Summary

Part 2 opens with an excerpt from Fulton’s lost notebook about the fragility of man and the power of the perfect elevator.

Lila Mae returns to the Fanny Briggs building and intuits the elevators next to where Elevator Eleven had been. She discovers that the elevator had gone into total free-fall due to an extremely rare catastrophic accident, and that no one had set up the accident. Although Lila Mae knows Natchez was lying about his identity, she believes that Fulton was colored.

The next section is a flashback to when Lila Mae returned to her house from her job to find her father holding her acceptance letter to the Institute. Although he is proud, he warns her that even in the North, things are the same as in her hometown.

Lila Mae returns to Mrs. Rodgers’ house. It has been ransacked and...