“But you didn’t know them—what kind of men they were,” said Hermia. “A wraith preserves the character of its maker, and these might have been very bad mages.”

“Yes, that seems obvious now,” said Danny. “I chose the most insistent. The most selfish. But it never occurred to me that I couldn’t control these gates.”

“You’ve never faced a gate that wasn’t under your control,” said Marion. “You’ve never seen a gate that wasn’t of your making.”

“But he did make it,” said Veevee.

“I wound them together, I threw them into spacetime,” said Danny. “But Marion’s right—they aren’t my gates.”

“Then move them,” said Leslie. “Get it out of my barn.”

Danny tried. The gate wouldn’t budge. Only when he stopped trying to move it did it move—in the opposite direction. And it widened.

“It’s trying to eat us,” said Hermia, alarmed.

It was true. The mouth of the Great Gate was seeking them out.

“Take them!” cried Veevee. “They were captive before, capture them again!”

Danny tried to unmake the gate as he had done with his previous Great Gate, but these were not his own gates, and they dodged him. He could work on one at a time, but they all resisted him. They refused to be captive again.

“I thought passing through the gate was supposed to make me irresistibly strong,” said Danny.

“They’re stronger, too,” said Veevee. “Dead as they are, it made them more powerful, to be part of a Great Gate.”

“Wad took them, though. Loki, I mean,” said Danny.

“They weren’t all woven together like this,” said Hermia. “And he knows more than you.”

Now Danny understood what Wad had meant: “You’ll be back here soon enough, begging me to teach you how to undo this terrible thing you’ve done.” Danny wanted to go back right now, to demand answers from Wad.

“No!” shouted Hermia.

“No what?” asked Danny.

“Don’t step into that gate!” she cried. “Don’t you see? It’s not yours. What’s to stop it from moving itself into the depths of the sea?”

“What have we done?” asked Veevee miserably.

“You don’t control it at all,” said Leslie. She wasn’t just angry now. She was afraid.

“It could go out and look for the Families that are hunting for it?” asked Marion.

“I don’t know what it can do,” said Danny. “Wad was right, I am a fool.”

“At least the return gate is closed,” said Hermia. “If the Families go to Westil, they can’t get back.”

“But that’s terrible,” said Danny. “What right do we have to set them loose in that world? I have to reopen the other gate. I have to make it so there’s no space between them, so that if you go through the gate you come back here immediately. No pause, no chance to see the sights.”