The Dark Vault

by Victoria Schwab

  My heart skips again, falters.

  My skin is going pins-and-needles numb as I manage to reach into my boot and pull Da’s Crew key out. I use the wall to get myself up, brace myself when my body sways, and run my hands over the surface until I catch the invisible lip of a door frame.

  The scenes have all gone quiet now except for one with Da.

  I can’t make out the words, and I can’t tell anymore if my eyes are open or closed, and it’s terrifying, so I focus on the smooth Louisiana lilt in Da’s voice as he talks, and I bring my hands back and forth, back and forth, until my fingers graze the keyhole.

  I get the key into the lock and turn hard to the left as Da’s voice stops. Everything goes black a moment before the lock clicks and the door opens. I stumble through, gasping for air, every muscle shaking.

  I’m back in the Narrows. Crew keys aren’t even supposed to lead here. Then again, I’m pretty sure Crew keys aren’t supposed to be used from within a Returns room. As I force my body to its feet, my pulse pounds in my ears. I’m thankful to still have a pulse. A scrap of paper is crumpled on the floor. My list. I lift it, expecting names, but there are no names at all, only an order.

  I look around.

  The Narrows are empty and painfully quiet, and when I round the corner I see that my cluster of numbered doors have all been flung open. The rooms beyond are cast in shadow, but I can hear shouting in the lobby and the coffee shop—orders, the cold, composed kind given by members of the Archive, not Histories or residents. Only the third floor is quiet. Something in me twists, whispers wrong wrong wrong, and I shut the other two doors and step out into the hall.

  The first thing I see is the red streaking across the faded yellow wallpaper.

  Blood.

  I drop to my knees and say a prayer even as I touch the floor and reach. The memory hums into my bones and numbs my hands as I roll it back. The scene is right at the top, and it skips away too fast, a blur of black-spiked hair and metal and red. Everything in me tightens. I slam the memories to a stop, and play them forward.

  Anger washes over me as I watch Owen step out from the Narrows door and pull a pen and slip of paper from his pocket. It’s the same size as the one with my list. Archive paper. There’s a muffled sound down the hall, like knocking, as Owen leans the page against the mirror and writes one word. Out.

  Moments later, a hand writes back.

  Owen smiles and pockets the slip.

  The knocking stops, and I see Wesley standing by my door. He turns, his fist slipping back to his side; and judging by the way he’s looking at Owen, he saw quite enough when he read my skin.

  Owen only smiles. And then he says something. The words are nothing more than a hush, a murmur, but Wesley’s face changes. His lips move, and Owen’s shoulders shrug, and then the knife appears in his hand. He slips his finger into the hilt’s hole, twirls the blade casually.

  Wesley’s hand curls into a fist, and he swings at Owen, who smiles, dodges fluidly, and follows upward with his knife. Wesley leans back just in time, but Owen spins the blade in his fingers at the top of its arc and swings down. This time Wesley isn’t fast enough. He gasps and staggers back, gripping his shoulder. Owen strikes again, and Wes avoids the blade but not Owen’s free hand, now a fist, as it comes down across his temple. One knee buckles to the floor, and before Wes can get up, Owen slams him back into the wall. Wes’s shoulder leaves a blossom of red against one of the hall’s ghosted doors, and the left side of his face is stained with blood, a gash on his forehead spilling down like a mask over his left eye. He collapses to the floor, and Owen vanishes into the stairwell.

  Wesley staggers to his feet and follows.

  And so do I.

  I spring up from the floor, the past vanishing into present as I race down the hall and up the stairs. I’m close. I can hear the footsteps floors above. I vault up past the sixth floor—more blood on the steps. Above me, I hear the roof door slam shut, and the sound is still echoing as I reach it and stumble through into the garden of stone demons.

  And there they are.

  Wesley catches Owen once across the jaw. Owen’s face flicks sideways, and the smile sharpens before Wes throws another fist, and Owen catches his hand, pulls him forward, and plunges the knife into his stomach.

  THIRTY

  A SCREAM RISES IN my throat as Owen pulls the knife free and Wesley collapses to the concrete.

