In the alley outside I dug the ink pen out of my pillowcase and pressed the check against the brick wall. I added a wobbly zero and a few extra letters, biting my lip. The check fluttered in a sudden wind that wasn’t there, the lettering blurring and curling, and I rested my head against the steam-warmed brick, dizzied. It shouldn’t have worked—the ink was a different color and crammed rather obviously into the blank space, and whoever heard of a laundress with a $40 check rather than a $4 one—but I’d believed it as I wrote it, and so did the bank teller.
By midafternoon I was boarding the New York Central Line, a precious train ticket clutched in my hand with the letters LOUISVILLE, KY. printed in neat red ink.
My pillowcase looked especially stained and grubby beside the gleaming leather suitcases in the luggage rack, like an underdressed party guest hoping to go unnoticed. I felt sort of stained and grubby myself; every other passenger was wearing pressed linen and high-necked gowns, their hats perched at fashionable angles and their shoes gleaming with fresh polish.
A rumbling shudder rolled through the carriage, like a dragon shaking itself from sleep, and the train pulled out of the shade of Buffalo Central and into the lazy sunlight of a summer afternoon. I pressed my forehead against the warming glass and slept.
I dreamed, or maybe just remembered: a different train heading in the same direction, ten years previously. A scrubby town on the Mississippi; a blue Door standing alone in a field; a city that smelled of salt and cedar.
My father’s city. My mother’s city, if she was somehow alive. Could it ever be my city? Assuming I could open the Door again, even though it was nothing now but a pile of ash. Assuming the Society didn’t get me first.
I dozed and woke, interrupted by the roll-and-stop of the train at every station, the porter’s shouted announcements and periodic demands to see my ticket, the thud and shuffle of passengers departing and arriving. None of them sat next to me, but I felt their eyes on me. Or thought I did; several times I flicked my head sideways, trying to catch them staring, but their faces were all politely averted. Bad lay tense over my feet, ears pricked.
I slipped a hand into my pillowcase and held the silver coin-knife tight in my fist.
The train sat unmoving for a full half hour in Cincinnati while the carriage grew stuffy and crowded with new passengers. Eventually a porter came shoving through the aisle. He strung a chain across the back of the car and hung a neat white placard on it: COLORED SEATING.
There was no Mr. Locke to protect me now. No private compartment with meals delivered by smiling porters, no comfortable veil of money between me and the rest of the world.
The porter strode back down the aisle prodding people with a stubby baton: a brown-skinned woman and her three children, an old man with a poof of white hair, a pair of young men with broad shoulders and mutinous expressions. The porter rapped his baton against the luggage rack. “This train abides by state law, boys, and the next stop’s in Kentucky. You can either move back or get off and walk, doesn’t bother me which.” They slunk to the back.
The porter hesitated at my seat, squinting at my red-glazed skin as if consulting a mental color chart. But then he looked at my grimy hem and scarred arm and entirely disreputable dog and jerked his head to the back.
Apparently, without money I wasn’t perfectly unique or in-between or odd-colored; I was simply colored. I felt something cold settle over me at the thought, a weight of rules and laws and dangers that hung on my limbs, pressed on my lungs.
I shuffled to the back without protest. I didn’t plan to be stuck in this stupid world with these stupid rules for much longer, anyhow.
I clung to the end of an overcrowded bench in the very back, the coin damp in my fist. It was only once the train was moving again that I noticed Bad staring fixedly into the aisle beside me, the faintest burr of a growl in his throat. There was no one there, but I thought I could hear a soft, steady rustling, almost like breathing.
I thought of Solomon’s missing golden feather and clutched my pillowcase tighter, feeling the corner of my father’s book press into my stomach. I kept my eyes carefully on the blue-green roll of the countryside.
Forty minutes later the porter shouted, “Turners Station, last stop till Louisville,” from the front of the carriage. The train slowed. The door rolled open. I hesitated, barely breathing, and then dove for the exit with Bad scrabbling behind me. I felt my shoulder slam into something solid in midair, heard a muttered curse—
And then there was something sharp and cold pressed against my throat. I stood very still.
“Not this time,” hissed a voice in my ear. “Let’s get out of this crowd, shall we?” Something prodded me forward and I stumbled onto the wood-planked platform. I was marched into the station, his breath hot against my ear and the knife tip biting into my neck. Bad watched me with worried, glaring eyes. Not yet, I thought to him.
The bodiless voice turned me through a peeling white door labeled LADIES and into a dim, green-tiled room. “Now, turn around slowly, there’s a good girl—”
Except I wasn’t a good girl anymore.
I drove my fist up and back over my shoulder, the coin-knife wedged between my knuckles. There was a terrible, wet pop beneath my hand and a shattering scream. The blade dragged away from my throat in a hot line and went skittering across the tile. “Damn you—”
Bad, seeming to decide that even invisible creatures could be bitten with sufficient effort, snarled and snapped at the air. His teeth closed around a mouthful of something and he growled in satisfaction. I dove for the knife, held it tight in blood-slick hands, and called Bad. He trotted to my side, licking red from his lips and glaring at his invisible prey.
Except he wasn’t quite invisible anymore. If I squinted I could almost see a racked shimmer in the air, a heaving chest and a thin face oozing with dark wetness. A single, hateful eye was fixed on me.
“Your compass, Mr. Ilvane. Give it to me.”
He hissed, low and vicious, but I raised the knife toward him and he dug something copper-colored out of his pocket. He slid it resentfully across the floor.
I grabbed for it without taking my eyes away from him. “I’m leaving now. I’d advise you not to follow me again.” My voice hardly shook at all.
He gave a dark crack of laughter. “And where will you run to, little girl? You’ve no money, no friends left to protect you, no father—”
“The trouble with you people,” I observed, “is that you believe in permanence. An orderly world will remain so; a closed door will stay closed.” I shook my head, reaching for the door. “It’s very… limiting.”
I left.
Out in the genteel bustle of the station I pressed my shoulder faux-casually against the bathroom door and fished Samuel’s pen out of my pillowcase-sack. I held it tight for a moment, feeling an echo of remembered warmth, then dug the tip into the peeling paint of the door.
The door locks, and there is no key.
The words were scratched deeply into the paint, jittering along the wood grain. The dull scrape of metal on metal sounded through the door, a permanent sort of clunk, and I gave a little gasp at the sudden weight of exhaustion pulling at my limbs. I leaned my forehead against the wood, eyes closed, and raised the pen again.
The door is forgotten, I wrote.
And then I was blinking up from the floor, knees aching where I’d fallen. I lay there for a while, unmoving, wondering if the stationmaster would come investigate the poor vagrant girl collapsed on his floor, or if I might just sleep for an hour or so. My eyes ached; my throat was stiff with dried blood.