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girl punched the numbers 911, and repeated, “I’m in a basement,” and the voice on the other end said, “Okay, sweetheart, okay, you just stay with us, just stay with us, keep talking, we can see you now, we can follow the phone’s signal, we know exactly where you are.”
    ***
    Devonté walked her up the stairs, across the porch, and back out to his car. She sat in the passenger seat until the sounds of the sirens came lilting through the night and the people in the house came pouring out through the windows and the doors and down the second-story fire escape and scattered. She waited until two female officers with flashlights, followed by two more men, one with bolt cutters, walked into the house.
    “You did good,” said Devonté. Shannon could barely bring herself to nod. She was so tired. It felt like this night had gone on forever. In her pocket, her phone had gone silent. Maybe the battery had died. She was hoping that it had. If that phone’s screen never flashed at her again, that would be, she thought, just fine.
    Devonté gave her a candy bar and a cup of coffee laced with sugar and fake dairy sludge like they had at the AA meetings, and she slurped it up, not minding when it burned her tongue. She was huddled in front of the heater, finishing the last of the coffee, when the girl emerged. She was wrapped in a blanket, a tiny figure with bare feet. Shannon hoped that her parents would welcome her home; that there’d be a warm bath and a soft bed, and that they’d tell her that they loved her, no matter what she’d done or what had been done to her, that no matter what, she would always be their girl.
    “You did good,” Devonté repeated. Her eyes had slipped shut. She forced them open, then let them close again. His voice seemed to be coming from the other end of a very long tunnel. The world looked strange, the sky stretching wide and thin overhead, the upturned Big Wheel on the porch seeming to float a few inches off the wooden boards, and Shannon was so tired. The electricity she’d felt when she’d recognized the house, when she’d known that she could find this place and save the girl imprisoned there, was gone. When she opened her eyes again and saw the row house silhouetted underneath the black fall sky, with the moon still riding behind its veil of clouds, she knew. She knew what had happened, and why the guy at that first meeting had wanted to talk about the white light, why Mr. Park hadn’t seen her at the fruit store, but she’d been perfectly visible to the old guy leading the Night Owls meeting, the one with the bandage on his cheek. The one who was dying.
    Don’t you know you’re dead already?
    She plucked at the sleeve of her undershirt, then tugged down the collar. The twin branches of the Y-shaped incision they’d made, then stitched shut with thick thread, were both visible. No need to make it pretty. The dress in her closet, the one her mother kept, had a high collar. Dead already. Devonté nodded as if she’d spoken the words. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
    “When?” she asked. Already the street was starting to fade. The crumbling brick facade of the house had faded to pale pink, the pumpkin set on the porch across the street was fading to the color of watery Tang. As she watched, there was a faint pop, then the pumpkin winked out of sight.
    “That night you went to the hospital,” Devonté said. “The night with the two guys. They gave you too much. It wasn’t on purpose. They bought it on the street, didn’t know it wasn’t cut.”
    She closed her eyes. It didn’t seem to matter much. “So why?” she asked. “Why all this?”
    Devonté shrugged. Outside the car window, the house collapsed in on itself, then disappeared. The sky above was flat and dimensionless as gray paint on a board. The street looked like a stage when the performance was over, just before the sets were struck. “Couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I’m not the one who