The Unbound

  But this scene is different from the others.

  There was no blood at Judge Phillip’s house. None in Bethany’s driveway.

  An aluminum baseball bat rests on the ground beside my shoe; I crouch and grab it (careful to keep my sleeve between the metal and my fingers to avoid leaving prints), then stand and turn in a slow circle, scanning the darker corners of the room for movement. I’m alone. It doesn’t feel like it, but that strange sense of wrong must be coming from the void door, because there’s no one here. My eyes flick back to the blood. Not anymore, at least.

  I notice a clipboard resting facedown a foot away from the blood. When I turn it over with my shoe, I see my name written in my own hand, and my stomach twists. With a concerning clarity I realize this is evidence. I reach down and free the paper, pocketing it with a silent apology to the coach.

  I clear the debris from the floor and kneel a foot or so behind the bloodstain, setting the bat to the side as I tug the ring from my finger and place it on the concrete. The void door will have burned through most of the memory, but maybe there’s something. I press my palm to the cold concrete, and the hum drifts up toward my hand. Then I stop.

  Because something in the storage room moves.

  Right behind me.

  I feel the presence a second before I catch the movement in my periphery, first only a shadow, and then the glint of metal. I will myself to stay crouched and still, one hand pressed to the floor as the other drifts toward the bat a few inches from my grasp.

  My hand wraps around the bat at the same instant the shadow surges toward me from behind, and I spring up and turn in time to block the knife that slices down through the air, the sound of metal on metal high and grinding.

  My gaze goes over the bat and the blade to the figure holding it, taking in the silver-blond hair and the cold blue eyes that have haunted me for weeks. He smiles a little as he drags the knife along the aluminum.

  Owen.

  “Miss Bishop,” he says, sounding breathless. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  He slices the knife down the length of the bat toward my hand, forcing me to shift my grip. As soon as I do, his shoe comes up sharply beneath the metal and sends it sailing into the air between us. In the time it takes the bat to fall, his knife vanishes into a holster against his back and he catches my boot with his bare hands as it connects with his chest. He twists my foot hard to the outside, knocking me off balance long enough to pluck the falling bat out of the air and swing it at my free leg. It catches me behind the knee, sending me backward onto the concrete.

  I hit the ground and roll over and up onto my feet again as he lunges forward and I lunge back. Or at least I mean to, but I misjudge the distance and the toppled shelves come up against my shoulders an instant before he forces the bat beneath my chin. I get my hands up at the last second, but it’s all I can do to keep him from crushing my throat. For the first time I see the blood splashed against his fingers.

  “Either you’ve gotten stronger,” he says, “or I’m worse off than I thought.”

  “You’re not real,” I gasp.

  Owen’s pale brow crinkles in confusion. “Why wouldn’t I be?” And then his eyes narrow. “You’re different,” he says. “What’s happened to you?” I try to force him off me, to get leverage on the bat, but he pins me in place and presses his forehead against mine. “What have they done?” he asks as the quiet—his quiet—spills through my head. Tangible in a way it never was in my dreams. No. No, this isn’t real. He isn’t real.

  But he’s not like the Owen from my nightmares, either. When he pulls back, he looks…tired. The strain shows in his eyes and the tightness of his jaw, and this time when I try to fight back, it works.

  “Get off of me,” I growl, driving my knee into his chest. He staggers backward, rubbing his ribs, and I grab the nearest bat and swing it at his head. But he catches it the instant before it can connect and rips the metal from my grip. It goes clanging across the concrete floor, bouncing through the pool of blood on its way and leaving a streak of red in its path.

  “The least you could do is ask me how my trip was,” he says coldly, twirling the bat still in his hand.

  He’s not real. He can’t be real. This is only happening because I thought of it. This is a hallucination…isn’t it? It has to be, because the alternative is worse.

  Owen stops spinning the bat and leans on it. “Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to tear open a void from the other side?”

