“I won’t slip,” he said, drawing an X on his shirt in white chalk. “Cross my heart,” he said. And then he reached out and took my hand, and I woke up.
What if?
It is a dangerous thought, like a nag, like an itch, like a prickle where my head meets my neck, where my thoughts meet my body.
I swing my legs off the bed.
“All Histories slip,” I say aloud.
But not Owen, whispers another voice.
“Yet.” I say the word aloud and shake away the clinging threads of the dream.
Ben is gone, I think, even though the words hurt. He’s gone. The pain is sharp enough to bring me to my senses.
I promised Owen a day, and as I get dressed in the half dark, I wonder if I’ve waited long enough. I almost laugh. Making deals with a History. What would Da say? It would probably involve an admirable string of profanity.
It’s just a day, whispers the small, guilty voice in my head.
And a day is long enough for a grown History to slip, growls Da’s voice.
I pull my running shoes on.
Then why hasn’t he?
Maybe he has. Harboring a History.
Not harboring. He’s not on my—
You could lose your job. You could lose your life.
I shove the voices away and reach for the slip of Archive paper on my bedside table. My hand hovers above it when I see the number sandwiched between the other two.
Evan Perkins. 15.
Susan Lank. 18.
Jessica Barnes. 14.
As if on cue, a fourth name adds itself to the list.
John Orwill. 16.
I swear softly. Some small part of me thinks that maybe if I stop clearing the names, they will stop appearing. I fold the list and shove it in my pocket. I know the Archive doesn’t work that way.
Out in the main room, Dad is sitting at the table.
It must be Sunday.
Mom has her rituals—the whims, the cleaning, the list-making. Dad has his too. One of them is commandeering the kitchen table every Sunday morning with nothing but a pot of coffee and a book.
“Where are you off to?” he asks without looking up.
“Going for a run.” I do a few impromptu stretches. “Might go out for track this year,” I add. One of the keys to lying is consistency.
Dad sips his coffee and offers an absent nod and a hollow “That’s nice.”
My heart sinks. I guess I should be glad he doesn’t care, but I’m not. He’s supposed to care. Mom cares so much, it’s smothering; but that doesn’t mean he’s allowed to do this, to check out. And suddenly I need him to care. I need him to give me something so I know he’s still here, still Dad.
“I’ve been working on those summer reading books.” Even though it’s a crime against nature to do homework in July.
He looks up, face brightening a little. “Good. It’s a good school. Wesley’s been helping you, right?” I nod, and Dad says, “I like that boy.”
I smile. “I like him too.” And since Wes seems to be the trick to coaxing signs of life out of my father, I add, “We’ve really got a lot in common.”
Sure enough, Dad gets brighter still. “That’s great, Mac.” Now that I’ve got his attention, it lingers. His eyes search mine. “I’m glad you’re making a friend here, honey. I know this isn’t easy. None of this is easy.” My chest tightens. Dad can’t voice what this is any more than Mom can, but it’s written across his tired face. “And I know you’re strong, but sometimes you seem…lost.”
It feels like the most he’s said to me since we buried Ben.
“Are you…” he starts and stops, searching for the words. “Is everything…”
I spare him by taking a breath and wrapping my arms around his shoulders. Noise fills my head, low and heavy and sad, but I don’t let go, not even when he returns the hug and the sound redoubles.
“I just want to know if you’re okay,” he says, so soft I barely hear it through the static.
I’m not, not at all; but his worry gives me the strength I need to lie. To pull back and smile and tell him I’m fine.
Dad wishes me a good run, and I slip away to find Owen and the others.
According to my paper, Owen Chris Clarke doesn’t exist.
But he’s here in the Narrows, and it’s time to send him back.
I wrap the key cord around my wrist and look up and down a familiar, dimly lit passageway.
It occurs to me that I need to find him first. Which turns out not to be a problem, because Owen isn’t hiding. He’s sitting on the ground with his back against a wall near the end of the corridor, legs stretched out lazily, one knee bent up to support an elbow. His head is slumped forward, hair falling into his eyes.
He’s supposed to be distressed, supposed to be banging on the doors, tearing at himself, at the Narrows, at everything, searching for a way out. He’s supposed to be slipping. He’s not supposed to be sleeping.
I take a step forward.
He doesn’t move.
I take another step, fingers tightening around my key.
I reach him, and he still hasn’t budged. I crouch down, wondering what’s wrong with him, and I’m just about to stand up when I feel something cool against my hand, the one clutching the key. Owen’s fingers slide over my wrist, bringing with them…nothing. No noise.
“Don’t do that,” he says, head still bowed.
I let the key slide from my grip, back to the end of its length of cord, and straighten, looking down at him.
He tips his head up. “Good evening, Mackenzie.”
A bead of cold sweat runs down my spine. He hasn’t slipped at all. If anything, he seems calmer. Grounded and human and alive. Ben could be like this, the dangerous thought whispers through my mind. I push it back.
“Morning,” I correct.
He stands then, the motion fluid, like sliding down the wall but in reverse.
