I
’M ELEVEN, ANDyou are sitting across from me at the table, talking under the sound of dishes in—
the kitchen. Your clothes are starting to hang on youshirts, pants, even your ring. I overheard Mom and Dad, and they said that you’re—
dyingnot the fast, stone-drop way, there and then gone, but still. I can’t stop squinting
at you, as if I might see the disease picking you clean, stealing you from me, bite
by bite.
You’re telling me about the Archive again, something about the way it changes and
grows, but I am not really listening. I’m twirling the silver ring on my finger. I
need it now. Fractured bits of memory and feeling are starting to get through whenever
someone touches me. They’re not jarring or violent yet, just kind of messy. I told
you that and you told me it would get worse, and you looked sorry when you said it.
You said it was genetic, the potential, but it doesn’t manifest until the predecessor
makes the choice. And you chose me. I hope you weren’t sorry. I’m not sorry. I’m only
sorry that as I get stronger, you seem to get weaker.
“Are you listening?” you ask, because it’s obvious I’m not.
“I don’t want you to die,” I say, surprising us both, and the whole moment hardens,
stops, as your eyes hold mine. And then you soften and shift in your seat, and I think
I can hear your bones moving.
“What are you afraid of, Kenzie?” you ask.
You said you passed the job to me and I can’t help but wonder if that’s why you’re
getting worse now. Fading faster. “Losing you.”
“Nothing’s lost. Ever.”
I’m pretty sure you’re just trying to make me feel better, half expect you to say
something like
I’ll live on in your heart.
But you would never say that.
“You think I tell you stories just to hear my own voice? I mean what I said. Nothing’s
lost. That’s what the Archive’s for.”
Wood and stone and colored glass, and all throughout, a sense of peace…
“That’s where we go when we die? To the Archive?”
“You don’t, not exactly, but your History does.” And then you start using your “Pay
Attention” voice, the one that makes words stick to me and never let go. “You know
what a History is?”
“It’s the past,” I say.
“No, Kenzie. That’s history with a little…
h
. I mean History with a big
H
. A History is” You pull out a cigarette, roll it between your fingers. “You might think of it as
a ghost, but that’s not what it is, really. Histories are records.”
“Of what?”
“Of us. Of everyone. Imagine a file of your entire life, of every moment, every experience.
All of it. Now, instead of a folder or a book, imagine the data is kept in a body.”
“What do they look like?”
“However they looked when they died. Well,
before
they died. No fatal wounds or bloated corpses. The Archive wouldn’t find that tasteful.
And the body’s just a shell for the life inside.”
“Like a book cover?”
“Yes.” You put the cigarette in your mouth, but know better than to light it in the
house. “A cover tells you something about a book. A body tells you something about
a History.”
I bite my lip. “So…when you die, a copy of your life gets put in the Archive?”
“Exactly.”
I frown.
“What is it, Kenzie?”
“If the Outer is where we live, and the Archive is where our Histories go, what are
the Narrows for?”
You smile grimly. “The Narrows are a buffer between the two. Sometimes a History wakes
up. Sometimes Histories get out, through the cracks in the Archive, and into those
Narrows. And when that happens, it’s the Keeper’s job to send them back.”
“What’s a Keeper?”
“It’s what I am,” you say, pointing to the ring on your hand. “What you’ll be,” you
add, pointing to my own ring.
I can’t help but smile. You chose me. “I’m glad I get to be like you.”
You squeeze my hand and make a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh, and say,
“Good thing. Because you haven’t got a choice.”
Doors to the Narrows are everywhere.
Most of them started out as
actual
doors, but the problem is that buildings change—walls go down, walls go up—and these
doors, once they’re made, don’t. What you end up with are cracks, the kind most people
wouldn’t even notice, slight disturbances where the two worlds—the Narrows and the
Outer—run into each other. It’s easy when you know what you’re looking for.
But even with good eyes, finding a Narrows door can take a while. I had to search
my old neighborhood for two days to find the nearest one, which turned out to be halfway
down the alley behind the butcher shop.
I think of the ripple in the fleur-de-lis paper in the lobby, and smile.
I head for the nearest stairwell—there are two sets, the south stairs at my end of
the hall, and the north stairs at the far end, past the metal cages—when something
makes me stop.
A tiny gap, a vertical shadow on the dust-dull yellow wallpaper. I walk over to the
spot and square myself to the wall, letting my eyes adjust to the crack that is most
definitely there. The sense of victory fades a little. Two doors so close together?
Maybe the crack in the lobby was just that—a crack.
This crack, however, is something more. It cuts down the wall between apartments 3D
and 3C, in a stretch of space without any ghosted doors, a dingy patch interrupted
only by a painting of the sea in an old white frame. I frown and slide the silver
ring from my finger and feel the shift, like a screen being removed. Now when I stare
at the crack, I see it, right in the center of the seam. A keyhole.
The ring works like a blinder. It shields me—as much as it can—from the living, and
blocks my ability to read the impressions they leave on things. But it also blinds
me to the Narrows. I can’t see the doors, let alone step through them.
I pull Da’s key from around my neck, running a thumb over the teeth the way he used
to. For luck. Da used to rub the key, cross himself, kiss his fingers and touch them
to the wall—any number of things. He used to say he could use a little more luck.
I slide the key into the keyhole and watch as the teeth vanish into the wall. First
comes the whisper of metal against metal. Then the Narrows door surfaces, floating
like a body up through water until it presses against the yellow paper. Last, a single
strand of crisp light draws itself around the frame, signaling that the door is ready.
If someone came down the hall right now, they wouldn’t see the door. But they would
hear the click of the lock as I turned Da’s rusted key, and then they would see me
step straight through the yellow paper into nothing.
There’s no sky in the Narrows, but it always feels like night, smells like night.
