"What do you mean?" asked one of the few boys, a tall Latino kid who was spinning a long piece of wood carved to resemble an ulna between his fingers. Nancy felt an odd kinship when she looked at him. Perhaps he'd been to someplace like her Underworld, filled with shadows, secrets, and safety. Perhaps he would understand if she went to him and spoke of stillness and respect for the dead.
But this was not the time. Jack met the question with a haughty sniff, and a too-calm, "I saw her body, like the rest of you. I know some of you have decided that I'm responsible for her death. I know further that those of you who believe my guilt will probably refuse to believe anything else. Draw on what you know of me. If I had decided to start killing my classmates, would I have left a body?"
The boy with the bone raised an eyebrow. "She makes a good point," he said.
"Making a good point doesn't mean she's not a killer," said Loriel, but the heat was gone; her accusations had been met with reality, and they didn't have anyplace else to go. She crossed her arms and slouched back in her chair. "I'm keeping an eye on her."
"Good," said Lundy. "We all need to be keeping our eyes on each other right now. We don't know who hurt Sumi. Eleanor is working with the authorities, and we should know more soon, but in the meantime, we need to be watching out for one another. No one goes anywhere alone-yes, Miss Youngers?"
Loriel lowered her hand as the attention of the group switched back to her. "What if one of us finds our door before the killer's caught?" she asked. "I can't take someone through with me just because we're not supposed to go anywhere alone, and I am not missing the passage back over this. I'm not."
"I think we can all agree that if someone happens to find their door while we're still staying together, the person whose door has been found will go, and the person who is left behind will find another buddy," said Lundy, with deliberate precision. Nancy realized with a start that Lundy didn't think any of them were going to find their doors. Not soon; maybe not ever. Lundy had given up on them. It was clear by her tone and by the way she chose her words. And maybe that made sense. Lundy's doors were closed, no matter where things went from here. Lundy needed to adapt to the idea that this was the world where she was going to die.
"Try for groups of three," said the boy with the bone. "If you can't manage that, try not to find your door."
Some of the students laughed. Others looked pained. Loriel was among the latter.
"Tell us about your door, Miss Youngers," urged Lundy.
"I almost didn't see it," said Loriel. Her voice turned distant. "It was so small. This perfect little door, carved into the lintel below the porch light. Like a door for moths. I just wanted to see what it was, that was all, so I got up really close, and I knocked with the tip of my pinkie finger. The world went all twisty and strange, and then I was standing in the hall on the other side of the door, looking back on this impossibly huge porch. I didn't go through. It pulled me. That was how bad the Webworld wanted me."
Loriel's story was grand and sprawling, a majestic, epic tale of spider princesses and tiny dynasties. Her eyes had always been keen, but after spending a year in service to the smallest, they had sharpened so much that she had to wear lenses made of carnival glass to keep the world from being so magnified that it was painful to behold. She had fought and she had triumphed, she had loved and she had lost, until finally the Queen of Dust had asked if she would become a princess of the land and stay forever.
"I said I wanted nothing more, but that I had to go home and tell my parents before I could accept," said Loriel, sniffling. The tears had started to fall somewhere around the death of her beloved Wasp Prince, and seemed set to continue for the foreseeable future. "She told me it would be hard to find the door again. That I would have to look harder than I had ever looked in my life. I said I could do it. That was almost two years ago. I've looked everywhere, but I haven't seen my door."
"Some doors open only once," said Lundy. There was a murmur of agreement from the room. Nancy frowned and sank deeper into her seat. It seemed cruel to dredge up everyone's pasts like this, pin them quivering to the floor, and then say things like that. Loriel surely knew by now that she probably wasn't going back through her tiny door to her even tinier world. She was smart enough to have figured it out for herself. What was the point in saying it?
If this was the school for those who wanted to come to peace with their voyages and remember them fondly, she would have hated to see the other campus.
"She said I could come back," said Loriel. "She promised me. Queens keep their promises. I just have to look more closely. Once I find the door, I'm gone."
"And your parents? Are they prepared for this inevitable disappearance?"
Loriel snorted. "I told them where I'd been-a year for me, twelve days for them-and they said I'd clearly been through some trauma and couldn't be trusted. They sent me here so I'd stop being crazy. But there's nothing wrong with me. I went on a journey. That's all."
"A journey to a documented world, even," said Eleanor. She was standing in the doorway, new lines of exhaustion graven in the soft skin around her mouth and eyes. She looked like she had aged a decade in a day. "There have been five children pulled into the Webworld since I began seeking you all out. Two of them found their way back again after returning home. So you see, there is hope. For Loriel, and for all of us. Our doors are hidden, but by looking closely enough, we can find them."
"Eleanor." Lundy stood. "You're supposed to be resting."
"I've had rest enough to last a lifetime, and only a lifetime for the rest of what's to be done," said Eleanor. She moved away from the door. Several students rose to help her to an open chair. She smiled, patting at their cheeks. "Good children, all of you-yes, even you, Lundy. You're all children to me, and I your teacher, the only one who refuses to lie to you. So listen to me now, because it sounds like you're doing a fine job of confusing and upsetting yourselves.
"You will not all find your doors again. Some doors really do appear only once, the consequence of some strange convergence that we can't predict or re-create. They're drawn by need and by sympathy. Not the emotion-the resonance of one thing to another. There's a reason you were all pulled into worlds that suited you so well. Imagine, for a moment, if you'd fallen into the world described by your neighbor instead."
Nancy glanced at Jack and Jill, uneasily imagining what her life would have been like if she'd found their door instead of her own. The moors didn't seem to care about stillness, only obedience and blood. Neither of those things were strong suits of hers. All around her, other students exchanged equally uncomfortable glances, making their own connections and finding them just as unpleasant as she did.
"Sumi had Nonsense in her heart, and so a door opened that would take her to a world where she could wear it proudly, not hide it away. That was her real story. Finding a place where she could be free. That's your story, too, every one of you." Eleanor tipped her chin up. Her eyes were clear. "You found freedom, if only for a moment, and when you lost it, you came here, hoping it could be found again. I hope the same, for each of you. I want to make excuses to your parents when you disappear, to tell them that runaways will always run again if they have half the chance. I want to see the back of you more than I want almost anything in this world."
What she wanted most didn't need to be spoken, for they shared her hunger, her brutal, unforgiving desire: what she wanted most was a door, and the things that waited on its other side. But unlike the rest of them, she knew where her door was. It was simply closed to her for the time being, until she could find her way back to childhood.
The boy with the wooden bone put his hand up. "Eleanor?"
"Yes, Christopher?"
"Why did your door stay, while all ours disappeared?" He bit his lip before adding, "It doesn't seem fair for it to work like that. We should have been able to go back."
"Stable doors like Miss West's are less common than the temporary kind," said Lundy, back on familiar ground. "Most children who go through them don't come back, either on their first trip or after making a short return to their original world. So while we have records of several, the chances of finding a stable door that resonates with the story you need are slim."
"What about, like, Narnia?" asked Christopher. "Those kids went through all sorts of different doors, and they always wound up back with the big talking lion."
"That's because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole," said one of the other boys. "C. S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn't know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he'd probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up. That's what all those authors did. They made shit up, and people made them famous. We tell the truth, and our parents throw us into this glorified loony bin."