Page 1 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

PART ISOMETIMES THINGS GET FOUND

LOST AND FOUND

CHILDREN OF THE DOORSknow about being mislaid. They are well-acquainted with stepping through an opening or following a passage that should lead fromheretothere,and finding themselves someplace entirely else, someplace entirely new. It is possibly their only truly unifying experience, the one thing they have so completely in common that there’s no need to even question it: once upon a time, they took an impossible step, opened an impossible portal, and ended up in a terribly, horribly possible place.

It’s inevitable that some worlds have known more than one traveler, but the majority of the wandering children went to totally different places, to worlds so dissimilar that those who touched them should have had nothing in common, and those places…

Those places wereperfect.

The worlds on the other side of their disparate doors were almost always perfect, fitting their young visitors like a bespoke glove fits the hand it was stitched for. “Almost always” is a very different thing from “always.” Lives are lived and lost in “almost.” Some of the children of the doors don’t find perfection in the passage, and so are left exiles in a community of the exiled, unsure why they were chosen for a life-changing experience that failed to change them the same way it seemed to change everyone else it touched.

But even those whose doors had let them down would walkwith a hole in their heart for the rest of their days, not quite present and not quite gone, unable to fully rejoin the world they had begun in and then been banished back to. Misplacement was their commonality; exile was their community.

These were the things they all knew, the stories they shared. But for some, there was another lesson buried under the misplacement, an education in instances and errors. Those travelers learned not only what it meant to be mislaid, but what it meant to become so fundamentally and foundationally unanchored from who they had originally been that they could no longer find their way back to that person, even in the rare cases when they had the enviable luxury of a tether. For some, “mislaid” blossomed into “lost” before it swelled to become Lost, which sounded the same, yet was somehow utterly and completely different, a passport to a different country.

Mislaid things would, inevitably, turn up again, returned to their places, whether or not those places still fit them. Things that were merely lost could still be found, could be returned to where they belonged, because they truly belongedsomewhere. A lost child might belong where they’d begun, or might belong in the world they’d traveled to, but either way, one of those places would hold and harbor them. One of those places could be home.

A Lost child could wander forever, destined only for the doors, could start and stop and start again a thousand times, and still they would be Lost, from the beginning to the end. Still they would be stumbling, still somehow stranded on that first threshold, in that instant between reaching out and reaching a destination.

The Lost understood the lost ones, for they had also begun among the mislaid. They had that in common. They still shared the similarities carried by all the children of the doors.It was just that they didn’t stop there, but continued onward, becoming something else. Something that was neither worse nor better, but was decidedly different.

Eleanor West had encountered a few of the Lost since opening her school, her Home for Wayward Children, and as they shared so much with their peers—as they had all been taken by the doors, voluntarily or no—if they were among the number she believed that she might be able to help find peace, she still welcomed them. She never once turned anyone away. Unlike the doors they had traveled through, the school’s door was always open for the lost and the Lost alike, offering them a sanctuary for as long as they might need it. Her rules were simple, universal, and unambiguous:

No solicitation. No visitors.

No quests.

1 ARRIVALS

ELEANOR’S SCHOOL WAS ORGANIZEDand patterned as only a school owned and at least technically operated by a true child of Nonsense could have been. The divisions between her students were less about age than they were experience, and as it was rare for two pupils to travel to the same world, even when the class rosters were studied over the span of several decades, those experiences were assessed more on conjecture than established fact. This perfectly suited Eleanor’s Nonsensical way of thinking, which had been trained into topsy-turviness and encouraged to remain that way. So she put Nonsense with Nonsense, and Logic with Logic, and assigned those labels based on the stumbling accounts of traumatized children who had just been cast out of their own personal homelands, and called it good.

Was it any wonder that occasionally, she got the labels wrong?

Cora Miller was a temporarily land-bound mermaid who had fallen through a door that couldn’t exist, a door suspended in hope and absence and shadows on the water, to find herself in a Drowned World deep beneath an endless sea. The closest label in Eleanor’s book of worlds was a Lake, but Cora’s Trenches had been so much bigger than any Lake. She had been swept out to sea, and if there was no classification for such a thing on the Compass, maybe it was because the children swept out to sea so very rarely survived the swim back to shore. Cora didn’t talk much about the Trenches outside oftherapy, but what she did say painted a land of endless tides, of predictable rhythms, of laws and rituals and deep, powerful customs.

