The Door

by Andy Marino

  Emerging, they traded the darkness of the tunnel for the darkness of the sky.

  Belinda sniffled. “Chilly now, isn’t it?”

  “Darkdays can get cold,” Stefan said. “Want my jacket?”

  “Thank you, young man. I’ll be fine. I’m just delighted to be out of that awful train.”

  “Do you want your jacket?” Hannah asked Stefan. “I feel like I’ve been wearing it for a month.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Early darkdays are the best. Makes me want to paint a pile of leaves and jump in it.”

  The mouth of the cave was set into a ridge that overlooked a neighborhood of limestone dwellings. Spotlights shone down from high above the streets. As Hannah’s eyes adjusted, the source of the lights came into focus: A flotilla of hornet-like ships infested the sky. Their abdomens were coated in metallic fuzz that glimmered wetly, as if they had been rolled in iron shavings. One ship floated nearby, eerily still. A spotlight blinked on at the end of its long snout. Its undercarriage glowed with the embers of a fiery engine.

  Her eyes picked out a light and followed it to the far end of the neighborhood, where a pyramid rose to a point above the hornets. Jutting out from the front of the pyramid was a two-headed beast, stone paws crossed in front. One head was human — the other, a hawk.

  “That’s a sphinx,” Belinda said. “Sort of.”

  Right, Hannah thought. Sort of. She was looking out across sort-of ancient Egypt. All the elements were there, but it was as if they had been put into a blender, scrambled up, and spit back out as a strange imitation.

  “Cool,” Nancy said. “See you later.”

  Hannah couldn’t believe it when Nancy started picking her way down a trail between rocks and low shrubbery.

  “You’re being difficult,” Belinda called after her. “And it’s very unpleasant.”

  Hannah skidded down the trail, caught up with her twin, and grabbed her arm. “Hey, what’s wrong with you? We gotta go —”

  “What, find your mother?” Nancy pulled away. “Well, guess what? I can barely remember her. I wanna see pyramids and mummies and stuff.”

  “Listen to me.” Hannah lowered her voice. She hesitated — saying the words out loud would make it real. “I’m having a hard time remembering, too, and it’s getting worse. Don’t let me forget who I am, okay?”

  Nancy was taken aback. She leaned against a trailside boulder, thinking, her spiky hair frosty in the glow of an approaching snout-light.

  Stefan and Belinda hurried over and crouched alongside the big rock. “Get down!” Stefan hissed. Hannah and Nancy ducked as the cone of light passed over them and swept up the ridge. Charlemagne glopped nervously about the hem of the army jacket. A humid breath descended from the hornet ship, sliding across her forehead, which prickled in a sudden sweat.

  Watchers.

  All Hannah could do was huddle in the deepening shadow of the boulder and wait for the aircraft to turn its attention back to the neighborhood. Instead, the cone of light widened — it was dropping altitude, coming in for a closer look. The hum of its engine was a low foghorn in stereo. Just as she was about to suggest making a run for it, the snout-light vanished and the foghorn receded. Charlemagne slunk out from the jacket, a slurry of dirt and paint, and curled himself around Stefan’s wrist. Hannah rose, cautiously, to look over the top of the boulder.

  “Gone,” she said. The darkday sky closed in with a cool breeze that swept away the humidity.

  Nancy elbowed Stefan’s arm. “You didn’t tell us about those.”

  “I’ve never seen them before,” he said. “I’m not usually on the run with the dead city’s most wanted.”

  “That would be Kyle, the banished one,” Hannah said.

  “Second-most wanted, then.”

  A voice came down from the top of the ridge, a barrage of frustrated curses, startlingly close. Instinctively, they ducked.

  “That’s no Watcher,” Stefan said after a moment. “Come on.”

  They made their way up the trail, Charlemagne riding on Stefan’s shoulders. A pencil-thin beam of light danced just ahead of them and went out.

  “Stupid piece of junk!” growled the voice, accompanied by the sound of a fist striking plastic. The light blinked on again, illuminating a thicket of Foundation meters, a night-forest of gauges and dials. The voice belonged to a meter man.

