Chapter 21

The group texts came in waves.

Dao sent lock-picking videos. Not instructional ones. Competitive ones. People racing each other to open padlocks, and Dao would annotate them in real time.

that guy's technique is trash. no feel. you gotta listen to the pins

ok this woman is actually good. watch her hands. she's reading the lock

reading the lock eli. like you read people. same principle. everything tells you what it needs if you pay attention

Sasha sent articles. Academic papers about historical cases of saturation extraction, most of them dismissed by mainstream practitioners as folklore or exaggeration. She'd highlight the relevant sections and add her own notes in a different color. Blue for confirmed patterns. Red for things that matched what we knew. Green for open questions.

She never said anything personal in the texts. No how are you or how's home. Just the work. The structure she was building brick by brick because that was how Sasha processed fear. By organizing it.

Thaddeus texted less often, but when he did, the messages landed heavy.

Asked my aunt about the founding families' involvement in school governance. She changed the subject three times. Then she said "some questions are better left to the archives, Thaddeus." My family doesn't talk like that. My family talks about EVERYTHING.

Talked to my mother again. She asked why I was so interested in institutional history all of a sudden. I said for a class. She said which class. I made one up. She knew I was lying. We both pretended she didn't.

And Marcus. One message. Christmas night, after midnight.

Hospice says weeks, not months. She grabbed my hand today and said "they never closed it, Marcus. They never closed it." She used my name. First time in ten days.

I stared at that message for a long time. Typed and deleted three different responses. Settled on I'm sorry, Marcus. Whatever she means, you won't have to carry it alone

He didn't reply. I checked my phone every few hours anyway, the way you check a wound that isn't healing.

The second time I saw Shelby was different.

She came to the house. Day after Christmas, afternoon. Dad let her in and she kicked the snow off her boots in the doorway and said "Mr. Lawrence, your scarf is very distinguished" and Dad said "Thank you, Shelby, it's imported" and they both grinned because they'd always liked each other in that easy way some people just do.

We went upstairs. She sat on my bed, cross-legged, leaning against the wall, wearing the same purple hoodie because Shelby owned approximately three hoodies and rotated them on a schedule only she understood. She looked at the posters and the books and the rabbit stain on the ceiling.

"This room hasn't changed."

"Nope."

"That's either comforting or depressing."

"Can't it be both?"

She noticed the nightstand. The coin and the rock, side by side.

"Your dad's coin. I remember when he used to carry that everywhere." She reached for the rock, then stopped. "Can I?"

"Sure."

She picked it up. Turned it over in her hand. To her it was just a smooth gray stone, pleasant to hold, unremarkable.

"Lake Erie," she said. "Your last trip with your mom."

"You remember that?"

"You talked about it a lot. After." She set the rock back down carefully, like she understood it mattered even if she didn't understand why. "You used to say it was the last time you felt normal."

Something tightened in my chest. She was right. I had said that. Sitting on the bleachers at Millbrook Middle, eating a gas station sandwich, I had told Shelby Hoffman that the week at Lake Erie was the last time I remembered being a regular kid. Before the feelings got too loud. Before every crowd became a minefield.

She'd remembered that for four years.

"I finished that documentary you texted me about," I said. "The bunraku one."

She brightened. "The puppeteers in black?"

"Yeah. And there was another tradition they covered. Shadow puppetry. Indonesian."

"Wayang kulit. I watched that part three times."

"The puppeteer sits behind a screen with a lamp, and the audience only sees the shadows on the other side. The puppeteer is right there, controlling everything, but the audience never sees them."

She stopped smiling. She was looking at me with that expression she got sometimes, the one that meant she was seeing through whatever I'd built between us and deciding whether to say so.

"That sounds familiar," she said.

"Yeah."

"Eli. What's happening to you?"

Not are you okay. Not the careful version. The real question, stripped down.

"I can't tell you."

"Can't or won't?"

"Both. But mostly can't."

She pulled her knees up to her chest. The purple hoodie was too big for her and the sleeves fell over her hands and she looked so much like the girl who used to sit next to me in seventh grade and share her fruit snacks that I almost broke.

