The Archived (6 page)

I
 
YAWN AS ROLAND
leads me back through the Archive. I’ve been here for hours, and I can tell I’m running
out of night. My bones ache from sitting on the floor, but it was worth it for a little
time with Ben.

Not Ben, I know. Ben’s
shelf
.

I roll my shoulders, stiff from leaning so long against the stacks, as we wind back
through the corridors and into the atrium. Several Librarians dot the space, busy
with ledgers and notepads and even, here and there, open drawers. I wonder if they
ever sleep. I look up at the arched stained glass, darker now, as if there were a
night beyond. I take a deep breath and am starting to feel better, calmer, when we
reach the front desk.

A man with gray hair, black glasses, and a stern mouth behind a goatee is waiting
for us. Roland’s music has been shut off.

“Patrick,” I say. Not my favorite Librarian. He’s been here nearly as long as I have,
and we rarely see eye to eye.

The moment he catches sight of me, his mouth turns down.

“Miss Bishop,” he scolds. He’s Southern, but he’s tried to obliterate his drawl by
being curt, cutting his consonants sharp. “We try to discourage such recurrent disobedience.”

Roland rolls his eyes and claps Patrick on the shoulder.

“She’s not doing any harm.”

Patrick glares at Roland. “She not doing any good, either. I should report her to
Agatha.” His gaze swivels to me. “Hear that? I should report you.”

I don’t know who this Agatha is, but I’m fairly certain I don’t want to know.

“Restrictions exist for a reason, Miss Bishop. There are no visiting hours. Keepers
do not attend to the Histories here. You are not to enter the stacks without
good
reason. Are we clear?”

“Of course.”

“Does that mean you will cease this futile and rather tiresome pursuit?”

“Of course not.”

A cough of a laugh escapes from Roland, along with a wink. Patrick sighs and rubs
his eyes, and I can’t help but feel a bit victorious. But when he reaches for his
notepad, my spirits sink. The last thing I need is a demerit on my record. Roland
sees the gesture, too, and brings his hand down lightly on Patrick’s arm.

“On the topic of attending to Histories,” he offers, “don’t you have one to catch,
Miss Bishop?”

I know a way out when I see it.

“Indeed,” I say, turning toward the door. I can hear the two men talking in low, tense
voices, but I know better than to look back.

I find and return twelve-year-old Thomas Rowell, fresh enough out that he goes without
many questions, let alone a fight. Truth be told, I think he is just happy to find
someone in the dark halls, as opposed to some
thing
. I spend what’s left of the night testing every door in my territory. By the time
I finish, the halls—and several spots on the floor—are scribbled over with chalk.
Mostly X’s, but here and there a circle. I work my way back to my two numbered doors,
and discover a third, across from them, that opens with my key.

Door I leads to the third floor and the painting by the sea. Door II leads to the
side of the stairs in the Coronado lobby.

But Door III? It opens only to black. To nothing. So why is it unlocked at all? Curiosity
pulls me over the threshold, and I step through into the dark and close the door behind
me. The space is quiet and cramped and smells of dust so thick, I taste it when I
breathe in. I can reach out and touch walls to my left and right, and my fingers encounter
a forest of wooden poles leaning against them. A closet?

As I slide my ring back on and resume my awkward groping in the dark, I feel the scratch
of a new name on the list in my pocket. Again? Fatigue is starting to eat into my
muscles, drag at my thoughts. The History will have to wait. When I step forward,
my shin collides with something hard. I close my eyes to cut off the rising claustrophobia;
finally, my hands find the door a few feet in front of me. I sigh with relief and
turn the metal handle sharply.

Locked.

I could go back into the Narrows through the door behind me and take a different route,
but a question persists: Where
am
I? I listen closely, but no sound reaches me. Between the dust in this closet and
the total lack of anything resembling noise from the opposite side, I think I must
be somewhere abandoned.

Da always said there were two ways to get through any locked door: by key or by force.
And I don’t have a key, so…I lean back and lift my boot, resting the sole against
the wood of the door. Then I slide my shoe left until it butts up against the metal
frame of the handle. I withdraw my foot several times, testing to make sure I have
a clear shot before I take a breath and kick.

