The Archived (28 page)

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
bˉ
o
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.

T
HE DAY YOU DIE,
you tell me I have a gift.


The day you die, you tell me I am a natural.


The day you die, you tell me I am strong enough.


The day you die, you tell me it will be okay.


None of that is true.


In the years and months and days before, you teach me everything I know. But the day
you die, you don’t say anything.


You flick away your cigarette, put your hollow cheek against my hair and keep it there
until I began to think you’ve gone to sleep. Then you straighten and look me in the
eye, and I know in that moment that you are going to be gone when I wake up.


There is a note on my desk the next morning, pinned beneath your key. But the note
is blank, save for the mark of the Archive. Mom is in the kitchen, crying. Dad, for
once, is home from the school and sitting by her. As I press my ear to my bedroom
door, trying to hear over my pulse, I wish that you had said something. It would have
been nice, to have words to cling to, like all those other times.


I lie awake for years and re-imagine that good-bye, rewrite that note, and instead
of the heavy quiet, or the three lines, you tell me exactly what I need to hear, what
I need to know, in order to survive this.


Every night I have the same bad dream.

I’m on the roof, trapped in the circle of gargoyles, their claws and arms and broken
wings holding me in a cage of stone. Then the air in front of me shivers, ripples,
and the void door takes shape, spreading across the sky like blood until it’s there,
solid and dark. It has a handle, and the handle turns, and the door opens, and Owen
Chris Clarke stands there with his haunted eyes and his wicked knife. He steps down
to the concrete roof, and the stone demons tighten their grip as he comes toward me.

“I will set you free,” he says just before he buries the knife in my chest, and I
wake up.

Every night I have that dream, and every night I end up on the roof, checking the
air in the circle of demons for signs of a door. There is almost no mark of the void
I made; nothing but the faintest ripple, like a crack in the world; and when I close
my eyes and press my hands against the space, they always go straight through.

Every night I have that dream, and every day I check my list for signs of a summons.
Both sides of the paper are blank, and have been since the incident, and by the third
day I’m so scared that the list is broken that I dig out a pen and write a note, not
caring who finds it.

Please update.

I watch the words dissolve into the page.

No one answers.

I ask again. And again. And again. And every time I’m met with silence and blank space.
Panic chews through my battered body. As my bruises lighten, my fear gets worse. I
should have heard by now. I should have heard.

On the third morning, Dad asks about Wes, and my throat closes up. I can barely make
it through a feeble lie. And so when, at the end of the third day, a summons finally
writes itself across my paper…

Please report to the Archive.
—
A


I drop everything and go.

I tug my ring off and pull the Crew key from my pocket—Owen took my Keeper key with
him into the void—and slide it into the lock on my bedroom door. A deep breath, a
turn to the left, and I step through into the Archive.

The branch is still recovering, most of the doors still closed; but the chaos has
subsided, the noise diminished to a dull, steady din, like a cooling engine. I’m not
even over the threshold when I open my mouth to ask about Wes. But then I look up,
and the question catches in my throat.

Roland and Patrick are standing behind the desk, and in front of it is a woman in
an ivory coat. She is tall and slim, with red hair and creamy skin and a pleasant
face. A sharp gold key hangs on a black ribbon around her throat, and she’s wearing
a pair of black fitted gloves. There is something calm about her that clashes with
the lingering noise of the damaged Archive.

The woman takes a fluid step forward.

“Miss Bishop,” she says with a warm smile, “my name is Agatha.”