Then the door was closed, and the strangers were gone. Bit by bit, the door crumbled away, joining the debris that covered the ground. Layla looked at Rini and smiled.

“Well?” she asked. “What are you waiting for? You have about a day’s walk between here and home, and I bet your parents want to see you.”

The sound Rini made was half laugh, half sob, and then she was off and running, leaving the junkyard and the girl who only wanted to make cookies behind, racing into the bright Confection hills.

*   *   *

FOUR STUDENTS HAD LEFT and four students returned, even if they weren’t the same ones, stepping out of a door-shaped hole in the air and onto the dry brown grass of the front lawn. Eleanor was standing on the front porch, smiling wistfully—an expression that transformed into a gasp of open-mouthed delight when she saw Sumi.

“Sumi!” she cried, and started down the stairs, moving faster than such a frail-looking woman should have been able. “My darling girl, you’re home!”

“Eleanor-Ely!” cried Sumi, and threw herself into Eleanor’s arms, and held her tight.

Kade and Cora exchanged a glance. There would be time, soon enough, to tell Eleanor about everything that had happened: about leaving Nadya behind, about Layla, who might someday join them at the school, about the ways that Nonsense could be underpinned with Logic, and how this changed the Compass. There would be time for Kade to find Layla’s family, to seize the chance to watch someone—from a distance, never interfering—who was about to be chosen by a door. There would be time for so many, many things. But for right now …

For right now, the only thing that mattered was an old woman and a young girl, embracing in the grass, under a bright and cloudless autumn sky.

Everything else could wait.

14. The Drowned Girl

14
THE DROWNED GIRL

WELL. PERHAPS NOT EVERYTHING.

Nadya sat on the bank of the River of Forgotten Souls, one leg drawn up against her chest so she could rest her chin atop her knee. Turtles basked on the bank around her, their hard-shelled bodies pressing against her hip and ankle. They followed her everywhere she went, a terrapin train of devoted acolytes keeping her company in this most uncompanionable of places.