The Unbound

EIGHTEEN

IT HAPPENS AT FIVE A.M.

At first I think it’s just another name, but I soon realize it’s not. It’s a note. A summons. The words write themselves onto the Archive paper.

Please report to the Archive. —A

I know what the A stands for. Agatha. It was only a matter of time. Even with Wesley picking up my slack in the Narrows, he can’t cover the incident with the cops, or this. Did Eric tell her I was here? If she knows, then she knows I can’t answer the summons. Is that what she’s counting on? Denying a summons from the Archive is an infraction. Another tally against me.

I’m reading the note for the seventeenth time, trying to decide what to do, when the door opens and Dallas comes in. I force myself to fold the paper and put it away as she says good morning and introduces herself to my parents, then asks them to wait outside.

She sinks into the chair by the bed. “You look like hell,” she says—which doesn’t strike me as the most professional way to start, but at least it’s accurate.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I say. “They’re going to let me go home today, right?” I ask, trying to mask the urgency in my voice.

“Well,” she says, tilting her head back, “I suppose that’s up to me. Which means it’s up to you. Do you want to talk?”

I don’t respond.

“Do you dislike me because I’m standing in your way,” she asks, “or because I’m a therapist?”

“I don’t dislike you,” I say evenly.

“But I’m both,” observes Dallas. “And most people generally dislike both.”

“I dislike hospitals,” I explain. “The last time my family was in one, my brother had just been killed by a car on his way to school. And I dislike therapists because my mother’s told her to throw out all of his things. To help her move on.”

“Well then,” she says, “I’m afraid your mother’s therapist and I wouldn’t get along.”

“That’s a solid tactic,” I say.

Dallas raises a brow. “Excuse me?”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s a good approach.”

“Why, thank you,” she says cheerfully. “You get away with this a lot, don’t you? Deflecting.”

I pick at the bandages on my hand. The shallow cuts are healing well. “Most people would rather talk about themselves anyway.”

She smiles. “Except therapists.”

Dallas doesn’t act like a shrink. There’s no “How does that make you feel?” or “Tell me more” or “Why do you think that is?” Talking with her is like a dance or a sparring match: a combination of moves, verbal actions and reactions strung together. Her eyes go to my arm. They took the bandages off so it could breathe.

“That looks like it hurts.”

“It was a nightmare,” I say carefully. “I thought someone else was doing it to me, and then I woke up and it was still there.”

“A pretty dangerous twist on sleepwalking.”

Her voice is light, but there’s no mockery in it.

“I’m not crazy,” I whisper.

“Crazy never crossed my mind,” she says. “But I was talking to your parents, about Da, and about Ben, and about this, and it seems like you’ve been exposed to a lot of trauma for someone your age. Have you noticed that?”

Have I? Da’s death. Ben’s murder. Owen’s attack. Wesley’s stabbing. Carmen’s assault. Archive secrets. Archive lies. Violent Histories. Voids. Countless scars. Broken bones. Bodies. Tunnel moments. Nightmares. This.

I nod.

“Some people crumble under trauma,” she says. “And some people build armor. And I think you’ve built some amazing armor, Mackenzie. But like I said last night, it can’t always protect you from yourself.” She sits forward. “I’m going to say something, and I want you to listen carefully, because it’s kind of important.”

She reaches out and brings her hand to rest over mine, and her noise is like an engine, low and humming and steady. I don’t pull away.

“It’s okay to not be okay,” she says. “When you’ve been through things—whatever those things are—and you don’t allow yourself to not be okay, then you only make it worse. Our problems will tear us apart if we try to ignore them. They demand attention because they need it. Now, are you okay?”

Before I even realize it, my head is turning side to side. Dallas smiles a little.

“See? Was that so hard to admit?”

She gives my hand a small squeeze, and my gaze drops to her fingers. I stiffen.

Dallas has a dent on her ring finger.

“Divorced,” she says, catching my look. “I’m starting to think the mark won’t ever fade.”

She pulls away and rubs at the spot between her knuckles, and I force myself to breathe, to remember that normal people wear rings, too—and that normal people take them off. Besides, her sleeves are pushed up and her forearms are free of Crew marks.

Dallas gets to her feet.

“I’m going to release you, on the condition that you attend counseling at Hyde. Will you do that for me?”

Agatha’s summons burns a hole in my pocket. “Yes,” I say quickly. “Fine. Okay.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” asks Mom when Dallas tells her the news. “I mean, she tried to…”

“Not to be crude, ma’am,” says Dallas, “but if she’d wanted to kill herself, she would have cut down the road, not across the street. As it is, she’s several blocks up.”

Mom looks horrified. I almost smile. She’s certainly no Colleen.

The nurse rewraps my left arm, and I change back into my school shirt, tugging the sleeve down over the bandage. I can’t hide the tape from the glass on my right palm, but that might work to my advantage. Misdirection. The worst of last night’s self-pity is gone, and right now I need to focus on surviving long enough to find out who’s framing me. Owen hasn’t won yet, I think, and then I remind myself that Owen didn’t do this. I did. Maybe Dallas was right. Maybe I need to stop denying I’m broken and work on finding the pieces.