"I can tell you're not okay," she said. "I've been able to tell since you left. And the further you go into whatever this is, the harder it's going to be for me to reach you when you need someone to reach you." She paused. "And you will need someone. Because you always do, eventually, and it's always almost too late when you let them."

The room was quiet. Downstairs Dad was watching something on TV, the sound drifting up through the floor. The rabbit stain watched us from the ceiling. The coin and the rock sat on the nightstand, one good luck charm and one token from two parents, one dead and one downstairs, both of them people who had tried to hold onto me while I moved further into a world they couldn't follow.

"I won't disappear on you," I said.

"You're already disappearing, Eli. You've been disappearing since September. I'm not saying it to be mean. I'm saying it because if I don't say it, nobody will."

My mother's notebook was downstairs on the desk. I married him because he was the furthest thing from this world I could find. That was the whole point. She'd built a life in Millbrook to keep her son away from what she was. And it had worked, for thirteen years, until it didn't.

And now I was doing the same thing she did. Building distance. Keeping secrets. Becoming someone my people couldn't reach.

"I know," I said.

"Don't be sorry. Just come back. Not now. Not today. But eventually. Promise me you'll come back from wherever you are."

"I promise."

She held my eyes for a long time. Then she unfolded herself from the bed and stood up.

"Okay. Your dad owes me hot chocolate. He promised me hot chocolate and I intend to collect."

We went downstairs. Dad made hot chocolate from a mix because he couldn't be trusted with anything more complicated. Shelby sat at the kitchen table and told my father about volleyball and her mom's soap business and the documentary on puppetry, and Dad listened the way he listened to everything, with his whole body, nodding in places that showed he was actually paying attention.

I sat across from her and drank hot chocolate and watched my friend talk to my father in the kitchen where my mother used to spread her lesson plans and I held both worlds inside my chest and neither of them knew about the other and the pressure of it was enormous and constant and mine.

After Shelby left I went back to the notebook.

This time I read more. Not everything, but enough to feel the weight of it.

He has my eyes. Not the color. James's color. But the way they move. The way they track people across a room, lingering a half-second longer than normal, processing what other children don't even notice. He watches people the way I was trained to watch them. Nobody trained him. It's in the architecture.

Cross used that word. Architecture. The fundamental shape of who someone is. My mother had used the same vocabulary years before Cross walked into my life.

Further in:

Had the conversation with James about Eli. Tried to explain what I'm seeing. He thinks I'm worrying too much. Overprotecting. How could he understand? I married him because he was the furthest thing from this world I could find. That was the whole point. Keep Eli away from it. Keep him normal. But he's not normal and I can't keep him from what he is forever.

And then, near the end, in handwriting that was faster and less careful, the gaps between entries getting longer:

I'm scared in a way I haven't been scared since I left. Not for myself. For him. They'll find him. They find all of us eventually. And when they do, he won't understand what he is or why they want him or what they made me to be.

Whatever they made me to be. She'd been circling this question for years. What she was. What that meant for me. She'd never written the answer down. Either because she didn't know it or because she was too afraid to put it on a page.

I closed the notebook. Put it back. Stood in the living room in the dark and breathed.

Then I went upstairs. Picked up the rock. Held it and pushed past the warmth and the sadness and reached for that third layer, the deliberate deposit she'd called a letter.

Closer now than it had been that first night. The frosted glass was thinning. I still couldn't read what was underneath, but I could feel its weight. Whatever my mother had hidden in this stone, it was substantial. A message she'd been building for years, layer by careful layer, pressed into a rock from a beach where a nine-year-old version of me had been happy enough to forget that the world was loud and terrifying and full of things I couldn't control.

She'd used that happiness as camouflage. Buried the letter under the best afternoon of my childhood so that someday, when I was ready, I'd push through the good memory and find what she'd left for me.

I wasn't ready yet. But I was getting closer.

The last night before I went back, Dad and I sat on the couch watching a movie neither of us was paying attention to.

