Page 17 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

Alone in the cave, Sumi exhaled. “All right,” she said. “You can come out now.”

Silence filled the air. Sumi continued to look straight ahead, watching the others move deeper into the store.

Finally, a voice behind her said, “You let the Opener go on without you.”

“True enough.”

“We could overpower you. Close the door. Strand you here without your friends.”

“I guess you could, if you wanted to be meanies to someone you haven’t even met yet.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

Sumi smiled. She was still facing front, but anyone behind her would have seen the way her cheeks pulled up, the way her shoulders relaxed.

“Nah,” she said. “If you wanted someone to be afraid, you should have tried to menace somebody other’n me. Maybe it’s logical of me and that makes it a bad idea, maybe it’s me being irrational in the face of a system that doesn’t work the way I want it to, but I know my door’s coming, and Confection doesn’t care where I am when it decides to take me home. It found me in a place where no one else’s doors could find them,and it let me leave again, because it wasn’t time yet. So you can strand me here for a while, but you can’t keep me forever. Say what you came to say, leave, and let me go.”

“Was that truly our prince?”

“According to him, yes, no, and maybe. Your king named him prince as he was dying, but then the fairies kicked him out of Prism, and he doesn’t want to come back here because he’d have to deal with them. And maybe he’ll change his mind and maybe he won’t, but it’s his mind to change and his choice to make. Does that answer your question?”

“Tell him we miss him.”

Sumi scoffed. “You neverknewhim. The fairies had him the whole time he was here, and you left him in their care.”

“We knew him on the battlefield. He fought like a lion, even when he was so young that our warriors feared to raise blade against him, lest they be condemned for cutting down a child. He was never cruel, but would not yield to those of lesser skill. He was made for this world. This world was made for him. We regret his absence.”

“I could say a lot of things, and most of them would be true, and all of them would be cruel, so I’m not going to do that right now. I’ll just say I’ll pass your message along, and I can’t do that if you don’t let me leave.”

“So we have an agreement.”

“No. We have an understanding.”

Still not turning to the goblin or goblins that had come up behind her, Sumi stepped through the door. It swung shut, and when she did look back over her shoulder, there was no door there, only a long corridor shaped by shelving, stretching off into the dimly lit distance.

“Huh,” she said. “That was kind of annoying.”

She faced front again, intending to go after the rest ofthe group, and stumbled backward, arms pinwheeling frantically, as she found herself suddenly face-to-face with Emily.

“Ack!” said Sumi.

Emily recoiled, and Sumi landed on her bottom in a heap of vinyl records and manilla folders full of ancient tax returns.

“I’m sorry!” said Emily.

“You startled me,” said Sumi. “I’m impressed.” She reached up, waiting for Emily to pull her off the floor, and when the other girl didn’t move, lifted her eyebrows in silent question. “Well?”

“I came back because we were worried about you,” said Emily, taking her hand and hoisting her to her feet. “Antsy was afraid the door might have closed before you could come through.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.” Sumi waved her free hand idly. “Just taking care of some loose ends. Where are we? Did Antsy say for sure?”

“Oh. Um, yes. This is the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. Antsy’s door, like she said before you opened it for her. Thank you for that, by the way. After Rowena… I understand why she’s so afraid of her body being older than it’s supposed to be. I guess we should have realized they’d take something from us, when they were giving us so much. I was just so busy focusing on what I had, and then on what I’d lost, that I never stopped to think about it.”

“None of us did,” said Sumi. “I don’t much care for reading—if I read a page and then you read it later, we’ll both see the words in the same order, unless one of us is dyslexic, but most people will see it the same, and that’s too logical for me. Even so, when I first came to the school, when I was so scared that this was it, I was never going to see Ponder,or swim in the strawberry sea, or go gathering fallen konpeito during the star showers ever again, I read everything there was about the doors. Most of it Eleanor wrote herself, but Kade edited it later, so it would make sense to more linear people. I read Eleanor’s original text. And none of it, ever, said anything about a toll. I guess because even people like Elly-Eleanor only get to go through five or ten times, and that’s a month, maybe. Not enough to notice.”

“Antsy is trying to find the front counter,” said Emily. “She says the Store is aware enough to only offer you what it wants to, and if it doesn’t want her to find the counter, she won’t. Being able to find anything she’s looking for started when she left here, so maybe it doesn’t work anymore.”

“Huh,” said Sumi. She pulled her hand free of Emily’s, cupped her palms around her mouth, and shouted, “Hello the Store!”

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