Speaking of Dallas, she gives me a small salute on the way out and tells me to loosen the armor. The nurse who stitched and bandaged me up seems surprised by Dallas’s order to release me, but doesn’t question it—only fires off cleaning instructions and tells my parents to keep an eye on me and make sure I get some rest. She leans in and confides in my mother, loud enough for me to hear, that she doesn’t think I ever went to sleep.

Great.

There’s no sign of Eric or Sako in the hospital lobby or in the lot, and I realize with a sinking feeling that their faces are the only two I’d recognize. I know that a Crew member made the void, but I don’t know which one. The Archive keeps its members isolated—each an island—but that means I don’t know how many Crew there are in my branch, let alone what they look like.

“Come on, Mac,” calls Dad, and I realize I’m standing on the sidewalk staring at the street.

On the drive home, I feel the scratch of more letters in my pocket, and by the time we get back to the Coronado, the summons has repeated itself on the page, the letters darker, as if someone’s pressing down harder on the ledger. I turn the paper over and write the words unable to report, watching as they bleed into the page. I wait for a reply, a pardon, but the original summons only rewrites itself on the page. The message is clear, but I’m not allowed to close my bedroom door or go to the bathroom without an escort, let alone slip off to the Archive for a good old-fashioned interrogation. I don’t even have the excuse of school, since it’s Saturday. When I ask if I can go for a walk to get some fresh air, Mom looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.

And maybe I have, but after an hour of trying to do homework in spite of the hovering and heavy quiet, I can’t take it anymore. I break down and text Wesley.

Save me.

Mom won’t stop pacing, and Dad finally cracks and sends her down to the café to work off some of her stress. Five minutes after that, there’s a knock on the door and Wesley’s there with a bag of pastries and a book, looking like himself—well, his summer self: black jeans, lined eyes, spiked hair—for the first time in weeks. When Dad answers the door, I watch the war between what he’s supposed to say—No visitors—and what he wants to say—Hi, Wes! What finally comes out is, “Wesley, I’m not sure now’s a good time.”

Even though Wes frowns and asks, “Has something happened?” I can tell he’s not totally in the dark. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s aware of the part where I got picked up by the cops, but not the part where I landed myself in the self-harm section of the hospital. His eyes go to my bandaged hand, and I can see the questions in them.

Dad casts a glance back at the table where I’m nursing a cup of coffee and trying not to look as tired as I feel and says, “Actually, why don’t you come in?”

Wesley takes a seat next to me, and Dad stands by the door, clearly debating his next move.

“Dad,” I say, reaching out and taking Wesley’s hand with my unbandaged one. The steady beat of his rock music fills my head. “Could we have a moment?”

Dad hovers there, looking at us.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I promise.

“I’ll keep her out of trouble, Mr. Bishop,” says Wes.

Dad smiles sadly. “I’m holding you to that,” he says. “I’ll go down and check on your mom. You’ve got ten minutes.”

When the door closes, Wes gives my fingers a small squeeze before letting go. “Did you hurt your wrist again?” he asks, nodding at my other hand.

I shake my head. “Did Amber tell you?”

“That you got arrested? Yeah.”

“It doesn’t count as an arrest unless they book you.”

Wesley arches a brow. “Spoken like a true criminal. What did you get picked up for?”

“Oh, Amber didn’t share that part?”

“She didn’t know.”

“Ah, well. Remember the guy who disappeared before Bethany? Judge Phillip? I went back to check out his house, since that’s where he vanished from. And I might have entered the place using less than legal methods.”

Wes hits the table. “You broke into a crime scene without me?”

“Be glad, Wes, or we both would have been caught.”

“We’re a team, Mac. You don’t go committing a crime without your partner in crime. Besides, if I’d been with you, we probably wouldn’t have been caught. I could have stood at the door and made wild bird sounds or something when the cops came back. And if we did get caught, our mug shots would look fabulous.”

I can’t help but smile at the thought.

“Tell me you at least found something.”

The smile slides off my lips. “I did,” I say slowly. “A void.”

Wesley’s brow knits. “I don’t understand.”

“A void. Like the one on the roof.”

“In the middle of Phillip’s living room? That doesn’t make any sense. The only way there’d be a void there is if someone made one. And they’d need a Crew key to do that.”

“Exactly.” I run my good hand through my hair and tell him about breaking into Judge Phillip’s and seeing the void, and the way it made the memories unreadable. I tell him about Eric and Sako following me. I tell him what Roland said about evidence, and that I know it sounds crazy, but I think I’m being set up.

“You have to tell the Archive,” he says.

