DawnBringer

Hayley Marrow is eighteen, works the dawn shift at a Bay Street deli, and has never set foot on the Staten Island Ferry. Her aunt Miriam has rules for everything. Turn every lock twice. Never open to a single knock.

On Halloween night the candles light themselves and a pleasant voice at the door asks Miriam to send the girl out. Miriam holds the door so Hayley can run. By morning her aunt is gone, and the fire locked in Hayley's chest for eight years is awake. The Lockmouths want to teach her. The Court wants her to open a door. And Cass, the Court's runaway choirboy, is keeping a secret.

Her aunt spent eight years keeping her small and safe.
The Court of Shadows has other plans.

Six weeks after she locked a door in a Mariners Harbor dry dock, Hayley Marrow cannot walk down Bay Street without the streetlights dying over her head. She is nineteen and unwarded. Her aunt Miriam is alive in a room with no door at the bottom of the sea.

Then a woman with a federal badge that names no agency takes a stool at the deli counter. Dario Marcelli calls in his favor. And Hayley learns of a second lock, set when she was thirteen, and that Cass, the boy she kissed in the snow, helped make her forget. To reach Miriam she must follow her own blood back to the mother she cannot remember.

Every lock takes something true.
This time the price runs in her blood.

Nine months after the Gate, a shape in her aunt's soaked keeper's coat walks into Vidalia's Deli every Tuesday at ten past six. It orders egg and cheese, leaves a dry twenty on the counter, and never eats. It has no face. It has Hayley's hands.

Hayley Marrow turns twenty in January. Miriam has been under the sea fourteen months. The ring that can carry Hayley down sits in a box belonging to Agent Catherine Ambler. Going down means a deal with Ambler and a guide from the Order whose letter came sealed in violet wax. Cass sleeps in the room over the deli because she asked him to. Neither of them has said why.

She is going down for Miriam.
Something down there has been waiting for her.

Hayley Marrow and Cass have promised each other a year of ordinary. Two rooms over a locksmith. A table with no burns. Cass across it, counting days. Miriam home on Bay Street, laying her palm on the green front door every night. But a violet rose appears on a locked windowsill, the feather lines on Hayley's arms are fading, and the voice that answers that door with Miriam's mouth is a little too warm.

In September the air over the Narrows opens for nine seconds. By spring Hayley is twenty-one and Cass has asked her a new question on a roof. By summer, doors are opening in the walls of a dozen cities.

A year of ordinary was the whole plan.
The sea has its hand on the door.

Two years after the Sky opened over the harbor, Hayley Marrow is presumed drowned. On Fire Island she goes by Nell Wyck and asks doors not to stick. She knows four hundred and twelve families believe she burned their own, because she did. She knows she loved Cass. She paid away what it felt like.

Then Dario Marcelli steps off the last boat of the season with his family's ledger, and every flame on the island leans northwest. At twenty-three, Hayley follows the pull up the river to a burning tree in the Catskills. Isaura is waiting there, beside a door built eleven thousand years ago. The door is wearing out.

She has spent two years not asking.
The fire will not wait for her to be ready.