Last Year

1

Two events made the first of September a memorable day for Jesse Cullum. First, he lost a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Second, he saved the life of President Ulysses S. Grant.

The part about saving Grant’s life was speculative. Even without Jesse’s intervention, the pistol might have misfired or the bullet missed its mark. Jesse felt uneasy about taking credit for an act of purely theoretical heroism. But the loss of the Oakleys, that was a real tragedy. He had loved those Oakleys. The way they improved his vision on sunny days. The way they made him look.

Grant’s visit had been carefully planned. That was how City people liked it: the fewer surprises, the better. Grant and his wife had arrived at Futurity Station in a special Pullman car, where they had endured a reception, complete with bands and a speech by the governor of Illinois, before a plush carriage carried them five miles down the paved road from the train depot to the steel gates of the City of Futurity. Jesse had ridden that absurdly smooth and perfect road many times—he had helped build it—and he knew exactly what Grant would have seen: a first glimpse of the City’s impossibly tall white towers across the rolling Illinois plains, massifs of stone and glass; then the enormous concrete wall with gaudy words and pictures painted on it; the gleaming gates, opening to admit his carriage; finally the crowd, both locals and visitors, jostling in the courtyard for a glimpse of him.

Policing the crowd was Jesse’s job. He had been assigned to the task by his boss, a man named Booking—the same Booking who had issued him the Oakleys six months ago. Today Jesse wore a freshly laundered City security uniform: white shirt, blue necktie, blue blazer with the words CITY OF FUTURITY / STAFF sewn in yellow thread across the pocket, a soft blue cap with the same legend above the bill—and, at least outdoors, the Oakley sunglasses, which Jesse believed lent him an air of sinister authority. When he wore his Oakleys, his reflection in the City’s plate-glass windows looked like a prizefighter with the eyes of a gigantic beetle. Newcomers invariably gave him startled, deferential looks.

Jesse and three other security people had been assigned to the viewing line. The way it was supposed to work: Grant’s carriage would enter through the gates; Grant and his wife would disembark; they would be escorted across the courtyard to the lobby of Tower Two in view of the guests already present. Post-and-rope stanchions had been set up to maintain a distance between the crowd and the president, and Jesse was assigned to patrol that boundary and make sure no one jumped the line.

It should have been easy duty. The weather was sunny but not unpleasantly warm, the current crop of guests seemed well behaved. Jesse was eager to get his own look at Grant, not that he had ever paid much attention to politics. So he watched attentively as the carriage came in and the gate rolled closed behind it. A valet took charge of the horses, and Grant and his wife, Julia, stepped into the sunlight. Mrs. Grant stared without embarrassment at the fantastically broad and tall buildings of the City, but General Grant himself appeared calm and measured—not as fierce in this last year of his presidency as the images of him that had been published in newspapers during the Rebellion, but just as sternly observant. He ignored the marvels of the City and surveyed the crowd. Jesse imagined the president’s gaze caught and lingered on him a moment—because of the Oakleys, perhaps.

Then Jesse had to give his whole attention to the job he had been assigned to do. He began a slow walk along the rope line, keeping a careful vigil. All the people on this side of the courtyard were local guests of the City. That meant they were well-heeled enough to afford the entrance fee, which implied a certain standard of gentlemanly and ladylike behavior to which, alas, they did not necessarily conform. Today, however, the crowd was mindful, and there was very little pushing or crowding of the ropes. Jesse told one couple to keep their children back of the stanchions, please, and he scolded another man for shouting out mocking references to Grant’s role in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Otherwise it was simply a matter of keeping his eyes open as Grant progressed from the courtyard to the Reception Center.

Had Jesse not been wearing the Oakleys he might have been too sunstruck to catch sight of the man at the rope line who reached into his overcoat with a purposeful motion. Long ago, in circumstances far from the City and vastly less congenial, Jesse had learned to recognize that gesture, and he broke into a run without thinking. Some in the crowd stared at Jesse, but no one had yet noticed the man in the overcoat, whose movements were deliberate and whose attention was entirely focused on Grant. The man’s hand emerged, bearing a pistol. The pistol looked peculiar, but Jesse didn’t think about that. He was racing now, closing the gap between himself and the would-be assassin, thinking: a pistol was a bad choice at this range. Odds were, a hasty shot would miss Grant altogether. But Jesse hadn’t been hired to play the odds. He had been hired to make the most effective use of his size and skills. He came at the gunman like a rolling caisson.

Jesse had been taught that the two overriding principles of City security were protection and discretion. The first and most important of these was protection—of the president, in this case—and it was Jesse’s priority as he made contact with his opponent. He grabbed the assailant’s gun arm at the wrist, isolating the weapon, and let his momentum carry his shoulder into the assailant’s chest. The gunman was taken by surprise, and the air was forced from his lungs in a startled grunt as both men fell to the ground. Jesse let his weight immobilize the assailant’s body as he dealt with the weapon. The assailant’s finger was out of the trigger guard and his hand was at an angle to his arm that suggested Jesse had successfully broken or dislocated the wrist. Nearby guests, still more puzzled than alarmed, stepped back to form a kind of perimeter. Jesse took the pistol from the assailant’s hand and quickly tucked it into the pocket of his now-soiled blue blazer. Then he twisted the assailant’s arm behind him and wrestled him to his feet.

The daylight seemed suddenly brighter, which was how Jesse discovered that his Oakley sunglasses had flown off during the altercation. He spotted them on the ground just as a female guest took a step backward, crushing one lens under her heel and bending the arms out of shape. Jesse’s sense of loss was immediate and aggravating.

But the second rule of City security was discretion, and he kept quiet. The gunman began to utter sharp obscenities. Jesse murmured apologies to the ladies present and hustled the miscreant through the crowd, away from Grant and toward the staff door of the Reception Center. The man was four or five inches shorter than Jesse and a few years older. Jesse was in an excellent position to observe his pomaded black hair, thin at the crown, and to register the tang of his body odor, salty and sour.

The staff door flew open as Jesse came within a couple of yards of it. Two City security men rushed out—security men from the future, Tower One men, which meant they outranked Jesse, who had been born in this century. They were staring hard at the assailant and spared almost no attention for Jesse himself.

Like most of the Tower One security people, they were as tall as Jesse and at least as muscular. One was a white man, one was brown-skinned. They braced the gunman and secured his arms behind him with flexible ties. “Thanks, chief,” the white man said to Jesse. “We’ll take it from here.”

“My name’s not chief.”

“Okay, sorry, bro. And, uh, we’ll need the weapon, too.”

Abashed at having forgotten it, Jesse retrieved the pistol from his pocket and handed it over. It was sleek, complex, and finely machined. Definitely not a contemporary handgun. “I broke my Oakleys wrestling with this man.”

“Sorry to hear that. Maybe you can pick up another pair from the supply room.”

They frog-marched the subdued assailant away.

Jesse sighed and went back to the rope line. But Grant was in Guest Reception now, and the crowd was already beginning to disperse. There was no panic. A few people had seen Jesse tackle the gunman, but no one seemed to have noticed the pistol. From any distance, the encounter would have looked like an unexplained scuffle between a security guard and an unruly guest. Protection and discretion, Jesse thought. They ought to give him a damn medal.

He headed to staff quarters for his afternoon break.

Two colossal, nearly identical buildings comprised the City of Futurity. Both buildings could be described as hotels, if you stretched that word to the limits of its definition. Both buildings were designed to house, feed, and entertain large numbers of paying guests. But the two buildings were carefully segregated. The guests who resided in Tower Two had all been born in the world outside the gate: Jesse’s world. The guests who occupied the other building had been born elsewhere, in a place that claimed to be the future. The second kind of guests didn’t enter by the gate, as President Grant had. They came up from underground, through the Mirror.

Jesse worked in Tower Two and slept in a windowless room in one of Tower Two’s sub-basements. He took his meals at the commissary on the same floor. Staff quarters were clean and acceptably private, but never entirely quiet. The sound of the machines that circulated the tower’s air and generated its electrical power seeped up from an even lower level of the tower, a faint ceaseless murmur, like the breath of a sleeping giant.

Jesse took his break at the staff commissary. Employees were issued food chits with which they could buy meals from a choice of vendors in the commissary concourse: booths with gaudy signs proclaiming them as McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Starbucks. Locals had been hired to staff these kiosks, and most of them knew Jesse by name. He used a chit to buy coffee in a paper cup and a glutinous muffin on a paper plate from a woman wearing a hairnet: her name was Dorothy, and her husband had been killed at Second Manassas fourteen years ago. “Looks like you scuffed up your jacket,” Dorothy said.

“You think I ought to change it? I’m off duty in a couple of hours and I figured on taking it to housekeeping after that.”

She reached across the counter and brushed his sleeve. “You’ll pass, if there’s not a formal inspection.”

“I busted my Oakleys today. The sunglasses.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. You want a second muffin, Jesse? Big fellow like you needs to eat.”

“I’m saving my chits.”

“On the house, then. Since you lost your eyeglasses and all.”

He carried his two muffins and steaming coffee to a vacant table. There were twenty minutes left in his official break, but he had taken no more than a single bite when his pager went off. He unhooked the device from his belt and read the message on the tiny display:

Summoned by his boss. He finished the first of his two muffins in a few hasty bites, wrapped the second in a napkin and put it in his jacket pocket. He had no choice but to abandon the coffee.

He used his pass card to summon an elevator. The City’s elevators were astonishing to new visitors, but Jesse had long since grown accustomed to them. His pass card was a more enduring marvel. It was a kind of key: it opened certain doors, but not others. It let him into all the places where he might be expected to go in the course of his duties, and into none of the places where his presence was forbidden. He could not imagine how this thin sliver of what was called plastic, or the slots into which he inserted it, knew or remembered which doors to allow him through. Everyone on staff carried a similar card, and each card was endowed with powers particular to its owner.

The elevator arrived with its customary pinging and sighing. Jesse stepped inside and pushed the button marked “21.” The twenty-first floor of Tower Two was the administrative level. Jesse had been there before, but only on rare occasions. His boss, Mr. Paul Booking, usually came down to the staff room to issue the day’s assignments. If someone was summoned to twenty-one, it was usually for a promotion, a dismissal, or a special assignment.

The elevator stopped and the door slid open on a wide, immaculate corridor. Jesse’s shoes tapped cadences on the smooth and polished floor as he made for Booking’s office. Secretarial persons gave him incurious glances from open doors as he passed. Some were men, some were women; some were white, many were not. And none of them was local. The City imported all its managers and paper-handlers from the far side of the Mirror.

Booking’s secretary was a woman with features Jesse once would have called Oriental, though he knew the word was considered objectionable by people from the twenty-first century. She looked up from the illuminated screen in front of her and smiled. “Mr. Cullum?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thanks for being so prompt. You can go on into Mr. Booking’s office—he’s waiting for you.”

Booking’s office possessed a large window, and even four years in the City had not accustomed Jesse to the view from the twenty-first floor. Even calling it a window seemed to mock it. It was a wall of glass from floor to ceiling, so finely manufactured as to be almost indistinguishable from empty air. There were vertically hung blinds to ward off the sun, but it was late afternoon now and the blinds had been fully retracted. Jesse felt as if he were standing on the scarp of an artificial mountain. A flock of passenger pigeons wheeled over a distant creek, and isolated stands of slippery elms sparkled in the long light like scattered emeralds.

“Your jacket’s a little scuffed,” Booking said.

God damn it, Jesse thought. “Yes, sir, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” Booking sat behind his desk giving him a thoughtful look. Booking was bald and appeared to be forty years old or thereabouts, though it was hard to tell with people from the future. He wore a goatee so meticulously trimmed it seemed nervous about its own continued existence. He was generally kind to hired help, and he spoke to the security hands as casually as an old friend, though that was not a two-way street: Jesse knew Booking’s first name only because it was printed on the badge clipped to his lapel. “You had an encounter on the reception grounds today.”

“Encounter is one word for it. It didn’t amount to much, in the end.”

“Don’t be modest, Jesse. I’ve seen the video.”

Like his secretary, Booking kept an illuminated display on his desk. He swiveled it to show Jesse the screen. The pictures it displayed had been captured by a wall-mounted camera, so the view was distant and a little indistinct, but Jesse recognized himself in his uniform and his Oakleys, lumbering along the rope line. What followed was pretty much as he remembered it. He shrugged.

“President Grant is grateful to you,” Booking said.

“He saw what happened?”

“You were quick and careful, but the president has a keen eye.”

Jesse supposed Grant had seen enough gunplay in the war that he was still alert to it. “His gratitude isn’t necessary.”

“And we’ve got the bad guy in custody, which is what matters. Nevertheless, Jesse, the president wants to thank you, and he wants to do it in person.”

“Sir?”

“And because President Grant is a special guest, we want to make that happen for him. So you’ll be escorted to his quarters tonight at seven sharp. Which gives you time for a shower and a fresh set of clothes.”

Jesse glanced back at the screen. The images were repeating in a thirty-second roundelay. He saw himself wrestling with the assailant. At that point, his Oakleys had already come off. “Is it absolutely necessary for me to meet him? Can’t you just tell him I appreciate the thought?”

“It is necessary, and you can tell him yourself. But I want you to keep a couple of things in mind. First, Grant hasn’t had the orientation yet. So he’s going to be full of questions, and he might pose some of them to you. So you need to remember the rule. You know the rule I’m talking about?”

“If a guest questions me about anything I learned in my employment at the City, I should refer him or her to a designated host or hostess.” Almost verbatim, from the handbook every local employee was required to read.

“Good. But in this case you’ll need to find a diplomatic way to do it. We think it would be best if you present yourself to President Grant as a hard-working employee whose duties keep him in Tower Two and who doesn’t know anything substantial about the future. Which is pretty much the truth—am I right?”

The question—Am I right?—was one of Booking’s verbal habits. Jesse found it irritating, in part because it wasn’t rhetorical. It required actual assent. “Yes, sir.”

“In any case, I doubt Grant wants a lengthy conversation. They say he’s a pretty tight-lipped kind of guy.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Don’t offend him, don’t volunteer information, and if he asks questions let him know his assigned host or hostess can answer them better than you can.”

“Sir,” Jesse said.

“And if he asks about the assailant, tell him our people are handling all that.”

“All right.”

“Okay, good,” Booking said. “One more thing, Jesse. If you carry this off the way we hope you will, the City will find a way to show its appreciation.”

Jesse sensed an opening. “I broke my Oakleys,” he said, “in that scuffle.”

“Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. Do this right, and we’ll get you a whole crate of Oakleys.”

Jesse showered and changed into his reserve uniform and took himself to the commissary for a meal. There was a line-up at every booth, but Jesse was patient. He spent his chits on fried chicken and French-fried potatoes and a cup of coffee.

