Pony and Bones waited outside. Pony was chewing on something that looked like a chunk of raw meat. None of them looked any closer. Instead, Jack dropped the bag containing Dr. Bleak’s head on the seat before she turned and walked further around the base of the castle, Sumi and Christopher behind her, while Kade and Cora remained with the wagon.

When they found Jill, she wasn’t moving. She had landed in a graceless sprawl, and it was clear, when Jack and Christopher gathered her up and lifted her, that several things inside her body had broken so profoundly that they could never be repaired, not even here, where science could do virtually anything. Sumi folded Jill’s hands across her chest, and the three of them carried her back to the wagon like pallbearers at the world’s least-attended funeral. They lay her down in the hay, and Jack climbed silently into the driver’s seat, leaving the others to arrange themselves.

This time, Kade rode up front, while the others—who were less squeamish, or maybe just more accustomed to this world and its horrors—rode in the back. He glanced at Jack as she drove. She didn’t glance back. Her eyes were fixed on the fields ahead, and the bag containing Dr. Bleak’s head rested in her lap like a swaddled child, something to be cared for and protected.

When the windmill came into view ahead, Kade swallowed. “Jack—” he began.

“Don’t.” Her voice was still utterly, eerily calm. “Please.”

He didn’t.

Jack drove on.

When they were close enough to the windmill to see details—the slope of the fence, the narrow, shuttered slits of the windows—the back door opened, spilling buttery yellow brightness into the darkness. Alexis appeared, silhouetted in the lamplight. Jack managed to contain herself long enough to pull the horses up to the stable. Then she jumped down and ran to the other woman, the burlap sack held in one hand. She flung herself into Alexis’s arms, and neither of them said anything, and neither of them had anything to say.

Kade looked awkwardly away. “Any of you know anything about horses?”

“No, but I know skeletons,” said Christopher. “Let’s get to work.”

By the time they finished unhitching the horses—Pony nipped, while Bones was docile as could be—and returning them to their stalls, Alexis was alone in the doorway. The four of them approached her cautiously.

She raised her hands and signed something. Sumi nodded.

“Jack went upstairs to change her clothes,” she said. “She’ll be right down, and then they’ll send us home. Alexis says thank you, by the way. She wasn’t sure we’d be back. She knew Jack couldn’t do it on her own.”

Alexis signed something else.