The interfaith room was smaller than Kitty expected.
There were no stained-glass windows, golden statues, or carved declarations about which name God preferred. A cabinet held folded prayer rugs, plain scarves, several religious books, and battery candles. Three wooden stools faced an empty cream wall. An arrow on the ceiling indicated the direction of prayer for anyone who needed it.
Kitty closed the door behind her.
The panic outside became a muffled vibration.
She sat on the middle stool and placed XH's collection receipt across both palms.
For several seconds, she did not pray.
She watched the printed numbers shake with her hands.
Kitty had prayed before examinations, before her mother's medical appointments, and during nights when gunfire reached Utopia from beyond The Walls. Those prayers had always contained bargains.
Let me pass, and I will study harder.
Let my mother recover, and I will stop complaining.
Let XH choose me, and I will never ask for anything again.
The last bargain embarrassed her now.
Love was not a reward God could remove from another girl and place in Kitty's hands because she had suffered correctly.
She closed her eyes.
"I don't know how to ask this without being selfish," she whispered.
Rain tapped against the narrow frosted window.
"I am angry with him. I am angry with June. I am angry with myself because part of me still wants him to return and look for me first."
Her voice broke.
"But that is not what I am asking."
She unfolded the receipt and pressed it flat against her knees.
"Please bring him back. Not to me. Just back."
The room offered no answer.
Kitty continued anyway.
"Bring him back to JP so they can argue. Bring him back to TZ and HS. Bring him back to the people who blame him and the people who love him. Bring him back to June, even if that is where he wants to go."
Tears reached her chin.
"Please don't make my love prove itself by losing him."
The words left her with nothing to bargain and nowhere to hide.
For the first time, Kitty prayed for XH's life without asking for a place inside it.
Inside the consular building, the senior officer made her fourth call to the sixth floor.
Nobody answered.
The reversed receipt number remained between us on the master authorization. Eleven passports rested inside the orange pouch. Thirteen remained in the gray security case behind the glass.
"Release the eleven," I said. "At least the others can use them."
"The authorization covers one batch. Once I partially complete the collection, the remaining documents require a new authorization."
"Then correct the two digits. You have the original passport and receipt in front of you."
"I can see the clerical error. I cannot certify another officer's amendment."
"Why not?"
"Because stolen blank passports and corrupted identity records are the reason your cohort entered this process. Every exception we invent today becomes a method somebody can exploit tomorrow."
I hated the answer because it was reasonable.
The officer turned her monitor so I could see the document trail. The receipt, biometric record, passport number, and revalidation mark all belonged to the same student. Only the copied sleeve number on my master form was wrong.
One reversed pair of digits stood between twenty-four people and the airport.
"Can the authorizing officer approve it electronically?"
"Yes."
"Then why isn't she?"
"Her floor remains a higher-risk zone. The health team collected everyone's phones during interviews to prevent surface transfer between rooms."
"Use the building intercom."
"Medical assessment rooms are not connected to the public address system."
"Send security."
"Movement between containment zones is restricted."
Every answer was another locked door.
I pressed both hands against the counter.
"There has to be something we can do while following the rules."
The officer studied me.
"Most people demand that rules disappear when the rules inconvenience them."
"I have seen what happens when the rules disappear."
She looked toward the red-lit stairwell.
"There may be one option. The central foreign ministry can issue a remote amendment after comparing the scanned documents. Their emergency team is overwhelmed, and we would need a ministerial priority code."
"How do we get one?"
"Your government-sponsored program requests it through the recovery office."
"Our coordinator is trying to put twenty-three students on a bus."
"Then I suggest you call her before your battery dies."
My screen showed twelve percent.
Anna found Kitty ten minutes after the prayer began.
She opened the door quietly and stopped when she saw the receipt in Kitty's hands.
"Do you want me to leave?"
Kitty wiped her face.
"I don't know."
Anna sat on the stool beside her.
"Then I can not know with you."
For a while, they listened to the rain.
"Does it count if I am still angry?" Kitty asked.
"Prayer?"
"Love."
Anna considered the question seriously.
"I think anger means something still matters. What we do with it decides the rest."
"I wanted him to choose me."
"I know."
"Part of me still does."
"I know that too."
"June kissed him knowing how I felt."
"Yes."
Kitty looked at her.
Anna did not soften the truth to make forgiveness easier.
"You do not have to forgive them today," she said. "You can want XH alive and still refuse to let him hurt you again."
Kitty's shoulders finally dropped.
"Can you pray with me?"
Anna reached for her hand.
"Tell me his full name."
Kitty spoke it slowly.
Not his nickname. Not the name shouted across dormitories or printed beneath accusations in the news.
His complete name.
Anna repeated it.
Together, they asked for one frightened, stubborn person to come back alive.
Aina answered my call while arguing with the airline.
"We need a ministerial priority code," I said.
"For what?"
I explained the reversed number and the remote amendment procedure.
Papers moved on her end. Voices asked whether the bus should leave.
"The National Recovery Office issued our travel orders," Aina said. "I will call them."
"My battery is almost gone."
"Give your phone to the consular officer."
I passed it through the transfer drawer after wiping it with the disinfectant cloth she provided.
The officer connected it to a charging cable behind the counter.
"There," she said. "You have postponed one disaster."
"Can I borrow the cable when we leave?"
"Do not become ambitious."