Night in a city after rain. On top of that there’s a breeze, faint but steady, carrying
stale air through the halls. Like you’re in an air shaft.
I knew what the Narrows looked like long before I saw them. I had this image in my
head, drawn by Da year after year. Close your eyes and picture this: a dark alley,
just wide enough for you to spread your arms and skim the rough walls on either side
with your fingers. You look up and see…nothing, just the walls running up and up and
up into black. The only light comes from the doors that line the walls, their outlines
giving off a faint glow, their keyholes letting in beams of light that show like threads
in the dusty air. It is enough light to see by, but not enough to see well.
Fear floats up my throat, a primal thing, a physical twinge as I step through, close
the door behind me, and hear the voices. Not true voices, really, but murmurs and
whispers and words stretched thin by distance. They could be halls, or whole territories,
away. Sounds travel here in the Narrows, coil through the corridors, bounce off walls,
find you from miles away, ghostlike and diffused. They can lead you astray.
The corridors stretch out like a web or a subway, branching, crossing, the walls interrupted
only by those doors. City blocks’ worth of doors mere feet apart, space compressed.
Most of them are locked. All of them are marked.
Coded. Every Keeper has a system, a way to tell a good door from a bad one; I cannot
count the number of X’s and slashes and circles and dots scribbled against each door
and then rubbed away. I pull a thin piece of chalk from my pocket—it’s funny, the
things you learn to keep on you at all times—and use it to draw a quick Roman numeral
I on the door I just came through, right above the keyhole (the doors here have no
handles, can’t even be tried without a key). The number is bright and white over the
dozens of old, half-ruined marks.
I turn to consider the hall and the multitude of doors lining it. Most of them are
locked—inactive, Da called them—doors that lead back into the Outer, to different
rooms in different houses, disabled because they go places where no Keeper is currently
stationed. But the Narrows is a buffer zone, a middle ground, studded with ways out.
Some doors lead to and from the Archive. Others lead to Returns, which isn’t its own
world, but it might as well be. A place where even Keepers aren’t allowed to go. And
right now, with a History on my list, that’s the door I need to find.
I test the door to the right of Door I, and to my surprise it’s unlocked, and opens
onto the Coronado’s lobby. So it wasn’t just a ripple in the wallpaper after all.
Good to know. An old woman ambles past, oblivious to the portal, and I tug the door
shut again and draw a II above the keyhole.
I take a step back to consider the numbered doors, set side by side—my ways out—and
then continue down the hall, testing every lock. None of the other doors budge, and
I mark each one with an X. There’s this sound, a fraction louder than the others,
a
thud thud
thud
like muffled steps, but only a fool hunts down a History before finding a place to
send him, so I quicken my pace, rounding a corner and testing two more doors before
one finally gives.
The lock turns and the door opens, this time into a room made of light, blinding and
edgeless. I draw back and close the door, blinking away little white dots as I mark
its surface with a circle and quickly shade it in.
Returns.
I turn to the next door over and don’t even bother to test the lock before I draw
a circle, this one hollow.
The Archive.
The nice thing about the Archive doors is that they’re always to the right of Returns,
so if you can find one, you’ve found the other.
And now it’s time to find Emma.
I flex my hands and bring my fingers to the wall, the silver ring safely in my pocket.
Histories and humans alike have to touch a surface to leave an impression, which is
why the floors here are made of the same concrete as the walls. So I can read the
entire hallway with a touch. If Emma set a foot here, I’ll see it.
The surface of the wall hums beneath my hands. I close my eyes and press down. Da
used to say there was a thread in the wall, and you had to reach, reach right through
the wall until you catch hold of that thread and not let go. The humming spreads up
my fingers, numbing them as I focus. I squeeze my eyes shut harder and reach, and
feel the thread tickling my palms. I catch hold, and my hands go numb. Behind my eyes
the darkness shifts, flickers, and then the Narrows take shape again, a smudged version
of the present, distorted. I see myself standing here, touching the wall, and guide
the memory away.
It plays like a skipping film reel, winding back from present to past, flickering
on the insides of my eyelids. The name showed on my list an hour ago, when Emma Claring’s
escape was registered, so I shouldn’t have to go back far. When I twist the memories
back two hours and find no sign of her, I pull away from the wall and open my eyes.
The past of the Narrows vanishes, replaced by an only slightly brighter but definitely
clearer present. I head down the hall to the next branching corridor and try again:
closing my eyes, reaching, catching hold, winding time forward and back, sweeping
the last hour for signs of—
A History flickers in the frame, her small form winding down the hall to a corner
just ahead, then turning left. I blink and let go of the wall, the Narrows sharpening
as I follow, turn the corner, and find…a dead end. More accurately, a territory break,
a plane of wall marked by a glowing keyhole. Keepers have access only to their own
territories, so the speck of light serves as nothing more than a stop sign. But it
does keep the Histories from getting too far away; and sitting on the floor right
in front of the break is a girl.
Emma Claring sits in the hall, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees. She’s not
wearing any shoes, only grass-stained shorts and a T-shirt; and she’s so small that
the corridor seems almost cavernous around her.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
She rocks back and forth as she says it, the beat of her body against the wall making
the
thud thud thud
I heard earlier. She squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them wide, panic edging into
her voice when the Narrows don’t disappear.
She’s obviously slipping.
“Wake up,” the girl pleads again.
“Emma,” I say, and she startles.
Two terrified eyes swivel toward me in the dark. The pupils are spreading, the black
chewing away the color around them. She whimpers but doesn’t recognize me yet. That’s
good. When Histories slip far enough, they start to see other people when they look
at you. They see whomever it is they want or need or hate or love or remember, and
it makes the confusion worse. Makes them fall faster into madness.