The following day, after her friends had gone, Lennon attempted to call an elevator to the past. With the Drayton gates a constant drain on her power, it wasn’t easy work. In fact, the first elevator she summoned resulted in her seizing on the floor of her bedroom for the better part of ten minutes. It went on like that for days.

While Lennon struggled to summon the dregs of her power, she delved deep into Dante’s past. Previously, he’d stated that his efforts to raise gates had only accessed a specific moment in time, one that was only important to him. If Dante really had called his own elevator as the chancellor’s mansion was imploding, it stood to reason that it must’ve taken him back to that point.

But what was it?

Dante had been vague about the details of his past, prior to Drayton. So Lennon had to rely heavily on Carly’s previous research into his life, piecing together a timeline of short-term apartments and the schools he’d briefly been enrolled in, the cities where he’d lived for little more than weeks at a time, the minutiae of a fraught childhood.

It was some months before she was able to open a gate to that crisp winter night when Dante had been freed from the prison. She’d chosen this night because, on all counts, it was one of the most significant of his life. The night that had changed everything, the night he’d been taken to Drayton.

Lennon stepped off the elevator cabin, and into the fresh-fallen snow. The Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility stood on a gentle hill, its few windows glowing dully in the cold dark. In the parking lot, a handful of cars were half buried under drifts. The whole night felt like it was holding its breath as Lennon approached the prison.

The lobby was empty, save for the security guard seated behind the front desk. “Visiting hours are over. You can try coming back—”

When Lennon didn’t break pace, the man sprang to his feet, started to come from around the desk, but she raised a hand and the man went stone still, stopping midstep, and crashing—stiff—against the welcome desk. Lennon stole her memory from his mind a moment before he struck the floor.

As she walked, Lennon let her consciousness extend, roaming through the halls and the run of cells until she homed in on one that contained an essence that felt familiar. Dante’s cell was in the solitary confinement block, and it took some effort to subdue the prison guards who oversaw the ward, the thick wall of bulletproof glass between them and Lennon making it difficult for her to extend her will and catch hold of their minds. Still, she managed to force them up from their seats and walked them down the hall, single file, into one of the only open cells on the block.

None of those under the force of her will so much as raised a finger in resistance, except one woman—visibly pregnant and terrified—who proved so contentious that Lennon had no choice but to drag her into a deep fugue. She slumped, comatose, against the wall, Lennon guiding her down to the floor.

The prison cell she sought was the last on the ward. It had a small slit for a window. Bleeding profusely now, her legs soft beneath her, Lennon stepped forward to look into the cell. It was empty, save for a small brown moth with tattered wings, throwing itself senselessly against the only light in the cell.

Lennon returned to the present, exhausted, crawling out of the elevator on her hands and knees, collapsing, spent, on the floor of the living room, her nose and eyes bleeding. It was some time before she managed to pick herself up off the floor, and when she did, she went out to the water, fully dressed, and waded waist-deep into the black surf. She stood there for some time, staring out toward the island, then she went inside, peeled off her wet clothes, and climbed into bed.

The next day, she rallied her strength and tried again.

This time, she went to a balmy Tuesday in the fifth summer of Dante’s childhood. It was, by all accounts, a rather unremarkable summer, as summers went. Lennon stepped off the elevator and onto a wet street in Brooklyn. Children—their faces blurs of joy—ran barefoot and shrieking through an arc of water that spit from an open fire hydrant. The fat summer sun limned the mist, casting the whole scene in a bright and bleary sepia.

Across the street, there was a man sitting on a park bench. So little of who Lennon knew to be Dante was present in this hunched, gaunt figure, with the smile and the bleeding nose. But when their eyes met from across the street, she saw familiarity spark to life in his sunken eyes, like a firefly trapped in a jar.

Lennon crossed the street and went to him. She saw that there was a small brown moth clinging to his cheek. It was a tiny little thing with wrinkled wings, and as Lennon sat down on the bench beside him, it took flight, fluttering about the shell of his ear.

“Took you long enough,” he said. Lennon noticed that his legs, broken the last time she’d seen him, had somehow been reset. A feat of persuasion, perhaps, and a painful one at that.

“I came as soon as I could,” she said. “You didn’t make it easy for me.”

In the street, two brave little girls ran hand in hand through the water, so close to the hydrant’s outlet that they were very nearly blasted off their feet.

“Are those your sisters?”

He nodded. “Beth and Eliza.”

“Which one are you?” Lennon asked, nodding to the children. Any one of the boys could have been a young Dante—at that age it was hard to tell, and their faces were blurred so badly by the water and the golden light of the setting sun that even when she squinted, she couldn’t quite bring them into focus.

Dante pointed to a window, three stories up, in one of the apartment complexes down the street. There was a small face pressed to the glass.

“Why aren’t you playing with the other kids?”

“I was grounded.”

“What’d you do?”

“I don’t remember now,” he said. “But I know I didn’t really mind. It was enough just watching them.” Here, his gaze returned to his sisters. “How are things at the school?”

“Things have changed. The gates held. I sent Eileen on her way.”

“And the chancellorship?”

“It’s mine now.”

He nodded. A small smile touched his lips, and when it did, fresh blood streamed from his nose and spattered the concrete.

“Why didn’t you tell me you planned to save my life?” Lennon asked. It was a question that had haunted her since the night she’d lost him. “You let me hate you. You let me think you’d betrayed me—”

“You would’ve stopped me,” he said. “There was no other way.”

“I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye.”

“This is that chance,” he said.

“Well, I didn’t come here to say goodbye, Dante. I came here to take you home.”

Dante chose his next words very carefully. She could tell by the furrow that formed between his brows, the same expression he made in the classroom when someone asked a particularly difficult question. “I’m tired, Lennon.”

“I know you are. But you can rest back in the present, where you belong.”

Dante considered this for a beat. Silent.

Lennon tried to keep her voice level. “You don’t want to come home, do you?”

“I haven’t decided,” he said.

“And that’s what you’re doing here? Deciding?”

“Yeah.” He gestured down the street, toward the brilliant sunset. “I think if I go that way, I get to rest.”

She wanted to stop him, of course. That was what she had come here to do. To pull him back from the brink, to save him as he had saved her. But now, alone in the past with him, Lennon knew she had no place. The choice of how and if he lived or died wasn’t hers to make, no matter how much she loved him. And so it was out of love when she nodded, relenting, and stood up, feeling dizzy, and she could smell blood high up in her sinuses. She knew she couldn’t stay there much longer. She was running out of time. The rest was up to Dante.

“Do you see that elevator across the street?” As she said this, it formed in the plexiglass wall of a bus stop awning.

Dante nodded.

“I’m going to go to it, and if you want to live, then you’ll follow me.”

Dante looked up at her, his eyes narrowed against the setting sun, which burned hotter and brighter by the moment. “And if I don’t?”

“Then you’ll stay here,” said Lennon, “and I’ll never forgive you for it, but I won’t love you any less either.”

“All right,” he said, which might’ve been yes, or it might’ve been goodbye, but Lennon, bleeding from the nose, didn’t pause to ask the question before turning her back on him. She walked across the wet street, listening for the sound of his footsteps behind her, hearing nothing but the laughing children. The elevator doors parted. Lennon stepped through them and turned to see Dante, standing in the street just a few feet behind her, the sunlight bright at his back, burning almost, as though he was on fire. He stepped forward on his weak and injured legs, almost fell but kept going. The doors began to close. Lennon threw out a hand to stop them, but they kept pressing inward, even as she fought to hold them back. Dante staggered—his face screwed with pain, his knees buckling—and fell into the elevator a moment before its doors sliced shut.