He sat at a table by himself. He could have joined friends, but he had been told not to say anything about his scheduled meeting with Grant, and under the circumstances it would have been hard to make small talk. In any case, the table where the security and housekeeping folks had gathered wasn’t as attractive a destination as it might have been. Doris Vanderkamp was there, paying obvious attention to a lanky, freckled security man named Mick Finagle. Jesse had lately extracted himself from a romantic entanglement with Doris, and he thought she might be trying to make him jealous by fawning over Mick. Jesse had a low opinion of Mick Finagle. And Doris, for all her posturing and covert glances in Jesse’s direction, clearly wasn’t at her best. She was sniffling as if her perennial head cold had come back, and her forehead was beaded with perspiration despite the machine-cooled air. He felt a little sorry for her, a sentiment that would have enraged her had he dared to express it.

He made quick work of the fried chicken. The commissary’s portions were lamentably small, and he often went back for seconds, but it was getting near the end of the month, and if he spent all his food chits he would have to resort to cash, which he didn’t want to do. What he could afford was a second cup of coffee. He bought one and sipped it slowly, watching the clock above the elevator bank, until a City woman in trousers showed up to escort him to President Grant’s quarters.

It was a well-known fact that women from the future often wore trousers. It had been remarked on in all the papers, especially since tour groups had begun visiting Manhattan and San Francisco. Visitors didn’t mingle with locals even there, but they were visible as they moved through the streets, and the presence of women in trousers was impossible to ignore. A few unctuous churchmen had condemned the practice. Victoria Woodhull, the notorious female-rights campaigner, had expressed her approval. Most commentators took the generous view that customs vary not just from place to place but from age to age, and that these novel forms of dress said more about changing customs than they did about morality or propriety. Jesse agreed, he supposed, though he had met enough City people to convince him that their morals might be almost as fluid as their fashion.

What surprised him about this woman was not her trousers as such but the fact that she was wearing them in Tower Two. Tower Two employees were issued uniforms designed not to shock sensitive guests, including skirts for females. So this was someone from the other tower, dressed according to its rules. The woman’s name, her badge said, was Elizabeth DePaul.

Whatever her assignment—and Jesse guessed it was more than just escorting him to Grant’s quarters—she seemed slightly bored by it. Her face was well formed but plain. Her dark hair was cut to a masculine length. She was nearly as tall as Jesse, thickset but not in any way ungainly. Nor was she demure. Her gaze was frank and unflinching. Her badge said CITY SECURITY.

“Good work on the rope line this afternoon,” she said.

Her accent was flat as well water and Jesse couldn’t gauge her sincerity. “Thank you,” he said.

“Seriously. I saw the video. You had the weapon out of the bad guy’s hand before anyone noticed.”

“Well, not quite. President Grant noticed.”

“There’s that. Are you looking forward to meeting him?”

“I expect we’ll exchange a few words, that’s all.” And then I can go back downstairs, Jesse thought, and have a beer. The commissary allowed the sale of beer to employees between the hours of six and ten. He wasn’t ordinarily a drinker, and the price of City beer had almost made a temperance man of him, but the occasion seemed to justify the expense. He asked Elizabeth DePaul whether she would be joining him for his conversation with Grant.

“Me? No. Though I wouldn’t mind getting a look at him. See what he’s like when he’s not decorating a fifty-dollar bill.”

Jesse failed to understand the reference but let it pass. “Have you talked to the gunman?”

“Not my department.”

“He’s just a lunatic with a grievance,” Jesse said, “I imagine.”

“I wouldn’t care to speculate.”

The elevator opened on the highest of the guest floors, where Grant had been assigned the biggest suite with the grandest view. Four City people waited in the corridor. Jesse recognized his boss, Mr. Booking. The others were unfamiliar to him. Prominent among them was a gray-haired man of maybe fifty years, wearing civilian clothes rather than a City uniform. The others seemed to defer to him. But no one bothered to make introductions. Elizabeth DePaul pointed in the opposite direction: “That way,” she said. There was only one door at the end of the corridor. “Go ahead and knock. He’s expecting you. We’ll be here when you come out.”

Grant’s second term as president would be ending soon, and Jesse wondered whether he might secretly be happy to leave office. It had been a rough seven years—rough years for everyone, especially since the crash of ’73; therefore politically difficult for Grant. The railroad scandals had reached all the way into the White House, and his tenure in office had not achieved all he had hoped or promised. He had promised a reconstructed South—what he got were serial lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. He had promised peace with the Indians—what he got were Crazy Horse, trouble with the Nez Percé, and the Little Bighorn.

But he was still the hero of Appomattox, the man who saved the Union, and Jesse could not imagine what to say to him or even how to address him. He knocked, and Grant opened the door. The two men stared at each other. Grant seemed speechless. Finally Jesse murmured, “Your Excellency, I was told you wanted to see me?”

“Jesse Cullum.” Grant put out his hand, and Jesse shook it. “Please come in.” Jesse stepped into the room and Grant closed the door behind him. “Sit down. No need for formal address, Mr. Cullum. I’ve noticed strangers often prefer to call me ‘General,’ and it doesn’t displease me.”

“Thank you, General.”

The room was plush. Jesse’s duties had occasionally taken him into Tower Two guest rooms, so he knew how this one compared. The furniture was of the future: finely made but almost aggressively plain. The window was almost as large as the one in Booking’s office. Beyond the flawless glass, dusk had turned the western sky blood-red. Jesse imagined he could see as far as Montana by the fading light. Maybe the State of Oregon, if he stood on his tiptoes.

“Mrs. Grant is out taking supper with one of our hosts. She knows nothing of the events in the courtyard, by the way. And given that no shot was fired, I prefer to keep it that way. You’ll forgive me for not introducing you to her. But I wanted to thank you personally for what you did on my behalf.”

“I took away a man’s gun, that’s all.”

“Your modesty is commendable. In any case, I think Mrs. Grant feels easier away from the window.”

“The view makes some guests dizzy at first, but they usually grow accustomed to it.”

“Yes, and I expect she will, and I will, too, but just now I feel like a swallow nesting on a cliff.”

“May I draw the drapes for you?”

“Please, if you can—it’s not obvious to me how they operate. How long have you worked here, Mr. Cullum?”

Jesse tugged the rod that rotated the vertical blinds. “Going on four years.”

“From the earliest days, then. May I ask how you came to be employed at the City of Futurity?”

“It was an accident, more or less. I was traveling east from San Francisco and I had to leave the train unexpectedly.” Because he had foregone the formality of buying a ticket, but he left that part out. “Futurity Station didn’t even have a name in those days. It was just another coaling depot out in the middle of nowhere. I meant to head toward Chicago on foot, but my directions were bad. The next day I saw a plume of dust from the construction site and showed up looking for food and water. The people here fed me and offered me work.”

“Just like that?”

“The City people weren’t looking for publicity until the major construction was finished. They figured I’d be more use to them as a hired hand than I would be spreading stories about what I’d seen. The road you came by from the station? I was part of the crew that laid it down.”

“And a fine road it is, though it pales by comparison with what lies at the end of it. Of course I’ve read a great deal in the papers about the City of Futurity. The testimony is unimpeachable, but the reality of it is so much more…” Grant groped for a word and gave up: “Real. You must have seen many marvels in your time here.”

Jesse tried to imagine how this room must seem to Grant. The electric lights and the switches that controlled them, the cool air flowing from ceiling vents, the thermostat to adjust the temperature. The explanatory notes printed on paper and affixed to the walls: how to lock and unlock the door, how to summon an elevator, the finer points of indoor plumbing. A button for summoning a City host or hostess, if the instructions proved inadequate. “What seems to impress visitors most,” Jesse said, “is the airship.”

Grant winced. “I’ve seen photographs. And I’ve been invited to ride it. And not just me, but Julia as well, if she can be convinced. Is the thing as safe as they claim?”

“I’ve seen it go up and down hundreds of times without any problem.”

“Though I suppose the greatest marvel is that these things have come among us at all, from a place that is and isn’t the future. Do you understand it, Mr. Cullum, the story of where these people come from?”

“I would never claim to understand it, General. They say there is a whole sheaf of worlds, and that the City people have learned to travel from one to another. They live on one stalk in the sheaf and journey to nearby stalks. But for the traveler, all those stalks look like the past.” Jesse felt himself blushing at his own incoherence. No, he did not understand it. “I imagine they’ll explain it to you better in the orientation session.”

“We are their past, but they do not necessarily represent our future. That’s what the brochure says.”

“I guess the brochure’s right.”

“I value your opinion precisely because it’s not printed in a brochure. All these mechanical marvels are impressive, but I wonder about the nature of the people themselves. You must know many of them.”

“They prefer to keep us separate. But some mixing does go on.”

“As employers, have they treated you well?”

“Yes, sir. They cured me.” He spoke without thinking, then realized with dismay that Grant was waiting for him to continue. “When they hired me on, you see, the first thing they did was send me to the City clinic—sort of a miniature hospital with a half dozen doctors on duty. At the time I was suffering from … well, it’s not easy to discuss. Being a military man, I guess you’ve had experience of camp sicknesses among your troops.”

What Jesse could not bring himself to say was that he had arrived at the clinic barely able to pass urine without shrieking like a cat with its tail on fire. Grant cleared his throat and said, “I take your meaning.”

“Sir, they cured that. And not with a syringe full of nitrate of silver. They gave me pills. They said I had other conditions that weren’t so obvious, and they cured those, too. They gave me injections to the arm that made me impervious to rubeola and smallpox and other diseases whose names I can’t recall. So, yes, I can testify that they treated me well. For all I know they may have saved my life.”

Jesse wondered if he had said too much. For a few moments Grant seemed plunged in thought. “That is a marvel,” he said at last. “I hope they can be convinced to share the secret of these cures.”

“They plan to do so. I’ve heard it discussed.”

“Perhaps they should have shared it when they first arrived. Many lives might have been saved already.”

“Yes, sir, but who would have believed them? Who believed the City was anything more than a trumped-up Barnum show, those first few months? Now that the skeptics are routed, it begins to become possible. You know 1877 is the last year of the City, before they close the Mirror and go home. They say, in the last year, they’ll be even more frank and forthcoming.”

“Now that they’ve prepared the ground.”

“Yes, sir.”

Grant tugged at the sleeve of his woolen suit. Even now, with all the weight he’d gained since Appomattox, he looked as if he’d be more comfortable in a Union uniform. Or maybe his restlessness meant Jesse had overstayed his welcome. But he couldn’t politely leave until he was dismissed.

Grant said, “And have they made moral progress, too? Are they better than us, or just cleverer?”

It was a dangerous question. “Hard to say, General. The ones I’ve met, they seem … I don’t know how to describe it. There’s a kind of bonelessness about them. The women in particular seem insolent, almost louche—I’ve heard them swear like infantrymen. But they’re capable of great tenderness and intelligence. The men aren’t dishonorable, but they don’t seem to think much of honor in general, as an abstraction I mean. When I first came here many of them struck me as effeminate or unserious.”

“They struck you that way at first, but not any longer?”

“Well, they have a saying: The past is a different country; they do things differently there. Which I figure cuts both ways. You don’t expect an Irishman to comport himself like a Chinaman, so why should we expect City people to behave just as we do?”

“In matters of custom, surely, but in matters of moral duty…”

“I’m not sure I’m qualified to render judgment in that department. They don’t seem especially better or worse than the rest of us.”

“Not more generous?”

“They’ve been generous to me, certainly. But visitors don’t get into the City for free, do they? The price is paid in gold and silver, and all that gold and silver goes straight to the so-called future, where it lines somebody’s pocket. How they came here is difficult to understand; what they want of us is not.”

“Well.” Grant stood up. “Once again I thank you, Mr. Cullum. Not just for your conduct this afternoon but for your forthright conversation.”

“You have a keen eye, sir, to have spotted the pistol.”

“I saw it briefly and from a distance—more the reach than the gun itself, though I had the impression it was unusual.”

“I only handled it a moment myself. But yes, it was one of theirs.”

“Not a Colt?”

“No, sir—whatever it was, it was not a Colt.”

“That surprises me. Because your employers told me it was a Colt.”

Jesse very carefully said nothing.

“I suppose they were mistaken,” Grant said.

“I suppose they were.”

Jesse shook the president’s hand again and made his exit.

The next morning Jesse was scheduled to ride the perimeter fence. Fence-riding was lonely duty but he enjoyed it, at least when the weather was decent.

The City of Futurity possessed many walls and fences, many boundaries. The most significant and least visible of these boundaries was the Mirror itself, deep underground: a wall (and at times a doorway) between present and future. Then there were the walls that separated Tower One from Tower Two. And surrounding these, the massive concrete wall that enclosed the City itself.

But the City was situated in a much vaster track of land, purchased by proxy and demarked by a fence of steel wire mesh. The fence served multiple purposes. It prevented curiosity-seekers from mobbing the City walls. It kept hucksters and frauds from setting up booths or buildings within sight of guests. It allowed the City to make the land available to visitors from the future as a specimen of “the untrammeled tallgrass prairie”—apparently all such landscapes would be “trammeled” in the years to come. And it enclosed a herd of American buffalo for the same reason: The buffalo were due for a trammeling, too.

The attractions of the City were so great, and the price of admission so high, that it was not surprising that unscrupulous people occasionally attempted to climb or cut the fence. Which meant it had to be regularly inspected and repaired; which meant Jesse was up before dawn, signing out a mechanical cart from the horseless-vehicle barn. By the time the sun breached the horizon he was mounted on a three-wheeled self-propelled vehicle and passing through one of the gates in the City wall and out into the grassland.

The chill of the morning was a reminder that autumn was approaching, but the lingering wisps of ground fog vanished at the first touch of sunlight. The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, and when he reached the fence the air had grown warm, and grasshoppers flew from the wheels of the cart in brown flurries. From there Jesse followed a pressed-earth trail that followed the fence, humming a tune to himself, stopping occasionally to inspect a dubious weld or a suspicious gopher hole. He was orbiting the City at a radius of roughly a mile, and by noon he had not detected any irregularities worth reporting. He stopped the cart, stood to stretch his legs, pulled off his jacket and hung it on the handlebar of the three-wheeled vehicle. He took a bagged lunch from the carry-box at the back of the cart (a sandwich from the commissary, coffee in a thermos bottle) and ate sitting sidesaddle on the padded seat. It felt good to be out of the labyrinth of the City for a day, away from its tuneless hums and whispers. Out here, only the bugs were humming. His own breath sounded loud in his ears.

He unscrewed the lid of the thermos bottle. The lid did double-duty as a cup. It was made of plastic, the City people’s material of choice for trivial things. The lid was small in Jesse’s large hands, as if he were drinking from a thimble. But the coffee was pleasant and hot.

