“Just curious,” I say automatically.
His mouth quirks. “If you’re going to lie to me, you’ll have to try a bit harder.”
“It’s not a big deal. There was an incident in my territory. I’ve just been thinking about it.” My words skirt around Owen and land on Hooper. “There was this adult—”
His eyes go wide. “Adult History? Like a Keeper-Killer?”
I nod. “I took care of it, but…”
He misreads my question about the Keepers on patrol.
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“Where?”
“In the Narrows. If you’re worried—”
“I’m not—” I growl.
“I could go with you, for protect—”
I lift the sponge. “Finish that word,” I say, ready to pitch it at his head. To his credit, he backs down, the sentence fading into a crooked smile. Just then, something scratches my leg. I drop the sponge back to the counter, tug off the plastic gloves, and dig out the list. I frown. The two names, Melanie Allen. 10. and Jena Freeth. 14. hover near the top of the page, but instead of a third name below them, I find a note.
Miss Bishop, please report to the Archive. — R
R, for Roland. Wesley is lounging in the chair, one leg over the side. I turn the paper for him to see.
“A summons?” he asks. “Look at you.”
My stomach sinks, and for a moment I feel like I’m sitting in the back of English class when the intercom clicks on, ordering me to the principal’s office. But then I remember the favor I asked of Roland, and my heart skips. Did he find the murdered girl?
“Go on,” says Wesley, rolling up his sleeves and reaching for my discarded plastic gloves. “I’ll cover for you.”
“But what if Mom comes in?”
“I’m going to meet Mrs. Bishop eventually. You do realize that.”
I can dream.
“Go on now,” he presses.
“Are you sure?”
He’s already taking up the sponge. He cocks his head at me, silver glinting in his ears. He paints quite a picture, decked in black, a teasing smile and a pair of lemon-yellow gloves.
“What’s the matter?” he asks, wielding the sponge like a weapon. “Doesn’t it look like I know what I’m doing?”
I laugh, pocket the list, and head for the closet in the back of the café. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I hear the slosh of water, a muttered curse, the sounds of a body slipping on a slick floor.
“Try not to hurt yourself,” I call, vanishing among the brooms.
THIRTEEN
CLASSICAL MUSIC WHISPERS through the circular antechamber of the Archive.
Patrick is sitting at the desk, trying to focus on something while Roland leans over him, wielding a pen. A Librarian I’ve never spoken to—though I’ve heard her called Beth—is standing at the entrance to the atrium, making notes, her reddish hair plaited down her back. Roland looks up as I step forward.
“Miss Bishop!” he says cheerfully, dropping the pen on top of Patrick’s papers and coming to meet me. He guides me off in the direction of the stacks, making small talk, but as soon as we turn down a wing on the far side of the atrium, his features grow stern, set.
“Did you find the girl?” I ask.
“No,” he says, leading me through a tight corridor and up a flight of stairs. We cross a landing and end up in a reading room that’s blue and gold and smells like old paper, faded but pleasant. “There’s no one in the branch that fits your description or the time line.”
“That’s not possible; you must not have searched wide—” I say.
“Miss Bishop, I scrounged up whatever I could on every female resident—”
“Maybe she wasn’t a resident. Maybe she was just visiting.”
“If she died in the Coronado, she’d be shelved in this branch. She isn’t.”
“I know what I saw.”
“Mackenzie—”
She has to be here. If I can’t find her, I can’t find her killer. “She existed. I saw her.”
“I’m not questioning that you did.”
Panic claws through me. “How could someone have erased her from both places, Roland? And why did you call me here? If there’s no record of this girl—”
“I didn’t find her,” says Roland, “but I found someone else.” He crosses the room and opens one of the drawers, gesturing to the History on the shelf. From his receding hairline to his slight paunch to his worn loafers, the man looks…ordinary. His clothes are dated but clean, his features impassive in his deathlike sleep.
“This is Marcus Elling,” Roland says quietly.
“And what does he have to do with the girl I saw?”
“According to his memories, he was also a resident on the third floor of the Coronado from the hotel’s conversion in 1950 until his death in 1953.”
“He lived on the same floor as the girl, and died in the same time frame?”
“That’s not all,” says Roland. “Put your hand on his chest.”
I hesitate. I’ve never read a History. Only the Librarians are allowed to read the dead. Only they know how, and it’s an infraction for anyone else to even try. But Roland looks shaken, so I put my hand on Elling’s sweater. The History feels like every other History. Quiet.
“Close your eyes,” he says, and I do.
And then Roland puts his hand over mine and presses down. My fingers instantly go numb, and it feels like my mind is being shoved into someone else’s body, pushed into a shape that doesn’t fit my own. I wait for the memories to start, but they don’t. I’m left in total darkness. Typically, memories start with the present and rewind, and I’ve been told the lives of Histories are no different. They begin with their end, their most recent memory. Their death.
But Marcus Elling has no death. I spin back for ten solid seconds of flat black before the dark dissolves into static, and then the static shifts into light and motion and memory. Elling carrying a sack of groceries up the stairs.
The weight of Roland’s hand lifts from mine, and Elling vanishes. I blink.
“His death is missing,” I say.
“Exactly.”
“How is that even possible? He’s like a book with the last pages torn out.”
“That is, in effect, exactly what he is,” says Roland. “He’s been altered.”
“What does that mean?”
He scuffs one sneaker against the floor. “It means removing a memory, or memories. Carving the moments out. It’s occasionally done in the Outer to protect the Archive. Secrecy, you have to understand, is key to our existence. Only a select few members of Crew are capable of and trained to do alterations, and only when absolutely necessary. It’s neither an easy nor a pleasant task.”
“So Marcus Elling had some kind of contact with the Archive? Something that merited wiping the end of his memory?”
Roland shakes his head. “No, altering is sanctioned only in the Outer, and only to shield the Archive from exposure. If he were dead or dying, there’d be no risk of exposure. In this case, the History was altered after he was shelved. The alteration’s old—you can tell by the way the edges are fraying—so it was probably right after he arrived.”
“But that means that whoever did it wanted Elling’s death hidden from people here in the Archive.”
Roland nods. “And the severity of the implication…the fact that this happened…it’s…”
I say what he won’t. “Only a Librarian possesses the skills to read a History, so only a Librarian would be able to alter one.”
His voice slides toward a whisper. “And to do so goes against the principles of this establishment. Altering is used to modify the memories of the living, not bury the lives of the dead.”
I stare down at Marcus Elling’s face, as if his body can tell me something his memories couldn’t. We now have a girl with no History, and a History with no death. I thought I was being paranoid, thought that Hooper could have been a glitch, that maybe Jackson stole the knife. But if a Librarian was willing to do this, to break the cardinal oath of the Archive, then maybe a Librarian was behind the malfunctioning list and the weapon too. But whoever altered Elling would be long gone by now…right?