Wayward Children 07 - Where the Drowned Girls Go, page 12
Maybe that was why she’d slipped through a door and into a world where being seen was never the goal, where learning to hide and run and get away were the most important things. She’d found peace on the other side of a doorway that couldn’t possibly exist, and when that peace had been stripped away, she’d run away home with a curse hanging over her head and a tongue that no longer remembered what it was to utter her own name.
At first, that had seemed like the only consequence; at first, she’d thought she might be able to find ways around it, to do work that didn’t require her to have a name. Maybe her enforced anonymity could even be an asset. She could be some billionaire’s secretary, untraceable because she couldn’t ever be named, suited to fulfill their every need.
But then she’d started shrinking. Then she’d started finding coarse brown hairs on her pillow in the morning, stiff and unbending, like the guard hairs on a rat’s back. Then she’d started waking up in the middle of the night with an aching tailbone, wondering whether this was when the tail was going to worm its way through her flesh, extending indelibly behind her, becoming an immutable part of who she was. She didn’t know the full shape of the Rat King’s curse, but she had a feeling, too strong to ignore, that once the tail sprouted, it would be too late for her to ever get her name back. Too late for her to ever be human again.
She crept through the school, silent as a sigh, until she reached the science classroom and slipped inside. The cameras in this room were out, had been since a bad accident in chemistry earlier in the week; their gleaming glass eyes saw nothing, transmitted nothing to the school’s security office. Carefully, she placed a chair on top of the matron’s desk and climbed onto it, straining until her fingertips brushed the paneled ceiling. A shove, a leap, an agonizing pull-up and she was inside, moving through the space between the dropped ceiling and the roof with quick precision. Her back didn’t even come close to brushing the actual rafters. Dust tickled her nose and she breathed it in, relaxing into the safe, familiar scent that lingered in enclosed places.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, to be a rat. Maybe she could be happy. Or maybe it wouldn’t matter. Rats didn’t have names the way people did. Maybe they didn’t care about happiness the way people did, either.
The school was large, but she’d been there for more than a year, and she knew where she needed to go. Inch by inch, she pulled herself along, until she felt warm air coming up through the small holes in the ceiling tiles. She was nowhere near the student dormitories. Carefully, she stopped, wedged her nails into the space at the edge of the nearest tile, and eased it an inch or so away from its frame, peering downward.
The matrons were gathered in a single central room, sitting in silent contemplation of the air. All save for Miss Lennox, who was moving from body to body, shaking them, grasping their hands, trying to get them to react to her.
“Please, Caroline, please,” she moaned, dropping to her knees in front of one matron, a pretty woman about Miss Lennox’s age, with freckled cheeks and the empty stare of a mannequin. “We were supposed to get out of here together, remember? You and me and whatever door was willing to have us, forever, no matter what anyone said. Don’t you remember?”
The freckle-faced matron stirred slightly, the ghost of a frown tugging at her lips, and then was still. Miss Lennox took her hands.
“I don’t know what they did to us, but I know you’re in there,” she said. “I know you can hear me. It’s me, Julia. You can always hear me. Fight, Carrie. Fight, and come back to me.”
“That will be quite enough of that.”
Miss Lennox gasped and jumped to her feet, moving to put her body between the other matron and the voice. The nameless girl squirmed into a new position in the ceiling, careful to keep her weight off the tiles, and scanned for the voice’s owner.
The man in front of the door was familiar: she’d seen him around the school with a mop in his hand and a bucket by his feet, mopping and scrubbing and wiping away the signs that children infested the building, tracking their filth and foolishness everywhere. He was wearing a gray jumpsuit, and had a wide, unremarkable face, easy to overlook, but impossible to forget.
His eyes were sharp as stones. They seemed to see everything. The nameless girl held her breath, lest he should look up and see her.
“You,” breathed Miss Lennox. “I remember … I remember you. You’re Headmaster Whitethorn. You didn’t want us to know that. You wanted us to think you were the janitor. You … you hurt me.”
“I never intended to, and you have my sincere apologies,” said the headmaster. The real headmaster. “You failed to graduate. Something had to be done, and I’ve taken care of you, haven’t I? You’ve had a roof over your head and food in your stomach, which is more than the world outside my walls would have promised you. You’ve helped my work.”
“Your work?” Miss Lennox stared at him. “You stripped our free will and kept us as prisoners. Carrie doesn’t even recognize me!”
“Of course not. She isn’t … that name you said. She’s one of my matrons, interchangeable, serene. Ready to serve. I’ll have words with my stand-in. He’s supposed to know better than to disrupt the pattern. I’m so sorry. You should never have needed to suffer this way.” The headmaster took a step forward. “It’ll be over soon.”
There was a choice to be made here. Sumi had asked the nameless girl to find out how the names were being taken, where they were being stored—even why the real headmaster was hiding himself. The nameless girl wasn’t sure how many of those questions she could answer, but she knew she could get more answers than she had so far. She could learn.
Or she could help.
