LOGINEvanThe first thing through the door was the smell, warm butter and cardamom and a little burnt sugar. Half the nursery turned toward it like sunflowers.I'd learned to be careful of anything that arrived with a pleasant smell. The old wolf had stood up behind my ribs, hackles lifting, and I felt him say pup, I do not trust a woman who brings gifts before she is asked.She's holding a box.That is my point.She stood on the mat in a camel coat and white trainers, with a tablet under one arm and a pastry box balanced on her palm like a waiter's tray. She was about forty, brown-skinned, bright-eyed, with a ponytail so high it looked like a decision. A lanyard swung at her chest. A pair of sunglasses sat pushed up in her hair, though it was dawn in a gray corridor with no sun in it.She looked at the tree, and the fire, and the wolf. Her whole face lit like a stage."Oh my God," said Verity Okafor-Lang. "It's better in person."YOUR FEET, said the wolf."Yes! Absolutely!" She wiped them
Hester VaneI should like it recorded that I opened the door myself.It is not a thing a reviewer is permitted to avoid. For ten thousand years, nobody had knocked on my door except to ask whether it was good. I put my spectacles on, handed my black book to the girl in the pinafore, and crossed the nursery while a hundred people watched me walk."Hester," said Odessa quietly. "You don't have to.""I do, rather." I took the blue knob in my hand. It was warm. "It is addressed to my profession. Somebody has left a review, and a review is owed a reply.""Is it?""It is the first rule of my trade, Mrs. Sorrel, and the only one I have never broken. A reader who has said something unkind has, at the very least, said something. One does not leave it on the step."Behind me, the pale green tree rustled. Another leaf had browned at the edge. I did not look.I opened the door.RhiannonI'd like to say I came to be cruel. I came because I was cold.My name is Rhiannon Pike. I'm thirty-four, and I
EvanThe laugh came again from the corridor, a girl's laugh, startled and delighted and a little embarrassed to be caught.Nobody moved. The page in Hester's book had gone still, the cursor holding its breath at the end of I'm so sorry about the mannequins. The wolf rose from her sill with every hair on end. Odessa's hand closed on mine.Pup, said the old wolf. That is not a villain's laugh.How do you know?Villains do not snort.The blue door opened.She stood on the sill with a cracked phone held in both hands like a lantern. It lit her face from below, a round brown face with a sleepy crease down one cheek from a pillow. She was about sixteen. She wore an oversized football jersey over striped pajama trousers and a satin bonnet slipping off one side of her head. A wrapper was thrown over her shoulders, and one end of a mosquito net trailed behind her on the gray corridor floor.She looked at the tree, the fire, the wolf, and the hundred weeping faces."Good evening," she said. "Ab
OdessaNobody answered the page for a long time.It hung from the bough among the other pale green leaves, a thin square of tissue turning in a draft that didn't exist. The words had stopped typing themselves. Would it be all right if I came to dinner? sat at the top in plain black font, and under it the cursor blinked, slowly, in the rhythm of someone who has her chin in her hand and has just said the bravest thing she knows."It could be a trap," said Josh. He had a dishcloth over one shoulder and a hammer in his belt, and he looked like a man who had been fooled by a map once and intended never to repeat it."It could," said Hester Vane."The last one who asked to come in nearly took a baby.""The last one who asked to come in was a Reader, and she turned to light and left us a pencil. I should be careful about generalizing." She took off her spectacles. "However, I take the point. Nobody in this household has ever been politely invited to anything that was not secretly a loan."Ev
TamsinI had the first watch, so I was the one who heard it.I'd taken it seriously. I had a stool by the flap, a bowl of fresh water, and Hester's sign-out sheet clipped to a board on my knee. The wolf lay across the threshold with one amber eye open, and Draven Hale stood against the wall with his hands behind his back, doing his best impression of a man who was not at all moved by a doorway. Neither of them had said a word in an hour. It was the most restful hour of my life.The knock came from the blue door, not the flap.It was three raps, then two. It was polite and a little breathless, the knock of someone who has been told to wait a long time and has run out of ways to do it quietly.I looked at the wolf. She looked at me.IT IS NOT MINE, she said. IT IS A DIFFERENT DOOR."Then who gets it?"YOU HAVE THE SHEET, said the wolf, with satisfaction. IT IS YOUR WATCH.I put down the clipboard and crossed the nursery in my stockinged feet. The little round door had been painted a rob
RuthI have been afraid of a blank page my whole life. I had never been afraid of one that was already full.I sat at my sister's table with the laptop in front of me and a nine-day-old baby standing on my knee, and I read the line the machine had typed by itself.It was a Tuesday, and the baby was screaming.It was a perfectly good first line. It was better than anything I'd written in ten years. My hands hovered over the keys without touching them, the way you hold them over a hot pan."Ruthie," said Dinah, very quietly. "What does it want?""For me to write it.""Do you want to?""I want to more than I've wanted anything." My voice came out cracked. "That's what frightens me."Lunet patted the edge of the screen with her inky palm. "Type," she said, in the voice of someone ordering soup."I'm not sure I'm allowed.""Who's going to stop you?"I looked at the cursor. It blinked at the end of the line, patient and thin and black, and for the first time in my life I wondered how long i