  “I’m impressed, Miss Bishop,” Owen says, turning toward me. The sun is sinking, the gargoyles multiplied by shadows.

  Wesley coughs, tries to move, can’t.

  “Hang in there, Wes,” I say. “Please. I’m sorry. Please.” I step forward, and Owen holds the knife over Wes in warning.

  “I tried to miss the vital organs,” he says. “But I told you, I’m rusty.”

  He extends one foot toward the ledge of the roof as he looks down, the blood-soaked knife hanging lazily from his fingers.

  “It’s a long way down, Owen. And there are plenty of Crew at the bottom.”

  “And they’re going to have their hands full with the Histories,” he says. “Which is why I’m up here.”

  He pulls the Crew key from his pocket and reaches out, slides it through the air as if there were…a door. My eyes slip off it several times before I can find the edges.

  A shortcut.

  The teeth vanish into the door.

  “Is that why you were on the roof last time? To get away?”

  “If they’d caught me alive,” he says, still gripping the key, “they would have erased my life.”

  I have to get him away from that door before he goes through.

  “I can’t believe you’re running away,” I say, making the disgust in my voice clear.

  And sure enough, his hand slips from the key. It hangs in the air as his foot slides from the ledge. “How did you get out?” he asks.

  “It’s a secret.” I pivot and step back, the weight of my Crew key heavy in my coat. I have an idea. “There’s something I don’t get. So what if you were Crew—you’re still a History.” I take another step. “You should have slipped.”

  He pulls the key out of the air and pockets it as he steps over Wesley’s body toward me.

  “There’s a reason Histories slip,” he says. “It’s not anger, or even fear. It’s confusion. Everything is foreign. Everything is frightening. It’s why Regina slipped. It’s why Ben slipped.”

  “Don’t talk to me about my brother.” I take another step back, and nearly stumble on the base of a statue. “You knew what would happen.”

  Owen steps over a broken statue limb without looking down. “Confusion tips the scale. And that’s why all members of the Archive are kept in the Special Collections. Because our Histories don’t slip. Because we open our eyes and know where we are. We’re not simple and scared and easily stopped.”

  I slip through a gap between the statues, and Owen falls out of sight. Moments later he reappears, following me through the maze of gargoyles. Good. That means he’s away from his shortcut. Away from Wes.

  “But other Histories aren’t like us, Owen. They do slip.”

  “Don’t you get it? They slip because they’re lost, confused. Regina slipped. Ben slipped. But if we had been allowed to tell them about the Archive when they were still alive, maybe they would have made it through.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say, vanishing just long enough to pull the Crew key from my pocket, guard it against my wrist.

  “The Archive owed us a chance. They take everything. We deserve something back. But no, it would be against the rules. Do you know why the Archive has so many rules, Miss Bishop? It’s because they’re afraid of us. Terrified. They make us strong, strong enough to lie and con and fight and hunt and kill, strong enough to rise up, to break free. All they have are their secrets and their rules.”

  I hesitate. He’s right. I’ve seen it, the Archive’s fear, in their strictures and their threats. But that doesn’t mean what he’s doing is r
ight.

  “Without the rules,” I force myself to say, “there would be chaos.” I step back, feel the front of a gargoyle come up against my shoulders. I slip sideways, never taking my eyes off Owen. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Chaos?”

  “I want freedom,” he says, stalking me. “The Archive is a prison, and not only for the dead. And that’s why I’m going to tear it down, shelf by shelf and branch by branch.”

  “You know I won’t let you.”

  He steps forward, knife hanging loosely at his side. He smiles. “You wanted this to happen.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. That’s how the Archive will see it. And they will carve you up and throw you away. You’re nothing to them. Stop running, Miss Bishop. There’s nowhere to go.”

  I know he’s right. I’m counting on it. I’m standing in a ring of winged statues, their faces crumbling with age, their bodies set too close. Owen looks at me as if I’m a mouse he’s cornered, his eyes bright despite the dusk.

  “I’ll stand trial for my mistakes, Owen, but not for yours. You are a monster.”

