Hermia was gone. But he still held the water bottle in his hand. He tried to lift it to drink more. He couldn’t remember how. He bent over and touched his cracked and bloody lips to the plastic lip of the bottle. The water didn’t come upward. But he was able to hold it against his lips as he straightened his body. This brought the bottle up with him. Water flowed from it over his lips. He made his lips and tongue work and swallowed some of it. This time it felt better. But then it went down wrong and he coughed. Choked. Dropped the bottle. Even as he continued to try to cough out the water that had gone down his windpipe, he felt around for the bottle. Why can’t I see it? he asked himself. Everything’s so bright.

Then there were hands again, hands on both sides of him, picking him up, raising him to his feet. It hurt to unwind his body, to stand up. His legs would not support him. His legs had no feeling. How long had he sat in the same position without moving?

They were talking to each other. Two women. Hermia again. Veevee. The other gatemages. His friends. They were both angry. They were both worried. But they were speaking in language, and he was avoiding language. He didn’t want to hear language because that would distract him from …

No, no, he wasn’t remembering anymore. He was no longer in the trance. It was good to have language now. He needed to hear what they were saying and understand them.

“He’s not hearing us,” said Veevee.

“Tell me what I don’t know,” said Hermia.

“We have to get him to Naples,” said Veevee.

“There’s no gate to—oh, Naples, Florida. Let’s just concentrate on getting him back through this gate to the house he left from.”

Danny staggered. His legs were beginning to get feeling again. An ecstasy of pins and needles. An agony of pain in his long-unmoved joints.

“He’s trying to walk,” said Hermia.

“He was just staring at the cave?”

“Makes the Narcissus story make sense,” said Hermia. “Forced to stare at the same spot forever.”

“Only not his own reflection.”

“How do we know what he was seeing?”

What was I seeing? Can I remember anything? Was this all wasted, because it didn’t enter my own mind in a way that I have any hope of making sense of?

They got him down the sandy, rocky slope to the gate and suddenly they were indoors. Hal’s bedroom. Was that really the last place he had been? It didn’t matter which had been last. There was a gate from Hal’s room to the cave in Egypt, and that’s all that mattered. Hermia had found it. Then she had gone for Veevee to help her. Chaining from gate to gate.