James stood. He held out his arm, and Iris took it, tucked her hand into his elbow the way she had at the top of the stairs, and got to her feet. Petra came and took the other side. Ruby went ahead, holding her sketchbook open in front of her like a map, and Mr. Sumner stood aside in the doorway with his red cap against his chest, and they walked her down the narrow curving stairs and out the open door and down onto the yellow step stool and onto the cold concrete of Track Twenty-Six, where Ms. Dobrev was standing with her arms folded and her radio in her hand.
"Got her?"
"Got her," James said.
Ms. Dobrev lifted her radio. "Engineer, conductor. Situation resolved. We're clear." She looked at her watch, and then at James, and one corner of her square mouth went up about a sixteenth of an inch. "Six minutes, Facilities. You owe me six minutes. I'm going to make them up by Princeton and I'm going to think about you the whole way."
"Yes, ma'am."
She stepped up into the car, and the attendant folded the yellow stool and swung up after her, and down the long silver flank of the train the doors began to close, one after another, a chain of soft pneumatic sighs going away into the dark. The locomotives at the far end changed their note. The Zephyr shuddered all down its length and began to move, so slowly at first that it seemed the platform was moving instead, the windows sliding past one by one, faces in them, the Mennonite family, the college girl with her neck pillow, and in the glass of the Sightseer Lounge, the boy with the headphones, who lifted one hand to them against the window and held it there as he went by.
They sat her under the owl.
It took a while to get there. Iris was tired now, the bone-deep tiredness that comes after terror, and she walked slowly, and stopped twice in the concourse to look up at the departure boards with a puzzled air, as if they were written in a language she had once known. Mr. Sumner brought the cart around and insisted, and so they rode the last stretch through the passage under Canal Street, Iris in the front seat beside him like a dowager in a parade, Petra and Ruby and James in the back with their knees up, the little orange flag snapping on its pole, people stepping aside. Iris waved at some of them. Some of them waved back.
Ron Winnick was waiting at the top of the passage, in the Great Hall, with the blue suitcase.
He was holding it in front of him with both hands, the way you'd hold a baby you'd been handed at a christening and didn't quite know how to give back, and Officer Akers was beside him, and Officer Akers's face was gray and stricken and young. Ron didn't say anything at first. He looked at Iris getting down from the cart on Mr. Sumner's arm, and at Ruby, and at James's badge hanging on its lanyard, and James saw him make the same slow calculation he made when a panel was sparking and he had to decide in what order to shut things off.
"East wall," James said. "Under the owl. That's where she needs to be."