"I need to ask you something," he said. He muted the TV. The house went quiet around us. "And I need you to be honest with me."

"Okay."

"The school you're at. The things you're learning. Are you safe?"

He was looking at the blank wall above the TV. Not at me. Giving me room to answer without being watched.

I thought about Lucia. About Jerome's empty bed and Derek's paralyzed body and Marcus's dying grandmother repeating a word that meant something terrible. About a closed portal in sublevel three and a scream pressed into the dark of a transit corridor by someone who was being erased.

"I'm safe," I said.

"Because I've been reading that notebook." He still wasn't looking at me. "Your mother's. I know I said I didn't read much but I lied. I read the whole thing. Cover to cover."

"And I don't understand most of it, Eli. She used words I've never seen before. Drew symbols I can't make sense of. But I understood enough to know she was scared. Not anxious. Scared. The way someone is scared when they know exactly what the danger is and can't stop it from coming."

The movie played silently on the screen. Lights moving across a dark room.

"She loved you more than anything in this world," he said. "More than me, more than this house, more than whatever life she had before she came to Millbrook. And she was afraid for you in a way that I'm only now beginning to understand."

He turned to look at me. His eyes were wet but his voice was steady.

"So I'm asking you again. Are you safe?"

I held his gaze. This man who'd given me his lucky coin and his steady love and never once made me feel like the weird things I could do made me less his son. This man who was sitting in a house that was too quiet, reading a dead woman's notebook, trying to protect a kid he couldn't follow into a world he couldn't see.

"I'm being careful," I said. It was the most honest thing I could give him.

He nodded slowly. Whatever he heard in my voice, it was enough. Or it had to be enough.

"Your mother wrote something near the end of that notebook. Last entry, I think. Just a few lines." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Not the notebook itself. A copy.

His handwriting, careful and neat, transcribing her words.

He handed it to me. I unfolded it and read:

He'll have to choose, eventually, between what's safe and what's right. I won't be there to help him choose. But I think he'll know. I think he already knows. He has his father's stubbornness and my eyes and something else entirely that belongs only to him. Whatever they made me to be, that's not what I made him to be. He's more than their design. He's mine.

The words blurred. I blinked and they came back.

"I don't know what she meant by all of it," Dad said. "Whatever they made me to be. The design part. None of that makes sense to me."

It made sense to me. Or the beginning of sense. A shape forming in the dark that I couldn't see clearly yet.

"But the rest of it." He put his hand on my knee. Heavy and warm. Solid. "The rest of it I understand perfectly."

I folded the paper and put it in my pocket, next to the coin.

We sat there for a while longer. The movie played on mute. Snow fell outside the window in the orange glow of the streetlight. Millbrook settled into its nighttime quiet, the kind of silence that came from a place where most people went to bed early because morning came hard and there was always work to do.

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"I love you."

"I love you too, kid. Always."

I went upstairs. Packed my bag. Set the alarm.

The rock went in first. Wrapped in a t-shirt, cushioned, protected. Then the coin in my pocket. Then the folded paper with my mother's words. Then the framed photo, wedged between two sweaters so the glass wouldn't break.

I lay in my childhood bed and stared at the rabbit stain on the ceiling and held the coin in one hand and the rock in the other.

He's more than their design. He's mine.

Tomorrow I'd go back to Mudwick. Back to the corner table and the investigation and the door in sublevel three. Back to the friends who knew what I was and the danger none of us could name yet.

But tonight I was in Ohio. In a small house with a father who loved me and a dead mother who'd tried to protect me and a friend who saw through everything and stayed.

I closed my eyes. The house creaked around me in the wind. Somewhere downstairs Dad was locking up, checking the doors, turning off the lights. The sounds of a man who'd lost his wife and sent his son away and still, every night, made sure the house was safe.

The rock was warm in my left hand. The coin was warm in my right.

I fell asleep holding both.

In the morning I'd go back to a fight that I wasn't sure I could win. But that night, for the last time in a long time, I slept without dreaming.