EMILY MANAGED TO HOLD her tongue until they were back in their dorm with the door closed. As soon as they were safe, she rounded on Cora, demanding, “What’s your plan? How are we getting out of here?”
“Tell me about your door,” said Cora.
Emily blinked. “It was … I found it in one of those janky haunted houses people set up around Halloween,” she said. “It was next to the exit. It said ‘be sure’ on it in these dripping blood letters, so I figured it was the way to get to a bigger scare. Instead, it led to a world where it was always harvest, where it was Halloween every night, and I danced with monsters and sang with scarecrows, and I was happy.”
“Uh-huh,” said Cora. She turned to Stephanie. “You?”
“Dinosaurs,” she said. Her tone turned beatific. “I went where there were dinosaurs.”
“Right.” Cora turned to the nameless girl. “You?”
“I already told you.”
“You told me how it ended. How did it begin?”
The nameless girl took a breath. “There was a door in the foundation of our house. I’d been … My father had been drinking, he’d been hitting my mom, all I wanted was to get away. So I got away.”
“Yeah.” Cora turned to Rowena. “You?”
“I’m not part of your little gang,” said Rowena. “I’m here because I want to be.”
“That isn’t—”
“I’m eleven.” Rowena spat the words out like they tasted sour. “Okay? I’m eleven. I was missing for three hours, and when I found my way back through the veil of clocks to the door, I looked like I was six years older than I was supposed to be. I fell through the door when I was six and I came back out physically twelve. My parents don’t believe I am who I say I am. I’ve been here for five years and I could graduate tomorrow, if I had anywhere to go. You can all go running back to your happy little fantasy worlds. If I went back through my door, I’d be dead of old age in less than a month. So leave me out of this.”
Cora nodded. “You’re making the right choice,” she said. She paused. “The veil of clocks … can you do anything with time?”
“What? No.”
“It was worth asking.” She turned back to the others. “Now that we all know what we’re watching for, we leave tonight. I honestly expect at least one of those doors to show up as soon as we’re clear of the grounds.”
“How?” asked Stephanie. “The doors are locked, the grounds are walled, and the matrons are everywhere.”
“The false headmaster gave us the key, even if he didn’t mean to,” said Cora. “When he gave Miss Lennox back her name, he broke whatever hold this place has over its graduates. He brought her back to herself. The matrons will be distracted, trying to help her.”
“Why do you call him the false headmaster?” asked Emily.
“No one remembers him when they’re not looking at him,” said Cora. “He can’t build anything. He’s a nasty man, full of nasty thoughts, and most of them are about being forgotten. I think that’s why he gave Miss Lennox her name back. To punish her for what we did. He wanted her to remember, even if it was only for a little while, that she was going to be forgotten. His door … wasn’t kind to him.”
None of the doors were kind, not really, not even when they gave people exactly what they wanted. The Trenches hadn’t been kind to her. They had given her the freedom to figure out who she was. But they had also given her a war, and a hundred drowned sailors, and the smell of blood mixed with saltwater. They had given her nightmares that would be with her until the day she died. They had given her scars, and only some of them were visible.
“So?” Rowena folded her arms. “Being headmaster doesn’t make you a nice person.”
“What’s the name of the school?”
“The Whitethorn Institute. Don’t be stupid.”
“If the man we’ve met is the headmaster, and he’s completely forgettable, how do we know the name of the school? If it’s his name, too, we should forget it. It hasn’t been stolen from him, but the things he went through on the other side of his door stole it from everybody else.” Cora spread her hands. “We haven’t met the headmaster. We’re being lied to. We’re being lied to and held captive and I’m done. We leave tonight.”
“How?” asked Emily.
Sumi grinned, seizing the dialog. “Nonsensically.” She turned to the nameless girl. “You’re good at fitting in little places. Go find a way into the matrons’ quarters. See what happens when they take Miss Lennox’s name away from her. See where they put it. And then come back here, and we’ll smash everything we have to smash, and we’ll go find Regan and her deer, and they’ll lead us out of here.”
“Are you sure?” asked the nameless girl timidly.
“No,” said Cora. “But it’s the only chance we’ve got.”
15?TWO SIDES OF THE STORY
REGAN WALKED THROUGH THE forest as if it were the most familiar, beloved place in the world; as if she knew every inch of it, and every inch of it knew her. The creatures of the wood reacted in kind. They didn’t flee at the sound of her footsteps, but inched closer, moving through the brush to watch her as she came. One particularly bold blue jay dropped so low that his wings brushed her hair as he flew by, and her laughter was all the brighter because she hadn’t laughed in so very, terribly long.
She had always been a solemn child, slow to make friends, slow to trust anyone’s intentions. She’d had her reasons—of course she’d had her reasons; most adults even agreed that they made sense, even as most children called her stuck-up and arrogant and weird when they thought she wasn’t listening, even as the girl she’d trusted most in the world had shared a secret that wasn’t hers to share and broken Regan’s heart in half—but all the reasons in the world can’t change the end result. She’d been lonely, she’d been angry, and when a door had appeared where a door had no business being, she hadn’t hesitated.
In a way, she supposed she was one of the lucky ones. She’d come back from her adventures to a family that loved her, even if they couldn’t understand who she’d become. That was all right. They hadn’t been able to understand her before. They’d loved her and they’d cared for her and they’d blamed themselves for the way she was and they’d blamed her for not mysteriously becoming different, and when they’d told her that she was going away to boarding school in order to “get over her ordeal,” she’d packed without complaint, because she’d assumed that anything had to be better than walking through a house filled with cool, accusing shadows.
She’d been wrong, of course. Home at least had the horses, had the trees behind the house, had the kids who’d treated her like an outsider for most of her life and at least couldn’t find anything new to torment her about. School was an unfamiliar country, filled with adults who wanted her to deny everything she knew to be true, and kids who were torn between a deep, angry denial of their situation and an even deeper, even angrier desire to find their doors, to go home. All any of them wanted was to go home. It was just the shape of the idea that changed.