The Door at the End of the World

by Caroline Carlson

  “Lucy?” she called. “Prince Arthur? I just wanted to see how you were getting along, and . . .” Her voice trailed off. She took in the half-eaten desk, the confetti of paperwork, and the explosion of orange sludge. Then she turned and saw Arthur, Rosemary, and me. The muscles of her jaw were tight.

  “Lucy Eberslee,” she said, measuring out each word precisely, “what in all the worlds is going on?”

  13

  Mrs. Bracknell wasn’t the sort of person who wasted time. We’d hardly finished telling her about the thistle-backed thrunt before she’d called for a small army of travel officers to join us in the archives. They spread out through the aisles with weapons and searchlights, looking for stray otherworld creatures under shelves and in boxes. “And who are you?” Mrs. Bracknell asked Rosemary. Then she held up a hand. “Wait. I’ve got it. Brown eyes, curls, a few years younger than you’d like to be: you must be the girl who pretended to work for Florence.”

  Rosemary took a step backward. I could see her eyeing the doorway, as if she were calculating how fast she could run through it, and her hands were clenched into fists. I wondered if she was nervous. She didn’t look half as brave as she had after slicing up the thrunt.

  “I was wrong, Mrs. Bracknell. About Rosemary, I mean.” I hadn’t meant to say it loudly, but my voice echoed through the archives, and half of the travel officers in the room turned to stare at me. Mrs. Bracknell’s eyes were brighter than ever and fixed on mine. Being eaten from the toes up would have been excruciating, I knew, but it couldn’t have been much worse than this. “I made a mistake.”

  “A mistake?” Mrs. Bracknell repeated the words carefully.

  I nodded. At least Rosemary’s fists had unclenched. “She didn’t have anything to do with sealing the worldgates. She’s not dangerous. And she saved our lives just now.”

  Mrs. Bracknell gave Rosemary a thoughtful look. “All right,” she said, “but I’d like to talk to her just the same. If she was near the Southern worldgate when it closed, her observations could be helpful to us.” She turned and strode toward the door. “For now, all three of you can come with me. Quickly, please, before anyone gets eaten.”

  With two travel officers close behind us to keep us in check, Mrs. Bracknell marched us up the stairs to the seventh floor. “This is my fault, really,” she said, shepherding us all into my bedroom. “I thought you’d be out of harm’s way at Interworld Travel, but it’s clear I was wrong about that. With otherworld creatures roaming the halls and explorers storming the lobby, who knows what might happen! You aren’t trained travel officers, and I’m responsible for your protection.” She looked over our heads at the officers who’d come with us, a tall, wiry woman and a short, stocky man wearing identical suits and solemn expressions. “Celeste, Kip, I’d like you two to stay with our guests until the situation with the worldgates is resolved. Don’t let them leave the Travelers’ Wing, and don’t let any unauthorized visitors into their rooms without my permission. I’ll have the café bring their meals up to them.”

  “Excuse me?” Arthur looked as dismayed as I felt. “You mean we’re stuck here?”

  “A thrunt didn’t try to eat me,” Rosemary pointed out. “Can’t I go home? My pa will be wondering where I am.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Bracknell, “but I can’t allow it. All the worlds are in crisis. The safest place for all of you is right here in this room.”

  “But we can still be helpful!” I said. “There’s got to be something more we can do. With the worldgates closed, and the crowds in the lobby to deal with, and—”

  Mrs. Bracknell sighed. There were dark circles under her eyes, and I wondered how long it had been since she’d had any sleep. “The most helpful thing you can do now, Lucy, is to follow my instructions. As soon as I’m sure there’s no threat to you or to your friends, you’ll be free to leave. Meanwhile, you’ll be perfectly safe with Kip and Celeste. They’ve worked in the most unstable corners of the worlds and lived to tell the tale.”

  “We’ll be safe, all right,” Rosemary said to me as Mrs. Bracknell left the room. “So safe it hurts.”

  Kip and Celeste stood guard outside our rooms: one in the hallway between my door and Arthur’s, and one just outside the Travelers’ Wing. Every so often they’d switch positions, but they didn’t have much to say to us, and they never once cracked a smile.

