The Archived

NINETEEN

I TAKE THE STAIRWELL up to the roof access door, which looks rusted shut, but it’s not. The metal grinds against the concrete frame, and I step through a doorway of dust and cobwebs, past a crumbling overhang, and out into a sea of stone bodies. I had seen the statues from the street, gargoyles perched around the perimeter of the roof. What I couldn’t see from there is that they cover the entire surface. Hunching, winged, sharp-toothed, they huddle here and there like crows, and glare at me with broken faces. Half of their limbs are missing, the rock eaten away by time and rain and ice and sun.

So this is Owen’s roof.

I try to picture him leaning against a gargoyle, head tipped back against a stone mouth. And I can see it. I can see him in this place.

But I can’t see him jumping.

There is something undeniably sad about Owen, something lost, but it wouldn’t take this shape. Sadness can sometimes sap the fight from a person’s features, but his are sharp. Daring. Almost defiant.

I trail my hand along a demon’s wing, then make my way to the edge of the roof.

It was a sea of brick below me. But if I looked up instead of down, I could have been anywhere.

If he didn’t jump, what happened?

A death is traumatic. Vivid enough to mark any surface, to burn in like light on photo paper.

I slide the ring from my finger, kneel, and press my hands flat to the weathered roof. My eyes slide shut, and I reach and reach. The thread is so thin and faint, I can barely grab hold. A distant tone tickles my skin, and finally I catch what little is left of the memory. My fingers go numb. I spin time back, past years and years of quiet. Decades and decades of nothing but an empty roof.

And then the rooftop plunges into black.

A flat, matte black I recognize immediately. Someone has reached into the roof itself and altered the memories, leaving behind the same dead space I saw in Marcus Elling’s History.

And yet it doesn’t feel the same. It’s just like Roland said. Black is black, but it doesn’t feel like the same hand, the same signature. And that makes sense. Elling was altered by a Librarian in the Archive. This roof was altered by someone in the Outer.

But the fact that multiple people tried to erase this piece of past is hardly comforting. What could have possibly happened to merit this?

…there are things that even Keepers and Crew should not see.…

I rewind past the black until the roof appears again, faded and unchanging, like a photo. And then finally, with a lurch, the photo flutters into life and lights and muddled laughter. This is the memory that hummed. I let it roll forward and see a night gala, with fairy lights and men in coattails and women in dresses with tight waists and A-line skirts, glasses of champagne and trays balanced on gargoyles’ wings. I scan the crowd in search of Owen or Regina or Robert, but find none of them. A banner strung between two statues announces the conversion of the Coronado from hotel to apartments. The Clarkes don’t live here yet. It will be a year until they move in. Three years until the string of deaths. I frown and guide the memory backward, watching the party dissolve into a faded, empty space.

Before that night there is nothing loud enough to hum, and I let go of the thread and blink, wincing in the sunlight on the abandoned roof. A stretch of black amidst the faded past. Someone erased Owen’s death, carved it right out of this place, buried the past from both sides. What could have possibly happened that year to make the Archive—or someone in it—do this?

I weave through the stone bodies, laying my hands on each one, reaching, hoping one of them will hum. But they are all silent, empty. I’m nearly back to the rusted door when I hear it. I pause midstep, my fingers resting on an especially toothy gargoyle to my right.

He’s whispering.

The sound is little more than an exhale through clenched teeth, but there it is, the faintest hum against my skin. I close my eyes and roll time back. When I finally reach the memory, it’s faded, a pattern of light blurred to nearly nothing. I sigh and pull away, when something snags my attention—a bit of metal in the gargoyle’s mouth. Its face is turned up to the sky, and time has worn away the top of its head and most of its features, but its fanged mouth hangs open an inch or two, intact, and something is lodged behind its teeth. I reach between stone fangs and withdraw a slip of rolled paper, bound by a ring.

One time she wrote me a story and scattered it across the Coronado, wedged in garden cracks and under tiles, and in the mouths of statues…

Regina.

My hands shake as I slide the metal off and uncurl the brittle page.

And then, having reached the top, the hero faced the gods and monsters that meant to bar his path.

