“Danny told you to tell me this?” asked Hermia.

“He left it up to me. Because simply telling you doesn’t help you at all,” said Pat. “You can only learn it by doing.”

Hermia tried to make sense of this. “So you learned it, and you didn’t learn it from Danny. What did you do, die?”

“Yes,” said Pat.

Hermia had meant the question as a joke. But Pat’s response was honest enough. So Hermia thought through what that implied. “He followed you to the afterlife and brought you back?”

“That’s the simplest version.”

“You were actually completely dead,” said Hermia.

“If you’re not dead, you can’t get to Duat. Except that Danny held on to me, mostly detached from his body, and let me pull him there.”

“So you’ve been dead, and you came back.”

“Which is how I know what it feels like to move—without leaving a gate behind me that somebody else might follow.”

Hermia began to realize the implications of this. Danny had given away all his gates, and a few days ago he got rid of the last of the captive gates, too. But now he could go anywhere without needing to have any gates at all. His outself was in Loki’s tender keeping, and yet Danny’s movements were not restricted. “So that makes you a windmage and a gatemage,” said Hermia.

“I can only move myself,” said Pat. “But in the long run, that’s all anyone can do. Danny and Veevee have talked about it, about how gates usually work, and I suspect they want you to hear their ideas and see if you can come up with alternatives.”

“Did they lock you out of the room, or do you know what they think?”

“If explaining it could give you the ability to do it, Veevee would already have learned it.”

So you think that if Veevee can’t learn it, neither can I? But Hermia did not say that. Instead, she said, “If I can’t learn it by hearing about it, you might as well tell me.”

Pat gave one little derisive laugh—but then went ahead and told. Maybe not everything, but something. “The movement I can do now is the only kind of movement there is—a ka relocating itself in relation to other kas. Only in Duat they seem to think ‘ka’ should refer only to the human inself. The generic term for every entity capable of such movement is ‘pret.’ All of us are prets. And the ba—the outself, right? It acts like a part of us, but it isn’t. It consists of the handful or dozen or thousand or billion prets that chose to follow us into this life, into our bodies.”

“So Danny’s not really a man with a billion gates, he’s just the chairman of the board?”