A sickening realization dawns on me. He’s already set the scene. He doesn’t need my consent to make me a diversion. But the only way he’ll come for me is if he thinks I’m worth saving.
But the ledger is on the desk at the very front of the Archive. What’s to stop him from walking in and taking it and leaving without me?
“I won’t,” he says, reading the thoughts through my skin. “I will not leave you behind. I still need you. We are the bringers of change, Mackenzie. But I need you to be the voice of it.”
His hands fall away. He turns toward the festival, and the lights cast shadows across his pale skin. “Change is coming,” he says quietly. “Either the Archive will evolve or it will fall.”
And watching him in that unsteady light, it hits me.
It’s all a lie. His promise of an Archive without secrets, his dream of a world exposed—Owen doesn’t expect the Archive to survive this. He doesn’t want it to. He wants the same thing he’s always wanted: to tear it down. And he thinks he’s found a way to do that—by letting this world do the work.
He doesn’t want change.
He wants ruin.
And I will do whatever it takes to keep him from it.
My mind is spinning, but I cannot afford to let him see my panic. I take a short, steadying breath. “You should have told me sooner,” I say. “For someone who scorns secrets, you sure keep a lot of them.”
He frowns. “I didn’t want you to overthink it,” he says. “But our fates are bound in this. If you fail, I fail; and if I fail, you fail. We are like partners.”
We are nothing like partners, I think, but all I say is, “Don’t you dare leave me there, Owen.”
He smiles. “I won’t.”
And then he crouches and lifts the end of the fuse from the grass. A lighter appears in his other hand. He looks up at the clock tower beside us. Five minutes till eight p.m.
“Perfect,” he says, sliding his thumb over the lighter. A small flame dances there. “Five minutes from the spark.” He touches the flame to the fuse and it catches, a hissing sound running down the line. No turning back now, I realize with a mixture of terror and energy.
“Find the spotlight.” Owen steps out of the shadows and onto the path, but I linger against the building and pull the phone from my pocket. There’s a text from Wesley…
Where are you?
…and I answer back…
Science hall.
…hoping I can at least get him out of the way of whatever’s about to happen. And then I swallow and dial home. Mom answers.
“Hi,” I say. “Just checking in. As promised.”
“Good girl,” says Mom. “I hope you have a great time tonight.”
I fight to keep the fear out of my voice. “I will.”
“Call us when it’s over, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, and I can tell she’s about to hang up, so I say, “Hey, Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you,” I say, before ending the call.
Four minutes till eight p.m. The clock tower looms overhead, fully lit. I watch a minute tick past as students dance and laugh beneath the colored canopy. They have no idea what’s about to happen.
In all fairness, neither do I.
Three minutes till eight p.m. I tell myself I can do this. Tell myself it isn’t madness. Tell myself it will all be over soon. When I run out of things to tell myself, I step out of the shadows, expecting to see Owen, but he’s not there, so I head toward the quad. I only make it a few strides before a large hand wraps around my arm and drags me back into the dark and thought you were clever can’t get past me thought I wouldn’t see the pattern ricochets through my head. Before I can try to twist free, a metal cuff closes around my wrist, and I crane my neck to see Detective Kinney behind me.
“Mackenzie Bishop,” he says, cuffing my hands behind my back, “you’re under arrest.”
THIRTY
“DON’T CAUSE A SCENE,” he orders, pulling me away from the festival.
“Sir, you’re making a serious mistake.” The clock strikes one minute till eight, and I twist around, desperately searching for Owen as Kinney drags me down the path.
“Do you know the last name entered into Coach Metz’s computer?” he says. “Yours. And the last number to call Jason Pinter’s phone? Yours. The prints on Bethany Thomson’s necklace? Yours. The only place you didn’t actually leave evidence was Phillip’s, but you broke into his house, so I’m willing to bet we can tie you to that, too.”
“That’s circumstantial,” I say. “You can’t arrest me for it.”
“Watch me,” says Kinney, pushing me toward the front gates. His cruiser is waiting, lights flashing, on the other side. But the gates are closed. Not just closed, I realize—locked. And I can smell the gasoline from here.
“What the hell?” he growls.
His grip slackens on my arm, and I wrench free, making it three steps back toward the festival before Kinney’s hand comes down hard on my shoulder.
“Not so—”
But he never gets a chance to finish. The clock tower chimes eight, and the fireworks start. Not in the air, but on the ground. Several high whistles, followed by the heavy booms as massive spheres of color, light, sound, and fire explode across campus. The blasts are concentrated in the quad, but one goes off much closer to where we stand, and the force is enough to send Kinney and me to the ground. My ears are ringing as a pair of hands pulls me to my feet.
“Can’t leave you alone for a moment, I swear,” says Owen, soot dusting his cheeks. Behind him, the Hyde front gate is engulfed in fire.
“Where the hell were you?” I snap, ears still ringing as he strides over to Kinney, who’s still getting to his hands and knees, clearly disoriented from the blast.
“Busy,” he says, pulling the gun from Kinney’s holster. He spins the weapon and brings the butt down hard against the detective’s temple. Kinney crumples to the path. Back at the quad, another round of explosions goes off. People are screaming. Owen finds the keys on Kinney’s belt, unlocks my cuffs, then drags me back toward the blossoming inferno.
We pass through a wave of smoke and into a world engulfed in fire. The blasts are deafening, and the streamer ceiling of the dance floor burns and breaks, dropping flaming strips onto the students below. Everyone is running, but no one seems to know where to run because the blasts keep going off. It’s a blanket of chaos.
Owen storms through it, scanning the smoke-covered ground.
“What are you looking for?” I have to shout now over the noise of the falling festival.
“I left him right—”
Just then a body slams into Owen hard, his gun skittering toward me as they both go down. Another blast goes off behind me as I scoop up the weapon, Owen and his opponent a tangle of limbs on the burning ground until he manages to snake his arm around the man’s throat and pull back and up, and I see his face.
Eric. One of his eyes is swelling shut, and a bad gash carves a path against his shirtfront, and when he sees me standing there, he tells me to run. And then he sees the gun in my hand and confusion lights up his blood-streaked face.
“Shoot him,” orders Owen.
I stare at him in horror. “He’s Crew!”
“Right now he’s in our way,” growls Owen, as if this is just an unfortunate turn of events. But it’s not. This was always his plan.
I’ll take care of the hard part.
The fireworks were nothing but a smoke screen. They could have been an accident. But killing a member of the Archive…there would be no question. No hesitation. The Archive would hunt me down. They’d erase me.