Long-press a paragraph to send danmaku
The door shouldn't be here.
I mean that literally. The hotel's fourth floor has twelve rooms according to the blueprints the demo crew gave me. I counted thirteen doors in the hallway. This one's at the end, past the exit sign, where the corridor should stop. Black paint, no number, and a lock I've never seen outside a museum.
The guy who hired me is waiting by the stairs. Cash job, he said. Three hundred to open one door. He didn't ask if I could do it. People who pay cash never ask. They just need it done before someone official notices they're in a condemned building.
I kneel in front of the lock and pull out my picks. The door's cold. I'm wearing gloves because of the asbestos warning downstairs, but I can feel it through the latex. Cold like a freezer. Cold like metal left outside overnight in January. It's July.
The lock's old. Warded, maybe eighteen hundreds, the kind where you need the right key shape or you're not getting in. Most people would call a drill. I fit the tension wrench in and feel for the wards.
Nothing.
I try again. The wrench slides in like the lock's empty, but when I twist there's resistance. Not the normal kind. It feels like the lock's full of something that shouldn't be there. Something thicker than oil. I pull the wrench out and check the tip. It's clean.
"Problem?" The guy's voice echoes down the hall.
"Give me a minute."
I don't have a minute. I have two hundred in my bank account and first-of-the-month rent is two thousand. Nina's covering me again this month, and she's too nice to say she's tired of it, which makes it worse. I need this three hundred. I need the next job too, and the one after that, because apparently my sister spent the last year of her life draining every account with my name on it and didn't bother to mention it before she drove into the river.
Six months. It's been six months and I still can't think about June without my chest going tight.
I shake it off and try a rake pick. Sometimes you can bounce warded locks open if you're lucky and the springs are worn. The pick goes in smooth. Too smooth. It slides all the way to the back like there's nothing inside the lock at all, and then I feel it.
A heartbeat.
I yank my hand back. The pick's still in the lock. I'm staring at it, at the black door, at the thin gap between the door and the frame. There's no light on the other side. The whole floor's electric is shut off. But I heard it. Felt it. A pulse through the metal like the lock's alive.
"Fuck this," I mutter, and grab the pick.
It doesn't come out.
I pull harder. The pick's stuck like it's welded in place. I brace my boot against the wall and pull with both hands and the pick slides free so fast I fall on my ass. The guy by the stairs laughs. I don't look at him. I'm looking at the door.
It's open.
Not unlocked. Open. A crack, maybe two inches, and I didn't hear it move.
The cold air rolls out like fog. It smells like rust and something sweet underneath. Something rotting. I should walk away. I should take the two hundred in my account and find a cheaper apartment and stop picking locks in condemned buildings for men who don't give their names.
I push the door open.
The room's bigger than it should be. Hotel rooms are small, maybe twelve by twelve, but this goes back farther than the outside wall. There's no windows. No furniture. Just a circle of chain on the floor, and a man sitting in the center of it.
He looks up.
I forget how to breathe.
He's young. Maybe thirty. Dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin like he hasn't seen sun in years. He's wearing a shirt that used to be white and pants that used to be black, both of them torn and stained with something dark around the knees and elbows. The chain's wrapped around his wrists, his ankles, his throat. It's not attached to anything. It's just looped around him like jewelry, links thick as my thumb, metal so dark it doesn't reflect the light from the hallway.
He smiles.
"Mara," he says.
I don't ask how he knows my name. The guy who hired me could've told him. Could've yelled it down the hall. But he didn't. I didn't give the guy my name.
"Who are you?" My voice comes out steady. I'm good at steady.
"Elias." He shifts and the chain moves with him, clinking soft against the floor. "You need to leave."
"I need three hundred dollars."
"You need to leave," he says again, and his voice is different this time. Urgent. Rough like he's been screaming. "Before the Wardens notice the door's open. Before the next eclipse. Before—"
"Before what?"
He looks at me. Really looks, like he's trying to memorize my face. Like he's seeing someone else.
"Before you end up like June."
The floor drops out from under me. Not literally. Literally I'm still standing in the doorway with my picks in my hand and my heart trying to break through my ribs. But everything goes cold. Colder than the door. Colder than the air.
"What did you say?"
Elias stands up. The chain doesn't stop him. It moves with him, sliding around his body like it's alive, links shifting to let him move but never letting go. He takes one step toward me. Just one. He stops at the edge of the circle.
"June Quinn," he says. "Your sister. She opened a door she shouldn't have. She made a deal she didn't understand. And when the Wardens came, she ran."
"My sister drove into the Crow River." My voice sounds far away. "Accident. Police report said accident."
"The police say what the Wardens tell them to say."
I should leave. I should walk out, tell the guy by the stairs the door's open, take the cash and go home and let Nina tell me I'm working too hard again. I should stop listening to the chained man in the room that shouldn't exist.
"How do you know her name?"
Elias tilts his head. The chain around his throat shifts. For a second I see the skin underneath. It's scarred. Burned, maybe, or branded. The marks look like letters but I can't read them from here.
"She told me," he says. "Right here. Six months and nine days ago. She was looking for a way out too."
My sister's been dead six months and seven days.
"You're lying."
"Am I?" He takes another step. The chain pulls tight. He stops like he's hit a wall, but there's nothing there. Just air and the circle on the floor. "She said you'd say that. She said you never believed her about anything. Not about the doors, not about the city, not about the people who keep the keys."
June used to say crazy shit when she was high. Paranoid shit. Doors that move, shadows that follow, men in gray who erase people from records. I didn't believe her because she was on pills and I was trying to keep us both alive.
"What else did she say?"
I don't know why I ask. I don't want to know. But the words come out anyway.
Elias smiles, and it's sad. Tired. He looks older suddenly. Older and sick and something else. Something wrong with the edges of him, like he's blurring.
"She said—"
The lights go out.
Not just the hallway. The whole building. The whole block. I hear car alarms outside, distant shouts, the sudden silence of a city with no power. My phone's flashlight is in my pocket but I can't move. I'm staring into the dark room, at the place where Elias was standing.
Something glows.
The chain. It's lighting up link by link, cold blue like foxfire, like the bioluminescent algae I saw once on a school trip to the coast. The light spreads up from the floor, around Elias's ankles, his wrists, his throat. He's still there. Still standing. Still watching me.
Behind him, deeper in the room, more lights.
Doors.
A dozen of them, maybe more, standing in a circle around him. Black doors with no walls, just frames standing in empty air, each one sealed with a lock that's starting to glow the same blue as the chain.
"Mara," Elias says, and his voice is different now. Layered. Like there's more than one person talking. "Run."
I hear footsteps on the stairs.
Heavy boots. Multiple people. Moving fast.
"Hey," the guy who hired me shouts. "We got company. We need to go. Now."
I look at Elias. At the chain. At the doors.
"What did my sister say?" I ask.
The footsteps are getting closer. I can hear radios crackling. Official voices. Not cops. Something else.
Elias meets my eyes. The blue light reflects in his pupils, makes them look empty. Hollow.
"She said, 'Tell Mara I'm sorry. Tell her the door knows her name too.'"
The first door behind him swings open.