Fabian and I sat in the front pew of the church. It was raining outside, and the parishioners who came in all had umbrellas and water-soaked coats.
Rory, Seph, and Eva had all left an hour earlier, but Fabian said he needed a little more time. I did, too. Rory had offered to bring me dry clothes, since my pants were still wet, but I didn’t really want to change. It was stupid, but somehow, they helped me remember that the whole thing had happened. That Reed really had walked into the diner, ordered a piece of pie, and then died.
“Seven years. He didn’t care about it for seven years and then he just gives in?” I asked quietly.
“Mrs. Bell wasn’t in town that much, Eerie. Maybe he did care about it for seven years. Maybe that entire time he fought to make us believe he couldn’t care less about that kid, when really it ate him alive,” Fabian answered.
A woman in a light pink poncho lit one of the dozens of candles that sat at the base of the altar. She bowed her head and then stood, smiling at us as she walked down the center aisle. I inclined my head to her. When she opened the door at the back of the church, the sound of rain flooded the sanctuary. Then it closed, and we were the only two souls in the building. If you believed we had souls. I still wasn’t so sure.
I thought about what Reed had said about Exhumed. That Hushed could have a second chance. I got why people would want hope in moments like this. Why Sarah thought we were just hijacked souls, taken from our place and forced to carry a secret that wasn’t ours. It was tempting to think that Reed could come back somehow. That even now, maybe in death, he’d gone back to where he’d come from. Today, I imagined him somewhere better than I ever had before, and it suited him. I hoped he was there, now. That he was in a 1950s malt shop, living with his slick hair and a cigarette behind his ear in his own time, and the only secret he had was his crush on the town goodie-goodie.
I’d called Logan to tell him what happened and told him I’d call him later. I needed some time to detangle the threads of my mind.
Something in me had shifted as I’d held Reed’s head in my lap, and I was reminded of it every time I swallowed and felt the sharp pain in the back of my throat where I was still raw from screaming.
You don’t know because you don’t want to know.
Margaret’s words rang through my head, and I saw the image replay in my mind. Reed walking out of the door. Turning right. His eyes locking on Mrs. Bell.
You don’t know because you don’t want to know.
I could get up and leave this church and never come back. Go to Logan’s cabin and kiss and pretend I was human. But I was Hushed. And if I didn’t start acting like it, more would die. Svenja, Ajit, even Margaret . . . they would all be like Reed. They’d be cold, their eyes unseeing.
I had ignored it and shoved it down, somehow managing to convince myself that I was being brave by avoiding the truth. But I felt it the moment I saw Reed through that glass.
“Do you think your God hears us, Fabian?” I asked.
Reed had told him he was running to grab a coffee and that he’d be right back. He’d patted Fabian on the shoulder as he walked out of the garage. I still didn’t know when Reed decided to do it. Or if he’d decided at all.
Fabian took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“And you think we have a purpose? That we’re not some weird accident or a punishment?”
“You know what I think.”
“Yeah, but right now I need to hear it.”
Fabian reached for my hand. “I think God once said that what was done in the dark will be brought to the light. He never said how.”
I nodded, biting hard on the inside of my cheek.
“That book has some catchy lines,” I said.
Fabian squeezed my hand as we gazed up at the facade of deep, polished wood and stained glass.
“I mean, yeah. That’s one way to put it,” he said.
“What’s another good one?”
Fabian sighed. I leaned my head on his shoulder.
“Love is patient. Love is kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
I loved the sound of Fabian’s voice echoing in his chest. It reminded me of being huddled up in a garage with him while he read a beat-up copy of The Brothers Karamazov until I fell asleep.
“Kind of an impossible standard. But I like it,” I whispered.
“Hmmm. Reed liked that one, too.”
I lifted my head. “Reed? Our Reed?”
Fabian smiled. “I’d say it sometimes at work when something wasn’t going right. It helped me keep perspective. I would also say it when Reed was getting pissed at someone.”