So how was it that Eleanor, in all her experience and wisdom, had looked at the Trenches and marked them as a Nonsense world? And how was it that when Antoinette Ricci had appeared on the school steps of her own volition, with no parents to enroll her and no academic record to guide her placement, Eleanor had listened to her halting description of the Land Where the Lost Things Go and decided that it, too, must be Nonsense?

Antsy could almost see the logic there, if she squinted. The store where she’d traded her childhood for wild adventures had opened Doors onto countless worlds, each with their own laws both natural and artificial. It had been a nonsense place, solely because no form of order could have encompassed everything it was connected to. But if the nature of whatever was on the other side of a door could be said to flavor the character of the room a person stood in, there were no Logical worlds. There couldn’t be. A single drop of Nonsense would be enough to pollute the whole system.

So Cora and Antsy, both of whom were Nonsense-but-not, both of whom had visited worlds with no cousin-cognates currently represented by the rest of the student body, were stuck rooming together, both trying to pretend it didn’t bother them in the slightest, just trying to move from one day to the next without causing any problems.

They had been shoved together the day Antsy showed up at the school, a jangling, unsteady bundle of nerves, stomach heavy with the remains of the cheeseburger she’d bolted down at the bus stop, which had tasted amazing and somehow transformed into lead the second that it hit her stomach.

Not literal lead—this was Earth, after all, where all the magic was specks and spots clinging to children who’d passed through Doors of their own, only to return with parlor tricks in their hands and shadows in their hearts—but something close enough that by the time Eleanor had finished explaining the purpose of the school and the rules under which it operated, Antsy had been increasingly sure that she was going to be sick. She didn’twantto be sick, had long since learned that the best meal was the one you didn’t lose, but sometimes the realities of living in a body didn’t match up well with what she wanted.

Still, she’d willingly gone with Eleanor to sit in her cozy, cluttered office and listen as Eleanor explained what would be expected of her if she was going to enroll in classes. Eleanor fascinated her. She looked old enough to be a grandmother, but she moved quickly, like someone much younger. Nothing about her made Antsy suspect her of trading time for adventure: Eleanor had lived every day she carried, and quite a few more beside.

“You’re not the first who’s come here with a name and an identity, but neither of them things that can be shared without legal difficulties,” she’d said, voice kind and hands folded carefully on the desk. She spoke to Antsy like she was a wild thing that Eleanor wanted very badly not to frighten, keeping her tone low and never letting her pitch rise beyond a certain point. It was impressive, given the clear marks of Nonsense in her eyes and clothing. That, more than anything she was saying, told Antsy she had the experience she claimed. That she couldunderstand.

“Now, to be quite clear, most of those travelers have come to us from worlds beyond this one, children of the doors whose paradise lay in more mundane directions than manyof our own, but we’ve had others who were so changed by where they’d gone that they couldn’t return to their old lives, even if they’d wanted to.” The woman had paused then, tilting her head to the side like a magpie, and asked, “Isthis the world where you were born?”

“Yes,” Antsy had answered, and the tears, which she had managed to hold back for so impossibly long, had finally come, rising to her eyes and running down her cheeks in fat, heavy lines. “My name is Antoinette Ricci. My father’s name was Joseph Ricci, and my mother’s name is Mia, but I don’t know her last name anymore. I have a little sister. Her name is Abigail, and I haven’t seen her since she was still a baby, and I don’t think I’m ever going to see her again. People call me Antsy.”

“All right, Antsy,” the woman had replied, and pushed a box of tissues across the desk toward Antsy. “You’re allowed to cry here, as much as you need to. My name is Eleanor, and that’s my name on the door, and this is my school. I own the house and the grounds and everything else around here, and you’re not going to get into any trouble with anyone for being here. Now, you said your father’s namewasJoseph Ricci. Did something happen, sweetheart?”

“Yes,” Antsy had said, and maybe that was the moment where she’d convinced Eleanor that she’d gone to a Nonsense world, because that one question marked the moment where she had begun to laugh. Her tears hadn’t stopped, hadn’t even really slowed, but oh, how the laughter had chased them out of her body, seeming to swallow her up completely.

Eleanor hadn’t batted an eye, only watched in patient silence until both tears and laughter began to taper off. Then, and only then, she had sighed and said, “I won’t ask until you choose to answer, but is anyone looking for you? Anyone at all?”

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