At this distance the City dominated the horizon. Its towers sparkled like twin escarpments of mica-flecked granite, the wall a varicolored reef at the foot of them. He watched an omnibus full of tourists exit the City on a paved road, headed for the eastern pastures where the buffalo were corralled and Wild West shows were sometimes staged. The paved road paralleled Jesse’s trail at a distance of a few hundred yards, and as the bus passed he saw the passengers peering out. Wealthy people from the future. Men and women with complexions of all hues, sitting companionably with one another as the amplified voice of the driver droned out facts about the prairie. If the tourists noticed Jesse they would have registered only his uniform. Just another City employee, to be ignored—although had they known a little more about him, they might have considered him an artifact almost as interesting as the buffalo. Step up, all you ladies in short pants, you beardless men. Bring your squabbling, spoiled children, too. See the Man from the Past. See the untrammeled syphilitic drifter of the Golden West.

The bus rolled on and out of sight. Jesse savored the silence once more, until the pager on his belt chimed, a sound that never failed to startle him.

The message on the screen was another summons to Mr. Booking’s office.

Jesse sighed and called his shift supervisor to report his position so another man could come out and finish riding the fence. Then he poured out his coffee on the untrammeled prairie, brushed a ladybug off the seat of the motor cart, and drove back to the City.

Booking’s office hadn’t changed, except that the woman who had escorted Jesse to Grant’s room last night, Elizabeth DePaul, occupied one of the spare chairs. She gave Jesse a long, indecipherable stare.

“Have a seat,” Booking said. “President Grant spoke to us about his meeting with you last night.”

Jesse searched his memory for any gaffe or revelation that might have provoked this summons or even cost him his job. He could think of a few likely candidates.

“The president was pleased,” Booking said. “He called you amiable and intelligent. He said he was glad to have had an opportunity to thank you for what you had done for him.”

“That was good of him.”

“Well, we happen to agree. You have a fine record, Jesse. This incident has made us wonder whether you aren’t being underutilized in Tower Two. We think it’s time for you to take a step up.”

“Kind of you to say so. What sort of step up?”

“Specifically, we’re going to need experienced security personnel for next year’s tours. Hard work but major rewards. Are you interested?”

Tour security was a coveted job. It might nearly double his income. He nodded.

“There’s a learning curve, of course, but we’ll have you up to speed by the new year. In the meantime I have a temporary duty assignment for you.”

“Sir?”

Booking reached into a desk drawer, took out a small wedge of plastic, and handed it to Jesse.

Jesse stared at it. It was a pass card, visually identical to the one he already possessed.

“We’ll need your old card back. You’ll find this one opens a lot more doors. Tower Two and Tower One—the job involves some crossover. Ms. DePaul can explain it to you.”

“Can she?”

“She’ll be your supervisor from now on.”

Everything comes at a price, Jesse thought.

“Oh, and I put in a call to the supply room. You can pick up a new pair of Oakleys next time you stop by.”

2

“I’ll contact you when I need you,” Elizabeth DePaul had told him. “In the meantime, keep your pager handy.”

Jesse waited the rest of the day. No page. He went to his dormitory room and slept. The bedside clock woke him at six the next morning. No page. He lingered over breakfast in the commissary. Nothing. By ten o’clock he had breezed through a second breakfast and enough coffee to call forth Lazarus. Boredom set in.

He went to the bank of elevators that serviced the guest floors and slid his new pass card into the slot. His old card would have been instantly rejected. His new one caused the small red light on the card reader to turn green. The elevator door slid open. Jesse stepped inside and touched the button marked MEZZANINE. A recorded female voice said, “You have selected mezzanine.”

Technically speaking, with the new card, he was permitted to do this. But he had been systematically excluded from the guest zones for years, and it felt like he was committing a trespass. Which made it even more interesting.

The mezzanine level of Tower Two was a vast rotunda. Its ceiling was three stories tall, a pale blue dome that glowed with the light of hidden electric lamps. In the center of the rotunda was a sort of desk or counter under an illuminated sign that said VISITOR INFORMATION. Other City employees were positioned throughout the rotunda. The employee nearest the elevator banks was a young woman with an immaculately crisp uniform and a fixed smile. She glanced at Jesse as he stepped out, registered his security badge, and lost all interest in him. She was here for guests, not staff.

The rotunda wasn’t crowded, but it was busier than Jesse had ever seen it. He had visited the mezzanine before—once just before the City opened for business, on a walk-through arranged for employees so they might know what the guests were paying to see, and a few other times on after-hours guard duty. The security personnel who worked the rotunda by daylight were from the future and bunked in Tower One; the same was true of the night shift, but when they were shorthanded they sometimes called up local hires like him. Jesse had taken night duty three times in four years. But the rotunda and the guest galleries were different after business hours, when the lights were dimmed and the gallery displays switched off. By night, this echoing chamber had seemed to Jesse as dark and ominous as a pharaoh’s tomb; by day, it buzzed with life and color.

The rotunda was the hub of a wheel. Four galleries projected from it like fat spokes: the Gallery of Science and Industry, the Gallery of Twenty-first Century Life, a Gallery of the Arts, and a Guests’ Gallery, which housed food vendors and souvenir shops.

It hadn’t taken Jesse long to figure out that the mezzanine was really just a sort of inside-out museum. A museum, in that it collected and displayed artifacts of another time; inside out, because its collections depicted the future rather than the past. He had been told the Galleries, with their soft lighting and genial atmosphere, were a way of acclimating guests. Anyone wealthy enough to buy a ticket for a week’s stay at the City would have known at least roughly what he was getting for his money—a glimpse of the future—but the details could be dismayingly strange. It had been a full year after the City’s founding before respectable publications began to admit that people from the twenty-first century had actually contrived to build a kind of vertical resort city on the plains of Illinois—a notion so expansive it barely fit within the compass of a human skull. Skepticism was natural. Derision would have followed, had the City not provided evidence of its claims.

The City itself was evidence. The Galleries were evidence, a way to ease the passage between the clashing rocks of awe and incredulity. An even more convincing demonstration waited at the far end of the Gallery of Science and Industry. Jesse headed in that direction.

Grasping the concept of travel in time wasn’t the last hurdle a visitor had to surmount, merely the first. The future represented here was so strange as to be intimidating, and guests were introduced to it one marvel at a time. Once you were comfortable with the mezzanine you could proceed to other levels of the City, where theaters presented moving pictures, where a heated swimming pool made its own waves, where acrobats and musicians imported from the twenty-first century performed on a nightly schedule. It was a lot to absorb, but the guests shuffling through the mezzanine seemed eager enough to absorb it. Jesse moved among them, insulated by his uniform. They were wealthy, and he was not. The women in the crowd wore fine silk bodices with bustles (and Jesse had once lived among women who would have killed, perhaps not just in the figurative sense, to own such things); the men wore waistcoats, frock coats, plain or checkered trousers, wing collars, elegantly knotted ties. Most of the guests appeared to be from the east, but the wealthy of Chicago were prominently represented, and Jesse saw a few less carefully dressed gentlemen who might have made their fortunes out west. There was a sprinkling of likely Englishmen and Frenchmen, too, and one conspicuous southerner in a white cutaway sack coat. City hosts guided visitors in groups through the various galleries, and Jesse followed one of these groups as it entered the Gallery of Science and Industry, hanging back so as not to make himself conspicuous.

The displays, dioramas, and mounted exhibits were eye-widening but vague on details. That was by design, Jesse knew. The rationale had been explained to him in one of the seminars local employees were required to attend. Too much explicit information about the future would be disorienting; it might also be unfair. In the world today men were laboring to invent a practical electric light, for instance, and the existence of the City of Futurity suggested that their labors weren’t futile; but if the City handed out engineering details, the native inventor of such a light would be made instantly irrelevant; geniuses would die unhallowed and impoverished simply because the City had revealed too much too soon.

So the Gallery of Science and Industry spoke in generalizations, and the history it portrayed was a shadow in a shadow. Here were horseless carriages, depicted in photographs and displayed behind glass, and claims that these devices would one day dominate the roadways of America, but no hint of whose fortunes might be made or broken by the use of them. Similarly the flying machine: soon to fill the heavens with commerce; soon to transform the art of war. A huge diorama depicted “Aircraft in the Great Wars of the Twentieth Century.” Winged airships hung in motionless combat against a painted sky full of smoke and fire. Guests were free to infer that there would be world-consuming wars in the coming century—but when, or with whom, or with what result, the gallery was careful not to say.

Static in their displays, the airships looked wonderfully strange but not quite plausible. Jesse walked a circle around something called a jet engine, a full-scale model with sections cut away to display its internal works. Wires, ducts, tubules, rotors; steel, rubber, copper, aluminum. It looked as complex as a Swiss watch, heavy enough to crush a millstone, and about as likely to fly through the air as a blacksmith’s anvil.

“Might as well be a carnival show,” Jesse heard a guest whisper to his wife. Patience, friend, he thought.

The group approached the end of the Gallery of Science. One of the final dioramas depicted what looked like a sheet-metal hut on a desert landscape under a black sky, men in white diving suits posed next to it. Men on the moon, supposedly. Next to it was a panoramic photograph of the plains of the planet Mars. The skeptics in the crowd became increasingly vocal, and Jesse understood the sentiment. But he knew what was coming next. These tours were carefully timed.

“Step this way,” the guide said. The guide wore a City uniform; she was from the future, and judging by the sly smile on her face she enjoyed her work. She used her pass card to open the door at the end of the gallery. A flock of guests followed her onto the outdoor deck of the mezzanine level of Tower Two. Jesse joined them, trying to look as if he had some official business here. The deck—a sort of wide balcony, like the porch of a plantation house—overlooked what City people called the helipad.

Four stories below and some few hundred yards away, the City helicopter rested on a concrete platform, poised to take flight. The airship flew on a strict schedule, every morning at eleven forty-five, weather permitting. Jesse had seen it fly many times before, but never from this vantage point.

“Unlike the gallery displays,” the tour guide said, “this is the real thing. Ladies and gentlemen, the marvel of manned flight. Please don’t be frightened by the noise, and please don’t crowd the railing. You’ll be perfectly safe here.”

She wasn’t joking about the noise. It began almost at once. It was two noises in one, Jesse thought, a bass note that beat in the chest and a metallic whine that rose to a scream. The air around the machine quivered with the heat of its engines. Ponderously, slowly, the airship’s enormous rotary blades began to turn.

Jesse had learned a few things about the City helicopter from the descriptive plaques in the gallery and from the conversation of Tower One repairmen who occasionally bought meals at the commissary. The airship was called a Sikorsky S-92. The crystalline bubble at the front of it was called the cockpit, and that was where the pilot sat. Behind it was a passenger compartment, which seated twenty. The helicopter was painted blue and white, with the words CITY OF FUTURITY emblazoned in gaudy red letters on the hull. On the near side of the machine was a row of small windows from which the faces of anxious guests peered out.

Every guest who bought admission to the City was eager to see the famous flying machine, but only a minority ever volunteered to climb inside it.

“Surely,” a woman said, “it must be too heavy…”

If she said anything further it was lost in the roar. Heavy the machine undoubtedly was. More than ten tons, loaded. Fifty-six feet stem to stern. The top rotors spanned the same diameter. A team of horses couldn’t pull it. It was frankly absurd to imagine such a thing rising into the air.

But that was exactly what it did. The rotors grew invisible with the speed of their rotation, raising hurricanes of dust. Even at this distance the wind caused men to put their hands to their hats and women to flatten their skirts. The guests stepped back from the rails, momentarily terrified. Then, engines roaring at maximum pitch, the machine at last parted company with the earth—awkwardly at first; then decisively, ferociously, beating its way into the sky by brute force.

Jesse guessed this was what the tourists found so dismaying: the unexpected violence of it. The helicopter was a cousin to weapons of war, not birds or kites. It was no more delicate than an artillery emplacement. It leaped on legs of fire and iron. It was a factory for manufacturing elevation, and if its furnaces were banked for even a moment it would plummet from the sky like a monstrous aerolite.

Jesse felt a hand on his shoulder and turned. The hand belonged to Elizabeth DePaul, who must have come over from Tower One. She was wearing a security uniform with trousers. Her expression was solemn.

Now that the flying machine was airborne it moved with startling speed. It was already crossing the western properties of the City, and it would fly for forty-five minutes more, darting across the low hills like a steel damselfly before it returned to its base. “We need to talk,” Ms. DePaul said.

Her face was long and just missed being handsome, but her eyes were unnerving, brown as sand and just as implacable. “You could have paged me.”

“A little private conversation before we head over to the other tower, all right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you don’t need to call me ‘ma’am.’”

“I don’t know what else to call you.”

“It’s not the fucking army. Since we’re working together, Elizabeth is fine.”

A guest overheard the curse and turned to stare at her with slack-jawed astonishment.

“Maybe we ought to step inside,” Jesse said. “Where we won’t offend the paying customers.” He added, “You can call me Jesse.”

She nodded at the now-distant helicopter: “You must have seen it fly before.”

“Often. Never from this angle.”

“Think you’d like to ride it?”

“I’d be a whole lot happier not to. I suppose, Elizabeth, where you come from, you rode helicopters like they were horses.”

“I’ve ridden a few,” she said.

Jesse had first seen the City of Futurity when the towers were still under construction. At the time he had been less impressed by the buildings themselves—as impressive as they undoubtedly were—than by the tower cranes that roosted on their steel frames like skeletal birds, lofting buckets of Portland cement with their beaks. The scale of the work was dreamlike, a mechanical ballet across the vault of the sky, but the work itself, he soon learned, was brutally physical. The City men had trained him to help with the simpler tasks, and for months he had hauled lumber and boiled tar, his face burned brown by the Illinois sun, as the towers rose to completion.

But the most impressive miracle had been in place before he arrived. It was underground, located at the midpoint beneath both towers, and it was called the Mirror. The Mirror was the boundary between present and future. As a local hire he had never been allowed to see it, had never been close to it, had never expected he would see it; but he wondered, with his new pass card, if that had changed.

“Here’s the deal,” Elizabeth said. “We have to work together, and that’s fine. Booking says you’re a smart guy, and you did a good job with Grant. But once we cross into Tower One, you’re on my turf. So we need to lay down some rules.”

They rode a service elevator from the mezzanine to a floor below the dormitory level, another part of the City Jesse’s original pass card would never have allowed him to enter. The elevator opened onto a corridor, crude by comparison with the guest floors—pipes and ducts had been plumbed in plain sight along the ceiling—but wide enough for vehicular traffic. A cart adorned with a flashing red light passed by as Elizabeth spoke.

“Rule one, don’t be a tourist. Don’t rubberneck. You don’t want to be staring at everything like a newb. Whatever you see, pretend to be unimpressed.”

He wasn’t entirely ignorant of what went on in Tower One. It was common knowledge among local hires that when workers from Tower One took meals at the commissary in Tower Two, a person at an adjoining table might overhear a few words of their conversation. By that method Jesse had discerned some interesting truths about the forbidden parts of the City, including the Mirror. The Mirror, people said, was as tall as a five-story building, and it had been given its name because its surface reflected light, except when objects or people were passing through, at which time it became transparent. It opened a passage between filaments of time—but what engine could power such a machine, what furnaces were stoked to drive it? It was never discussed.