  Hannah glanced down at the city below. The houses, the pyramid, even the hornets — Foundation was the core material for everything, a substance that could become steel, cotton, glass, paint. It was hard not to think of it as magic, but perhaps it wasn’t much different than back home, where things were composed of atoms and molecules and cells.

  The meter man began to sing in a theatrical baritone, drawing out every syllable. One lyric, over and over again: I hate my job! His voice faded as he moved away from them, slapping his clipboard against the metal posts. Hannah led Stefan, Belinda, and Nancy through the thicket, past meters that rose at odd angles like abandoned scarecrows. Once they crested the ridge, ancient Egypt seemed like a distant memory.

  Spreading out before them was the travel poster on a grand scale.

  The towers of Su-Ankyo delivered a million blinking lights straight up into the sky, giving the darkness a creased and folded glow that reminded Hannah of solar systems and dying stars. Glass-sided office buildings reflected a carnival of floating advertisements. First Hannah thought the ads were being cast from blimps, then she noticed they were being projected from shadowy machines that crawled up and down the buildings like leeches. Monorails hummed above traffic-clogged streets. The headlamps of motorbikes and scooters lit the spaces between stalled cars.

  Hannah’s spirits were lifted by the magnificent skyline, and she practically sprinted down into the jittery glow.

  “Hey, zombie face,” Nancy said, “you might want to put up your hood.”

  The army jacket, it turned out, had a thin canvas hood rolled up inside a zippered pouch at the back of the collar.

  “I need a touch-up — a hood’s not going to work forever.”

  “Makeup, aisle three,” Nancy droned.

  “Nothing lasts forever,” Stefan said, “no matter how great of an artist I am.”

  “Maybe the glass eyes can’t see as well in the dark,” Hannah said hopefully, glancing up and down the alley at the outskirts of Su-Ankyo, where they were huddled around a pile of empty television boxes. Out on the street, savory aromas mingled with pungent odors from steel-sided lunch carts.

  “Smells like hot dogs,” Nancy said.

  In this neighborhood, people seemed to like their food and drink, even though souls in the city of the dead didn’t require nourishment. Su-Ankyo thrived on the business of it all. Holographic signs blazed with martini glasses and dinner specials. Greasy fast-food bags swirled in the darkday breeze and collected, fluttering, against hydrants and curbs.

  “Frankfurters!” Belinda said. “Of course. I was just trying to figure that out.”

  Nancy snickered. “Frankfurters.”

  Hannah kept seeing a cat out of the corner of her eye — a cat just made sense in this alley — but it was only Charlemagne, his body flecked with glinting headlights.

  Stefan beckoned impatiently toward Hannah’s pocket. “Give me all the paint you have left.”

  She reached into her pocket and handed over the tube.

  Car doors slammed at the end of the alley. Lively chatter flooded Hannah with impressions of other lives. That’s why you were such a fabulous dentist, somebody said.

  Hannah thrust her face toward Stefan. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “For what?”

  She looked down at the top of a box, where Stefan was already putting the finishing touches on a fat mongoose with big friendly eyes and a goofy smile. He turned it over, fully solid in his hands, and painted fur on its whitish underbelly. Next to the mongoose, the tube of paint curled, empty and used-up.

  “What a charming little trinket,” Belinda said.


  “That’s what you did with the last of our paint?” Hannah said, astonished.

  “My paint,” Stefan reminded her. “Just keep your hood up, okay? This is more important. Take it.”

  “More important than my disguise.”

  “Nothing’s free, Hannah. You need a computer; you’ll have to pay.”

  Charlemagne bounded onto the box, puddling eagerly. Stefan squeezed the last of the paint off the end of the brush. Hannah put up her hood, pulling the drawstring tight. Then she snatched the mongoose and headed out into the street.

  * * *

  “Welcome to Jester’s Computer Café and So Much More.”

  The teenage boy behind the desk spoke in a bored monotone. A tri-cornered hat flopped over his face, weighed down by silver bells. His eyes were hidden behind a scraggly curtain of dyed green hair. He licked his chapped lips. “How may I help you today?”

