The Dark Vault

by Victoria Schwab

  “Okay,” I say, trying to keep up, “it’s real. I just want to know your full name.”

  “Why?” he snaps.

  “Because sometimes I don’t feel like I know the full you,” I say, grabbing his sleeve. I drag him to a stop. His eyes are bright, reflecting specks of mottled brown and green and gold. “The other girls here might think your air of mystery is cute, but I know what you’re doing—showing everybody different pieces and keeping the whole secret. And I thought…” I trail off. I thought if you could be honest with anyone, it would be me. It’s what I want to say, but I bite back the words.

  Wesley squints at me a little. “You’re one to talk about secrets, Mackenzie Bishop,” he says. But the words are playful. He turns to face me and surprises me by bringing his hands to rest firmly on my shoulders. My head fills with the cluttered music of his noise.

  “You want to know my full name?” he asks softly. I nod. He brings his forehead to rest against mine and talks into the small window of space between our lips. “When Crew are paired up,” he says, his voice easy and low over the sound of his noise, “there’s a ceremony. That’s when they have their Archive marks carved into their skin. Three lines. One made by their own hand. One made by their partner. One made by the Archive.” His eyes look down into mine. His words are little more than a breath between us. “The Crew make their scars and take their vows to the Archive and to each other. The vows start and end with their names. So,” he whispers, “when we become Crew, I’ll tell you mine.”

  And then the bell echoes through the gym, and he smiles and pulls away. “About time,” he says cheerfully, heading for the locker rooms. “I’m starving.”

  Da won’t talk about his Crew partner.

  He once said he’d tell me anything if I asked the right question, but somehow I never ask the right one to get him to tell me about Meg. He doesn’t even tell me her name; I learn it later, after he’s gone and I’m packing up his things.

  They all fit into one box.

  There’s a leather jacket, a wallet, a few letters—to Dad, mostly (and one to Patty, my grandmother, who left him before I was born). There are only three photos in with the letters (Da was never very sentimental). The first one is of him as a young man, leaning up against an iron fence, looking lean and strong and a little arrogant—really the only difference between young Da and old Da is the number of wrinkles on his face.

  The second one is of him with Mom and Dad and me and Ben.

  And the third one is of him with Meg.

  They stand close, shoulder to shoulder but for a small gap, Da tilting his head slightly toward hers. His sleeves are rolled down, but hers are rolled up, and I can see, even in the faded photo, the three parallel scars of the Archive carved into her forearm. It’s a mirror image of the one etched into Da’s skin, the two of them bonded by scars and oaths and secrets.

  Neither one of them is smiling in the photo, but they both look like they’re about to, and all I can think is that they fit. It’s not just the way their bodies nest, even without touching. It’s the knowing way they share the space, sensing where the other ends. It’s their mirrored almost-smiles, the closest I have ever seen Da to happy. I know so little of this woman, of Da’s days as Crew—only that he left. He told me he wanted to live long enough to train me himself (what would have happened if he’d died first? Would someone else have come?), but seeing him—this strange, vibrant, happier version of my grandfather—it hurts to think he gave her up for me.

  “Do you think they were in love?” I ask Roland, showing him the photo.

  He frowns, running a thumb over the worn edges.

  “Love is simple, Miss Bishop. Crew isn’t.” His eyes are proud and sad at the same time, and I remember that underneath the sleeves of his sweater, he bears the scars as well. Three even lines.

  “How so?” I press.

  “Love breaks,” he says. “The bond between Crew doesn’t. It has love in it, though, and transparency. Being Crew with someone means being exposed, letting them read you—your hopes and wants and thoughts and fears. It means trusting them so much that you’re not only willing to put your life in their hands, but to take their life into yours. It’s a heavy burden to bear,” he says, handing the picture back, “but Crew is worth it.”

  ELEVEN

  I TAKE A LONG, cold shower.

