“Excuse me?”
“Your father is missing, not dead.”
I shook my head, rising up on one elbow. “Mr. Locke said—”
Jane’s lips curled, and she made a gesture like a woman swatting a gnat. “Locke is not God, January.”
He might as well be. I didn’t answer but knew my face had gone mulish with denial.
Jane sighed at me, but her voice when she spoke again was softer, almost hesitant. “I have reason to believe—your father made certain assurances—well. I haven’t given up on Julian, not yet. Perhaps you shouldn’t, either.”
The black Thing seemed to curl closer around me, an invisible nautilus shell protecting me from her words, hope-laced and cruel. I closed my eyes again and rolled away from her. “I don’t feel like coffee. Thank you.”
A sharp indrawn breath. Had I offended her? Good. Maybe she would just leave without pretending to miss me, without false promises about staying in touch.
But then she hissed, “What’s that?” and I felt her hand fumble in the sheets at my back. A small squarish something slid out from beneath me.
I sat up and saw The Ten Thousand Doors clutched in her hands, her fingertips white where they pressed into the cover. “That’s mine, if you don’t—”
“Where did you get this?” Her voice was perfectly level but oddly urgent.
“It was a gift,” I said defensively. “I think.”
But she wasn’t listening. She was riffling through the book with hands that shook slightly, eyes skittering across the words as if they were some vital message written just for her. I felt a strange, illogical jealousy.
“Does it say anything about the irimu? The leopard-women? Did he find—”
A harsh rap-rap-rap on the door. Bad stood, one white tooth bared.
“Miss Jane? Mr. Locke would like a private word with you, if you please.” It was Mr. Stirling, sounding as usual like a typewriter that had somehow learned to walk and talk.
Jane and I stared at one another. Mr. Locke had never, in her two years at Locke House, spoken a private word to her, nor more than a dozen public ones. He regarded her as a regrettable necessity, like an ugly vase one is obliged to keep because it was a gift from a friend.
I watched Jane’s throat move, swallowing whatever emotion made her palms leave dark, damp patches on the leather-bound book. “I’ll be right there, Mr. Stirling, thank you.”
A professionally tuned throat-clearing noise sounded on the other side of the door. “Now, if you please.”
Jane closed her eyes, jaw rolling in frustration. “Yes, sir,” she called. She stood, tucking my book in her skirt pocket and resting her palm against it as if reassuring herself of its existence. In a much quieter voice, she hissed, “We’ll talk when I return.”
I should’ve grabbed on to her skirts and demanded an explanation. I should’ve told Mr. Stirling to shut his mouth, and enjoyed the stunned silence thereafter.
But I didn’t.
Jane swept into the hall and everything went silent and still again, except for the agitated swirl of the dust motes disturbed by her passage. Bad hopped to the floor, stretched, and shook himself. A mist of fine bronze hairs joined the dust, glinting gold in the sunbeams.
I fell back into the mattress. I could hear the neat snick of the gardener’s shears outside on the grounds. The distant burr of a motorcar trundling past the wrought-iron gates. The too-fast patter of my heart, fluttering against my ribs like someone knocking frantically at a locked door.
Mr. Locke had told me my father was dead. Accept it, he’d told me, and I had. But what if—?
Sour exhaustion welled in my limbs. How many years of my life had I spent waiting for my father, believing he would return tomorrow or the next day? Rushing to collect the mail, searching for his neat handwriting in the pile? Hoping and trying not to hope for the day he would come home and say, January, the time has come, and I would go away with him into the shining unknown?
Surely I could spare myself this last and greatest disappointment.
I wished Jane had left my book behind. I wanted to run away again, back into Ade’s quest for her ghost boy. So many years she’d spent searching on only the thinnest, most unlikely thread of hope. I wondered what she would have done in my place.
Go find out for myself. The answer came in a flat, southern-streaked voice that I thought must be Ade’s own, if she’d been a person rather than a fictional character. It rang clear and strong in my skull, as if I’d heard it before. Go find him.
I lay very still, feeling a dangerous shivering spread from my chest like a sudden fever.
But a more grown-up, sober-sounding voice reminded me that The Ten Thousand Doors was just a novel, and that novels are untrustworthy advisers. They aren’t concerned with rationality or sobriety; they peddle in tragedy and suspense, in chaos and rule breaking, in madness and heartache, and they will steer you toward such things with all the guile of a piper luring rats into a river.
It would be wiser to stay here, beg my way back into Mr. Locke’s good graces after last night’s debacle, and keep my childish dreams locked up where they belonged. Learn to forget the low, sincere sound of my father’s voice as he said I promise.
You never came back for me. You never rescued me.
But perhaps—if I were brave and temerarious and very foolish—if I listened to that flat, fearless voice in my heart, so familiar and so strange—I could rescue both of us.
I didn’t expect to see anyone on my way out. I should have—several Society men were staying as Locke’s honored guests, occupying the gaudy guest suites on the second floor, and the house was still crawling with hired servants cleaning up after the party—but Running Away from Home involves a very particular and time-worn script: Bad and I were supposed to slip out the front door and down the drive like a pair of ghosts. Later Locke might storm up to my room and find my note (uninformative but apologetic, thanking him for years of generosity and kindness) and swear softly. He might stare out the window after me, far too late.
Except Mr. Locke was standing in the foyer. And so was Mr. Havemeyer.
“—just a child, Theodore. I’ll have it all sorted out in a day or two.” Locke was standing with his back to me, one arm making the confident gestures of a banker reassuring a nervous patron, the other holding Havemeyer’s coat. Havemeyer was reaching for it, face narrowed in doubt, when he saw me standing on the staircase.
“Ah. Your prize malcontent, Cornelius.” Havemeyer’s smile was only a smile in the sense that his lips were curved and his teeth were bared. Locke turned. I watched his face move from cold disapproval to consternation, his mouth falling slightly open.
Under that frowning, what’s-all-this-nonsense gaze, I felt myself falter. The swooping, heady confidence that had taken me this far—dressing myself in my sturdiest clothes, stuffing a canvas bag full of semirandom belongings, writing two notes and arranging them artistically—wavered, and I felt suddenly very much like a child announcing she was running away from home. It occurred to me that I’d packed at least nine or ten books, but not a single pair of spare socks.
Locke opened his mouth, chest swelling with the coming sermon, but I’d just realized something. If he was down here with Havemeyer, he was clearly finished meeting with Jane—but she hadn’t come back.