“Sorry,” he says, gesturing to the space around us. A smile flickers across his face. “It’s kind of hard to tell.”
“Owen,” I say, “I came to…”
He steps forward and tucks a stray chunk of hair behind my ear. His touch is so quiet I forget to pull back. As his hand traces the edge of my jaw and comes to rest beneath my chin, I feel that same silence. That dead quiet that Histories have…I’ve never paid it any mind, always been too busy hunting. But it’s not just the simple absence of sound and life. It is a silence that spreads behind my eyes, where memories should be. It is a silence that doesn’t stop at our skin, but reaches into me, fills me with cottony quiet, spreads through me like calm.
“I don’t blame you,” he says softly.
And then his hand falls away, and for the first time in years, I have to resist the urge to reach out and touch someone back. Instead, I force myself to take a step away, put a measure of distance between us. Owen turns toward the nearest door and brings both hands up against it, splaying his fingers across the wood.
“I can feel it, you know,” he whispers. “There’s this…sense in the center of my body, like home is on the other side. Like if I could just get there, everything else would be okay.” His hands stay up against the door, but he turns his head toward me. “Is that strange?”
The black in the center of his eyes stays contained, the pupils small and crisp despite the lack of light. What’s more, there’s a careful hollowness in his voice when he speaks about the draw of the doors, as if he’s skirting strong emotion, holding on to control, holding on to himself. He looks at the door again, then closes his eyes, brings his forehead to rest against it.
“No,” I say quietly. “It’s not strange.”
It’s what all Histories feel. It’s proof of what he is. But most Histories want help, want keys, want a way out. Most Histories are desperate and lost. And Owen is nothing like that. So why is he here?
“Most Histories wake up for a reason,” I say. “Something makes them restless, and whatever it is, it’s what consumes t
hem from the moment they wake.”
I want to know what happened to Owen Chris Clarke. Not just why he woke, but how he died. Anything that can shed light on what he’s doing in my territory, clear-eyed and calm.
“Is there something consuming you?” I ask gently.
His eyes find mine in the semidark, and for a moment, sadness dulls the blue. But then it’s gone, and he pushes off the door. “Can I ask you something?”
He’s redirecting, but I’m intrigued. Histories don’t tend to care about Keepers. They see us only as obstacles. Asking a question means he’s curious. Curious means he cares. I nod.
“I know that you’re doing something wrong,” he says, his eyes brushing over my skin, working their way up to my face. “Letting me stay here. I can tell.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I am.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
Because you don’t make sense, I want to say. Because Da told me to always trust my gut. Stomach tells when you’re hungry, he’d say, and when you’re sick, and when you’re right or wrong. Gut knows. And my gut says there’s a reason Owen is here now.
I try to shrug. “Because you asked for a day.”
“That man with the knife asked for your key,” says Owen. “You didn’t give it to him.”
“He didn’t ask nicely.”
He flashes me that ghost of a smile, a quirk of his lips, there and gone. He steps closer, and I let him. “Even the dead can have manners.”
“But most don’t,” I say. “I answered your question. Now answer one of mine.”
He gives a slight obliging bow. I look at him, this impossible History. What made him this way?
“How did you die?”
He stiffens. Not much, to his credit; but I catch the glimpse of tension in his jaw. His thumb begins to rub at the line I made on his palm. “I don’t remember.”
“I’m sure it’s traumatic, to think—”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s not that. I don’t remember. I can’t remember. It’s like it’s just…blank.”
My stomach twists. Could he have been altered, too?
“Do you remember your life?” I ask.
“I do,” he says, sliding his hands into his pockets.
“Tell me.”
“I was born up north, by the sea. Lived in a house on the cliffs in a small town. It was quiet, which I guess means I was happy.” I know the feeling. My life before the Archive is a set of dull impressions, pleasant but distant and strangely static, as if they belong to someone else. “And then we moved to the city, when I was fourteen.”
“Who’s we?” I ask.
“My family.” And there’s that sadness again in his eyes. I don’t realize how close we’re standing until I see it, written across the blue. “When I think of living by the sea, it’s all one picture. Blurred smooth. But the city, it was fractured, clear and sharp.” His voice is low, slow, even. “I used to go up on the roof and imagine I was back on the cliffs, looking out. It was a sea of brick below me,” he says. “But if I looked up instead of down, I could have been anywhere. I grew up there, in the city. It shaped me. The place I lived…it kept me busy,” he adds with a small private smile.
“What was your house like?”
“It wasn’t a house,” he says. “Not really.”
I frown. “What was it, then?”
“A hotel.”
The air catches in my chest.
“What was it called?” I whisper.
I know the answer before he says it.
“The Coronado.”
SEVENTEEN
I TENSE.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say, a fraction too fast. What are the odds of Owen’s managing to make his way here, within arm’s reach of the numbered doors that don’t just lead out, but lead home?
I force myself to shrug. “It’s unusual, isn’t it? Living in a hotel?”
“It was incredible,” he says softly.
“Really?” I ask before I can stop myself.
“You don’t believe me?”
