The girl is gone.

I sit in the wreckage of the lab. The gate is dormant, but not sealed. A thin seam of light still bleeds through. The Demogorgon is dead, but its mother—the Mind Flayer, the shadow that lives between worlds—I glimpsed it in the final second. It saw me. It smiled with her face.

Not vanished. Not dead. Gone. There is a difference, and it is a difference I intend to exploit.

And she will.

But she won't. Not for me.