He saw a sign that said ACCESS TO ALL MIRROR LEVELS, but Elizabeth passed it without turning.

“Rule two,” Elizabeth said, “don’t ask for explanations and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

They reached a concrete bulkhead in which a steel door had been set. A sign said, OBSERVE ALL TOWER ONE PROTOCOLS BEYOND THIS POINT. Elizabeth dipped her pass card in a slot and the door sighed open.

“And stay with me,” she said. “Don’t wander off. We have a meeting in exactly one hour with August Kemp.”

August Kemp: a man whose name was familiar to everyone at the City, even low-status locals like Jesse. Kemp was the twenty-first-century financier who controlled the company that had built the City of Futurity. Kemp crossed the Mirror at will, and he had made himself familiar to the powerful and the wealthy of this world—just this summer he had dined in Manhattan with Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller, and in San Francisco with Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins. The idea of a personal meeting with August Kemp seemed as implausible to Jesse as the prospect of shaking hands with the king of the moon.

“Okay?” she said. “Is that copacetic?”

He had no idea what she was talking about. “Yes,” he said.

He followed Elizabeth to another bank of elevators and up a couple of levels to the staff commissary of Tower One. At first glance it could have been mistaken for the commissary of Tower Two. Same windowless enclosed space, many tables, plastic chairs. Similar booths housing similar food vendors, though there seemed to be a greater variety of them. “I’m due for lunch,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

He was. But the booths appeared to be set up for cash, not chits. And the cash changing hands was a specie not familiar to him. “I guess I’ll do without.”

“Are you sure? It’s on my dime.”

“Well, that’s generous. Thank you—I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

“Bento box and a Coke?”

He nodded, though he wasn’t sure she was actually speaking English. She ordered from a booth called California Sushi, and the box she gave him contained contrivances of rice and fish, mainly. He carried his tray to an empty table, and Elizabeth sat opposite him.

He unwrapped his utensils. “Chopsticks,” he said, surprised.

“You can get a fork if you want.”

“No need.” He sampled a ball of rice.

“Where’d you learn to handle chopsticks?”

“I’m from San Francisco. We don’t lack for Chinamen or chopsticks. Is this supposed to be Chinese food?”

“Japanese. Sort of. Fast-food sushi. And ‘Chinamen’ is offensive, FYI.” She mixed soy sauce with a green paste and dipped a rice roll in it. Jesse did the same. The paste was a kind of mustard, apparently. He managed to chew and swallow without breaking into tears.

He apologized for “Chinamen”—he knew better; it had been covered in his orientation course. The word was commonplace, but it risked offending visitors from the future.

“So,” Elizabeth said, “maybe you can guess why we’re going to see August Kemp.”

He was distracted by an overhead video screen. Several such screens were suspended from the ceiling of the commissary, and all of them were showing a baseball game. At least, Jesse guessed it was baseball. The diamond looked right, though the catcher wore a mask and the game was played in a stadium that dwarfed the Roman Colosseum.

Elizabeth sighed theatrically. “What did I tell you about staring?”

“Sorry.” He was tempted to call her ma’am, just to antagonize her.

“I was saying, maybe you can guess what this is all about.”

“It’s about the attempt on Grant.”

“Right. You handled the incident really well. If the guy had pulled the trigger, we would have had a major shitstorm on our hands. Worst case, a dead president, federal investigators knocking at the gate, a major hit to the revenue stream, maybe even an early shutdown. As it stands, no shots were fired and we have the shooter in custody. He’s a local, by the way. Some douchebag who’s still angry at Grant for taking Richmond. The important thing is, you saved Kemp a boatload of money and rescued him from a potential scandal. Which makes you a very shiny object in his eyes. You know about Kemp, right? Majority shareholder and CEO, the big boss, you came to his attention, he’s favorably disposed toward you, and that’s why you’re moving up in the world. All good, except for one detail.”

“The pistol,” Jesse said. “They told Grant it was a Colt. But it wasn’t.”

“The weapon was a Glock 19 with a full clip, most definitely not local.”

“And why is that a problem?”

“Because the shooter came into the City with the most recent batch of local guests, only a few hours before Grant himself. We have him on camera for pretty much every second after he passed through the gate. He didn’t interact with anybody, didn’t go anywhere unusual. So the question is, where did he get the gun? As far as we can tell, it was already in his possession. But they don’t sell Glocks in Shitstain, Missouri, or wherever he hails from. So we need to know how he obtained it.”

“You’re saying the pistol was smuggled out of the City somehow, delivered to the gunman, and the gunman carried it back in.”

“That’s one possibility.”

“So he must have had collaborators.”

“Most likely, yes. I’ve been asked to find out. The investigation will have to look both ways, inside the City and outside of it. And in the conduct of the investigation, it could be useful to have help from someone who’s both reliable and native to 1876. Specifically, you.”

“I see. Well, I appreciate your confidence.”

“I’m kind of agnostic on the subject, to be honest. In other words, yeah, if we set foot outside the gate you might be helpful to me. But until then—and especially here in Tower One—I need to be the one calling the shots. That’s the arrangement, and I hope you’re okay with it.”

“I’m okay with it.”

Jesse guessed she had said everything she had meant to say at that point, because the conversation lapsed into an awkward silence. He went to work on the remaining contents of his bento box. After a while Elizabeth looked at her watch. And Jesse looked at his. Their appointment with Kemp was still a half hour away. She said, “So, uh, you’re from San Francisco?”

“Yes.” Because she seemed to expect more from him, he said, “I was born in New Orleans, but my father took me west at a young age.” She nodded and said nothing. If this was supposed to be polite conversation, she was no better at it than he was. “So where do you hail from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Born in Minneapolis, but my folks moved to North Carolina. I joined the army when I turned nineteen. After I left active duty I settled in Charlotte and started working private security.”

“You were a soldier?”

“Yeah.”

“A soldier in a war?”

“I’m not sure how much I ought to say about that. The rules are kind of relaxed between us, but … well, okay, yeah. In a war. What about you?”

“I was eight years old at the time of First Manassas. My father was eligible but didn’t like to pick sides. That’s why he headed for San Francisco, where he couldn’t be called up.”

“How did you end up working for the City?”

“I was thrown off a train,” he said.

Up on the television screen, a batter wearing a Red Sox jersey hit a ball into a fielder’s enormous glove. Third out. The teams traded places. The game, Jesse discerned from fleeting captions, was being played in Boston. It was a cloudy day in the Boston of the future. Elsewhere in that world, perhaps, female soldiers were riding helicopters and firing Glock 19s. But Boston seemed peaceable enough.

“Oh, shit,” Elizabeth said (and it was certainly true, Jesse reflected, that she had a soldier’s vocabulary). He looked away from the baseball game and saw two men in security uniforms approaching from the direction of the elevator banks. “Castro and Dekker,” she said, scowling.

“Enemies of yours?”

“Not enemies so much as just assholes.”

The man in front, Elizabeth said, was Castro—he was big and well-fed, and he filled his uniform to capacity. Dekker was even bigger. His head was shaved to stubble, and his grin suggested he was the ringleader of the two. “Liz!” Dekker called out. “Is this your new partner?”

Elizabeth showed him the middle finger of her right hand.

“So your partner’s a local,” Dekker said, undaunted. He turned to Jesse. “Is this your first time in Tower One?”

Jesse met the man’s eyes. “It is.”

“I saw you looking at the game. You like baseball?”

“I’ve never played it.”

“They got fiber-optic cables strung through the Mirror so we can watch in real time. Red Sox versus the Orioles. Hey, Castro, you’re a baseball geek. Do they have baseball here in 1876?”

“Sure,” Castro said. “But different leagues and shit. Teams like, you know, the White Stockings or the Red Caps. Knickerbocker rules. No night games.”

“No instant replays,” Dekker said. “Right, chief?”

Jesse shrugged.

“So how do you like Tower One?”

“I haven’t seen much more of it than this table.”

“I bet you wish you could see the real thing, though. Step through the Mirror into the glorious future, am I right?”

No, you are not right, Jesse thought. For one thing, it never happened. A wealthy local could buy a ticket to Tower Two for a peek at things to come, but that was as far as he’d get. A few local hires found their way into Tower One, usually as entertainers or servants. But cross the Mirror into their world? No one had ever managed such a feat—as far as Jesse knew, no one had ever tried. “I don’t give it much thought.”

“Bullshit,” Dekker said.

“Excuse me?”

“Bullshit you don’t give it much thought. I never met a local who didn’t lie awake wondering about it.”

“Like wetbacks,” Castro said. “Sneak into the twenty-first century, get a job at Swift or Tyson.”

“Mirrorbacks,” Dekker said, laughing. “Except we have a perfect fence. Sorry, bro, but this is as close as you’ll ever get to the World of the Future.”

“My name’s not bro.”

“I don’t really give a shit about your name.”

Jesse stood up.

“Whoa,” Dekker said. “You’re pretty big for a local, but you don’t want to be getting in my face here.”

Jesse put out his open right hand. “My name’s Jesse Cullum.”

Dekker was clearly startled. It took him a moment to comprehend that he was being offered a handshake. Then his grin came back. He accepted the offer. Enthusiastically. More than enthusiastically. Jesse felt as if he’d put his hand into a laundry mangle, but he managed not to show it. He squeezed Dekker’s hand in return. “Elizabeth,” Jesse said, “do you think I’d lose my job if I knocked Mr. Dekker down?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“In that case, Mr. Dekker, I’ll just ask you to excuse us. Ms. DePaul and I have business to conduct elsewhere.”

Dekker’s grin had become an outright sneer. His friend Castro was trying not to laugh.

Elizabeth stood up. “He’s right, Dekker. We have to go. You can compare dicks some other time.”

Dekker released Jesse’s nearly lifeless hand and leaned toward Jesse’s ear. “We’ll see who gets knocked down.”

“At your pleasure,” Jesse said. “Chief.”

“And by the way, your partner? It’s not ‘Ms. DePaul.’ It’s Mrs. DePaul. She’s married, didn’t she tell you that?”

“Dekker, you’re such an asswipe,” Mrs. DePaul said.

They took a staff elevator from the commissary level. As soon as the doors closed, Elizabeth said, “Dekker never fails to mention my husband.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“Because my husband’s in prison. Five years on a trafficking charge.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s still none of my business.”

“Dekker likes to use it against me, like it’s some big secret or something.”

“Your husband’s crimes, whatever they may have been, surely don’t reflect on you.”

“Why did you offer to shake his hand, by the way? Dekker’s completely steroidal. He could have broken bones.”

“It seemed like the gentlemanly thing.”

“You might want to save that behavior for actual gentlemen.”

The elevator stopped at one of the guest levels. A half dozen women in identical cuirass bodices and ruffled skirts stepped inside, probably waitresses or barmaids. Locals, by the sound of their voices. Jesse knew that such employees were well paid, often hired away from places like Thompson’s Restaurant in Chicago or Delmonico’s in New York City. “Afternoon, ladies,” he said.

Some of them giggled, not especially politely. They scorned his western vowels, he guessed, or the way he carried himself. “You’re a long way from Tower Two,” a redheaded one said.

About a thousand yards. But she was right. It was a long thousand yards.

“Is it true,” the woman asked, “General Grant’s visiting?”

“Yes, ma’am, he is. I saw him myself.”

“Enjoying a taste of the future. Where women and niggers can vote and gal-boys can marry each other.” She winked at Jesse. “You may be an old hand in Tower Two, but you’re just a pie-eater over here. Be careful till you get your bearings.”

The waitresses left the elevator at another level.

“Is that true?” Jesse asked.

“Which part?”

“Who can vote and all. Where you come from.”

“Women vote. African-Americans vote. And you don’t have to be straight to get married.”

“Straight?”

“Heterosexual. Boy-girl.”

Jesse was still pondering that when they reached the administration floor.

Something about Elizabeth DePaul made Jesse think of horses.

Not in an insulting way. She wasn’t big or ugly, though she wasn’t small, nor was she pretty in the polished manner of the waitresses he had encountered in the elevator. But she had the dignity of a well-bred horse. A certain horsey implacability. Brown eyes that seemed to express a cynicism born of bitter experience. And beneath that, a pride that was neither false nor self-flattering. He had seen that combination of traits before, in some of the Tenderloin women among whom he had grown up, and he had learned to recognize it even in the faces of strangers, especially the strangers who eked out a living in the streets south of Broadway and north of Market. It was a survivor’s look. Such people were useful and dangerous, often in equal parts.

And she was a soldier. According to the dioramas of Tower Two, the twenty-first century was a land of marvels. But, by inference, it was also a world that contained wars. And prisons, if Elizabeth was to be believed; and prisoners; and prisoners’ wives.

Like the commissary, the administration level of Tower One was a replica of the same level in Tower Two: the same tiled floors and subdivided offices, the same gentle sound of tapped keyboards and cool air hissing from concealed ducts. Clerical workers looked up as Jesse and Elizabeth passed, and a few of them were startled enough to look twice, though they were too well trained to stare. What exactly was it, Jesse wondered, that made him so conspicuously a local? He felt like a belled cat.

He followed Elizabeth to the office where August Kemp and the Tower One security administrator were waiting. It was a big office, and it housed a big desk, and several plush chairs and a sofa. The window was like the window in Tower Two, except that it looked east. Outside, ominous clouds tumbled across the sky. Far below, in a sward of mottled green, the City’s captive buffalo huddled in anticipation of rain.

Both men stood up as Elizabeth and Jesse entered. The man behind the desk was the Tower One security chief, Elizabeth’s boss. He was a dark-skinned man of middle age with a hawkish face and fiercely observant eyes, and his name was Barton. “Please sit,” he said crisply.

Jesse and Elizabeth stationed themselves on the sofa. August Kemp remained standing.

Kemp was not what Jesse had expected. In Jesse’s experience wealthy men tended to wear their authority in plain sight, an expectation of obedience as conspicuous as a Sunday hat. August Kemp was the right age for such a man: hard to tell with future people, but Jesse pegged him at fifty years or more by the grain of his skin. But he was lean as a whippet hound and tan as a cowherd, and his clothes seemed not only informal but unserious: denim trousers and a shirt on which pictures of tropical fruit were printed. His white hair was abundant, and he wore it loosely. His teeth were conspicuously perfect. He displayed them in a broad smile.

“Mr. Cullum, I don’t want to embarrass you with praise for your handling of the apparent attempt on President Grant’s life. I understand the president has already thanked you, and you know you have the gratitude of the City of Futurity.”

“Yes, sir, I appreciate that,” Jesse said.

“The gunman is in custody, and we’ve had time to interrogate him. Mr. Barton can fill you in on the details.”

