Chapter 48
The Waterline
Water filled the corridor.
Claire lost the floor first. The current lifted her into the glass wall. Tess's hand caught her coat. Daniel grabbed Tess. Lucy held Noah. Eli vanished beneath the surface.
Ada reached for him.
The guards disappeared in the dark.
Claire kicked toward the glass. A seam opened above her. She pulled herself through and surfaced in the treatment chamber from the memory.
The room was dry.
Ada surfaced beside her. Rowan appeared last, coughing, with Eli in her arms.
“Where is everyone?” Tess asked.
Claire looked through the glass.
The water had vanished. The corridor was empty. Daniel, Lucy, and Noah were gone.
On the wall, a new message appeared.
ORIGINALS RETURN TO SOURCE. WITNESSES REMAIN.
“What does it mean?” Tess asked.
Ada looked at Claire. “The system separated the people it could not control from the people it could.”
“Where are Daniel and Lucy?”
“The archive.”
The treatment chamber door opened onto a different hallway. Claire recognized the carpet from the courthouse.
They emerged beneath the county building.
Rows of sealed boxes had been stacked along the wall. Every box was open. Paper moved through the air like snow.
Daniel stood at the far end, trapped behind a glass partition.
Lucy and Noah were in separate rooms beside him.
Owen Bell appeared on the other side of the glass.
“You have confused access with freedom,” he said.
Claire pressed her palm to the glass. “Open the doors.”
“The originals are returning to source.”
“You cannot own them.”
“I do not own them. I maintain the records that allow the world to recognize them.”
Ada stood beside Claire. “You maintain the records that allow the world to forget them.”
Owen looked at her.
“You were not meant to survive.”
Ada smiled faintly. “Neither were you.”
The courthouse lights began to flicker.
A printer in the records room started running.
It printed one page.
The page carried Owen Bell's birth name: Everett Bell.
Below it was a photograph of him as a child, standing in the clinic beside Mara.