Frankie adjusted her glasses, which had fogged up from her crying. “Oh, that’s right.” She perked up a little. “I read about the school at the library. It’s protected by magic. We can only enter if it lets us.”

“So why isn’t it letting us?” I asked, remembering how Eli and Zeran had gone ahead to make sure the school was still safe. Was there something wrong?

“While I was at the library, I read that the school didn’t exist in one place,” Frankie said. “That must be why you can’t open a gateway directly there.”

“Grand,” I said, frustrated.

Frankie shrugged with a goofy look on her face. “Someone once told me that magic explains the unexplainable.”

“I did say that, didn’t I?” I thought about Shangó’s theory that the Lord of Shadows drew his power from dark energy and got an idea. “Do you think that dark energy can exist in bubbles outside of space and time?”

Frankie tilted her head to one side and furrowed her eyebrows. “I suppose it could be possible,” she said. “But if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, the hard part would be to get the Lord of Shadows in that bubble.”

Maybe it was another dead end, but I couldn’t get Shangó’s theory out of my head. The celestials couldn’t kill the Lord of Shadows. That much was clear. He was too powerful, but if he was weakened enough, he might be able to be contained forever. I groaned in frustration. It was all just so . . . theoretical. It didn’t matter anyway. I would be stuck on Azur while the celestials did their celestial thing.

I redirected my gateway to open near the arch that led to the school. I wondered if Eleni had gotten back from our neighborhood yet and what news she would bring. “Time to take a little detour.”

Frankie gave me a nervous look before we stepped onto the bridge of god symbols. When we exited in the middle of the market in Azur, there was no one left on the streets—not even a peacekeeper. The sky was purple and gray, like a brewing storm, but it wasn’t completely dark. All the shops had been closed, and some had disappeared entirely, as if the shopkeepers had carried them off. All that was left were the lingering smells of sugar, butter, cinnamon, and popcorn.

“Maya, the arches,” Frankie said at my side. “They’re gone.”

Rana Kane, the ghost of the 112th librarian, had said the gateway between Azur and earth had closed after the first alarm went off, but he failed to mention that the arches would eventually disappear too. “This is inconvenient.”

“If my memory serves me correctly, which I’m sure it does, the school has a physical location in Azur,” Frankie said. “We passed it months ago when we visited Sky Father’s hut.”