The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,72

stoop, like everyone else’s, and when Mrs. Reynolds and another nurse escorted me into my room I said “Thank you” in a soft, docile voice. Mrs. Reynolds’s eyes flicked up to mine, then away. They did not cuff me to the bed when they left.

I waited until their steps had clicked down the hall to the next locked door, then dove for my mattress. I ran my fingertips along the spine of my father’s book, lightly, but left it where it lay. Instead, I found the cool silver of the coin from the City of Nin.

It sat heavy in my palm, wider than a half-dollar and twice as thick. The queen smiled up at me.

Slowly, I scrubbed the edge of the coin against the rough cement stucco of the wall beside my bed. I held it back up to the light and saw that the smooth curve of the coin had been worn away, ever so slightly.

I smiled—the desperate smile of a prisoner as she digs her escape tunnel—and pressed the coin back against the wall.

By dinner, my arm muscles were wrung-out rags and my finger joints ached where they curled around the coin. Except that it wasn’t a coin anymore. There were two angled sides leading to a single point, with nothing left of the queen’s face except one wise eye in the center. I kept scraping after dinner, because I wanted to be sure it was sharp enough and also because I was scared.

But night was coming—I watched the light on my bare walls turn from rose to palest yellow to dim ash—and Havemeyer would return soon. Creeping like a penny-dreadful monster along the halls, reaching his cold fingers out for me, drinking the warmth from my flesh…

I rolled back my blankets, pressed bare feet to the floor, and crept to the locked door.

The coin lay gleaming and thin in my palm, transformed into a tiny blade or a sharp silver pen nib. I touched it lightly to my fingertip, thought of Havemeyer’s hungry eyes, and pressed down.

By moonlight, blood looks like ink. I knelt and drew my finger across the floor in a shaky line, but the blood beaded and pearled on the slick-polished tile. I squeezed my hand, forced the reluctant drops into a puddled, smeary T, but I already knew it wouldn’t work: it would take too much blood, and too much time.

I swallowed. I laid my left arm across my knees and tried to think of it as paper or clay or slate, something not-alive. I touched the silver knife to my skin, right where the stringy muscle of my forearm joined up to my elbow.

I thought Hold On January, and began to write.

It hurt less than I’d thought it would. No, that’s a lie—it hurt precisely as much as you’d think to carve letters into your own flesh, deep enough for blood to boil up like red oil wells; it’s just that sometimes pain is too unavoidable, too necessary to feel.

THE DOOR

I was careful to cut my lines away from the ropy veins in the middle of my forearm, out of a dim sense that I might exsanguinate myself on the hospital floor and cut my whole escape attempt tragically short. But I was equally afraid of cutting too lightly, as if it might signal some secret hesitancy or unbelief. It’s believing that matters, remember.

THE DOOR OPENS FOR HER.

The coin edge bit and twisted around the period, and I believed it with all my shaken heart.

The room did that same almost-familiar reshuffling of itself, a subtle wrenching, as if an invisible housewife were tugging at the corners of reality to shake out the wrinkles. I screwed my eyes shut and waited, hope thudding through my veins and dripping out onto the floor—God help me if it didn’t work—in the morning they’d find me lying in the curdling muck of my own blood—at least Havemeyer wouldn’t have any life-heat left to steal—

The lock clicked. I opened my eyes, blinking through sudden exhaustion. The door swung inward just slightly, as if pulled by a faint breeze.

I slouched forward and rested my forehead against the tile, letting waves of fatigue roll and crash over me. My eyes wanted to close; my ribs ached as if I’d swum to the bottom of the lake and back.

But he was coming, and I couldn’t stay.

I limped back to the bed in a three-limbed crawl, smearing red behind me, and fumbled for my book. I hugged it close to me,