Mike Wheeler. Lucas Sinclair. Dustin Henderson. I have their names now. Their faces are in my files. They think they are protecting her. They don't understand that she is the most dangerous thing in Hawkins—more dangerous than the thing she unleashed.

That is the art of it. Love is just another lever.

Her name is Eleven—though she never chose it. I did. A name is the first cage you build for a wild thing. She was my finest creation. The numbers on her wrist meant nothing to her, but they meant everything to me. Eight. Nine. Ten. Then her. Eleven. The breach in the wall. The key.

Fools.

The Hawkins lab is a mausoleum of my own ambition. The gate pulses in the lower sublevel, a wet, screaming wound in the wall of the universe. It breathes. It hungers. And somewhere in the pine woods, so does she.

And then she was gone.