The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,117

a few salted hunks of prairie rat for Bad. I stuffed it all into a pillowcase with my silver coin-knife and my father’s book and slipped back into the streets of Arcadia, now glowing pink in the rising dawn. I had nearly reached the feather curtain when a graveled voice stopped me.

“Headed out so soon?”

Bad and I froze like a pair of deer caught in the headlights of Mr. Locke’s Model 10. “Ah. Morning, Miss Neptune.”

Molly looked like she hadn’t slept either—the lines in her face were deep-carved cobwebs and her hair was a black-and- silver tangle—but she’d recovered her stovepipe hat and beaded collar. She squinted at me with flint-chip eyes. “You won’t last three days out on the plains, girl. I’d stay, if I were you.”

She thought I was slinking away into the hills, running away from my guilt. I felt my shoulders straightening and a smile curving my lips. “Thank you, but there are things I need to attend to back home. Back through the Door.”

Watching the realization settle over her face was like watching a woman age in reverse. Her spine unbent and her eyes went round with hope. “No,” she breathed.

“We opened it last night,” I told her softly. “We didn’t want to wake everyone, so we—well, Samuel—was going to tell you in the morning.”

Molly closed her eyes, then buried her face in her hands, shoulders heaving. I turned to leave. “Wait.” Her voice was tear-thick and shaky, unlike her usual growl. “I don’t know who or what is chasing you, and I don’t know how it followed you here, but be careful. Sol”—I heard her swallow, choking back grief—“Solomon’s feather, the one he wore in his hair—it’s gone.”

A chill prickled my spine as I imagined the golden feather clutched in Ilvane’s hand, the horror of being hunted by something you couldn’t see. I made myself nod calmly. “I’m sorry for the loss of the feather. Thank you for warning me.” I adjusted the pillowcase on my shoulder, not looking at her. “Don’t tell Samuel, please. I wouldn’t want him to… worry.”

Molly Neptune ducked her head. “Good luck, January Scholar.”

I left her sitting in the warming sunlight, looking up at her city like a mother surveying her sleeping children.

The Door seemed somehow smaller by day, dark and narrow and terribly lonely. It brushed softly against the grass as I pulled it shut behind me and stepped into the void between the worlds.

When you travel with money, you follow a smooth, well-worn path through the world. Wood-paneled train cars lead to shiny black cabs, which lead to hotel rooms with velvet curtains, each step effortlessly following the last. When I’d traveled with Jane and Samuel the path had grown narrow and twisting, frequently terrifying.

Now I was alone, and the only path was the one I left behind me.

Bad and I stood for a moment in the charred skeleton of the lighthouse, looking through the mist to the pocked and rugged coast. I felt like an explorer at the precipice of some new, wild world, armed only with ink and hope; I felt like my mother.

Except that she hadn’t been pursued by invisible monsters with fox-toothed smiles. The giddy grin faded from my face.

I floated my pillowcase on an unburnt plank from the lighthouse and waded back into the icy sea with Bad at my side. Clouds settled like eiderdown around us, a feathered fog that swallowed everything: the sound of my splashing, the sight of the shore, the sun itself. It was only by the rough scrape of stone beneath my fingers that I knew we’d reached the other side.

We climbed the cliffside on jellied legs, found the road, and began to walk. At least I had boots this time, although I’d had difficulty in identifying them as such when Molly presented them to me—they’d looked more like the remains of small, unfortunate creatures. I thought briefly of the shined, patent-leather shoes Mr. Locke had bought me as a girl, with their narrow toes and stiff heels; I didn’t miss them.

By midmorning I’d realized fewer trucks or cars were willing to stop for an in-between girl and her vicious-looking dog, without Samuel’s respectable whiteness nearby. People swerved around me without slowing; it was as if I’d fallen through the cracks, slipped down into some invisible underworld that decent people preferred to ignore.

It was a horse and buggy that eventually stopped beside me, with a jangle of harnesses and a querulous “Dammit, Rosie, I said whoa.” The