But a question lingered, hot and spiny and horrible inside my head. If what Leviathan had said about my ability was true, then all of this was my fault. It might not have been the pixies, but I’d sure as heck done something to get this doorway open. And that doorway had sucked the missing magicals right into it, somehow. Leviathan had just flipped me out of the frying pan and into the proverbial flames of guilt.
Maybe he’s lying. Maybe it’s a game he’s playing. The strange, Irish-named place had sounded real enough, but the Door to Nowhere had a distinctly made-up, kid’s story vibe to it. And it seemed like the kind of thing that the Institute would know about, or that someone would have read in a book somewhere. They wouldn’t just build something on top of a powerful, mythical gateway… would they? That was just asking for trouble.
But a conflicting notion nagged at the back of my mind. What if he wasn’t lying? What if this doorway existed, and I’d opened it, and that was where the magicals had gone?
I decided to go with it, just in case.
“The Door to Nowhere is responsible for this. The Basanis built this Institute on sacred ground, and now the magical powers that be are pissed. I don’t know why they’ve chosen now to take their revenge, but it’s happening.”
Another slight omission of the truth. Leviathan had told me I was somehow responsible, but I didn’t think it wise to implicate myself when I was already implicated for something else. If I’d somehow opened the Door, maybe I was the only one who could get the missing people back and close it again. If not, people would keep on vanishing and the pixies would keep on getting blamed. If all the pixies were captured and people continued to disappear, Victoria’s theory would grind to a halt. But I didn’t want it to get that far—no one should have to suffer for Victoria’s stubbornness.
Victoria laughed. “That is a fairytale, Persie. An ancient legend that has no basis in reality whatsoever. Do you know how many places in Ireland claim to be the gateway to the land of Tír na nÓg? There are entire Internet pages dedicated to it. If you believe in that, I strongly urge you to avoid toadstool rings. As for the idea that the Institute is built on such a place,” she continued, opening her arms to indicate the facility, “that isn’t even mentioned in the most thorough of Internet chatrooms. I think there’s one nod to it in an old text somewhere, but that manuscript also posits the theory that Finn McCool threw a rock that turned into an island. So, I’ll let you be the judge of how reliable that source is.”
“There’s truth in legends, Ms. Jules.” Someone had told me that, my mom or Uncle Finch, or maybe Melody. Atlantis had been nothing but a legend for thousands of years, but it had been at the bottom of the ocean the whole time, as real as the surface world.
“Not this one.” Victoria walked to the door, prompting the pixie to disappear in a puff of green smoke. I prayed she hadn’t seen it wafting across my books. “Stop looking for other culprits, Persie, when the truth is staring you in the face. I know it’s hard for you to accept because these pixies are yours, but you need to come to terms with it. The simplest explanation is likely the right one. Pixies have been Purged for the first time in centuries. Fifteen people have gone missing so far.” She paused and hit me with a solemn stare. “And among them is your friend, Genie Vertis.”
After dropping that bombshell, she strode out and closed the door behind her.
Twenty-Two
Persie
Genie can’t be missing! No… no, no, no. She can’t!
An hour later, my thoughts were still leaping up and plunging low, leaving me with mental whiplash. I spun around and around in an endless vortex of panic and fury, fearing the worst—that ‘missing’ meant something else. That it meant gone, in the most final sense of the word: dead, or trapped, or hurt, or being tortured in some place I couldn’t reach her. As the terrifying possibilities kept coming, my nerves sang at fever pitch, making my skin crawl and my head hurt. I paced, I sat down, I leapt up, I paced some more. I wanted to scratch at the walls and kick down the door, just to get out and do something for my friend, in case it wasn’t too late to help her.
The cold manner in which Victoria had given me the news made me want to turn pixie and break everything in my room. Maybe if I set fire to the rug and the alarms went off, someone would come and let me out. But I had no means of starting a fire. The hunters had taken my lighter and anything remotely sharp when they’d locked me in here. And, to add insult to injury, Victoria had somehow taken my phone when I wasn’t looking, so I couldn’t have called the SDC even if she hadn’t put a block on outside communication.
Storming over to the door for the hundredth time that hour, I battered it as hard as I could. “Let me out of here! My friend’s in danger! LET ME OUT!” I heard footsteps in the hallway and a burst of cruel laughter, but nobody came to open the door. Like Einstein (or maybe someone else, no one knew for sure) said, this was the very definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I felt insane, and hopeless.
They’re treating me like a monster. My room wasn’t a glass box, but still… There were four walls and no