Barton cleared his throat and said, “The suspect is one Obie Stedmann of Calhoun’s Landing, Louisiana. A few months ago there was an encounter between what Stedmann calls his ‘rifle club’ and federal troops, a shoot-out that left fifteen dead, two of them soldiers and the rest of them Stedmann’s buddies. The army claims it prevented a lynching. Stedmann calls it murder and blames Reconstruction in general and Grant in particular. When he read in the papers that Grant would be visiting the City, he started to make plans. He traveled to Chicago, spent a night there, then came to Futurity Station, where he spent a week prior to Grant’s arrival. We don’t know what he did during that time, but we know what he didn’t do. He didn’t make an attempt on Grant when Grant’s Pullman car arrived at Futurity Station. Probably because it wasn’t possible. Guests bound for the City are escorted from their train to the coaches by a security detail, and Grant’s security was tight as a drumhead. We believe that’s why Stedmann decided to take Grant from inside the City.”

“Which would have been a problem for him,” Kemp interjected, “because it’s not easy to buy a ticket on short notice. We’re generally booked up at least six months in advance.”

“It’s not easy,” Barton said, “but it’s not impossible. Tickets come up for resale if guests cancel. We have a generous rebooking program, but not everyone takes advantage of it. Tickets can be resold. And while we discourage scalping, despite our best efforts, it happens. Stedmann managed to buy himself a ticket, though it must have cost him a small fortune.”

“He bought something else, too,” Jesse said. “A pistol, if I’m not mistaken.”

Kemp nodded as if Jesse had said something wise. Barton said, “You saw it yourself. A clip-loading handgun, not of contemporary design.”

A Glock 19, specifically, Jesse thought.

“We’ve gone to great lengths,” August Kemp said, “to keep a careful boundary between the City and this world. It was part of the design of the City from the beginning. Our concerns are both pragmatic and ethical. We want to protect locals from ideas and technology that might be destabilizing or dangerous out of their context. And we want to protect the City from misunderstanding and needless litigation. Obviously, the boundary is going to be a little porous no matter what we do. We permit a limited trade in authorized souvenirs, and if one of our Tower One visitors is out on tour and misplaces a smartphone or a wristwatch, so be it. No great harm done. But a weapon? Every handgun we allow through the Mirror is itemized and assigned to a member of the security detail. No unauthorized carries are permitted. Zero tolerance. Finding such a weapon inside the City would have been bad enough. The possibility that Stedmann bought it at the railway depot is shocking, absolutely unacceptable.”

Elizabeth said, “Have you got anything out of Stedmann about the gun?”

Barton said, “He gave us his backstory, but he won’t say anything about buying the weapon. So here’s what we want you and Jesse to do for us. First, you head out to Futurity Station and see if you can reconstruct Stedmann’s movements. Your focus should be on the purchase of the weapon—who was the vendor? Are there more weapons being sold? Contraband other than weapons?”

Kemp addressed Elizabeth directly: “The details are in your inbox. This is your first trip into the field, isn’t it?”

“I worked transit a few time between here and the railroad,” Elizabeth said. “So I’ve been out of the gates. But basically, yes.”

“We’ll get you suitable clothing, but you’ll need to take cues from Jesse when it comes to deportment. Are you good with that?”

“I had the orientation sessions—”

“And that’s great,” Kemp said. “But a little brushup is always helpful. And Jesse’s a native. Remember that. It’s his world out there, not yours.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Jesse, are we on the same wavelength here?” Kemp registered Jesse’s blank expression and said, “Are we in agreement?”

“I think so.”

“That’s wonderful. Elizabeth, again, we texted you details. Jesse, I probably don’t need to tell you this duty comes with a pay raise.”

“That’s very kind,” Jesse said.

“You’re one of our most loyal local employees and one of the least troublesome. And that’s the attitude you need to take into the field. Do you have any other questions before we break this up?

Jesse thought about it. “We’re working as a team. Elizabeth and me, I mean. And I need to help her pass as local. Correct?”

“Right.”

“But if the gun was smuggled out of the City, the trail might lead right back to Tower One. And I’m happy to follow it. The trouble is, I’m conspicuous here. Twice today I got pegged as a local, and your clerks all peer at me like I’m Lazarus come forth. What am I doing wrong? Can you tell me that?”

August Kemp looked at Barton, who looked back at Kemp. Neither spoke. Finally Elizabeth said, “It’s your beard.”

“There are men with beards here.”

“Not like yours. You look like a refugee from ZZ Top. You look like Zack Galifianakis auditioning for a Civil War comedy. Don’t guys in 1876 ever shave?”

“Some do,” Jesse said stiffly. “And not all your men are beardless.”

“Right. With a little trim you could pass in both worlds.”

Kemp said, “We’ve got a styling salon in Tower One. Off hours, it’s available for staff. I’ll book you an appointment. You’ll need to learn to find your way around Tower One in any case, since we’re moving you here for the duration of this assignment.”

“I thank you,” Jesse said uncertainly.

“Any other questions?”

Plenty, Jesse thought. But none he could bring himself to ask right now.

“And, oh,” Kemp said, “I understand you need a new pair of Oakleys. Did you stop by the supply room?”

“I did,” Jesse said. “They’re all out of Oakleys.”

“I’ll look into it,” August Kemp said.

3

The clothes Jesse was issued for his trip to the railroad depot were strangely made.

He had to wear them even so. The last “authentic” items of clothing he had owned were the trousers, shirt, and flannel underwear he had been wearing when he arrived at the City, and the first thing the City had done was to send them for delousing. Today—given that he was supposed to pass as a modestly successful businessman—a drifter’s shabby pants wouldn’t do. So he had been instructed to report to the supply room to be fitted for passable substitutes.

Which they had given him, and which he had put on this very morning. And judging by the reflection in the mirror in his dormitory room, he did look more or less like the sort of modestly successful shopkeeper he had often passed in the streets of San Francisco. Except that the shirt was too perfectly clean. And the collar was too white. And the waistcoat felt slick, as if the cotton had been woven too closely. Add to that his recent shave and haircut, and he felt both newly minted and altogether ridiculous.

“You’ll do,” Elizabeth said as he climbed into the coach and settled on the bench opposite her. He was grateful for the comment, but she was hardly in a position to judge. Her own clothes were imitations and, to Jesse’s eye, looked it.

The carriage was also a replica, assembled in the twenty-first century and imported through the Mirror. From a distance it would be indistinguishable from an ordinary hackney coach, but it rode differently: the City people had installed a complex suspension. But the coach didn’t have to fool anyone. It was part of the fleet of coaches and horse-drawn omnibuses that conveyed guests from the City to the train station on a weekly schedule.

The coach jolted as the driver urged his team through the gate and away from the City. Rain streaked the windows, rendering the Illinois prairie in a molten palate of greens and yellows, and Jesse’s mood wasn’t much sunnier. Trouble ahead, he thought. Or, to be fair, maybe not. Maybe he could winkle out enough facts to satisfy Elizabeth and her bosses, and his life would resume its prior course uninterrupted. But there were other possibilities.

Last night he had dreamed of his sister Phoebe. Again. The same dream, as familiar as it was terrible. He had been back at Madame Chao’s, and there had been a room in flames, and Phoebe in a box, and his father spilling blood from his cupped hands.

He had awakened in a cold sweat. He showered and dressed, then made his way to the commissary for breakfast. He told Dorothy, the war widow who worked the counter at Starbucks, that she might not be seeing him so often now that he was being moved to Tower One.

“New job,” she said, “that’s nice! Making a name for yourself. You look like it, too.”

“This is special. They dressed me for a trip out to the depot.”

“As a fashion plate?”

“I’m not at liberty to speak of it,” Jesse said, meaning he didn’t want to.

“You’ll have the ladies all agog, that’s certain.”

One lady who was not all agog was Doris Vanderkamp, taking a break from her work cleaning guest rooms. Doris’s on-again, off-again case of the grippe seemed to be in abeyance today, and her face was more pretty than haggard, dark curls framing mischievous eyes. She joined Jesse at his table without waiting for an invitation. “Well, well, well! Jesse Cullum, spiff as a new dime. Almost enough to make a girl miss him.”

“You’re looking fine as well, Doris.”

“All this time I figured your only aim in life was to collect your wages and smile at the boss. But it turns out you’re ambitious.”

“Pretty soon you’ll have fewer opportunities to insult me, so you might as well get the job done while I’m here.”

“I don’t mean to insult you—at least not at the moment. But you’re an inconstant lover, Jesse, you have to admit it.”

He wasn’t much of a lover at all. His entanglement with Doris had been born of his desire, her availability, and a certain spirit of recklessness that had arisen between them like a summer storm. There had never been a future in it. He suspected Doris had known that long before their intimate friendship ran on the rocks. Her consequent resentment of him was a form of social theater, for which she possessed a remarkable talent.

“I hear they partnered you with a big old girl from the twenty-first century,” she said. “Some female ogre with pants on.”

“Ogre’s not an apt word. Though she’s not as small and pert as you.”

“That’s a pretty thing to say.” Doris reached out and covered his hand with hers. “I forgive you nothing, you idiot.” Then she took a handkerchief from the folds of her dress and blew her nose into it. Her cold was coming back, Jesse thought.

“I had a word with Dekker this morning,” Elizabeth said.

Jesse turned his gaze from the window. The rain came down hard and heavy, as if children were pelting the coach with gravel. The City’s helicopter would remain in its hangar today. Outdoor events would be postponed and rescheduled, and both of the indoor pools in Tower Two—one for women, one for men—would be crowded with guests, who seemed to take a particular pleasure in bathing in heated water while a storm beat at the high glass walls.

But all that was behind him. Ahead, the streets of Futurity Station would be awash in mud and worse.

Dekker, Jesse thought: the man who had insulted him and then attempted to crush his hand. “Was he in a better mood today?”

“Pretty much the opposite of a better mood. After you talked to him in the food court? His pass card went missing. He had to call the security office to get a new one. The old one turned up this morning, stuck in a flowerpot on the commissary floor.”

“I’m sorry to hear of his troubles.”

“Dekker blames you.”

“On what grounds?”

“There’s a security cam video of him hassling you, but it’s from the wrong angle, so it didn’t prove anything—assuming that’s when you lifted the card.”

“Are you suggesting I stole it?”

“I think, if you did steal it and dump it in a flowerpot, it would have served that asshole right. But I didn’t see you do it, and I was sitting less than a yard away. Are you a pickpocket?”

Jesse considered the question. He didn’t want Elizabeth to think of him as someone who had gone around skinning wallets in his earlier life. Nor did he want to lie. “What you’re talking about sounds more like sleight of hand.”

“What, like stage magic? So you’re a magician?”

“No. Nor was my father … but he learned a few card tricks in his youth.”

“And that’s how you lifted Dekker’s pass without anyone noticing, including Dekker?”

“I imagine, if I had done such a thing, I might be reluctant to admit it.” In fact he was angry at himself for having done it at all. It had been an intolerable risk for a trivial act of revenge.

“Your secret’s safe with me. Dekker can’t prove anything, and everyone in Tower One security except Dekker thinks it’s pretty funny.” She thought for a moment. “It’s important to you to keep your job.”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean, yes.”

“Any particular reason?”

“None that I care to discuss.”

“Okay. That’s interesting, though, about your father being a magician.”

“He wasn’t a magician. He earned his keep by opening doors. Do you come from a family of soldiers, Elizabeth?”

She laughed. “No. My father was an electrical engineer until he smoked himself into a premature coronary. My mother worked as a beautician, but these days she mostly watches Fox News and goes to church.”

“I’m sure they’re fine people.”

“I’m glad somebody’s sure.” Moisture in the air had made the windows opaque, and Elizabeth scrubbed the glass with the heel of her hand. “But you know the saying? ‘All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’”

“Who said that? Some wise man from your century?”

She shrugged. “I think I heard it on Oprah.”

Futurity Station was a smudge on the northern horizon now, as if someone had run a sooty finger across the wet Illinois plains. If Jesse craned his head he could see the rest of this convoy of coaches and horse buses bending toward the rail town like ants to a cabbage. And when the veils of rain parted he could see a skyline of wooden structures, the largest and tallest of which was the three-story Excelsior Hotel, where they would be spending the night.

The depot’s smell preceded it. Jesse saw Elizabeth wrinkle her nose. Two years ago the City had installed waste disposal amenities for Futurity Station, but the town had rapidly outgrown those niceties. The weather could only have made it worse, Jesse imagined; the streets would be flooded and wet air would enclose the stench like a dome. “Sometimes I wonder why you’re here at all.”

“I’m here to make sure you don’t screw up.”

He smiled at what she probably intended as a witticism. “Not you personally. You twenty-first-century people. The guests in Tower One. What do you come here for? I don’t see the attraction. I understand well enough how it works for my people: the wonders of the future, a better draw than anything Barnum ever dreamed up. We pay to see your moving pictures and swim in your heated pools and ride in your helicopter, and if we can’t afford a week in the City we can come to Futurity Station to buy trinkets and catch a glimpse of the airship. But your people, the people who leave the twenty-first century to come here—what’s the draw? I don’t see it. People are still out of work from the Panic of ’73. We’re little more than a decade gone from a war that filled the streets with widows and legless veterans. The Indians are in rebellion, and the South is proving as difficult to reconstruct as a broken egg. It’s a little surprising to me that so many guests should care to drop in and visit just now.”

He was obscurely pleased that Elizabeth didn’t have an easy answer for him. She sat in thoughtful silence for a moment. Then she said, “The Mirror is a machine. It has limitations. It won’t take you to last month, because it can’t do that kind of precision—a short jump is like threading a needle. And it won’t take you back much farther than a century or two, because a longer jump would require a ridiculous amount of energy. So we have a window of opportunity, and you’re in it.”

“But that’s not the only reason.”

“Well, no. And in a way you’re right—not everybody wants to visit. You notice we don’t get a lot of black tourists? Because a place with a recent history of slavery doesn’t seem like an ideal vacation spot to most African-Americans.”

“I’ve seen black people in the tour groups.”

“Sure, if they have an academic interest or a family history that matters to them. But think about what the City has to do to keep them safe. Armed escorts, gated hotels in San Francisco and New York.”

All that was true. Just last winter the New York Tribune had managed to place a reporter in a tour group, and the result had been such sensational headlines as NEGRO PRESIDENT ELECTED IN THE FUTURE and IN FUTURE AMERICA VICE RUNS RAMPANT. But City authorities refused to confirm or deny the stories, and since there was an apparently endless supply of lies and rumors—no fewer than fifteen books had been published this year alone, all claiming to reveal “secrets the City won’t tell,” all mutually contradictory—the controversy had amounted to nothing substantial.

“And yet you come,” Jesse said.

“Because you’re what we used to be. Or we like to think so. If I say ‘1876’ to somebody back home they’re going to picture, I don’t know, cowboys and Indians, or maybe a shady New England town with an ice cream parlor and fat politicians in waistcoats and celluloid collars, some kind of Disneyland-Main Street-Frontierland deal…”

“Dear God,” Jesse said.

