“Come on,” I say, turning toward the elevator. Wes gets shakily to his feet and follows. I hit the call button, cringing at the thought of using this death trap, but I don’t exactly want to retrace the path of our destruction right now, especially with Wes covered in blood. He hesitates when I pull open the grille, but climbs in beside me. The doors close, and I punch the button for the third floor and then turn to look at him. He’s smiling. I can’t believe he’s smiling. I shake my head.
“Red looks good on you,” I say.
He wipes at his cheek, looks down at his stained hands.
“You know, I think you’re right.”
Water drips from the ends of my hair onto the couch, where I’m perched, staring down at the Crew key cupped in my hands. I listen to the shhhhhhh of the shower running, wishing it could wash away the question that’s nagging at me as I turn Da’s key over and over in my hands.
How did Roland know?
How did he know that we’d need the key today? Was it a coincidence? Da never believed in coincidence, said chance was just a word for people too lazy to learn the truth. But Da believed in Roland. I believe in Roland. I know Roland. At least, I think I know him. He’s the one who first gave me a chance. Who took responsibility for me. Who bent the rules for me. And sometimes broke them.
The water shuts off.
Jackson was returned. I returned him myself. How did he escape a second time in less than a week? He should have been filed in the red stacks. There’s no way he would have woken twice. Unless someone woke him and let him out.
The bathroom door opens, and Wesley stands there, his black hair no longer spiked but hanging down into his eyes, the eyeliner washed away. His key rests against his bare chest. His stomach is lean, the muscles faint but visible. Thank god he’s wearing pants.
“All done?” I ask, pocketing the Crew key.
“Not quite. I need your help.” Wesley retreats into the bathroom. I follow.
An array of first-aid equipment covers the sink. Maybe I should have taken him to the Archive, but the cut on his face isn’t so bad—I’ve had worse—and the last thing I want to do is try to explain to Patrick what happened.
Wesley’s cheek is starting to bleed again, and he dabs at it with a washcloth. I fish around in my private medical stash until I find a tube of skin glue.
“Lean down, tall person,” I say, trying to touch his face with only the swab and not my fingers. It makes my grip unsteady, and when I slip and paint a dab of the skin glue on his chin, Wes sighs and takes my hand. The noise flares through my head, metal and sharp.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “Let go.”
“No,” he says, plucking the swab and the skin glue from my grip, tossing both aside and pressing my hand flat against his chest. The noise grows louder. “You’ve got to figure it out.”
I cringe. “Figure what out?” I ask, raising my voice above the clatter.
“How to find quiet. It’s not that hard.”
“It is for me,” I snap. I try to push back, try to block him out, try to put up a wall, but it doesn’t work, only makes it worse.
“That’s because you’re fighting it. You’re trying to block out every bit of noise. But people are made of noise, Mac. The world is full of noise. And finding quiet isn’t about pushing everything out. It’s just about pulling yourself in. That’s all.”
“Wesley, let go.”
“Can you swim?”
The rock-band static pounds in my head, behind my eyes. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Good swimmers don’t fight against the water.” He takes my other hand, too. His eyes are bright, flecked with gold even in the dim light. “They move with it. Through it.”
“So?”
“So stop fighting. Let the noise go white. Let it be like water. And float.”
I hold his gaze.
“Just float,” he says.
It goes against every bit of reason in me to stop pushing back, to welcome the noise.
“Trust me,” he says.
I let out an unsteady breath, and then I do it. I let go. For a moment, Wesley washes over me, louder than ever, rattling my bones and echoing in my head. But then, little by little, the noise evens, ebbs. It grows steadier. It turns to white noise. It is everywhere, surrounding me, but for the first time it doesn’t feel like it’s in me. Not in my head. I let out a breath.
And then Wesley’s grip is gone, and so is the noise.
I watch him fight back a smile and lose. What comes through isn’t smug, or even crooked. It’s proud. And I can’t help it. I smile a little too. And then the headache hits, and I wince, leaning on the bathroom sink.