“It’s not that,” I say. “I just can’t picture it.”
“Close your eyes.” I do. “First, you step into the lobby. It is glass and dark wood, marble and gold.” His voice is smooth, lulling. “Gold traces the wallpaper, threads the carpet, it edges the wood and flecks the marble. The whole lobby glitters. It gleams. There are flowers in crystal vases: some roses the dark red of the carpet, others the white of stone. The place is always light,” he says. “Sun streams in through the windows, the curtains always thrown back.”
“It sounds beautiful.”
“It was. We moved in the year after it was converted to apartments.”
There’s something vaguely formal about Owen—there is a kind of timeless grace about him, his movements careful, his words measured—but it’s hard to believe he lived…and died…so long ago. But even more striking than his age is the date he’s referring to: 1951. I didn’t see the name Clarke in the directory, and now I know why. His family moved in during the time when the records are missing.
“I liked it well enough,” he’s saying, “but my sister loved it.”
His eyes take on an unfocused quality—not slipping, not black, but haunted.
“It was all a game to Regina,” he says quietly. “When we moved to the Coronado, she saw the whole hotel as a castle, a labyrinth, a maze of hiding places. Our rooms were side by side, but she insisted on passing me notes. Instead of slipping them under the door, she’d tear them up and hide the pieces around the building, tied to rocks, rings, trinkets, anything to weigh them down. One time she wrote me a story and scattered it all across the Coronado, wedged in garden cracks and under tiles, and in the mouths of statues.… It took me days to recover the fragments, and even then I never found the ending.…” His voice trails off.
“Owen?”
“You said you think there’s a reason Histories wake up. Something that eats at them…us.” He looks at me when he says it, and sadness streaks across his face, barely touching his features and yet transforming them. He wraps his arms around his ribs. “I couldn’t save her.”
My heart drops. I see the resemblance now, clear as day: their lanky forms, their silver-blond hair, their strange, delicate grace. The murdered girl.
“What happened?” I whisper.
“It was 1953. My family had lived at the Coronado for two years. Regina was fifteen. I was nineteen, and I’d just moved away,” Owen says through gritted teeth, “a couple of weeks before it happened. Not far, but that day it might as well have been countries, worlds, because when she needed me, I wasn’t there.”
The words cut through me. The same words I’ve said to myself a thousand times when I think about the day Ben died.
“She bled out on our living room floor,” he says. “And I wasn’t there.”
He leans back against the wall and slides down it until he’s sitting on the ground.
“It was my fault,” he whispers. “Do you think that’s why I’m here?”
I kneel in front of him. “You didn’t kill her, Owen.” I know. I’ve seen who did.
“I was her big brother.” He tangles his fingers in his hair. “It was my job to protect her. Robert was my friend first. I introduced them. I brought him into her life.”
Owen’s face darkens, and he looks away. I’m about to press when the scratch of letters in my pocket drags me back to the Narrows and the existence of other Histories. I pull the paper out, expecting a new name, but instead I find a summons.
Report at once. —R
“I have to go,” I say.
Owen’s hand comes to rest on my arm. For that moment, all the thoughts and questions and worries hush. “Mackenzie,” he says, “is my day over?”
I stand, and his hand slides from my skin, taking the quiet with it.
“No,” I say, turning away. “Not yet.”
My mind is still spinning over Owen’s
sister—their resemblance is so strong, now that I know—as I step into the Archive. And then I see the front desk in the antechamber and come to a halt. The table is covered in files and ledgers, paper sticking out of the towering stacks of folders; and in the narrow alley between two piles, I can see Patrick’s glasses. Damn.
“If you’re trying to set a record for time spent here,” he says without looking up from his work, “I’m pretty sure you’ve done it.”
“I was just looking for—”
“You do know,” he says, “that despite my title, this isn’t really a library, right? We don’t lend, we don’t check out, we don’t even have a reference-only reading area. These constant visits are not only tiresome, they’re unacceptable.”
“Yes, I know, but—”
“And are you not busy enough, Miss Bishop? Because last time I checked, you had”—he lifts a pad of paper from the table, flicks through several pages—“five Histories on your list.”
Five?
“You do know why you have a list, correct?”
“Yes,” I manage.
“And why it’s imperative that you clear it?”
“Of course.” There’s a reason we constantly patrol, hoping to keep the numbers down, instead of just walking away, letting the Histories pile up in the Narrows. It’s said that if enough Histories woke and got into the space between the worlds, they wouldn’t need Keepers and keys to get through. They could force the doors open. Two ways through any lock, said Da.
“Then why are you still standing in front of—”
“Roland summoned me,” I say, holding up my Archive paper.
Patrick huffs and sits back in his seat, examining me for a long moment.
“Fine,” he says, returning to his work with little more than a gesture to the doors behind him.
I round the desk, slowing to watch him write in the ancient ledger sprawled open before him, and then, barely lifting his pen, in one of a half dozen smaller books. This is the first time I’ve ever seen the desk look cluttered.
“You seem busy,” I say as I pass.
The Archived Page 15