I let the paper curl in on itself and look at the ring that held it closed. It’s not jewelry—it’s too big to fit a finger or a thumb—and clearly not the kind a young girl would wear anyway, but a perfect, rounded thing. It appears to be made of iron. The metal is cold and heavy, and one small hole has been drilled into the side of it; but other than that, the ring is remarkably undisturbed by scratches or imperfections. I slide it gently back over the paper and send up a silent thank-you to the long-dead girl.

I can’t give Owen much time, and I can’t give him closure.

But I can give him this.

“Owen?”

I wince at the sound of my own voice echoing through the Narrows.

“Owen!” I call again, holding my breath as I listen for something, anything. Still hiding, then. I’m about to reach out and read the walls—though they failed to lead me to him last time—when I hear it, like a quiet, careful invitation.

The humming. It is thin and distant, like threads of memory, just enough to take hold of, to follow.

I wind through the corridors, letting the melody lead me, and finally find Owen sitting in an alcove, a doorless recess, the lack of key light and outlines rendering the space even dimmer than the rest of the Narrows. No wonder I couldn’t find him. My eyes barely register the space. Pressed against the wall, he is little more than a dark shape crowned in silver-blond, his head bowed as he hums and runs his thumb over the small dark line on his palm.

He looks up at me, the song trailing into the nothing. “Mackenzie.” His voice is calm but his eyes are tense, as if he’s trying to steel himself. “Has it been a day?”

“Not quite,” I say, stepping into the alcove. “I found something.” I sink to my knees. “Something of yours.”

I hold out my hand and uncurl my fingers. The slip of paper bound by the iron ring shines faintly in the dark.

Owen’s eyes widen a fraction. “Where did you…?” he whispers, voice wavering.

“I found it in a gargoyle’s mouth,” I say. “On the Coronado roof.” I offer him the note and the ring, and when he takes it, his skin brushes mine and there is a moment of quiet in my head, a sliver, and then it’s gone as he pulls back, examining my gift.

“How did you—”

“Because I live there now.”

Owen lets out a shuddering breath. “So that’s where the numbered doors lead?” he asks. Longing creeps into his voice. “I think I knew that.”

He slides the fragile paper from its ring and reads the words despite the dark. I watch his lips move as he recites them to himself.

“It’s from the story,” he whispers. “The one she hid for me, before she died.”

“What was it about?”

His eyes lose focus as he thinks, and I don’t see how he can draw up a story from so long ago, until I remember that he’s passed the decades sleeping. Regina’s murder is as fresh to him as Ben’s is to me.

“It was a quest. A kind of odyssey. She took the Coronado and made it grand, not just a building, but a whole world, seven floors full of adventure. The hero faced caves and dragons, unclimbable walls, impassable mountains, incredible dangers.” A faint laugh crosses his lips as he remembers. “Regina could make a story out of anything.” He closes his hand over the note and the ring. “Could I keep this? Just until the day’s over?”

I nod, and Owen’s eyes brighten—if not with trust, then with hope. Just like I wanted. And I hate to steal that flicker of hope from him so soon, but I don’t have a choice. I need to know.

“When I was here before,” I say, “you were going to tell me about Robert. What happened to him?”

The light goes out of Owen’s eyes as if I blew out a candle’s flame.

“He got away,” he says through clenched teeth. “They let him get away. I let him get away. I was her big brother and I…” There’s so much pain in his voice as it trails off; but when he looks at me, his eyes are clear, crisp. “When I first found my way here, I thought I was in Hell. Thought I was being punished for not finding Robert, for not tearing the world apart in search of him, for not tearing him apart. And I would have. Mackenzie, I really would have. He deserved that. He deserved worse.”

My throat tightens as I tell Owen what I’ve told myself so many times, even though it never helps. “It wouldn’t bring her back.”

“I know. Trust me, I do. And I would have done far worse,” he says, “if I’d thought there was a way to bring Regina back. I would have traded places. I would have sold souls. I would have torn this world apart. I would have done anything, broken any rule, just to bring her back.”

My heart aches. I can’t count the times I’ve sat beside Ben’s drawer and wondered how much noise it would take to wake him up. And I can’t deny how hard I’ve wished, since I met Owen, that he wouldn’t slip: because if he could make it through, why not Ben?

“I was supposed to protect her,” he says, “and I got her killed.…” He must take my silence for simple pity, because he adds, “I don’t expect you to understand.”