“Baby steps,” says Wes, beaming. He offers me the tube of skin glue. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind fixing me up? I don’t want this to scar.”
“I won’t be able to hide this,” he says, examining my work in the mirror.
“Makes you look tough,” I say. “Just say you lost a fight.”
“How do you know I didn’t win?” he asks, meeting my eyes in the glass. “Besides, I can’t pull the fight card. It’s been used too many times.”
His back is to me. His shoulders are narrow but strong. Defined. I feel my skin warm as my gaze tracks between his shoulder blades and down the slope of his back. Halfway down the curve of his spine is a shallow red cut, glittering from the sliver of glass embedded in it.
“Hold still,” I say. I bring my fingertips against his lower back. The noise rushes in, but this time I don’t push. Instead I wait, let it settle around me, like water. It’s still there, but I can think through it, around it. I don’t think I’ll ever be the touchy-feely type, but maybe with practice I can at least learn to float.
Wes meets my gaze in the mirror, and quirks a brow.
“Practice makes perfect,” I say, blushing. My fingers drift up his spine, running over his ribs till I reach the shard. Wesley tenses beneath my touch, which makes me tense too.
“Tweezers,” I say, and he hands me a pair.
I pinch the glass, hoping it doesn’t go deep.
“Breathe in, Wes,” I say. He does, his back expanding beneath my fingers. “Breathe out.”
He does, and I tug the glass out, his breath wavering as it slides free. I hold up the fragment for him to see. “Not bad.” I put a small bandage over the cut. “You should keep it.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, turning to face me. “I think I should wash it off and make a little trophy out of it, ‘Courtesy of an escaped History and the coffee table in Two C’ etched into the stand.”
“Oh, no,” I say, depositing the shard in his outstretched hand. “I wouldn’t wash it off.”
Wes drops it onto the top of a small pile of glass, but keeps his eyes on mine. The crooked smile slides away.
“We make a good team, Mackenzie Bishop.”
“We do.” We do, and that is the thing that tempers the heat beneath my skin, checks the flutter of girlish nerves. This is Wesley. My friend. My partner. Maybe one day my Crew. The fear of losing that keeps me in check.
“Next time,” I say, pulling away, “don’t hold the door open for me.”
I clean off the cluttered sink and leave Wes to finish getting dressed, but he follows me down the hall, still shirtless.
“You see what I get for trying to be a gentleman.”
Oh, god—he’s flirting.
“No more gentlemanly behavior,” I say, reaching my room. “You’re clearly not cut out for it.”
“Clearly,” he says, wrapping an arm loosely around my stomach from behind.
I hiss, less from the noise than the pain. He lets go.
“What is it?” he says, suddenly all business.
“It’s nothing,” I say, rubbing my ribs.
“Take off your shirt.”
“You’ll have to try a hell of a lot harder to seduce me, Wesley Ayers.”
“My shirt’s already off,” he counters. “I think it’s only fair.”
/> I laugh. It hurts.
“And I’m not trying to seduce you, Mackenzie,” he says, straightening. “I’m trying to help. Now, let me see.”
“I don’t want to see,” I say. “I’d rather not know.” I managed to shower and change without looking at my ribs. Things only hurt more when you can see them.
“That’s great. Then you close your eyes and I’ll see for you.”
Wesley reaches out and slips his fingers around the edge of my shirt. He pauses long enough to make sure I won’t physically harm him, then guides my top over my head. I look away, intending to educate myself on the number of pens in the cup on my desk. I can’t help but shiver as Wesley’s hand slides feather-light over my waist, and the noise of his touch actually distracts me from the pain until his hand drifts up and—
“Ouch.” I look down. A bruise is already spreading across my ribs.
“You should really have that looked at, Mac.”
“I thought that’s what you were doing.”
“I meant by a medical professional. We should get you to Patrick, just to be safe.”
“No way,” I say. Patrick’s the last person I want to see right now.
