Kane blinked at her. The cave was gone, the arena evaporated. Behind Adeline, dusk had come to East Amity, and the stadium lights blazed white against a ruddy sunset. She helped him up, and he saw that they stood before the congregation of rapt spectators, arranged in a minimized version of the reverie’s crowd. He saw the football players he’d recognized as barbarians. And farther back he spotted Mikhail and Ethan with the rest of the pep band, no longer dressed as guards. Off the side huddled the cheerleading team, as though caught mid-escape.

Kane swung around to face where the giant lobster god had been; he now looked up in the vacant smile of the empty goalposts.

“Hey! Everything okay?”

Off to the side, Ursula waved at them from the locker rooms.

“Elliot’s getting his car,” she called. She was dressed in her field hockey uniform (still charred). Kane saw that Adeline was transformed, too. She wore shorts and a loose mint shirt. Both girls appeared completely free of the wounds they’d sustained. Kane ran his hands over his own body.

He was unhurt and alive, and the only burns that remained were the ones around his head.

“Kane, hurry up and give it back.”

Adeline motioned upward.

Hanging in the air was the knot of light, glinting like a cut-crystal ornament. Kane reached out and it floated to him with noncommittal buoyancy, stopping just above his palm. It emanated the memory of fire, of blood, of bones ground to dust. It had a sound, too. Susurrant and gentle, betraying none of the violence it held.

“Take this part easy, okay?” Adeline said. “You have to give it back slowly. Freely.”

Kane looked at her, then back at the knot. “You’ve done this before?”

“Not personally.”

Luckily for both of them, the knot knew what to do. It drifted over the confused crowd until it found was it was looking for: a player on the bench. It sank into his helmet.

“I told you it was Ben Cooper,” Adeline called.

“What?” Ursula threw her hands up. “He seems so nice! I never took him for the misogynistic, tomb-raiding type.”

“More like womb-raider. He’s the one who tried to get with me at my birthday last year. He’s a creep-o, Urs. He just hides it well.”

“I thought you suspected John Heckles.”

Adeline threw out a mocking laugh. “Heckles? That idiot doesn’t have an imaginative bone in his body. He’s a refrigerator.”

“Refrigerators hold wonders!”

Kane didn’t understand the joking mood. All around them people were panicking, the vanishing of the reverie having dumped them back into their home reality. Someone began an unsure chant. Others cowered, as though the summoned god still loomed.