  “And you aren’t? The Archive makes us monsters. And then it breaks the ones who get too strong, and buries the ones who know too much.”

  I dart sideways as his hand flies forward. I pretend to notice too late, pretend to be too slow. He catches my elbow and forces me back against a demon, his arms caging me. And then he smiles, pulls me toward him just enough to rest the tip of the bloodstained knife between my shoulder blades.

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to pass judgment. You and I are not so different.”

  “You twisted it so I would think so. You conned my trust, made me think we were the same, but I am nothing like you, Owen.”

  He presses his forehead against mine. The quiet slides through me, and I hate it.

  “Just because you can’t read me,” he whispers, “doesn’t mean I can’t read you. I’ve seen inside you. I’ve seen your darkness and your dreams and your fears, and the only difference between us is that I know the true extent of the Archive and its crimes, and you are only just learning.”

  “If you’re talking about my inability to quit, I already know.”

  “You know nothing,” Owen hisses, forcing my body against his. I wrap my empty hand around his back for balance, and bring the one with the key up behind him.

  “But I could show you,” he says, softening. “It doesn’t have to end like this.”

  “You used me.”

  “So did they,” he says. “But I’m giving you the one thing they never have, and never will. A choice.”

  I slide the key through the empty air behind his back and begin to turn. Da said it had to make a full circle, but halfway through the turn, the air resists and coalesces around the metal like a lock forming. A strange sense bleeds up the key into my fingers as the door takes shape out of nothing, barely visible and yet there, a shadow hovering in the air behind Owen. I look into his eyes, hold their focus. They are so cold and empty and cruel. No butterflies, no shoulders-to-shoulders, knees-to-knees, no sideways smiles. It makes this easier.

  “I’d never help you, Owen.”

  “Well, I’ll help you,” he says. “I’ll kill you before they do.”

  I hold fast to the key, but let my other arm fall away from his back. “Don’t you see, Owen?”

  “See what?”

  “The day’s over,” I say, turning the key the rest of the way.

  His eyes widen with surprise as he hears the click behind him, but it’s too late. The moment the key finishes the full turn, the door opens backward with explosive force, not onto the dark halls of the Narrows or the white expanse of the Archive, but a cavernous black, a void, like space without stars. A nothing. A nowhere. Just like Da warned. But Da didn’t convey the crushing force, the pull, like air being sucked out of an open plane door. It rips Owen and the knife backward, the void at once swallowing him and wrenching me forward to follow; but I cling to the broken arms of a gargoyle with all that’s left of my strength. The violent wind within the doorway twists and, having devoured the History, reverses, slamming the door shut in my face.

  It leaves nothing. No door, nothing but the key Roland lent me, which hangs in the air, still jammed in the invisible lock, its cord swaying from the force.

  My knees buckle.

  Then someone lets out a shuddering cough.

  Wesley.

  I pull the key free and run, weaving through the gargoyles and back to the edge of the roof where Wesley is lying, curled, red spreading out beneath him. I drop to the ground beside him.

  “Wes. Wes, please, come on.”

  His jaw is clenched, his palm pressed against his stomach. I’m still not wearing my ring, and as I take his arm and try to wrap it around my shoulders, he gasps, and it’s pain fear worry anger pacing the hall not home where is she where is she I shouldn’t have left and something tight like panic before I can focus on getting him to his feet.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, dragging him up, his fear and pain washing over me, his thoughts running into mine. “I need you to stand. I’m sorry.”

  Tears escape down his cheeks, dark from the eyeliner. His breath is ragged as I lead him, too slowly, to the roof door. He leaves a trail of red.

  “Mac,” he says between gritted teeth.

  “Shhh. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” And it’s such a bad lie, because how can it possibly be okay when he’s losing this much blood? We’ll never make it down the stairs. He won’t last long enough for an ambulance. He needs medical attention. He needs Patrick. We reach the roof door, and I get the Crew key into the lock.

  “I’ll kick your ass if you die on me, Wes,” I say, pulling him close as I turn the key left and drag him through into the Archive.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE 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.”