The Door

by Andy Marino

  “Duck!” Hannah pulled Stefan down. A UFO-shaped piece of metal came spinning down the side of the tarp and landed at their feet.

  Throckmorton’s helmet. The suite erupted with high-pitched battle cries, followed by screams of terror. She thought of the little boy with the squirt gun. What were all these souls doing to each other?

  When Hannah tried to pull Stefan up, he wouldn’t budge.

  “No way,” he said. “I’m done.”

  “You can’t be done,” she said. “We have to move.”

  “Why? Ever since I met you, it’s been one terrifying ordeal after another. When does it end? When we steal a Watcher’s ship and fly it to your mother’s house? Then what? What comes after that?”

  “You can start painting again.” Hannah tugged violently on his arm.

  “I can? Because I guarantee they’ll be coming after us, unless you think they’ll be happy to lend us a ship.”

  He shook his head fiercely, which looked like the waving of a checkered flag. Hannah felt something give way inside her — it was as if someone cracked an egg in her brain and the yolk was sliding down the base of her spine, spreading out into her fingers and toes.

  “You’re the first real friend I ever had,” Hannah said. “The only one who didn’t come from inside my head.”

  “That says a lot about both of us.”

  “I’m sorry I took away your Ascension. I hope you find another way to get there. But first you have to get up.”

  “According to Kyle, there is no Ascension. But according to Eri there is, and you’re supposed to take me there.”

  “I’m sure Kyle is lying.”

  “Yeah,” Stefan said. “And what about you?”

  Hannah paused. Charlemagne cycled impatiently through his patterns. “I just want you to keep being my friend.”

  Stefan went very still. Hannah wished she could read his thoughts. Then he held out his hand. “Let’s go get Eri and a hornet, in that order.”

  Relieved, she helped him up, just as the Watchers’ eyes began going off like flashbulbs. Both the Institute and the banished broke ranks and scattered.

  Hannah and Stefan didn’t dare raise their eyes. She watched all manner of shoes — from steel-toed boots to elegant pumps — slosh away in retreat. She wondered if everyone was heading for the elevator. Then splashes came, one after another, as souls fled into the canal.

  “Charlemagne,” Hannah said, “we can’t look up right now. Can you steer us toward Eri?”

  “My sword is my own.”

  With her eyes shut, the chaos of the room was intensified. She tried not to think about bungling into a decay weapon. Or a Watcher.

  Quickly, they devised a system: Charlemagne would gurgle in Stefan’s ear if they were to move left, and Hannah’s if they were to move right. She could feel frantic souls giving them a wide berth. Nobody wanted to get up close and personal with a pair of Watchers.

  When she thought she heard the metallic whine of an impossibly sharp sword, she risked a quick glance before snapping her eyes shut again.

  “Eri,” she said. The girl was jabbing at an errant sprite. “It’s Hannah.”

  “And Stefan. Don’t stab us.”

  “We’re stealing a hornet.”

  “In that case,” Eri said, “hurry. Your costume is ridiculous. I will cover your escape.”

  “Do you think you can figure out how to fly the … Eri?” Hannah risked another glimpse. Eri had already sprinted to the tarp. She began cutting shadow bonds with her sword.

  “Watcher,” Charlemagne warned.

  Hannah closed her eyes before she could see the object underneath the tarp. She held on to Stefan’s elbow as they waded through the wreckage. The shouts and cries had been all but silenced — the suite was emptying out. The Watchers were taking souls, clearing the room.

  She heard Kyle yell, “Now!” and a clean, fiery heat cut a swath through the humidity. Sizzling water lapped at her shins.

  “Faster.”

  They held each other, stumbling, running as best they could.

  When the first Watcher screamed in pain, the noise was so grating that Hannah felt it in the nerves of her teeth. Like a dentist’s drill, it rattled her to the core. She looked back. She couldn’t help it.

  Kyle and his companions were firing over the top of the sofa. The white-hot rooster from his weathervane found its mark and lifted an entire squad of Watchers into the air. Cloudbursts of Foundation turned their disguises against them, mutating their masks into fiery squids that licked at their faces as their legs kicked helplessly.

