For a moment, I stood there with my mouth hanging open, then I leapt for Kevin at the same time as Marie. We bumped heads and bounced off each other. She looked straight at me – I suppose hitting your forehead on someone makes you notice them – and said, “You check that he’s OK, I’m going to open a door.”
I knelt down beside him and checked his breathing, which he still had some of. That was about all the first aid I remembered in the heat of the moment. Meanwhile, with the hand that wasn’t clutching her bruise, Marie flung open the nearest door, the one we’d just come through. As I probably should have expected, it now led to a small sick bay with a cot (complete with blankets and pillow) and a large first aid kit on a shelf.
Kevin is bigger than either of us, and it took a determined effort from us both to haul him into the room and up onto the cot. I noticed a first aid manual in the kit and was just paging through the index looking for “fainting” when he stirred and moaned.
“Kevin,” I said, “what happened, mate?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them wide. “Ow,” he said. “Headache.”
I fished some pain pills out of the kit and looked around to see that Marie had run a glass of water for him to take them with. He sipped and swallowed. His colour was rapidly improving.
“Not like you to pass out,” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “I think it’s the distance. How far did you bring us, anyway?” he asked Marie. She shrugged with one shoulder, turning her hands up in the “who knows?” gesture.
“I don’t pick the destinations,” she said. “I don’t even know where you guys are from. I’m guessing not Toronto.” So she was Canadian.
“Auckland,” he said. “New Zealand,” I clarified.
“That’s… a long way,” she said. I noticed she was wearing a winter uniform, not a summer one. “I didn’t know I could do that.”
“Yeah, and we’re a long way from there again,” said Kevin. “I think that’s why I passed out. My talent, knowing where things are? I think I… sort of reach out to them in my mind. When I’m away from school in the holidays, I can tell where people are and where the school is, but it’s fainter, like a radio station that’s based a long way away. Auckland is that way,” he said, and pointed through a wall, not in the direction we’d come from, “but it’s fainter than I’ve ever felt it.”
“So, you kind of got disoriented?” I asked.
“Something like that. Your talent seems unaffected,” he pointed out – Marie had just started again when I spoke. “She forgot you were here in what, twenty seconds?”
“Great,” I said in a that’s-not-great voice.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Not your fault. I put out some kind of damper wave, I think. There’s a part of the brain which people use to tell where things are, and if you damage it, you can still navigate round them but you’re not conscious that they’re there. I think I shut that part of the brain down in everyone except Kevin, but only for noticing me. They notice everything and everyone else.”
“I always thought mine was just magic,” she said, and turned back to Kevin. That’s the other thing – people’s tolerance for listening to me talk seems to stop after two or three sentences, at best.
“How are you feeling now?” she asked.
“Better,” he said. “The headache’s passing off. At risk of getting another one – can you tell us why you hurried us through the wardrobe like that?”
“That man,” she said, “Mr Brown. He came for me as well. I actually went with him, too, but something didn’t feel right, he wasn’t answering any questions, and I opened a door and escaped.”
“How long ago?”
“Yesterday.”
“Where did you sleep?”
“I don’t know, I opened a door and there was a bed.” There was a certain element of “Haven’t you got it yet?” in her tone.
“Must be convenient.”
“Sometimes. I usually try to let other people open doors instead of me, though, because I don’t want to suddenly end up somewhere else or have someone see and freak out.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said. We shared a reflective silence, reviewing various incidents in our minds – I was, anyway, and I assume they were too.
“OK,” Kevin said after a while, “I think I’m all right now.” He put his bare feet down on the floor and winced. “We’ll need shoes if we’re going to stay here. I think we must be back in the Northern Hemisphere.” He stood up, a little cautiously, and took the two steps out the door – where he stumbled, and caught himself against the wall as he passed through.
“Wah,” he said. “Mental compass just spun again. I don’t think the sick bay is in the same building.”
“Probably not,” I said, “it looks abandoned here, and the sheets on the cot were fresh.”
“That is one strange power you have,” he said to Marie, but his tone was more respectful than complaining.
“What happens if we don’t close the door?” I asked. “Do the people who own the sick bay now have a door that doesn’t lead anywhere?”
Marie did her one-shoulder shrug again. “I always close them when I’m finished.” She did so, and we stood in the dusty hall in front of a chipped plywood door that could lead anywhere in the world, as long as Marie was the one opening it. I shivered, not entirely from the cold – we were definitely in winter here.
“Come on,” said Kevin, “let’s poke around since we’re here. Maybe you can open a door and find us some wooly socks.”
“And a vacuum,” she said, and sneezed. “And some food, and a microwave. It’s dinnertime.”
“It’s ten in the morning,” I said.
“Not in Toronto it isn’t.”
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.
