The Unbound

I sigh and sink against the patio wall to wait, picking at the tape on my palm. Someone casts a shadow over me, and a moment later, Eric sits down on the low wall a few feet away, resting a Bishop’s to-go cup on his knee.

“I didn’t know about Roland,” I say.

“I didn’t tell you,” he says simply. I look over. He looks tired, but otherwise unscathed. “Agatha is ru

I swallow hard. “How much time do I have?”

“Not enough,” he says, sipping his coffee. “Are you i

“I was afraid I’d fail an assessment.”

“But you just said—”

“A mental assessment,” I clarify. Silence falls between us. “Do you ever wish you’d gone a different way?” I ask after a minute.

Eric gives me a guarded look. “I’m honored to serve the Archive,” he says. “It gives me purpose.” And then he softens a little. “There have been times when I’ve wavered. When I thought maybe I wanted to be normal. But the thing is, what we do, it’s in our blood. It’s who we are. Normal wouldn’t fit us, even if we wanted to wear it.” He sighs and gets to his feet. “I’d tell you to stay out of trouble,” he says, “but it just seems to find you, Miss Bishop.”

Mom reappears with two to-go cups, and there’s this split second as she hands me one when she finally looks me in the eye. Then she sees the man standing beside me.

“Good morning, Eric!” she says brightly. “How’s that dark roast?”

He gives her his best smile. “Worth crossing the city for, ma’am,” he says before heading off down the sidewalk.

“Eric’s become a bit of a regular,” explains Mom as we walk to her car.

“Yeah,” I say drily. “I’ve seen him around.”

Mom has the decency to drop me off a block and a half from school and out of the line of sight of the parking lot. As the car pulls away, I look down at my arm, hoping I can get through one day without an incident. Maybe Eric’s right. Maybe normal doesn’t suit us, but I’d be willing to pretend.

I catch sight of Cash, resting against the bike rack with coffee and a smile. Cash, who always makes me feel normal. But the moment I reach him, I can see something’s off.

His dark hair trails across his cheekbones, but it can’t entirely hide the cut beside his eye or the bruise darkening his jaw.

“Looks like I’m not the only one to get into a scrape,” I say. “Soccer? Or did you and Wes go a few rounds on the mat?”

“Nah,” he says. But he doesn’t seem eager to say any more.

“Well, come on,” I say as he hands me a fresh coffee. “I told you my clumsy story. It’s only fair you tell me yours.”

“I wish I could,” he says, furrowing his brow, “but I’m not exactly sure what happened.”

I frown, taking a sip. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I was heading back from your place yesterday—I was going to take the bus, but it was a nice day, so I decided to walk. I was almost back to the school, when all of a sudden there’s this crashing sound behind me, and before I can turn to see what happened, someone pulls me backward hard.”

The coffee goes bitter in my mouth.

“It was insane,” he says. “One minute I’m minding my own business, and the next I’m laid out on the sidewalk.” He brings his fingertips to the cut beside his eye. “I caught myself on a bench on the way down. I couldn’t have been out for more than a minute or two, but by the time I got up, there was no one else around.”

“What did it sound like?” I ask slowly. “The noise behind you.”

“It was loud, like a crash, or a tear, or a whoosh. Yeah, a whoosh. And that’s not even the strangest part.” He curls his fingers around the cup. “You’ll think I’m crazy. Hell, I think I’m crazy. But I swear there was a guy walking maybe a few strides behind me right before it happened. I thought he might have been the one to grab me, but by the time I got back up he was gone.” He straightens and chuckles. “God, I sound like a nut job, don’t I?”

“No,” I say, gripping the paper cup. “You don’t.”

A ripping sound, a force hard enough to slam Cash backward, and no visible trace? All the markings of a void. Was the man behind him Crew? Or a fourth victim?

“What did the other guy look like?”

Cash shrugs. “He looked normal.”

I frown. It doesn’t make sense. If someone was trying to attack Cash, they missed, and I don’t see why they’d attack him in the first place—not while I was under lock and key. There would be nothing to tie me to this crime, so why do it?

“Did you see anyone else besides the other guy?” I ask, stepping closer.

He shakes his head, and I grab his arm, his noise singing through me. “Can you remember anything about the moments before it happened? Anything at all?”

Cash’s gaze goes to the ground. “You.”

I pull back a fraction. “What?”

“I wasn’t paying attention, because I was thinking about you.” My face goes warm as he gives a small, stifled laugh. “Truth be told, I can’t stop thinking about you.”

Then, out of nowhere, Cash takes my face in his hands and kisses me. His lips are warm and soft, and my head fills with jazz and laughter; for an instant, it feels sweet and safe and simple. But my life is none of those things, and I realize as the kiss ends that I don’t want to pretend it is, and that there is only one person I want to kiss me like this.

Someone by the gate whistles, another cheers, and I pull away sharply.

“I can’t,” I say, my face on fire. It feels like everyone in the lot is looking at us.

Cash immediately retreats, trying not to look stung. “It’s Wes, isn’t it?”

Yes. “It’s life.”

“Way to be broad,” he says, slouching back against the bike rack. “It’s a lot easier to hate a person.”

“Then it’s me. Look, Cash, you’re amazing. You’re sweet and clever, and you make me smile.…”

“I sound pretty awesome.”

“You are,” I say, stepping away. “But my life right now is…complicated.”

Cash nods. “Okay. Understood. And who knows,” he says, brightening, “maybe one day it will be simpler.”

I manage a thin smile. Maybe.

And then someone calls Cash’s name, and his face lights up as he turns and shouts back, and it’s like nothing happened. I have to wonder if he has masks he wears, too. Maybe we all do.

Wes shows up a few minutes later in his senior black-and-gold, looking like he spent the weekend lounging by a pool instead of scaling Coronado walls and warding off my nightmares. Cash gets dragged into a conversation with a nearby group, and Wes knocks his shoulder against mine and whispers, “No nightmares?”

“No nightmares,” I say. And that’s something to be thankful for. That is progress—small, fractional, but it is something. It is me clawing my way back to sanity.

The bell rings, and we all head through the gate. Whatever Fall Fest is, it’s starting to take over campus. The bones of it are scattered in the stretches of grass between buildings, massive ribbons in black and green and silver and gold are rolled and waiting, and everyone seems oddly cheerful for a Monday morning.

Every moment without the watch and the warden and the constant reminders that I’m not okay makes me feel closer to normal. By ten thirty in Lit Theory, I’m feeling positively mundane. And then Ms. Wellson drags her chalk across the board and the sound is too sharp, like metal on stone.

Metal on stone, I think. And as I think it, my body stiffens and stops. The rest of the room doesn’t. Wellson keeps talking, but her voice seems suddenly dull and far away. I desperately try to move the pen in my hand, but my hand refuses. My whole body refuses.

“Did you really think,” comes a voice from behind me, “that a little sleep could fix the ways you’re broken?”

No. I close my eyes. You’re not real.