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Lundy, since coming back from the GoblinMarket for the last time, had become quite good with numbers.
When Eleanor West invited her to a third home, to teach the children that were coming after, she knew she had forty-eight years left. Her body had eleven, technically speaking, but the Market and the Archivist had given her forty-eight.
She arrived at the school and continued her already extensive journey of learning even more than she had already know. Her lack of knowledge and cleverness had been her downfall in the Market, but it was going to be her greatest advantage here.
She turned one empty room of the mansion into a giant chalkboard, with the Compass and its rules taking up one entire wall, and a series of bookshelves covered another.
Eleanor mostly let her be for those first couple of years, treating her more like one of her children than a colleague. Then, when Lundy got her therapist's license, she began trying to help the others too. She could never go back to her world, she had broken the rules, but what if everyone else here was just in the same type of problem she had been? They just didn't know enough to make the right choice. So she taught them.
Lundy taught the girl who had lived in silence the way sound bounced off surfaces, and how to minimize it. She taught her how to breathe quieter, to move quieter, and at one point even how to not react if she was struck. That was how she had been kicked out. It wouldn't happen again.
She taught the boy who had lived with skeletons- not the same as Christopher would come to know, but similar- every bone in the body, until he could identify them even at the height of sleep deprivation, and he was better than any doctor in this world.
She taught the child who had gone to a world where they could never speak certainties how to never talk plainly. These were her favorite, the rules of talking and how to play the game. She was good at it now. She replayed every moment of her life up until two days before she turned eighteen and she knew that she could do it right this time. She talked and trained with the child for hours every day, until she knew they would never say a certainty again.
But slowly, none of them ever found their doors, and Eleanor had to gently tell Lundy she was hurting her students, and this could not go on.
Lundy pulled back from the students, and dove deeper into her calculations. Her body was eleven, and she was the cleverest one in the school. She knew that the doors didn't care about the people they were inviting in, only that it was a fun new distraction for the worlds they were entrances to.
She grew to resent her Goblin Market, thinking for sure that it had all been a setup, an impossible choice, a living ethics puzzle of what to choose- the life she had known that was begging her to stay, or her perfect life that was pleading with her to come back.
But then she met Juliet. A girl that looked five years her senior who had gone to a world of science. Not the lightning science of the Moors, but numbers and calculations and space.
Juliet had been the youngest and one of the most proficient members of this world's space force, colonizing a nearby planet. She had been on the crew that made contact with the first alien race, and she had made peace with them.
Juliet explained in clear, mathematical terms why she believed the doors were kind. How they did not act out of malice, but as an outlet for those children desperate for an escape. She didn't hate her world for losing her. She had been on a mission on the alien planet when her bioskin- the equipment that kept her alive- failed spectacularly.
Even as she was working to fix it before the extreme levels of radiation could seep in, she had been running back towards the base, when the ground below her swung open and she plummeted back to Earth, landing squarely on a trampoline in her neighbor's backyard.
She said the doors were trying to save her, to keep her from dying in one world or the other. Then she fixed Lundy with a crooked grin and said she hoped it kept working. Then she helped Lundy calculate how much more her body could take as it aged backwards, and entertained debates on fair value. It was precarious, to say the least, between one who had lived with the system and one who was sure it could all break down into numbers.
Lundy received her first happy heartbreak when Juliet came up missing, along with her favorite hijab the color of her stars.
She started to think that maybe the doors could be kind, that the students could find their ways home. But she had none of Eleanor's Nonsense hope, and she was quickly learning that she would see more lost causes than found doors. Lundy, her body at age ten, began to warn the students about lightning striking twice.