Wood cracks loudly, and the door moves; but it takes a second strike before it swings
open, spilling several brooms and a bucket out onto a stone floor. I step over the
mess to survey the room and find a sea of sheets. Sheets covering counters and windows
and sections of floor, dirty stone peering out from the edges of the fabric. A switch
is set into the wall several feet away, and I wade through the sheets until I get
near enough to flip the lights.

A dull buzzing fills the space. The light is faint and glaring at the same time, and
I cringe and switch it back off. Daylight presses in with a muted glow against the
sheets over the windows—it’s later than I thought—and I cross the large space and
pull a makeshift curtain down, showering dust and morning light on everything. Beyond
the windows is a patio, a set of suspiciously familiar awnings overhead—

“I see you’ve found it!”

I spin to find my parents ducking under a sheet into the room.

“Found what?”

Mom gestures to the space, its dust and sheets and counters and broken broom closet,
as if showing me a castle, a kingdom.

“Bishop’s Coffee Shop.”

For a moment, I am genuinely speechless.

“The café sign in the lobby didn’t give it away?” asks Dad.

Maybe if I’d come through the lobby. I am still dazed by the fact that I’ve stepped
out of the Narrows and into my mother’s newest pet project, but years of lying have
taught me to never look as lost as I feel, so I smile and roll with it.

“Yeah, I had a hunch,” I say, rolling up the window sheet. “I woke up early, so I
thought I’d take a look.”

It’s a weak lie, but Mom isn’t even listening. She’s flitting around the space, holding
her breath like a kid about to blow out birthday candles as she pulls down sheets.
Dad is still looking at me rather intently, eyes panning over my dark clothes and
long sleeves, all the pieces that don’t line up.

“So,” I say brightly, because I’ve learned if I can talk louder than he can think,
he tends to lose his train of thought, “you think there’s a coffee machine under one
of these sheets?”

He brightens. My father needs coffee like other men need food, water, shelter. Between
the three classes he’s set to teach in the history department and the ongoing series
of essays he’s composing, caffeine ranks way up there on his priority list. I think
that’s all it took for Mom to get him to support her dream of owning a café: an invitation
from the local university and the guarantee of continuous coffee. Brew it, and they
will come.

I try to stifle a yawn.

“You look tired,” he says.

“So do you,” I shoot back, pulling the covers off a piece of equipment that might
have once been a grinder. “Hey, look.”

“Mackenzie…” he presses, but I flip the switch and the machinery does in fact grind
to life, drowning him out with a horrible sound like it’s eating its own parts, chewing
up metal nuts and bolts and gobbling down air. Dad winces, and I turn it off, sounds
of mechanic agony echoing through the room, along with a smell like burning toast.

I can’t help glancing back at the cleaning closet, and Mom must have followed my gaze,
because she heads straight for it.

“I wonder what happened here,” she says, swinging the door on its broken hinges.

I shrug and head over to an oven, or something like it, and pry the door open. The
inside is stale and scorched.

“I was thinking that we should bake some muffins,” says Mom. “‘Welcome’ muffins!”
She doesn’t say it like
welcome
but rather like
Welcome!
“You know, to let everyone know that we’re here. What do you think, Mac?”

In response, I nudge the oven door, and it swings shut with a bang. Something dislodges
and lands with a
tinktinktinktink
across the stone before rolling up against her shoe.

Her smile doesn’t even falter. It turns my stomach, her sickly-sweet-everything’s-better-than-fine
pep. I’ve seen the inside of her mind, and this is all a stupid act. I lost Ben. I
shouldn’t have to lose her, too. I want to shake her. I want to say…But I don’t know
what to say. I don’t know how to get through to her, how to make her see that she’s
making it worse.

So I tell the truth. “I think it’s falling apart.”

She misses my meaning. Or steps around it. “Well then,” she says cheerfully, stooping
to fetch the metal bolt, “we’ll just use the apartment oven until we get this one
in shape.”

With that she turns on her heel and bobs away. I look around, hoping to find Dad,
and with him some measure of sympathy or at least commiseration, but he’s on the patio,
staring up at the awnings.

“Chop chop, Mackenzie,” Mom calls through the door. “You know what they say—”

“I’m pretty sure no one says it but you—”

“Up with the sun and just as bright.”

