The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,75

moving with an uneven hesitancy. Impossible. I raised my head.

Bad limped into the light. One eye was swollen, his back leg was hovering and shaking above the ground, and his head hung low and haggard. For a stretched half second he blinked at me, as if unsure it was really me, and then we dove toward one another. We collided, a desperate mess of dark limbs and yellow fur. He rooted around my neck and armpits as if trying to find a place he could crawl into, making a hoarse, puppyish whine I’d never heard from him before. I wrapped my arms around him, resting my forehead against his shivering shoulder and saying all the stupid, inane things you say when your dog is hurt (I know, love, it’s all right, I’m here, I’m sorry, I’m sorry). Some jagged, broken thing in my chest began to mend.

Jane cleared her throat. “I hate to interrupt, but should there be anything… else, coming out of this hole?”

I went still. Bad’s tail ceased its thumping against the floor. Scuffling, creeping sounds echoed behind me, like something crawling closer. I looked back over my shoulder at my Door—a ragged black tear, as if reality had been careless and caught itself on a loose nail—and saw, or thought I saw, a malevolent gleaming in its depths, like a pair of hungry eyes.

“He’s coming for me.” My voice was calm, almost detached, while my thoughts ran in terrified circles. Havemeyer would emerge, white and wicked, and take whatever it was he wanted from me. Others would follow once they gathered their courage. They’d lock me up forever, if there was anything left of me to lock up, and probably Jane too. Certainly nothing good would happen to an African woman found in the company of a clinically insane fugitive at midnight. And who would take care of poor, battered Bad?

“I think I have to—I have to close it.” Anything open can be closed. Hadn’t my father discovered that when the Door closed between the City of Nin and my mother’s field? He’d never known why or how it happened, but then, my father was a scholar: his tools were careful study and rational evidence and years and years of documentation.

My tools were words and will, and I was out of time. I found my coin-knife, so blood-crusted it no longer gleamed silver. I pulled my knees under my belly and laid my poor, aching arm before me. I pressed the coin to my skin a final time, blinking a little against the weird blurring and unblurring of the room.

“No! January, what are you—” Jane tugged my hand away.

“Please.” I swallowed, swaying a little. “Please trust me. Believe me.” There was no reason in the world she should. Anyone else would have happily dragged me back to the doctors with a note pinned to my chest suggesting they lock me in a small room without any sharp objects for the next century or so.

(This was the true violence Mr. Locke had done to me. You don’t really know how fragile and fleeting your own voice is until you watch a rich man take it away as easily as signing a bank loan.)

The scuffling sounds grew louder.

Her eyes flicked to the hole in the wall behind me, and to the congealed lettering on my arm. A strange expression moved across her face—shrewdness, perhaps? A wary understanding?—and she let go of my hand.

I chose a bare, unbloodied patch of skin, and began to carve a single word: JU

Movement in the blackness, the harsh sound of breathing, a white-spider hand reaching out of the darkness toward me—

JUST.

The Door opens just for her.

I felt the world pull itself back together, like skin pulling tight around a scar. The blackness receded, the white hand spasmed—there was a terrible, inhuman screech—and then I was staring at nothing but a patch of unremarkable cabin wall.

The Door was closed.

Then my cheek was pressed to the floor and Jane’s cool hand was on my forehead. Bad limped closer and lay down with his spine pressed against me.

My last, wavering sight was of three odd, pale objects lying in a row on the floorboards. They looked like the white ends of some unusual mushroom, or maybe candle stubs. I’d already closed my eyes and begun to drift into a pain-hazed sleep when I recognized them for what they were: three white fingertips.

I was somewhere else for a while. I don’t know where, exactly, but it felt like