EVEN AS REGAN WAS remembering what it meant to breathe, the girl who no longer had a name crept along the edge of the hall in the main building of the school, her back bent and her head hunched, willing herself unseen. She knew where the cameras were, thanks to weeks and months of observation, and she knew how to flatten herself out, to fit into their blind spots. It was a necessary skill to possess, especially when living with the daily fear that eventually dwindling would become shrinking would become regressing. The day she was more rat than girl, she would need to be ready to go into hiding, to find a way into the walls in order to save herself from an exterminator’s hands. The headmaster—fake, real, it didn’t matter—would never tolerate vermin sleeping in a bed like a real person. It didn’t matter that she was real, that she had always been real. She’d die for the crime of not wanting to love a monster.
Back when she’d been—and even the thought of her name turned to roaring static, making her wince and almost straighten into the path of a camera’s lens—before, she’d been happy enough, if unchallenged and unfulfilled. She’d walked in a world of low expectations, too pretty to be clever, too clever to be kind, a pig-in-the-middle girl with her future mapped out for her by the adults who smiled indulgently whenever she tried to ask a question. She would graduate from high school, go on to college for a nice, safe degree, something that would make her better equipped to be a good wife one day, a good helper for a man who was a little less attractive and a little more clever, and maybe both those things were a matter of opinion, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she get good grades, wear the right brands, say the right things, and always, always be on display.
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.