Twenty-Two

Eleanor groped in her pocket for the crystal and put it up in front of her eye, but though the reddish color of the brick appeared, there was no door.

“I thought you didn’t know who your dad was,” Pip said.

“I don’t,” Eleanor said. She stared at the wall as if it would explain things to her. She’d asked her mom who her father was, of course, but she’d never gotten very satisfactory answers. She didn’t know what to think about what Bartimaeus had said. Could he just be wrong? And if he wasn’t, why did he know her dad?

And what had her mother known, anyway?

“Weird old man,” Pip muttered. She kicked the ground. Eleanor forced thoughts of her parents out of her mind. For Otto’s sake, she needed to stay focused. “And we’re back at school. Yay.”

“On a Saturday,” Eleanor said. “At least no one’s here. But we should find somewhere to hide.”

“The library,” Pip suggested. “We can hide in the archives. The only person who ever goes in there is Mrs. Zimmerman, and she moved here from Portland four months ago. There’s no way she’s January Society.”

They raided a vending machine along the way—Eleanor could hear Pip’s stomach growling—and darted around to avoid being seen from any of the windows. They wedged themselves between two stacks of old newspapers and split up the bags of kale chips and edamame puffs. Eleanor hoped Otto was getting something to eat, and that they were keeping him somewhere comfortable. There was no reason to hurt him, was there? They just didn’t want him running away.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to find Otto wherever they’re keeping him,” Eleanor said. “He could be anywhere.”

“We can’t give up,” Pip replied.

“I’m not giving up. We just need to find out where the door is. We know they’re bringing him there. We can save him when they do, and then run away and hide.”

“They need all three of us for the deal. Maybe it would be better for the two of us to hide and wait it out,” Pip said.

“They’ll probably put Otto through the door either way, if they think it might save even some of them,” Eleanor said.

“Yeah. You’re probably right,” Pip said. “So then . . . where’s the door?”

“I don’t know. The Founders’ Memorial?” Eleanor guessed.

Pip made a face. “I doubt it. It’s in the middle of Main Street Square. There’s a Halloween festival there every year.” She looked grim. “Do you think . . . do you think that’s so that they know everyone will be there and won’t accidentally stumble on the Society? So no one interrupts them?”

“Who organizes it?”

“The January Society,” Pip said. “They run everything in Eden Eld.”

“Not after tonight,” Eleanor said fiercely, as if by saying it she could make it true. “After tonight, there won’t be a January Society. Because they’ll all be in the gray. And we won’t be.”

If the door wasn’t at the Founders’ Memorial, where would it be? Eleanor searched around the room until she found a set of long, flat drawers that were full of maps. They were all sorts of maps, new and old—elevation maps, maps of the county, maps of specific places in Eden Eld. She sifted through them until she found one marked Eden Eld—1898. It was in a wide, flat cardboard box with tissue paper over it. She pulled out the box and set it on top of the bureau of drawers, setting the tissue paper aside.

The map was drawn in dark gray ink, or maybe black ink that had faded—or maybe it was some other color entirely, and it was only the gray world making it that way. She started to run her finger over the line of the river that snaked along the southern edge of town.

“Don’t touch that!” Pip warned her. “You need to wear the special gloves.” She yanked open a small drawer and fetched out a pair of thin white gloves.

Eleanor flushed. She should have known that. She was the one that loved old books and things. She pulled the gloves on and went back to peering at the map.

The streets branched out from Eden Eld, with closer-together streets at the center. It looked like a spiderweb with too many right angles. The streets weren’t as dense on the map as they were in modern day, and the town was much smaller, but that meant it was easier to see everything—and she figured wherever the door was, it would be roughly the same now as it was back then.

“I don’t see anything obvious,” she said.

“They aren’t exactly going to write evil gray door on a map,” Pip pointed out.

“I guess not.” Eleanor’s hand throbbed. She touched the shiny burned skin and felt the puffy flesh and painful divots where the cat-of-ashes had bitten her. She’d cleaned the bite with wipes from a first aid kit they found in the back of the room, but it still hurt.

What did they know? Her mind was spinning with a dozen things. Make a list.

Gray world. Door. Thirteens. Halloween. Iron, ash, and salt. The People Who Look Away. Mr. January. Palindromes.

Palindromes.

She traced a street that ran along the west side of Eden Eld before hooking toward the center of town. “Renner Road,” she read.

Pip looked confused. Then her eyes widened. “R-e-n-n-e-r. Forward and back. It’s a palindrome.”

“Are there any others?” Eleanor asked. They pored over the map together, fingers moving from one spidery line to the next.

“Here!” Pip declared. “Civic Boulevard.”

“Look. Level Avenue,” Eleanor said. They ran their fingers toward each other, tracing the lines of the roads. Together they formed a triangle—directly around the meadow outside of Eden Eld Academy.

“Here,” Pip said. “They’re coming here.”