Diana’s eyes filled with slow and terrible tears. “I thought you loved me.”
“I do love you, Diana, I genuinely do, but the place I belong…” She hesitated. “If I don’t go back before I turn eighteen, I can’t go back at all. I can’t imagine growing old in this world. I’m sorry, I can’t. If I stay any longer, I could be trapped.”
“I wanted…” Diana shook her head. “I wanted you to see me go to high school. I wanted a sister. Can’t you stay and be my sister?”
Lundy hesitated. Then, finally, in a small voice, she said, “I can try.”
* * *
SEE HER NOW as she was then, almost a woman, still technically a child, running, running, through the trees, a shopping bag filled with everything she could grab—forks and spoons and candlesticks, lace doilies and roller skates—thumping against her hip as her feet pound against the soil. How she runs, Katherine Lundy, sweet seventeen and running out of time.
How she ran.
She reached the door, flung it open, flung herself inside, past the rules and through the passage, out into the evening air. It smelled sweet; it smelled like home.
She kept running.
The shutters were open at Vincent’s pie stand. Moon, who had somehow become a young woman while she wasn’t looking—while she was away doing the same in a foreign land—lifted her head from the dough she’d been kneading, surprise slowly bleeding into delight.
“Lundy!” she cried. “Are you home? Are you finally home? I was so worried, I thought—”
“I need to stop,” said Lundy.
Moon blinked. “What?”
“I need to stop,” repeated Lundy. “My sister, she’s not ready to let me go, and the Archivist said I had to take the oath before I turned eighteen. If I can stop getting older, I won’t turn eighteen. I need to stay where I am for a little while, until Diana can let go, and I can come home. Please, will you help me?” She held up her bag. “I’m prepared to give fair value.”
“I—”
“Please.”
Moon stopped. In a small voice, she said, “Follow me.” Then she turned, not bothering to remove her apron, and walked away from the dough on the counter.
Lundy followed. Together, not quite side by side, they walked the length of the Market, until they reached a familiar trail, until a small, rickety shack came into view. Moon stopped. Lundy looked at her curiously.
“This is as far as I go,” said Moon. “You were my best friend ever. Remember that, okay? I loved you a lot. Even if you did build a boat big enough to bury yourself in.” Then she turned and walked away.
Lundy blinked after her for a moment before she started, cautiously, toward the shack. The door was closed. Opening it seemed wrong; instead, she raised her hand, and knocked.
The door swung open. The Archivist was there. Wearily, she looked at Lundy, and asked, “It’s to be this, is it? What have you come to ask me for?”
“I…” Lundy took a breath. “My sister needs me. I don’t want to turn eighteen. I need to wait. Can you help me wait?”
“Lundy—”
“Please.”
“What you’re asking for isn’t what you want. Come home. Stay with us. Be safe and happy and stay.”
Lundy, lover of rules, lover of loopholes, shook her head. Like a dog with a bone, she had found her solution. “No. If I don’t turn eighteen, the curfew doesn’t apply. I can stay. Please.”
The Archivist closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them again, the weariness was gone, replaced with sorrow. “Can you give fair value?”
Silently, Lundy held out her sack of stolen trinkets. The Archivist took it, ran her hand through its contents, and sighed.
“Wait here,” she said, and vanished into the shack. When she returned, she no longer held the sack. Instead, she held a small vial the color of a ripe strawberry, carved from a single bright crystal. She offered it to Lundy.
Lundy took it.
“If you drink this,” she said, “you will not turn eighteen. But it isn’t … Please. You asked a question, and you paid the price of it, but please. There will be consequences if you do this. Stay. Please. Just stay.”
“Whatever the consequences are, I’ll pay them,” said Lundy, and opened the vial, and drank.
It tasted like water. It tasted like nothing. It tasted like tears. Again, the Archivist sighed. Lundy looked at her. She was crying.
“The rules are the rules,” said the Archivist. “They were set for a reason. I set them for a reason.”
Lundy’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Names have power, child,” said the Archivist. “Titles, too. They call me ‘the Archivist’ because it would be an insult to call me by my name. But I was here first, and I will be here last, and the Market lives because I am its heart. I loved you so much. I truly did.”
“I don’t…”
“I asked you to remember the curfew, and you did, you did, but you didn’t give me fair value for it, because you forgot Mockery.” The Archivist—the Market—seemed to shimmer, and for a moment she was a girl with white feathers tangled in her hair, a sign of the swan she could have been, if she had lived, if she had been given time enough to grow. “You forgot that sometimes, fair value comes from change, and death, and sacrifice. You can’t have everything and give fair value. You can’t stop your clock and expect to stay a part of the world. You’ve followed the rules, my love, my little Lundy, but you’ve betrayed them at the same time, and your punishment is the punishment that has awaited all rulebreakers, for a broken rule pains us all. Banishment. Go.”
