained of the tower, avalanching down into the white-capped sea.

Jonathan looked at Colin. Colin was staring at the pile of rubble with wide eyes. It was Colin’s tower. The tower with his mattress and his papers and his three lonely candlesticks. Somewhere among those waves bobbed dozens of white paper cranes. And a few shiny gold chocolate wrappers.

“There! Look at the gate!”

They all spun back to the courtyard with its ghostly boat. The far side, with the watery stairs and the gate through which they had all entered Slabhenge, was crumbling before their eyes. The arch above the gate crashed into the water with a massive splash. The gigantic waves poured relentlessly through the gap, pushing and pulling at the hundred-year-old walls. They fell apart, stone block by stone block, as the water coursed through. Soon the whole wall was gone, a heaped mound of stones just below the water’s surface. The courtyard was left with walls on only three sides.

With the one wall gone, the waves rushed unhindered into the courtyard, rising above the level of the dining room windows. It wouldn’t be long before the rest of the walls succumbed to the ravenous, storm-fueled waters of the sea.

“The whole dining room’s under now,” Walter said, his voice hollow with shock.

“The kitchen,” Tony said.

“The freezer,” David added. They all stood and stared.

“We should light the lighthouse,” Jonathan said, watching Slabhenge fall apart. No one heard him over the wind and the thunder and their own openmouthed amazement.

“We should light the lighthouse!” Jonathan shouted, and stricken faces turned toward him.

“Why?”

“So they know we’re here!” he answered. “So they send help!” He looked into Colin’s eyes, then Walter’s, then Patrick’s. “I want to go home.” His voice cracked at the end and got lost in the mad confusion of noise. He said it again, from the bottom of his lungs. “I want to go home!”

“If ye light it, they’ll know to come!” Patrick yelled from behind them. “When they can, anyway! This old thing ain’t been fired up since before I was born! They’ll notice it for sure, and they’ll know to come!”

Jonathan ran to a large wooden bin that lined one of the walls and threw open the lid with all his strength.

Inside, neatly stacked, were rows of split logs. Firewood. Stowed, dry and safe. By a man who began as a madhouse baby and ended as a forgotten librarian. In between, though, he was a lighthouse keeper.

“We need paper!” he shouted, turning to face the group.

“The school office is underwater by now!” Benny yelled back.

“What about the Admiral’s room?”

They all looked at Sebastian. He shook his head.

“None in there! He didn’t even have a book!”

Jonathan’s mind flashed. “The Admiral’s office!”

“It’s locked, remember?”

Jonathan smiled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the rusty metal key that had fallen out of the dead Admiral’s jacket. Sebastian’s mouth dropped open.

“Come on,” Jonathan said to him, tossing his piece of the Sinner’s Sorrow into the great iron bowl. “The rest of you, get the wood in the fire pit!” He took the lantern from Colin, then pulled Ninety-Nine gently from his shoulder and handed him to Colin. Colin grimaced and held him with two hands, out away from his body.

Jonathan and Sebastian ran back down the lighthouse stairs. When they got to the old door, Jonathan swore.

There was an inch of water running like a river down the stairwell, pouring in from the hallway. The water was even higher than he’d imagined. It was already to the second story.

“We’ve gotta hurry,” he said to Sebastian. “This whole place is gonna fill up and fall down.”

They bolted down the hall, their feet splashing through the rushing water. At the door to the Admiral’s office, Jonathan held the lantern up and stabbed the key into the lock. It clicked into place. Then turned. He shouldered the door open and they ran inside. The water rushed in with them.

The office was lost in shadows, but Jonathan remembered it vividly from that first, awful night. The Admiral’s sneering voice, his demonic eyebrows. The pain of the Sinner’s Sorrow. The letter home, full of lies. The Admiral’s acidic words as he’d read Jonathan’s paperwork: You have done terrible things, haven’t you, Jonathan Grisby?

Jonathan walked straight over to the standing file behind the desk where he’d seen the Admiral tuck his folder. He pulled it open. Inside were neatly ordered, identical manila folders, each stuffed with papers. He didn’t have to count to know there were sixteen files. On the tab of the first folder was scrawled his own name. His eyes scanned the rest. Colin Kerrigan. Sebastian Mortimer. And thirteen more.

He set the lantern down and grabbed half of the folders, then handed them to Sebastian. He tucked the other half under his arm and picked up the lantern.

“This should be enough,” he said, and they darted back out into the hallway. The water was even higher now. Jonathan winced and dodged a dead rat being washed down the hallway. Another one bobbed by, paws stuck out stiff into the air.

