Page 37 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“I know of five Wights who disappeared beyond those doors, kicking and screaming,” the Wight says, and a chill goes up Chloe’s arms. “I know they’re no longer alive, but I don’t know what’s past that door.”

And her research is right behind it.

Chloe has two ways to go about this, two methods of breaking into doors like this.

The easy conventional way is to alchemy a key. Doors like this generally have keys that set off interlocking pins that control the rods, and a millimeter off of what it’s supposed to be would ruin the door and ruin the possibility of opening it.

Chloe would put money that they have protections against that. Almost any alchemist could make that, and if they had training they could consistently get close, if nothing else. It would be the first option most people would go to, and the most easy to guard against.

The other way would be to change the very matter of the locking bolts.

It’s fundamentally risky, of course. Changing matter—especially thousands of pounds of matter that these doors usually are—tends to drain the caster, burn them out, rendering them useless. Most can’t handle massive amounts of metal orinert materials, preferring to pick something at least a little bit malleable if they have to, finding themselves intimidated by the rigid molecular structure.

Chloe’s not most.

“See, this is one of the places the college went wrong with me,” Chloe says, and she rarely gets a chance to monologue like this to someone new, so she takes it with glee. “They made me into a tomb breaker, then left all these secure tombs all over the world.”

“Get out of this alive, and I will have many more for you to break into,” the Wight mutters, dark. “More bases where my kind is kept, more imprisonments. Survive this trap, and you will be useful.”

“Okay?” Chloe replies, nervy.

“That is what I ask for you in repayment,” the Wight continues, and Chloe stills. She really hasn’t had enough interactions with Wights to know the weight of that sentence. “I got you here, I got you that paper, you finish with this quest and I will have more.”

Chloe shivers, and the Wight tosses a glare at the door, then…disappears. Leaving Chloe alone.

“Ooookay,” Chloe whispers, but she rests her palm against the metal and lets her eyes flutter shut.

The molecular structure of metal always appealed to her instead. She can count on it, impurities are more rare, the crystalline straight lines easier for her mind to comprehend. No need to worry about a spare oxygen molecule or random bit of cellular organism left in it like someone would for wood or fossils.

This one is a stainless-steel alloy, tied in with a trace of gold, most likely to foil a spellweaver. Piston bolts are socketed into their locks, each one roughly two pounds, resting against a weight sensor.

So she needs something heavy, something to balance, but malleable. And all at the same time—if one moves when the others do not, then the entire thing collapses.

She lets her hand flutter to her pocket, where the compass lays still, before she dives her mind into the metal structure and…changes it.

Immediately, the door wavers in front of her, wheezing like a bagpipe being tossed around. It deflates, as if she could push it inwards, before the pistons snap up, soft as clay but twice as heavy.

The handle spins, then clicks open, the hinges creaking outwards, and Chloe tugs it the rest of the way until it props open, the bolts limp in the open air.

“And that’s why they call me tomb breaker,” she whispers to the empty desert.

Chloe peers over the doorway, but there’s no warded traps. As if the creators of the place honestly thought a big door was going to be enough for them.

Tapping the battery into another pen light, she flashes it up at the ceiling, then at the floor and walls around.

No magical wards, no protections, nothing.

There’s the door that could swing shut, could trap her inside without any light or air, but she nudges the hinges with her toe, freezing it open, transforming the hinge into a static object, a manual physical block from it closing.

A less creative—less paranoid—magician would just magic it open. Put a spell or a ward to prevent it from swinging shut. Something obvious and something that would show the entire world someone had been there.

Always better to give something a physical barrier rather than magical. Magical could be twisted away, reversed with just a touch.

A stick in a door hinge will keep it open until removed.

And then, almost out of the corner of her eye, there’s the faint hint of demon magic, twisting in the air, footsteps faint in the dust of the floor.

And four paces in, on Chloe’s neon orange scarf, is her gun.

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