The Archived

THIRTY-ONE

T

HE DAY BEFORE YOU DIE,

I ask if you’re afraid.

“Everything ends,” you say.

“But are you scared?” I ask.

You are so thin. Not brittle bone so much as barbed wire, your skin like paper over the top.

“When I first learned about the Archive, Kenzie,” you say, smoke leaking out of the corner of your mouth, “every time I touched something, someone, I thought, That’s going to be recorded. My life is going to be a record of every moment. It can be broken down like that. I relished the logic of it, the certainty. We are nothing but recorded moments. That’s the way I thought.”

You put the cigarette out on Mom’s freshly painted porch rail.

“Then I met my first Histories, face-to-face, and they weren’t books, and they weren’t lists, and they weren’t files. I didn’t want to accept it, but the fact is, they were people. Copies of people. Because the only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.”

You use the cigarette to draw those same three lines in ash.

“I don’t know whether that should terrify or comfort me, that everything is backed up like that. That somewhere my History is compiling itself.”

You flick the cigarette butt into Dad’s bushes but don’t brush away the ash on the rail.

“Like I said, Kenzie. Everything ends. I’m not afraid to die,” you say with a wan smile. “I just hope I’m smart enough to stay dead.”

The first thing I notice is the noise.

In a place where quiet is mandatory, there is a deafening clatter, a banging and scraping and slamming and crashing loud enough to wake the dead. And clearly it is waking them. The doors behind the desk have been flung back to reveal the chaos beyond, the vast peace shattered by toppled stacks, people rushing, breaking off in teams down halls, shouting orders, and all of them too far away. Da is in there. Ben is in there. Wes is dying in my arms, and there is no one at the desk. How can there be no one at the desk?

“Help!” I shout, and the word is swallowed by the sound of the Archive crumbling around me. “Someone!” Wesley’s knees buckle beside me, and I slide to the ground under his weight. “Come on, Wes, please.” I shake him. He doesn’t respond.

“Help!” I shout again as I feel for a pulse, and this time I hear footsteps and look up to see Carmen striding through the doors. She closes them behind her.

“Miss Bishop?”

“Carmen, I’m so glad to see you.”

She frowns, looks down at Wesley’s body. “What are you doing here?”

“Please, I need you to—”

“Where’s Owen?”

Shock hits, and the whole world slows. And stops.

It was Carmen all along.

The Archive knife in Jackson’s hands.

Hooper’s name showing up late on my list.

Jackson escaping a second time.

The disruption spreading through the stacks.

Altering Marcus Elling and Eileen Herring and Lionel Pratt.

Flooding Wesley’s territory after the trial.

Writing back to Owen the moment he got out.

It was all her.

Beneath my hands, Wesley gasps and coughs blood.

“Carmen,” I say, as calmly as I can, “I don’t know how you know Owen, but right now we have to get Wesley help. I can’t let him—”

Carmen doesn’t move. “Tell me what you did with Owen.”

“He’s going to die!”

“Then you’d better tell me quickly.”

“Owen is nowhere,” I snap.

“What?”

“You’ll never find him,” I say. “He’s gone.”

“No one’s ever gone,” she says. “Look at Regina.”

“You’re the one who woke her.”

Carmen’s brow knits. “You really should be more sympathetic. After all, you woke Ben.”

“Because you both manipulated me. And you betrayed the Archive. You covered up Owen’s murders. You altered Histories. Why? Would you do that for him?”

Carmen holds up the back of her hand to show the three lines of the Archive carved into her skin. Crew marks. “We were together, once upon a time. Before I got promoted. You’re not Crew. You’ve never had a partner. If you had, you’d understand. I’d do anything for him. And I did.”

“Wes is the closest thing I have to a partner,” I say, running my fingers over his jacket until I find the collapsed bˉo staff. “And you’re killing him.”

I drag myself to my feet, vision blurring as I stand. With a flick of my wrist, the staff expands. It gives me something to hold on to.

“You can’t hurt me, Miss Bishop,” Carmen says with a withering look. “You think I’m here by choice? You think anyone would give up a life in the Outer for this place? They wouldn’t. They don’t.”

And for the first time I notice the scratches on her arms, the cut on her cheek. Each mark is little more than a thin, bloodless line.

“You’re dead.”

“Histories are records of the dead,” she says. “But yes, we’re all Histories here.” She comes toward me, blocking my path to the doors and the rest of the Archive. “Appalling, isn’t it? Think about it: Patrick, Lisa—even your Roland. No one told you.”

I ignore my lurching stomach. “When did you die?”

“Right after Regina. Owen was so broken without his sister, and so angry at the Archive. I just wanted to see him smile again. I thought Regina would help. In the end, he made such a mess, I couldn’t save him.” And then her green eyes widen. “But I knew I could bring him back.”

“Then why did you wait so long?”

She closes in. “You think I wanted to? You think I didn’t miss him every day? I had to transfer branches, had to wait for them to forget, to lose track of me, and then”—her eyes narrow—“I had to wait for a Keeper to take over the Coronado. Someone young, impressionable. Someone Owen could use.”

