The line clicked and hissed over the oceanic cables, and rang, four times, and then a voice answered, thick with the sleep of a man in the middle of a Cincinnati night.

“Hello?” “Martin,” I said.

“It’s Nora Vance.” There was a beat of heavy silence on the line, the silence of a man understanding that a number which has never once rung in all the years since he assigned it is ringing now.

“Nora,” he said.

And I looked down at the two pieces of damning stationery crumpled in my fist, and I said the phrase I had teased him about, the phrase I had spent years certain I would never need, the two words that were the entire point of his humorless drill.

“Blue Lantern.” And the atmosphere on the line changed instantly, completely.