“Would it calm him down?”
“Not at all, but it made him more irritated at me, which was better than getting fired.”
I laid my head back on his shoulder.
He took a deep, slow breath. “Sam’s favorite is the one inscribed on the wall there,” he said, pointing to our left, just above the bottom stair.
I sat up suddenly, looking over at him.
“What?” I asked.
Fabian met my eyes. “I was going to tell you sooner, but there wasn’t really a good time.”
“You remember?” I asked.
Fabian nodded. “Not everything. Not the secret.”
I pushed myself up off the pew. “What do you remember?”
“Bits and pieces. That I belonged to Sam. That he used to come here after work sometimes. It was peaceful. And that he loved Madeline Winspeare.”
I couldn’t explain that I knew that already without telling him the whole story of my time with the Haunt.
“Sounds messy,” I said, walking toward the spot on the wall Fabian had pointed to.
“I’m pretty sure it got them both killed.”
I stared at the spot on the wall that he’d pointed to. The part with the scripture.
“Which verse was Sam’s favorite?” I asked, just as my eyes found the words in the wood.
Fabian spoke. “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
And the ground fell out from under me.
One moment, I was there, sitting by the wall, and the next, I was back in the cell, with Madeline’s reflection looking back at me, her face crumpled.
“Because he will destroy himself to save me, and I can’t let him do that,” Madeline said, her voice thick with tears.
“You know what happens tonight. Why would you try to turn him away?”
And then the perspective moved, like my line of sight was shifting. I could finally see who had been speaking in the corner of the cell after Sam left.
Because you love him?
Behind Madeline, a young man stood, his face pained as he met her gaze in the mirror.
Dr. Davie.
His eyes flicked up, meeting mine.
Ours.
I wasn’t Madeline’s Hushed.
I was his.
I saw everything. His lab, lit by a small desk lamp that sat directly above where I stirred.
Everything smudged.
Then he was in the woods, wearing a dark sweatshirt and carrying a backpack.
He stopped, kicking up a layer of leaves and reaching down to punch in a code.
The trapdoor opened and he slid down a ladder, landing at the top of a rickety, winding staircase.
At the bottom, he pulled a lab coat off a hook and punched in another code.
A wide white hallway. On the wall, lit in green, read, “Level 3B.”
The level of Ironbark that wasn’t supposed to exist.
The memory swirled and settled again.
Madeline was in the lab, a needle in her arm. Dr. Davie moved it, and she winced.
“Sorry,” he said, and she smiled.
I felt the way his chest constricted at the sight, felt the way the surprise registered on my skin.
She doesn’t deserve this.
It wasn’t a new feeling. It slid through his chest easily, like it had worn grooves.
Whatever he had been doing, it had started to make him sick.
It flashed to the keypad at the base of the stairs again, and I saw his hand pull back before recommitting and punching in the numbers.
She doesn’t deserve this.
Then we were back in Madeline’s cell, Dr. Davie behind her. He looked at the picture of Logan, the sweet boy she left behind, the one who would never know how strong his mother was.
“I have to take your vitals now,” he said, and she nodded.
“Of course. Have to do this by the books, right?” she asked.
The memory tilted, and when it righted itself, I saw from Dr. Davie’s eyes once more.
The words taped up by Madeline’s cell door, written by Sam:
Come to me, all who are weary and with heavy burden, and I will give you rest.
And then I was back in the church, staring at the words as my mind spun and my blood boiled. I’d fallen to my knees, and Fabian was beside me, rubbing my back.
“What happened?” he asked.
I didn’t feel anything in my chest. I’d seen Dr. Davie, and I’d seen him walk in and out of the prison without officially signing in, but none of it tugged deep in my bones. I’d seen so much I felt like I would burst, but nothing stood out.
I still didn’t know my secret.
“I belong to Dr. Davie,” I whispered.
Fabian sat back.
“What else?” he pressed.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I saw weird fragments, kind of like you. Images.”