  To be fair, there wasn’t much to smile about. Rosemary stomped between my room and Arthur’s, shouting about being kidnapped and imprisoned against her will. Arthur chased after her, urging her not to slice up the furniture with her double-edged defense ray. The bees flew listlessly around a vase of flowers someone had left on the table beside my bed. Rain splattered the windowpanes. And I sat hunched on the sofa, trying to think of something I could say to Mrs. Bracknell to convince her I wasn’t most useful when I was locked up out of sight.

  “I could go get the travel records from the gatehouse!” I said. “The ones from the past few days before the door closed. Mrs. Bracknell wanted to see them earlier.”

  Arthur shook his head. “She’s probably had her officers bring them back here by now.”

  “Fine. Then I’ll visit the families of people who are trapped in other words. Or I’ll help to calm down the diplomats. I’ll tell them everything will be all right.”

  “What makes you think it will be all right?” Rosemary snapped. “We’re trapped in this place that’s practically making me break out in hives. Southeast is totally cut off, no one in this entire city seems to be able to do anything about it, Henry Tallard has gone missing somehow, someone is probably trying to kill you, Mrs. Bracknell wants to interrogate me later, I’m going to be in buckets of trouble with Pa, I might never see my sisters again, I’ve got a perfectly good thrunt going to waste in my bag, and I’ve lost my house keys!” She flopped down next to me on the sofa. “Please, Lucy, go ahead. Tell me everything will be fine.”

  I moved to make room for Rosemary, and something in my back pocket crinkled. I pulled it out: it was the folded-up packet of papers I’d snuck from my own file in the archives that morning. “Oh, worlds,” I said. I’d forgotten all about it.

  I unfolded the papers and pulled my knees up to my chest. There was my own handwriting in careful blue ink: my application to work at the end of the world. Bits of it had been underlined and circled in red pen, as if it were a school assignment, and there was an extra page clipped to the back. Candidate assessment, it read in Thomas’s familiar scrawl:

  Candidate does not meet minimum requirements for employment (experience, expertise, talent, etc.). Under normal circumstances, candidate would not be eligible for a gatehouse position. However, retired governor W. Eberslee, government official G. Eberslee, and this travel officer all recommend an exception be made in this case. Other applications have been unremarkable, and gatekeeper states that the deputy position is not crucial at the Eastern end of the world. Candidate will receive necessary training and is unlikely to give us trouble. —T.E.

  Underneath that, there was a single line added in someone else’s writing:

  EXCEPTION GRANTED. SHE CAN START NEXT WEEK. DON’T MAKE ME REGRET IT. —C.B.

  My cheeks stung, and my whole face felt as hot as if I’d stuck it into an oven. I’d always guessed I couldn’t have gotten my job on my own, but to know it for sure—well, I almost wished they’d never hired me in the first place. Had my parents been so worried about my future that they’d marched into Mrs. Bracknell’s office and demanded that she find a place for me at Interworld Travel? Was Mrs. Bracknell already regretting her decision to bring me on? It was too embarrassing to think about.

  Arthur sat down on the other side of me. “What’s that?” he asked, craning his neck to look at the papers.

  “Nothing.” I crumpled up the whole packet, shoved it deep in the crevice between the sofa cushions, and walked over to the window. “It’s not important.”

  It was raining harder now, and the wind had picked up. The sky was lo
w and greenish. Toward the ends of the world, over the patchwork fields and the mountains, I could see hints of sunlight, but here in Centerbury, trees were bending, umbrellas were gusting inside out, and it looked like there was worse weather to come.

  Back on the sofa, Arthur had dug out my Interworld Travel application. I wished I’d torn it into pieces. “Oh, Lucy,” he said, reading it. “I’m sorry.”

  “Did something terrible happen?” Rosemary leaned over eagerly.

