“No. Thank you. He gets like this sometimes.”

Conner hovered over me, a serious look on his face. He combed my hair back from my eyes with his fingers. He was shaking, nervous. Something happened.

“You need to get up. Let’s get the fuck out of here before we end up in trouble.”

I knew what he was saying, but it took all my will just to move my legs.

The Underground.

This is it.

Conner pulled me to my feet, lifted my arm across the back of his neck. He held both our bags with one hand, and someone said, “Let me help.”

But Conner dismissed the man. “We’re okay. I just need to get him outside.”

So he dragged me along. It seemed like we walked for miles in that station, through long subterranean tunnels that stunk like sweat and piss until we finally came up into the light of a gray afternoon. And the entire way, as we threaded like a weaver’s string between the anonymous ghosts of people, knitting us and them all together into the fabric of my this is it, I kept searching for the redhead, expecting Quinn to be following along, always following, watching.

But he was gone.

In the cold outside, we sat on a low stone wall looking out at the churn of the Thames.

A bead of sweat crawled slowly along the front of Conner’s ear and curled around the bend of his jaw.

I caught my breath, watched the river.

“What the fuck happened in there?” Conner tried to look into my eyes, to see if Jack was really here or not.

I swallowed.

He said, “Who was that kid? Why was he calling you that? Billy?”

This was it.

Right?

I shook my head. Conner knew about Quinn Cahill in Marbury. He told me how the Rangers made deals with the redhead who lived in the firehouse.

Not here.

What do I tell him?

This has to be it.

This is going to be it.

So I said, “I don’t know, Con. I swear I never saw that kid before in my life.”

Conner blew out a breath that fogged and then vanished in front of his face.

It was cold.

He said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if he didn’t know you before, I don’t think he’s going to ever forget us now.”

“What happened to him?”

Conner grinned. “I punched him in the fucking face when he tried to follow us off the train.”

“Conner?”

“What?”

“You’re amazing.”

“I try, dude.”

Farther down the bank, sheltered behind a row of square wooden stands that sold tickets for river cruises, an old man sat playing a concertina in the gray wind.

It would rain soon.

I could feel it coming.

“And, Con?”

“Yeah?”

“How about we just catch a taxi to Charing Cross?”

“Good call, Jack.”

“I try.”

a passenger’s epilogue

In this winter, they sleep.

Nearly three months have passed, and I have never once taken them out, touched the Marbury lenses.

I know what would happen if I did.

I am done with that place, all those worlds and not-worlds.

And this is it.

It is okay for me and Conner to let this be it.

I have to keep telling myself that.

There was a time when I could almost hear it breathing, calling me, and each time the sound made such a convincing argument for how desperately Jack needed Marbury. But ever since I opened my eyes that rainy morning, safe inside the room Ethan Robson shares with me at St. Atticus, I have either been deaf, or Marbury has been silent, asleep.

I’m not fooling myself, though.

Jack’s First Law of Marbury: Objects at rest are just waiting for some asshole to wake them up.

And Jack always knows where they are; where he keeps them.

What strikes me is the one thing I believe to be perfectly true: I caused it all to happen. Everything. Waking up drugged, stripped, bound to Freddie Horvath’s bed, stumbling into Henry Hewitt, finding Ben and Griffin in Marbury, and all the terrible and destructive things that took place there—the choices I made—I caused it all.

Like Freddie said: He didn’t do anything to me; I did it all to myself.

It’s been six months since that happened. It seems like forever, but I still think about it every day.

And I’m still carrying around that garbage.

So fuck you, Jack.

But if nothing else, now that we’ve all made it back—even if this is just another not-world—I am determined to keep it this way. Forever. This will be it.

So there is no need for me to ever explain to Conner the truth about the redheaded kid who sat across from us on the train at Green Park, how Quinn Cahill is a part of our world in Marbury, too.

Everything is everywhere.

Conner knows it. He heard the old man playing the accordion on the bank of the Thames. The strings are always going to cross, weave, and burn; and I wonder if Conner wakes up every day saying those same three words to himself.

This is it.

None of it matters now, if I keep it this way.

Ben and Griffin started calling me again. For a while, it was almost like they’d vanished. They didn’t call me for the longest stretch after we came back from Marbury the last time.

Sometimes, I’d start to take the phone out to see if they were okay, to be certain they hadn’t ended up inside some fucking blue trash barrel, and every time I would stop myself, believing that never knowing is the same as not being. Jack’s Second Law.

But all this past week, just minutes after the school day ends, my phone buzzes and it’s the boys, asking when I’m coming back, and can they come over and see me when I do.

I know what they want.

And I haven’t been able to tell them it’s not going to happen.

Ben and Griffin want something else. Maybe they feel, as I once did, that all they need is one small peek at Marbury again. The boys aren’t finished playing yet.

But I am the King of Marbury, and I say this is it.

Conner’s been giving me shit for avoiding Ben and Griffin. He says it would be better if we all faced the truth, but I can’t bring myself to tell Ben and Griffin that they can’t go back to Marbury again.

I haven’t seen Henry since the night I told him good-bye at The Prince of Wales. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a sick sonofabitch who fucked me worse than Freddie ever did. And I knew two things for certain that night before I tried to hang myself, naked, inside our fucking closet: that I never wanted to see Henry Hewitt again; and that he would do anything to take another slide through the lenses, even if it meant winding up back in his crap-filled apartment in a crumbling city on a street plastered with fucking corpses and crucified kids who were begging to die.

Fuck you back, Henry.

He called a few times. I deleted his number from my phone and erased whatever fucked-up pleading messages he left in his civilized and reasonable-sounding appeal to Jack’s mercies.

We don’t ever go to The Prince of Wales now, just because I’m afraid I’d see him there, stalking the place, waiting for Jack and his lenses to pop in.

Now, Conner and I hang out in the places the St. Atticus boys go.

I’ve decided I love being here at St. Atticus.

Conner does, too.

In some ways, I suppose it’s almost like being in Marbury. There’s a Jack who lives in the minds of the people back in Glenbrook, and a Jack that does the things they’ll never find out about over here. We’ve talked about staying on through our senior year, too; and I think it’s what Conner and I are going to end up doing.

So, good-bye, Glenbrook.

Fuck off.

And good-bye, Marbury, too.

Seth never came back after I told him to leave me alone, when his thrashing rousted Conner out of the shower so he could cut me free from my gallows. I know he’s not gone forever, because I know more about Seth Mansfield than I know about myself.