“Don’t look at him,” said Hermia. “He’s too strong for us.”

“I’m weak,” said Wad. “You have most of my outself inside you now. What do I call you?”

“You don’t,” said Danny. He gathered the mouth of the Great Gate around himself and they were in the barn again.

The sunlight was gone. The stones. The grass.

Stone knelt, his fingers pressed against the floor. He was weeping. “It’s a desert here, compared to there,” he said.

“We met the Gate Thief,” Veevee told Marion. “He was almost as pretty as Danny, and as old as the stars.”

“I can’t lock the other gate,” said Hermia. “The outbound gate, the one you made from the hearts of strangers.”

Danny could see that she had locked the return gate, and was trying to close the other. “You can’t control it because there are twenty mages in it,” said Danny. “You have to close them one at a time.” He began pinching off the gates.

But by the time he got to the third gate, the first was open again. “It won’t stay closed,” he said.

“I see now,” said Hermia, and instead of trying to close the whole Great Gate, she began to join him in closing the individual gates. “I can see everything more clearly. I’m so much stronger. You’d think I could close them.”

Danny could see that she was getting no better results than he was.

The inbound Great Gate, the one made entirely from Danny’s own gates, was closed and locked, but the gates of other mages were not so obedient. They willed themselves to be open, and though Danny and Hermia could close them, they would not stay closed.

“We have a wide-open public gate here,” said Veevee. “I can see what you’re doing, and they won’t stay closed. They don’t want to be closed.”

“Wild Gates,” said Danny. “‘Angry Wild Gates,’ he called them.”

“Angry at him, not us,” said Veevee.

“I held them prisoner, too,” said Danny. “And it doesn’t matter who they’re angry at. They aren’t people, just the wraiths of people, the lingering memory of them. But strong.”

“Going through a Great Gate strengthened us,” said Veevee. “But they are a Great Gate. How strong is that?”

“Let them stay open,” said Danny. “It isn’t going to work, no matter what we do.”

“Are you saying that you can’t close the Great Gate?” asked Marion.

“I closed the one coming back to Earth,” said Hermia. “But not the one leading to Westil from here.”

“So my barn is now a Great Gate, and you can’t close it?” demanded Leslie.

“Why did you use those gates?” said Hermia.

“They wanted it,” said Danny. “It seemed only fair, after so long in prison.”