Echo walked toward the back room of Perrin’s shop, where she knew he kept the stuff too expensive or rare or downright dangerous to display. The skin between her shoulder blades prickled as if she weren’t alone. A glance around showed that she was, but the feeling lingered. Ghosts, then. Or guilt. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Even if she didn’t want to remember Perrin, it was only a matter of time before memory—fickle, cruel thing it was—caught up with her. She didn’t want to remember the first time she’d entered this very shop, hand clutching the Ala’s, eyes as wide as saucers, as she took in the utterly disorganized assortment of glittering wares. Didn’t want to remember the cookie he’d given her when he caught her eyeing the open box of macarons on the countertop—it had been raspberry-flavored, and the cloyingly sweet filling had stuck to the roof of her mouth. She didn’t want to remember the first time she’d accepted a job from him; for some reason, he’d wanted a 1961 Mickey Mantle baseball card—“Mint condition or don’t bother darkening my doorstep, please”—and so Echo had tracked down a collector, slunk into his office, and swiped the card from his album when he was out to lunch. Perrin had given Echo a six-month supply of shadow dust in exchange, teaching her the ways of the Avicen’s barter economy.
And that was how she’d decided she ought to be a thief instead of a mere pickpocket. She’d discovered something about herself: she was good at stealing other people’s things, really good. The knowledge that she’d developed such a talent filled her with a confidence she’d never had before. She didn’t want to remember how much the person she was now had been shaped by Perrin’s request for a baseball card. And she did not want to remember the last time she had seen him, eerily motionless, either dead or dying, reduced to nothing more than a pile of rags huddled in the corner of a damp dungeon in the belly of Wyvern’s Keep. She hadn’t said goodbye; she’d been angry at him. He’d told the Drakharin about her—what she did, where to find her—and it hadn’t mattered to her then that the information had been tortured out of him or that he’d died scared and alone and in pain.
Regret clawed at Echo’s insides like a beast fighting to break free. Her vision blurred as she rifled through the back room, messier than it had been even when Perrin was alive. His records were less of a system and more of a loose constellation of papers strewn about his desk, crammed into drawers, and spilling over densely packed bookshelves. What she was searching for would be hidden, most likely. Perrin had managed to track her for the Drakharin using a bracelet he’d fashioned from braided leather, shiny beads, and his own feathers. Echo had left the bracelet in her cell in Wyvern’s Keep, but she knew a tracker was no good without a way to track it. He’d probably used a scrying bowl or a mirror or something like that to locate the bracelet, which he knew had been attached to Echo. The same bracelet Caius and his Drakharin agents had used to find her when she’d been hunting down the objects Rose had scattered around the globe, a scavenger hunt that led straight to the firebird. The feathers were what made locating it possible. A little biological material, a clever enchantment, and a reflective surface to tie a charm to, et voilà: a tracking spell so easy even a modest shopkeeper could use it. If Perrin had been around for Echo to ask why he’d done it, he probably would have said it was to keep an eye on her. But he wasn’t around, so she couldn’t ask. She shoved a pile of books off a box, flinching when the noise reverberated through the abandoned shop. The counterpart to the bracelet had to be here somewhere. If it wasn’t, then their only lead to find Caius was dead. Dead, dead, dead.
She should have said “Goodbye.”
She should have said “I’m sorry you got dragged into this mess.”
She should have said “Thank you for the macaron. It was lovely and I was so hungry and you were kind when I had known so little kindness.”
But she hadn’t said any of those things. She had left his broken body to rot in that dungeon, and now there was no one left to say anything to at all.
—
Echo stepped over broken glass and collapsed tables, making her way to the office where Perrin kept his account books.
The room itself was modest. Large, heavy tomes bound in unassuming brown leather lined the shelves, their spines embossed with golden dates spanning back to the late nineteenth century. The Agora had been around for a long time. When it was established, the island had been a Dutch colony by the name of New Amsterdam, and the market had weathered the years since. Perrin’s records were meticulously arranged in chronological order on shelves that covered every inch of wall space. The books’ bindings had been worn smooth by age and handling. The business had operated, like most Avicen enterprises, on a complicated bartering system. Echo’s involvement with Perrin had been relatively simple. He had requests. She fulfilled them, acquiring goods out in the human world that were difficult for an Avicen to come by, and in return, he kept her in a steady supply of shadow dust.
But she knew from watching him work in the shop that his other arrangements had not always been as simple. The shopkeeper had woven a complex web of favors and debts, and each of these books was a record of every transaction he had performed in the year stamped on its spine. The books had obviously been pulled off the shelves with frequency. There was a scant bit of dust on them from the months of neglect, but they still showed signs of once-regular usage. Echo had no doubt that Perrin remembered, with the aid of his detailed record keeping, every favor owed him by the Avicen—and occasional warlock—who passed through his shop. A less discerning eye might not have caught the slight aberration among the books, but Echo, who spent the vast majority of her life surrounded by books in various states of disrepair, noticed it.
A single ledger, almost identical to its neighbors. The year, written in faded golden lettering on its spine: 1961. Echo snatched at a fragment of memory: Perrin, listing the greatest baseball teams in the history of the sport during one of the slow days at his shop, when Echo had come around looking to stock up on shadow dust only to find herself roped into one of his diatribes on sports. She couldn’t remember most of what he had said, but she remembered the enthusiasm in his voice as he’d described the virtues of the 1961 Yankees: victors of that year’s World Series after defeating the Cincinnati Reds in five games; home to both Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, who were famous for racing to beat Babe Ruth’s home run record. The memory would probably have remained buried deep in Echo’s subconscious if not for the condition of the ledger.
The spine was not cracked.
The leather showed signs of handling, particularly near the top where someone would have pressed their fingers to the book to pull it off the shelf. But unlike every other ledger in the office, it showed no sign of having been opened repeatedly. This book was not for reading. She rested her hand atop it and pulled.
The ledger did not slide off the shelf as it should have. Instead it angled forward like a lever. Echo continued applying gentle pressure to the book until she felt a click. The shelf swung toward her, revealing a shallow alcove set into the wall.