For a moment—just a moment—she closed her eyes and thought about Bright, the curve of her smile and the cupped shape of her ears, which were closer to a mouse’s than a human’s, covered in soft fur, like velvet, and so sensitive that she had come apart under the nameless girl’s hands every time they held each other. She thought about running through secret tunnels hand in hand, about the taste of mushroom cutlets and glowing caveberries, about feeling like she had a future, not just a frail and fading memory of one.
Bright would understand. If there was ever another traveler, and that child somehow knew the story of the girl who’d lost first her name and then her chance at coming home, Bright would understand.
The nameless girl opened her eyes and shoved the ceiling tile away at the same time. It landed on the floor with a clatter. The headmaster turned to stare at it, then looked up at the hole in the ceiling. He was so focused on it that he didn’t notice when another tile moved aside above him. The nameless girl dropped out of the opening, landing on his back and wrapping her arms around his neck, cutting off his oxygen supply.
“Run, Miss Lennox!” she howled. “Run now!”
And Miss Lennox, to her credit, did. She grabbed Caroline by the hand and raced for the door, leaving the other matrons behind. The headmaster clawed at the nameless girl’s arm, trying to break her grasp. She ground her teeth and held on fast, refusing to be dislodged. Her size helped her. She was stronger than anyone expected her to be, denser than she looked, and her grip was strong: he couldn’t get the leverage to throw her off.
“You stole their names,” she spat, voice close to his ear, where he couldn’t help hearing her. “You kept my name from finding me. I don’t know why you’re doing this and I don’t know who you are, but you’re a monster, and I hate you.”
The headmaster choked and wheezed. The nameless girl held on tighter. When he finally dropped to his knees, when he finally fell, she kept holding on, until she was absolutely sure that he was unconscious, not just faking. Then—only then—she let go and staggered to her feet, turning to stare at the blank-faced, motionless matrons all around her. None of them seemed to have noticed, or to care, that two of their number had fled; none of them seemed bothered that she had just choked a man to unconsciousness in front of them.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and turned and fled, out into the hall, along its silent length and around the school’s many corners until she reached the familiarity of her dorm.
The door was open. Miss Lennox and her still blank-eyed companion were standing in the hall outside; Sumi and Cora were standing in the doorway.
“Please, you have to believe me,” said Miss Lennox. “It isn’t safe for you here. It isn’t safe for any of us here. The headmaster—he wants to seal the doors forever. For the sake of the world. He’ll never let you leave.”
“What about the graduations?” asked Cora.
“Graduates forget,” said Miss Lennox. “As soon as they step off of school grounds, they forget, and they think they were sent here because they’d had some sort of breakdown. The ones who won’t let go of their doors never graduate.” She shuddered. “When I was a student, I wondered what happened to them. I don’t have to wonder anymore.”
“The headmaster’s a wizard,” said Cora.
“He’s a monster,” said Miss Lennox.
“We’re not the only students here,” said Cora.
Miss Lennox shook her head. “We can come back. We can find people who believe us, other travelers who didn’t wind up here, and we can come back, but we can’t stay, and we can’t save everyone. Not right now. Not with the resources we have.”
“We have a way out of here,” said Sumi. “But I don’t know if you can take it. You’re older than eighteen.”
To the nameless girl’s surprise, Miss Lennox laughed.
“That’s just a number, Sumi: it doesn’t mean anything. People say it’s when you become an adult, but that isn’t universal. You’re Japanese American. In Japan, the age of majority is twenty. So when do you get too old to open a door?”
Sumi looked impressed. “How did you—”
“I’ve heard ‘we keep them until the doors lock’ more times than I care to count, and I am telling you, age means nothing. Age is experience, not absolution. If you’ve found a way to pry open a door, I will go through it, and I will survive whatever’s waiting there. We both will. Now please. We have to go.”
Sumi smiled.
17 THE LONG ROAD HOME
THEY LEFT THE SCHOOL like thieves fleeing the scene of a crime, quickly, quietly, and with only what they could carry. Sumi left her shoes behind.
They ran, five students and two teachers, across the field behind the institute, into the borders of the wood. Regan was waiting for them there, leaning against a tree with a blissful expression on her face, arms laden with owls and feet surrounded by raccoons. She opened her eyes at the sound of footsteps, straightening, gently shaking her woodland companions away.
“Did you find it?” demanded Cora.
Regan nodded.
They ran on.
At the edge of the wood, where the wall cut the Whitethorn Institute off from the rest of the world, was a deadfall, branches and fallen trees piled together by the wind and the weather until they reached a point almost as high as the wall itself.
“We’ll have to jump,” said Regan apologetically. “I tried to explain to the stag who led me here that humans aren’t that good at jumping, but he didn’t understand.”
“It’s fine,” said Cora. “All those laps around the athletic field had to be good for something.”
“I don’t understand,” said Miss Lennox.
“He doesn’t just take away names,” said Sumi, beginning to climb the deadfall. She moved quickly and efficiently, seemingly without fear. “All the doors want is for us to be sure. They want us to know where we belong. This many students, in this small a space, with this many rules and regulations designed to make us miserable? Half of them must know they don’t belong here. So where are the doors? They’re being kept out, that’s where.”
