Free Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

a knock at the door. Nancy and Jack both turned to see Kade stick his head inside.
    “The crowd has mostly dissipated, but I have to ask: Jack, did you kill Sumi?”
    “I’m not offended that you’d suspect me, but I’m offended that you think I’d kill for a pair of hands,” said Jack. She sniffed, squaring her shoulders. She looked suddenly imperious, and Nancy realized how much of Jack’s superior attitude was just a put-on, something to keep the world a little more removed. “If I had killed Sumi, there would have been no body to find. I would have put every scrap of her to good use, and people would be wondering for years whether she’d finally managed to pry open the door that would take her back to Candyland. Alas, I didn’t kill her.”
    “She called it Confection, not Candyland, but point taken.” Kade stepped into the room. “Seraphina and Loriel have taken Jill someplace quiet while we wait for everyone to calm down. We’re supposed to stay in our rooms and out of sight while Eleanor summons the city coroner.”
    Nancy stiffened. “What’s going to happen to us now?” she asked. “They’re not going to send us away, are they?” She couldn’t go back. Her parents loved her, there was no question of that, but their love was the sort that filled her suitcase with colors and kept trying to set her up on dates with local boys. Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn’t broken.
    “Eleanor’s been here for a long time,” said Kade. He shut the door. “Sumi was her ward, so there are no parents to involve, and the local authorities know what’s what. They’ll do their best to make sure this doesn’t shut us down.”
    “It would have been better had she not called at all,” sniffed Jack. “An unreported death is just a disappearance in its Sunday clothes.”
    “See, it’s things like that that explain why you don’t have many friends,” said Kade.
    “But Sumi was among them,” said Jack. She turned to look at Sumi’s side of the room. “If she has no family, what are we supposed to do about her things?”
    “There’s storage space in the attic,” said Kade.
    “So we box them up,” said Nancy firmly. “Where can we get some boxes?”
    “The basement,” said Jack.
    “I’ll go with you,” said Kade. “Nancy, you stay here. If anyone asks, we’ll be right back.”
    “All right,” said Nancy, and held herself perfectly still as the others walked away. There was nothing left to do but wait. There was peace in stillness, a serenity that couldn’t be found anywhere else in this hot, fast, often terrible world. Nancy closed her eyes and breathed down into her toes, letting her stillness become the only thing that mattered. Flashes of Sumi kept breaking her concentration, making it difficult to keep her knees from shaking or her fingers from twitching. She forced the images away and kept breathing, looking for serenity.
    She still hadn’t managed to find it when the others returned, the door banging open to Kade’s declaration of “We are ready to box the world!”
    Nancy opened her eyes and turned toward him, somehow mustering a smile. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”
    Sumi’s things were as tangled and chaotic as Sumi had been. There was neither rhyme nor reason to the way they were piled around her bed and dresser. A pile of books on candy making was tied together with a pair of training bras. A bouquet of roses folded out of playing cards was shoved under the bed, next to a frilly blue dress that didn’t look like something Sumi would ever have worn and a roast beef sandwich about a month past its “best by” date. Jack, who had put on gloves before they got to work, disposed of all the soiled or biologically questionable material without complaint: apparently, her squeamishness extended only as far as her bare skin. Kade sorted through Sumi’s clothing, folding it neatly before boxing it up. Nancy was fairly sure it would