Wren's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Wren left the cave with the cat at his heel and the thirteen names still faint on his hand. Names alone would not walk. Names alone would not sleep in cots. He needed bodies for them, and the only place that filed bodies to names was the Soul-Registry Hall in the city he had just tricked. He pulled his coat tight and went anyway. He went in through a service door behind the kitchens. The hall smelled of paper and cold lamp oil. Shelves climbed higher than he could see. Somewhere above, a red glow pulsed and a thin voice screamed a number over and over. Then another voice joined it. Then a third. He found her at a low desk under a leaning tower of files. The clerk who had drawn the whole backlog onto herself. Her blue cloak was smudged with ink at both cuffs. She did not look up when he stopped in front of her. She slid one entry left, tapped it, and three folders above her head flared red and began to wail. "Don't touch the shelves," she said. "They bite back." "I need thirteen bodies filed to thirteen names," Wren said. He turned his hand so she could see the faint marks. "Ageless. Stuck somewhere in your queue." She looked at his hand. She looked at his face. She did not ask how he had gotten the names onto his skin. "Show me," she said. He read them off. She pulled a ledger from the base of her tower without dislodging the tower. She ran a finger down a column. Her finger stopped, moved, stopped again. "All thirteen are here," she said. "Filed wrong. No bodies attached. They've been screaming for years. No one volunteered." "Can you attach them?" "Yes." She did not soften it. "It takes a signature. Mine counts." She drew a fresh sheet. He held out his hand and she copied each name across, careful, in a small hand. As each name left his skin the mark faded. As each name touched her page a small warm shape lifted out of the ledger like breath on cold glass. Thirteen shapes. Child-sized. They hung above her desk and waited. Above her, four new folders lit red and screamed. She did not look up. "They'll follow you now," she said. "Once. To wherever you take them. After that they belong to that place." "Why help me," Wren said. She pulled the pen back and set it down straight. "Forty-three years ago I filed a girl under the name she used before. I kept her there. I know what a queue does to a child." She looked at him for the first time. "Go. Fast. My signature is on your line now. When the guards read the log they'll come for both of us." Wren pulled his coat around the thirteen shapes and ran.