“I set the fracture ablaze. It was dry pine, went up like a torch. Your father wept, January, he begged, before I shoved him through. I caught sight of his hands, briefly, flailing back through the flames, then nothing. He never emerged.”
Ilvane watched me as he finished, his eyes hunger-bright. He wanted tears, I knew. He wanted heartbreak and despair, because my father was trapped forever in some other world and I was permanently, terribly alone. But—
Alive, alive, alive. Father is alive. Not wracked and rotting on some foreign hillside, but alive, and finally gone home to his own true world. Even if I would never see him again.
I closed my eyes and let the twin waves of loss and joy crash over me, let my legs go limp and my knees crunch to earth. Bad’s nose snuffled worriedly at my neck, checking for injuries.
Too late, I heard the scuffling sounds of Ilvane moving. My eyes snapped open to find him scrabbling sideways for his knife and the copper compass.
“No!” I shouted, but he was already running back toward the city, a black-and-red shadow darting through the grass. I fired the gun high into the night, saw him duck, and heard the echoing pound of his feet on the empty street. He disappeared into the tangle of abandoned houses.
Bad and I tore after him. I hardly knew what I’d do if I caught him—the revolver hung heavy in my hand, and the image of Solomon’s white-draped body flashed sickeningly before me—but I couldn’t let him leave, couldn’t let him tell the Society where I was, where Arcadia was—
Two tall figures reeled into the street ahead. Jane reached an arm out to catch me. “We heard a shot—what—”
“Ilvane. From the Society. Went that way—think he’s trying to get back to the Door—” My words sputtered between gasps of air. Jane did not wait for clarification but simply ran, flowing down the hill in a long-striding lope several times faster than mine. Samuel fell in with Bad and me, stumbling over humped bricks and cracks.
We skidded into the courtyard to find Jane crouching before the feather-curtained tunnel, lips peeled back in a hunter’s triumphant grin. Ilvane stood several paces away, eyes wild and nostrils flared in animal desperation.
“That, I think, is enough,” Jane said coolly, and reached into her skirt pocket for Mr. Locke’s revolver. But then her face went slack. Her leopardess smile vanished.
Because it wasn’t there. Because I’d stolen it from her.
There was a single stretched second in which I fumbled with the gun, sweaty thumb slipping on the hammer, and Ilvane watched Jane’s empty hand emerge from her skirts. He smiled. And then he struck.
There was a slash of silver, the gleam of something wet and wine-colored in the moonlight—and then he was gone, the golden curtain fluttering in his wake.
Jane fell to her knees with a soft, surprised sigh.
No. I don’t remember if I screamed it, if the word shattered against the clay ruins and echoed up the alleys, if there were answering shouts of alarm and running footsteps.
I remember kneeling beside her, clutching at the long, gaping edges of the cut, seeing my own hands blacken with blood. I remember Jane’s expression of distant surprise.
I remember Samuel crouching on her other side, his guttural hiss—“Bastard”—and the sight of his back disappearing through the curtain after Ilvane.
And then there were other hands pressing beside mine—competent, probing hands—and a clean, crushed-mint smell. “S’all right, child, just give me some room.” I drew back to let the gray-haired woman bend closer over Jane, an old-fashioned lantern sputtering beside her. I held my blood-gummed hands awkwardly away from my body, as if hoping someone would tell them what to do.
The woman called for clean cotton and boiled water and someone skittered to obey. Her voice was so calm, so unhurried, that the tiniest curl of hope unwound in my stomach.
“Is she—will she—” My voice raw-sounding, like something recently peeled.
The woman cast a harassed eye over her shoulder. “All this is just mess and show, girl. He didn’t get anything she can’t do without.” I blinked at her and she softened. “She’ll be fine, long as we can keep infection out.”
I went slack with relief, muscles unspooling like cut wires. I pushed sticky palms into my eyes, pressing back the hysterical tears that sizzled just below the surface, and thought: She’s alive. I didn’t kill her.
I stayed that way, half-slumped over my knees and weak with relief, until the feathered curtain rustled again. It was Samuel, and I knew from the grim line of his mouth that Mr. Ilvane had escaped back through the Door.
Samuel did not look at the people now filling the square with fearful whispers, or at the ruby gleam of blood in the lantern light. He strode straight to me, feet bare and shirt half-buttoned, eyes roiling with some dark emotion. It was only when he stood directly above me that I knew what it was: fear.
“I followed him to the tree,” he said softly. “I tried to follow him farther, tried to go through after him. But”—and I knew what he would say, knew it as surely as if I’d stood beside him on that empty plain—“there was nothing, no way through.”
Samuel swallowed. “The door is closed.”
The Lonely Door
Samuel had spoken softly, his voice a tired rasp, but tragedy has its own terrible volume. It rolls and cracks, shakes the ground beneath your feet, lingers in the air like summer thunder.
The Arcadians gathered in the courtyard fell silent, their eyes turned toward us in a dozen shades of disbelief and terror. The quiet stretched, taut as piano wire, until one man issued a strangled curse. Then came a rising clamor of panicked voices.
“What will we do?”
“My babies, my babies need—”
“We’ll starve, every last one of us.”
An infant woke and wailed in his mother’s arms, and she gazed down at his crumpled face in listless despair. Then a wide form shouldered past her and moved to the front of the crowd. Molly Neptune’s stovepipe hat was missing and the upward glow of the lantern painted shadowed hollows over her face.
She held up two hands. “Enough. If the way is closed, we’ll find another way through. We’ll find another way to survive. Aren’t all of us here survivors, one way or the other?” She surveyed them with a kind of fierce love, willing strength into their shaking limbs. “But not tonight. Tonight we’ll rest. Tomorrow, we’ll plan.”
I found myself leaning into the rumble of her voice, letting it beat back the tide of guilt and horror that threatened to swallow me—until her eyes met mine, and I watched all the warmth flow out of her face like dye running in the rain. It left nothing behind but bitter regret. Regret that she’d ever seen my father, perhaps, or ever offered Arcadia as a refuge; regret that she’d let me set foot in her fragile kingdom with monsters on my heels.
She turned away and addressed the woman still bent over Jane. “Will she live, Iris?”
Iris ducked her head. “Likely, ma’am. Except it’s deep in some places, and messy, and…” I saw the pink dart of her tongue as she moistened her lips, the fearful flick of her eyes toward the feathered curtain. “And we’re out of iodine. Even salt water might do the job, but we, we can’t…” Her voice trailed to a racked whisper.