Well. It would have to do, because I certainly wasn’t lingering in this vicious, white-toothed world where the people you loved could do such terrible things to you.
I’ve always been good at running away.
I extended my finger, almost lazily, and drew it through the muddy puddle of blood. I wrote in the earth itself, in red-mud letters that glistened in the summer afternoon. The cicadas made the bones of my hand buzz.
SHE WRITES A DOOR OF ASH. IT OPENS.
I believed in it the way people believe in God or gravity: with such unswerving intensity they hardly notice they’re doing it. I believed I was a word-worker, and that my will could reshape the very warp and weft of reality itself. I believed that Doors existed in rare places of resonance between worlds, where the skies of two planets whispered against one another. I believed I would see my father again.
An eastward wind blew suddenly up from the riverbank, but it didn’t smell catfishy and damp like it should have. Instead it smelled dry and cool and spice-laden, like cinnamon and cedar.
The wind scudded over the ash pile. It swirled, like one of those strange dust devils you see sometimes teasing leaves into the air, and ashes and rain-rotted charcoal and dirt flung themselves upward. They hung for a moment between Mr. Locke and me, an arch framed in blue summer sky. I saw Locke’s face slacken, his gun wavering.
Then the ash began to… spread? Melt? It was as if each speck of dirt or char were actually a drop of ink in water, and now delicate tendrils were spiraling toward one another, connecting, melding, darkening, forming a curved line in the air until—
An archway stood before me. It looked strangely fragile, as if it might crumble back to ash at the slightest touch, but it was a Door. I could already smell the sea.
I reached for my discarded pillowcase and climbed unsteadily to my feet, exhaustion blurring my eyes, bits of dirt and grass embedded in my kneecaps. I saw Mr. Locke’s grip seize around the revolver again. “Now, just, just stop. We can still make this right. You can still come back with me, come home—everything can still be fine—”
That was a lie; I was dangerous and he was a coward, and cowards don’t let dangerous things live in their spare bedrooms. Sometimes they don’t let them live at all.
I stepped toward the ash door and met Mr. Locke’s eyes for the last time. They were white and barren as a pair of moons. I had a sudden childish urge to ask him a question—Did you ever really love me?—but then the barrel of the gun drifted upward again and I thought, I suppose not.
I dove through the ash archway with Bad leaping at my heels and my heart thud-thudding in my chest and the crack of a second shot ringing in my ears, following me into the black.
The Open Doors
I had entered the Threshold four times before. Perhaps, I thought as I fell into the echoing black, the fifth time won’t be so bad.
I was, of course, wrong. Just as the sky doesn’t turn less blue the more times you see it, so the atomless, airless nothing of the space between worlds does not grow less terrifying.
The darkness swallowed me like a living thing. I tilted forward, falling but not falling because in order to fall there has to be an up and a down and in the Threshold there’s only the endless black nothing. I felt Bad brush past me, legs paddling ineffectually against the emptiness, and scooped my arm around him. He kept his eyes fixed on me. It occurred to me that dogs are probably never lost in the in-between, because they always know precisely where they are going.
And so, this time, did I. I felt my father’s book wedged tight against my ribs, and followed the cedar-and-salt smell of his home world, my home world, toward that white-stone city.
I could still feel the hungry tugging of the darkness, but it was as if something bright and shining in me had finally unfurled and filled me to my edges. I was weak, riddled with hurts—betrayal, abandonment, the tiny black hole in my shoulder, a new something-very-wrong in my left hip that I didn’t want to think about—but I was entirely myself, and I was not afraid.
Until I felt a hand close around my ankle.
I didn’t think he would follow me. I want you to understand that—I didn’t mean for it to happen, any of it. I thought he would stay behind in his safe little world and crush my Door back to ash and char. I thought he would sigh regretfully, cross out my entry in his mental ledger book (In-between girl, magic powers suspected, value unknown) and then go back to his twin passions of amassing wealth and closing Doors. But he didn’t.
Maybe he loved me, after all.
I think I even caught a glimpse of love when I turned back to look at his face—or at least a possessive, conditional, desire-to-own—but it was quickly subsumed beneath his towering fury. There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.
His fingers burrowed into my flesh. His other hand still held the shining revolver, and I saw his thumb move. There was no sound in the Threshold, but I imagined I could hear that ominous click-click again. No no no—I could feel myself slowing, floundering in the black, fear blurring my goal—
But I had forgotten Bad. My first friend, my dearest companion, my terrible dog who had always seen the Please Do Not Ever Bite list as a fundamentally negotiable document. He arched backward, yellow eyes gleaming in the fierce joy of an animal doing what he loves best, and buried his teeth in Locke’s wrist.
Locke’s mouth opened in a soundless scream. He let go of me. And then he was floating, falling alone in the empty vastness of the Threshold and his eyes had gone white and wide as china plates.
For all the Doors he’d closed, I wondered how long it had been since he’d stepped through one, since he’d seen the Threshold. He seemed to have forgotten his rage, his direction, the gun in his hand—now there was nothing in his face but wild terror.
He could still have followed me.
But he was too afraid. He was afraid of change and uncertainty, of the Threshold itself. Of things outside his power, and things in between.
I watched the darkness nibble, delicately, at the edges of him. His right hand and his revolver vanished. His entire arm. His eyes—his powerful, pale eyes, which had brought him such wealth and such status, which had subjugated enemies and persuaded allies and even reshaped stubborn young girls, temporarily—could do nothing against the darkness.