  Wesley’s touch lingers on my skin. His music echoes through my head. I remind myself as I scrub my skin that we are both liars and con artists. That we will always have secrets, some that bind us and some that cut between us, slicing us into pieces. That we will never see each other whole…until we become Crew. But I don’t know if I want to be Crew with Wesley. I don’t know if I’m willing to let him see all the pieces.

  I try to put his promise from my mind. It doesn’t matter right now. A world stands between me and Crew: a world of nightmares and trauma and Agatha. How do I tell Wesley that I might not make it to the ceremony, let alone the naming? Crew are selected. They are assessed. They are found fit.

  If Agatha got her hands on my mind right now, I would never be found fit. Which means I need to keep her from getting her hands on me until I find a way to fix whatever’s happening.

  I have to hope there is a way to fix it.

  A way that doesn’t involve letting the Archive inside my head to cut out memories. If I let them in, they’ll see the damage Owen did. The damage he continues to do.

  I snap the water off and begin to get dressed. The lockers have emptied out by now, but as I slip the key back over my head, shivering a little when the metal comes to rest against my sternum, Safia rounds the corner, focused on the braid she’s weaving with her hair. Until she sees me. Her eyes narrow even more than usual.

  “What’s that?” she asks as I pull my shirt on over the key.

  “A key,” I say as casually as I can.

  “Obviously,” she says, finishing her braid and crossing her arms. “Did he give that to you?”

  I frown. “Who?”

  “Wesley.” Her voice tightens a fraction when she says his name. “Is it his?”

  My hand goes to the metal through my shirt. I could say yes. “No.”

  “They look the same,” she presses.

  They don’t, actually. Wesley’s is darker and made of a different metal. “It’s just a stupid trinket,” I say. “A good luck charm.” I hold her gaze, waiting to see if she buys it. She doesn’t seem convinced. “I read it in some book when I was a kid. This girl wore a key around her neck, and wherever she went, the doors all opened for her. Maybe Wesley read the same book. Or maybe he kept losing his keys so he put them around his neck. Ask him yourself,” I say, because I can tell she won’t.

  Safia shrugs. “Whatever,” she says, tugging on one of her earrings. They look like real gold. “If you guys want to wear ratty old keys, that’s your choice. Try not to get tetanus.” With that, she turns and strolls out.

  My stomach growls, and I’m about to follow her when a sliver of metal catches my eye from beneath the bench. I kneel down and find a necklace: a round silver pendant on a simple chain. The pendant has been rubbed so much that the ornate B etched into its front is barely visible. I weigh it in my palm, knowing I should just leave it and hope whoever it belongs to comes looking for it. It’s not my problem. But the level of wear on the pendant suggests that it’s important to someone. It also means there’s a good chance a memory or two has been worn in to it. Object memories are fickle—the smaller the object, the harder for memories to stick—but they’re usually imprinted by either repetition or strong emotion, and this kind of token sees a fair amount of both. It can’t hurt to look.

  I glance around the locker room, making sure I’m alone before I pocket my ring. Instantly, the air in the room changes—doesn’t thicken or thin, exactly, but shifts—my senses sharpening without the metal buffer. Curling my fingers over the pendant, I can feel the subtle hum of memories tickling my palm, and I close my eyes and reach—not with my skin, b
ut with the thing beneath it. My hand goes numb as I catch hold of the thread, and the darkness behind my eyes dissolves into light and shadow and, finally, into memory.

  A girl—tall, thin, blond, classically pretty—sits in a parked car in the dark, face wet from crying, with one hand wrapped, knuckles tight, on the wheel and the other clutching the pendant at her throat. As I roll time back, the memory skips from the car to a marble kitchen counter. This time, the girl is on one side of the counter clutching her pendant, and a woman old enough to be her mother is on the other, gripping a wineglass. I let the memory roll forward, and a moment later the girl shouts something—her words nothing more than static—and the woman pitches the wineglass at the girl’s head. The girl cuts to the side and the glass strikes the cabinet behind her and shatters, and I swear I can feel the anger and the hurt and the sadness worn into the surface of the pendant.

