Sethlo and Maella kept their heads down as they hurried through the Jillow City streets. Sewer smells lay heavy in the air, making them gag. Trash had begun piling up on steps over the last few days and then tumbling into the street because no one dared leave the city walls for a chance encounter with General Foster’s soldiers. Little rat-like creatures, and even a few untethered camels, hunted through the trash, throwing it around. There was no one to chase them off.
Veda Loor had forbidden all book catchers from leaving the library for their own safety but Maella needed to speak with Utheril about what they had found and to seek Utheril’s advice. Should she try opening a door with Tomi?
What if Utheril said yes, but Tomi refused?
Maella didn’t know what she would do.
They tied the yellow ribbons high on their arms and used side streets and shadows to make their way to the Hestroth temple. But when they explained what they had found, Utheril rejected the idea outright.
“Too dangerous,” Utheril said. “Too many unknowns. The patterns told the users where their door would lead. Otherwise such power is too chaotic, too volatile. Until you know who Tomi is—and even then.” Utheril shook his head. “What if it makes everything worse?”
They had debated it back and forth until the evening bells rang. Dejected, Maella and Sethlo left Utheril to head back to the library.
“Maella,” Sethlo said quietly as they hurried down an empty alleyway. “I am in no position to suggest this after what I did before, but if you do want to try to open a door with Tomi—”
Sethlo’s voice trailed off. Maella shook her head and stepped around a pile of food trash that a camel was pushing around with its mouth.
“I—”
The city’s speaker system crackled:
“Attention Jillow City citizens, licatherin rations are reduced a further one quarter effective immediately. Food and water rations are similarly reduced. All citizens, new and old, will report to section immediately for testing.”
A handful of Jillow citizens turned the corner onto the street. Sethlo and Maella ducked into a doorway. The Jillow City citizens shouted insults as they marched. Several of them shook the announcing pole and tore off the speaker. Others kicked trash around and still others banged on doors. One unlucky household opened up. The occupants were dragged into the street and all were forced to open boxes the marchers had produced. When none turned out to be doormakers, their house was ransacked instead.
Sethlo was on his toes, knees bent, searching the area like a predator might. She knew him well enough by now to see this as his way of dealing with fear. They left the doorway and sprinted to the closest place of relative safety—the Hestroth temple. The mob saw them—they raised howls and the pounding of feet sounded.
“Go back!” Sethlo said, but the way was blocked by another mob, bigger than the first, who shouted and rallied their group after Maella and Sethlo.
They veered away from the Hestroth temple, but the Sechnel temple was open. They burst inside. A Sechnel yelled at them to take off their shoes. Sethlo shouted for them to lock the temple door or the temple would surely get ransacked.
Two Sechnel closed up the temple’s doors and buttressed it with thick blocks of wood. Vibrations jumped out from the door.
Maella gasped. “They’re back on. It’s not supposed to be until tomorrow.” But it was more than that. There was also the faintest hint of wrongness that flew at her, as if from a great distance. She hadn’t felt it other than at night sometimes in her nightmares, or when she opened her own doors of stone.
It was the feeling of wrongness that always overtook her when a door had been opened by another doormaker.
She thought through the vibrations and feelings to separate potential doors from this new door. She wanted to determine direction and distance. Everything felt weak and fluttery. The licatherin in her system barely held back the symptoms anymore.
The focus stones in her pocket seemed to warm. She pressed her hand against the leather pocket where she had hid them. Pushing aside the krokosod headache, pushing aside the potential doors pouring vibrations out all around her, she went inside herself and then launched her consciousness up and out and felt—
“Sethlo, I think Tomi opened a door,” Maella said, quiet enough to make sure the Sechnel did not hear. It was the strangest feeling—she couldn’t be sure, but the door felt like it had been opened outside of the Jillow City walls.
Except that she had seen Tomi that morning.
Each day, he worked with Senta to research a cure for krokosod, but that morning, she noticed he had slipped away alone and vanished into the stacks, as if on a search of his own. Still, the stacks were inside the city. Why did the door feel farther away?
Her focus fell apart with a crash and a headache throbbed in its place. Maella rubbed her temples. She tried to feel for something again, but she had lost the thread. Maybe she had read the vibrations wrong and the door that had been opened was somewhere inside the city. Somehow, after all of his protests, after all of his rage, he had opened a door.
To where? And why?
And what would happen if they opened a door together?
The thought had become a dangerous obsession for Maella.
