The Children(53)

Guinevere knows this place. It’s the Mortal Cinema, a movie palace she and Ennis visited way back in book three, titled for the theater. There they watched the dead flicker in shades of gray, living out a thousand kinds of afterlife.

She passes the gilded rabbits that flank its front, one a robed scholar and the other in military dress. With a feeling of great foreboding, she enters the cinema.

The doors of one of its stalls are swinging. She slides between them into a room rattling with the click of a projector wheel, where the sea of red seats is empty. All but one. The figure sitting there turns their head: no thief, but the Architect. Guinevere didn’t chase them anywhere, she was led.

She should have known. A real undercity pickpocket could steal the thirst off your tongue without you noticing. Boldly she sits beside the Architect—looking dapper in a moon-colored suit and black pompadour—and says:

You took something from my brother. I want it back.

Shh, the Architect says. The movie is starting.

Guinevere looks at the screen and her blood chills.

She and her brother are up there, cast in the hard-boiled palette of the dead. She watches as they find their way into the City. Their confusion, wonder, fear. She revisits their adventures on the deck of the Salt Witch, in the Map Museum, in the arms of the Architect’s boundless tree, nearly a city in itself. There they are in the shadowy lobby of the pink hotel, untangling the mystery of the sinister Whistlebox.

She watches them go home again and again. Tumbling back to Earth, their own familiar Fourth City, to make new memories in place of the ones that were plucked.

Why are we up there? she asks, bravely as she can. We’re not—I mean, we can’t be—

She won’t say it. Dead.

The Architect makes an indifferent hum. The rules change down here. I have no jurisdiction over the undercity, even I can’t tell you what this means. They lean over, sniff. You don’t smell dead.

Guinevere leans away. Why did you make me come here?

Look. The Architect nods toward the screen. There it is, what you’re looking for. Your brother’s lost memory.

Guinevere looks.

She sees herself and Ennis, at home in the Fourth City. This can’t be real, though: they’re arguing, fists clenched, each talking over the other. She hears none of it, of course. This is a silent film, the endless projector clicking its sole soundtrack. Onscreen her eyes fill with tears and she shoves him. He shoves her back harder. Guinevere stiffens in her seat as she watches herself falling to the ground, arm crooked beneath her, crying out with no sound. Ennis’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t help her. He runs away.

No. Guinevere speaks in a hard voice. That never happened.

The Architect shrugs. Maybe it’s in the future. Or you’ve lost the memory, too.

Guinevere touches her hair, as if she might feel the place where it was plucked. No, she repeats, this time uncertainly. I don’t want to remember this.

Above their heads, the movie loops back to its start.

Then stay. The Architect makes the offer with a thin smile. You can always choose to stay.

The same offer, every time. The Architect only ever makes it to Guinevere. The children don’t understand this favoritism until book four, when they’re told that the contents of her mind make for the strangest of structures. Labyrinths and libraries, houses with impossible dimensions. It’s as if, the Architect says in a wondering tone, they remain half dream.

But Guinevere has seen what happens to the children who stay. There’s a name for what they become: Hollows. Ageless and smiling and drained of their memories, adrift in a land that feels perpetually new. They tend to congregate around bright places—carnivals and fairgrounds, lit cafés—but Guinevere has seen them in the dark, too. Their eyes catching the light like cats’ eyes.

Stay and forget everything I’ve ever known? No, thanks.

The Architect purses their lips. You would know new things.

Guinevere shakes her head. Why make the City so wonderful, she asks bitterly, if the price of staying is so high?

I didn’t make it any more than you made your world, the Architect says dismissively. In the Fourth City, there is a thing called sickness, and another called grief, and a version of dying that goes on and on. They flick a hand sharply over their jacket front, as if dusting the unpleasant notion away. Do you really think that place less vicious than this one?

They rise without waiting for an answer. Come on. It’ll do you no good, watching again.

Guinevere follows the Architect back into the Graveyard. As soon as they’ve passed through the cinema doors, she hears a terrible noise.

Behind her, the whole theater is folding up like a piece of origami. The gilded rabbits throw up their heads and scream, and in the next moment they’re gone.

Guinevere, who has seen many wonders in the Ninth City, is freshly struck by this one. In no more than a minute all that’s left of the cinema is a tiny rectangle lying on the ground. The Architect picks it up and offers it to her: a miniature door, cast in blue glass.



* * *




By the end of the book Ennis will knock on that little door. It will grow into an exit back to their own Fourth City. And just this once, Guinevere will refuse to follow. He’ll reach back, she’ll hesitate. The door will slam shut and disappear, leaving the siblings trapped for the first time in separate lands.