  “Listen,” said Arthur, “I know you must feel awful, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  I blinked at him. Then I sat right down on the floor where I’d been standing. The bees hummed around my head. “It’s not the end of the world,” I murmured. But Rosemary had lost her house keys. Everyone at Interworld Travel kept getting turned around on the stairs and in the hallways; even Huggins had tried to go to breakfast and ended up in the archives somehow. Arthur and I had gotten hopelessly lost on our way to Rosemary’s, it was awfully late in the season for snow, and the storm gathering over us now was getting stronger by the minute. I wondered exactly how much of the Interworld Travel Commission’s mail had been sent to the wrong address recently.

  “Lucy?” Arthur looked worried. “Are you all right?”

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it sooner. “What if this is the end of the world?”

  14

  Arthur and Rosemary looked blank.

  “Think about it,” I said. I kept my voice low so Kip and Celeste wouldn’t overhear me. “Have you lost anything lately? Other than the house keys?”

  Arthur frowned. “My bath towels keep going missing,” he said. “I’ve had to ask the information desk for more three times so far.”

  “And I never found that jar of powdered lightning,” said Rosemary. “But you can’t actually mean . . .” Thunder rumbled overhead, and Rosemary trailed off. She twisted a curl around her finger. “When I ended up in that room with all the fish tanks,” she said quietly, “I couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten so turned around.”

  “I couldn’t find the Travelers’ Wing yesterday,” said Arthur. “I thought I was going in the right direction, but somehow I wound up in a room full of typewriters on the fifth floor instead. I was too embarrassed to mention it.”

  “And I made three wrong turns before I found Thomas’s office this morning,” I said. “Either we’re all having the worst luck possible, or someone has opened a door into another world nearby.”

  “How?” Arthur wanted to know. “With the gatecutters?”

  “Never mind how,” said Rosemary. “I’d like to know who.”

  They both looked at me. It took me a few seconds to realize they were expecting me to answer their questions.

  “I’ve got no idea!” I said. “I’m as confused as you are.”

  Arthur stood up and started pacing the room. “First all the worldgates were closing,” he said, “and no one knew why. Now it’s possible that new worldgates are opening, and still no one knows why.”

  “Well, someone knows why,” said Rosemary. “The person who’s doing it ought to know pretty well.”

  “It might not be the same person,” I pointed out. “Anyway, we don’t know for sure that we’re right. Should we tell Interworld Travel what we think? If there really is a new worldgate that’s opened up, maybe we can help them find it.”

  “We are not telling Interworld Travel,” Rosemary snapped.

  “The travel officers probably won’t even pay attention to us,” said Arthur, “and even if they do, they’ll only tell us to let the professionals take care of it.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then we’ll find the worldgate ourselves.”

  “Good.” For the first time since we’d met, Rosemary smiled at me. “Let’s do it.”

  Kip and Celeste couldn’t stay awake all night to guard us, they explained, so they were taking the overnight hours in shifts. This suited our plan perfectly. As soon as Celeste had trudged off to get some sleep, Rosemary dug through her bag and pulled out a wad of plastic the size of a pencil eraser. At least, that’s how big it was at first. As she peeled away the plastic layers, though, the bundle grew and grew. “Shrink wrap,” I told Arthur, who was staring at Rosemary as if she were some kind of magician. The stuff was so expensive that almost no one in any of the worlds could afford it, but if Silos and Daughters had access to a stash of Southern shrink wrap, at least I knew how they were able to sneak so many smuggled goods through the worldgates. Wherever she was, the Gatekeeper would want to know about this.

  When the last layer of shrink wrap fell away, Rosemary lifted the lid of the box that had been wrapped inside it and pulled out two thin silver cards a little bigger than my palm. The bottom half of each card was engraved with letters from the most common interworld alphabets, and the top half was a smooth piece of metal. I’d never seen anything like it. “What are they?” I asked as Rosemary fiddled with the silver cards, pressing buttons I couldn’t see.

  “Smugglers’ tools.” Rosemary didn’t look up. “They’re called InterComs—interworld communications devices. Western technology, not magic. They can send messages to other InterComs anywhere else in the worlds. Don’t ask me how it all works. It does work, though, and that’s the important thing.”