“Mac—”
“I said no.” Pain weaves between my ribs when I breathe, but I can breathe, so that’s a good sign. “I’ll live,” I say, taking back my shirt.
Wes sags onto my bed as I manage to get the shirt over my head, and I’m tugging it down when there’s a knock on my door, and Mom peeks in, holding a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies.
“Mackenz—Oh.”
She takes in the scene before her, Wesley shirtless and stretched out on my bed, me pulling my shirt on as quickly as possible so she won’t see my bruises. I do my best to look embarrassed, which isn’t hard.
“Hello, Wesley. I didn’t know you were here.”
Which is a a bald-faced lie, of course, because my mother loves me, but she doesn’t show up with a tray of cookies and a pitcher and her sweetest smile unless I’ve got company. When did she get home?
“We went for a run together,” I say quickly. “Wes is trying to help me get back in shape.”
Wesley makes several vague stretching motions that make it abundantly clear he’s not a runner. I’ll kill him.
“Mhm,” says Mom. “Well, I’ll just…put these…over here.”
She sets the tray on an unpacked box without taking her eyes off us.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Bishop,” says Wesley. I glance over and find him eyeing the cookies with a wolfish smile. He’s almost as good a liar as I am. It scares me.
“Oh, and Mac,” adds Mom, swiping one of the cookies for herself.
“Yeah?”
“Door open, please,” she chirps, tapping the wooden door frame as she leaves.
“How long have we been running together?” asks Wes.
“A few days.” I throw a cookie at his head.
“Good to know.” He catches and devours the cookie in a single move, then reaches over and lifts Ben’s bear from the bedside table. The plastic glasses are no longer perched on its nose but folded on the table, where I dropped them last night before I went to find my brother. My chest tightens. Gone gone gone thuds in my head like a pulse.
“Was this his?” Wes asks, blind pity written across his face. And I know it’s not his fault—he doesn’t understand, he can’t—but I can’t stand that look.
“Ben hated that bear,” I say. Still, Wesley sets it gently, reverently, back on the table.
I sink onto the bed. Something digs into my hip, and I pull the Crew key out of my pocket.
“That was close today,” says Wes.
“But we did it,” I say.
“We did.” Halfway to a smile, his mouth falls. I feel it too.
Wes reaches for his Archive paper as I reach for mine, and we both unfold the lists at the same time to find the same message scrawled across the paper.
Keepers Bishop and Ayers:
Report to the Archive.
NOW.
TWENTY-SIX
I KNOW THIS ROOM.
The cold marble floors and the walls lined with ledgers and the long table sitting in the middle of the chamber: it’s the room where I became a Keeper. There are people seated behind that table now, just as there were then, but the faces—most of them, at least—have changed. And even as we gather, I can hear the distant sounds of the disruption spreading.
As Wesley and I stand waiting, my first thought is that I avoided one tribunal only to end up in another. This morning’s would have been deserved. This afternoon’s makes no sense.
Patrick sits behind the table, glowering, and I wonder how long he’s been making that face, waiting for us to walk in. It is, for a moment, absurdly funny, so much so that I’m worried I’ll laugh. Then I take in the rest of the scene, and the urge dies.
Lisa sits beside Patrick, her two-toned eyes unreadable.
Carmen is beside Lisa, clutching her notepad to her chest.
Roland heads the table, arms folded.
Two more people—the transfer, Elliot, and the woman with the braid, Beth—stand behind those seated. The expressions in the room range from contempt to curiosity.
I try to catch Roland’s eye, but he’s not watching me. He’s watching them. And it clicks: Wesley and I are not the only ones on trial.
