Jordin Yu's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Jordin Yu had not slept in six days, and the center of Marshwood was cracking again. He sat on the floor of his dorm with the sketchbook open to page forty-one. The city he built at nineteen, the city where his surrogate father lived and his surrogate son went to middle school, was falling apart from the inside because he could not remember drawing half of it. He had made Marshwood in one long night he barely remembered starting. Now the pages underneath, the older pages he'd drawn over, were bleeding through. He needed to see them. He could not see them. That was the whole problem. He pressed his palms to his eyes and tried, again, to picture what he'd sketched before Marshwood. Nothing came. Just the same static, the same locked door in his own head. Forty redraws of the center. Forty failures. He couldn't fix what he couldn't remember making. So he built a machine to remember for him. He spent the night soldering mirror panels to a steel frame and filling glass tubes with ink he'd mixed from the same bottle he used on the map. The rig stood on his desk by morning, taller than his lamp, humming faintly when he plugged it in. He sat in front of the center mirror. He thought about Marshwood's oldest street. He waited. The ink in the tubes shifted. One went black. One went clear. The middle panel showed him a face he did not recognize, then a hospital hallway, then nothing. He leaned closer. The mirror cracked from corner to corner and went dark. His nose was bleeding. The rig had pulled something up and then shut, like a mouth closing. He knew, then, that he could not do this alone from inside his own skull. Someone in Marshwood had to remember what he could not. He crossed into the city through the portal in his closet and walked to the one house he had never fully drawn — the tree hut at the edge of the marsh, the one that had drawn itself. Ray Parker opened the door before Jordin knocked. Herbs hung behind him. He looked at Jordin's face, at the dried blood, and did not step aside. "You built something," Ray said. "It broke." "I need what's underneath the city." Ray watched him a long moment. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded page, torn in half, the paper aged brown. He held it out but did not let go. "1692," Ray said. "Witch trials. My uncle cursed the soil you're standing on. I've been waiting to see who came looking." Jordin took the page. The handwriting on it was his own, from a sketchbook he had thrown away years ago. Marshwood had been built on top of something older, and he had known once, and forgotten. Behind Ray, in the dark of the hut, something moved that was not Ray.