Chapter 16 — The Burning Press

It doesn't scream. It types. (Tap-tap-tap-tap—)

SIGNATORIES: Mayor Elias Whitmore. Librarian Agatha Wicker. And one blank line, waiting.

Waiting for me.

Miss Wicker's voice rose from the pages:

MIRA BIRCH AGREES TO BECOME THE NEW STORYKEEPER, ERASING ALL MEMORY OF PIGEON HOLLOW'S TRUE HISTORY IN EXCHANGE FOR—

I didn't read the exchange. I didn't need to. I knew what it was—what it always is when something powerful asks you to sign: just enough of what you want to make the cost feel worth it.

Mom's human hand found mine. "There's a third option. The colophon is also an excision mark. Cut out the heart of it."

"You'll lose too," the Mayor said, oozing up the book's spine. "You'll be real, girl, but you'll be nobody's story."

The Press roared and spewed:

Pages that caught Dad and turned him back into text, scattering him across the walls.

Headlines that sealed Mom's mouth.

And one final sheet that fluttered into my hands: Epilogue Draft No. 42—And so Mira Birch signed, as they all do, and the story reset once more.

I looked at it for a long moment.

Then I took the colophon page and drew it across the contract like a blade.

The book's scream had no single voice—it was everyone who had ever had their story taken, returned all at once in a sound that pressed against the inside of your skull.

The Press's gears melted into punctuation marks that clattered to the floor—commas, full stops, semicolons, question marks by the handful.

The Mayor unspooled into a sentence that kept rewriting itself:

Elias Whitmore was just a man who loved power too much to—Elias Whitmore never existed except as a—Elias Whitmore was a—

And then the fire.

Not orange. Blue.

Editing fire. The kind that only burns what isn't true.