While Aina contacted Yandong, I continued verifying the passports that remained inside the gray case. The officer could not release them, but she could prepare everything for the moment authorization arrived.
NS.
Kitty.
June.
Mine.
The photographs were taken before The Walls. Before bruises, stitches, medals, accusations, and Water Boom.
June's picture showed the beginning of a smile she had apparently decided against. Kitty looked directly into the camera with the calm expression she wore whenever she was most nervous. NS appeared offended that an immigration office had asked him to stand against a plain white wall.
My own photograph looked younger than the person holding it.
"You know them well," the officer said.
"I thought I did."
"Travel is good at correcting that belief."
"Does it ever make people simpler?"
"No. It only gives them unfamiliar places in which to remain complicated."
The final sleeve matched the final receipt.
Twenty-four genuine passports.
Twenty-four identities the previous government had failed to erase.
All that remained was permission to carry them through one door.
News of Kitty's prayer moved through the residence without anybody announcing it.
NC entered next and sat against the wall.
Jihye left her tarot deck outside before joining them.
Cherry came because Bunny was crying and refused to enter alone. Bunny carried a list of every classmate's emergency contact, folded so many times that the paper had begun tearing along the creases.
They did not all pray the same way.
Some closed their eyes. Some folded their hands. Jihye sat with her palms open on her knees. NC watched the battery candle flicker while rainwater moved down the frosted window.
Kitty repeated XH's name.
Then she began saying the others.
JP.
TZ.
HS.
NS.
June.
Anna continued with the students sitting outside beside their luggage. Bunny added Aina and the shuttle driver. Cherry quietly included the consular employees trapped with XH and the health workers entering rooms everyone else wanted to escape.
The prayer expanded until it no longer belonged to one love triangle or one group of friends.
It belonged to everyone waiting for somebody behind a border.
Through the narrow glass beside the door, Kitty could see NS sitting on the opposite side of the corridor.
He had not entered.
At Water Boom, he had told her that it had always been her. Since then, he had asked for nothing. He had carried the umbrella, brought her somewhere safe, and stayed awake without using her heartbreak as a doorway.
Now he guarded the quiet room without claiming a place inside it.
Kitty understood something that made the prayer harder.
Loving XH did not make NS's love less real. NS loving her did not require her to stop being afraid for XH. None of their feelings became clean simply because danger demanded an answer.
She had spent years imagining that one final choice would arrange all four hearts into the correct order.
There was no correct order.
There were only people trying not to destroy one another with what they needed.
Kitty looked toward NS through the glass.
He lowered his eyes, giving her privacy even after she had seen him.
"Please protect him too," Kitty whispered.
She did not say which him.
Perhaps she meant both.
When Kitty opened her eyes, June stood in the doorway.
Their gazes met.
Water Boom remained between them.
So did the Grand Fountain, the Wall Raid, and every year in which both girls had mistaken suffering for proof that one of them deserved XH more.
Kitty did not invite June inside.
She did not ask her to leave.
June lowered herself onto the floor beside the door.
"I don't know how to pray," she said.
Kitty looked down at the receipt in her hands.
"Neither do I."
"What did you ask for?"
"For him to come back."
June waited for the rest.
There was no rest.
"Even if he comes back to me?" she asked.
Kitty's pain moved visibly across her face.
"I asked for his life," she said. "I didn't tell God who should own it."
June began to cry.
She bowed her head beside the girl she had hurt.
For several minutes, they wanted the same thing without turning it into a competition.
At five eighteen, the airport issued its final instruction.
Our cohort had to enter the international terminal by eight thirty. After that, the airline would release the seats to stranded citizens already at the airport.
The bus could wait until six.
No later.
Aina's request for a ministerial priority code remained unanswered.
The National Recovery Office had been reduced to emergency staffing because half its employees were helping coordinate citizens across four countries. Every available line was busy.
XH remained inside the containment building.
The twenty-four passports remained legally unreleased.
Families began telling students to abandon the cohort and find separate ways home.
One father offered to purchase a private ticket through Singapore. Another instructed his daughter to report her passport stolen. A mother begged her son to leave for the airport with only a photograph of his document and argue at the counter.
Fear traveled through phone speakers more efficiently than any virus.
June left the interfaith room and stood beneath the departure board Aina had taped to the wall.
BUS: 6:00 P.M.
AIRPORT DEADLINE: 8:30 P.M.
FLIGHT: 11:40 P.M.
She read it once.
Then again.
She wrote the three times on her palm beside the notes already fading there.
NS approached quietly.
"What are you planning?"
"Something XH will hate."
"That narrows it down to every decision you have ever made."
June opened A.V.'s conversation.
"He has a driver cleared for the airport," she said. "If he can arrange one emergency document, he can reach someone inside the foreign ministry."
"His offer was for you."
"Then I will make helping XH the price of helping me."
"June, what does this man want from you?"
She looked at the message calling her beautiful.
"A future I never promised him."
"Do not promise it now."
"I won't."
"What will you promise?"
June pressed the call button.
"Enough for him to answer."
A.V. picked up after one ring.
"June? Have you finally decided to be sensible?"
She watched rain cover the road between Mashara and the city.
"You wanted a reason for me to see you when I return home," she said.
The man became silent.
"Yes."
"Earn it."
"How?"
June closed her fingers around the fading times written on her palm.
"Help me bring someone back."