“You just do whatever it is you have to do. I’ll give you space,” his grandfather said, rising. “In fact, I think I’ll go prowl around, just in case. I won’t be far.” The old man smiled, nodded, then headed into the trees, leaving Alex alone among the shadows swaying gently with the breeze.

XVI.

SOMEWHERE IN THE LIGHT

Alex took out the toy robot. He knew the clumsy face so intimately he could draw it blindfolded. He closed his eyes, holding the image in his mind, lining it up as the first door he had to pass through in the experimental process he’d worked out. First the toy. Then the tablet. Then the light.

He sat like that for what felt like a long time, trying to move his mind. Eventually, he opened his eyes. To judge by Harry’s old watch, nearly an hour had passed. It was useless.

He shifted where he sat, trying to get comfortable, and tried to think what he would be doing at this moment if he were at home and not sitting deep in the woods in Germany, trying to raise the dead for his two-hundred-year-old grandfather. Double math. He still couldn’t decide which was worse.

He lay back and pulled out his phone. Nothing new. He tapped a message to David—Hey, I’m away just now with my grandad. Short notice trip. Back in a couple of days. I hope—just to send some contact back to normality. It would be nice to keep in touch. The message wouldn’t go. “No signal,” Alex said, and laughed bleakly.

Raindrops spattered the screen as he scrolled through the pictures of the stolen paintings. He stopped at the one called The Great Last Judgment, struck by the blues and reds of the garments some of the figures wore, very vivid in his gloomy surroundings.

“The dead have risen . . .”

He stared at the last message from Kenzie.

You need to go to the right I think.

He shook himself. He was putting off what he had to do, just like he always did with his math homework. The Prince of Procrastination, his mum called him. He pulled out his notebook and puzzled over the lines he’d scribbled to himself, searching for a clue. He hesitated, uncertain. The idea that was forming didn’t make sense. He decided not to think about that—what did make sense anymore?—and just follow the feeling that it somehow seemed to fit.

He resolved to make one last try at contacting the power, give it everything. But this time, he would line up a new set of mental doors to guide him: the old toy, then the tablet, and then . . . Okay—something to do with Kenzie Mitchell. Then the light.

He cleared his mind, put those thoughts in order, and focused.