The glass was broken and jagged: it would cut her to shreds. It would kill Galt.

Who was Galt?

Dear God! She had to stop this. Stop imagining. Roger had Jeremiah. He had Joan and Sandy. If Linden died here—if she let her delusions trap her—nothing would save her son.

With her bag, she swept daggers of glass from their frame. Her flashlight she tossed outside. She meant to throw her bag as well; but first she braced her right hand on the window-frame.

A shard of glass dug into her palm. Blood pulsed from the cut. She could not let go of her bag. She needed it—

—needed it to fight the flames.

Screaming like the storm and the blaze and the bane, she took the bag in her right hand, sealed her grip with blood. Awkward as a cripple, she began to crawl backward through the window.

Stave would have helped her, but he did not exist. None of her friends had ever existed.—dreaming, Covenant had once told her. We’re sharing a dream. If she could not stop imagining people and events and nightmares, Roger would butcher her son.

But going backward through the window required her to brace her shins on the window-frame. She felt half a dozen cuts in one leg, a dozen, more cuts than there were scraps of glass.

And when she dropped to the ground outside the house, she was still in the hallway. Smoke and flame boiled toward her, a tumult avid for the end of all things. But now the last room, Sara’s death-chamber, had become an inferno. It roared with ruin like the rest of the farmhouse.

She should have thrown her medical bag out the window with her flashlight. She had lost her chance to escape that way.

Long arms of fire reached out for her. Ebony smoke streaked with bitter orange and unbearable heat tumbled toward her.

Shrieking, she turned and fled; ran frantically as if the hall were the throat of She Who Must Not Be Named. She had to find the end before the bane’s mouth closed; before she became horror and torment forever.

Before Roger hurt Jeremiah.

Because she was still trying to save her son, she slapped fire and smoke away with her bag. Floundering and flailing, she ran with all her strength—

—and could not reach the end, the final wall—

Pain throbbed in her leg as if her shin and calf were gushing blood.

—because there was no end. She had been betrayed by her dreams. The hall stretched interminably ahead of her, and flames devoured the walls, growing faster than she could stamp them out, and the furnace squalling at her back had become the heart of a volcano: the savage core of the bane’s need, or the brimstone ferocity of Roger’s given hand.