“Of course it’s bullshit, and we kind of know that, but—look at it this way: If somebody in 1876 invents a time machine and offers you a trip to see the Crusades, say, or the building of the pyramids, wouldn’t you accept?”

“I suppose I might. As long as I was guaranteed protection from the Saracens or the pharaohs.”

“Well, yeah,” Elizabeth said. “Exactly.”

The convoy from the City of Futurity pulled into a long coach barn next to the rail depot at Futurity Station.

It wasn’t the depot Jesse remembered from his arrival here four years ago, when he had been unceremoniously evicted from the baggage car of a westbound express. Back then, it hadn’t even had a name. It had been a coaling station and a water tank then, not a locus of human habitation, but four summers of proximity to the City of Futurity had turned it into a boomtown with hundreds of permanent inhabitants.

The new train station had been constructed in partnership with the Central Pacific Railroad, and one of its purposes was to protect paying guests from the idly curious. Today’s paying guests were returning from the City to meet either the westbound train at six o’clock or the eastbound at seven; later, the same convoy of vehicles would carry fresh guests back to the City. Jesse and Elizabeth waited until the other conveyances were empty before leaving their coach. Their coachman, a local hire, handed down their luggage: a cloth valise apiece for Elizabeth and Jesse, each containing fresh clothes and sundry supplies, including a pistol and ammunition. Jesse exchanged a wave with the coachman before heading to the south end of the cavernous enclosed carriageway.

The rain had subsided to a drizzle. “Let me carry your bag,” Jesse said.

“I can carry it.”

“It’s better if I do. For the sake of appearances.”

Elizabeth gave him a hard look but handed over the valise.

The Excelsior Hotel across the street was fully occupied. Just one room had been reserved for them, and Jesse nodded at the desk clerk and signed the register as Jesse Cullum & wife. The Tower One security boss had warned Jesse of the necessity of the subterfuge. If he had a problem about sharing quarters, Barton had warned him, he needed to get over it. But Jesse didn’t anticipate any problem. Apart from a certain inevitable awkwardness.

A bellman escorted them to their room, three stories up. As soon as they were alone Elizabeth opened the window. A rising wind billowed the cloth curtains and seemed to mitigate the stench of the town. Unless, Jesse thought, we’re just growing accustomed to it.

In any case the daylight would be gone within hours. He cleared his throat and said, “You should know … I’m not a sound sleeper. Sometimes in the night…”

Elizabeth turned away from the window and gave him her full attention. “Sometimes in the night what?”

“I suffer from nightmares. Sometimes I wake up. In an agitated state. Possibly shouting.”

“This happens often?”

“I’m hoping it won’t happen at all. But I thought you should know. If it does happen, don’t be frightened. As soon as I’m fully awake, it stops.”

He was gratified that Elizabeth nodded as if he had said nothing surprising. “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said.

They shared an evening meal in the hotel’s dining room, then returned to their room and made a plan for the following day. Elizabeth used a device like a fancy pager to report back to Barton at the City. Then they went to bed.

There were two beds in the room. Jesse turned down the gaslights as Elizabeth undressed. She was unselfconscious about it. Her dress looked conventional, but the stays and buttons were false. It was held together with something called Velcro, which made a sound like a dog’s fart as she unfastened it. Underneath she wore briefs and a cotton halter.

Jesse’s clothes were more simply made. City-issue underwear for men came in two varieties, briefs and shorts. Jesse preferred the briefs. They kept everything in place without getting in the way. As he put his hand to the mantle of the lamp Elizabeth said, “You sure you’ve never been in a war?”

She was looking at the various scars on his body. “Not a war that was formally declared.”

The gaslight flickered down to nothing.

“Must have hurt like hell,” Elizabeth said.

He didn’t answer.

He put himself to sleep as he often did, by thinking about the complexities of time travel. It was a more reliable soporific than counting sheep.

The concept had been explained to him early in his tenure at the City. The City people had been careful to communicate the idea that time travel was not (as they said) linear—that there was not just one history but many histories, side by side. They talked about a philosophical problem called the Grandfather Paradox: if a time traveler killed his grandfather in the cradle, would the time traveler himself then cease to exist? But it didn’t apply, they said, because in this case past and future were different worlds. City people could kill all the grandfathers they liked—all it meant was that this world’s future would not perfectly replicate the future from which the City people came.

Jesse thought about all those threads of time laid side-by-side like fibers in a rope, each thread a world with an identical history. The Mirror was a device that braided histories together, so that human beings and physical objects could pass back and forth. It amounted to time travel because every accessible world was identical to the source, but less ancient. A nearby history might be only a few seconds or minutes less old, so that traveling to it would seem like traveling a few seconds or minutes into the past. More distant histories were separated by years, centuries, eons. But as Elizabeth had said, there were practical limits to what a Mirror could do. Traveling to a nearby history required relatively little energy but an impossible degree of precision. Traveling to a very distant history required little precision but an absurd amount of energy.

What kind of energy it required Jesse could not begin to guess. But he knew, intuitively, that the Mirror was the most remarkable thing the City people had produced—more remarkable than a helicopter, more remarkable even than a photograph of the icy plains of Mars. It was more than a machine—it was a metaphysical machine. It was a steamship that plied the winding rivers of heaven itself.

Phoebe was crying.

That was unusual. Phoebe was twelve years old, and she took pride in her maturity. She had taught herself not to cry when she was unhappy. But she was crying now, and Jesse was frustrated because he couldn’t locate the source of the sound.

The walls were on fire.

The walls were on fire, and his father stood in the center of the room, cupping blood in his hands. His father’s expression was sorrowful. He bowed at the waist like a man at prayer.

“I tried to stop it,” Jesse said, or tried to say.

Phoebe was inside a steamer trunk, he realized. He went to the trunk to open it. But it was locked, the key was nowhere to be found, and the brass fittings were too hot to touch.

“I’m sorry,” Jesse’s father said.

He opened his hands. Blood and unspeakable things dropped to the floor.

In the trunk, Phoebe screamed.

“You’re safe,” someone said.

Jesse became aware of the room, the stink of his own sweat, the rawness of his throat, the cotton sheet coiled around him like a rope.

“You’re safe.”

It was Elizabeth who spoke. And she was holding his hand. Or at least compressing his hands against his body in a kind of wrestling grip, so that he couldn’t lash out at her. “Thank you, I’m awake now,” he managed to say, and she released him and took a wary step back.

He was profoundly embarrassed. “Elizabeth, I’m sorry…”

“Nothing to be sorry for.” She was a dark presence in a room lit only by moonlight. “You okay now?” Her voice was soft and had no anger in it.

“Yes.”

“All right then.”

She went back to her own bed.

No further words were spoken. Outside, the rain had stopped. A cooling wind came through the window. Elizabeth’s bed creaked as she turned on her side. Jesse pulled his blanket around his shoulders and stared into the darkness and waited for morning.

4

He woke at dawn. He dressed and washed and waited while Elizabeth did the same, then escorted her to the hotel’s dining room. She insisted on taking all her meals here, where City officials periodically inspected both the food and the kitchen. Jesse objected that this would anchor them to the Excelsior, but Elizabeth wouldn’t be moved: “You people don’t have practical refrigeration. You put lead oxide in your milk and God knows what in your sausages. You call dysentery ‘the summer complaint.’ So this is where we eat, period, full stop.”

He didn’t argue. He was still ashamed that he had troubled her with his nightmare, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak about it, and she didn’t raise the subject. Which was just as well, since they had the day’s work ahead of them.

Futurity Station was more circus than town, Jesse thought. Like a circus, it had an air of impermanence and expedience. And like a circus, its main sources of revenue were dreams, deception, sex, and theft.

Their plan was to pose as a married couple, not quite well-heeled enough to afford admission to the City, who had come to Futurity Station for a glimpse of the flying machine and to buy any futuristic contraband they could lay their hands on. This morning they would get the lay of the land by way of a leisurely stroll, and the weather was ideal for it: vivid sunlight and a pleasant warmth, the town’s gaudy signs and wooden sidewalks all washed clean by last night’s rain.

The town had two main streets, one parallel to the train tracks and one perpendicular to them. The first street was called Depot, the second was called Lookout. Most of the respectable establishments—hotels, a barber, an apothecary shop, a Methodist church—were situated on Depot, west of the train station. Lookout Street was home to saloons, pawn shops, penny theaters, music halls dedicated to burlesque shows and minstrelsy, and, at its southernmost extremity, rows of bleachers where customers could buy a “guaranteed best” view of the regularly scheduled fly past of the City airship.

Jesse and Elizabeth began by dawdling along Depot Street. Any hour before noon was early for a town like Futurity Station, but the sidewalks were far from empty, and daylight hours were especially suited for the respectable tourists they were pretending to be. It was the element of pretense that worried Jesse. He had reminded Elizabeth as tactfully as possible that she must not swear or swagger or express her opinions too freely or do any of the ten thousand other things City women did without thinking and which might, in the year 1876, raise eyebrows or start riots. Her response had been to roll her eyes and say, “So they tell me,” which had not entirely reassured him.

But she carried herself convincingly enough as they strolled, taking his arm and keeping to his side. Her skirt and bodice must have made her uncomfortable in the warm weather, but the City outfitters had also provided her with a straw hat with a flat brim and blue ribbons, which disguised her short hair and gave her some protection from the sun. They stopped briefly at an apothecary shop with a soda fountain, and she put on a plausible show of interest in the patent medicines on the shelves and the array of red and blue bottles of all sizes, but when the druggist asked whether he could serve them she smiled and said, “No, thank you, maybe we’ll stop by on our way back to the hotel.”

At the western end of Depot Street they passed a shop offering novelty items and curios—it looked too respectable to be a source of contraband weapons, but something in the window caused Elizabeth to pause and tug him toward the door. A table inside was stocked with books claiming to be guides to the City or fictional accounts of future history, most with stamped covers featuring lurid or fantastical illustrations. Elizabeth picked up a novel that gloried under the title America’s War with Mars. “I guess H. G. Wells is screwed,” she murmured.

He didn’t know what that meant, but he smiled in response to her smile.

The proprietor of the shop, a skinny man with a mustache and a striped shirt, bustled out from behind his counter. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Elizabeth said, “There’s a book in your window … at least, I think it’s a book.” She pointed. “May I see it?”

The shopkeeper made a tragic face. “I’m not sure you would like to, frankly.”

The book in question was made of paper without boards, like a pamphlet. But it was thick. The title of the book was The Shining. “It sounds as if it might be religious,” Elizabeth said.

“Quite the contrary, I’m sorry to say. It’s an authentic book of the future, left behind by a visitor, but the contents aren’t suitable for a female reader. If it weren’t such a significant artifact I should be ashamed to sell it.”

“Are such books typical reading material for the people of the future?”

“I wouldn’t care to speculate, ma’am. But if you’re interested in the future, we have many other publications that discuss it. Our hand-colored lithographs are popular with the ladies, and we also offer engraved spoons, decorative mugs—”

“Thank you, I’ll look,” Elizabeth said.

Which gave Jesse an opportunity to take the shopkeeper aside and ask about the price of the book, which was predictably astronomical. He said, “Don’t you have any less expensive editions?”

The shopkeeper glanced at Elizabeth, who feigned interest in a display of commemorative ribbons, and leaned toward Jesse’s ear. “That’s an astute question. You’re right, the book has been copied to a contemporary edition.” He tipped open a drawer to show Jesse a crudely bound volume on which the words The Shining were stamped in flaking gilded letters. “Completely unexpurgated—you understand the need for discretion. If you’re interested—” He quoted a number, less than half the price of the original but still startling.

“I am interested,” Jesse said. “If I can come back for it later.”

“The edition is nearly sold out, and it’s not available at other vendors.”

“Well, in that case.” Jesse took out his wallet. “Will you hold a copy for me?”

The proprietor nodded knowingly and scribbled a receipt. Jesse accepted it and said, “Can you tell me whether there are other items like this for sale in town? I don’t mean books exclusively. Any artifact or object. But authentic ones.”

“City people don’t approve of such transactions, so that’s a ticklish question. Such items do come up for sale from time to time. Mainly on the south side of town. More than that I’m reluctant to say.”

Did he want to be bribed? Jesse had been supplied with enough cash to appear convincingly prosperous, and more was available if they needed it. But if the shopkeeper had any sense he would have negotiated an arrangement with the other clandestine sellers in town. “Any recommendation would be welcome,” Jesse said flatly.

“Well … there’s a certain vendor on Lookout Street. The shop is called Onslow’s. Onslow might be willing to show you his private stock. But his goods aren’t cheap, and he only deals with genuinely interested buyers.”

“This whole town,” Elizabeth said, “is August Kemp’s nightmare.”

They followed Depot Street until the sidewalk ended in a clutter of squatters’ shacks, then crossed the street and turned back toward Lookout, dodging a flock of female tourists with sun umbrellas and bright calico day dresses. “What does Kemp have against Futurity Station? It hardly seems to threaten him.”

“Kemp tries to keep a strict wall of separation between our guys and your guys. Guests from the twenty-first century get a guided tour of 1876, and guests from 1876 get a sanitized glimpse of the twenty-first century. But they’re not supposed to mix, except when Kemp arranges it. Policing the wall between them is how he makes his money.”

“Looks like there’s plenty of money being made here.”

“But it’s not Kemp who’s making it. It’s diluting his product. Authenticity is everything when it comes to the revenue stream. People who pay to see the Old West don’t want some kind of theme park where ersatz cowboys kick back in the ranch house with Netflix and a bag of Doritos. They want the real thing.”

“Or so they think.” Jesse had met a few cattlemen. He did not despise them, as a class, but he couldn’t imagine spending money for the privilege of looking at one of them.

“That’s why Tower One guests coming from the City go directly to the tour trains, no dallying at Futurity Station. Kemp won’t give them more than a glimpse of this town, because it reeks of—well, lots of things, but from Kemp’s point of view it reeks of inauthenticity. And authenticity is what he sells.”

“I suppose I see what you mean. But Kemp gave up true authenticity as soon as he built the City, didn’t he? It changes everything just by being there.”

“That’s why the City has a limited life span. Five years as a tourist resort in what still plausibly resembles the past, then he hands over the buildings and the land to Union Pacific and turns off the Mirror for good and all.”

“Because beyond that point it becomes too obvious that our histories differ.”

“Right.”

“But there’s money to be made mingling past and future.” He was thinking of the price tag on that Shining book.

“Well, yeah, and Kemp knows that. That’s why, come January, we stop being so coy about where we come from, we start handing over our medical and scientific knowledge—we turn the country into one big Futurity Station, and Kemp milks it for twelve months before he switches off the lights and hands over the keys. But not until then.”

“You make Kemp sound mendacious.”

“I don’t know what that word means. But it’s not such a bad bargain if you think about it. You guys get a jump on things like electricity and the combustion engine, plus all the lessons we learned by doing that stuff crudely and badly. You also get a better look at the way we really live up there in the twenty-first century, which might make your pastors blush and your matrons clutch their pearls, but are you going to turn it down?”

