And then Wesley’s grip is gone, and so is the noise.

I watch him fight back a smile and lose. What comes through isn’t smug, or even crooked. It’s proud. And I can’t help it. I smile a little too. And then the headache hits, and I wince, leaning on the bathroom sink.

“Baby steps,” says Wes, beaming. He offers me the tube of skin glue. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind fixing me up? I don’t want this to scar.”

“I won’t be able to hide this,” he says, examining my work in the mirror.

“Makes you look tough,” I say. “Just say you lost a fight.”

“How do you know I didn’t win?” he asks, meeting my eyes in the glass. “Besides, I can’t pull the fight card. It’s been used too many times.”

His back is to me. His shoulders are narrow but strong. Defined. I feel my skin warm as my gaze tracks between his shoulder blades and down the slope of his back. Halfway down the curve of his spine is a shallow red cut, glittering from the sliver of glass embedded in it.

“Hold still,” I say. I bring my fingertips against his lower back. The noise rushes in, but this time I don’t push. Instead I wait, let it settle around me, like water. It’s still there, but I can think through it, around it. I don’t think I’ll ever be the touchy-feely type, but maybe with practice I can at least learn to float.

Wes meets my gaze in the mirror, and quirks a brow.

“Practice makes perfect,” I say, blushing. My fingers drift up his spine, running over his ribs till I reach the shard. Wesley tenses beneath my touch, which makes me tense too.

“Tweezers,” I say, and he hands me a pair.

I pinch the glass, hoping it doesn’t go deep.

“Breathe in, Wes,” I say. He does, his back expanding beneath my fingers. “Breathe out.”

He does, and I tug the glass out, his breath wavering as it slides free. I hold up the fragment for him to see. “Not bad.” I put a small bandage over the cut. “You should keep it.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, turning to face me. “I think I should wash it off and make a little trophy out of it, ‘Courtesy of an escaped History and the coffee table in Two C’ etched into the stand.”

“Oh, no,” I say, depositing the shard in his outstretched hand. “I wouldn’t wash it off.”

Wes drops it onto the top of a small pile of glass, but keeps his eyes on mine. The crooked smile slides away.

“We make a good team, Mackenzie Bishop.”

“We do.” We do, and that is the thing that tempers the heat beneath my skin, checks the flutter of girlish nerves. This is Wesley. My friend. My partner. Maybe one day my Crew. The fear of losing that keeps me in check.

“Next time,” I say, pulling away, “don’t hold the door open for me.”

I clean off the cluttered sink and leave Wes to finish getting dressed, but he follows me down the hall, still shirtless.

“You see what I get for trying to be a gentleman.”

Oh, god—he’s flirting.

“No more gentlemanly behavior,” I say, reaching my room. “You’re clearly not cut out for it.”

“Clearly,” he says, wrapping an arm loosely around my stomach from behind.

I hiss, less from the noise than the pain. He lets go.

“What is it?” he says, suddenly all business.

“It’s nothing,” I say, rubbing my ribs.

“Take off your shirt.”

“You’ll have to try a hell of a lot harder to seduce me, Wesley Ayers.”

“My shirt’s already off,” he counters. “I think it’s only fair.”

I laugh. It hurts.

“And I’m not trying to seduce you, Mackenzie,” he says, straightening. “I’m trying to help. Now, let me see.”

“I don’t want to see,” I say. “I’d rather not know.” I managed to shower and change without looking at my ribs. Things only hurt more when you can see them.

“That’s great. Then you close your eyes and I’ll see for you.”

Wesley reaches out and slips his fingers around the edge of my shirt. He pauses long enough to make sure I won’t physically harm him, then guides my top over my head. I look away, intending to educate myself on the number of pens in the cup on my desk. I can’t help but shiver as Wesley’s hand slides feather-light over my waist, and the noise of his touch actually distracts me from the pain until his hand drifts up and—

“Ouch.” I look down. A bruise is already spreading across my ribs.

“You should really have that looked at, Mac.”

“I thought that’s what you were doing.”

“I meant by a medical professional. We should get you to Patrick, just to be safe.”

“No way,” I say. Patrick’s the last person I want to see right now.

“Mac—”

“I said no.” Pain weaves between my ribs when I breathe, but I can breathe, so that’s a good sign. “I’ll live,” I say, taking back my shirt.

Wes sags onto my bed as I manage to get the shirt over my head, and I’m tugging it down when there’s a knock on my door, and Mom peeks in, holding a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies.

“Mackenz—Oh.”

She takes in the scene before her, Wesley shirtless and stretched out on my bed, me pulling my shirt on as quickly as possible so she won’t see my bruises. I do my best to look embarrassed, which isn’t hard.

“Hello, Wesley. I didn’t know you were here.”

Which is a a bald-faced lie, of course, because my mother loves me, but she doesn’t show up with a tray of cookies and a pitcher and her sweetest smile unless I’ve got company. When did she get home?

“We went for a run together,” I say quickly. “Wes is trying to help me get back in shape.”

Wesley makes several vague stretching motions that make it abundantly clear he’s not a runner. I’ll kill him.

“Mhm,” says Mom. “Well, I’ll just…put these…over here.”

She sets the tray on an unpacked box without taking her eyes off us.

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Bishop,” says Wesley. I glance over and find him eyeing the cookies with a wolfish smile. He’s almost as good a liar as I am. It scares me.

“Oh, and Mac,” adds Mom, swiping one of the cookies for herself.

“Yeah?”

“Door open, please,” she chirps, tapping the wooden door frame as she leaves.

“How long have we been running together?” asks Wes.

“A few days.” I throw a cookie at his head.

“Good to know.” He catches and devours the cookie in a single move, then reaches over and lifts Ben’s bear from the bedside table. The plastic glasses are no longer perched on its nose but folded on the table, where I dropped them last night before I went to find my brother. My chest tightens. Gone gone gone thuds in my head like a pulse.

“Was this his?” Wes asks, blind pity written across his face. And I know it’s not his fault—he doesn’t understand, he can’t—but I can’t stand that look.

“Ben hated that bear,” I say. Still, Wesley sets it gently, reverently, back on the table.

I sink onto the bed. Something digs into my hip, and I pull the Crew key out of my pocket.

“That was close today,” says Wes.

“But we did it,” I say.

“We did.” Halfway to a smile, his mouth falls. I feel it too.

Wes reaches for his Archive paper as I reach for mine, and we both unfold the lists at the same time to find the same message scrawled across the paper.

Keepers Bishop and Ayers:

Report to the Archive.

NOW.

TWENTY-SIX

I  KNOW THIS ROOM.

The cold marble floors and the walls lined with ledgers and the long table sitting in the middle of the chamber: it’s the room where I became a Keeper. There are people seated behind that table now, just as there were then, but the faces—most of them, at least—have changed. And even as we gather, I can hear the distant sounds of the disruption spreading.

As Wesley and I stand waiting, my first thought is that I avoided one tribunal only to end up in another. This morning’s would have been deserved. This afternoon’s makes no sense.

Patrick sits behind the table, glowering, and I wonder how long he’s been making that face, waiting for us to walk in. It is, for a moment, absurdly funny, so much so that I’m worried I’ll laugh. Then I take in the rest of the scene, and the urge dies.