Chapter 1: The Amber Door
The corridor should not have existed.
Mira Ashworth pressed her palm flat against stone that was warm where stone had no business being warm, and behind her the door was already closing, sealing itself shut with a sound like a held breath finally let go. Somewhere ahead, lanterns burned with a light that was not quite orange and not quite gold, and the air smelled of rain that had not fallen yet. Her own front door was gone. Her dining room, gone. The half finished essay on the Treaty of Versailles that had started all of this, gone, replaced by a hallway that curved away into a dark she could not name and a voice, low and unimpressed, coming from somewhere just behind her shoulder.
"You should not be here," the voice said. "And you certainly should not have wished for it."
That was several minutes after the moment that mattered. First, the essay.
It had begun, as most disasters in Mira's life began, with homework. She was sixteen years old, sitting cross legged on the floor of her aunt Lenora's antique shop because the shop had better lighting than her bedroom and better snacks than the library, and she had been staring at the same paragraph about reparations and war guilt for forty minutes without absorbing a single fact. The shop was closed for the evening. Dust motes drifted through the last of the daylight. Aunt Lenora had gone upstairs to make tea, leaving Mira alone among the shelves of chipped teacups, tarnished mirrors, and the one item she was under strict instructions never to touch.
It stood in the back corner, half draped in a canvas sheet, and it was, undeniably, a door. Not a door built into a wall, not a door that led anywhere sensible, just a door, freestanding, its surface the color and texture of amber frozen mid drip, with a handle shaped like a closed fist. Aunt Lenora called it the amber door and refused to say where she had acquired it, which in Mira's experience meant either something illegal or something worse.
Mira had looked at that door roughly four hundred times over the two years her aunt had owned the shop. She had never touched it. She had certainly never spoken to it.
But it was nine at night, she had a paper due in eleven hours, and the sentence in her textbook about the Treaty of Versailles's Article 231 was doing absolutely nothing to help her understand why anyone in the twentieth century had thought any of this was a good idea. She closed the laptop. She looked at the door, because it was there, because it was strange, because some small reckless part of her brain had decided that talking to furniture was a reasonable coping mechanism for academic despair.
"I wish," she said, mostly joking, mostly to herself, "that I could just disappear from this entire assignment and never think about world history again."
She meant it the way anyone means that kind of thing. A complaint dressed up as a wish. A joke with no teeth.
The amber door did not agree that it was a joke.
The fist shaped handle turned on its own, slow and deliberate, like something waking up after a very long sleep. Light bled out from the seam where the door met its frame, not lamplight, not anything Mira had a word for, and the canvas sheet slid to the floor as though an invisible hand had pulled it away. Mira had time to think, distantly, that this was the part in a story where the sensible character backed away and called for an adult.
She was not the sensible character. She stood up. She reached out. Her fingers touched the handle, and the world she had lived in for sixteen years folded itself neatly away like a page being turned, and she was somewhere else.
Now, standing in a corridor that smelled of unfallen rain, Mira turned to find the source of the voice and discovered a boy about her own age leaning against the wall with the particular posture of someone who found the entire situation exhausting rather than alarming. He had dark hair that looked like it had never once cooperated with a comb, a long gray coat that belonged in a different century, and an expression that suggested he had delivered this exact speech many times before and was already tired of delivering it again.
"Who are you," Mira said, which was not the most useful question available to her, but it was the first one that arrived.
"Kade," he said, as though that settled everything. "Warden of the door you just broke."
"I didn't break anything. I made a wish. There's a difference."
"Not here." Kade pushed off the wall and studied her the way Mira's aunt studied a piece of pottery she suspected was a fake, close and critical and faintly disappointed. "Here, a wish spoken with real feeling behind it is the same as turning a key. You turned it. Congratulations. You're the first person to open that door from your side in about a hundred years, and you did it over a homework assignment."