Lundy’s eyes went wide. “How will I get the potion to start me aging again?”
The Market smiled, heartbroken. “You don’t.”
She closed the door.
Lundy tried to reach for it, and found she couldn’t move; couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do anything but stand there, struggling against the air, until she turned on her heel and fled, running back the way she had come.
There was no release even in the passage, which pressed down against her like it was trying to force her out. She stumbled to the final door, tumbled out into the dust, and fell to her hands and knees, gasping.
When she had her breath back, she looked behind herself. The door was gone.
“I was sure,” she whispered, and all was silence.
EPILOGUE
COME BUY, COME BUY
1990
THE WOMAN, WHO APPEARED to be in her early fifties, and was dressed like she had never met a color she didn’t feel compelled to keep somewhere on her person, stepped out of her car and considered the house. It looked perfectly ordinary in every possible way, as did the town around it. She knew better. She paid attention, which was sometimes the dearest coin of all, and she had heard the rumors, the stories of a little girl who aged, not forward as children are intended to do, but in reverse, slow as the hands of a clock running backward.
(One of those rumors had come in the form of a letter from the girl’s younger sister turned older and wiser and sadder. “My sister disappeared when she was a child,” the woman had written. “Now my son has done the same, and I think it’s happening again, and she still needs someone to save her…”)
“Well,” she said, and started up the walk. The doorbell was in good repair; the sound it made rang out clearly. Settling on her heels, she waited.
The door opened, just a crack, several minutes later. “My parents aren’t home,” said the girl on the other side, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old, but who had the eyes of a woman grown and condemned.
“I know, dear,” said the woman. She smiled, clearly trying to be engaging. “My name is Eleanor West. I’ve been looking for you for qui
te some time, Miss Lundy. I think we’re going to be very good friends, you and I.”
Slowly, Lundy pulled the door open and looked at Eleanor. Neither said a word.
It was not, perhaps, a happy ending. But it was what they had, and so we shall leave them to it as we head on, ever on, toward the next, patiently waiting door.
ALSO BY SEANAN MCGUIRE
Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day
Deadlands: Boneyard
THE GHOST ROADS SERIES
Sparrow Hill Road
The Girl in the Green Silk Gown
THE WAYWARD CHILDREN SERIES
Every Heart a Doorway
Down Among the Sticks and Bones
Beneath the Sugar Sky
THE OCTOBER DAYE SERIES
Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Late Eclipses
One Salt Sea
Ashes of Honor
Chimes at Midnight
The Winter Long
A Red-Rose Chain
Once Broken Faith
The Brightest Fell
Night and Silence
THE INCRYPTID SERIES
Discount Armageddon
Midnight Blue-Light Special
Half-Off Ragnarok
Pocket Apocalypse
Chaos Choreography
Magic for Nothing
Tricks for Free
That Ain’t Witchcraft
THE INDEXING SERIES
Indexing
Indexing: Reflections
AS MIRA GRANT
THE NEWSFLESH SERIES
Feed
Deadline
Blackout
Feedback
Rise: The Complete Newsflesh Collection (short stories)
THE PARASITOLOGY SERIES
Parasite
Symbiont
Chimera
Rolling in the Deep
Into the Drowning Deep
Final Girls
Kingdom of Needle and Bone
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seanan lives in the Pacific Northwest with her cats, in a faintly haunted house that overlooks a swamp. She has never been happier.
Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot. She has won two Alex Awards, in 2017 and 2018, making her the first person to win the Alex two years in a row.
She is probably coming soon to a cornfield near you. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I: What We Would Reap
1. A Very Ordinary Garden
2. When Is a Door Not a Door?
3. Rules Are Rules, No Exceptions, No Appeal
4. Fair Value
5. A Beginning Ends
Part II: We First Must Sow
6. Back Through the Impossible Door
7. Fly Away, Fly Away Home
8. By the Fire
9. With Ribbons for Her Hair
Part III: Where We Would Be
10. In Which a Quest Begins and Ends
11. In Air as Clear as Crystal
12. On Wings So Wide
Part IV: We First Must Go
13. One More Door
14. Promises and Paperwork
15. Fair Value
Epilogue
Also by Seanan McGuire
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
IN AN ABSENT DREAM
Copyright © 2018 by Seanan McGuire
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-9929-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7653-9928-1 (ebook)
eISBN 9780765399281
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First Edition: January 2019