“I’m sorry, Miss Bishop.”

“Roland,” I plead. “Don’t do this.” He scratches something onto the paper. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but please don’t—”

“I don’t have a choice,” he says as the card on the front of Ben’s drawer turns red. The mark of the restricted stacks.

No, no, no come the metronome cries, each one causing a crack that splinters me.

I take a step forward.

“Stay where you are,” orders Roland, and whether it’s his tone or the fact that the cracks hurt so much I can’t breathe, I do as he says. Before my eyes, the shelves begin to shift. Ben’s red-marked drawer pulls backward with a hush until it’s swallowed by the wall. The surrounding drawers rearrange themselves, gliding to fill the gap.

Ben’s drawer is gone.

I sink to my knees on the old wood floor.

“Get up,” orders Roland.

My body feels sluggish, my lungs heavy, my pulse too slow. I haul myself to my feet, and Roland grabs my arm, forcing me out of the room into an empty hall.

“Who opened the drawer, Miss Bishop?”

I won’t rat out Carmen. She only wanted to help.

“I did,” I say.

“You don’t have a key.”

“‘Two ways through any lock,’” I answer numbly.

“I warned you to stay away,” growls Roland. “I warned you not to draw attention. I warned you what happens to Keepers who lose their post. What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t,” I say. My throat hurts, as if I’ve been screaming. “I just had to see him—”

“You woke a History.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“He’s not a goddamn puppy, Mackenzie, and he’s not your brother. That thing is not your brother, and you know that.”

The cracks are spreading beneath my skin.

“How can you not know that?” Roland continues. “Honestly—”

“I thought he wouldn’t slip!”

He stops. “What?”

“I thought…that maybe…he wouldn’t slip.”

Roland brings his hands down on my shoulders, hard. “Every. History. Slips.”

Not Owen, says a voice inside me.

Roland lets go. “Turn in your list.”

If there’s any wind left in my lungs, that order knocks it out.

“What?”

“Your list.”

If she proves herself unfit in any way, she will forfeit the position.

And if she proves unfit, you, Roland, will remove her yourself.

“Roland…”

“You can collect it tomorrow morning, when you return for your hearing.”

He promised me he wouldn’t. I trusted…but what have I done with his trust? I can see the pain in his eyes. I force one shaking hand into my pocket and pass him the folded paper. He takes it and motions toward the door, but I can’t will myself to leave.

“Miss Bishop.”

My feet are nailed to the floor.

“Miss Bishop.”

This isn’t happening. I just wanted to see Ben. I just needed—

“Mackenzie,” says Roland. I force myself forward.

I follow him through the maze of stacks. There is no warmth and there is no peace. With every step, every breath, the cracks deepen, spread. Roland leads me through the atrium to the antechamber and the front desk, where Elliot sits diligently.

When Roland turns to look at me, anger has dulled into something sad. Tired.

“Go home,” he says. I nod stiffly. He turns and vanishes back into the stacks.

Elliot glances up from his work, a vague curiosity in the arch of his brows.

I can feel myself breaking.

I barely make it through the door and into the Narrows before I shatter.

It hurts.

Worse than anything. Worse than noise or touch or knives. I don’t know how make it stop. I have to make it stop.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t—

“Mackenzie?”

I turn to find Owen standing in the hall. His blue eyes hangs on me, the smallest wrinkle between his brows.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

Everything about him is calm, quiet, level. Pain twists into anger. I push him, hard.

“Why haven’t you slipped?” I snap.

Owen doesn’t fight back, not even reflexively, doesn’t try to escape, the slightest clenching of his jaw the only sign of emotion. I want to push him over. I want to make him slip. He has to. Ben did.

“Why, Owen?”

I push him again. He takes a step away.

“What makes you so special? What makes you so different? Ben slipped. He slipped right away, and you’ve been here for days and you haven’t slipped at all and it isn’t fair.”

I shove him again, and his back hits the wall at the end of the corridor.

“It isn’t fair!”

My hands dig into his shirt. The quiet is like static in my head, filling the space. It is not enough to erase the pain. I am still breaking.

“Calm down.” Owen wraps his hands around mine, pinning them to his chest. The quiet thickens, pours into my head.

My face feels wet, but I don’t remember crying. “It’s not fair.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Please calm down.”

I want the pain to stop. I need it to stop. I won’t be able to claw my way back up. There is all this anger and this guilt and—

And then Owen kisses my shoulder. “I’m so sorry about Ben.”

The quiet builds like a wave, drowning anger and pain.

“I’m sorry, Mackenzie.”

I stiffen, but as his lips press against my skin, the silence flares in my head, blotting something out. Heat ripples through my body, pricking my senses as the quiet deadens my thoughts. He kisses my throat, my jaw. Each time his lips brush my skin, the heat and silence blossom side by side and spread, drowning a little bit of the pain and anger and guilt, leaving only warmth and want and quiet in their place. His lips brush my cheek, and then he pulls back, his pale eyes leveled cautiously on mine, his mouth barely a breath from mine. When he touches me, there is nothing but touch. There is no thought of wrong and no thought of loss and no thought of anything, because thoughts can’t get through the static.

“I’m sorry, M.”

M. That drags me under. That one little word he can’t possibly understand. M. Not Mackenzie. Not Mac. Not Bishop. Not Keeper.

I want that. I need that. I cannot be the girl who broke the rules and woke her dead brother and ruined everything.…

I close the gap. Pull Owen’s body flush with mine.

His mouth is soft but strong, and when he deepens the kiss, the quiet spreads, filling every space in my mind, washing over me. Drowning me.

And then his mouth is gone, and his hands let go of mine. Everything comes back, too loud. I pull his body against mine, feel the impossibly careful crush of his mouth as it steals the air from my lungs, steals the thoughts from my head.

Owen steps forward, urging my body against the wall, pushing me with his kisses and the quiet that comes with his touch. I am letting it all wash over me, letting it wash away the questions and doubts, the Histories and the key and the ring and everything else, until I am just M against his lips, his body. M reflected in the pale blue of his eyes until he closes them and kisses me deeper, and then I am nothing.

TWENTY-THREE

I  CANNOT STAY HERE forever, buried under Owen’s touch.

At last I push away, break the surface of the quiet, and before I lose my will, before I cave, I leave. I can’t hunt, so I spend what’s left of the night searching the Coronado, moving numbly from floor to floor, trying to read the walls for any clues, anything the Archive—or whoever in it tried to cover things up—might have missed, but that year is shot full of holes. I run through the time lines, scour the memories for leads, and find only dull impressions and stretches of too-flat black. Elling’s old apartment is locked, but I read the south stairs, where Eileen supposedly fell, and even brave the elevators in search of Lionel’s stabbing, only to find the unnatural nothing of excavated pasts. Whatever happened here, someone went out of their way to bury it, even from people like me.