  “Then how did you get out?”

  “Perseverance,” he says. “The problem with these things…” He nods at the rip in the air and makes a small, exasperated sound. “Is they don’t stay open very long. As soon as someone gets dragged in, they snap shut. I couldn’t seem to get out first. I couldn’t go around them. Finally, I decided I had to go through them.” His eyes flick toward the blood. I think of Coach Metz’s body, floating in the void, torn in two by Owen’s knife, and my stomach twists. I curl my fingers around the metal shelf behind me.

  “Messy business,” he says, running his blood-streaked fingers through his silver hair. “But here I am, and the question is—”

  Owen doesn’t get a chance to finish. I pull the shelf as hard as I can, twisting out of the way just before it comes crashing down on top of him. But even in his current shape, he’s too fast. He darts out of the way, and the metal rings out against the concrete. A second later, the lights go out, plunging the storage room into darkness.

  “Feistier than ever.” His voice wanders toward me. “And yet…”

  I take a step back and his arm snakes around my throat from behind. “Different.” He pulls me sharply back and up, and I gasp for breath as my shoes lift off the floor.

  “I should kill you,” he whispers. “I could.” I writhe and kick, but his hold doesn’t loosen. “You’re running out of air.” My chest burns, and my vision starts to blur. “It’s not such a bad way to go, you know. But the question is, is this how Mackenzie Bishop wants to die?”

  I can’t get enough air to make the word, but I mouth it, I think it, with every fiber of my being.

  No.

  Just like that, Owen’s grip vanishes. I stagger forward and land on my hands and knees on the concrete, gasping, inches away from the streak of Metz’s blood.

  My silver ring glints on the floor, and I grab the metal band and shove it on as I stagger to my feet and spin. But Owen’s no longer there. The signs of him—the toppled shelves, the blood—are there, but I’m alone. A door in the distance closes, and I storm through it into the brightly lit trophy hall…but there’s no sign of him. No sign at all. I hurry through the outer door and into the afternoon light. Again, nothing. Only the distant laughter of students setting up Fall Fest. The green is dotted with a huddle of sophomore girls. A freshman boy. A pair of teachers.

  But Owen is gone.

  I spend ten minutes in the girls’ locker room, washing the coach’s blood off my skin.

  I didn’t track any of it out of the storage room, but there are traces on me—my arm, my hand, my throat—from Owen’s grip, and I scrub everywhere he touched. When I’m done, I wash my face with cold water over and over and over, as if that will help.

  I can’t bring myself to go back.

  There are no prints, nothing to tie me to the room—the crime scene, I realize with a shiver—and the longer it’s there, the greater chance of somebody finding it. I can’t have them finding me with it.

  Mom sends a text that says she’s waiting in the lot, and I force my legs to carry me away from the scene and through campus, past students who have no idea that Metz is nothing more than a drying red slick on a concrete floor. Or that it’s my fault.

  Sako is leaning up against a tree nearby, and her eyes follow me as I pass. She’s not just watching anymore. She’s waiting. Like a hunting dog, kept back until the gun goes off. I know how much she wants to hear the bang. A new wave of nausea hits me as I realize that if Owen is real, she’ll get he
r chance. Agatha will run out of Crew. What am I supposed to tell her when she does? That I know who made the void doors? That the History I sent into the abyss clawed his way back into the Outer using the key I helped him assemble? The only reason she pardoned me before was because Owen was gone.

  He was supposed to stay gone.

  He is gone.

  He wasn’t real.

  But the blood—the blood is real, isn’t it? I saw it.

  Just like I saw Owen.

  “Is everything okay?” Mom asks as I slump into the passenger seat.

  “Long day,” I murmur, thankful for once that we’re not really on speaking terms. Numbness has crept through my chest and settled there, solidifying. I know distantly that it’s a bad thing—Da would have something to say about it, I’m sure—but right now I welcome any small bit of steadiness, even if it’s unnatural.