“Do you feel the Pull?”
I shook my head and looked up at the words.
The words had triggered the memory. Madeline kept them in her cell.
I stopped.
The words pulled at my mind, and suddenly, Madeline’s handwriting slid across my memory.
There are so many people here willing to shoulder the burden of the pain we all feel.
Then Sam’s.
Um dia você vai saber onde pesam os fardos e então não vai mais se sentir solitário.
Burdens.
They were trying to tell us something.
“Wait,” Fabian said. I followed his gaze to the candle that rested below the scripture.
It was high up, barely used. He reached up and pulled it out of the sconce. Carefully, he tipped it, pouring the wax out onto the railing, and we both saw something rested at the bottom.
A necklace.
Fabian looked up at me, and then pulled the necklace out of the candle, blowing to try and cool the wax.
I knew what was happening, though I don’t really know how I knew. It was the crash I always waited for—the moment when a Hushed remembered. Whatever this necklace was, it triggered his memories. I’d never seen it before. But his eyes were darting rapidly under his closed eyelids, and his hand clasped tight over the chain of the necklace. Half of me waited for the fear, for the part of me that would reach out and grab Fabian’s face and scream to shake him loose. But that didn’t come.
He wanted to know, and I had to let him.
I had to trust him. I had to watch this weird transformation and know that he would still be my brother at the end of it, no matter what.
He opened his eyes and let out a sharp exhale.
“It was for me to give to Logan,” he said, smiling softly as he closed his eyes. “Sam left it here the night he died.”
I clenched and unclenched my teeth as the words settled in.
Logan was Fabian’s Wounded.
Fabian looked up at me. “It’s okay, Eerie.”
“It’s far from ‘okay,’” I said, and Fabian took my hand. I knelt down next to him. My heart hammered in my chest.
He brushed the wax away. It was a pewter cross, just like Logan’s. Fabian turned it over. Numbers were etched into the back. He remembered.
“GPS coordinates to a lockbox. Madeline would’ve flipped if she knew, but Sam knew that if something went wrong, if they didn’t make it out, Logan wouldn’t stop looking until he found answers.”
That was true. I hated that it was true.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
Fabian looked up from the necklace.
“It’s filled with almost every secret given to a Harborer at Ironbark. The Harborers gave them to Madeline, and she gave them to Sam. He never read them, that’s why they never became attached to him.”
My chest hollowed.
“So . . . so all the other Hushed died that night—”
“—but they didn’t take the secrets with them, like the Internment wanted,” Fabian finished, a smile turning up the corners of his mouth.
“Did you see how the fire started?” He shook his head.
My head was swimming, and I shut my eyes tight.
“And where is the lockbox?” I asked.
“Um. Well.”
I opened my eyes.
“Fabian.”
“Ironbark. Beneath Sam’s locker on level 2B. He built it deep beneath the base.”
“But you can’t get close to Ironbark,” I reminded him. “It’s not safe.”
“No. I’ve never chosen to get close because it wasn’t worth the risk. Now there’s a reason.”
“Fabian,” I said, swallowing down the words I wanted to shout at him. I took a deep breath. We couldn’t get in a fight right now. I stood, ignoring the way the world tilted as I walked over to the first pew.
“Fabian, Logan just got his life back. If you bring this up, if you give him this . . . I’ll lose both of you, and I can’t.”
Fabian touched my cheek.
“What did I say? What have I said all along? I need to know the truth in order to figure out what to do with it, Eerie. I know how far Logan’s come, and I wouldn’t take that from either of you. But I still have to find it. The box was Sam’s, and I need to protect it. I need to find a way into Ironbark as soon as possible.”
Ironbark. Where the box of written secrets was waiting—the box that Fabian alone could find. Ironbark, which was going to be attacked by the Haunt, tonight.
“No. Don’t get anywhere near Ironbark tonight,” I said, looking up into Fabian’s eyes. “We need to get home. Now.”