For others, the lure of a world where they fit is too great to escape, and they will spend the rest of their lives rattling at windows and peering at locks, trying to find the way home. Trying to find the one perfect door that can take them there, despite everything, despite the unlikeliness of it all.

They can be hard for their families to understand, those returned, used-up miracle children. They sound like liars to people who have never had a doorway of their own. They sound like dreamers. They sound … unwell, to the charitable, and simply sick to the cruel. Something must be done.

Something like admission to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a school for those who have gone, and come back, and hope to go again, when the wind is right, when the stars are bright, when the world remembers what it is to have mercy on the longing and the lost. There, they can be among their peers, if they can truly be said to have peers: they can be with people who understand what it is to have the door locked between themselves and home. The rules of the school are simple. Heal. Hope. And if you can, find your way back where you belong.

No solicitation. No visitors.

No quests.

1. One Door Opens, Another Is Blown Off Its Hinges

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ONE DOOR OPENS, ANOTHER IS BLOWN OFF ITS HINGES

AUTUMN HAD COME TO Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children in the usual way, with changing leaves and browning grass and the constant smell of impending rain hanging heavy in the air, a seasonal promise yet to be fulfilled. The blackberry briars at the back of the field grew rich with fruit, and several students spent their afternoons with buckets in their hands, turning their fingers purple and soothing their own furious hearts.

Kade checked the seals on the windows one by one, running putty along the places where the moisture seemed likely to find a way inside, one eye on the library and the other on the sky.

Angela watched the sky too, waiting for a rainbow, ordinary shoes on her feet and enchanted shoes slung over her shoulder, laces tied in a careful, complicated knot. If the light and the water came together just so, if the rainbow touched down where she could reach it, she would be gone, off and running, running, running all the way home.

Christopher, whose door would open—if it ever opened for him again; if he ever got to find his way back home—on the Day of the Dead, sat in the grove of trees behind the house, playing ever more elaborate songs on his bone flute, trying to prepare for the moment of disappointment when the door failed to appear or of overwhelming elation when the Skeleton Girl called him back where he belonged.