But I do. Too well.

“My little brother is dead,” I say. The words get out before I can stop them. Owen doesn’t say I’m sorry. But he does shift closer, until we’re sitting side by side.

“What happened?” he asks.

“He was killed,” I whisper. “Hit and run. They got away. I would give anything to rewrite that morning, to walk Ben all the way to school, take an extra five seconds to hug him, to draw on his hand, do anything to change the moment when he crossed the street.”

“And if you could find the driver…” says Owen.

“I would kill him.” There is no doubt in my voice.

A silence falls around us.

“What was he like?” he asks, knocking his knee against mine. There is something so simple in it, as if I am just a girl, and he is just a boy, and we are sitting in a hallway—any hallway, not the Narrows—and I’m not talking about my dead brother with a History I’m supposed to have sent back.

“Ben? He was too smart for his own good. You couldn’t lie to him, not even about things like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. He’d put on these silly glasses and cross-examine you until he found a crack. And he couldn’t focus on anything unless he was drawing. He was really great at art. He made me laugh.” I’ve never spoken this way about Ben, not since he died. “And he could be a real brat sometimes. Hated sharing. Would break something before he’d let you have it. This one time he broke an entire box of pencils because I wanted to borrow one. As if breaking pencils made them useless. So I pulled out this sharpener, one of those little plastic ones, and sharpened all the pencil halves and then we each had a set. Half as long as they were to start, but they still worked. It drove him mad.”

A small laugh escapes, and then my chest tightens. “It feels wrong to laugh,” I whisper.

“Isn’t it strange? It’s like after they die, you’re only allowed to remember the good. But no one’s all good.”

I feel the scratch of letters in my pocket, but leave it.

“I’ve gone to see him,” I say. “In the stacks. I talk to him, to his shelf, tell him what he’s missing. Never the good stuff, of course. Just the boring, the random. But no matter how I hold on to his memory, I’m starting to forget him, one detail at a time. Some days I think the only thing that keeps me from prying open his drawer, from seeing him, from waking him, even, is the fact it’s not him. Not really. They tell me there’s no point because it wouldn’t be him.”

“Because Histories aren’t people?” he asks.

I cringe. “No. That’s not it at all.” Even though most Histories aren’t people, aren’t human, not the way Owen is. “It’s just that Histories have a pattern. They slip. The only thing that hurts me more than the idea of the thing in that drawer not being my brother is the idea of its being him, and my causing him pain. Distress. And then having to send him back to the stacks after all of it.”

I feel Owen’s hand drift toward mine, hover just above my skin. He waits to see if I’ll stop him. When I don’t, he curls his fingers over mine. The whole world quiets at his touch. I lean my head against the wall and close my eyes. The quiet is welcome. It dulls the thoughts of Ben.

“I don’t feel like I’m slipping,” says Owen.

“That’s because you aren’t.”

“Well, that means it’s possible, right? What if—”

“Stop.” I pull free of his touch and push myself to my feet.

“I’m sorry,” he says, standing. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset,” I say. “But Ben’s gone. There’s no bringing him back.” The words are directed at myself more than at him. I turn to go. I need to move. Need to hunt.

“Wait,” he says, taking my hand. The quiet floods in as he holds up the note in his other hand. “If you find any more of Regina’s story, would you…would you bring it to me?” I hover at the edge of the alcove. “Please, Mackenzie. It’s all I have left of her. What wouldn’t you give, to have something, anything, of Ben’s to hold on to?”

I think of the box of Ben’s things, overturned on my bed, my hands shaking as I picked up each item and prayed there would be a glimpse, a fractured moment, anything. Clinging to a silly pair of plastic glasses with nothing more than a single, smudged memory.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” I say, and Owen pulls me into a hug. I flinch but feel nothing, only steady quiet.

“Thank you,” he whispers against my ear, and my face flushes as his lips graze my skin. And then his arms slide away, taking the quiet and the touch, and he retreats into the alcove, the darkness swallowing everything but his silvery hair. I force myself to turn away, and hunt.

As nice as his touch was, it’s not what lingers with me while I work. It’s his words. Two words I tried to shut out, but they cling to me.

What if echoes in my head as I hunt.

What if haunts me through the Narrows.

What if follows me home.