"You could," she agrees levelly, "save for the fact that if you're here, that means that someone has summoned you. Spirits don't exactly just drop in." And why hadn't she? Kitty is quite thoroughly annoyed at Bartimaeus, but for a flash, she's annoyed at herself, too. Why hadn't she reached out? The thought had crossed her mind, now and again, that perhaps they had escaped. She had an easy way to confirm it, hadn't she? Draw the pentacles, speak his name. But -

Someone has summoned you. A little leap of painful hope in her chest. Maybe there was a magician who would have given Bartimaeus the freedom to go where he would. Oh, to be sure, he was a typical magician in many ways, binding Bartimaeus so cruelly, but he'd been different there at the end. Maybe not changed, past tense, but changing. An image flashes through her head, of a boy knocked unconscious by the blast but no worse than that, recuperating in an anonymous hospital bed somewhere - slipping away into the night, staying incognito, unwilling to assume power again, not summoning a spirit until now, to finally finally send word -

She swallows painfully, and squares her shoulders. Enough of that. That's a romantic fancy, better confined to the theater stage than believed as a truth. And so she manages to make her voice level when she asks this next question, betraying only the bare minimum of hope.

"Who is it that's summoned you?"