The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,102

Samuel and me in the predawn gloom, and we were halfway across the lake before the first honeyed line of sunlight crept above the horizon. The four of us crammed into the Zappias’ rowboat rather than risk the ferry and its curious eyes, and took turns rowing toward the dull gaslight glow of the shore.

Rowing, I discovered, is quite as difficult as shoveling dirt. By the time the hull scuffed against coarse sand, my palms had progressed past blistered and were approaching bloodied, and Samuel was moving like someone several decades older than his actual age. Jane looked perfectly fine, except for the grave dirt and blood still staining her skirt.

I should’ve predicted the way people would scurry away from us as we straggled into town, clutching their hats and muttering. We made an unsettling gang: an armed black woman, a sickly young man, a glaring dog, and an odd-colored girl with ill-fitting clothes and no shoes. I tried to ask one of the scurrying women for directions to the nearest train station, but Jane stamped on my bare foot.

“Well, excuse me, but I thought you said we’d take the train?”

Jane sighed at me. “Yes, but as we will not be purchasing tickets, it’s best not to draw attention to ourselves.” She jerked her head at the railway snaking east out of town. “Follow me.” She walked on without waiting for assent.

Samuel and I looked at one another for almost the first time since our conversation the night before. He raised his brows, eyes sparking with humor, and made a grand after-you bow.

Jane led us to a small, mostly empty train yard, where we slunk aboard a flat railcar labeled MONTPELIER LUMBER CO. and waited. Within the hour we were hurtling east, deafened by the roar and rattle of the rails, coated in coal smoke and dust, grinning like children or madmen. Bad’s tongue lolled in the wind.

The next two days are blurred in my memory, lost in a haze of heat and aching feet and the ever-present fear that there were eyes on the back of my neck, hunting me. I remember Jane’s voice, cool and certain; a night spent curled in an overgrown field with the sky hanging like a spangled quilt above me; greasy fish sandwiches bought from a roadside store; a ride from a farmer hauling blueberries to Concord in a mule-drawn cart, and another from a chatty postal carrier at the end of his route.

And I remember Jane lifting her face to the breeze as we limped down an unnamed road just over the Maine state line. “Smell that?” she asked.

I did: brine and cold stone and fish bones. The ocean.

We followed the road until it turned to smooth pebbles and salt-stunted pines, our footsteps muted in the moonlight. Jane seemed to be navigating from my father’s instructions rather than any map or memory of her own. She muttered to herself, occasionally reaching out to touch an odd-shaped rock or squinting up at the stars. The rhythmic rushing of the sea drew closer.

We rounded a dense wall of pines, scrabbled down a short bluff—and there it was.

I’d been to the seaside dozens of times: I’d strolled along the beaches of southern France and sipped lemonade on the coast of Antigua; I’d taken steamers across the Atlantic and watched the neat parting of the sea before us. Even storms felt small and distant from inside a hotel or a steel hull. I’d thought of the ocean as something pleasant and pretty, a slightly bigger version of my own familiar lake. But standing there on the rock ledge with waves crashing beneath me and the vastness of the Atlantic roiling like the black contents of a witch’s cauldron—it seemed to be something else entirely. Something wild, something secretive, something that might swallow you whole.

Jane was picking her way down a lichen-slick path, hugging the cliff side. Samuel and I followed, Bad scrabbling ahead of us. My lungs felt strangely constricted, my pulse shuddering in anticipation: A Door. A real, actual Door, the first I’d seen since I was a half-feral child running through the fields.

A Door my father had left hidden and open just for me. Even now, when he was trapped or caged or dead on the other side of the planet, he had not abandoned me. Not entirely. The thought warmed me, like a candle flame held safe against the whipping sea wind.

Jane had disappeared into a low, damp crevice. I leaned forward eagerly, but