  I close my eyes as Mom drives. And then to fill the quiet, she starts to sing to herself, and my blood goes cold. I recognize the tune. There are hundreds of thousands of other songs she could sing, but she doesn’t choose any of them. She chooses Owen’s. He only ever hummed the melody. She adds the words.

  “…my sunshine, my only sunshine…”

  My skin starts to crawl.

  “…you make me happy…when skies are gray…”

  “Why are you singing that song?” I ask, trying to keep my voice from shaking. She trails off.

  “I heard you humming it,” she says.

  “When?”

  “A few days ago. It’s pretty. Used to be popular, a long time ago. My mother used to sing it when she cooked. Where did you hear it?”

  My throat goes dry as I look out the window. “I don’t remember.”

  I follow the humming through the halls.

  It is just loud enough to hold on to. I wind through the Narrows, and the melody leads me all the way back to my numbered doors and to Owen. He’s leaning back against the door with the I chalked into its front, and he’s humming to himself. His eyes are closed, but when I step toward him, they drift open, crisp and blue, and consider me.

  “Mackenzie.”

  I cross my arms. “I was beginning to wonder if you were real.”

  He arches a brow, almost playfully. “What else would I be?”

  “A phantom?” I say. “An imaginary friend?”

  “Well then,” he says, his mouth curling up, “am I all that you imagined?”

  The moment we are home—safe within the walls of the apartment—I sit down at the kitchen table, pull my phone from my pocket, and text Wesley.

  No sleepover tonight.

  A moment later he texts back.

  Is everything okay?

  No, I want to say. I think Owen might be back and I can’t tell the Archive because it’s my fault—he’s my fault—and I need your help. But you can’t be here because I can’t stand the thought of him coming for me and finding you. If he’s even real.

  Do I want him to be real? Which is worse, Owen in my head, or flesh and blood and free? He felt real. But real people don’t just disappear.

  He’s not real, whispers another voice in my head. You’ve just lost it.

  Cracked little head, echoes Sako.

  Broken, whispers Owen.

  Weak, adds Agatha.

  Finally I text Wesley back.

  I’m just tired.

  Can’t keep running.

  Or hiding.

  Have to face my bad dreams sooner or later.

  The grim truth is, I’m not afraid to fall asleep, because my nightmare is already coming true. I sit at the table waiting for his reply. Finally it comes.

  I’ll miss your noise.

  The numbness in my chest begins to thaw, and I turn the phone off before I can break down and write back. It takes everything I have to sit through dinner, to muster up some semblance of poise and scrounge together words about school. I only bother because skipping would lead to more worry, but the instant the dishes are clear, I escape to my room. My chest tightens when I see the open window, and I move to slide it shut. I hesitate, my fingers still wrapped around the lip.

  There are three names on the list in my pocket. Part of me thinks they are the least of my problems, but the other part clings to this last vestige of duty, or at least control. I consider the climb to the apartment above, and then the drop.

  “Mackenzie?” I turn to find my mother in the doorway. She’s looking directly at me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I answer automatically.

  She continues to look me in the eyes. Her mouth opens and closes like a fish, and I can tell she’s still trying to form the words: I’m sorry. But when she finally speaks up, all she says is, “Better shut the window. It’s supposed to rain.”

  My attention drifts back to the drop—what was I thinking? I barely made it up that wall last night with Wesley helping me—and I pull the window closed, and say good night. Mom surprises me by pulling the door shut behind her. It’s a small step, but it’s something.

  As soon as she’s gone, I collapse onto the bed. Beyond the walls of my room, I can hear my parents talking in low voices as they shuffle through the apartment, and past them, the far-off sounds of the Coronado shutting down, the tenants retreating, the traffic on the street ebbing to a trickle and then to nothing. I realize how quiet it is in this room, without sleep and without Wesley. Some people might find it peaceful. Maybe I would, too, if my head weren’t so cluttered.

