Page 32 of The City of Stardust

“There is a year on your contract, Violet Everly. And if Marianne isn’t found, then it will be you walking through the dark with me.”

CHAPTER

Sixteen

PENELOPE’S SHADOW WEIGHSheavily on the Everly house tonight, as what remains of the family reconvene in a desperate attempt to scrape together a plan. There is talking, arguing when talking fails, and subsequently silence, as each Everly considers how best to persuade the others oftheirplan.

Then, one by one, the Everlys depart.

Gabriel Everly is the first. He parks his ugly, expensive car in the garage and pulls a key from the chain underneath his shirt. Like most of his valuable possessions, the key once belonged to someone else, though it’s been some time since the owner cared about its whereabouts. He glances behind him, noting the dark outlines of his brother and niece at the window, then turns the key in the side door of the garage. It shouldn’t make any sound at all—the lock has been broken for years—and yet it clicks. Blue light unfurls at the edges, and a chilly winter wind wraps around Gabriel’s legs from the gap underneath the door.

He takes one last look at the house. Then he opens the door, and vanishes.

Ambrose Everly packs two bags, ready to go into the trunk of a much less remarkable—and indeed, less ugly—car. One for himself, and one for Violet. Their destination is on no map he knows of and eventually they’ll have to abandon the car to trek the rest of the way on foot, but it’s safe, which is all that really counts. For a time, anyway.

As Ambrose packs upstairs, Violet Everly sneaks down to the library. Carefully, the way Gabriel taught her, she picks a lock onAmbrose’s desk drawer and steals a notebook. He thinks she hasn’t noticed the way he locks himself in here for hours at a time, or how protective he’s been over this one particular drawer.

Moonlight shimmers against the windowpane as she flicks through it. Names, places, contact numbers. Half of them are crossed out in firm red pen, but there are several with promising question marks next to them, and a handful of Ambrose’s notes.

Saw M last.

Bought map from him? G says stole—unsure.

Won’t answer phone. New line? Threatened?

Where is she???

Back in her bedroom, Violet pushes open her window and shimmies through it into the pouring rain. She hasn’t done this since she was a teenager—hasn’t needed to—but something tells her that her uncles won’t just let her walk out the front door. And she can’t forgive them for keeping the truth from her. If they’d told her, maybe Matt would still be alive. Maybe she would have been able to do something besidessit there, useless and terrified.

She readjusts the backpack on her shoulders, weighed down with everything she can carry. Her lock picks, her clothes, the stolen notebook—and her green silk-bound book of fairy tales, to give her courage. She slides down the drain pipe, hands in a death grip, until her feet land in the flower bed. Rain falls in fat droplets, and her hair is quickly plastered to the back of her neck.

No one puts up a fight like an Everly. And if a year is all she has, then she’ll damn well do something with it. No more waiting in this empty, grey house, eavesdropping on her uncles, hoping for a miracle that’ll never arrive. No moresitting around.

Marianne is out there. And when Violet finds her, they’ll triumph. It’s inevitable.

Curses, after all, are made to be broken.

Deep in the bowels of the scholars’ tower, there is a place which does not belong to the scholars. It has lain in slumber for centuries, unheeding of the stone dungeons above it, the sewer systems, the kitchens andbaths, the novice dormitories and the assistants’ quarters—the hidden foundation to a many-tiered organism. It may have once appeared on an architectural diagram or in the very earliest records tucked in the archives. But one by one, these articles have been recorded as lost, misplaced or otherwise destroyed, so that there are truly no records left. Even the night attendants, who stitch their own mouths closed in servitude to the scholars’ tower and whose skin is blurred with tattoos of devoted scripture, have no knowledge of this room.

Light does not penetrate here. And the smell is of stale air, threaded with decay. The ground is deep mountain stone, slick and marbled with grey-green lichen. Yet the walls suggest that this room used to be known. Figures dance along the room in red paint, or blood, cradled in the bowl of what could be a sun, its rays shooting spindles outwards.

In the darkest part of this already dark room, there is a door, or what remains of it. Hammered reveurite, thick as stone in some places, has worn away to paper thin in others. An inscription flows over the door, barely more than gentle ridging, and almost incomprehensible, even to those who speak the centuries-dead language. Curiously, although it is obviously a door, there is no keyhole—only two iron hands outstretched, as though waiting for an offering.

For a long time, Penelope sits on the stone floor, her forehead pressed to the cool metal of the door. She runs her hands over the inscription, long memorised by her fingers even if the language is no longer one she speaks aloud. That language, and the world to which it belongs, lies through a doorway beyond this door. There are no other ways home; if there is a crueller punishment, she can’t conceive of it.

In the beginning, she used to believe she could hear singing beyond it, the familiar hum of her brethren that made her weep with want. Then it faded to a thrum that rattled her bones. Now, she hears nothing.

But she remembers the sound like it was five minutes ago, like it’s still escaping the edges of the doorway.

There’s a lot from those days that she still recalls.

One day, this door will open. And she will be the first to step through it.

NotMarianne Everly.

PART TWO

An Old Story

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