The F-Class Awakening

Chapter 3 : "You Killed Me"

The old quarter was called Marrow, and nobody had lived in it for sixty years.

Halcyon had been built on the water and then built over the water, and when the sea came up the year Evan's mother was born, the city had simply moved east and left the drowned half behind. Now Marrow sat along the river like a mouthful of broken teeth: rooflines, church spires, a clock tower with its hands stuck at ten past four. All of it stood in three feet of black water that moved in slow rings wherever the wind touched it.

A causeway of flat iron plates ran from the seawall into the middle of it. Evan walked it at dusk with his hood up, counting plates and trying to decide whether he was being an idiot.

She knows your walk.

He'd started noticing it. That was the problem. Twice on the way out here he'd caught himself doing exactly what she'd described, left, left, right, and both times he'd stopped, and both times stopping had told him nothing except that he hadn't known he did it.

Serena was waiting on the last plate, where the causeway ended at the stub of a drowned church. She sat on the step with her boots in the water and her coat wrapped around her, looking out at the ruins, and she didn't turn around.

"You came," she said.

"I want to know what you remember."

"That's not why you came." She glanced back, and the last of the light was on her face. "You came because you couldn't stand not knowing. It's not the same thing."

"It's close enough."

"It isn't." She stood, and water sluiced off her boots. "But it'll do."

The church had lost its roof and kept its ribs. Evan followed her in through the gap where the doors had been. Stone floor, standing water, pews rotted to splinters, and overhead a square of deepening blue with three or four stars already in it.

Serena sat on the dry end of a fallen beam. Evan stayed standing.

"Ask," she said.

"You said you remember me. What do you remember?"

She took a moment. When she spoke, she laid each piece down slowly, like something she didn't want to break.

"A street. Not this one. It's warm there. There are trees with white flowers, and the petals come down for about a month and everyone complains and nobody means it. A room with a window that doesn't close properly. A chair under it with one short leg, so you have to sit up straight or it rocks."

"You remember a room."

"I remember our room."

Evan took that in.

"I remember you laughing at something on the floor," Serena said. "I don't know what. I remember the sound, and I remember thinking that I'd remember it my whole life, and it still wouldn't be enough of it. That's a strange thing to think when you're twenty-three."

"Twenty-three."

"I was twenty-three. You were twenty-five."

She was nineteen. Evan was eighteen. He filed that away and said nothing.

"That's the good part," he said.

"Yes."

"Tell me the rest."

Serena drew her feet up onto the beam and wrapped her arms around her knees. She stared at the far wall, at a pale shape carved into the stone that the water had been working on for sixty years.

"A colder place," she said. "Stone. Night. There's a lamp everything's lit by, and the light is the wrong color. A green that shouldn't be in a room. There are people standing in a line along the wall. I never see their faces. I'm at the end of the line, and I'm not allowed to move.

"And I see you," she said, "walking down the middle of that room toward me."

She said it without any weight at all, which was how Evan knew how much weight it had.

"And?"

"And then I'm on the floor." Her voice didn't change. "There's a lot between those two things and none of it comes back. I remember the floor. Cold on one side of my face. A hand on my throat, not squeezing. Just there. And I remember looking up and seeing you, and thinking —"

She stopped.

"Serena."

"I remember thinking that you were crying."

The church ticked. Somewhere out in the drowned quarter a plank shifted and slapped the water.

Evan realized he'd stopped hearing the river. He could feel his own pulse in his neck, and a strong, specific desire to be anywhere else. He stayed exactly where he was, because leaving would mean she was right about him.

"That's what you've been carrying for two years," he said.

"That's the shape of it." She finally looked at him. "You want the last part."

"There's a last part."

"There's a last part."

"Say it."

Serena let go of her knees and stood. She was close enough now that he could have touched her, which he was very deliberately not doing.

"In another life," she said, "you killed me."

The words went out into the open air of a drowned church and did nothing dramatic. That was the odd thing. Evan had half expected thunder. The building falling.