  I’m about to rewind further when the sharp slam of the locker room door causes me to drop the thread. I blink, pulling myself out of the past just as Amber rounds the corner. I frown and straighten, slipping the necklace into my shirt pocket and sliding my ring back on as she says, “There you are! We were beginning to wonder if you’d snuck out a back door.”

  And before I can ask who we is, she leads me out into the lobby, where Wes and Cash and Gavin are waiting.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize anyone was waiting for me.”

  “Wouldn’t be much of an ambassador—” starts Cash, but Wes cuts in.

  “Thought you should probably know where they keep the food.”

  “The pizza yesterday was my treat,” adds Amber. “First day tradition. But the rest of the time we have to make do.”

  Gavin chuckles, and a few minutes later, once they’ve ushered me across the lawn to the cafeteria—or the dining hall, as Hyde prefers to call it—I understand why.

  “Make do”? Hyde has one of the most extensive kitchens I’ve ever seen. Five stations, each with a course—each course with a regular, healthy, vegetarian, and vegan option. Appetizer through dessert, and a station dedicated to drinks. The only major failing, I realize as another yawn escapes, is the lack of soda. The lack, in fact, of anything caffeinated. My body’s beginning to slow, and as I load up my tray I can only hope there’s some kind of black market caffeine business happening on campus. I ask Cash as much while we’re waiting to check out.

  “Alas,” he says, “Hyde School is technically caffeine-free.”

  “What about the coffees you brought yesterday?”

  “Swiped them from the teacher’s lounge. Don’t tell.”

  Looks like I’m on my own. It’s not so bad, I tell myself. I’ll be fine. I just need to eat something. And eating helps, for a little while, but half an hour later, when our trays are stacked on the Alchemist’s outstretched arms and I’m wading through a chapter of precalc, Owen’s voice begins to whisper in my head. It hums. The song reaches up from the back of my mind, out of my nightmares and into my day, wrapping its arms around me in an effort to drag me down into the dark. I close my eyes to clear it, but my head feels heavy, Owen’s voice twisting the melody into words and—

  “Is that today’s homework?”

  My head snaps up, and I find Gavin taking a seat on the step above me. I look down at the open math book in my lap and nod.

  “I take it that’s not,” I say, gesturing to the book in his hands.

  He shrugs. “You learn to work ahead here whenever you can. Because at some point, you’ll invariably fall behind.”

  I hold up my own work. “Does that point usually come in the first week?”

  He laughs. It’s a quiet, gentle laugh, not much more than an exhale, but it brightens his face. He pushes the glasses up his nose, and my chest tightens when I see a set of numbers drawn in Sharpie on the back of his hand. It’s such a stupid little thing, but it makes me think of Ben. Ben who drew a stick figure on my hand when I dropped him off at the corner near his school the day he died, who let me draw a stick-figure me on his hand to match before I let him go.

  So many students make notes on their skin; so few of them look like my brother. “Mackenzie,” says Gavin, articulating each syllable.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not a big deal or anything, but you’re kind of staring at me.”

  My gaze drops down to my work. “Sorry. You just remind me of someone.”

  He cracks open his book and takes the pen from behind his ear. “Well, I hope it’s someone nice.”

  Ben takes shape behind my eyes—not the way he was before he died, but the way he was the night I brought him back, the night Carmen opened his drawer and I woke him from his sleep. I see his warm brown eyes turning black as he slips, see him shoving me away with the strength not of a boy, but of a History. I see him crumple to the floor, a gold Archive key gleaming from his back, before Roland returns his small body to its shelf. I see the drawer closing and me on my knees, begging Roland to stop, but it’s too late, and the bright red Restricted bar paints itself across the drawer’s face before the wall of the Archive swallows my brother.

  The math problems on the page blur a little. Fatigue is catching up with me, weakening my walls. Everything is beginning to ache.

  “Mackenzie?” presses Gavin softly. “Is it someone nice?”

  And I somehow manage to smile and nod. “Yeah,” I say softly. “It is.”

  I can’t breathe.

  Owen’s hand is a vise around my throat.