  Hannah glanced at the name tag pinned to his frilly tunic.

  “Hi, Kevin. I need to use SoulLink.”

  Hannah had discovered the term in her handbook, which was becoming even more jumbled and confusing in its argument with itself.

  Kevin nodded once, bells jingling. Hannah tried to keep her own face hidden in the shadow of the hood, but she knew that Kevin must be able to see part of it. If her appearance freaked him out, he was doing a good job of hiding it.

  “I would be happy to assist you with that.” His voice cracked. “Have you had a chance to look over some of our additional services?”

  He jingled his head to the side to let her see the screen attached to the wall behind him. Text scrolled up like the credits at the end of a movie.

  “I just need a computer,” Hannah said.

  “If you don’t see a special service that interests you, for a small fee we would be happy to find the best local establishment to fulfill your needs. And it’s not on the screen yet, but we also sell fine silk vests and cortex implants.”

  “Just the computer,” Hannah said. “And I also have one question.”

  Kevin looked nervous. “I’m supposed to collect the fee before adding on any special services.”

  “Answering questions is a special service?”

  “I can’t answer that until you pay.”

  She reached into her pocket, hoping Stefan knew what he was doing. Feeling like an idiot, she plunked down the mongoose. Even in the low light of the orbs that floated about the café, Hannah could tell it was a Guild specialty: a painting of a mongoose hiding a genuine mongoose, or the other way around.

  “Dude! No way.” Kevin leaned in close, finally brushing a clump of green hair from his eyes. Hesitantly, he reached for the mongoose, barely touching it with a fingertip, as if he were afraid to damage such a priceless artifact. His voice had become an excited stammer. “Did you — I mean — all the way from Nusle Kruselskaya, right? This is — I mean …” He shook his head.

  Hannah tried her best to pretend like there were more where that came from. “So my question is, are there any glass eyes in this place?”

  “Glass eyes, glass eyes” — Kevin bit his lip, thinking — “I don’t think we have any in stock at the moment, but I’d be happy to order one for you.” He squinted at her face. “Or two, if you need both.”

  “No,” Hannah said. “Like, Watcher eyes. Spying eyes. For people’s Ascensions.”

  His face blanked. Then he grinned. “Oh! I forgot you’re not from around here. We got these in Su-Ankyo.”

  He placed his arm on the counter and lifted the sleeve of his tunic. Implanted in the skin of his wrist was a microchip. Tiny LED lights illuminated his veins. His arm throbbed and twitched with electrical impulses.

  Hannah grimaced. “I guess I’ll just go sit down.”

  Kevin dropped his sleeve and went back to his examination of the mongoose. “Sure.” He waved his hand without looking up. “Anywhere you want.”

  * * *

  Most of the terminals were taken, so Hannah had to settle for a machine that wasn’t plugged in. A quick survey confirmed that none of the computers even had power cords. And yet, there were dozens of souls here, typing merrily away. She punched a key. The screen brightened to reveal the online SoulLink edition of the Dead City Herald.

  Kyle was still front-page news. The headline was TERRORISTS OCCUPY JARETSAI STATION. She clicked his picture away. She told herself that Kyle and his banished friends were free to occupy all the dead city stations they wanted, and pick fights with the Watchers from now until the end of time. She was here to get her mother and take her home. After this was over, she’d never see Kyle again, and the Watchers would sort him out. It wasn’t her business. Besides, even if she was capable of getting revenge, what could she do to Kyle that the Watchers couldn’t do a million times worse? She thought of him stuck in a windowless cell, smiled, and set to work.

  At first she sat in front of the search screen, thinking. She had to find a really talented hacker without tipping off the Watchers, in case they were monitoring computer searches. That meant she probably couldn’t visit some geeky chat room and talk to anybody directly.

  She surfed around in circles, getting frustrated, her fingers jabbing angrily into the keyboard. At the terminals beside her, souls came and went. Kevin’s costume jingled. Video games competed to be the café’s background noise: monstrous growls and scatter-gun fire and the roar of digital crowds.