Roland thinks it’s one of them who has been altering Histories. Is this his way of rounding up suspects? I scan their faces. Could one of these people be wreaking so much havoc? Why? I scour my memories of them, searching for one that lights up, any moment that makes one of them seem guilty. But Roland is like family; Lisa is sometimes stern but well-meaning; Carmen has confided in me, helped me, and kept my secrets. And little as I like Patrick, he’s a stickler for rules. But the two people standing behind them… I’ve never spoken to the woman with the braid, Beth, and I know nothing about Elliot other than the fact that he transferred in just before the trouble started. If I could spend some time with them, maybe I could tell—
A shoe knocks against mine, and a tiny flare of metal and drums cuts through my thoughts. I steal a glance at Wesley, whose forehead is crinkling with concern.
“I still can’t believe you told my mother we were going on a date,” I say under my breath.
“I told her we were going out. I couldn’t exactly be more specific, could I?” Wesley hisses back.
“That’s what lying’s for.”
“I try to keep lies to a minimum. Omissions are much less karmically damaging.”
Someone coughs, and I turn to find two more people sidling into the chamber, both in black. The woman is tall, with a ponytail of blue-black hair, and the man is made of caramel—gold skin and gold hair and a lazy smile. I’ve never seen them before, but there is something lovely and frightening and cold about them, and then I see the marks carved on their skin, just above their wrists. Three lines. They’re Crew.
“Miss Bishop,” says Patrick, and my attention snaps back to the table. “This is not your first infraction.”
I frown. “What infraction have I committed?”
“You let a History escape into the Outer,” he says, taking off his glasses and tossing them to the table.
“We also caught him,” says Wesley.
“Mr. Ayers, your record has been, before today, impeccable. Perhaps you should hold your tongue.”
“But he’s right,” I say. “What matters is that we caught the History.”
“He shouldn’t have gotten into the Coronado in the first place,” warns Lisa.
“He shouldn’t have gotten into the Narrows at all,” I answer. “I returned Jackson Lerner this week. So tell me how he managed to wake, find his way back into my territory, and avoid my list? A product of the disruption?”
Roland shoots me a look, but Patrick’s eyes flick down to his desk. “Jackson Lerner was a filing error.”
I bite back a laugh and he gives me a warning glare, as does Lisa. Ca
rmen avoids eye contact and chews the side of her lip. She’s the one who took Jackson from me. She was supposed to return him.
“It was my…” she says softly, but Patrick doesn’t give her the chance.
“Miss Bishop, this was a filing error precipitated by your incorrect delivery of the History in question. Is it not true you returned Jackson Lerner to the Archive’s antechamber, as opposed to the Returns room?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Jackson Lerner’s presence in the Narrows is not the most pressing issue,” says Lisa. “The fact that he was allowed into the Outer…” Allowed, she says, like we just stepped aside. Allowed, because we were still alive when he got through. “The fact that two Keepers were patrolling the same territory and yet neither—”
“Who authorized that, anyway?” Patrick cuts in.
“I did,” says Roland.
“Why not just give them a Crew key and a promotion while you’re at it?” snaps Patrick.
Da’s Crew key weighs a thousand pounds in my boot.
“The status of Miss Bishop’s territory necessitated immediate aid,” says Roland, meeting Patrick’s gaze. “Mr. Ayers’s territory has yet to experience any increase. Whereas the Coronado and surrounding areas are, for some reason, suffering the greatest damage during this disruption. The decision was well within my jurisdiction. Or have you forgotten, Patrick, that I am the highest-ranking official not only in this branch but in this state, and in this region, and, as such, your director?”
Roland? The highest ranking? With his red Chucks and his lifestyle magazines?
“How long have Miss Bishop and Mr. Ayers been paired?” asks Lisa.
Roland draws a watch from his pocket, a grim smile on his lips. “About three hours.”
The man in the corner laughs. The woman elbows him.
“Miss Bishop,” says Patrick, “are you aware that once a History reaches the Outer, it ceases to be the Keeper’s task, and becomes that of the Crew?” On the last word, he gestures to the two people in the corner. “Imagine the level of confusion, then, when the Crew arrives to dispatch the History, and finds it gone.”
“We did find some broken glass,” offers the man.
“Some police, too,” adds the woman.