Chapter 9 — The Thief's Shadow (It Doesn't Match)

It moves when he doesn't. And it's staring at you.

Ellis came apart the closer we got to the Press.

His shadow peeled away first, moving independently, walking a different direction entirely before it caught itself and snapped back. Then his left ear flattened against the side of his head, the cartilage going pale and paper-thin. By the time we reached the sewer grate at the back of the printing house, his entire right side rustled when he breathed.

"How long do you have?" I asked.

He smiled with typewriter-key teeth. "Long enough."

We looked through the grate.

The townsfolk were arranged in rows, blank-eyed, waiting. Miss Wicker moved between them with a clipboard, checking them against some list I couldn't read. Mayor Whitmore stood at a high desk, dipping a long pen into a well filled with something too red to be ink.

But I hadn't understood the Press until now.

What I'd thought were metal gears were letters, hundreds of cast-iron letters meshing together, turning each other. The massive roller at the heart of the machine wasn't printing text onto paper—it was cleaning it off, licking each page to a white blankness and spitting it out empty.

"They're resetting the story," Ellis said. "After tonight, no one will remember Pigeon Hollow ever existed. Not what it really was. Not what was done here."

A wet, rhythmic sound came from behind us.

We turned.

My mother walked down the alley.

Her left side was her. Her right side was something else—unbound manuscript pages, loosely held in the shape of an arm and shoulder, flapping softly in her wake. The eye on that side was gone, the socket a swirling vortex of text.

"Mira." Her voice came from her mouth and from the pages simultaneously, a strange harmonic. "You need to—"

Miss Wicker's head snapped up through the grate. "There."

My mother moved fast. Her paper hand sliced the padlock from the grate. "RUN TO THE PRESS!" she screamed, and then the Mayor's pen connected with her shoulder and she came apart.

Not violently. Gently. Like a book dropped into water.

Page by page, she became the air around her, each one burning at the edges with gold-rimmed holes where words had been punched out. I grabbed the only piece I reached in time:

…love you find the first draft under the—

Then Ellis pulled me through the open grate and inside.

The smell hit first. Chemical. Coppery. Ink and something rawer beneath it.

The townsfolk turned as one.

Mayor Whitmore raised his dripping pen and smiled.

"Then we'll just have to edit her."