The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,60

and perfectly white. Yule watched the ship lumbering closer, awkward and squarish in the water, until his eyes burned from salt and sun. There was a single figure aboard, facing the island with a challenging, prideful stance and a flaxen tangle of hair whipping around her head. Yule felt a hysterical desire to dance or scream or faint, but instead he simply stood and raised one arm into the air.

He saw her see him. A stillness fell over her, despite the lolling of the ship beneath her feet. Then she laughed—a wild, whooping laugh that rolled over the water to Yule like summertime thunder—removed several layers of dirt-colored clothing, and dove into the shallow waves beneath her ship without a trace of hesitation. Yule had half a second in which to wonder precisely what manner of half-wild madwoman he had been questing after for twelve years, and to doubt his sufficiency for the task, before he was splashing out to meet her, laughing and dragging his white scholar’s robes through the waves.

And so, in the late spring of the year 1893 in your world, which was the year 6920 in that one, Yule Ian Scholar and Adelaide Lee Larson found one another in the noonday tides surrounding the City of Plumm. They were never willingly parted again.

The Locked Door

I dreamed in gold and indigo.

I was skimming over a foreign ocean, following behind a white-sailed ship. There was a blurred figure standing at the prow, hair running bright behind her. Her features were smeary and uncertain but there was something so familiar in the shape she made against the horizon, so whole and wild and true, that my dreaming heart broke.

It was the feeling of tears sliding down my cheeks that woke me up. I lay on the floor of my room, stiff and chilled, my face aching from where it pressed against the corner of The Ten Thousand Doors. I didn’t care.

The coin. The silver coin I’d found as a girl, half-buried in the dust of a foreign world, the coin that now lay blood-warm in my palm—it was real. As real as the chill tile beneath my knees, as real as the tears cooling on my cheeks. I held it, and smelled the sea.

And if the coin was real… Then so was the rest of it. The City of Nin and its endless archives, Adelaide and her adventures in a hundred elsewheres, true love. Doors. Word-working?

I felt a shiver of reflexive doubt, heard an echo of Locke’s voice scoffing fanciful nonsense. But I’d already chosen to believe, once, and written open a locked door. Whatever this story was—this unlikely, impossible fantasy of Doors and words and other worlds—it was true. And, somehow, I was a part of it. And so were Mr. Locke, and the Society, and Jane, and maybe even my poor lost father.

I felt like a woman reading a mystery novel with every fourth line missing.

There’s really only one thing a person can do when they’re hip-deep in a mystery novel: keep reading.

I snatched the book and flipped through the pages to find my place, but stopped: a thin slip of paper peeked out from the back pages. It was a note, written on the waxy back of a receipt labeled Zappia Family Groceries, Inc. It read:

HOLD ON JANUARY.

The letters were stiff capitals, written with the careful pressure of someone uncomfortable with a pen in their hand. I thought of Samuel talking about his family’s cabin on the north end of the lake, his dusk-colored hands gesturing in the darkness, his cigarette drawing comet trails in the night.

Oh, Samuel.

If I hadn’t been holding that scrap of paper and thinking of those hands, I might’ve heard the nurses’ footsteps before the lock clunked and the door opened, and they stood on the threshold like a pair of gargoyles in starched white aprons. Their eyes surveyed the room—unslept-in bed, unlatched window, patient on the floor with her nightgown rucked past her knees—and landed on the book. They moved toward me with such synchronous efficiency it had to have been some kind of Procedure. Procedure 4B, When an Inmate Is Out of Bed and in Possession of Contraband.

Their hands came down like harpy claws on my shoulders. I froze—I had to stay calm and sane-seeming, had to be good—but one of them scooped my book off the floor and I lunged for it. And then they were twisting my wrists behind my back and I was kicking and howling and