Instead a girl in a wet coat stood in front of him and told him, without raising her voice, that he was going to murder her.

"You're insane," he said.

"Probably." She said it without offense. "I've had four years to come to terms with that and I still haven't."

"I'm eighteen. I've never hurt anyone in my life. I got into two fights at school and lost both."

"I know."

"You don't know anything."

"I know you lost both," Serena said. "The second was fourth year, against a boy called Ilya something. He broke your nose and you told everyone you'd walked into a door. You fought him because he said something about your mother that you're still not going to repeat."

Evan's hands came out of his pockets. He didn't remember deciding to take them out.

"That's not —"

"Ask me how I know."

"How do you know?"

"I've seen it." She took a half step back and put her hands in her coat, and for the first time since the shop she looked like someone about to do something she'd promised herself not to do. "It isn't only memories. Sometimes, when I'm awake, and I'm somewhere that matters, I see a piece of it. Like standing in a doorway with your back to the room and knowing exactly what's behind you.

"That's how I found you. I saw a piece. A boy standing under a board that said F-CLASS."

"You weren't at the Awakening."

"I was. Upstairs, at the back of the gallery, behind a pillar." She said it flatly, without apology. "I'd seen that afternoon seven times before it happened. Always 0-A. Always the same second line. I left when it printed."

Evan heard himself say, "You saw the second line."

"I saw it before you did."

"There was a woman in the gallery," he said slowly. "Grey coat. She watched me like —"

"That wasn't me."

It came out too fast. Serena's jaw moved.

"I saw her too," she said. "I don't know who she is."

She said it like a door closing, and Evan let it go, because there was something else he needed more.

"What's the crack?" he said. "You said the second line always comes three weeks before something."

"Before the first crack." Her eyes went to the water. "I'll tell you when I know you'll believe me."

"Serena. What crack? Three weeks before what?"

She opened her mouth to answer.

And Evan, who had been standing with his weight on his back foot and his mind running like a crane, did something he would spend a long time trying to explain.

He reached out and touched her.

*  *  *

He would think about it afterward and never find the decision. There was no decision. A girl had just told him something so enormous that the only way to know whether it was true was to put his hand on it, literally, and he was eighteen, and he'd spent a week with a power everyone said was useless. Some part of him had been waiting for something to try it on.

The link opened the way it always did, with a small cold click, like a key finding a lock.

Then it kept opening.

Evan had linked a chain to a hook a dozen times that week, and every time it was exactly this much: a click, six seconds, a faint tug. This time the click went through her like a door swinging wide. What lay on the other side was enormous, and it took hold of him, and it did not let go.

He was somewhere else.

*  *  *

Stone floor. Cold on one side of a face. He looks down at his own hands, and they aren't his hands. They're older, wider. There's a scar across the back of the right one that he doesn't have. The left is holding something he can't see.

A lamp above him, the wrong shade of green.

A girl on the floor at his feet.

Serena. Older, twenty-three maybe, her hair cut short, wearing grey. She lies with her cheek against the stone and her eyes open and not looking at anything. There's blood on the floor in a shape Evan doesn't understand and won't be able to stop seeing.

And he is standing over her.

And his own voice, older, hoarse, wrecked, says from somewhere above and behind him, close to his ear, in the tone you use to sign a document:

"It's done. Close it."

*  *  *

Evan came back on his knees on the church floor, hands flat in six inches of water. Serena was on the beam above him, staring down with both hands pressed over her mouth.

For a long moment neither of them could speak.

"What did you see?" she said at last. Her voice was wrecked. "Evan. What did you see?"

He got one hand onto the edge of the beam. The water was so cold it hurt.

"A room," he said, and had to stop and start again. "Green lamp. Stone floor. Your hair was short. There was blood."

Serena made a small sound.

"And a voice. Behind me. Above me. Mine, but older." He looked up at her. "It said, It's done. Close it."

Her hands came down very slowly.

"Then it's true," she said.

Evan didn't answer.

"Say it. Say it's true."

"No."

