I’d used Neverwhere too much recently. The energy flowing through the pages had begun to turn them the color of ash. I sighed and pulled its power into the supply door, then opened it and stepped through to the Gateway room. The others followed a moment later. I switched on the lights and looked around. Most of my work was where I’d left it. “They haven’t gotten it working yet.”

I gathered books from the floor and my worktable and sat down on the floor to work.

“You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” asked Toby.

“The theories are sound.” I began by twining stories together, pulling passages from different books and braiding them into a doorway in the center of the room.

Story was magic. Magic was story. Memory was also story, disparate events linked together in our mind to create a narrative. I simply needed to bind magic and memory together. It was the same thing I’d done with Neverwhere, splicing the text with the imagined destination in my mind. This was simply bigger, more stable, and hopefully more precise over long distance. Assuming it worked.

Water rippled over the partially formed doorway, each wave taking on a silver sheen as story elements combined. I glimpsed other worlds: fantastical forests and twisting tunnels and alien skies sprinkled with strange stars and oversized moons: fragments of realities that lived only in the minds of the authors and their readers, but were no less real for not existing. They flooded my thoughts, each one trying to impose itself on my memories.

I pushed them aside, concentrating on my own memories of the Copper River Library. Of lounging on the beanbag chairs as a child, reading Goosebumps books and Bunnicula and A Wrinkle in Time and everything else I could get my hands on.

That place had been a second home long before I’d come back as an adult and begun working there. I’d kept my first library card, a battered old laminated thing with my careful eight-year-old’s signature, up until last year when it was lost with everything else in a house fire. I’d read every book in the children’s section and moved on to the adult books. I remembered the summer after fifth grade, when the whole place smelled of sawdust and paint from renovations.

Slowly, the ripples cleared and sagged, melting into a circle on the floor.

“What’s happening?” asked Lex.

“Um . . .” I’d hoped for a vertical doorway, but it looked like I’d created a hole instead. On the other side were the colorful shelves, carpeting, and toys in the children’s section. The portal was horizontal on this end and vertical in Copper River, but it appeared to be working. “It’s all right. I think.”