“Where’s Jane?” I interrupted. She was supposed to return to our room and find the note I’d hidden in Tom Swift and His Airship. Then she would join me in Boston, book passage on an eastbound steamer, and begin our adventure. If she wanted to; my clever plan evaded the necessity of asking her face-to-face and the possibility of hearing her say no.
Locke’s face had whitened in irritation. “Return to your room, child. I’ll deal with you later. In fact, you are hereby confined to your quarters until such time as I deem—”
“Where’s Jane?”
Havemeyer, watching, drawled, “It’s comforting to find you aren’t only rude when drunk, Miss Scaller.”
Locke ignored him. “January. Upstairs. Now.” His voice had gone low and urgent. I looked away from his face but felt his pale eyes grasping and fastening on my flesh, prodding me backward. “Return to your room—”
But I was tired of listening to Mr. Locke, tired of the weight of his will crushing me smaller and smaller, tired of minding my place. “No.” It came out a wavering whisper. I swallowed, touching my fingers to Bad’s bronze heat. “No. I’m leaving.”
I ducked my head and squared my shoulders, like a woman walking into a strong headwind, and heaved my bag down the steps and across the foyer. I kept my spine very straight.
We were almost past them, almost within reach of the brass handle of the front door, when Havemeyer laughed. It was a hideous, high-pitched hiss that made Bad’s hackles rise beneath my palm. I looped my fingers through his collar.
“And where could a thing like you possibly be going?” he asked. He lifted his cane and gave my canvas sack a mocking prod.
“To find my father.” I was tired of lying, too.
Havemeyer’s not-smile turned saccharine. Something unseemly—anticipation? delight?—lit his eyes as he leaned toward me and curled one gloved finger beneath my chin, tilting my face upward. “Your late father, I think you mean.”
I should’ve let go of Bad’s collar right then and let him chew Havemeyer into red ribbons. I should’ve slapped him, or ignored him, or lunged for the door.
Anything but what I actually did.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he’s just lost, out there somewhere. Maybe he found a Door and fell through it and he’s in some other world, a better world, where there aren’t people like you.” As comebacks go, it was somewhere between outright lunacy and pitiable. I waited for Mr. Locke’s sigh, for that sibilant sound that passed for laughter from Havemeyer.
But instead, both of them went very still. It was the kind of stillness that makes the hairs on your arms stand up, and makes you think of wolves and snakes waiting in the high grass. The kind of stillness that makes you realize you have just misstepped very badly, even if you don’t see how.
Mr. Havemeyer straightened, letting my chin fall and flexing his hands in his driving gloves as if they’d grown restless. “Cornelius. I thought we’d agreed to keep certain information preserved for Society members. I thought, in fact, that it was an essential tenet of our organization, as laid down by the Founder himself.” For the second time that morning, I had the sensation that the conversation was suddenly being conducted in an unfamiliar language.
“I didn’t tell her a damn thing.” Locke’s voice was brusque, but there was a strangled note in it I might have called fear, except that I’d never heard Locke afraid.
Havemeyer’s nostrils flared. “Is that so,” he breathed. “Luke! Evans!” A pair of hulking men thumped down the stairs at his shout, half-packed luggage in their arms. “Mr. Havemeyer, sir,” they panted.
“Escort this girl to her room, won’t you, and lock her in. And watch out for the dog.”
I’ve always hated it in books when a character freezes in fear. Wake up! I want to shout at them. Do something! Remembering myself standing there with my canvas bag hanging stupidly over my shoulder, my fingers gone slack on Bad’s collar, I want to shout at myself: Do something!
But I was a good girl, and I didn’t do anything. I was silent as Havemeyer tapped his cane to hurry his men along, as Locke huffed and protested, as heavy-knuckled hands closed above my elbows.
As Bad erupted, snarling and brave, and one of the men threw a heavy coat over his thrashing head and tackled him to the floor.
I was half dragged up the stairs and slung into my bedroom, and the lock rolled and snicked into place like the oiled metal hammer of Mr. Locke’s revolver.
I didn’t make any sound at all, until I heard furious barking and men swearing and then a series of boot-on-flesh thuds, and then hideous silence. And by then it was too late.
Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.
Bad Bad BadBadBad. I scrabbled at the door, twisting the knob until my wrist bones creaked. Men’s voices spiraled up the stairs and slid under my door, but I couldn’t hear them over the rattling of the hinges and an awful, sourceless moaning. It was only when I caught Havemeyer’s irritated voice on the landing—“Can someone shut her up?”—that I realized the sound was coming from me.
I stopped. Heard Havemeyer shout back down the steps, “Get that out of here and clean up this mess, Evans,” and then there was nothing but the thunderous shushing of blood in my ears and the silent sound of my own unraveling.
I was seven again and Wilda’s key had just turned in the black-iron lock and left me caged and alone. I remembered the walls pressing me between them like a botanical specimen, the sick-sweet taste of syrup on a silver spoon, the smell of my own terror. I thought I’d forgotten, but the memories were crisp as photographs. I wondered dispassionately if they’d always been there, lurking just out of sight and whispering their fears to me. If behind every good girl lurked a good threat.
Shuffling, swearing noises from the distant parlor. Bad.
My legs bent beneath me and I slid down the door, thinking: This is what alone feels like. I only thought I knew, before, but now Jane was gone and Bad was taken, and I might rot away to cotton and dust in this shabby gray room and no one on Earth would care.
That black Thing descended again and settled its coal-smoke wings around my shoulders. Motherless, fatherless. Friendless.
It was my own fault. My fault, for thinking I could just run away, just gather my nerve and walk out into the wide unknown like a hero beginning a quest. For thinking I could bend the rules, just a little, and write myself into some better, grander story.
But the rules were made by Lockes and Havemeyers, by wealthy men in private smoking rooms who pulled the world’s riches to themselves like well-dressed spiders in the center of a golden web. People of significance; people who could never be locked away in small rooms and forgotten. The best I could hope for was a life spent creeping in their generous shadows—an in-between creature neither loved nor reviled, but permitted to scurry freely so long as I didn’t cause trouble.
I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. I wanted to cast a spell and unspool the last three days, to find myself standing innocent and bemused in the Pharaoh Room, reaching for the blue chest. I wanted to disappear back into The Ten Thousand Doors, to lose myself in Ade’s impossible adventures—but Jane had taken the book, and Jane was gone.