  It wasn’t until Hannah had spent a long time scanning a message board called Hidden Su-Ankyo that she found something interesting: a series of posts by someone calling herself the Lady of the Lake. Hannah was fully absorbed in her reading when she noticed a slight tickle in her thumb.

  With a shriek she pulled her hand from the keyboard, but it was too late. The space bar had melted into her thumb. She could see the white plastic beneath her skin, drifting down into her arm. A moment later it was fully absorbed, her flesh stitched together as if nothing had happened. She tried to stay calm, glancing around to see if anyone was watching. Thankfully, most other patrons were leaning close to their screens, slack-jawed and unaware.

  Disturbed, Hannah quickly printed the Lady of the Lake’s message board posts. She stopped by the desk to collect her pages on the way out and noticed that the screen had a new addition:

  It didn’t take very long to find the lake. Finding the lady was another matter.

  “Read those pages one more time,” Stefan said. Hannah shuffled her printouts back to the beginning. In bustling Su-Ankyo, it was bright enough to read during a darkday without even straining your eyes.

  They were at the eastern edge of a city park ringed by a monorail, which hummed above their heads at precise intervals. Highways split the park into four sections and met, via bridges, in the center of a perfectly round lake. Thin sheets of water cascaded from the bridges, reflecting the lights of the city in glitchy patterns.

  Hannah peered into the water. A digitized version of herself stared back, as if she’d been animated for a video game. Still, she could see that the boy-mask had mostly fallen away.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Nancy said.

  In a nearby tent, souls huddled over laptops and musical instruments made of jellyfish with helmets. Scratchy beats skittered from speakers arranged along the shore — holographic statues of men and women who opened and closed their mouths to change the sounds.

  “Here we go,” Hannah said. “The first post from the Lady of the Lake: ‘The one true Ascension is borne of neither art nor politics nor special talents.’ ”

  “Old news,” Stefan said. “There are different ways to Ascend. There’s no one right way.”

  “Post two,” Hannah continued. “This is the one that got my attention: ‘If those who hold the keys to our Ascension turn their eyes on us, should we not be turning our eyes on them?’ ”

  “Bleep blop,” Nancy said, doing a jerky robotic dance as the music abruptly picked up its tempo.

  Hannah ignored her. “Post three: ‘Our knowledge of the city and its
residents must equal those who hold the keys. Only then will we be granted our Ascension.’ Post four: ‘In images and maps and charts and graphs we will forge our salvation. We will see the city as they see it.’ Post five, the last one: ‘We welcome all who would join us, but there is a price — give us something precious we have never seen before. Expand our knowledge. Deliver your gift to the edge of the water. If it pleases us, you will know.’ ”

  “Look, Hannah,” Stefan said, “this is a dead end. We used up the last of our paint. I can’t make anything else until I get more.”

  Nancy sat down cross-legged in the grass. “Weren’t you supposed to be finding somebody to help us?”

  Hannah crumpled the pages in her fist and snapped at her. “I’m thinking, okay?”

  Low tones from the mouths of the statues rumbled her belly. Car horns and revving engines and shouts of frustrated drivers rattled her brain. The whole neighborhood seemed to teeter on the verge of a complete breakdown, and yet somehow it all kept going while a million lights blinked on and off. Distracted, she didn’t even notice Belinda wandering away, down the shore, until she was almost out of sight.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Nancy called out.

  “I seem to be the only one with any sense!” Belinda said as she disappeared behind the shimmering, half-formed statue of a tall man in a white robe.

  “If she gets lost here, we’ll never find her,” Hannah said.

  Nancy scrambled up, and together with Stefan they searched the shoreline until they found Belinda presenting herself to the statue of a woman in a sleek gray business suit. The statue’s eyes were closed. Belinda was talking to it.

  “I tried to be a wise old woman, but it didn’t work. I don’t know what I am, or where I come from. But I am surely something that the Lady of the Lake has never seen before.” She knelt before the statue. “On behalf of Hannah Silver,” Belinda said, “I offer myself to help expand your knowledge.”