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And then a woman in a plain black dress steps off the east wall, lowers a mask on a stick, and I stop breathing.

Evelyn.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Since seven." She doesn't apologize. She doesn't look at Seraphine either. "Come to the Lantern, Maren. Tonight, in front of witnesses. It's the only door in this building that leads anywhere you can survive."

Two women. One in candlelight and one in shadow. Both with a hand out.

Both of them still telling me what I am and what I should do.

Mercy doesn't say anything. She stands beside me with her burned hands loose at her sides and she waits, and that's the whole difference, and I finally understand what my mother was trying to say.

Past the barrier, Gage isn't saying anything either. His palm is still in the air. He hasn't moved it once.

They're both going to tell you there are two doors.

There aren't.

I look at Seraphine's circle. I look at Evelyn's gates. I look at the parquet under my boots, where the black star has been drinking candle wax all night, and the knocking underneath it that stopped ten minutes ago, and I know exactly why it stopped.

"Threshold," I say.

Evelyn goes still.

"That's the word, isn't it. That's what everyone's been chewing around for thirteen days." I'm not shouting. I don't have to. The chandelier is ringing at the pitch of my voice, one crystal at a time. "You both want me to pick a side of the line."

"Maren," Evelyn says.

"I'm not on one side of it." My hands come up, and white fire opens across both palms without being asked, steady as a lamp. "I am the line."

The room goes so quiet I can hear the wax cooling.

"Everyone in this building has a door they want me to walk through. Light. Dark. Custody. Family." I close my hands, and the fire stays. "I choose me."

Something under the floor answers.

The black star splits. Not wide. A seam the width of a wedding ring runs from my left boot to the fireplace, and the cold that comes up out of it isn't weather, isn't October, isn't anything that's ever been outside. The paper bats stop moving. Three hundred people feel it at once, and this time they scream.

Seraphine begins to laugh.

I drop to one knee on the star and put my burning hand flat over the seam.

Under my palm, the door stops. Not shut. Stopped.

And on the other side of it, something that has been knocking for four hundred years takes hold of my hand.

47

MAREN

STILL MIDNIGHT

Nothing on the other side of the floor has a hand.

I understand that with my palm still flat on the seam and something closed around it. It isn't a grip. It's a hundred things reaching at once for the only open thing they've found in four hundred years, the way water takes the shape of a crack.

It isn't hunting me. That's worse. Pressure doesn't hunt. Pressure just waits for the wood to give.