realized the sound was coming from me.
I stopped. Heard Havemeyer shout back down the steps, “Get that out of here and clean up this mess, Evans,” and then there was nothing but the thunderous shushing of blood in my ears and the silent sound of my own unraveling.
I was seven again and Wilda’s key had just turned in the black-iron lock and left me caged and alone. I remembered the walls pressing me between them like a botanical specimen, the sick-sweet taste of syrup on a silver spoon, the smell of my own terror. I thought I’d forgotten, but the memories were crisp as photographs. I wondered dispassionately if they’d always been there, lurking just out of sight and whispering their fears to me. If behind every good girl lurked a good threat.
Shuffling, swearing noises from the distant parlor. Bad.
My legs bent beneath me and I slid down the door, thinking: This is what alone feels like. I only thought I knew, before, but now Jane was gone and Bad was taken, and I might rot away to cotton and dust in this shabby gray room and no one on Earth would care.
That black Thing descended again and settled its coal-smoke wings around my shoulders. Motherless, fatherless. Friendless.
It was my own fault. My fault, for thinking I could just run away, just gather my nerve and walk out into the wide unknown like a hero beginning a quest. For thinking I could bend the rules, just a little, and write myself into some better, grander story.
But the rules were made by Lockes and Havemeyers, by wealthy men in private smoking rooms who pulled the world’s riches to themselves like well-dressed spiders in the center of a golden web. People of significance; people who could never be locked away in small rooms and forgotten. The best I could hope for was a life spent creeping in their generous shadows—an in-between creature neither loved nor reviled, but permitted to scurry freely so long as I didn’t cause trouble.
I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. I wanted to cast a spell and unspool the last three days, to find myself standing innocent and bemused in the Pharaoh Room, reaching for the blue chest. I wanted to disappear back into The Ten Thousand Doors, to lose myself in Ade’s impossible adventures—but Jane had taken the book, and Jane was gone.
I wanted to find a Door and write my way through it.
But that was madness.
Except—there was the book, which echoed my own memory. And Jane’s urgent, black-eyed expression when she held it. And Havemeyer and Locke, freezing at the barest mention of Doors. What if—?
I teetered on that invisible cliff’s edge, holding myself back from the seething, teeming ocean below. I stood up, slowly, and crossed to the dresser. My jewelry box was an old sewing box I’d stood on end and stuffed with the accumulated treasures of seventeen years—feathers and stones, trinkets from the Pharaoh Room, letters from my father folded and refolded so many times the creases were translucent. I ran a finger along the lining until I felt the cool edge of a coin.
The silver queen smiled her foreign smile at me, just as she had when I was seven. The coin was heavy in my palm; quite real. I felt a dizzy rushing, as if some great-winged seabird had swooped through the center of me, trailing salt and cedar and the familiar-but-not-familiar sun of another world.
I took a breath, and then another. Madness. But my father was dead and my door was locked and Bad needed me, and there was no way out except through madness.
I dove over that unseen edge and plunged into the dark waters below, where the unreal became real, where the impossible swam by on glimmering fins, where I could believe it all.
And in believing came a sudden calm. I tucked the coin into my skirt and crossed to the writing desk beneath the window. I found a scrap of half-used paper and smoothed it against the desktop. I paused for a moment, gathering every speck of my dizzy, drunken belief, then took up the pen and wrote:
The Door opens.
It happened just as it had when I was seven and still young enough to believe in magic. The pen nib swirled around the period and the universe seemed to exhale around me, to shrug its invisible shoulders. The light streaming through my windows, gone dim and watery with afternoon clouds, seemed suddenly more golden.
Behind