“I don’t know. I feel sick, Con. Like I’m going to pass out.”
“Jack?”
He’s rubbing my back, like he’s trying to keep me awake, and I say, “Shhhhh…”
Everything is suddenly so noisy. I am trapped inside the howling engine of a jet.
Whiteness paints my drained skin; I feel the opening of each pore and I begin to bleed small tears of freezing sweat. I am shaking, and Conner has his arm around my shoulder.
“Let’s get off for a second, Jack. Catch your breath.”
Conner begins to lift me up, but it is too crowded and too late. The doors are closed. The air turns to chalk dust, and I drop back into my seat as the train sluggishly lurches, skips, accelerates.
Of course.
This is why we got onto the wrong train.
The train passes into a tunnel. Outside in the velvet black, a white light smears by; it burns a trail like a glowing worm across my eyes. And as it wriggles, I stare blankly at the glass, waiting for it to become real and swallow me.
I take a deep breath.
Breathe, Jack.
I know Conner is here, he’s pressing his mouth up to my ear, saying something. I can feel the steam of the words that evaporate against my skin, but I can’t tell what he’s saying.
I feel along the seat beside me, find his hand, and grab on.
Tight.
I lean into him. “Conner, no matter what happens, I love you.”
I feel him squeezing my hand.
“Jack?”
“Hey,” he says, trying to shake me back. “Jack? Do you know that kid? What’s he want?”
Someone is saying, “I have a score to settle with you.”
The train begins to slow, it leans me forward, and I nearly fall into Conner.
Conner says again, “Do you know him?”
I shut my eyes tightly, reopen them.
Everything is everywhere.
Seated across the aisle on the bench directly facing us is a redhead kid.
The punk.
Quinn Cahill.
Slower.
Slower.
The kid is saying something.
“Billy? Billy? Isn’t that you, Billy? Don’t play games now. Hell … I knew I’d find you somewhere, as long as I only kept looking.”
My words are slurred, drunk, and they disconnect, set loose from my mouth like crazy rabbits. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, kid.”
The train stops.
Westminster.
Whoosh.
The doors.
The kid looks like he’s been stung.
“Billy!”
I’m holding Conner’s hand. I jerk it and lean forward, grab my bag.
I whisper, “Please get me out of here, Con.”
I fall out of the train as the doors hiss shut behind us; end up flat on my face in a forest of legs on the crowded Westminster platform.
* * *
“He’s okay. He’s okay. He’s just sick and couldn’t breathe for a second.”
Conner waved back the people standing around me, fanning the air above my face with his hand.
Someone said, “Do you need medical assistance?”
“No. Thank you. He gets like this sometimes.”
Conner hovered over me, a serious look on his face. He combed my hair back from my eyes with his fingers. He was shaking, nervous. Something happened.
“You need to get up. Let’s get the fuck out of here before we end up in trouble.”
I knew what he was saying, but it took all my will just to move my legs.
The Underground.
This is it.
Conner pulled me to my feet, lifted my arm across the back of his neck. He held both our bags with one hand, and someone said, “Let me help.”
But Conner dismissed the man. “We’re okay. I just need to get him outside.”
So he dragged me along. It seemed like we walked for miles in that station, through long subterranean tunnels that stunk like sweat and piss until we finally came up into the light of a gray afternoon. And the entire way, as we threaded like a weaver’s string between the anonymous ghosts of people, knitting us and them all together into the fabric of my this is it, I kept searching for the redhead, expecting Quinn to be following along, always following, watching.
But he was gone.
In the cold outside, we sat on a low stone wall looking out at the churn of the Thames.
A bead of sweat crawled slowly along the front of Conner’s ear and curled around the bend of his jaw.
I caught my breath, watched the river.
“What the fuck happened in there?” Conner tried to look into my eyes, to see if Jack was really here or not.
I swallowed.
He said, “Who was that kid? Why was he calling you that? Billy?”
This was it.
Right?
I shook my head. Conner knew about Quinn Cahill in Marbury. He told me how the Rangers made deals with the redhead who lived in the firehouse.
Not here.
What do I tell him?
This has to be it.
This is going to be it.
So I said, “I don’t know, Con. I swear I never saw that kid before in my life.”
Conner blew out a breath that fogged and then vanished in front of his face.
It was cold.
He said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if he didn’t know you before, I don’t think he’s going to ever forget us now.”
“What happened to him?”
Conner grinned. “I punched him in the fucking face when he tried to follow us off the train.”
“Conner?”
“What?”
“You’re amazing.”
“I try, dude.”
Farther down the bank, sheltered behind a row of square wooden stands that sold tickets for river cruises, an old man sat playing a concertina in the gray wind.
It would rain soon.
I could feel it coming.
“And, Con?”
“Yeah?”
“How about we just catch a taxi to Charing Cross?”
“Good call, Jack.”
“I try.”
a passenger’s epilogue
In this winter, they sleep.
Nearly three months have passed, and I have never once taken them out, touched the Marbury lenses.
I know what would happen if I did.
I am done with that place, all those worlds and not-worlds.
And this is it.
It is okay for me and Conner to let this be it.
I have to keep telling myself that.
There was a time when I could almost hear it breathing, calling me, and each time the sound made such a convincing argument for how desperately Jack needed Marbury. But ever since I opened my eyes that rainy morning, safe inside the room Ethan Robson shares with me at St. Atticus, I have either been deaf, or Marbury has been silent, asleep.
I’m not fooling myself, though.
Jack’s First Law of Marbury: Objects at rest are just waiting for some asshole to wake them up.
And Jack always knows where they are; where he keeps them.
What strikes me is the one thing I believe to be perfectly true: I caused it all to happen. Everything. Waking up drugged, stripped, bound to Freddie Horvath’s bed, stumbling into Henry Hewitt, finding Ben and Griffin in Marbury, and all the terrible and destructive things that took place there—the choices I made—I caused it all.
Like Freddie said: He didn’t do anything to me; I did it all to myself.
It’s been six months since that happened. It seems like forever, but I still think about it every day.
And I’m still carrying around that garbage.
So fuck you, Jack.
But if nothing else, now that we’ve all made it back—even if this is just another not-world—I am determined to keep it this way. Forever. This will be it.
So there is no need for me to ever explain to Conner the truth about the redheaded kid who sat across from us on the train at Green Park, how Quinn Cahill is a part of our world in Marbury, too.