Before the hour had finished, rolling earthquakes turned the desert into undulating waves of sand. The camels moaned and spat, pulling at their harnesses. When the first wave had begun, Veda Loor shouted instructions to strap down the shelves. Now Veda Loor took the driver’s bench and whipped the camels to follow after the other caravan survivors and away from the fallen Tower of Shadows.
It was afternoon, and when Maella dared to look outside, the heat created waves on the horizon that morphed into mirages. The air still tasted like burnt licatherin. Hours passed, the earthquakes did not dissipate, the doors did not vibrate. They shared what little food they had hidden among their pockets. Senta went off across the sand to search for torchlighter survivors in the other wagons. Sethlo remained in the wagon with Maella and Tomi.
It was Maella’s intention to search the patterns for anything that could help their mission to find a way into Thrae after her best friend—or to her father, somewhere here on Rathe. The desire to go after both of them at the same time threatened to pull Maella apart. She didn’t know what to concentrate on first or even what to search for, but she had to do it all right under Veda Loor’s nose.
She described her intention to Sethlo—to search the wagon’s patterns and parchments while Veda Loor was distracted on the driver’s bench. He agreed. Starting at the far ends of one set of shelves, they worked their way towards each other. Tomi lay curled up, asleep, in a little cubby stuffed with rags for blankets.
“The Tower of Shadows fell just like Junle’s pattern showed it would.” Maella spoke quietly so as not to wake Tomi as they worked. “It makes a strange sort of sense now, doesn’t it?”
“How does any of this make sense?” Sethlo sneezed at the dust kicked up by the parchment in his hands before he returned the parchment to the shelf. “The patterns showed you at the One Door. The patterns showed you had seven doors left to open before you died—or turned into a Klylup—or whatever was supposed to happen. None of that has come true.”
Maella sifted through patterns of tower workers that were little more than dreams of future houses or children or maybe childhood memories. It felt strange to touch the stack without the worry of opening a portal. She moved through them quickly and onto the next pile. “I wasn’t at the One Door when I opened my seventh door. The patterns aren’t fate—only possibilities. I think my pattern changed because of that.”
Tomi shifted and seemed to awaken for a moment. Maella and Sethlo both paused in their work and waited for him to resettle.
“Maybe there are two ways to interpret my pattern. Maybe it all depended on the choices I made,” Maella continued, almost whispering now.
“You mean,” Sethlo said, also in a whisper, “if you had waited to open your seventh door at the One Door, only then would you have been transformed into a Klylup?”
“I think so,” Maella said. “That’s what Oren and Xomara believed, at least. But I chose differently. I broke the Klylup curse instead. And I think I broke the doors too. Why else would they turn on and off now?”
Sethlo rifled through another stack of patterns, frowning down at them before moving onto the next stack. “But that does not change that Claritsa is gone and Doormaker Tain is at fault.”
“It doesn’t change anything that already happened. But I think it means we have a chance to shape the future,” Maella said, a rising conviction taking hold in her heart. “The patterns do not control us.”
As if in reaction to Maella’s words, Tomi whimpered. She looked over her shoulder at him. He looked so frail while sleeping. He had yet to say a word to anyone.
“Doormaker Tain never expected you to break the doors,” Sethlo said, a half grin on his lips. “I would like to see the look on his face when he figures it out.”
“Then…you aren’t angry? I…when I opened that door at the top of the tower, I might have lost our chance at the One Door for good.” The words popped out of Maella’s mouth. She winced, afraid she would see disappointment cross his face before he could hide it—and then her heart would cut in half.
Sethlo rested his hands on a stack of parchment. Tar-pitch flecked the skin on his neck, but his hands had been scrubbed clean according to Veda Loor’s specifications.
After a long, heart-stopping moment, he faced Maella. “Look at me.”
Maella moved her gaze from his neck to his eyes. They were hazel and flecked with brown. All sound vanished. It was like she was floating—no, drowning.
“I would trade everything to prevent you from becoming a Klylup,” Sethlo said.
Instead of splitting in half, Maella’s heart began to gallop inside her chest. The way Sethlo looked at her made her stomach twist into knots. It was the best feeling in the world. She wanted him to cup her face with his hands. Instead, she felt herself blush, deeply embarrassed at this strange thought.
