Finally, the door to their building swallowed her up. She shook the water from her now-lowered brolly onto the front step and then let the door swing shut behind her.

It smelled of damp and mold in this front hallway, as it always did. Maman had tried once to scrub it into lemony bliss, but even wood soap couldn’t long hold out against the century or two of damp that had crept into the banisters and floors and walls.

Margot took a moment to wipe her feet—no point in transferring more moisture to said floors—and then let them take her on the familiar path. Four steps to the stairs. Up nineteen, pivot on the landing. Up nineteen, pivot on the landing. Again. Again. Her right hand trailed along the banister, counting in time to her feet. A knot in the wood on step sixteen, between the first and second floor. A nick at step three on the next span. The missing rung on the eleventh step of the final stretch of the banister, which did change the pitch of her hand running along it, despite Lukas the Pitch Expert swearing it didn’t.

Of course it did. It must. Her ears might not be able to hear it, but her mind could.

Then, finally, the corridor that would lead to the familiar door with the familiar number hanging from it in tin: 3E.

She fumbled in her pocket for her key. Until this flat, she’d never lived in anything but a house, with a number all its own. No letters had ever been required by the number. It was a variable, she’d claimed to her mother when they first moved in. Not just 3E, but 3(e)—three of E—with any number of possibilities for what the value really was. Some days she let it be a mere three of one—three times one, a simple three. Some days she enjoyed the chance to let larger numbers swell, and it became 37,518—three of 12,506.

Today, exhaustion and sore throats and keys that would not fit right in the lock inspired a simpler number. Three of six would do, since it took her six attempts to fit the blasted metal into the blasted hole correctly. Eighteen.

Eighteen. That meant something, but she was too startled by opening the door and finding darkness within to think what. “Maman?” Darkness implied her mother wasn’t there, though that couldn’t be, could it? She’d not passed her on the way.

She shoved her wet umbrella into the stand, beside the faulty one that still stood in its usual spot, no evidence of it having been growled over and declared impossible. Pushed the door shut. Switched on the electric lights that they were only allowed to use in the daytime, when they wouldn’t shine out the windows and give away their location to any unfriendlies flying overhead.