The Last Door

Chapter 2: Twenty-One Days

I held perfectly still, because the only other choice was to scream.

Daniel's hand rested warm between my shoulder blades, exactly where it had rested every morning for eleven months, and every muscle in my back locked at the touch. He felt it. His thumb stopped a quarter inch above my spine, and he propped himself up on one elbow to look at me with a small crease between his eyebrows.

"Mar? You're really shaking," he said. "Was it a bad one?"

"Yes," I said, and my voice came out scraped and raw, as though I had been screaming for hours. "It was a bad one."

"You kept saying Elise's name in your sleep." He pushed the hair back from my forehead with the same gentleness he showed every morning. "You're freezing, babe. Stay in bed, and I'll start the coffee."

He kissed my temple, and the kiss was real, which was the worst part. He climbed out of bed, and I listened to his bare feet cross the floorboards.

As soon as I was alone, I pressed two fingers to the side of my neck, because four years of nursing had taught me to count a pulse before I let myself feel anything. My heart was pounding at about one hundred and forty beats a minute, which made sense, because my last memory was of dying.

I held both hands up in front of my face. All ten fingers were whole, and my palms were clean. The skin I had left on the steel door was only skin again, pink and unmarked. Then I snatched my phone from the charger to check the date, and the screen blurred because I had stopped blinking.

It was Monday the second, eleven minutes past seven in the morning.

I knew that date. The alert would come on the twenty-third, when every phone in the city would scream at once and everyone would remember exactly where they had been standing. That gave me twenty-one days.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my head between my knees until the room stopped tilting, and the phone slid off my lap onto the rug. Slowly, one thought separated itself from the noise in my head. They did not know. Daniel had not made his choice yet, and Elise had not pulled the lever. As far as either of them was concerned, I was only the woman who had woken from a nightmare about her sister.

I considered waking Daniel and telling him everything, and I considered it for exactly as long as it took to imagine his face. I was a nurse who had spent four years watching what happens to patients who insist that the world is ending. I knew how quickly a calm and caring fiancé could turn that insistence into a phone call to a hospital. If I told him the truth, he would hold my hand and drive me to an emergency room, and I would spend the next three weeks on a locked ward while the date came and went outside the window.

I went into the bathroom, locked the door, turned on the tap so the water would cover the sound, and I pressed a towel over my mouth. Then I screamed into it until my throat tasted of metal. I stayed on the cold tile afterwards until my breathing slowed because I knew that every minute I stayed away would make Daniel more curious.

When I finally looked in the mirror, the face looking back was young and well rested and had no cut on the lip from the fall on the ridge road. But my eyes were flat in a way I did not recognize, as though someone had turned down the light behind them. I washed my face, put on a sweatshirt, and went to find my sister.

The kitchen smelled of syrup and scorched butter, and I heard her humming before I saw her. I stopped in the doorway with one hand on the frame because my legs had gone weak at the sight of her whole, clean and alive, with no steel door between us. Elise stood at the stove in Daniel's oversized college sweatshirt with her damp hair twisted into a clip, flipping a pancake with the concentration of a surgeon. Her fingernails were painted chipped coral, and her shoulders had the loose, easy line of someone who had slept eight hours in a warm bed.

She turned around, saw me, and smiled.

It was not a forced smile, and it was not cruel. It was bright and open and a little sheepish, the smile of a twenty-four-year-old who knew she had burned the first batch and wanted forgiveness before I noticed. It was the smile I had worked fourteen years to earn, with double shifts and skipped meals and every scholarship form I had ever signed.

"Morning, sleepyhead," Elise said. "You look awful."

"Thanks."

"I mean that nicely." She crossed the kitchen and wrapped her arms around me, resting her chin on my shoulder. Though I felt her hands settle over my collarbones, they were the same hands that had pulled a lever on a wall. I did not scream, though I still can not say how I managed it.

What rose in my chest was not hatred, and I wished desperately that it had been because hatred would have been clean. It was love, still warm and still stupid and still completely functional, like a limb that has not yet been told it was cut off.

"You're crying," Elise said, drawing back.

"It was a bad dream."

"Oh, Mar." She wiped her thumb under my eye. "It was only a dream."

"Yes," I said, and I made myself smile. "I'm sure it was."

Behind her, on the counter, Daniel's phone buzzed against the granite. He stood at the coffee machine with his back to us, humming along with Elise now, the two of them off key in perfect harmony. The screen lit up where it lay faceup between the fruit bowl and a pile of mail, and I was close enough to read it.

Marcus, Hale Group: Ridge site passed final inspection. Mr. Hale wants the full structural team on site Friday for the door test. Bring your code.

The preview ended there, but I did not need the rest. I had stood on that ridge and watched a keypad glow green in a dead world, and I had heard Daniel say that nobody else knew the place existed. Yet here, three weeks before anyone had screamed, a stranger was already scheduling a test for the door.

Daniel turned, saw me reading, and slid the phone into his pocket with an easy motion. "Work stuff," he said. "It's boring."

"It sounds important."

"Not really." Elise glanced at him over her shoulder with a look I could not read. "Did you tell her yet?" she asked, and Daniel shook his head and said that he would tell me tonight because it was good news and he wanted to say it properly. Then he crossed the kitchen and pressed a mug into my hands, the chipped one with the faded lighthouse. "Eat something, Mar. You're too pale."

I took the mug and looked at my sister, flushed and glowing at the stove. And at the man I had been going to marry, smiling at me over the rim of his own cup. Sunlight came through the window above the sink and turned the whole room gold. The syrup was warm on the air, and nobody in that kitchen had any idea what I was.

I lifted the coffee to my lips so that I would not have to speak. Which had to use both hands to keep it from shaking, and that was when I heard it. It was a slow, patient mechanical tick, so faint that I took it for the refrigerator. It rose from somewhere beneath the floor, beneath the building, beneath the whole waking city. I held my breath and listened before I glanced at the clock above the stove, but its hands were moving in perfect silence.

The door I had died against already existed, and in four days, someone was going to test it. I did not yet know how, but before Friday, I was going to stand in front of that door again, and this time, I intended to be the one who decided whether it opened.