"It wasn't just about the homework." Mira crossed her arms, because it was easier than admitting how much her hands were shaking. "It was about every single thing I have to do by myself because my parents are on the other side of the planet for their jobs, and my aunt has a shop to run, and I am so tired of being the only person handling my own life that when a magic door offered me an exit I took it, so forgive me for not reading the fine print on a piece of furniture."
Kade's expression flickered, just barely, something that might have been surprise or might have been recognition, and then it smoothed back into irritation so fast Mira almost doubted she had seen it at all.
"That's the trouble with wishes," he said, quieter now. "The world doesn't care about the feeling behind them. It only cares about the words. You wished to disappear from the assignment and never think about history again. Congratulations again. You've disappeared. You are, as of about four minutes ago, entered into the Ledger as a resident of Veylorien, and the version of you that exists back home is already starting to fade from everyone's memory."
The floor did not literally drop out from under Mira, but it felt like it should have.
"Fade," she repeated. "Fade how much."
"Depends how long you stay." Kade started walking, and after a beat of pure stunned stillness, Mira hurried to catch up, because staying alone in a corridor that smelled like unfallen rain seemed considerably worse than following the annoying boy who at least appeared to know where the exits were, if there were any. "There's a rule. Every wish gets recorded in the Ledger of the Threshold, and every recorded wish comes with a deadline. Three full moons, counted from tonight. If you haven't unmade the wish by the third moon, it becomes permanent. Your family keeps a blurry sort of memory, like someone they used to know in a dream, and you stay here."
"That's not a rule, that's a nightmare with paperwork."
"Most rules here are." For the first time, something that was almost a smile crossed his face, gone as quickly as it appeared. "Welcome to Veylorien."
They walked. The corridor opened, eventually, into a wider hall lit by those strange not quite gold lanterns, and Mira caught glimpses through archways of things she did not have names for yet, a courtyard where the trees grew upside down with their roots in the open air, a fountain that poured light instead of water, a market square she could hear but not yet see, full of voices haggling in a language that sounded like her own but was not quite. It should have terrified her more than it did. Instead, underneath the fear, there was a small, treacherous flicker of something that felt uncomfortably close to wonder.
"Why do you care," Mira asked, when the silence had stretched long enough to feel strange. "You said I'm not the first person to open the door. So why walk me through this instead of handing me off to whoever handles this sort of thing."
Kade did not answer right away. When he did, his voice had lost its edge, gone quiet and careful in a way that made Mira suspect she had accidentally asked something he did not usually let people ask.
"Because your wish and my curse are tangled together now, whether either of us likes it or not," he said. "I am bound to this threshold until the last wish made against it is unmade. Yours is the last wish. Which means, unless you find a way to take it back before the third moon, I don't just watch you fade from your world."
"What happens to you."
He turned to look at her directly for the first time since they had started walking, and there was something in his face, something guarded and old and tired in a way that did not match a boy who looked seventeen at most, that made the question feel far heavier than she had meant it.
"I forget I was ever anything but this," he said. "Every memory I have of being something other than a Warden goes with it. So you'll forgive me if I have a personal stake in getting you home, Ashworth, whether or not either of us is enjoying the company."
Before Mira could decide whether to be offended or oddly comforted by that, a sound rolled through the hall behind them, a deep chime like a bell struck once underwater, and every lantern in the corridor dimmed at once, as though the entire palace, or building, or whatever this place was, had just taken a sharp breath in.
Kade went very still.
"That's the Ledger," he said, and for the first time since she had met him, four minutes and one entire world ago, he sounded genuinely alarmed. "It only rings like that when a new wish gets entered."
"That's my wish. That's what you already told me."
"No." He was already moving, fast, back the way they had come, and Mira had to run to keep up. "Your wish rang four minutes ago. That's a second one. Someone else just wished on the amber door, from your side, tonight, within minutes of you."
Mira's stomach dropped somewhere past her shoes.
"Who," she managed. "Who else was even near it."
Kade did not slow down, and when he answered, his voice was flat with the particular calm of someone doing quick, unwelcome math.
"I don't know yet," he said. "But the Ledger only opens the door twice in one night for one reason. It means someone is trying to follow you in."