no more turn away from her goal than a compass needle could point south.
She waited for Lucio and his friend to crisscross back down the slope, and for the half-moon to paint the pines in soft silver. Then she dragged her haphazard vessel along a deer trail to a low stone building that might once have served as a miners’ church, or perhaps something older and holier.
The doorway was just as she’d found it weeks previously. It took up almost the entirety of its stacked-stone wall, framed in vast timbers gone age-black. A rough hole in the planking was the only handle, and already Ade could swear a soft breeze whistled through it carrying the smell of salt and cedar and long, sun-gilded days.
It was a smell that shouldn’t have been familiar to her, but it was. It was the smell of the ghost boy’s skin as they’d kissed in a late-summer field. It was the smell of elsewhere.
She opened the door and launched her boat into the strange seas of another world.
The Unlocked Door
My eyes, when I opened them, felt as if they’d been plucked from my head, rolled in coarse sand, and crammed clumsily back into my skull. My mouth was gummed and sour, and my skull seemed to have shrunk several sizes overnight. For a few disoriented seconds I forgot the half-dozen glasses of champagne from the party and wondered dizzily if the book had done this to me. As if a story could ferment in my veins, like wine, and leave me drunk.
If any story could have done it, it would have been that one. I’d certainly read better books with more adventure and kissing and less pontificating, but none of them had left me with this fragile, impossible suspicion that maybe, somehow, it was all true. That there were Doors hidden in every shadowed place, waiting to be opened. That a woman might shed her childhood skin, snakelike, and fling herself into the seething unknown.
It seemed unlikely that Mr. Locke would give me something so fanciful, no matter how sorry he felt for me. How, then, had it found its way into my treasure box in the Pharaoh Room?
But the mystery of it felt thin and distant beneath the weight of the Thing that still sat on my chest. I began to see how it would always be there, how it would cleave to my flesh like a second skin, secretly poisoning everything I touched.
I felt the damp poke of Bad’s nose as he rooted under my arm, the way he had as a puppy. It was far too hot—the July sun was oozing across the floorboards now, baking against the copper roof—but I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face in his fur. We lay sweat-sticky while the sun rose and Locke House creaked and murmured around us.
I was drifting into a forced, heat-dazed sleep when the door opened.
I smelled coffee and heard familiar, decisive steps across the floor. Some secret tenseness in my chest unwound itself, exhaling relief: She’s still here.
Jane was dressed and alert in a way that said she had been awake for a considerable time and refrained from disturbing me for as long as was decent. She balanced a pair of steaming cups on the bookshelf, dragged a spindly chair to my bedside, and sat with her arms neatly crossed.
“Good morning, January.” There was something almost stern in her voice, businesslike. Perhaps a single day was the acceptable mourning period for a mostly absent father. Perhaps she was just irritated at me for sleeping late and monopolizing our room. “I heard from the kitchen girls the party was, ah, eventful.”
I made a moany, I-don’t-want-to-discuss-it sound.
“Is it true that you got drunk, shouted at Mr. Locke, and stormed out of the smoking room? And then—unless my informants are mistaken—disappeared with the Zappia boy?”
I repeated the moany sound, a bit louder. Jane merely raised her eyebrows. I threw an arm over my face, stared at the orangey afterglow of my eyelids, and grunted: “Yes.”
She laughed, a rolling boom that made Bad jump. “There’s hope for you yet. There are times I think you’re too much of a mouse to make it out in the world, but perhaps I am wrong.” She paused, sobering. “When I first met your father he told me you were a troublesome, feral child; I hope that’s so. You’ll need it.”
I wanted to ask if he’d spoken often of me, and what he’d said, and if