"Evan —"

"It means something." He got to his feet. His legs weren't entirely reliable and he ignored that. "It means something happened, or will, or somebody put it there. It doesn't mean I did it."

"You were standing over my body."

"I was standing over your body, and a voice like mine said it's done." He wiped his hands on his coat, which did nothing. "Did it sound like me to you? Because it didn't to me. It sounded like me doing an impression."

Serena stared at him.

"That's a very small detail," she said.

"It's the only one I've got."

She was quiet. Then she sat back down on the beam, hard, like someone who'd been standing a long time without noticing, and put her face in her hands. Evan stood in a flooded church on the wrong side of a dead city and had no idea what to do.

He had never once been the person who comforted anyone. He was the person who carried things and didn't say much. His mother liked to say he had steady hands and a closed mouth, and that the combination would keep him out of trouble and lonely in about equal measure.

So he did the only thing he could think of. He sat down next to her on the beam.

"I'm not going to ask if you're all right," he said.

Serena made a noise into her hands that might have been a laugh.

"You are," she said, "the worst person I've ever met."

"I get that a lot."

"No, you don't." She lifted her head. Her eyes were red and her face was a mess and she was, Evan noted with some alarm, completely composed again. "That's the thing about you. Nobody says that to you. Nobody says anything to you."

She looked at him properly.

"Your hands are shaking."

"I know."

"You should sit on them."

"I'm sitting on them."

*  *  *

They stayed in the drowned church long past dark. He asked her three more questions. She answered two.

What did the people in the line want? She didn't know. She remembered being afraid at the end of it, and she remembered being allowed to be there, which was worse than being made to.

How many times had she seen the Awakening before it happened? Seven, she said. Always 0-A. Always three weeks before the crack. When he asked again what the crack was, she said she'd tell him when she knew he'd believe her. Evan let it go. She was as frightened of the answer as he was.

Had she ever told anyone? Serena was quiet a long time. Then: "Once." When he asked who, she said, "I don't want to talk about it," in a voice with a door on it. Evan's father had taught him exactly one useful thing, which was how to recognize a door. He let that one go too.

They walked back along the iron plates in the dark. At the seawall she stopped.

"Don't use it on me again," she said.

"All right."

"I mean it."

"I said all right."

"I know what you said." Serena pulled up her hood. "But you found out about that power a week ago, and the first time you really wanted something, you reached out and took it. You didn't ask. You didn't hesitate. You reached."

Evan stood at the end of the causeway with the fog coming off the water and had nothing to say.

"Goodnight," Serena said, and went.

He got three steps up the seawall road before he heard her again, behind him, in a voice not quite steady.

"Evan."

He turned.

She was standing in the middle of the road in the fog, small and far away.

"I remember loving you more clearly than I remember dying," she said. "I need you to know that before you decide what I am."

Then she was gone into the grey.

Evan walked home. His hands didn't stop shaking for an hour.

*  *  *

At three in the morning he sat on the floor of his room with the lamp on and his notebook open, writing down every detail of the room he'd seen before it could soften. The green of the lamp. The scar on the back of the right hand. The shape of the blood on the stone.

And he noticed something.

There had been a window behind her.

He hadn't written it down, so he closed his eyes and went back for it. There it was: high in the wall, a window with nine panes. And in the ninth pane, reflected, tiny and warped, the thing his eyes had skipped over because it made no sense in a room with a stone floor.

Evan opened his eyes and looked at the page.

He'd seen the reflection of the Registry Tower.

Tall, pale, unmistakable, exactly as it stood in the middle of Halcyon today, right down to the twin fins on its north face.

He sat very still.

Serena believed she was remembering another life, one that had already happened. But the Tower was only eleven years old. A life from the past couldn't have it in the window.

And the girl on the stone floor was twenty-three. The girl in the church was nineteen.

Evan understood, with a certainty that arrived before any of the reasoning did, that he hadn't been looking at something that had already happened.

He'd been looking at something that hadn't happened yet.

And the girl he'd just met was remembering it as though it were over.