To the west, the zeppelin was growing larger as it neared, eclipsing the setting sun, but if the kids crowding the fountain noticed, they didn’t care. By the time Mary arrived, she would be too late; they’d be gone. Perhaps not every single one of them, but most of them. All the ones who were ready. As it should be.

Nick looked up to the peaks of the Twin Towers, converging as they scraped the sky. He marveled at their majesty the way tourists had during the Towers’ twenty-nine years of life. It was a comfort to know that they would never be gone completely, because they were here, a timeless part of Everlost. They were great monuments of memory, and although Mary had, for a time, turned them into her own personal orphanage, that was over now. They had a greater place in the scheme of things.

By now more than half the children were gone, and the rest were well on the way. Meadow came up to Nick, and together they watched the joyful vanishings.

“Mary’s going to have a fit when she sees this,” Meadow said. “It’ll totally trip her out.” Then she smiled. “Good thing I won’t be here to see it.”

Then Meadow ran toward the fountain, jumped in, and a moment later she was gone.

Nick pulled his own coin from his pocket—the one he had salvaged from the empty bucket. It was still cold as cold could be, but that was all right. He realized now that while his arrival had tied him to Allie, his departure was tied to Mary. As long as she was fighting to keep children here, he would be fighting to free them.

He supposed that made them enemies. It almost made him laugh. How strange it was to be in love with your enemy.

With the zeppelin coming in for a landing, and the last of the children vanishing from the fountain, Nick put his hands in his pockets and left, strolling leisurely uptown.

Perhaps Mary was right about Everlost being an eternal world: a place where all things and places that have earned immortality remain forever in glory. If that were the case, then Everlost was like the grand museum of the universe, a heavenly and priceless gallery. As Mary once said, they were blessed to be able to see it—but a museum was to be visited, and appreciated, not to be lived in. That was Mary’s mistake. Afterlights were merely visitors passing through.

Nick knew there were more lost souls in lost places to free. There were more fountains and more buckets of coins to be found—and although he didn’t know when he would ever get where he was going, he knew that when the time was right he would get there.

In the meantime, he had work to do.

EPILOGUE

The Sky Witch

The little girl sat knees to chest on the playground sand, not knowing what to do. The last she remembered, she was at the very tippy top of the jungle gym, above all the other kids. Then she had lost her balance, and fallen. For the strangest moment, she had found herself running down a tunnel toward a distant light … if only she had listened to her mother, and tied her shoelaces, she might not have tripped over her own feet on the way.