“Power, my dear, has a language. It has a geography, a currency, and—I’m sorry—a color. This is not something you may take personally or object to; it is simply a fact of the world, and the sooner you accustom yourself to it, the better.” Mr. Locke’s eyes were pitying; I slunk out of his office feeling small and bruised.
The next day Jane disappeared for an hour or two and returned bearing gifts: a large ham hock for Bad and the newest issue of The Argosy All-Story Weekly for me. She perched at the end of Wilda’s stiff, narrow bed.
I meant to say Thank you, but what came out was, “Why are you being so nice to me?”
She smiled, revealing a slim, mischievous gap between her front teeth. “Because I like you. And I do not like bullies.”
After that, our fates were more or less sealed (a phrase that always makes me picture a weary old Fate tucking our futures into an envelope and pressing her wax seal over us): Jane Irimu and I became something like friends.
For two years we lived in the secret margins of Locke House, in its attics and forgotten storerooms and untended gardens. We scurried around the edges of high society like spies or mice, staying mostly in the shadows, noticed only sporadically by Locke or his assorted minions and guests. There was still something confined about her, something tense and waiting, but now at least it felt as if we shared the same cage.
I didn’t think of the future much, and if I did it was with a child’s desire for vague, far-flung adventures, and a child’s certainty that everything would remain as it always had been. It did, mostly.
Until the day before my seventeenth birthday. Until I found the leather-bound book in the chest.
“Miss Scaller.”
I was still standing in the Pharaoh Room, still holding the leather-bound book in my palm. Bad was growing bored, issuing periodic sighs and huffs. Mr. Stirling’s toneless voice startled both of us.
“Oh—I didn’t—good evening.” I spun to face him with the book tucked behind my back. There wasn’t any particular reason to hide a scuffed-up novel from Mr. Stirling, except that there was something vital and wondrous about it, and Mr. Stirling was more or less the human opposite of vitality and wonder. He blinked at me, eyes flicking to the open chest on its plinth, then inclined his head infinitesimally.
“Mr. Locke requests your attendance in his office.” He paused, and something flitted darkly across his face. It might have been fear, if Mr. Stirling had been physically capable of any expression beyond attentive blandness. “At once.”
I followed him from the Pharaoh Room with Bad’s claws click-clicking at my heels. I tucked The Ten Thousand Doors in my skirts, where it rested warm and solid against my hip. Like a shield, I thought, and then wondered why the idea was so comforting.
Mr. Locke’s office smelled as it always had, of cigar smoke and fine leather and the sorts of liquors that are kept in crystal decanters on the sideboard, and Mr. Locke looked as he always did: squarish and neat, seeming to reject the aging process as a waste of valuable time. He’d had the same respectable dusting of white hairs at his temples my entire life; the last time I’d seen him, my father’s hair had turned almost entirely ashen.
Mr. Locke looked up from a stack of stained, weathered-looking envelopes as I entered. His eyes were gravestone-gray and serious, focused on me in a way they rarely were. “That will do, Stirling.” I heard the valet retreat from the room, the brassy click of the door latch. Something fluttered in my chest, like bird wings against my ribs.
“Sit down, January.” I sat in my usual chair, and Bad stuffed himself half-successfully beneath it.
“Sorry about Bad, sir, it’s just Stirling seemed to be in a hurry and I didn’t take him back to my room first—”
“That’s quite all right.” The fluttery, panicky feeling in my chest grew stronger. Bad had been banned from Mr. Locke’s office (as well as all motorcars, trains, and dining rooms) since the Society party two years ago. Just the sight of him usually provoked Locke into a speech about poorly behaved pets and lax owners, or at least a grumbling snort through his mustache.
Mr. Locke’s jaw worked backward and forward, as if his next words required chewing to soften them. “It’s about your father.” I found it difficult to look directly at Mr. Locke; I studied the display case on his desk instead, its brass-plate label gleaming: Enfield revolver, Mark I, 1879.
“He’s been in the Far East these past few weeks, as I’m sure you know.”
Father was beginning in the Port of Manila, then island-hopping his way northward to Japan, he’d told me. He’d promised to write often; I hadn’t heard from him in weeks.
Mr. Locke chewed his next sentence even more thoroughly. “His reports on this expedition have been spotty. Spottier than usual, I mean. But lately they’ve… stopped coming altogether. His last report was in April.”
Mr. Locke was looking at me now, expectant and intent, as if he’d been humming a tune and paused for me to finish it. As if I ought to know what he would say next.
I kept staring at the revolver, at the oiled darkness of it, the dull square snout. Bad’s breath was hot on my feet.
“January, are you paying attention? There hasn’t been word from your father in nearly three months. I got a telegram from another man on the expedition: no one has seen or heard from him. They found his camp scattered and abandoned on a mountainside.”
The bird in my chest was scrabbling, beating its wings in frenzied terror. I sat perfectly still.
“January. He’s gone missing. It seems—well.” Mr. Locke drew a short, sharp breath. “It seems very likely that your father is dead.”
I sat on my thin mattress, watching the sun creep butter-soft across my pink-and-gold bedspread. Frayed threads and cotton stuffing made shadows and spires across it, like the architecture of some foreign city. Bad curled around my back even though it was too hot for cuddling, making soft, puppyish sounds deep in his chest. He smelled of summer and fresh-clipped grass.
I hadn’t wanted to believe it. I’d howled, screamed, demanded Mr. Locke take it back or prove it. I’d dug bloody pink crescents in my palms with the effort of not lashing out, not smashing his little glass cases into a thousand shimmering shards.
Eventually I’d felt hands like paving stones on my shoulders, weighing me down. “Enough, child.” And I’d looked into his eyes, pale and implacable. I’d felt myself flaking and crumbling beneath them. “Julian is dead. Accept it.”
And I had. I’d collapsed into Locke’s arms and soaked his shirt with tears. His gruff murmur had rumbled against my ear. “S’all right, girl. You’ve still got me.”
Now I sat in my room, face swollen and eyes dry, teetering on the edge of a pain so vast I couldn’t see its edges. It would swallow me whole, if I let it.
I thought about the last postcard I’d received from my father, featuring a beach and several tough-looking women labeled FISHERWOMEN OF SUGASHIMA. I thought about Father himself, but could only picture him walking away from me, hunched and tired, disappearing through some terrible, final doorway.
You promised you would take me with you.
I wanted to scream again, felt the sound clawing and writhing in my throat. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to run away and keep running until I fell into some other, better world.