  “Hold still,” he says. “You’re making it worse.”

  He’s pinning me to the cold ground, one knee on my chest, the other digging into my bad wrist. I’m trying to fight back, but it doesn’t help. It never helps. Not here, not like this, when he’s taking his time.

  And he is. He’s carving lines across my body. Ankles to knees, knees to hips, hips to shoulders, shoulders to elbows, elbows to wrists.

  “There,” he says, dragging the knife from my elbow down to my wrist. “Now we can see your seams.” If I could breathe, I would scream. My uniform is dark and wet with blood. It shows up red against the black fabric, like paint—splashed across my front, pooling beneath my body.

  “Almost done,” he says, lifting the blade to my throat.

  And then someone scrapes her chair against the floor and I snap back to English.

  Only a few minutes have passed—the teacher’s attention is still on the essay she’s reading aloud—but it was long enough that my hands are trembling and I can taste the blood in my mouth from biting down on my tongue.

  At least I didn’t scream, I think as I grip the desk and try to shake the last of the nightmare off. My heart is slamming in my chest. I know it’s not real. Just my imagination—today the role of Mackenzie Bishop’s fears will be played by the History who tried to kill her in a variety of ways. I still spend the rest of the day picturing Roland’s room in the Archive—the daybed with the black blanket, the violin whispering from the wall, the promise of dreamless sleep—and digging my fingernails into my palms to stay awake.

  By the time school lets out, there are red crescents across both palms, and I shove through the doors of the building and onto the path, gasping for air. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. I feel like I’m cracking. Everything aches, the pain drawing itself into phantom lines.

  Ankles to knees, knees to hips, hips to shoulders, shoulders to elbows, elbows to wrists.

  “Hey, Mac!”

  I open my eyes to find Wesley a little ways down the path, a sports bag slung over his shoulder. I must not be hiding the frayed nerves well enough, because he frowns. Cash is only a few strides behind him, talking to another senior guy.

  “All good?” asks Wes as casually as possible.

  “All good,” I call back.

  Cash and the other guy catch up. They’re both carrying sports bags.

  “Hey, Mac,” Cash says, shifting the bag on his shoulder. “Think you can find your way without me?”

  “I think I
can manage,” I reply. “The parking lot is that way, right?” I point in the opposite direction of the lot. Cash laughs. Wesley’s eyes are still hovering on me. I flash him a smile, Cash knocks his shoulder, and the three head off toward the fields.

  I take a last, steadying breath and head through campus to the front gate and the bike rack. I unlock Dante and swing my leg over the bike, and I’m just about to head home when I see a girl in the lot.

  I recognize her. It’s the girl from the pendant I found in the locker room. The one who clutched a steering wheel in a drive-way at night sobbing and dodged the glass her mother threw at her head.

  She’s a senior—gold stripes—and she’s standing with a group of girls in the lot, leaning up against a convertible and smiling with perfect teeth. Every inch of her has that manicured look that so often comes with money, and it’s hard to line this girl up with the one in the memories, even though I know they’re the same. Finally she waves to the others and strides up onto the sidewalk, walking away from Hyde’s campus.

  Before I even realize it, I’m following her. Every step she takes away from Hyde seems to weigh her down, changing her a fraction from the girl in the lot to the girl in the memories. I remember the anger and sadness worn into the pendant, and I will myself to call out. She turns around.

  “Sorry,” I say, pedaling up to her, “this is going to sound really random, but is this yours?”

  I pull the necklace from my pocket and hold it up. Her eyes widen and she nods.

  “Where did you find it?” she asks, reaching out.

  “The locker room,” I say, dropping the silver piece into her palm.

  Her perfectly plucked eyebrows draw together. “How did you know it was mine?”

  Because I read the memories, I think, and you keep bringing your hand to the place where it should be.

  “Been asking around all afternoon,” I lie. “One of the seniors in the lot just now said they thought it was yours and pointed me in this direction.”

  She looks down at the pendant. “Thanks. You didn’t have to do that.”