Use. The word crawls over my skin.

The crashing of the Archive mounts behind her, and she glances back. “Amazing how easy it is to make a little noise.”

In that moment, when she looks away, I make a run for the doors. I push as hard as I can before her hand grabs my arm and she wrenches me backward to the stone floor. The doors open, chaos and noise flooding in, but before I can get up, Carmen is straddling me, holding the staff across my throat.

“Where. Is. Owen?” she asks.

A few feet away, Wesley groans. I can’t reach him.

“Please,” I gasp.

“Don’t worry,” says Carmen. “It’ll be over soon, and then he’ll come back. The Archive doesn’t let you go. You serve until you die, and when you do, they wake you on your shelf and they give you a choice, a one-time offer. Either you get up and work, or they close the drawer on you forever. Not much of a choice, is it?” She presses down on the staff. “Can’t you see why Owen hates this place so much?”

Over her shoulder and through the doors I can see people. I get my fingers between the pole and my throat, and shout for help before Carmen cuts me off.

“Tell me what you’ve done with Owen,” she orders.

People are coming through the doors, past the desk, but Carmen doesn’t see, because all of her fear and anger and attention is focused on me.

“I sent him home,” I say. And then I manage to get my foot between us and kick, and Carmen stumbles back into Patrick and Roland.

“What the hell?” growls Patrick as they wrestle her arms behind her back.

“He’ll come back,” she shrieks as they force her to her knees. “He would never leave me here—” Her eyes go wide as the life goes out of them. The Librarians let go, and she crumples to the floor with the sickening sound of dead weight. Patrick’s key, gleaming and gold, is clutched in his grip.

I cough, gasping for breath as the room fills with sound—not just the chaos of the Archive pouring in through the doors, but with people shouting.

“Patrick! Hurry!”

I turn to see Lisa and two other Librarians kneeling over Wesley. He’s not moving. I can’t look at his body, so I look through the doors at the Archive, at the people hurrying about, barricading doors, making so much noise.

I hear Patrick ask, “Is there a pulse?”

My hands won’t stop shaking.

“It’s slowing. You have to hurry.”

I feel like I should be breaking down, but there’s nothing left of me to break.

“He’s lost so much blood.”

“Get him up, quickly.”

A Librarian I’ve never met takes me by the elbow, guides me to the front desk and a chair. I slip into it. She has a deep scratch on her collar. There’s no blood. I close my eyes. I know I’m hurt but I can’t feel it anymore.

“Miss Bishop.” I blink and find Roland kneeling beside my chair.

“Who are all those people?” I ask, focusing on crumbling world beyond the antechamber.

“They work for the Archive. Some are Librarians. Some are higher up. They’re trying to contain the disruption.”

Another deafening crash.

“Mackenzie…” Roland grips the arm of the chair. There’s blood on his hands. Wesley’s. “You have to tell me what happened.”

I do. I tell him everything. And when I’m done, he says, “You should go home.”

I look at the slick of red on the floor. Behind my eyes I see Wes collapsing on the roof, see him storming away, see him sitting on the floor outside Angelli’s, teaching me to float, hunting with me, reading to me, draped over a wrought iron chair, showing me the gardens, leaning in the hall in the middle of the night with his crooked smile.

“I can’t lose Wes,” I whisper.

“Patrick will do everything he can.”

I look back at Wes’s body. It’s gone. Carmen’s body is gone. Patrick is gone. I look down at my hands. Dried blood is flaking from my palms. I blink, focus on Roland. His red Chucks and his gray eyes and that accent I could never place.

“Is it true?” I ask.

“Is what true?” asks Roland.

“That all Librarians…that you’re dead?”

Roland’s face sinks.

“How long have you been…” I trail off. What word do I even want? Dead? We’re trained to think of a History as something other, something less than a person, but how could Roland ever be less?

He smiles sadly. “I was about to retire.”

“You mean, go back to being dead.” He nods. I shudder. “There’s an empty shelf here with your name and dates?”

“There is. And it was beginning to sound nice. But then I got called in to this meeting. An induction ceremony. Some crazy old man and his granddaughter.” He stands, guides me up beside him. “And I don’t regret it. Now, go home.”

Roland walks me toward the Archive door. A man I don’t know comes over and begins to speak to him in hushed, hurried tones.

He tells him that the Archive is hemorrhaging, but more staff have been called in from other branches. Sections are still being sealed off to stem the flow. Almost half of the standard stacks had to be sealed. Red stacks and Special Collections were spared.

Roland asks and confirms that Ben and Da are safe.

The Crew appears, the cocky smiles from the trial replaced by grim, tired frowns. They report that the Coronado has been contained. No casualties. Two Histories made it out, but both are being pursued.

I ask about Wesley.

They tell me I’ll be summoned when they know.

They tell me to go home.

I ask again about Wesley.

They tell me again to go home.