Sechnel approached, robes flapping.
She could see the whites of Sethlo’s eyes as he scanned the inside of the temple for an escape route.
“Do not touch anything,” Sethlo said.
“No duh,” Maella said.
Sethlo frowned but there was no time to explain.
“What are you doing here?” Kinton demanded.
They explained about the mobs.
Kinton exchanged a look with his fellow Sechnel. “Come with me. We have a place for you that will be safe.”
He led them to a room next to the scholars’ room. A few Sechnel gathered inside. There were looks on their faces Maella didn’t like.
Kinton motioned for them to sit at a table.
Before Maella or Sethlo knew what happened, Sechnel had grabbed each of them. Maella and Sethlo struggled, but there were too many.
They forced Maella’s hand onto a box the size of a cookie sheet. The box vibrated and streamed white light into the air, though no one could see that except for her. Fear of discovery struck Maella to her core. She struggled back, but the Sechnel were like a wall.
“What are you doing?” Sethlo shouted. He fought against the Sechnel but three of them held him back, though one got an elbow to the chin and another to the gut for their efforts.
“General Foster swears we have a doormaker within our walls,” Kinton said simply. “The city council wants everyone tested again. This is only a formality.”
General Foster had forced her hand to open a drawer. Fire had jumped out and consumed the desk. It was the moment she had known everything her family had taught about the terrible wrongness of the doors had been true.
Before she could even think through what was happening, the Sechnel forced her hand to flip open the lid of a small box.
Only one Sechnel gave the inside a cursory look, but when he froze and an exclamation tore from his throat, others crowded in. The room quieted into a deep silence as they studied the box contents. The looks on their faces clearly showed they had not expected to find anything, especially whatever her door had opened to.
Maella craned her neck. The way they looked at the box—had it opened, finally, to something other than the blue stone now that she could do nothing about it?
“That is One Door stone,” a Sechnel breathed out. “She opened a portal to the One Door.”
All the blood drained from Sethlo’s face.
Maella couldn’t process what they had said. How did they know it was One Door stone when even Utheril had not? But there was no time.
Maella saw their chance in the Sechnels’ dawning horror. She kicked out of her captors’ grip. This awoke Sethlo from his own shock. He twisted out of his captors’ hold. She kicked another Sechnel in the crotch, remembering Deep as she did. The Sechnel’s grip became like the weight of a butterfly.
Sethlo and Maella made it to the door before the Sechnel could act. On the other side of the door now, Maella slammed it closed. The vibrations jumped out at her. The Sechnel battered the door and dust sprinkled from the hinges. Wood began to crack.
Like at the shed with Barth’s men, Maella opened the door.
One piece of the blue stone crumbled and a small pebble skittered off its surface onto the floor at her feet.
One Door stone, they called it.
The Sechnel shouts vanished behind the insulation of the stone. The walls of the room were stone too. There was no way out unless this door was closed and reopened by someone other than a doormaker.
Maella looked at the work that her hands had created. Blue-grey stone, pockmarked with age, swirling symbols and geometric designs carved in it. Quarter moons surrounding full moons. She bent down and picked up the bit of rock that had fallen off even as her teeth chattered from the wrongness of the open door. The stone pebble matched the second stone in her pocket.
One of her focus relics had been One Door stone?
She felt stunned by this realization, yet somehow, somehow, deep down, she had known—hadn’t she?
From a nearby room, Maella noticed more scholars had stuck out their heads and were staring at her. They looked scared, like they had seen everything Maella had done with the other door.
“Let’s go,” Sethlo said, tugging at her hand. “Do not follow us or she will do the same to all of you!”
As if as one person, the blood drained from the scholars’ faces and they ducked back inside the room.
“How long do you think it will take for them to realize they can free the Sechnel by closing my door?” Maella said.
Sethlo shook his head. “The scholars will realize soon that going into a room with no windows and a single door is a dangerous thing to do around a doormaker. Let us get out of here.”
They paused at the Sechnel temple door, listening for sounds of the mob. Satisfied at the quiet and hearing Sechnel feet approach, they fled back into the street. They attempted a different route to the Library of Souls. The streets were empty, houses closed up, no person or mob in sight, though trash had spread everywhere. Here and there a house had been emptied out, its doors and windows broken.
“They know who I am now,” Maella said.
“We have to get help,” Sethlo said. “Utheril.”
“No,” Maella said, feeling something change in her heart—an inevitable darkness for what she was about to do. “We have to find Tomi.”