A camel brayed and the wagon lurched, as if hitting a dip in the sand. Parchment and scrolls shifted, though the straps held most in place. The moment broke and Maella’s awareness came rushing back.
Sethlo returned to the shelves. Maella regretfully did the same.
As the hours passed, the licorice smells that had tainted every breath inside the Tower of Shadows began to lessen. Soon the only smells that remained were of dust and parchment. The light faded. Both Maella and Sethlo picked up speed before the light was lost altogether. There were plenty of patterns to go through, but none of them seemed related to their search for the One Door, Claritsa, her father, or Doormaker Tain.
When they met in the middle and had still found nothing, Maella decided it was time to go back to her family’s book of patterns.
Doormaker Wars. Unfulfilled prophecies. Secrets that crossed generations. Her family had participated in so much destruction across three worlds. As she headed for the shelf where she had stored the book, a loud ripping noise filled the wagon.
Maella and Sethlo both jumped. She searched for the source and saw Tomi was sitting up. At Tomi’s cross-legged feet were scraps of parchment with torn, ragged edges. He picked up a pattern from a stack not yet searched. Maella gasped as he ripped the pattern down the middle and then again, and again until the pattern was little more than confetti.
Sethlo rushed over and grabbed the papers from Tomi’s lap. “Stop!”
Tomi resisted Sethlo. His face scrunched up and flushed from rage.
Maella helped wrestle the papers away. When they finally succeeded, Tomi let out a cry and crumpled into a ball.
Sethlo bent to gather the torn pieces. Maella brought the rest of the stack into the last bit of light filtering through the wooden slats of the wagon.
“Why would you destroy—”
“Sethlo,” Maella interrupted. Her heart fluttered in her chest. The papers weren’t patterns. They were about something else, an object, that seemed familiar. Maella tapped on a drawing of a—she didn’t know—machine? Device? Relic? “I’ve seen this before.”
Sethlo came up next to her, hands cupping the confetti paper. “In the Tower of Shadows?”
She glanced at Tomi, but he lay facedown on the rags, ignoring them. Anger flared in her before extinguishing when she remembered he had been a Klylup. He had done terrible things outside his control. “I never saw this in the tower. But I’ve seen something like it before…but I can’t remember.”
Maella approached the rag pile. Though Tomi did not move, somehow he became even more still, as if he sensed her presence.
“Who are you?” Maella demanded. “Why were you tearing up these papers?” She hesitated. Her questions were just as likely to send Tomi into a catatonic state or a rage than give her any of the answers she needed. Maella shook her head in frustration. Claritsa’s life was at stake. Nothing mattered more than getting her back alive. If Tomi had found something important—
“What were you doing right before you transformed into a Klylup? Who are your parents? Are you a Botron? Were you going after the One Door? What is this device supposed to do?”
Tomi lay there, unmoving, his back to her.
A lightning bolt of guilt struck Maella’s heart. What kind of monster was she to demand such answers from a traumatized little boy? It hadn’t even been a single day that he had been human after being a Klylup for who knew how many years.
Because it had to have been years.
Maella stepped back at that realization. The torchlighters had made it clear when Maella first arrived at the Tower of Shadows that the Klylup and the Circle had been a part of the tower for as long as they could remember. Tomi’s parents were probably long dead. Anyone Tomi knew or had loved was probably long dead.
Sethlo handed Maella the papers Tomi had been trying to rip up.
“Do you know anything about the One Door?” Sethlo shook Tomi’s shoulder roughly. “Do you remember anything about—before?”
Imprisoned at the top of the tower in his Klylup form, Tomi had been used as a way to execute people inside the Circle. The monsters Maella had fought since the moment she had stepped through that first door in the field had all once been human. The Klylup in the cave—chasing after Maella and Claritsa in the cold mud, and then dive-bombing the valley of General Foster’s fighters—had likely been her father.
As Maella turned back to the papers, the hair on the back of her neck raised. The drawings displayed an object, as if examined from different angles. This object looked small enough to fit in one hand, but it was intricately made. Metal swirls and quarter moons, three of them, surrounded an empty center oval. The drawing of the device’s side profile showed maybe an inch in depth. It would sit flat on a table surface or against a hand. Two quarter moons framed either side of the empty center that was framed by four metal loops. Other shapes, like gears and sprockets, held the moon and center together. Maella scanned the text but it was written in a language other than English and she couldn’t decipher it.
