He tugs off his boots and knots the laces and hangs them on his shoulder before stepping in. I do everything he does and nothing he doesn’t, and together we head inside.
It’s a crime scene.
I can tell because everything is very still.
Still in that undisturbed-on-purpose way.
I stand by the door and watch him work, amazed by the way he touches things without leaving any mark.
From the street, Mr. Phillip’s house looks almost normal.
The plants are still in their pots, the doormat still clean and even at the top of the steps, and I’m willing to bet that inside the door, several pairs of shoes are lined up against the wall. But the illusion of calm order is interrupted by the bright strip of yellow tape crisscrossing the front door and the police cruiser parked on the street.
I’m leaning against a fence a few houses down, assessing the situation. There’s one cop in the cruiser, but his seat’s kicked back and his hat is over his eyes. Halfway down the block a woman is walking a dog; other than that, the street is empty.
There’s a high wooden fence jutting out to either side of Mr. Phillip’s house, but his neighbor’s lawn is open, and I make my way across the street behind the cop car and into the yard, heading for their backyard like it’s my own. Luckily, they’re not home to contradict me—as soon as I’m out of the cop car’s line of sight, I press my ear to Mr. Phillip’s fence and listen. Nothing. The wood barely groans as I hoist myself up and over and land in a crouch in the manicured backyard.
Plastic has been taped over the two shattered windows at the back of the house, and the grass beneath them is sprinkled with glass, which is strange itself. Normally in a break-in, the windows would be broken inward, but the glass out here suggests the windows were broken from the inside out.
I keep my eyes on the ground, careful to step where others have obviously stepped rather than in the untouched patches.
When I reach the back door, I press my ear to the wood and listen. Still nothing—no voices, no footsteps, no sounds of life. I check the lock, but it doesn’t budge, so I pull the set of picks from my backpack and kneel in front of the lock. From there I maneuver the two metal bars until the lock shifts and clicks under my touch.
“Open sesame,” I whisper.
I turn the handle and the door falls open. I slip the lock pick set back into my pocket and step inside, tugging the door shut behind me. At first, everything looks normal—a small room with a tiled floor, a pair of shoes neatly by the door, an umbrella in a holder, that same sense of everything in its place. Then I look into the room on my left and see the damage. The plastic on the windows has left the space dark, but even without the light I can make out the debris scattered across the hardwood floor. A set of floor-to-ceiling bookcases are built into the wall opposite the broken windows. Most of the debris seems to have come from there—the shelves are practically empty, and a trail of books and odd trinkets litters the floor, thinning as it nears the windows.
I hold my breath. There’s a horrible stillness to the room. It’s only been three days, but the air is starting to feel stale. It’s eerie—a crime scene without a body, like a movie set without the actors.
I tug off my ring and set it on the table by the door. The air shifts around me, humming faintly with life. I’m just bringing my hand to the nearest wall when something happens.
I let my gaze slide over the room. Near the windows, it slides off.
My chest tightens. A shortcut? Here?
And then a pit forms in my stomach as I realize it isn’t a shortcut. Shortcuts—the invisible doors Crew use to cheat their way across space—disturb the air, but they are smooth, and this is jagged, snagging my gaze and repelling it at once. My heart starts to race.
A shortcut wouldn’t do that.
But a void would.
Voids are illegal, tears made in the world, doors to nowhere. The last—and only—time I saw a void was the day I made one. The day Owen broke free and the fight spilled out of the Narrows and into the Coronado, through the halls and up the stairs and onto the roof.
I squeeze my eyes shut and can feel Owen’s grip tighten around me, his knife between my shoulder blades, his cold blue eyes full of anger and hate as I lift the Crew key behind his back. I turn the key in the air and there is a click and a crushing wind, and Owen’s eyes widen as the void opens and rips him backward into the darkness.
And then it closes an instant later, leaving only a jagged seam in its wake.
A seam, just like the one in front of me now. My pulse pounds in my ears. That’s why there’s debris and broken glass but no body. Voids only open for an instant, long enough to devour the nearest living thing. A perfect crime, when you consider no one can see the method, the mark.
But who would do this? There’s only one tool in the world that can make a void door.
A Crew key.
And then it hits me: Eric.
What was it he said in the park last night?
What are you going to do with them?
Make them disappear.
Mr. Phillip and Bethany and Jason. They all went missing after I crossed paths with them. Eric hasn’t been following me to look for evidence. He’s been planting it. Setting me up.
Panic chews through me as I bring a trembling hand to the nearest wall, already knowing what I will find. Nothing. The same white-noise nothingness that I found on the Coronado roof that day. Voids cover their own tracks, eat through time and memory and make it all unreadable. But I have to try to see, so I close my eyes and let the memories float toward my fingers. I reach out, taking hold of them and rolling time back. The room flickers into sight. At first it is empty; then, bit by bit, it fills with people: officers and men taking photographs. The images spin away and the room empties again, and for a moment I think I might see something. I can feel the void hovering beyond the quiet.
The memory brushes against my fingers.
And then it explodes.
My vision floods with white and static and pain. The room vanishes around me into light, and I wrench my hand away from the door, my ears ringing as I blink away the blinding white.
Ruined. It’s all ruined. Whoever did this, they knew they wouldn’t show up. They knew the void would hide their presence. But they can’t hide the void itself. Not that anyone’s going to see that evidence. No, the only evidence anyone will see is mine. My prints somewhere in Mr. Phillip’s kitchen and on Bethany’s necklace, my number in Jason’s phone.
I tug my sleeves over my hands and rub any fresh marks from the wall.
And then I hear the car door slam.
The sound makes me jump. I knock into the table by the door, and my silver ring rolls off, hitting the hardwood floor and rolling into the debris as footsteps and muffled voices sound from the front path.
I drop to a crouch and scramble forward, kneeling on an open book. I knock aside a binder and a heavy glass ornament as I grasp for the ring. The smooth metal circle fetches up against a toppled chair, and I grab it and shove it back onto my finger just as the front door opens down the hall. I freeze, but the glass ball continues to roll across the hardwood floor with a steady, heavy sound before coming to rest against the wall.
I hear it, and so do the cops.
One of them calls out, “Hey, someone here?”
I hold my breath, weaving my way silently between pieces of debris toward the wall, where I press myself back against it like it’ll do a damn bit of good if they decide to come in.