“There’s no magic in this world,” said Emily.
“Of course there’s magic. Look at Cora’s hair. The magic’s smaller, and sometimes it’s borrowed, but it’s here. The headmaster has magic. He takes names and he somehow keeps the doors at bay, and if you hit the magic number without being sure this world is where you belong, he keeps you on campus, where your door can’t ever reach you. Once we break the boundary of the grounds, we’ll see what happens then.”
“And if no door comes?” asked Stephanie.
“We find a pay phone and I call Eleanor-Elly and tell her she needs to send a bus.” Sumi laughed, wild and bright and utterly delighted with herself. “We’re leaving. One way or another, we’re leaving.”
She reached the top of the deadfall and leapt, landing light as a leaf atop the wall. She danced experimentally, then beamed at the group.
“No electricity,” she said. “Come on!”
One by one they climbed, even Cora, until Rowena was alone on the ground, looking up at them. The nameless girl waved impatiently.
“Come on,” she said. “Come with us.”
“No,” said Rowena. She grabbed one of the biggest branches from the deadfall and began to yank, trying to pull it free. “Run. All of you, run. Go far, far away, and don’t look back.”
“Rowena,” whispered the nameless girl.
Rowena smiled. It was wavering and small and brave, all at the same time. “Run,” she repeated. “Go find your name. Find your door. When you see Bright again, tell her you knew me. Tell her I was cool.”
“You were,” said the nameless girl.
“Time to go,” said Sumi, and the group turned away, sliding down the far side of the wall to land with a thump in the brush on the other side. Sumi was the last to move. She met Rowena’s eyes, and nodded, and then she was gone, and Rowena was alone.
She set herself to dismantling the deadfall with all the strength she possessed, ripping it out one branch at a time, making it harder and harder for anyone to follow. When she heard footsteps running through the wood she stopped, looking down at her chapped, torn-up hands, and didn’t turn. Whatever was behind her, she didn’t want to see.
“Where did they go?” demanded a half-familiar voice. She thought it might be one of the janitors.
“Why do you lock the doors?” Rowena asked.
“This world has magic,” he said. “It would have more if it wasn’t lured away, carried in the hands of foolish children. We lock the doors and we preserve our natural resources. We keep what’s meant to be ours. Where did they go?”
“Away from you,” said Rowena. She closed her eyes. “They got away from you.”
When his hands landed on her shoulders, she didn’t scream.
She was proud of that.
Then she wasn’t proud of anything at all.
EPILOGUE
GINGERBREAD AND BONE
THE DOOR OPENED OUT of nowhere and disgorged its contents onto the driveway in a pile of limbs and bodies, tangled together like puppies. A short, slightly pudgy teenage girl stepped out last, right onto the bodies of her traveling companions, not seeming to notice when she stepped on their heads or hands. She was dressed in a patchwork vest of countless colors, laced shut with a rope of licorice, over pink leggings that looked to have been knitted out of candy floss. Her hair was pulled into two pigtails and studded with sugar candies. She smiled as she gazed at the house in front of them, which was large and sprawling in the way of homes that had been less “designed” and more simply constructed.
“Is everyone all right?” she asked, before pulling a gumdrop out of her hair and popping it casually into her mouth. “No broken bones?”
“You’re standing on my hair,” said Cora.
Sumi skipped lightly down from the pile of shifting, groaning bodies, turning to offer her hand to the nearest of them. “We’re safe now. Or, if not safe, at least less unsafe. Eleanor-Elly will be thrilled to meet you all.”
Julia Lennox, who had snapped fully back to herself while crossing a gingerbread plain studded with carbonation geysers, pushed herself to her feet. “Even us?” she asked, gesturing to Carrie, who was helping Emily up.
“Even you,” said Sumi firmly. “Like you said, years are only numbers. They don’t matter here, unless we let them, and I don’t think I want to let them anymore.”
The nameless girl took Sumi’s hand. She was taller now; had grown almost six full inches in the week and a half since they’d fled the school for the forest, and then through the door to Confection that Sumi had seen tangled in a twist of ivy clinging to an old oak. Of the lot of them, her absolute conviction that Confection would never let her go had apparently been the strongest, capable of moving mountains, capable of changing worlds.
Stephanie’s door had appeared two days later, in the middle of a forest where the trees had cookies for leaves, spreading so wide they almost blocked out the sun. She’d looked back long enough to shout a quick farewell and then she’d been gone, diving through into a world of lush greenness, the sound of prehistoric reptiles echoing on the wind. The rest of them had kept on walking, kept on searching for something none of them had ever expected to be searching for: a door back to the world where they’d started.
Cora’s door hadn’t appeared, but her hair was full of rainbows, and she wasn’t worried. The Trenches would take her home when it was time.
The nameless girl paused, eyes bright with unshed tears. She looked at Sumi, still holding her hands, and said, “Your door’s closing.”
“Eh.” Sumi shrugged. “I’m not ready to be a wife and a mother and a story for the historians yet, so it’s not my time to go back to stay. I know I go home. I can spend a little more time here before that happens.”