  Stefan pulled her along. She kept her eyes open and caught his astonished glance: They could be defeated! The Watchers guarding the roof deck rushed to aid their stricken companions.

  Outside, hornets idled on delicate legs. The meters were still spinning out of control. The meter man was a ghost in overalls, haunting his metal forest.

  They made for the nearest ship. At rest, its translucent wings were folded back, sparkling in the lightday sun. Clusters of glass eyes were arranged like bouquets on either side of the snout-light, which curved almost all the way down to the deck.

  There was a hatch beside one of the wings. Stefan groped for a handle. While he struggled, a dull wave of energy — a blunt sonic thump — rippled the roof deck. An eerie calm descended, bringing with it the musty odor of a long-abandoned attic. Dust seemed to settle from nowhere.

  “How’s that door coming?” Hannah asked as the bright shiny tiles became drab and cracked beneath her feet. She thought of Eri, hacking away at the tarp on Kyle’s mysterious object. Had she unleashed a wave of decay?

  “Got it!” Stefan gripped the handle and pulled. The door swung upward.

  Hannah sucked air between her front teeth. The ship had a passenger: a Watcher in corduroy pants and a T-shirt. His face swam with the blue-tinted controls of the dashboard behind him.

  Hannah knew that she had to look away, but it was already too late. The Watcher’s eyes were backlit sunspots. She prepared to find herself alone in a tiny cell. Three steps to the sink, three steps to the cot. And yet — the world did not recede.

  The Watcher was clutching his face, pawing at his disguise.

  Hannah touched her own face and felt bare skin. Next to her, Stefan’s mask had also disappeared. Puzzled, she jumped out of the way as the Watcher fell from the hatch and hit the roof deck, writhing, trying to regain control of his mask.

  Then she figured it out: Charlemagne.

  The paint-lizard had leapt from their faces to splatter himself into the Watcher’s eyes.

  Rays of lightday sun shimmered between Charlemagne’s body and the Watcher’s mask. All around them, the Dockside Arms was falling into disrepair. Hannah peered into the suite. There were souls moving about, but they were just blurry shapes.

  “Come on, Eri,” she muttered.

  Inside the ship, a buckle clicked as Stefan strapped himself in. “I think I found some kind of steering thing,” he announced.

  “I don’t see Eri,” Hannah said. The roof began to sag like a neglected porch. Tiles reverted to cobblestones.

  A bright flash lit the suite and Hannah looked away, blinking. When she recovered her sight, two figures had appeared in the ancient stone archway that used to hold glass doors.

  “Eri!” Hannah yelled, waving her hand. Eri had rescued a boy in the costume of an angel — her companion’s head was wreathed in a spectral glow. But then Eri shoved him roughly to his knees, and Hannah realized it was Kyle. His halo was composed of Eri’s sprites, absorbing the smoke that billowed from his eyes. His expression was blank.

  Eri presented him, wordlessly, to Hannah. Kyle’s body sagged and he bowed his head in the resigned pose of the defeated.

  SHNK.

  Eri’s sword was in her hands, its blade poised just behind Kyle’s neck. Hannah’s stomach lurched as she understood what kind of scene she was witnessing.

  An execution.

  Eri cocked her head.
With perfect stillness, she questioned Hannah with her eyes. Hannah was too far away to be sure, but she could have sworn that she saw Eri raise an eyebrow, as if the most powerful thing Eri was feeling at this moment was curiosity.

  It was up to Hannah to decide Kyle’s fate.

  Hating him was easy when he had the upper hand, when there was nothing she could do but step aside and let the Watchers handle the situation. But now Eri had delivered the chance for swift, brutal revenge, and Hannah didn’t even have to swing the blade. All she had to do was nod her head.

