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Twenty-six the other way.

"That's it, then," Tobin says.

The barn smells like cold hay and forty people who've been awake since four. Frost on the inside of the high windows. someone's kid was asleep in a coat in the corner because there was nobody to leave her with.

Ansel spoke first, and he was better than I thought he would be.

He didn't call her a danger. He put Dario on the table and explained that a man of ours walked out of a fight and into nothing, twenty-one feet from the fence, and there's no body to bury and nothing positive to tell his sister, and every single thing about that is true.

Then he said the part that bothered him.

"I'm asking you to hand her to the Lantern because I don't have anything better. That's my whole case. I don't have anything better."

Cass went next with six stitches under her sleeve and told them the truth in both directions, the way she promised me she would.

That Maren put half a living creature in the air and left it hanging in my kitchen.

That she felt Maren's pulse afterward and it was steady while her own hands shook.

That she is standing in this barn at all because of her.

"Both of those are the same woman," Cass said. "I'm not going to make her simpler for you."

I said less than any of them. I told them what Evelyn told me three days ago and I didn't soften it.

There’s no fence anymore. They don't have to break in, so nobody is behind a line. Handing Maren to the Lantern doesn't put her somewhere safe. It just puts her somewhere else.

"Ansel's right about everything except the part where it helps her," I said. "That's all I've got."

Then the hands.

Ansel's goes up with the fourteen. He doesn't drop his eyes when I look at him, which I respect more than I want to.

Afterward he waits for me by the door.

"If another one of ours goes," he says, "we meet again."

"I know."

"And you'll stay in the room this time."

"I will."

He nods once and goes out into the gray.

Tobin comes past me and puts his old hand flat on my back for about a second and doesn't say a word, which from him is a speech.

The girl asleep in the corner wakes up while they're filing out and asks her father if it's done. He tells her it's done. She asks who won.

Nobody in the barn answers her.

I drive home with twenty-six and fourteen going around in my head.

Ours is waiting.

I know.

You said you'd tell her.