I pulled against Locke’s hand on my chin, broke away from his eyes. The charcoal moved on the page. SHE—
Locke stumbled backward and I heard him scrabbling at his waist. I ignored him. SHE WRITES—
Then came the soft shush of metal on leather and a syncopated click-click. I knew that click; I’d heard it in the Zappia family cabin just before the thunderclap of sound had killed Havemeyer; I’d heard it in the fields of Arcadia, when I’d fired wildly after Ilvane.
“January, I don’t quite know what you’re doing, but I can’t allow it.” I noted, distantly, that I’d never heard Mr. Locke’s voice shake before, but I couldn’t seem to care; I was distracted by the thing in his hands.
A revolver. Not the old, beloved Enfield that Jane had stolen, but a much sleeker, newer-looking gun. I stared dumbly down the black-tunnel barrel of it.
“Just put it down, dear.” He sounded so calm and authoritative that he might have been chairing a board meeting, except for the subtle tremor of his voice. He was afraid of something—me? Or Doors, and the ever-present threat that something more powerful than himself was lurking on the other side? Maybe all powerful men are cowards at heart, because in their hearts they know power is temporary.
He smiled, or attempted to smile; his mouth stretched in a bare-toothed grimace. “These doors of yours are meant to stay closed, I’m afraid.”
No, they aren’t. Worlds were never meant to be prisons, locked and suffocating and safe. Worlds were supposed to be great rambling houses with all the windows thrown open and the wind and summer rain rushing through them, with magic passages in their closets and secret treasure chests in their attics. Locke and his Society had spent a century rushing madly around that house, boarding up windows and locking doors.
I was so very tired of locked doors.
SHE WRITES A DOOR OF—
I suppose, looking back, that I hadn’t ever been properly afraid of Mr. Locke. My childish heart refused to believe that the man who had sat beside me on a hundred different trains and steamers and ferries, who smelled of cigars and leather and money, who was always there when my own parents weren’t—could ever really hurt me.
I might even have been right, because Mr. Locke didn’t shoot me. Instead, I saw the black glint of the barrel swing to the right. It paused, pointed at Bad, at the spot where his hairs met in a ridged seam down his chest.
I moved. My scream was eaten by a booming crack.
And then Mr. Locke was yelling, swearing at me, and I was running my fingers over Bad’s chest whispering oh God no and Bad was whimpering but there was no wound, no hole, his skin was as smooth and whole as it had been before—
Then where was all this smeary red coming from?
Oh.
“Can’t you ever, just once, mind your damned place—”
I sat back on my heels, watching blood slide down the dirt-dark skin of my arm in neat runnels, like a street map to a foreign city. Bad’s whiskers trailed through it as he investigated the dark hole in my shoulder, his ears pulled flat in concern. I tried to reach my left hand up to comfort him, but it was like tugging a broken puppet string.
It didn’t hurt, or maybe it did hurt but the pain didn’t want to be pushy about it. It waited politely at the edges of my vision, like a well-bred houseguest.
I’d dropped my charcoal. My sentence lay unfinished beside a smallish pool of redness forming at the end of my fingertips.
Well. It would have to do, because I certainly wasn’t lingering in this vicious, white-toothed world where the people you loved could do such terrible things to you.
I’ve always been good at running away.
I extended my finger, almost lazily, and drew it through the muddy puddle of blood. I wrote in the earth itself, in red-mud letters that glistened in the summer afternoon. The cicadas made the bones of my hand buzz.
SHE WRITES A DOOR OF ASH. IT OPENS.
I believed in it the way people believe in God or gravity: with such unswerving intensity they hardly notice they’re doing it. I believed I was a word-worker, and that my will could reshape the very warp and weft of reality itself. I believed that Doors existed in rare places of resonance between worlds, where the skies of two planets whispered against one another. I believed I would see my father again.
An eastward wind blew suddenly up from the riverbank, but it didn’t smell catfishy and damp like it should have. Instead it smelled dry and cool and spice-laden, like cinnamon and cedar.
The wind scudded over the ash pile. It swirled, like one of those strange dust devils you see sometimes teasing leaves into the air, and ashes and rain-rotted charcoal and dirt flung themselves upward. They hung for a moment between Mr. Locke and me, an arch framed in blue summer sky. I saw Locke’s face slacken, his gun wavering.
Then the ash began to… spread? Melt? It was as if each speck of dirt or char were actually a drop of ink in water, and now delicate tendrils were spiraling toward one another, connecting, melding, darkening, forming a curved line in the air until—
An archway stood before me. It looked strangely fragile, as if it might crumble back to ash at the slightest touch, but it was a Door. I could already smell the sea.
I reached for my discarded pillowcase and climbed unsteadily to my feet, exhaustion blurring my eyes, bits of dirt and grass embedded in my kneecaps. I saw Mr. Locke’s grip seize around the revolver again. “Now, just, just stop. We can still make this right. You can still come back with me, come home—everything can still be fine—”
That was a lie; I was dangerous and he was a coward, and cowards don’t let dangerous things live in their spare bedrooms. Sometimes they don’t let them live at all.
I stepped toward the ash door and met Mr. Locke’s eyes for the last time. They were white and barren as a pair of moons. I had a sudden childish urge to ask him a question—Did you ever really love me?—but then the barrel of the gun drifted upward again and I thought, I suppose not.
I dove through the ash archway with Bad leaping at my heels and my heart thud-thudding in my chest and the crack of a second shot ringing in my ears, following me into the black.
The Open Doors
I had entered the Threshold four times before. Perhaps, I thought as I fell into the echoing black, the fifth time won’t be so bad.
I was, of course, wrong. Just as the sky doesn’t turn less blue the more times you see it, so the atomless, airless nothing of the space between worlds does not grow less terrifying.
The darkness swallowed me like a living thing. I tilted forward, falling but not falling because in order to fall there has to be an up and a down and in the Threshold there’s only the endless black nothing. I felt Bad brush past me, legs paddling ineffectually against the emptiness, and scooped my arm around him. He kept his eyes fixed on me. It occurred to me that dogs are probably never lost in the in-between, because they always know precisely where they are going.
And so, this time, did I. I felt my father’s book wedged tight against my ribs, and followed the cedar-and-salt smell of his home world, my home world, toward that white-stone city.
I could still feel the hungry tugging of the darkness, but it was as if something bright and shining in me had finally unfurled and filled me to my edges. I was weak, riddled with hurts—betrayal, abandonment, the tiny black hole in my shoulder, a new something-very-wrong in my left hip that I didn’t want to think about—but I was entirely myself, and I was not afraid.