They carried the girl down into the Vault.
Her name, it turned out, was Wren.
Her mother spat the name at them on the way down, as though she resented the fact that she'd needed them to save her daughter.
She had been in the crowd the whole time.
Too frightened to speak while the torches were burning.
Too frightened to move while her daughter was tied to the pole.
Only now, with the danger apparently passed, had she found her voice.
This time, nobody argued about it.
They settled Wren in one of the smaller rooms beneath the Vault.
Marguerite posted herself by the door, arms folded, watching the girl as though she might bolt.
Or worse.
Ethan wasn't sure which possibility she considered more likely.
"Explain it to me again," Alistair said.
Wren had been examined.
Her pulse was steady.
Her breathing was normal.
There was no trace of the green glow that had filled her eyes in the square.
That seemed to bother Alistair more than if she'd been dying.
"You shut a door," he continued. "What door?"
"The one I've been learning to open."
Ethan sat heavily against the edge of a table.
The coal in his chest was still simmering.
Not quite anger.
Something closer to resentment.
"Idris taught me to listen to mine. I didn't think about what would happen if I did the opposite while something inside her was reaching toward it."
Alistair's eyes narrowed.
"Something inside her."
"The same kind of thing that's inside me."
Idris stood near Wren's bed, silent.
"You closed yourself against it," he said slowly. "You prevented your... passenger from answering the call."
Ethan nodded.
"Is that bad?"
Idris considered the question.
"It's unprecedented."
He looked toward Wren.
"In my experience, that's usually worse than bad."
He crossed to the girl and checked her pulse with two fingers, the same way Alistair had checked Ethan's a week ago.
Wren stirred faintly but didn't wake.
Idris withdrew his hand.
"Whatever was inside her is gone."
Alistair's expression tightened.
"Gone where?"
Nobody answered.
Ethan looked down at his hands.
He remembered the moment the connection had snapped.
It hadn't felt like killing.
It hadn't felt like victory, either.
It had felt like something being pulled through a place that wasn't meant to be crossed.
"These things don't normally call to each other," Idris said.
"How do you know?"
"They compete for hosts. They interfere with one another. They react to one another."
His brow furrowed.
"But I've never encountered one deliberately reaching for another through a human host."
"Mine called hers kin," Ethan said.
The room went very still.
"Kin," Alistair repeated.
"Not prey."
Ethan looked at him.
"Not rival."
He paused.
"Kin."
The word seemed to hang in the room.
Idris slowly turned toward him.
"And you're certain?"
"I heard it."
"Could you have misunderstood?"
"No."
Ethan closed his eyes.
He reached inward.
The coal was still there.
Sulking. Furious.
But underneath the anger was something else.
Fear.
He pulled gently at the thread of it, the way Idris had taught him.
The sensation sharpened.
Not an image.
Not a memory.
Just an impression.
Distance.
Separation.
A door that had once been open.
Something on the other side.
Waiting.
"I think they came from the same place."
Alistair said nothing.
"Karrathess," Ethan continued. "That's what mine showed me."
"Showed you?"
"A name."
He opened his eyes.
"I don't know if it's a place. I don't know if it's a wound. I don't even know if I understood what I was seeing."
He glanced toward Wren.
"But I think there's a connection."
"Between them?"
"Maybe."
Ethan frowned.
"Maybe there's more than one door."
He touched his chest.
"Or maybe there's one door with more than one thing trying to get through it."
Silence.
"And mine," Ethan said, "has been trying to reopen it since the moment it landed in me."
"And tonight," Marguerite said quietly from the doorway, "it nearly got a second key."
Nobody answered immediately.
Idris straightened.
For the first time since Ethan had met him, the old man looked less like a scholar and more like a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to.
"How many Taken has this city burned in the last year?" he asked.
It wasn't really a question.
His eyes moved from Ethan to Wren.
"How many people did we burn because we thought there was nothing left to save?"
Nobody answered.
Idris's gaze settled on the door.
"How many doors were we closing?"
His voice dropped.
"And how many were we, without knowing it, leaving ajar?"
Nobody answered.
Nobody needed to.