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.

Ray still had not let go of the page. Jordin held one edge; Ray held the other. The hut behind Ray smelled of dried herbs and wet wood. The thing that had moved in the dark stepped forward into the lamplight and became a man. Slightly Hispanic-looking, denim vest, hands out of his pockets now. Ray's alien companion, the one Ray covered for. Pablo did not look at Jordin. He looked at the page. "You want it," Ray said. "I keep it. That's the deal I made with myself a long time ago." "I need to read it," Jordin said. "I wrote it. I don't remember writing it." "That's your problem." Ray's voice went flat. "Not mine." Jordin's hand shook on the paper. Six days without sleep pressed behind his eyes. He could rip it. He could run. He would lose half and Ray would lose half and Marshwood would keep cracking. He let go. "Then let me copy it," he said. "Here. In front of you. The page stays with you." Ray's jaw worked. Pablo spoke for the first time. "Fair." One word, dropped like a stone. Ray looked at him. Pablo shrugged. "He bleeds. You saw." Ray folded the page once and set it on the plank table. He did not sit. "You bring what you have." Jordin pulled the sheet from his jacket. Translucent vellum, faint guide marks, the last clean one from his desk. He also set down the worn leather satchel he'd carried from Ray's own porch step — the one Ray had left there weeks ago and never come back for. Ray stared at it. It had been his great-uncle's. Jordin had kept it dry. "Trade," Jordin said. "The bag for an hour with the page." Ray picked up the satchel. He turned it over. His thumb found a stitch he must have known by feel. He set it down on his side of the table. "One hour," Ray said. "I watch." Jordin laid the vellum over the torn page and began to trace. His own handwriting came up through the sheet, letters he did not remember shaping. 1692. Marshwood witch trials. Names crossed out. A curse laid into the soil. A second block of writing below in a script that tilted the wrong way, as if written by someone else using his hand. He copied every mark. His nose started to bleed again near the end. He wiped it on his sleeve and kept tracing. When the hour closed, Ray took the original back and slid it inside his jacket. Jordin folded the vellum against his chest. "Read it somewhere I'm not," Ray said. Jordin walked out onto the wooden stair. He had the copy. He could not yet read the second hand on the page, and he did not know whose it was. That was the next problem. He went to find someone who might.

Jordin left Ray's hut with the traced page folded against his ribs. He needed a sample of handwriting to test against the second hand on the copy. He knew one place he had never checked. The boy he had drawn Lucas Andreas from kept a stack of old papers in his room, and some of those papers were older than Jordin remembered giving him. He crossed back out of Marshwood and drove to the house where his godson lived. The kid met him at the door with the iPad tucked under one arm and the blue headphones pushed down around his neck. Bluey played low against his hoodie. Jordin had not called ahead. The boy did not seem surprised. "You look tired," Lucas said. "More tired. Sorry. Worse." "I need to see the fort," Jordin said. "The one you built in the closet. You keep stuff under the cushions." Lucas nodded once and turned. Jordin followed him down the hall. The pillow fort filled half the bedroom, couch cushions stacked into walls, quilts pinned across the top. Lucas crawled in first. Jordin got on his knees and followed. Inside it smelled like laundry soap. Lucas lifted a corner cushion and pulled out a shoebox. Drawings. Worksheets. A church program. And under those, a single lined page covered in colored pencil, letters looping the wrong way, words half-spelled, hearts and stars pressed into the margins. "You gave me your sketchbook once," Lucas said. "When I was seven. I wrote in the back. I thought you would be mad. You never said anything, so I thought you didn't see." Jordin took the page. He unfolded the vellum copy beside it on the carpet. He held the lamp down close. The tilt matched. The way the L leaned. The way the T crossed low. The second hand on the 1692 page was a child's hand grown careful, the same loops stretched into cursive but still built on the same bones. The curse's second author was sitting across from him in a pillow fort, eating a fruit snack. Jordin's throat closed. He had spent two years believing a stranger had reached into his book. It had been a seven-year-old kid with a pack of colored pencils. "Did you write about a curse?" he asked. "About names being crossed out?" Lucas thought. "I wrote a story. About a town that was sad because it forgot something. I wanted to help. Your book had empty pages." "You remember what you wrote?" "Some." Jordin folded both pages together. His hands were steady for the first time in a week. The author was not a stranger. The author was a child he loved, who had written a story into a book he thought was finished, and the story had taken root in the soil under Marshwood. He was going to have to ask a fifteen-year-old boy what he had done to a city.

Jordin drove out of his godson's neighborhood with both pages in his coat and one hand shaking on the wheel. He knew the second author now. He still could not read the first section. The ritual language on the top half of the page was English shaped wrong, letters pinched into a hand three hundred years dead. He had already learned that guessing at the words made the ink on the copy shiver. Whatever the page warned about, it was listening. He needed someone who spoke that century. He called Dontae first. Dontae was his best friend in the real world and his secret boyfriend, three thousand miles away at Howard. Dontae studied history. Dontae picked up on the second ring. "You sound bad," Dontae said. "I have a page. 1692. Puritan hand. I can't read the ritual parts and I can't ask Google." "Send me a photo." "I can't photograph it. It reacts." Dontae was quiet. Then he said, "Then you need a primary source translator, not me. Find a Puritan lexicon. Old church one. Something a minister used. Not a modern reprint." "Where." "Somewhere that keeps old things and doesn't advertise. You know that town better than I do." Jordin thanked him and hung up. He knew one place. A bodega on the edge of Marshwood run by a woman his friends whispered about — Aleia Dalton-Romano, back in town after years away, asking careful questions about the soil. Chul Li had said she was descended from a woman burned here in 1692. He crossed into Marshwood and parked in front of the striped awning. The bell above the door rang flat. Aleia was behind the counter, sleeves pushed up, sorting salt into small jars. She looked at him once and knew. "You have something you shouldn't," she said. "I need to read it. Without setting it off." "Show me your hands." He held them out. She studied the ink stains and the cut on his palm from the memory machine. "Basement," she said. "Now." She led him through a curtain and down narrow steps. On a low shelf sat a dark leather book, brass-cornered, its spine cracked. A translation codex. Puritan. She set it between them and did not open it. "Read only what I point to," she said. "Out loud only what I say out loud. Hold something you trust." Jordin pulled the rosary from his pocket. His mother had given it to him at twelve. He wrapped the beads around his knuckles. Aleia opened the codex and the copied page side by side. Her finger moved. She translated the first line flat, no music in it. "Bind the name. Bury the name. The town forgets what the name did." She stopped. Her mouth tightened. "The crossed-out names," she said. "They're not victims. They're what the town agreed to forget. And one of them is Pitch." Jordin's stomach dropped. Blake. He had told Blake everything. He had not known he was handing the truth to a name on this page.