  She wondered what would happen to an executed soul. Kyle had claimed he couldn’t be killed. Would Eri’s blade merely hurt him, or would it somehow end him? Hannah didn’t know. But Kyle had known exactly what would happen when he pushed Leanna Silver from the lighthouse. He’d known that he was taking Hannah’s mother away from her, cleaving the Silvers in two. And what was his excuse? She got in the way of something way more important than any single earthly life. As if he didn’t have a choice. As if his only option was to leave Hannah to find her mother’s broken body.

  Hannah shook her head. Kyle was wrong. There was always a choice.

  “Don’t do it!” she yelled. Kyle’s shoulders jerked in surprise. He lifted his head to gaze at her through eyes obscured by smoke.

  “I think I found the START button,” Stefan said.

  Eri sheathed her sword and charged across the deck. Her sprites abandoned their orbit of Kyle’s head. Hannah watched him crawl back into the suite. She wondered if he would ever understand why she let him go.

  As Eri sprinted past the fallen Watcher, her hand took hold of Charlemagne’s spiraling tail. Without breaking her stride, she peeled him away from the Watcher and flung him straight at Hannah, who ducked.

  Charlemagne made himself into a water balloon, sailed through the hatch, and splashed all over Stefan.

  Now the Watcher was free. Hannah was careful to look away, keeping her eyes on Eri as the girl dove headfirst into the ship. The Watcher’s long shadow loomed. Hannah scrambled inside. She reached up and found the latch, but the Watcher’s hand slammed against the door, propping it open.

  “Hey there, Hannah-bear,” he said. “Need a ride?”

  The hornet’s control panel was a square of touch-sensitive glass. The slightest brush of a fingertip sent the ship plunging down toward the city streets or up into the heart of the sky.

  My father’s fingertip, Hannah thought as she watched him steer with practiced swipes of his hand across the panel. His fingers were long and slender, the nails well-groomed, with perfect semicircles at the end of each one.

  “Mom’s nails are so different,” Hannah said. She was sitting in the copilot’s chair. Behind her, Eri and Stefan were buckled into a two-seater bench, trying to help Charlemagne put himself back together.

  “What, bitten down to the quick?” Her father glanced over, then went back to the display. “Hangnail city, right?” Hannah took note of his expert movements as he piloted. She suspected he didn’t really need to give his full attention to the controls.

  My father, Hannah’s mind kept repeating. This is my father. It didn’t seem true. The word didn’t connect to the man. Sure, he had the beard, the guitar pick necklace. But they were just things — items — like the Slinky in the shoebox.

  “You remember her, then,” Hannah said.

  “Of course. Watchers get memory-keeping benefits.”

  My father, the Watcher.

  “But how did you know who I was, if you —”

  “Died before you were born? Sorry about that, by the way.” He laughed, a little too heartily. “Not much I could have done about the ice on that bridge. Anyway, you know what an APB is?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “All points bulletin. It’s what cops send out to other cops if they’re hunting for somebody.”

  He swiped his finger along a round mirror at the end of his armrest, and Hannah’s face appeared on the panel. It was a photograph taken in her cell — she was sitting on the cot.

  “I didn’t even know you were in the city until you’d already escaped,” he explained, dismissing the APB. “They say you blew up the wall. How’d you manage that?”

  “A friend helped me.”

  She watched him wipe a streak of orange paint from his forehead.

  “Listen, I know how you were treated there. If I had been on the case from the beginning, you and Leanna would both be in the safe house, together. Keeping you locked up was a terrible misunderstanding.” He slid his ring finger across the glass and the ship banked hard to the right. “Not that I blame you for leaving when you had the chance, but if you had just stayed locked up a little while longer, I would have had time to file the paperwork to take charge of your case.”

  “Paperwork?”

  “Ooops!” Her father made a circle on the glass as if he were drawing on a steamed-up window. “Hold on a second.”

  A view screen appeared within the circle, displaying the city. The ship was cruising through a neighborhood of Renaissance towers a hundred stories high — it was as if someone had taken elaborate castles, rolled them into a long cylinders, and stuck them into the ground like fenceposts.

  “Wrong turn,” her father said, chuckling. “Hold on.”

