. . .” She hesitated. “If I don’t go back before I turn eighteen, I can’t go back at all. I can’t imagine growing old in this world. I’m sorry, I can’t. If I stay any longer, I could be trapped.”
“I wanted . . .” Diana shook her head. “I wanted you to see me go to high school. I wanted a sister. Can’t you stay and be my sister?”
Lundy hesitated. Then, finally, in a small voice, she said, “I can try.”
* * *
SEE HER now as she was then, almost a woman, still technically a child, running, running, through the trees, a shopping bag filled with everything she could grab—forks and spoons and candlesticks, lace doilies and roller skates—thumping against her hip as her feet pound against the soil. How she runs, Katherine Lundy, sweet seventeen and running out of time.
How she ran.
She reached the door, flung it open, flung herself inside, past the rules and through the passage, out into the evening air. It smelled sweet; it smelled like home.
She kept running.
The shutters were open at Vincent’s pie stand. Moon, who had somehow become a young woman while she wasn’t looking—while she was away doing the same in a foreign land—lifted her head from the dough she’d been kneading, surprise slowly bleeding into delight.
“Lundy!” she cried. “Are you home? Are you finally home? I was so worried, I thought—”
“I need to stop,” said Lundy.
Moon blinked. “What?”
“I need to stop, ” repeated Lundy. “My sister, she’s not ready to let me go, and the Archivist said I had to take the oath before I turned eighteen. If I can stop getting older, I won’t turn eighteen. I need to stay where I am for a little while, until Diana can let go, and I can come home. Please, will you help me?” She held up her bag. “I’m prepared to give fair value.”
“I—”
“Please.”
Moon stopped. In a small voice, she said, “Follow me.” Then she turned, not bothering to remove her apron, and walked away from the dough on the counter.
Lundy followed. Together, not quite side by side, they walked the length of the Market, until they reached a familiar trail, until a small, rickety shack came into view. Moon stopped. Lundy looked at her curiously.
“This is as far as I go,” said Moon. “You were my best friend ever. Remember that, okay? I loved you a lot. Even if you did build a boat big enough to bury yourself in.” Then she turned and walked away.
Lundy blinked after her for a moment before she started, cautiously, toward the shack. The door was closed. Opening it seemed wrong; instead, she raised her hand, and knocked.
The door swung open. The Archivist was there. Wearily, she looked at Lundy, and asked, “It’s to be this, is it? What have you come to ask me for?”
“I . . .” Lundy took a breath. “My sister needs me. I don’t want to turn eighteen. I need to wait. Can you help me wait?”
“Lundy—”
“Please.”
“What you’re asking for isn’t what you want. Come home. Stay with us. Be safe and happy and stay.”
Lundy, lover of rules, lover of loopholes, shook her head. Like a dog with a bone, she had found her solution. “No. If I don’t turn eighteen, the curfew doesn’t apply. I can stay. Please.”
The Archivist closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them again, the weariness was gone, replaced with sorrow. “Can you give fair value?”
Silently, Lundy held out her sack of stolen trinkets. The Archivist took it, ran her hand through its contents, and sighed.
“Wait here,” she said, and vanished into the shack. When she returned, she no longer held the sack. Instead, she held a small vial the color of a ripe strawberry, carved from a single bright crystal. She offered it to Lundy.
Lundy took it.
“If you drink this,” she said, “you will not turn eighteen. But it isn’t . . . Please. You asked a question, and you paid the price of it, but please. There will be consequences if you do this. Stay. Please. Just stay.”
“Whatever the consequences are, I’ll pay them,” said Lundy, and opened the vial, and drank.
It tasted like water. It tasted like nothing. It tasted like tears. Again, the Archivist sighed. Lundy looked at her. She was crying.
“The rules are the rules,” said the Archivist. “They were set for a reason. I set them for a reason.”
Lundy’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Names have power, child,” said the Archivist. “Titles, too. They call me ‘the