The Dark Vault

by Victoria Schwab

  I run until I feel like myself again.

  I run until I find peace.

  When my shoes finally slow and stop, I bend over my knees, breathing shallowly. Then I pace slowly in a circle, waiting for my heart to slow, my eyes closed in the middle of the empty gym. I focus on the sound of my pulse.

  “Miss Bishop?” calls a gruff voice, and I drag my eyes open to find the gym teacher—the one who oversees the sparring ring, I think his name is Metz—trotting over with a clipboard.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Am I not supposed to be here?”

  Coach Metz waves the clipboard. “Whatever. None of the sports have started yet. Speaking of, you’re quite the runner. Have you considered track?” I shake my head. “You should,” he says. “You’re a natural.”

  “Not sure I have the time, sir.”

  “Gotta make time for the important things, Bishop. Tryouts are next week. Can I at least put your name down?”

  I hesitate. Where will I be next week? Hunting Histories in the Narrows, or strapped to a chair having my memories carved out? What if next week this is all a bad dream and I’m alive and still me?

  “We could use someone like you,” he adds.

  “Okay,” I say. “Sure. Count me in.” It’s so small, but it’s something to cling to. A sliver of normal.

  Coach Metz passes me the clipboard, and I write out my name and hand it back. He offers me a gruff nod of approval as he reads my name and makes a few notes in the margin.

  “Good, good,” he grumbles. “Hyde honor at stake, need the speed…” And then he trots away, disappearing through a door at the other end of the gym marked OFFICES.

  I sink onto the mats to stretch out. My muscles ache from the sudden burst of activity, but it’s a welcome pain. I lie down on the mat, going through my stretches; then I stare up at the ceiling and breathe, wondering: If the Archive came for me, would I run? Will it come to that?

  My theory is getting thinner by the day. Everything pointed to a setup until Cash. Was the attack on him a mistake? A message? A punishment? Did they miss on purpose? Or were they trying to interrupt the pattern and weaken the theory? Questions trickle through me, and at the heart of all the hows and whys, the biggest question is who.

  You’re getting tangled, Da would say. Most problems are simple at their center. You just gotta find the center.

  What’s at the center of this problem?

  The key.

  You don’t technically have to be Crew to make a void—I wasn’t—so long as you have the right kind of key. But Crew are the only ones issued those keys, so the person making the voids is either Crew or someone who’s been given a Crew key. Roland gave me Da’s, so I know it’s possible. Would a Librarian really smuggle one out? Give it to a Keeper to bury the trail of guilt? What if Owen had other allies in the Archive besides Carmen? Could one of them be trying to get revenge? Librarians are Histories; can they be read like Histories? Is there some kind of postscript that records the time they’ve been in the service of the Archive after their lives have been compiled?

  Would Agatha ever consider reading them? Or would she just pin the crimes on me instead? It wouldn’t fix the problem, wouldn’t change the fact that someone is doing this, but it would give her an out, a person to blame. And after our latest meeting, I have no doubt she plans to find me guilty of something. Why wouldn’t she sink me for this? It would be easy. All she has to do is claim I have Owen’s key.

  I sit up, inhaling sharply.

  Owen’s key. He had it on him when he went into the void. Agatha accused me of having it and I don’t, but he did. Maybe he still does.

  It’s the one option I haven’t considered. Haven’t wanted to consider. Is it even possible? A void is a door to nowhere, but it’s still a door. And every door has two sides. What if the voids aren’t being opened from this side? What if someone isn’t throwing people in? What if they’re just trying to get out?

  What if Owen’s trying to get to me?

  No.

  I fall back against the mat and force myself to breathe.

  No. I have to stop. I have to stop seeing Owen in everything. I have to stop looking for him in every moment of my life. Owen Chris Clarke is gone. I have to stop bringing him back.

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath. And then I feel the scratch of letters on the list and take it out, expecting another name. Instead I find a message:

  Roland. Something untangles in my chest. A thread of hope. A fighting chance. I get to my feet, and I’m nearly to the locker rooms when I hear the crash.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IT CAME FROM SOMEWHERE across the gym.

  The crash was far enough away to sound low, loud enough for it to echo around me, but it started in the far corner, the same direction Coach Metz went. I sprint across the gym floor and through the door marked OFFICES, only to find myself in a small hallway full of trophy cases. None of them seem disturbed, and besides, the crash was deep, like something heavy falling—not high, like breaking glass. Doorways stud the hall, each with a glass window insert; I make my way down the corridor, glancing in each room to see if anything’s off.

  Three doors in, I look through the window and slam to a stop.

  Beyond the glass is a storage room. Inside, it’s too dark to make out much more than the metal shelves, half of which have toppled over. I pull my sleeve down over my hand and test the door. It’s unlocked.

  I step through, flicking on one of the three wall switches, illuminating the space just enough to better see the shelves. Two of them have fallen forward and caught each other on the way down. Balls and bats and helmets are now scattered across the storage room floor.

  I’m so focused on not tripping on any of the equipment that I nearly slip on the blood.

  I catch myself midstep and retreat from the fresh, wet slick on the concrete. I look up at the air above the blood, and my eyes slide off of a new void. The air catches in my throat as I listen for sounds of life around me, hearing only the thudding of my pulse.

  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 Bis
hop,” 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 her 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, a
nd 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.