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I start to pull back.

"Don't." Mercy's voice, low at my shoulder. "It learns from pulling."

So I hold still on my knees on a painted star in a room full of screaming, and I let the cold take my hand, and I count to three.

The pressure eases. It goes looking somewhere else along the line.

I take my hand back slowly, and it comes away wet with something that isn't water and dries before it drips.

"That's not the door," I say.

"That's the hinge." Mercy stands over the seam with her burned hands at her sides and doesn't reach for it, and I see that she can't. Not won't. Her fingers stop an inch above the floor the way they'd stop at glass. "You're the door, Maren. You always were. They only ever needed to get you standing in the right place."

I look up at the room.

I can see the circle now.

Not candles. That's the trick of it, and it's a good one. Three hundred people spent all night calling it decoration. From down here it's one continuous line of white wax running the whole perimeter of the ballroom, up the stairs, along the gallery rail, and where it closes on itself behind the punch table it's been finished with black feathered dominoes propped upright in the wax.

My dominoes. From my table. Under my awning.

They built the magic out of my inventory and rented it from me for forty dollars.

I stand up.

"Maren." Seraphine's voice comes across the wax. She's stopped pretending to be patient. "The minute is over."

"I know."

I've opened a ward with my mind and shut one with my whole body and neither of those is this. This is a line someone else drew across my floor, in my town, out of my merchandise, and it's holding three hundred people against the walls like animals in a pen.

I don't blow it out.

I reach for the place where it closes, the seam behind the punch table where wax meets wax, and I put my thumb on it the way you'd take a stitch out of a hem.

And I open my hand.

The line comes apart all the way around the room at once.

Every candle on that perimeter goes white, then goes out, three hundred wicks dying in the same half second with no smoke at all. The pressure of what’s been standing between me and the rest of my life is just gone, like a held note ending.

The barrier around me dissolves.

Air moves against my face. I hadn't understood I'd stopped feeling air.

"The doors," someone sobs. "The doors are still shut."

Right.

I turn toward the front of the house, and I think about eleven doors drifting open in Gage's hallway from a dead stop, and how frightened I was of myself that night.

Then I open every door in the Hollis mansion.

They go together, front and back and gallery and cellar and the little warped one under the stairs, and the cold October air comes through the whole building at once and lifts three hundred paper bats off the ceiling. People run. Ansel is in the back hall doorway with a dozen children going past him under his arms, and he doesn't look at anybody, and nobody looks at him. Cass is on the bottom stair with her hand under her ribs, and she isn't going anywhere, so she's pointing instead. That way. Go.

Gage crosses the ballroom.

The dead don't move.