The forward momentum of the ghost horse trying to gallop through stone was greater than their upward momentum, but that was fine. Even if they were only moving up inch by inch, they’d get to the surface eventually.

At last they surfaced in a New Jersey wood. It was dusk now, and they were a few miles inland from where they had begun.

The second they were on the surface, Allie leaped off the horse, fully prepared to run if she had to. As far as she was concerned, Mikey McGill was not to be trusted—even if he did just rescue her.

“I should have let you sink,” Mikey said.

“Why didn’t you?”

Mikey didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Where were you trying to go? Maybe I can help you get there.”

She hesitated, expecting to see some sort of deceit in him, but found none. “If you must know, I’m going home.”

Mikey nodded. “And then?”

Allie opened her mouth to answer, and found that nothing came out. Allie was a goal-oriented girl. The problem was she rarely thought beyond the goal.

What was her plan, really? She would get home, but then what? She would see if her father survived the car accident. She would spend a little time watching her family’s comings and goings. She would try to communicate with them—maybe she would even find a neighbor willing to be skinjacked, and then talk to her family convincing them it was her by telling them things that only she could know. Allie would tell them she was all right, not to worry and not to mourn. But then what?

It was now that Allie figured out something she should have figured out a long time ago: Home was no longer home. She had denied it, refused to think about it, pretended it didn’t matter, but she couldn’t pretend anymore. If her great victory was going home, then her victory was an empty one.

“I asked you a question,” said Mikey. “What will you do after you go home?”

Since Allie had no answer, she threw it back in his face. “That’s my business,” she said. “What about you? Are you going to make yourself into the One True Monster of Everlost again?”

Mikey gently kicked his heels into Shiloh’s side to remind the horse to keep pulling his hooves out of the ground, so they didn’t sink again. “I’m done with being a monster,” he said. Then he reached into his pocket and threw something to Allie, and she caught it. It was a coin.

“What’s this for?”

“You can use it to get you where you’re going.”

Allie looked at the coin, so similar to the one she had tossed into Mary’s fountain. Did he mean what she thought he meant? To get where she was going—it was terrifying yet enticing. Electrifying. She stared at the coin, then looked back up at Mikey. “Is that what you’re doing, then? ‘Getting where you’re going’?”

Allie thought she read some fear in his face at the suggestion. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I’m going anywhere good. I’m in no hurry to get there.”