  I’d wondered how Mr. Silos had been communicating with his friends in other worlds since the doors had closed. “Are these the smugglers’ channels your pa was talking about?”

  Rosemary looked annoyed. “You can’t tell anyone, or—”

  “You’ll have me eaten?”

  “I was going to say my pa will kill me, but all right.” Rosemary handed one of the cards to me and the other to Arthur. “Here. I’ve set these up so we can all send messages to one another. I’ve got my own InterCom in my bag.”

  I flipped the card over and back again, admiring it. “What else do you have in your bag?”

  “Things to sell. Things to trade.” Rosemary gave me a squirrelly sort of look, buckled up the bag, and shoved it aside. “I’m supposed to be bringing those InterComs to a customer in Northwest, by the way. You’d better not lose them, or Pa will sell your ears on the black market to make up for it.”

  Arthur poked at his InterCom. “Please tell me you’re joking about that.”

  “Of course.” Rosemary grinned at him. “Your ears aren’t even worth half the cost.”

  I hadn’t considered the exact price of Arthur’s ears before, but his lungs, at least, turned out to be extremely valuable. Just before midnight, we all said good night to Kip, Arthur and I crawled into our beds, Rosemary curled up on my sofa, and we switched off the lamps.

  A few minutes later, in the stillness of the Travelers’ Wing, Arthur let out a shout.

  “Help!” he called. It was loud enough to make me sit straight up in bed, even though I’d been expecting it. “I need help right away!”

  I rolled out of my blankets and listened: there were Kip’s footsteps as he hurried down the hall, there was Arthur’s door swinging open on its squeaking hinges, there was the slam as someone closed it again.

  “That’s our cue,” said Rosemary in the darkness.

  Soon I could hear Arthur’s voice again, quieter this time. “I thought there might be someone hiding in my bedroom,” he was saying earnestly. “At home—in my palace, because that’s where princes live, you know—I have servants who sweep all the spies and assassins out from behind the curtains every night. I’m just not used to doing it myself. Would it be too inconvenient for you to take a look?”

  I didn’t know how long Kip would be willing to put up with His Royal Highness’s demands, but I guessed time wasn’t on our side. Rosemary and I hurried out of the bedroom as silently as we could. The Travelers’ Wing was empty, thank the worlds, and so were the hallways beyond it. Somewhere below us, Thomas and the rest of Mrs. Bracknell’s team were probably working late into the night, but up on the seventh floor, everything was dark and quiet.

  Rosemary took out her
InterCom. As she tapped away on her own card, a message in glowing white light appeared on the plain silver surface of mine: Everyone ready?

  Yes, I wrote back. The message popped up at the top of my device, and on Rosemary’s, too, but these letters were blue instead of white. The way they flickered on the surface reminded me a little of the bees, who were back in the Travelers’ Wing with Arthur. I hoped they were doing their best to keep him out of trouble.

  After a few seconds, my message vanished, and new letters took their place. This time, they were green. Hello! said Arthur. Have sent Kip into washroom to look for assassins. Princes are very demanding.

  Rosemary snickered a little at this. Where first, Lucy?

  It didn’t take me long to type out the answer: Sculpture.

  We wound down the seven flights of stairs, keeping our eyes open for worldgates and our ears open for travel officers. The lights in the lobby were off, and all the worried people who’d been waiting there had been led away to worry somewhere else. No one stood behind the information desk. On the other side of the tall glass wall, a few streetlamps flickered, casting just enough light for us to make our way to the sculpture.

  At first I thought the space between the glass globes was completely dark, just the way it had looked in the daylight. Then Rosemary nudged me with her elbow, and I looked where she was pointing. The Southeast globe was glowing, not at either end of the world but at a spot near the middle. The glow was so faint that if the room had been any brighter, I wouldn’t have noticed it. Even in the darkness, I had to squint to make it out. The longer I looked, though, the more sure of it I was: thin, tentative lines of light radiated across the fabric of time and space, each connecting Southeast to one of the other worlds. There had to be at least four of them.

  I heard Rosemary draw in her breath.

  Many worldgates? I asked her.

  I think so, she wrote back. But where?