“Sethlo, I need your help—”
Without missing a beat, Sethlo turned to face Maella. “Anything.”
Maella’s stomach flipped. She feared his desire for the One Door was greater than any feelings he held for her. She feared he thought of her like a sister and she thought much more of him.
Handing him the drawings, she said, “Tell me what this says.”
Sethlo sat cross-legged on the wagon floor and thumbed through the papers, squinting to read in the growing darkness. “It’s written in Thrae. Looks like it’s signed by Master Hull. He describes—wait…” Sethlo used his finger to brush the paper and scan the lines, then turned to the next page. “Doormaker Tain gave them an object—it lists the dimensions. Something small for safekeeping and research. This object is supposed to enhance pattern-machine veracity and the abilities of any doormaker to channel portals to the One Door.” Sethlo looked up, excited. “It’s a device to help find the One Door.” He ducked his head and finished reading the pages. “But the device was missing something and the research was not finished. They never got it to work.”
Anything that could make sense of the doors was worth its weight in licatherin. She could use the device to help find Claritsa and her father. “That doesn’t mean it couldn’t work. Where is the device now?”
Sethlo flipped through the papers. “It doesn’t say it was moved. Only that they were studying it inside the tower.”
Maella’s heart sank. “Then it’s lost in the rubble of the Tower of Shadows.”
“That is most likely.” He rearranged the papers and handed them back to Maella.
Tomi sat up as if something had electrocuted him. Maella flinched and stepped back from the papers as if struck. Everything was vibrating. The papers, the wagon doors.
The doors.
“Don’t hand them to me. They’re portals now.”
Sethlo’s eyes lit up. “Maella, try them.” He pushed the papers at her. “See where they lead. See what will happen.”
Maella drew back at first, skeptical of his motives. Outside, the sky and sand had darkened to a soft grey blue. Inside, the wagon lit up in a different way. Sethlo couldn’t see it, but she thought Tomi could. The vibrations felt strong, and like they tied all the pages together into paintings of light, as if she were home for 4th of July and Father had brought them sparklers. These sparkling vibrations created a painting that shifted and formed and circled and dissipated and grew again.
The doors were back. The earthquakes had quieted.
A recklessness filled Maella.
Seven doors.
She should be dead or transformed into a Klylup.
But the pattern had been wrong. Or they had misread the pattern. Or she had broken the patterns.
Now the doors felt like wonderful potential.
Claritsa had told Maella not to trust the patterns, but she couldn’t know how true they had become. What if her next door led to answers, or Claritsa, or her father? She was a doormaker. There were consequences to her every action. Sometimes deadly ones.
So be it.
Sitting down, she placed the stack of papers in her lap and quieted her apprehension over Sethlo’s intentions. He had saved her life more than once. He had stayed by her side even as others had betrayed her. Tomi whined, like a dog in pain, but Maella had already blocked out all sound and thought except for what she was about to do.
Was she still a doormaker?
Were the doors broken once and for all?
Or rather, were the doors breaking, and she only needed to find the new pattern to make them work for her again?
Maella hovered a hand over the top page. Half of it was covered with a sketch of that device that sent shivers of familiarity crawling down her spine. Looking backward into memory, Maella could see that Grandmother had often hinted at the worlds and doormaker doings.
“The Hestroth said that a doormaker needs protection when opening a door…” Maella didn’t know why she was at a loss for words. Sethlo would want to know whether Maella was still a doormaker as much as Maella needed to know. But maybe that was it—the knowledge that somehow, if this didn’t work, if everything really was broken, that it would change things between them.
“I will be here.” Sethlo’s breath tickled her ear.
She shivered, surprised at his closeness and warmth. Her stomach got that melting feeling until she pushed it aside to focus on the vibrations spinning their light trails inside her mind. Dark, braided hair. Severe bangs like a movie star. Flashing eyes and a sense of humor and heart that always brought Maella back from the darkness.
“I will protect you from whatever comes out,” Sethlo said, as if prompting her.
Maella decided to believe him and refocused her thoughts on Claritsa.
Bring me to my friend.
Maella opened the book cover.
The pages crushed her legs into the planks. “Ohhhh!” It felt like an elephant had sat on her lap. She tried pulling the book up but felt the grit of rough stone instead of paper.
