Page 22 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

“Yes, Sumi,” said Cora. “She stayed in the Halls of the Dead so they’d let us take your ghost with us when we went to Confection.”

“So many people, coming and going, to-ing and fro-ing, where does it all end?” asked Sumi.

“When I find the Door that takes us to Hudson, and we hope he’s still alive,” said Antsy hotly. “The Doors appear here whenever they want to—I don’t know what draws them, or if they show up in time with something from the other side getting lost enough to wind up in our intake pile, or what, and I was never able to figure out a pattern reliable enough to tell me what was coming—but before I left the Store, I didn’tfind things on purpose, I justfoundthem. I guess the Store making me leave made me figure out how to do consciously what I’d been doing all along.”

“Meaning you think you can find a specific Door now?” Emily looked back over her shoulder. “Vineta said that once a Door was closed, it was gone for good.”

“Yes. It is.” Antsy glanced at her. “A Door is a passage. You don’t take the same Door into and out of a world. They disappear every time you close them. Where she’s wrong is in thinking that another Door won’t open to the same place. Idothink I can find specific places, or at least findHudson. Putting him through a Door to a world he doesn’t know—putting him in acage…that’s maybe the worst thing I’ve ever heard of someone doing to another person.”

“Apart from murder,” chirped Sumi. The others turned to look at her. She blinked at them. “What? I didn’t much like it when Jill murdered me.”

Antsy reached the end of the aisle and turned sharply left, heading along the shelves toward a corner. The store had been bigger than this a moment ago, hadn’t it? Could it really be rearranging itself to get them where it wanted them to go? Maybe. If it was, maybe that meant it was on Antsy’s side, not Vineta’s.

It was something to hope for, at least, and she hoped all the harder when they reached the corner to find two tall doors waiting for them. One was painted in colorful funhouse red and blue; the other was roughhewn, barely shaped enough to be considered a door at all, rather than a naturally occurring pile of sticks and branches.

“They didn’t used to advertise what they were this clearly,” said Antsy. “Most of them looked like the ordinary doors back at home, like they were trying to be ambushes. NowI can see exactly what they are, and if either of these led to a world I’d been to visit before, I’d be able to just look and know it.”

“How do we know which one to open?” asked Sumi. “Do we each take one, or…?”

“This one’s mine to pay for,” said Antsy. “I left him alone with her, even if I didn’t mean to. I should have realized there was no way she’d stop, and that it didn’t matter how many threats I made if I wasn’t here to enforce them. So this one’s on me.”

“Aw, but I was looking forward to chasing my birthday around the calendar.”

Antsy stepped between the two doors and closed her eyes, raising her hands until her palms were pointed toward them, the funhouse on the left, the woodpile on the right.

“Clowns,” she said, after a moment’s long silence. “Greasepaint and sawdust and the sound of screams and laughter, and maybe they’re different things, but maybe they’re not always. Darkness, and a terrible logic, and Hudson isn’t there.” Her shoulders sagged with what looked like relief. “That’s not the right door. The other one…” Again the pause, again the silence, before: “Green leaves and rain and the sound of storms. Teeth and claws and running, but no malice at all. Just nature, doing what nature does. Nature, andHudson.”

Opening her eyes, Antsy turned toward the woodpile door. “This way,” she said.

She stepped forward, grasping a particularly protruding branch, and pulled the door toward herself. There was a moment of resistance where it seemed jammed into the frame, unwilling to be moved, and then, with a low creak, it swung open, and revealed the world beyond.

At first it seemed like they were looking at the densestrainforest jungle that had ever existed, all towering trees with broad green leaves, dangling vines, and bell-shaped flowers larger than Antsy’s entire head. The ground was a sea of tall ferns and unfamiliar brush, with nothing resembling grass in any direction. Small creatures rushed and rustled through the growth, sending everything moving constantly in different, irregular directions.

There was no sign of a birdcage, or a black-and-white bird, but Antsy looked pleased all the same.

“This is the one,” she said. “She put Hudson here. Someone needs to stay behind.”

“Why?” asked Sumi.

“I can prop the door open to keep it from closing while we’re on the other side, which is important—if it closes, it disappears, and I have to spend another week or two of my life bringing us back here the long way. I’ve never had a doorstop get knocked loose before, but…”

“But you’ve never had Vineta out to get you before, either,” said Kade, somewhat grimly. “I don’t want to let y’all out of my sight, you know that, right?”

“I’ll stay,” said Christopher. They all turned to look at him. He shrugged, grimacing apologetically. “Whoever’s world that is, it’s completely antithetical to mine. That’s so alive it hurts my eyes. I want clean bone and cultivated flowers, not wild growth and rotting. I’d only slow the rest of you down.”

“Thank you, Christopher,” said Antsy, and reached for a box, using it to prop the door open before she stepped through. Sticking her head back into the Store, she said, “You don’t let this Door close foranything,you understand me? Not foranything.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Christopher.

One by one the others followed her through, into the endless green, until Christopher was left alone. He watched them talking, Antsy pointing off into the distance, and then they plunged deeper into the ferns and tall brush, until he wasn’t looking at anyone at all.

Christopher sat down, flute in his hands, and settled in to wait.

11 THE GLORY OF THE GREEN

SUMI SNIFFED THE AIRas they walked. “Ever spend much time in the reptile house at the zoo?” she asked.

“I don’t like snakes,” said Emily.

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