The Unbound

The memory is so vivid: Wesley bleeding out on the other side of the roof while Owen pressed the blade between my shoulders and gave me a choice that wasn’t really a choice because of the metal biting into my skin.

It doesn’t have to end like this.

Words, promises, threats that hung between us only long enough for me to turn the key in the air behind his back and make a tear in the world, a door out of nothing, to nothing—to nowhere—and send him through.

Now my eyes find the invisible—impossible—mark. It’s barely a scratch on the air, all that’s left of the void door. Even though I can’t see the mark, I know exactly where it is: the patch of dark where my eyes slide off, attracted and repelled at once by the out of place, the u

The void door is a strange, corrosive thing.

I tried to revisit that day, to read what happened in the statues on the roof, but the memories were all ruined. The opening of the void had overexposed them like film, eaten through solid minutes—the most important of my life—and left only white noise.

But I don’t need to read the images in the rocks: I remember.

A stone crumbles off a statue on the far side of the roof and I jump, nearly losing my balance on top of the gargoyle. My head is starting to feel heavy in that dangerous, drifting-off way, so I get down before I fall down, rolling my neck as the first slivers of light creep into the sky. I tense when I see it. I am in no way ready for today, and not just because I haven’t slept. I’m not ready for the uniform hanging on my chair, or the new face I’ll have to wear with it. I’m not ready for the campus full of bodies full of noise.

I’m not ready for Hyde School.

But the sun keeps rising anyway.

Several feet away, one of the gargoyles stands out from the others. Its stone body is bundled in old cushions and duct tape, the former stolen from a closet off the Coronado lobby, the latter from a drawer in the coffee shop. It’s a poor substitute for a boxing dummy, but it’s better than nothing—and if I can’t sleep, I might as well train.

Now, as dawn spills over the roof, I gingerly unwind the boxing tape that crisscrosses both my hands, wincing as the blood returns to my right wrist. Pain, dull and constant, radiates down into my fingers. It’s another relic from that day. Owen’s grip like a vise, tightening until the bones crack and the knife in my fingers clatters to the Narrows floor. My wrist would probably heal faster if I didn’t spend my time punching makeshift dummies, but I find the pain strangely grounding.

I’m almost done rolling up the tape when I feel the familiar scratch of letters on the piece of paper in my pocket. I dig the slip out and in the spreading light of day I can just make out the name in the middle of the page.

Ellie Reynolds. 11.

I run my thumb over the name, as if expecting to feel the grooves made by the pen, but the strange writing never leaves a real impression. A hand in the Archive writes in a book in the Archive that echoes its words onto the paper here. Find the History, and the name goes away. (No lasting mark. I thought of keeping a list of the people I’d found and returned, but my grandfather, Da, would have told me there’s no point in dwelling. Stare too long at anything, he’d say, and you start to wonder. And where does wondering get you? Nowhere good.)

I head for the rusty rooftop door. Finding Ellie Reynolds should keep me busy, at least until it’s a more acceptable hour to be awake. If I told my parents how I’d been spending my nights—half in nightmares and half up here on the roof—they’d send me to a shrink. Then again, if I told my parents how I’d spent the last four and a half years of my life—hunting down and returning the Histories of the dead—they’d lock me in a psych ward.

I make my way down four flights of concrete stairs, intensely aware of the silence and the way my steps knife through it. At the third floor, the stairwell spits me out into a hall adorned with worn yellow wallpaper and dusty crystal lights. Apartment 3f waits at the far end, and part of me wants so badly to go home and sleep, but another part of me isn’t willing to risk it. Instead I stop halfway, just past the metal cage-like elevators at the spot framed between an old mirror and a painting of the sea.

Next to the painting, I can make out the crack, like a ripple in the wallpaper, simultaneously pushing and pulling my gaze. It’s a pretty easy way to tell if something doesn’t belong, when your eyes can’t quite find it because it’s something you’re not supposed to see. Like on the roof. But unlike on the roof, when I slide the silver ring off my finger, the discomfort disappears and I can see the shape crystal clear in the middle of the crack.