Mislaid in Parts Half-Known (Wayward Children, #9)

by Seanan McGuire

I’m a friend to the desperate and daunted Companion to beggars and kings, I do not Envy the thrones of the mighty, I am content As the god of lost things. Only don’t ask me for hope or for innocence Keep this in mind as you pray I am the god of lost things but I cannot comfort you. —“The God of Lost Things,” Talis Kimberley

questions are like coats: you can turn them inside out when you need to hide from the fairies. Nothing sees you when you’re cloaked in a question with its seams showing.

“Every door is a little different, and every world they take us to is very different indeed, but they all ask the same thing of us, and they all break our hearts, in the end.”

Kade, with his steady, calming personality, the oldest student currently at the school, who never willingly spoke of the world on the other side of his door; Sumi, who was exactly the opposite of either steady or calming, whose parents were dead and who talked about the time she’d been murdered and resurrected in the same airy, careless tone she used when explaining why maple syrup was a natural topping for spaghetti and meatballs, why wouldn’t you want a little sweet with your savory?; Christopher, who was quick and cool and careful, who carried a flute made of bone that only Sumi could hear him play.

“Everyone’s a monster on Halloween, and that means no one’s a monster, and if there aren’t any monsters, you get to decide what ‘monster’ means.”

“None of us is normal, and we’ll either figure out how to pretend we are, or we’ll find our doors home, and then we won’t have to worry about it anymore, because all the ways we’re not normal are the way our real homes want us to be. We’re perfectly normal in the right environment.”

She was so beautiful that she could get anything she wanted, as long as she would just keep looking at you, keep paying attention to you, keep making you feel like the most important person in the world just because she thought you mattered enough to notice.

“I am, aren’t I? But what I’m not, in this world, is real. I’m so beautiful that no one can focus long enough to teach me anything, and no one can treat me impartially. All the teachers give me perfect grades, even when I turn in blank pieces of paper. The only person in this world who’s ever told me no left a long time ago, thanks to the only person who’s ever raised a hand against me. At least on the other side of my door, I had a chance. I could have a life. A person can’t live like this. You can’t be a person when you never have to work for anything, can you?”

“I swear, if I ever figure out how I turned out the responsible one, I’m going to start setting fires for fun.”

“So you helped and helped and you stayed and stayed, and you were steady and sturdy and not hollowed out by hope like the rest of us, and eventually that meant we all started to depend on you to be here when we needed you.”

It wouldn’t make sense for all these different places to develop the exact same ways of talking? But no one ever goes through a Door and finds themselves totally unable to talk to anybody around them. The Doors give us language when they give us passage, and take it back when we pass through again.

“Every time you open a Door, there’s a toll. It costs. I don’t know exactly how much, because it doesn’t take money, and it doesn’t tell you. You probably wouldn’t even notice unless it happened a whole bunch of times, over and over and over again.”

“The door wasn’t there because you have any obligations left to these people, or this world. It was there because sometimes people can’t let go of who they thought we were, and so they keep trying to tangle us in nets and drag us back. That doesn’t mean we have to go. Or if we do go, that doesn’t mean we have to stay.”

“People who can’t change aren’t really perfect, and no matter how much we love it somewhere, that doesn’t mean it’s good for us,”

“Just because someone hurt you when you were a child, that doesn’t make it right for you to hurt anyone else.”

“This is a Nexus. Worlds that have the strength to open Doors will open them here, as well as on whatever world waits on the other side. The travelers who reach this place can use it to move from world to world, with intent. With purpose. Doors that open here don’t require a perfect match the way they do when they open elsewhere. There’s no need to be sure. No need to be ideal. She could open Doors for every one of you, and send you onward to your heart’s desire, whether what you yearn for is your original destination, or another. Have you always yearned for a world someone else described to you? She could get you there, and as you would have come through a universal door, your conviction would have no power to eject you.”

“People who’ve been hurt often think they have some sort of right to go around hurting other people,” said Sumi. “They think trauma’s a toy to keep handing down forever. But the fact that someone hurt you and tied you up in knots doesn’t give you the right to do it to anybody else.

“Not wanting to look at a thing doesn’t make it not so; it just makes it so the thing can lurk and loom and leap out when you don’t expect it. If you want a life without terrible surprises, you should always look at the worst possible answer until you understand it all the way down to the bottom. Once you can do that, you’ll know what’s coming, even if you’ll never learn to like it.”

“What about me?” asked Sumi. “Refined sugar doesn’t exist.” Sumi’s eyes went wide. “This is hell. We’ve discovered an Underworld for certain, because this is hell, and everything that happens here is designed for torture and for torment.”

“I don’t think we get second chances with our own injuries,” said Sumi. “All we can really do is try to clean up all the broken glass before someone else gets there.”