  Still, the quiet is heavy, and eventually it drags me down toward sleep.

  And then, just as my eyes are starting to unfocus, the radio on my desk turns on by itself.

  My head snaps up as a pop song fills the room. A glitch, I tell myself. I get to my feet to turn the radio off when the tuner flicks forward to a rock station, all metal and grind. And then a country song. I stand there in the middle of the room, holding my breath as the radio turns through half a dozen stations—no more than a few lines of each piping through—before landing on an oldies channel. The signal’s weak, and I shiver as the wavering melody of a staticky crooner floats toward me.

  The volume begins to turn up.

  My hand’s halfway to the power switch when the window next to the desk begins to fog. Not the whole window, but a small cloud in the middle of the glass. My heart hammers in my chest as a series of letters writes itself across the misted surface.

  R I N G

  I glance down at my silver band and then back up as a line draws itself through the word.

  R I N G

  I stare at the message, torn between confusion and disbelief before finally tugging off the metal band and setting it on the sill. When I look up again, Owen’s there, his reflection hovering right behind mine in the glass. I spin, ready to strike, but he catches my fist and forces me up against the window, resting his knife under my chin.

  “Violence isn’t always the answer,” he says calmly.

  “Says the one holding a knife to my throat,” I hiss.

  I can see the outline of the Crew key beneath his black shirt. If I can get it away from him and reach the closet door without him slitting my throat, I can—

  He presses down on the blade in warning, and I wince, the knife’s sharp edge denting the skin under my jaw. A little harder and it will slice.

  “That would be a bad idea,” says Owen, reading the thoughts in my skin. “Besides, the key beneath my shirt isn’t the one you need.” He leaves the knife against my throat and uses his other hand to pull the cord free of his collar, so I can see the too-familiar piece of rusted metal hanging from the end. It’s not a Crew key at all. It’s Da’s key. Mine.

  “Maybe, if you can be civilized, I’ll give it back.”

  The knife begins to retreat, and the moment it shifts away from my skin, I catch his wrist and wrench hard. The blade tumbles to the hardwood floor, but before I can lunge for it, Owen sends it skittering across the room with his shoe. Then he catches my shoulders and pins me back against the wall beside the w
indow.

  “You really are a handful,” he says.

  “Then why haven’t you killed me?” I challenge. He pulled back earlier and again just now. The Owen in my nightmares never hesitated.

  “If you really want me to, I’ll oblige, but I was hoping we could talk first. Your father is sitting in your living room, asleep in a chair with a book. I’m going to let go of you,” he says, “but if you try anything, I’ll slit his throat.” I stiffen under his touch. “And even if you scream and wake him,” adds Owen, “he can’t see me, so he won’t stand a chance.”

  Owen’s hands retreat from my shoulders, and I will myself not to attack.

  “What’s going on?” I say. “Why can’t he see you?”

  Owen looks down at his hands, flexing them. “The void. It seems to have a few side effects. You helped confirm that when you first came into the storage room. I was standing right there, and you didn’t even see me until you took off—”

  “My ring,” I say under my breath. It’s a buffer, after all. A set of blinders.

  “It comes in handy, I suppose,” says Owen. “And all that matters is I’m here.”

  “But how are you here?” I growl. “You said you just tore your way through, but I don’t understand. The doors you made, they weren’t random. Why did you attack those people?”

  Owen rests his shoulder against the wall. He still looks…drained. “I didn’t mean to hurt them. I was looking for you.”

  My chest tightens. “What do you mean?”

  The song on the radio ends and another picks up, this one slower, sadder.

  “It turns out,” says Owen, “the vast infinite emptiness you pitched me into isn’t really empty. It’s more like a shortcut without a destination. Half a door. But you can’t have half a door,” he says, blue eyes dancing. “You have to give it a place to go. Or a person to go to. Someone you can focus on with all your strength. I chose you.”