I was deep in a book, as usual, and didn’t really pay attention when the door to our room opened and closed. But I looked up when Kevin, from the top bunk, said, “Looks like you’re new here, but they should have told you – no girls in guys’ rooms.”
The girl was about our age, late teens, but small for it. She was slightly on the ordinary side of pretty, with shoulder-length hair of an indeterminate brown, and her school uniform – which wasn’t our school’s uniform – hung a little loose where other girls our age would be getting curves. She looked worried.
“Do you have special powers?” she asked him. She had to tilt her head back to look at him up there, and her accent was North American. (I can’t tell a USAican from a Canadian unless they say “about”.)
“What?”, said Kevin.
“Do you have things you can do that are unusual? You do, don’t you?”
“He knows where everything and everyone is,” I said, and got the usual reaction people have when I speak – she gave a start, and looked at me wide-eyed.
“And people don’t notice me,” I added. Unnecessarily.
“I’m Marie,” she said. “I open doors.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a superpower,” said Kevin.
“I open doors between where I am and where things are that I need,” she said. “And right now I apparently need you guys.”
“I’m flattered,” said Kevin dryly. “There’s a nun coming up the stairs, by the way, so keep your voice down. While you continue explaining,” he added, when she didn’t reply immediately.
“Nothing more to explain,” she said, more quietly. “I opened the door to my room and it was the door to your room. Unfortunately my talent doesn’t include knowing why I need the things I find, but it always turns out that I do.”
“And I suppose you don’t know whether we need to go with you or whether we should stay here?”
“Nope. That a closet? I sometimes find things out if I open closets,” she said, and opened our wardrobe door.
Instead of assorted books, clothes, our slowly growing collection of camping gear and other such detritus, the door now led to the back of another cupboard – also full of books, but neatly arranged, multiple copies. They were textbooks, and we could hear the voice of Sister Mary Anselm, the principal.
“I’m sure that Sister Mary Martin will be back with the boys in no time, Mr Brown. So tell me more about this special programme they’ll be going to. It isn’t for gifted students, is it? Because Kevin is quite bright, but not exceptional, and, um, John…” She trailed off. I’m used to this. She couldn’t actually remember anything about me, my academic record or even what I looked like. If asked to list the members of my class, she would inevitably leave me off, and so would Sister Mary Martin, who was our form teacher. If I stayed still and said nothing, Sister Mary Martin would probably not even remember she’d been sent to get two boys.
“No, it’s just an opportunity for them to fulfill their full potential,” said a man’s voice, and Marie jumped and turned white.
She slammed the wardrobe door closed and opened it again. It now led somewhere dusty, ill-lit from high windows.
“You’ve got to come with me,” she told us, not shouting, but forgetting to keep her voice down. “No arguments or questions, just come.”
Something about her intensity convinced us. John leapt down off the top bunk, and I dropped my book and swung off the lower one. We were both barefooted, and we didn’t pause to grab shoes, or anything else, we just dashed past Marie into what should have been a cluttered wardrobe a little deeper than our forearms, but was now clearly a long corridor in a run-down building we’d never seen before.
She hurried through after us and pulled the door closed. Beyond her, as the gap we’d come through narrowed, I saw the handle turning on our bedroom door – no doubt Sister Mary Martin, who Kevin had sensed on the stairs.
Kevin was looking around. He’s tall and lanky and not actually athletic as such, but likes doing physical things, running round and throwing and catching. But he’s not so good at it that he’s in any school teams or anything, he just does it for fun. He has kind of a heavy face with big jawbones, and straight straw-coloured hair.
“Where are we?” he asked. He was taking it all pretty calmly on the outside, but I knew him well enough to know that he’d be freaking quietly out.
“No idea,” said Marie, without apparent concern. “Where we need to be, I imagine.”
Judging by the decor, we were in the premises of Bland and Company, Licensed Boring Merchants, and it had shut down some years ago after several decades of heavy daily use. Everything was dull colours (a different set of dull colours from the institutional dull colours our school was painted in, but from the same kind of imagination). The industrial linoleum floor was scuffed and dusty, the plastered walls cracked and dinged here and there, and a few of the high windows, which had that wire grid stuff embedded in the glass, were cracked as well. You couldn’t see out them, but it seemed to be a dull day, which was funny because it had been sunny where we’d just left. I wondered how far we’d come.
John got that look he gets when he’s trying to locate something or someone, kind of like his eyes go distant so he can see where they are. Then the blood drained out of his face and he collapsed messily to the floor.
Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