I look out the window at the light and cringe, and follow.

We spend the rest of the morning in the apartment baking
Welcome!
muffins. Or rather, Dad ducks out to run some errands, and Mom makes muffins while
I do my best to look busy. I could really use a few hours of sleep and a shower, but
every time I make a move to leave, Mom thinks up something for me to do. While she’s
distracted pulling a fresh batch from the oven, I dig the Archive list from my pocket.
But when I unfold it, it’s blank.

Relief washes over me before I remember that there should be a name on it. I could
swear I felt the scrawl of a new History being added when I was stuck in the café
closet. I must have imagined it. Mom sets the tray of muffins on the counter as I
refold the paper and tuck it away. She drapes a cloth over them, and out of nowhere
I remember Ben standing on his toes to peek beneath the towel and steal a pinch even
though it was always too hot and he burned his fingers. It’s like being punched in
the chest, and I squeeze my eyes shut until the pain passes.

I beg off baking duty for five minutes just to change clothes—mine smell like Narrows
air and Archive stacks and café dust. I pull on jeans and a clean shirt, but my hair
refuses to work with me, and I finally dig a yellow bandana out of a suitcase and
fashion a headband, trying to hide the mess as best I can. I’m tucking Da’s key beneath
my collar when I catch sight of the dark spots on my floor and remember the bloodstained
boy.

I kneel down, trying to tune out the clatter of baking trays beyond the door as I
slide off my ring and bring my fingertips to the floorboards. The wood hums against
my hands as I close my eyes and reach, and—

“Mackenzie!” Mom calls out.

I sigh and blink, pushing up from the floor. I straighten just as Mom knocks briskly
on the door. “Have I lost you?”

“I’m coming,” I say, shoving the ring back on as her footsteps fade. I cast one last
glance at the floor before I leave. In the kitchen, the muffins are already wrapped
in blossoms of cellophane. Mom is filling a basket, chattering about the residents,
and that’s when I get an idea.

Da was a Keeper, but he was a detective too, and he used to say you could learn as
much by asking people as by reading walls. You get different answers. My room has
a story to tell, and as soon as I can get an ounce of privacy, I’ll read it; but in
the meantime, what better way to learn about the Coronado than to ask the people in
it?

“Hey, Mom,” I say, pushing up my sleeves, “I’m sure you’ve got a ton of work to do.
Why don’t you let me deliver those?”

She pauses and looks up. “Really? Would you?” She says it like she’s surprised I’m
capable of being nice. Yes, things have been rocky between us, and I’m offering to
help because it helps me—but still.

She tucks the last muffin into a basket and nudges it my way.

“Sure thing,” I say, managing a smile, and her resulting one is so genuine that I
almost feel bad. Right up until she wraps me in a hug and the high-pitched strings
and slamming doors and crackling paper static of her life scratches against my bones.
Then I just feel sick.

“Thank you,” she says, tightening her grip. “That’s so sweet.” I can barely hear the
words through the grating noise in my head.

“It’s…really…nothing,” I say, trying to picture a wall between us, and failing. “Mom,”
I say at last, “I can’t breathe.” And then she laughs and lets go, and I’m left dizzy
but free.

“All right, get going,” she says, turning back to her work. I’ve never been so happy
to oblige.

I start down the hall and peel the cellophane away from a muffin, hoping Mom hasn’t
counted them out as I eat breakfast. The basket swings back and forth from the crook
of my arm, each muffin individually wrapped and tagged.
BISHOP’S
, the tag announces in careful script. A basket of conversation starters.

I focus on the task at hand. The Coronado has seven floors—one lobby and six levels
of housing—with six apartments to a floor, A through F. That many rooms, odds are
someone knows something.

And maybe someone does, but nobody seems to be home. There’s the flaw in both my mother’s
plans and in mine. Late morning on a weekday, and what do you get? A lot of locked
doors. I slip out of 3F and head down the hall. 3E and 3D are both quiet, 3C is vacant
(according to a small slip of paper stuck to the door), and though I can hear the
muffled sounds of life in 3B, nobody answers. After several aggressive knocks on 3A,
I’m getting frustrated. I drop muffins on each doorstep and move on.