They reached the intersection of Lookout and Depot. Turning south onto Lookout was like stepping onto the midway of a traveling carnival, Jesse thought. Here, every commercial establishment had been hung with yard-lengths of bunting—to celebrate both the centennial year and Grant’s visit—and painted with fanciful illustrations of flying machines and ringed planets. What was offered inside these buildings appeared to be random collations of pamphlets, mounted tintypes of the City, toy helicopters carved in wood, festive whirligigs, fried sausages, steamed corn, pickled eggs, and doughnuts. Jesse cast a wistful glance at the sausage sellers. He was a big man. He liked to eat plentifully and regularly. He wasn’t sure Elizabeth understood that about him.

At the southern reach of Lookout was the Stadium of Tomorrow, a high wall of pineboard that blocked any view of the prairie. Here the gimcrack vendors gave way to restaurants and saloons. Where there were saloons there would of course be whorehouses, and some of the crude shacks on the side streets, sleepy in the sunlight, looked as if they might conduct that business after dark.

Onslow’s Unusual Items was a small storefront situated between a tavern and a magic-lantern theater. Jesse and Elizabeth slowed as they passed it, but they needed to agree on a strategy before they went in. “Let’s take in the show,” Elizabeth suggested.

“The magic lanterns?”

“The Stadium of Tomorrow. It seems to be where everybody’s headed.”

“It’s a cheat,” Jesse said. “I’ve heard all about it. It’s just stacked bleachers facing south. All you get for your nickel is some patter and a look at the airship when it flies over.”

“A place to sit and talk,” she said.

He shrugged. It was the City’s dime, not his.

“Money back if the flying machine don’t show,” the ticket seller told them. An easy promise to make: It was a rare day the City helicopter didn’t fly, weather permitting, and the weather today was fine. “Entertainment starts in a few minutes.”

They headed for the less desirable seats, where the crowd was thinner and they could speak without fear of being overheard. A peanut vendor wandered past, and Jesse bought a bag for himself and one for Elizabeth. If she didn’t want her portion he would eat it himself. But she accepted the bag with only a brief dubious look. He guessed roasted peanuts were unlikely to be dusted with poison or infected with deadly diseases, even in 1876. She ate from her portion unselfconsciously—like a man, Jesse thought—brushing shell fragments from her billowing dress with the back of her hand.

“So here’s what we know,” she said. “The would-be assassin bought a Glock here in town. He was working solo, without partners or connections, so the weapon probably came from a novelty vendor like Onslow. The question is, how does the vendor lay his hands on an automatic pistol?”

Jesse thought about it. “Most of the goods in these shops are lost items or copies of lost items, like that Shining book. Supposedly, the merchandise comes from tour groups. You put a hundred or two hundred City people on a train to New York or San Francisco, lodge them for a week, carry them back—they’re bound to leave a few things in the Pullman car or the hotel room. At least that’s the story I’ve heard.” City management was aware of the trade and for the most part had ignored it.

“So someone like Onslow,” Elizabeth said, “must get his goods from a City employee, or someone with access to a City employee.”

“That’s a whole lot of people, though, and lots of them are local hires. Railroad porters, hotel staff, coachmen—”

“What if Onslow decides he’s tired of fencing two-bit castoffs? He knows he can sell anything that’s authentically City, way more than he can get his hands on. He might figure he’d be better off with a steady supply—someone on the inside feeding him a little of this and a little of that, in quantity and on a predictable schedule.”

Horses and riders marched out onto the parade grounds of the Stadium of Tomorrow for the warm-up show. The riders wore spangly red-white-and-blue uniforms and put their mounts through some synchronized rearing and prancing. A brass band played “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and the audience gave back a tepid round of applause.

“It would affect the nature of his stock,” Jesse said. “It wouldn’t be random, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the kind of thing that people tend to leave behind.”

“So we need to see his stock.”

“Onslow might be reluctant to show us. If he has a source inside the City, he’ll know all about the attempt on Grant. If we’re too obvious, he’ll play dumb. But he’s a businessman,” Jesse said, “and if he scents cash, he’s bound to show us something.”

It was almost noon. The horse show came to a desultory conclusion. The parade grounds cleared. There was a wooden tower to the left of the bleachers, and a man in nautical garb climbed to its highest point, a sort of crow’s nest, where he trained a theatrically huge brass telescope on the southern horizon. Down on the ground, in what would have been the center ring if this had been an actual circus, a master of ceremonies in a claw-hammer coat addressed the crowd through a megaphone. Something about how the people in the bleachers were about to witness an “indisputable miracle of the future,” meanwhile consulting a pocket watch on a chain and glancing at the tower, where the man with the telescope eventually rang a bell and shouted, “Airship ho!”

The crowd grew hushed with anticipation. Elizabeth leaned toward Jesse’s ear and said, “That was pretty fucked up last night. The way you were yelling. Maybe we should talk about it.”

“No,” Jesse said, horrified.

The helicopter appeared first as a mote on the southern horizon, small as a blown leaf but remarkable for the precision of the curve it etched against the blue September sky. It seemed to increase in size as it approached, and the noise of it increased in step until it rattled the bleachers, thunder with a clockwork rhythm in it. At its closest approach the airship hovered in midair for all to admire. Then it darted at the audience, deft as a steel dragonfly.

“That’s Vijay,” Elizabeth said. “The pilot. Showing off. He can’t resist a crowd.”

Jesse guessed the people in the bleachers believed they had got their money’s worth. Some of the women covered their eyes or clutched their husbands’ arms, pleased and terrified in equal parts; some of the men cringed into their seats. For an interminable moment, tons of screaming steel hung suspended above their heads. Then the airship veered away.

Elizabeth was still talking into Jesse’s ear, shouting to make herself heard: “We call it PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I mean, I’m not diagnosing you, and you can tell me it’s none of my business. But it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You think I have some kind of disease?”

“I’m a veteran—I know lots of people who are dealing with PTSD.”

“Is your husband one of them?”

It was an ugly remark and he regretted it immediately. But she only blinked and said, “Actually, yeah.”

The helicopter flew to the south. Before a minute had passed it was almost invisible, a dark comet carving the blue meridian.

“I’m sorry,” Jesse said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Let’s go see Onslow,” Elizabeth said.

He had almost let himself forget that Elizabeth was a married woman—whatever that meant to women of her time.

It wasn’t that Jesse cherished any illusions about the sanctity of marriage. He had learned about the hypocrisy of married men at an early age. And it wasn’t that he was attracted to Elizabeth, in the romantic sense. Of course he’d noticed that she was attractive, for a woman of her unusual height and strength. But she was out of bounds. She was Tower One. Her marriage was none of his business … any more than his night terrors were any business of hers.

Still, now that she had reminded him of it, he couldn’t help wondering about her life in the twenty-first century. As hard as it was to picture her as a soldier, it was harder still to picture her as a soldier’s wife, the wife of a soldier who woke at dawn with the echo of a scream in his ears. The way she had clasped Jesse’s hands, he realized, had been a sort of medical intervention, kindly but impersonal, like a nurse binding a wound.

There was much he didn’t know about her.

They walked into Onslow’s Unusual Items like a pair of tourists, giddy from the helicopter show. Jesse looked around as the shopkeeper—presumably Onslow—waited on another customer. The large front room of the shop was walled with shelves and stocked with the same kind of merchandise every other such store in Futurity Station sold. If Onslow had something better to offer, he didn’t keep it in plain view. All that distinguished Onslow from any other vendor on Lookout Street was his girth (generous) and the plain straw boater he tipped to his female customers. His chin was clean shaven, but his sideburns were making a determined march on it. His eyes were narrow and calculating.

The bell over the door tinkled as Onslow’s previous customer left. Onslow turned to Jesse and said, “How can I help you?”

Elizabeth, as they had arranged, remained at the far end of the store so Jesse could speak freely. He mentioned the name of the store they had visited on Depot.

“I know the place,” Onslow said. “Did you buy the book in the window?”

“A copy of it,” Jesse said. “But don’t tell my wife.”

Onslow grinned and touched a finger to the side of his nose. “If that’s the sort of thing you want, you’ve come to the right place. Genuine editions or copies as you prefer and can afford. Harry Potter. Fifty Shades of Grey. The works of Lee Child—”

“Thank you, but I already have a book. I’m interested in something more substantial.”

“A display piece? A watch, say? Something electrical? Such things don’t come cheap, as I’m sure you know.”

“Well, I haven’t thought it through. What can you offer me?”

“Do you have a price in mind?”

Jesse gave a number that seemed excessive even for the successful businessman he was pretending to be. He hoped it wouldn’t make Onslow suspicious. In fact it had the opposite effect. Onslow said, “That rules out the more spectacular items.”

“I might be convinced to go slightly higher—what do you call spectacular?”

Onslow unlocked a drawer, took out a rectangular object of glass and plastic and placed it on the counter. Jesse recognized it as what Elizabeth would call a smartphone. Tower One guests carried them. He feigned ignorance. “It’s not very large. What does it do?”

“It does more than you can imagine.” Onslow touched a button. Instantly, images welled up on the screen of the device. “It makes pictures that move and speak. It plays music. It can even add and subtract.”

Elizabeth stopped pretending not to overhear and joined them. Onslow repeated his description of the device. She turned to Jesse and said, “Why, that’s marvelous! Can it possibly do what the man says?”

Here was another interesting fact about Elizabeth, her ability to lie without blushing. “I don’t know. I suppose it can.”

“It almost seems alive. Is it alive? I mean to say, will it work this way forever? Or does it need some kind of fuel?”

“That’s a fine question, Mrs.—”

“Cullum,” Elizabeth said promptly.

“A fine question, Mrs. Cullum. On its own, no, it would not work indefinitely. But its functions can be restored with this.” He took another device from a different drawer, a glassy wafer with a wire dangling from it. “You attach the wire like so, and put this under sunlight for an hour or two.”

“Sunlight?”

“Nothing more, nothing less.”

“It fuels itself with sunlight? How is that possible?”

“I don’t pretend to understand it, Mrs. Cullum. I can tell you what it does, and I can tell you how to make it do what it does, but I’m as ignorant as an infant regarding its works.”

“Have you sold many of these?”

“Just a few. They’re scarce, as you can imagine.”

Jesse said, “It’s a costly item.”

“I’m sure it must be! Has Mr. Onslow mentioned a price?”

“Yes, but—”

“In that case, Mr. Onslow, would you excuse us while I talk this over with my husband?”

“Of course.”

Out of earshot, Elizabeth said, “This pretty much nails him.”

“Does it? How so? The device is something a tourist might have lost, isn’t it? There’s nothing to say he got it directly from the City.”

“The device, sure, but not the charger. The City makes sure its guests have access to electrical power everywhere they go. The City hotels in New York and San Francisco run generators around the clock—even the City’s Pullman cars are electrified. Nobody needs to bring a solar charger through the Mirror, and nobody does.”

“So we shouldn’t buy it?”

“Waste of money.”

“We ought to buy something,” Jesse said, “if only to keep up the charade.”

He went back to the counter and looked wistfully at the phone. Onslow said, “Have you come to a decision?”

“Is the price negotiable?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“In that case, can we see something a little less costly?”

Onslow was visibly disappointed. “There’s an assortment of simple goods in the drawers at the side. All individually priced. You’re welcome to look.”

It was a chilly invitation, but Jesse dutifully open one of the drawers Onslow had pointed out.

His eyes widened.

The drawer was full of Oakley sunglasses in plastic wrappers.

“I’ll take one of these,” he said.

They went back to the dining room of the Excelsior for their evening meal. The room was crowded tonight. A dozen or more press men, in town for Grant’s visit, filled the air with cigar smoke and forced levity, but Jesse managed to secure a reasonably private table in a darkened corner. He ordered mutton stew with a side of boiled onions; Elizabeth ordered roast beef. A waiter drew the curtains and lit lamps as sunset colored the sky.

“We don’t know for sure if it was Onslow who supplied the pistol,” Elizabeth said, “but we can be fairly sure he has connections inside the City. So we need to look at the supply side, any City employees Onslow might have had contact with. I’ll call Barton tonight and let him know what we found out.”

“It’s a different town after dark,” Jesse said, “when the shops close and the saloons open up. It would be easy enough to follow Onslow, see who crosses his path.”

“I guess we could do that.”

“Not we,” Jesse corrected her. “A respectable woman would be out of place in the kind of establishment Onslow is likely to frequent.”

“I’m respectable now?”

He smiled and said, “In a dim light you’d pass.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“I can scout the south end of town while you talk to the City.”

“Uh-huh. Or you could just go out and get drunk.”

“I could get drunk and hire a loose woman and come back with my pants on sideways, but is that really what you imagine I mean to do?”

She laughed. “I guess not.”

At least she gives me the benefit of the doubt, Jesse thought. “I’m sorry I raised the subject of your husband, back at the helicopter show. It’s none of my business and I shouldn’t have presumed.”

“Are you curious about my husband?”

He didn’t know how to answer that.

She said, “His name’s Javiar. I met him in high school. He dreamed about doing something big, like becoming a doctor, but he was a west Charlotte kid with all the baggage. We enlisted about the same time. Nineteen years old, both of us, we got married at city hall and signed up a month later, how crazy is that? I ended up in signals intelligence, but Javiar was infantry. Multiple tours. After we mustered out it seemed like we had a chance. I got a job with Riptide, that’s a security company that hires a lot of vets. Javiar hired on, too, and that was okay for a while, but he didn’t last. They eventually fired him for not showing up, or for showing up drunk, some combination of the two. So I was the breadwinner, and we had Gabby by then.”

“Gabby?”

“Our daughter. Gabriella. When Javiar got bored with looking for work he took up with some of his old friends. Who were mostly petty criminals. Breaking and entering, low-end drug dealing. He was happy to spend my paychecks but he resented having to ask me for them. He got angry. Often. He finally saw somebody at the VA hospital, got diagnosed with PTSD. Okay, you don’t know what that means—it’s something that happens to people who’ve had some kind of shocking or terrifying experience. Humiliating for these guys who come back from the front and suddenly they can’t sleep through the night, can’t think straight, get in fights, drink, do drugs, maybe end up on the street or in jail. So I tried to nurse Javiar through it. Talk him down when he woke up screaming. Tolerate his fits of anger. I drove him to the hospital and I made sure he kept his appointments. All that. But.”

Jesse waited as she took a sip of water.

“But he was out of control. It wasn’t just the PTSD. I think PTSD just opened the door to something that was inside him long before he enlisted. It got to where he was obviously dangerous, not just to me but to Gabby. He fired a gun in the house.”

“Is that why he went to prison?”

