well.
He finds an electrical outlet by one of the lamps and plugs in his phone, though the effort feels futile.
He sits by the fire and pages through Sweet Sorrows again, relieved to be reunited with it. There are more missing pages than he remembers. Maybe he should show the book to Mirabel. He pauses at the bit about the son of the fortune-teller. Not yet. Well, he’s here now. He’s made it to the Harbor even if he hasn’t found the Starless Sea. Now what?
Maybe he could trace the book backward. Where was it before? He remembers his long-ago library clue. From the library of…somebody. He closes his eyes and tries to picture the piece of paper Elena gave him after Kat’s class, donated by…something foundation…dammit. There was a J, he thinks. Maybe.
Keating. The name comes back to him but he can’t remember the initials. He can’t believe he forgot to bring the piece of paper along.
One thing is certain: He’s not going to find his next move here unless his next move is a nap.
Zachary tucks Sweet Sorrows in his bag, sends his dishes back to the Kitchen and asks for an apple (it sends a silver bowl filled with yellow apples touched with spots of soft blushing pink), and sets off into the wilds of the Harbor again.
He tries not to use his compass but he has no idea what direction he’s moving in at any given time. He finds a room filled with tables and armchairs, some set in individual alcoves around the room and a large empty space with more chairs and a cascading fountain in the middle.
In the bottom of the fountain there are coins, some he recognizes and others are unfamiliar, piles of wishes resting under softly bubbling water. He thinks of the fountain full of keys and the key collector from Dorian’s book and wonders what happened to him.
No one ever saw him again.
He wonders if anyone is wondering what happened to him yet. Probably not.
Beyond the fountain is a hall with a lower ceiling, its entrance obscured by a bookshelf and an armchair. He has to move the chair to proceed. The hall is dimly lit with closed doors and as Zachary walks he realizes what is strange about it. It is not the relative lack of books or cats, rather that the doors along the hall have no doorknobs, no handles. Only locks. He pauses at one and pushes but it doesn’t budge. A closer inspection of the wood around the door reveals streaks of black char along the edges. There’s a hint of smoke in the air, like a long-extinguished fire. There’s a spot on the door where the doorknob had been, a vacancy that has been plugged with a piece of newer, unburned wood. Something moves in the shadows at the other end of the hall again, too big to be a cat, but when he looks there’s nothing there.
Zachary walks back the way he came, toward the fountain, and chooses a different hall. It is more brightly lit but “brightly” is a comparative term here. Most of the space has light enough to read by and little more.
He wanders aimlessly, avoiding going back to check on Dorian and mildly annoyed that so much of his mind is occupied by thinking about it (him).
He passes a painting of a candle and he could swear it flickers as he goes by so he investigates and it is not a painting at all but a frame hung on the wall around a shelf, a candle in a silver candlestick set inside and flickering. He wonders who lit it.
A meow behind him interrupts his wondering. Zachary turns to find a Persian cat staring at him, its squished face contorted in a skeptical glare.
“What’s your problem?” he asks the cat.
“Meooorwrrrorr,” the cat says in a hybrid meow-growl implying that it has so many problems it does not even know where to begin.
“I hear you,” Zachary says. He looks back at the candle, dancing in its frame.
He blows it out.
Immediately, the picture frame shudders and moves downward. The whole wall is moving, from the picture frame down, sinking into the floor. It stops when the bottom of the frame reaches the tiled ground, the extinguished candle halting at cat-eye level.
In the vacancy where the frame had been is a rectangular hole in the wall. Zachary looks down at the cat who is more interested in the candle, batting at a curl of