Cora had been in the Trenches for a year and a half, diving deeper every day, fighting the Serpent of Frozen Tears with the other mermaids, flirting with sirens and chasing currents for the glory of the queen. Then had come the dreadful day when she was swept into one of the Serpent’s whirlpools, and the reaching hands of her sisters hadn’t been enough to anchor or to save her, and she’d woken on a beach back in the world of her birth, tail split down the middle into two familiar, unwanted legs, scales gone, fins and gills and freedom gone. All she’d been left with was her hair, which now grew in a deep blue-green, a perfect complement to the fins she no longer had.
She’d staggered up the beach naked and starving and half-delirious, unsure where she was or how she’d gotten there, and the first tourists to see her had called the local police, convinced that she had been attacked. The police, in turn, had called her parents, and they’d come laughing and crying down to the station to collect her, asking her over and over again where she’d been. But she’d already heard the officers snickering at the naked fat girl, and she already knew that telling her parents she’d tried to drown herself and turned into a mermaid instead wasn’t going to get her very far, so she’d turned her face away and stammered excuses, claiming not to know, not to remember, not to understand.
She’d lasted three months in the wreckage of her old life, suddenly sixteen, suddenly remarkable because she’d disap peared, because her hair stood out in a crowd, because she had somehow learned the trick, during the time she claimed not to remember, of dyeing her eyebrows.
Then one of the other girls on the swim team had broken the silent agreement not to look at the fat girl during post-pool shower time, and the news that Cora cared enough about her “new look” to dye her pubic hair had spread around school before the end of the day. She’d gone home mortified and crying, and when the next morning came, she had simply refused to get out of her bed.
The next day, Eleanor West had been on their doorstep, pleasantly dotty in a knee-length rainbow raincoat over a bright peach dress that somehow managed to skirt the color “pink” in all but implication, a smile on her face and a pamphlet about her school for children like Cora in her hands.
Cora’s parents had been reluctant to listen to a sales pitch for sending their daughter away from home when she’d only just returned from an adventure she still steadfastly insisted she didn’t remember, but Cora had looked at Eleanor and seen something familiar in the older woman’s eyes, something that spoke to understanding where she’d been and what she’d been through. At Cora’s insistence, her parents had allowed Eleanor to explain what she had to offer, and when offered a fresh start, with no one who remembered who she’d been before she disappeared, Cora had leapt at the chance to go.
She’d believed she was never going to see her family again when she’d given herself over to the Trenches, had mourned them and buried them in the hallowed ground of her heart, where they could rest. Leaving them a second time was a promise kept, not a loss. And for them, she was their miracle girl, returned by the sea, and they knew she didn’t dye her hair, and they knew that she was miserable, and they knew that whatever was broken inside her was something they couldn’t fix, and so they let her go.
Cora Miller walked away from her childhood home with her head held high and her knees barely shaking, convinced that she had finally found the place where she belonged.
Now, as she stood outside Eleanor’s office with her fist raised to knock on the door, unable to quite commit to finishing the gesture, she felt the last of her conviction crumbling away, washed out to sea by the constant erosion of her fear.
The door swung open, still untouched. Cora shrank back.
Eleanor, standing framed by the narrow opening, offered her a wan smile.
“It’s all right, dear,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you. I suppose you had best come inside.”
3?FULL FATHOM FIVE
ELEANOR’S OFFICE WAS THE only room in the school designed more for the comfort of people who hadn’t been to the other side of an impossible door than those who had. The main foyer boasted a chandelier made of crystals that had once been Eleanor’s own tears; the kitchen looked like it had been ripped half from an industrial cafeteria and half from a medieval recreation village. Every other room in the house had been touched by the reality of its residents, but in Eleanor’s office, it was possible to pretend that this was just another boarding school, one for students who had survived and started to recover from personal tragedy.
Eleanor herself smiled warmly at Cora as she walked around the bulk of her desk and settled in her leather-backed chair, gesturing for Cora to sit in one of the more modest chairs on the other side of the desk. Cora settled without a word of complaint, her still-damp nightgown sticking to her skin, while her hair sent rivulets of water down her back. The upholstery might get wet, but Eleanor wouldn’t care about that. Caring about things getting wet wasn’t very nonsensical, and Eleanor’s devotion to the Nonsense still waiting for her on the other side of her own door was one of the school’s few true constants.
（No one knew the name of Eleanor’s world, not even Kade, who would inherit the school on the day when she finally felt her grasp on reality had grown flexible enough to allow her to return to her beloved Nonsense to die. But Eleanor’s door was one of the rare stable ones, and everyone did know that she could go back whenever she felt the time was right.）
“So,” said Eleanor.
“So,” echoed Cora, and that was where her courage deserted her. All the words she’d been working her way toward saying dried up on her lips, and she looked down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap, dry and unwebbed and dancing with oilslick rainbows.
The rainbows never left her anymore. She would never have believed that she could hate color as much as she did.
“They still speak to you?” asked Eleanor.
Cora’s head snapped up. “Every night,” she whispered. “They … they want me. They think I belong to them because they held me for a few minutes. They won’t leave me alone.”
“And you think that it’s because your door is still propped open, just that little crack, that sliver held by hope. You think if you could let it close, they’d have to let you go.” Eleanor pursed her lips, agony in her eyes. “You’re wrong, you know. The doors never completely leave us. Even the ones who lose all desire to resume their journeys, even the ones who forget, they’re always more vulnerable—”
But Cora wasn’t listening anymore. She had seized on the only part of Eleanor’s speech that mattered, leaping to her feet and reaching across the desk for Eleanor’s hands. “Yes, forget,” she said. “I want to forget. I want to be normal again. I want my hair to be brown and the air to feel natural and to go home and sleep in my own bed and see my parents every morning when I wake up.” She stopped there, waiting for Eleanor to reply. Seconds slithered past, the silence unbroken until Cora herself took a deep breath, and said, “You’ve always said that there was a second school.”
Eleanor pulled her hands away. “The Whitethorn Institute. Cora, you can’t intend—”