“What is it?” Sethlo pressed against her shoulder, peering over her. “I see some type of stone, but what is it from?”
The vibrations of the open door entered their wrongness into her bones and teeth, making them chatter. The stone was the size of the page and it was squeezing her legs against the wooden planks of the floor and grinding her bones together. She reached for the paper that would close the door, but the pain of that stone made her unable to see.
She realized Sethlo could see the stone but didn’t realize it was crushing her. “Close it, Sethlo,” Maella gasped. “It hurts.”
Sethlo jumped into action, lifting the cover that was still its original wood and paper, and slamming it closed over the stone door.
Maella felt instant relief from the crushing weight. She collapsed onto her side. The doors had never acted like that before. What came through from the other side was real—fire, water, ants, people. But never before had a door had weight. Her legs felt mashed together, numb and tingling, all at the same time.
Hands tenderly checked her over and extended her legs to give them relief. “Nothing feels broken,” Sethlo said.
“It was a wall of stone,” Maella said. “And the stone somehow changed the door and gave it weight on this world.” She looked over at Tomi. His eyes were impossibly wide and shining in the starlight that filtered through the planks of the wagon. Did he remember killing Junle and Feren and Torian? Maella had made Sethlo promise to kill her if she had transformed into a Klylup while opening her last door. Did Tomi remember what it was like—opening that last door and transforming into a monster?
“Maella, are all the doors back? Even the wagon doors?” Sethlo said sharply.
Maella reached out, feeling for the vibrations, sorting through them. “Yes.”
Senta jumped up the wagon steps, opening and then slipping through the wagon doors. Day had turned into evening. Soon it would become impossible to see anything inside the wagon. “We found the other torchlighters—Dev and Deep and everyone else who survived. Not all of them did, but they took over a caravan wagon no one came back for.”
Relief rose at Senta’s words. Maella had been metaphorically holding her breath, wondering how much more loss they would face.
“Injuries?” Sethlo asked.
“Some,” Senta said. “Dev and Deep are talking about what to do next when we get to Jillow City. They’re calling for—well, they will tell you themselves. They are leading the wagon over to us now.”
The months she and Claritsa had spent as torchlighters had bonded them all together. It was safer by far to work together for however long that could last until Maella found a way back to Claritsa. “We will all need each other to get through krokosod—if we can get through it.”
“We will, Maella,” Sethlo said with conviction. “We have to. We are so close to the One Door. Even with the doors being broken—”
“The doors are broken?” Senta said, surprise in her voice. “How?”
“It does not matter,” Sethlo replied. “There is an object to help doormakers find the One Door.”
“It looks like a little machine of some sort.” Maella explained to Senta what Tomi had tried to do and what they had found in the saved papers.
“A device?” Senta said. “Junle said Shun was forced to trade a device for Supervisor Hull. She collected payment from the visitors and Shun made the actual trade.” She explained who Shun was, and who he had been to Junle, and how he had died. “The device was what cost Shun his life and changed Junle forever.” Senta glanced at Tomi and looked away. “At least until she was killed inside the Circle.”
Tomi turned his head until his face was inches away from the wagon’s wall.
There were a tense few seconds of silence and grief. Maella felt some of that guilt as her own. It was her licatherin oil bottle that had sent Junle and Feren to the Circle. She had not known about Shun, or that Junle and Shun had loved each other. Junle had been so brave and Maella could only hope to one day match that bravery. She would do everything she could to honor the sacrifice Junle and the others had made for her.
Sethlo stood and showed Senta the papers. “Is this the device?”
Senta shook her head. “I never saw what it looked like. Only that it was worth a great deal. Supervisor Hull wanted it traded in secret and he killed to protect those secrets.”
Sethlo turned to Maella. “It has to be the same one. And if it is, that means the device wasn’t destroyed in the rubble. We could find it—and find the One Door.” Excitement filled his voice. “This could be our best chance.”
Maella caught his excitement even though this had never been about the One Door. This was about finding her family, and now, about getting her best friend back. “And the doors are back again. I just tested them with the papers.”
“We should try the wagon doors,” Sethlo said. “They were the doors in Junle’s pattern. They are the right doors—”
Sethlo and Maella spoke at the same time.
“To find Claritsa—”
“To find the One Door—”