At the top of the lighthouse, the other boys and Patrick had half the wood piled in the big metal bowl with the ravaged remains of the Sinner’s Sorrow. They stood waiting on the raised platform around it, looking out at the world gone mad. Jonathan glanced quickly and counted the towers. Another had fallen. Only two were still standing. And the lighthouse. Another of the courtyard’s walls was mostly gone.

Jonathan looked at the name on the top file in his hands. Walter Holcomb. He handed the folder to Walter. Reginald Miller the next one said, and he gave it to Reggie. Sebastian started to do the same.

Eventually, Jonathan was left with one folder in his hands. Jonathan Grisby, it said. He opened it and words from the top page jumped out at him. Guilty. Criminal. Arson. He ground his teeth together and crumpled the paper into a ball. He stepped forward and shoved it under the waiting pile of wood.

He looked at the second sheet. More words swam up through the darkness and lightning. Death. Sophia. Injuries. Grief. Guilt. Tears scalded his eyes. His lungs shivered as they breathed.

He wadded the paper up into a tight ball. As tight as his fists could manage. And he added it to the unlit fire.

Around him, other boys started to do the same. Amidst the roar of wind and storm came the sound of ripping paper, of crumpling files. And all around the circle, fuel was added to the lighthouse fire.

Eventually, they all stood, hands clean and empty. Beneath the ready logs was tucked a white mound of twisted paper. A crumpled pile of crimes. A bonfire’s worth of guilt and punishment and dark history.

Sebastian took a candle from another boy’s hand. He leaned forward. But he stopped, the candle’s flame inches from the paper.

He frowned. He leaned back. He looked at Jonathan. Lightning flickered, showing his flooded eyes.

“I don’t want to go,” he said.

Jonathan blinked and didn’t answer.

“You wanna know why I never wrote letters?” Sebastian asked. “Because there was no one to send them to. I got no parents. I got no family. I’ve spent my whole life in places like this. Or orphanages. Group homes. Foster homes.” He looked out at the storm that was pressed in all around them, screaming and pounding the windows. “I don’t have anyone to read my letters. No one cares. I got no one to write to.”

Jonathan swallowed and took a step closer to Sebastian.

“You can write to me,” he said.

Sebastian’s eyebrows furrowed. His mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything.

“You can write to me,” Gerald said.

“You can write to me, man,” Walter called out.

“You can write to me, Thebathtian,” Colin said, just loud enough to be heard.

Sebastian sniffed. He nodded, looking around, then rubbed his eyes with his sleeve.

“Light the fire,” Jonathan said. Sebastian nodded again, one more small nod, then stretched the candle out and touched it to the nearest paper. Other boys stepped forward then with their own candles, holding the flames to the papers closest to themselves.

Climbing fingers of flames crept up through the crisscrossed wood. The papers flared and burned into bright flashes of yellow. The boys stepped back and covered their eyes.

There was a crackle and a snap as a piece of wood caught fire. A couple of wisping sparks rose up and flickered out.

The sound of the fire grew louder, the light brighter, the flames higher, the heat hotter. The boys stepped down from the platform and back to the lower floor. The room grew warm. Their soaking clothes steamed in the heat.

With a final flurry of crackling, the whole pile caught fire. Flames arced and danced six feet high. The round room, hemmed in on all sides by the stormy world’s fury, grew brighter than daylight. Jonathan stepped to the metal hand crank and muscled it into motion. With a shuddering, squeaking creak the gears and wheels attached to the mirror sprang to reluctant life. The mirror began to slowly rotate around the towering flames of their signal fire, magnifying and reflecting the light out into the clouds, the storm, the world.

Sebastian joined him at the crank and they worked together. The mirror moved faster, sending its spear of light out into the darkness.

After a while, Jonathan let go and stepped back, sweating and gasping. Another boy took his place.

He leaned back against a low wall beneath the windows. His arms were burning, the good burning of muscles put to good use. The room was filled with the vital heat of the fire he had built and lit, the fire that would save them all. A good heat, the kind that calms shivers and warms the chill from wet and tired bones. The fire felt good.

He closed his eyes and didn’t try to stop the tears that seeped out between his eyelids, running in warm paths down his face. They ran down his cheeks and over his lips, which opened into a wide smile, tasting their saltiness. He laughed as the tears poured from his eyes.

Colin walked over and stood beside him. The giant rat still sat on his shoulder, sniffing at the smoky air.

“Why are you laughing like that?” he asked.

Jonathan laughed and sobbed and looked at the beautiful fire through the blur of his tears.

“Because I want to go home,” he answered.

“Then why are you crying?”

Jonathan didn’t wipe at the tears. He let them burn in his eyes until they were full and flooded out.

“Because I want to go home,” he said. “Because I want to go home.”