The Children(123)

The little girl in the tower had walked those streets in pursuit of grand adventure. She’d watched the keylights flicker and flash. And she’d forgotten all of it.

From sunup to midnight she watched the City from the Architect’s tree, through the Architect’s wonderful spyglass. She never felt sad or bored or lonely. Each day felt as new as a snowdrop. But when she lay down at night, she felt an emptiness beneath her ribs. She gave it a new name every time, the thing she was lacking. A curled-up fox kit, a jewel-handled dagger, a storybook with a thousand—

Bang. A piece of the floor dropped out. The girl sat up in bed, kicking her blankets away, and watched as a boy with a filthy face climbed through the hidden trapdoor and into the tower. He was crying, his face cleaning itself in wet streaks. She waited to see if he would do anything interesting. He only stared at her, and in a trembling voice said, “Guinevere?”

She looked at him haughtily. “What’s Guinevere?”

The question made the boy look so unhappy she was almost sorry. Until he did something terrible: crossed the tower room and flung his arms around her.

The girl was too angry to speak. She didn’t like the dirt on him or his ugly clothes, not one bit of them shiny. His blue eyes looked like her own, and she didn’t like that, either. The Architect had assured her she was a singular child.

She felt something, though, in that empty room beneath her rib cage. It was an aching, waking feeling, not entirely pleasant: pins and needles in a place you couldn’t reach. “Say that word again,” she said. “That funny word with a G.”

“Guinevere. You’re Guinevere, that’s your name. There’s more, lots more, but we don’t have time.”

She was mostly listening to him. A little part of her was playing with the name. Guin-e-vere. She liked it. If it truly belonged to her, she wouldn’t lose it again.

“I need to find something that looks like this. Do you know what this is?” He held up a silver key with a fat tri-looped bow.

Shiny. She licked her lips. “Course I know what a key is.”

“Have you seen any in this room? The Architect, do they carry a key?”

The girl, the Guinevere, pretended to think. At last she had someone to show her secret to. She was so clever, and there’d been no one to tell.

The Architect’s spyglass could be as long as her entire arm. Or it could fold up into a circle as small as a monocle. If you opened it carefully, one solitary click, you would see in the brushed metal the faintest dent. Except it wasn’t a dent, it was a catch. She showed the boy how to tick it with your nail and make a drawer pop out. Inside the drawer, a key.

“This is so good, Guin.” He gazed at the key then at her, his tearstained face shining. “Do you want to know a secret?”

“Yes,” she said instantly. Secrets were her favorite thing. Second favorite, she decided, after her name.

“I know where the Architect came from.”

His expression had changed, become hard and glittering. He had changed, and even when she remembered herself enough to ask, Ennis would never tell Guinevere all he suffered to reach her, all he had done.

“They’re from the Fourth City, Guin. Earth. And we’re going to send them back. It’s the Architect who’s going home this time, not us. The Ninth City will be ours.”

—Guinevere Sharpe, The Architect’s Key (Hart & Crane, 2026)





Acknowledgments




Thank you to my agent, Bill Clegg, for your kindness, your fearsome advocacy, and your dazzling instinct for story. Thank you to my editor, Jessica Williams, for loving my feral Farmhouse kids and for seeing both the book and the better book it could be. What a blast it was to run back through it with the aid of your razor-sharp read and unerring vision. This book and I could not have asked for better allies.

Thanks to the fabulous team at William Morrow, who made the path to publishing a joy from day one: Liate Stehlik, Jennifer Hart, Eliza Rosenberry, Kelsey Manning, Atira Gali, Peter Kispert, Hope Ellis, Jessica Rozler, Dale Rohrbaugh, Marie Rossi, Emily Bierman, Nancy Tan, Heather Bosch, Kyle O’Brien, and Elsie Lyons. And again to Eliza and Kelsey, for your tireless creativity in helping this book find its readers.

Thanks to everyone at the Clegg Agency: Simon Toop, Marion Duvert, MC Conners, Rebecca Pittel, Kirsten Wolf, Sam Verney, and Andi Grene. Thank you to Anna Webber, for bringing the book to UK readers, and to Brooke Ehrlich, for representing it for film and TV.

Thank you to Will Staehle, for the cover (and illustrations) of my dreams. I still can’t believe I get to see my name in a font worthy of the fantasy books I grew up on. And on that subject, thank you again to Kyle and Elsie, for helping make this book so beautiful.

Thank you to the team at Bloomsbury, my UK publishing home: my wonderful UK editor Emma Herdman, Gurdip Ahluwalia, Natasha Drewett, Genista Tate-Alexander, Helen Upton, and Grace Nzita-Kiki.

Thank you, Kamilla Benko, for being a calm, honest, and brilliant first reader. Thank you, Tara Sonin, for reading early and letting me kvetch. I have no coworkers; thank god for group chats: my gratitude to the Donut Holes (props to Matt Dinniman for the name), Cake Night, and the (formerly) B&N Slack, going strong since the darkest days of March 2020. Thank you, Alexa, Amy, Bill, Eric, Gaby, Joel, Molly, Sarah, and Sarah Jane.

To all the children’s book authors named or alluded to in this book, and all the ones who haunt it whether I meant them to or not. Like so many of my favorite people, I was terrible at being in grade school. You were excellent company when I needed it most.