“I know.” I know. But tell them what? I know how ludicrous it all sounds. I can see the skepticism in Wesley’s eyes, and he’s far more forgiving than Agatha will be. I can’t just walk in there and announce they have another traitor in their midst. Not after what happened with Owen and Carmen. I need to talk to Roland, but I’ll have to get past Agatha first. I know I can’t keep ignoring the summonses, but after everything I’ve put my parents through, I can’t just disappear. I think about sending Wesley to the Archive on my behalf, but the last thing I want to do is get him tangled up in this, especially now that Agatha’s involved. Besides, we’re not really partners. Wesley’s not supposed to be helping me.

He looks at me hard. “You didn’t feel like mentioning any of this last night?”

I pick at a fraying bit of tape on my hand. “It wouldn’t translate well to text,” I say. “And I was a little busy.”

He reaches out and takes my wrapped hand and runs his fingers lightly over the tape. “What happened, Mac?”

I pull away and roll up my left sleeve for him to see the bandage. I unwrap it so he can see the fourteen little red X’s beneath.

“Who did this to you?” he growls.

I wish that were an easier question to answer. I take a breath and hold it for several long seconds before finally saying, “I did.”

Confusion flickers across Wesley’s face, followed by worry. I go to push my sleeve back down, but he catches my hand and draws my arm closer. His fingers hover over the cut. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t mean to do it,” I explain. “It started as a dream. Owen was… He was the one with the knife, and then I…” Wesley pulls me into a hug. He holds me so tight it hurts, so tight his noise pounds through my head, but I don’t pull away.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I whisper into his shirt.

Wes pulls back just enough to look at me. “Tell me how I can help.”

Go away, I think. Stay away from me and whatever bad is circling. But I know him well enough to know that he won’t. “For one, you could ask Amber not to tell the whole school I got arrested.”

“It doesn’t count as an arrest unless they book you,” echoes Wes, adding, “She won’t tell anyone.”

“She told you.”

“Because she knows I…” He trails off.

“You what?”

“She knows I care,” says Wes. “About you. By the way, you look like hell. Have you slept at all since…”

I rub my eyes. “I can’t.”

“You can’t stay awake forever, Mac.”

“I know…but I’m scared.” Words Da taught me never to say. He thought saying it was halfway to surrendering. Now the confession hangs between us. The room settles and thickens, and I can feel the cracks in my armor as it loosens around me.

Wes pushes up from the table. He pours himself a cup of coffee and rests against the counter.

“Okay,” he says. “If you’re determined to stay awake, I can help. But this”—he gestures down at the spread of precalc and lit theory on the table—“isn’t going to do.” He digs the physiology book out from the bottom of the pile and flashes me a mischievous smile. “Here we go.”

By the time Dad gets back, Wes has managed to cover himself in an impressive number of Post-it notes, each labeling a muscle (I don’t have the heart to tell him we’re studying blood flow right now). Dad takes one look at him and almost smiles. And when it takes Wes half a dozen tries to affix a yellow sticker to the place between his shoulders, I end up laughing until my chest hurts, and for a while I forget how much trouble I’m in and how tired I am and how much my arm hurts.

I make it to dusk, but even with Wesley’s company, I’m starting to fade. Mom is back home and making no attempt to hide the fact that she’s hovering. Every time I yawn, she tells me I should go to bed. Tells me I need to sleep. But I can’t. I know Dallas said I had to confront my problems, but I just don’t have the strength to face another nightmare right now. Especially now that I know I’m capable of doing actual damage to myself. And maybe to others. I would rather be exhausted and awake than a danger and asleep, so I brush off her concern and crack open a soda. It’s halfway to my lips when she catches my hand, filling my head with her high, worried static as she pries the can away and replaces it with a glass of water.

I sigh and take a long sip. She passes the soda to Wes, who makes the mistake of yawning as he takes it.

“You should head home,” Mom tells him. “It’s getting late, and I’m sure your father is wondering where you are.”

“I doubt that,” he says under his breath, then adds, “He knows I’m over here.”

“Mom,” I say, finishing the glass of water, “he’s helping me study.”

“Does he know you’re here here?” she presses, ignoring me. “Or does he think you’re upstairs with Jill?”

Wesley’s brow furrows. “Frankly, I don’t think he cares.”

“Parents always care,” she snaps.

“Honey,” says Dad, looking up from a book.

They’re talking, all three of them, but the words begin to run together in my ears. I’m just thinking about how strange it is when my vision slides out of focus.

The room sways, and I grip the counter.

“Mac?” Wes’s voice reaches me. “Are you okay?”

I nod and set the glass down; or at least I mean to, but the countertop’s not where I thought it was, and the glass goes crashing to the floor. It shatters. The sound is far away. At first I think I’m about to have another blackout, but those happen fast, and this is slow like syrup.

“What have you done?” Wes snaps, but I don’t think he’s talking to me.

I close my eyes, but it doesn’t help. The world sways even in darkness.

“The doctor said she needed to—”

Everything else is far away.

“Allison,” growls Dad. I drag my eyes open. “How could you—”

And then my legs go out from under me, and I feel Wesley’s arms and his noise wrap around me before the world goes black.