Incomplete

The door opened a little way, and stopped.

It happened in the evening, in the square, with the light going out of the sky. Behind the kneeling man, on the far side of the fountain, a seam had appeared in the air. It was a thin bright vertical crack, like a gap between curtains, and through it came a faint, clean, silvery glow. It was the light Archie remembered from Thornkeep, from Ashmore, from the hatch on Meridian-7. It was the light of a way forward.

It was about a hand's breadth wide.

"It's open," said Zoe.

"Partly," said Jin.

"Why only partly?"

"Because we've done two of three." He had come up beside her, quietly. In the dying light his face was drawn and gray. "She said it, in the instructions. Whoever would pass. It's not a door for one person. It's a door for a party. All of us, or none."

"But I did it. You did it."

"Yes."

"So why's it only—"

"Because it's counting," said Jin.

He did not say what. He didn't need to. They both looked at the man on his knees.

…

Night came to the Mirror World as a slow thickening of the gray.

They made camp where they stood, because nobody could think of anything else to do. Jin found blankets in a shuttered haberdasher's and a tin of biscuits that had gone hard as stone. Zoe lit a fire in the dry fountain, out of broken chairs. The flames burned a pale, thin, sickly color, and threw no heat, but she sat close to them anyway, with her arms around her knees.

Faces had begun to gather at the edge of the square.

They came out of the dark one by one, as the news traveled. A woman in a gray coat. A boy in a blue one. An old man with a stick. A pair of girls in school uniforms, holding hands. They stood in a loose half-circle, at a respectful distance, in the firelight, and every one of them had a face. They were not remarkable faces. They were plain, tired, ordinary. But they were new, and they wore them as people wear a new coat, with a kind of baffled, grateful wonder.

"What do they want?" whispered Jin.

"I think they're waiting," said Zoe.

"For what?"

"For him."

Archie sat at the foot of the fountain, a little apart. He had not spoken since the mirror. He had not moved, except to draw up his knees. His eyes were open, and fixed on the cracked stone before him, and the pale firelight made hollows of his cheeks.

The woman in the gray coat took a step forward.

"Excuse me," she said, shyly.

Nobody answered.

"I only wanted to say." She twisted her hands together. "Thank you. Both of you. For, for the faces. I didn't know I'd lost it. I thought it was only how things were." She smiled, hesitantly. "I'd like to see my daughter's. Tomorrow. If she'll let me."

"I'm sure she will," said Zoe, in a thick voice.

The woman bowed. She backed away. And as she melted into the dark, Archie lifted his head and looked at the narrow bright seam in the air, and a sound escaped him, like a man being struck.

…

Zoe came to him at midnight.

She did it without a word. She crossed the square in the thin blue dark and sat down on the stones beside him, close, but not touching. She had a blanket round her shoulders. Her hair was pushed behind her ears. She looked, in the firelight, about sixteen years old.

For a long time they sat together in silence.

"Jin says we can't wait forever," she said at last.

"I know."

"The door's not stable. It'll shrink, if we don't go. Tomorrow, the day after."

"I know."

"We could leave. You know that. We could go through without you and you'd stay." Her voice was very quiet. "He won't let us. I won't. But we could."

"You should."

"Don't be an idiot."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." She turned her head. "Archie, look at me."

He did. It took an enormous effort. Her face was swollen with weeping and tight with exhaustion, and in the pale light her eyes were very large and dark and clear.

"You were wrong," she said.

He flinched.

"I want you to hear that, because I mean it. You were wrong. You should have stayed. We should all have stayed, and risked the door. Venn deserved that. He deserved a lot better than what he got." She drew a breath. "I'm angry. I'm still angry. I think I'll be angry for a long time. I don't forgive you. Not yet. Maybe not ever."

"I know."

"But." She stopped. She looked at the fire. "But I've been thinking. About what I did, in front of the mirror. About the woman in the glass. She was awful, Archie. She let my mother die. I looked at her, and I wanted to scream, and then I thought: no. That's me. That's what I could have been." Her voice cracked. "And I said yes to her. I held her hand. And she wasn't gone. She's still in there. She's part of me, and she'll be there when I'm eighty."

"You're not her."

"No. But I'm not not her." She laughed a little, wetly. "That's what it means. That's the whole thing. You don't get to throw away the worst bits. You have to carry them. You have to live with them."

"I can't."

"You can."

"I can't." It tore out of him. "I left him, Zoe. I left Venn in the dark, with a hole in his chest, and I walked away. How do you live with that? How? I keep thinking, if I could go back, if I could just. If I could take it back."

"You can't."

"I know."

"So you have to live with it instead of dying of it."

He stared at her.

"That's all there is," she said. "You made a terrible choice. You did. And now you have two options. You can carry it, and walk, and try every day to be a better man than the one who made it. Or you can lie down on these stones and let it crush you." She wiped her cheek. "And if you do the second, Archie, it won't help Venn. It won't bring him back. It won't pay for a single minute of what he lost. It'll just. It'll take away one more person who loved him."

The fire hissed.

"I don't think he'd want that," said Zoe softly. "I think he'd be very, very angry."

He put his face in his hands.

She did not touch him. She sat there for a long time, a few inches off, with the blanket round her shoulders and her eyes on the flames. At length, so quietly that he almost missed it, she added:

"You have the right to live, Archie. Even now. Especially now."

…

At dawn, the seam in the air had narrowed.

It was the width of a finger. It shimmered faintly, a thread of silver in the gray, and through it came the faintest breath of air, cold and clean and smelling of rain. Jin stood in front of it with his hand upraised, as though he could keep it open by willpower. His lips moved. His jaw was clenched.

"An hour," he said. "Perhaps less."

"What happens then?"

"We're locked in."

"For how long?"

"For good."

Zoe was beside him. She did not look at Archie. She looked at the door. But her hand, behind her back, was open, palm up, and a little away from her body.

She's waiting, he thought.

He stood.

It was an effort. His legs had gone numb. He swayed, and caught himself, and stood in the middle of the square in the colorless early light with his arms hanging at his sides. He looked at the mirror. It had come back in the night, silently, the tall black frame at the edge of the stones, and in it the man in the gray suit stood waiting with his paper cup.

This is also I.

He could say it. He knew he could. He had only to open his mouth and force the words out, like a splinter from a wound. He could do it now, in anger, in despair, in a blind spasm of self-loathing, and the door would widen a little, enough, perhaps, to pass through. He felt that with a sort of dull certainty. He didn't have to mean it. He had only to say it.

But would that be enough?

Or he could lie down. He could turn his back on all of it, the mirror and the door, and let the silver thread close. Zoe and Jin would go on without him. They would find a way. They were stronger than he was. They had always been. He could stay here, in the gray, in the stillness, where no one needed anything, where nothing could be lost.

It would be so quiet.

Behind him, the woman in the gray coat watched with her new face. The boy in the blue one watched. The old man with the stick. A hundred pairs of eyes, in the cold dawn light, and not one of them said a word.

The seam in the air flickered.

Zoe's hand, behind her back, trembled very slightly in the cold.

Archie looked at it. He looked at the mirror. He felt the silence settle round him like a hand.