  He mashed his thumb into the view screen, leaving a print, then enlarged the whorls of the print and traced a line with his pinky. The hornet nosed toward the ground. The skin of Hannah’s face was pummeled by the force of the maneuver.

  Behind her, Stefan doubled over, clutching his paint-spattered stomach. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

  “If you have to, puke into the disintegrator, please,” Hannah’s father said. Then, leaning close to Hannah, whispered, “What’s his name again?”

  “Stefan.”

  Hannah felt slightly nauseous, too, like she’d eaten pizza at the Carbine Pass Fair before taking a ride on the wooden roller coaster. But it was a distant sensation. Everything seemed unimportant except the city zipping past on the view screen as the hornet brought her closer and closer to her mother. Soon she would be at her mother’s house — the safe house, her father had called it. And to think she could have been there long before lightday, if only she’d remained in her cell. Albert, Belinda, and Nancy might still be with her — but what of Stefan? And Eri? If her father had simply plucked her from the Watchers’ prison, she never would have met them. Her only friends would still be the ones who had sprung from her lonely mind. She missed the standoffish boy and the fussy old woman. Most of all she missed her twin. But she didn’t think she would take it all back, even if she could rewind her journey and stop Albert from calling forth the storm.

  The ship righted itself. On the screen, the neighborhood changed to a dizzying network of elevated trains.

  “Anyway,” her father said. “Yes. Paperwork. We get thousands of those fugitive bulletins a day. By the time yours came down the pipeline to my desk, I had already been assigned to go undercover with the banished.”

  Eri piped up from the backseat. “You are a spy?”

  He shrugged. “Not usually. But for this case they had the perfect cover story for me. I pretended to betray the Watchers, and Kyle couldn’t resist having another traitor in his group.”

  “Another traitor?” Eri asked.

  “Kyle used to be a Watcher, too,” her father explained. “A very long time ago. That’s how he knows about Ascension.”

  Hannah noticed that her father had a habit of rubbing his palm in a circle on his right knee, which he’d worn down to a shiny patch of corduroy.

  My father, the stranger.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally, Stefan cleared his throat. “Knows what about Ascension, Mr. Silver?”

  “Well, for starters, that it doesn’t exist.”

  This time, the silence was more than uncomfortable. Hannah’s thoughts went immediately to Stefan — at least when he’d run away from the Guild, Ascension was still his goal. He could always start over somewhere else. Bu
t her father had just ripped that goal away for good. And he had done it so casually, as if he were talking about the closing of a restaurant.

  Hannah watched her father as he idly checked their location on the screen and made a minor adjustment to their altitude. How could he be so cruel?

  She broke the silence. “It’s not true. You’re lying to us, just like Kyle lied to us.”

  “Sorry, Hannah-bear, but —”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  This time he met her eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I would say when I finally met you, and … I don’t know, I’ve just always imagined calling you that.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I refuse to believe what you are saying, Benjamin,” Eri said.

  Hannah’s father raised a pointed eyebrow in her direction.

  She glared back. “Eri.”

  “Right. Eri,” her father said. “I’m in a position to know more than you about this stuff.”

  “Do not speak to me like I am a child,” Eri said.

  “I know you’re lying,” Stefan said excitedly. “You have to be. Here’s why. If there’s really no Ascension, and it’s this great big myth that the Watchers keep spreading, and Kyle is so dangerous for knowing the truth, then why did you just come out and tell us like it was nothing? Aren’t you supposed to be keeping the secret from people like me and Eri? Isn’t that your job?”

  “Actually,” her father said, “a lot of people know the truth. And plenty of others don’t believe in Ascension for reasons of their own. Kyle just happens to have certain … abilities that make him more dangerous.”

  “Wait,” Hannah said. “If a lot of people already know the truth, how come the whole lie doesn’t just fall apart?”

  “Stefan,” her father said, “what did you think when Kyle told you there was no Ascension?”

  “That he was crazy.”

  “And how about when you heard it from me, straight from the Watcher’s mouth, as it were?”

  “That you were lying.”