“They took him on multiple charges, including a botched drug deal where he pushed a guy into a wall and broke his hip. But I testified against him in court. Because by then it was clear to me that Javiar wanted to hurt us, and that he would hurt us, or try to, sooner or later. I wanted him behind bars long enough to get Gabby and me to a safe place. Which is why I’m at the City, actually. The City’s security service offered me a pretty generous contract. It means I’m away from Gabby for months at a time, which is bad, and it means my mother is caring for Gabby while I’m in 1876, which I’m not real happy about. But at the end of my tour I get a paycheck big enough to take us out of North Carolina altogether. Divorce, name change, new job. That’s my plan.”

Jesse was too startled to say more than, “I see.”

“The moral of the story is, I’m not shocked by the fact that you wake up in a cold sweat in the small hours of the morning. I don’t think it’s some kind of weakness you have.”

“Do you think I’m dangerous? Like Javiar?”

“I don’t know you well enough to say. But on slim evidence, no, I don’t think you’re dangerous.” She added, “In that way.”

Clearly, she knew she was treading on troubled ground. But Jesse guessed she wanted to clear the air. She valued honesty. After a moment’s thought he said, “You twenty-first-century women remind me of whores.”

Elizabeth stiffened in her chair. Her eyes went narrow and hard.

He said, “That’s not an insult. I don’t mean you have loose morals or that you’re venal or contemptible. I was raised around whores, and for the most part they treated me well. What I mean is, whores tend to speak frankly. They see much, and they take a cynical view of things. Listening to their talk spared me a host of polite delusions. It made me harder to fool, and it forced me to think honestly about myself. Do you understand?”

She was a long time answering, but she said, “I guess so.”

“I think you’re an honorable woman, Elizabeth. And I hope things go well for you and Gabby.”

“Okay. So what would you say to a whore who asked you about your bad dreams?”

“I would thank her for her concern,” he said, “and I would tell her it’s a subject I don’t care to discuss.”

Futurity Station was a different town after dark. It was still a circus, Jesse thought, but it was a night circus now: fewer lion tamers, more cooch shows. Storefronts closed and saloon doors opened. Lookout Street was crowded with men, many of them spitting tobacco with carefree abandon, and on the side streets gaslights gave way to torches.

Onslow’s store was shuttered now, but there was a saloon around the corner. Jesse went inside and was assaulted by the smell of adulterated liquor and cigar smoke and the bodies of unbathed men—four years of sanitized City life had made him as sensitive as a woman.

The saloon served beer at tables, like a German establishment, but featured frontier attractions: faro, poker, California pedro. Jesse spotted Onslow standing at the bar. He turned away and took a table at the far end of the room and paid for pickled eggs and a pitcher of beer.

He thought about what Elizabeth had said about PTSD. The letters, she had explained, stood for post-traumatic stress disorder. Post, a Latin word meaning after. Traumatic stress, self-explanatory. Disorder, because the people of the future liked opaque words; since the condition was treated in hospitals, Jesse guessed the word was a euphemism for disease.

Did that mean he was suffering from a disease? Maybe so, by Elizabeth’s standards. But it didn’t feel exceptional enough to qualify as diseased: His condition wasn’t exactly uncommon. The whole nation has PTSD, Jesse thought. It was a plague that had started at Fort Sumter and grown virulent at Manassas. Its nightmares were lynchings, Indian wars, and the pick-handle brigades that hunted Chinamen on the docks of San Francisco. And if we ever wake up from such dreams, he thought, then yes, we’ll likely wake up screaming.

Onslow drank continuously and methodically for most of an hour, his back to Jesse. He didn’t stir from his barstool until three men entered the saloon and approached him. One slapped him on the back as the other two laughed amicably. Onslow accompanied them to a table. Jesse tried to memorize the features of these men, insofar as the flickering light of the kerosene lanterns permitted. Two of the men were strangers to him, but one looked tantalizingly familiar. He couldn’t be sure … but he thought it might be the coach driver, the one who had handed down his and Elizabeth’s bags after the trip from the City of Futurity.

He left the saloon before he could be recognized in return. He needed time to think.

He thought about the man who looked like the coachman. If he was a City hire he would probably be staying at the Excelsior. Maybe the desk clerk could identify him, or maybe Elizabeth could talk to Barton about it. Jesse stood in the dimness beyond the torchlight, in the shade of a wooden building he took to be a brothel by the sounds emanating from it, and watched the saloon for most of another hour, but the coachman didn’t emerge. He was about to give it up when the door of the building behind him flew open and a woman stepped out to empty a slop jar into the alley. He turned and exchanged a look with her, and before he could walk away she said, “My God, is that Jesse Cullum?”

He stared, speechless.

“It is!” she said.

He knew her, of course. Her name was Heddie Finch. She used to work at a white bordello on Pike Street, back in the Tenderloin. “Well, Heddie,” he said. “You’re a long way from home.”

She stepped away from the light that shone through the half-open door. It seemed to dawn on her that Jesse Cullum might not want to be recognized. “How are you, Jesse?”

“I’m all right. You?”

She shrugged. “I left San Francisco after the trouble. A lot of us did. Some went to Sacramento, or back east. I ended up here. But not permanently, if I can help it—Illinois winters are colder than a nun’s cunt. I swear, Jesse, I thought I’d never see you again, not after—”

She registered his expression and stopped speaking.

“I’d appreciate it,” he said, “if you didn’t mention my name to anyone.”

Whispering now: “They still talk about you in the Tenderloin. The man who shot Roscoe Candy. We all thought you was dead.”

“I left right after I killed him.”

Her eyes went wide. “Is that what you think? Oh, Jesse! You shot him all right. Dead center. But you didn’t kill him, worse luck.”

5

Jesse braced himself for bad dreams. Running into Heddie Finch had provoked all kinds of troublesome memories. But from the moment he put his head on his pillow, he slept as soundly as if he had dosed himself with laudanum. When he next opened his eyes Elizabeth was standing by the bed, fully dressed, and sunlight streamed through the window curtains.

Another bright, cloudless day, cooler than the one before. Over breakfast Elizabeth described her wireless conversation with the security chief Barton back at the City. Barton had thanked her for what they had learned, but his only advice was to “keep Onslow under surveillance.” Spy on him, in plainer words. But Jesse had a better idea. “Do you carry your phone when you go out?”

She nodded. Jesse supposed it was tucked into some hidden compartment of her day dress, probably secured with Velcro.

“Will it work from anywhere in Futurity Station?”

“As long as it’s within range of the repeater on the roof of the hotel, yeah. Why?”

“Keep it with you. We may need it. The first thing I want to do is talk to the owner.”

“The owner of what?”

“Of this hotel. Or at least the manager.”

“What do you think the manager of the Excelsior can tell us?”

“He can tell us who runs this town.”

The hotel manager, a cadaverously thin man whose name Jesse promptly forgot, was reluctant to speak to them until Elizabeth reminded him that they were from the City.

The manager escorted them to his office, a room furnished with a few chairs and a pedestal desk with a chased silver inkwell on it. “We have excellent relations with the City of Futurity. We allow you to install your machines, we let you inspect the kitchen, we let you poison the bedbugs—I don’t know what more you could possibly want.”

Jesse said, “There’s no problem with the hotel. Everything’s very satisfactory. You’re doing a fine job.”

“Well, we try.”

“When you say ‘we’—?”

“Speaking for my staff and myself. The hotel is owned by a partnership in Chicago, as I’m sure you know.”

“The Excelsior is the town’s preeminent business, isn’t it?”

“I like to think so. We’ve been here since the beginning, when the agents of the City and the railroad first put these lots up for sale.”

“I’d guess a gentleman like you knows everyone worth knowing in this town.”

“You give me too much credit. But I keep my eyes open.”

“The town’s high rollers, could you name them?”

The manager’s face clouded. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

“Well, say we wanted to throw a party for the men who matter in Futurity Station. Who would be the first five names on the list?”

“Is this—are you actually planning such a party?”

“Remains to be seen,” Jesse said.

“Well. Five names? I would have to say … Karl Knudsen, who holds leases on half the properties on Lookout. Billy Mingus, the restaurateur. A shop owner, Elbert Onslow. Casper Brigham, if I have to name another hotelier. Oh, and of course Marcus Frane. Mr. Frane would be at the top of the list.”

“Marcus Frane?”

“He owns the Stadium of Tomorrow.”

“Does Mr. Frane live in town?”

“He winters in Chicago but he’s usually here until the end of September. He stays at the Dunston House when he’s not supervising the show.”

“Can we find him at the stadium, if we want to talk to him?”

“This time of day, almost certainly.”

“Thank you,” Jesse said, standing. “That’s all very helpful.”

“You’re welcome. About this party—”

“We’ll let you know if we need to make arrangements.”

The manager was wrong. Marcus Frane wasn’t at the Stadium of Tomorrow. The ticket-taker directed them to the Deluxe Barber Shop on Depot Street, where Frane was holding court with a half dozen cronies.

Or thugs, Jesse thought. More thugs than cronies by the look of them. Their presence suggested that Frane was the right person to talk to, though possibly dangerous.

Elizabeth came into the barber shop with Jesse, which made everyone sit up and stare. Frane’s men occupied all the chairs, but only Frane was getting service. After a long moment the barber whipped away a cotton bib as if he were unveiling a statue, and Frane wiped his face and gave Jesse and Elizabeth a long, thoughtful look.

“We’d like to have a word with you,” Jesse said.

Frane was a big man, neither very young nor very old, strong and confident in his body. He stood up. “I’m afraid we haven’t been introduced.”

“We’re from the City.”

“Is that so?”

Elizabeth spoke up: “Yes. That’s so.”

In this case, her frankness was as good as a calling card. Frane asked the barber to take a break. He told his boys to wait outside. The doors creaked closed. The shop seemed suddenly larger. Sunlight striking bottles of pomade made rainbows on the ceiling. “I don’t have any beef with the City,” Frane said. “Does the City have a beef with me?”

“I’d say the City does pretty well by you,” Jesse said. “It flies the airship that puts paying customers on those bleachers of yours every day.”

“What of it?”

“Given how much you benefit from the City, we hoped you’d be willing to do the City a favor in return.”

Frane paused long enough to take a cigar from his pocket and trim it and light it. “What kind of favor?”

“We both know this town runs on contraband. Men like Elbert Onslow make their entire living from it.”

“Is this about Onslow?”

“In a way.”

“So go talk to him. I don’t deal in contraband, and I don’t have much to do with Elbert Onslow.”

Though you drink with him, Jesse thought. Jesse was fairly sure Frane had been one of Onslow’s companions in the saloon last night. “Mr. Onslow might be reluctant to tell us what we want to know.”

“I don’t see how that concerns me.”

“Mr. Frane, has the City ever interfered in your business?”

“No—”

“No, nor has it interfered in Onslow’s business. What goes on in this town doesn’t always please us, but our attitude is live and let live. Everybody gets along and everybody makes money. As long as everything stays within certain limits. The trouble is, Onslow overstepped those bounds. He’s been buying from someone who shouldn’t be selling, and we want to know the name of the person he’s dealing with.”

“Ask Onslow.”

“He has every reason not to tell us. The City isn’t the law here. What Onslow’s doing is underhanded, but it isn’t illegal. We can’t easily dispossess him and we’re too civilized to burn his shop down. All we want to know is who he buys his guns from.”

Elizabeth gave Jesse a sharp look. He probably shouldn’t have mentioned guns. But it had the desired effect on Frane, who grew more serious. “If Onslow’s selling guns, I don’t know anything about it.”

“But you can find out. And when you do find out, you can tell us.”

“Are you drunk? Onslow’s not stupid—if he won’t talk to you, he won’t talk to me.”

“We think you’re wrong. We think he’d be willing to share the information on a friendly basis, if you ask him politely. Or you can be impolite and unfriendly, if the first approach fails.”

“You want me to intimidate a fellow businessman, for no better reason than that you’re unwilling to intimidate him yourself?”

“You seem like just the man who could do it.”

Frane drew himself up to his full height. He had the thick hands and scarred knuckles of a brawler, and his nose had been broken at least once. Jesse had seen plenty of men like Frane in San Francisco, men who had prised gold out of mountains and imagined themselves transformed into imperial powers. Men who wore silk hats and pissed in the street. “I’m not your servant,” Frane said. “Do your own dirty work.”

Jesse could see Elizabeth’s impatience in her face. She was itching to speak. But she had agreed to let him handle this. “I remind you again,” Jesse said, “we represent the City of Futurity.”

“Maybe so, but you don’t own my land, you don’t own my bleachers, and you don’t own the bright blue sky. I’m not about to strong-arm Onslow just because some hired bull strutted in here with the word ‘City’ on his lips.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“And I’m sorry you’re blocking my sunlight.”

“What the fuck!” Elizabeth exclaimed as the door swung shut behind her. One of Frane’s henchmen overheard her and laughed derisively. Jesse steered her farther down the sidewalk.

“You’re attracting attention.”

“Does it matter? Before midnight, everyone in town will know we’re City operatives.”

An operative, Jesse thought—is that what I am? “Before midnight we’ll probably have what we came for.”

“And what leads you to that conclusion?”

“Yesterday at the bleachers you mentioned Vijay.”

“Sandeep Vijay, the helicopter pilot—what about him?”

“He’s a friend of yours, you said.”

“We’re not best buds, but I know him.”

“You have your phone. Can you call him?”

“Sure, but why would I— Oh.” She paused. Jesse was gratified to see the smile that evolved on her lips. “Yeah, I can talk to Vijay.”

They took a midday meal at the Excelsior. Because there was nothing to do but wait, the conversation grew halting and awkward. Jesse was silent much of the time, casting glances through the window. President Grant had left the City this morning, and a little before noon a crowd of gawkers and newsmen had descended on the train station to look at him. Grant had waved at the crowd but said nothing—it had taken a gunshot to silence the eloquent Lincoln, but Grant was mute as a crawfish.

Then the depot had reverted to its customary business. Later today a convoy of twenty-first-century visitors would be escorted onto a City train bound for a week-long tour of Manhattan. Of Futurity Station they would experience nothing but its pervasive odor—like an outhouse on a summer afternoon, Jesse thought, a mingled perfume of shit and slaked lime, which even Jesse found galling, though he wouldn’t give Elizabeth the satisfaction of hearing him say so.

He had taken delivery of his copy of The Shining from the store on Depot Street. It sat on the table now, and Elizabeth pointed at it with her spoon: “Are you actually going to read that?”

“I don’t see why not. I’m braced for the obscenities. I’m not expecting Pilgrim’s Progress.”

“Whose progress? No, never mind. You seem pretty well-read for a guy who claims to have been educated by prostitutes.”

“My father loved books.”

“I thought you said he was a doorman. Or a magician.”

“He could read, and not just the Bible. He kept three volumes of Gibbon in a sea chest by his bed. I didn’t go to school—his books were my school.”

“But he opened doors for a living?”

Jesse saw by Elizabeth’s frankly curious expression that she wasn’t going to let the matter drop. “He was a large man, like me. I inherited his size. He wasn’t a doorman as I imagine you understand the word. He earned his income as a bouncer. Do you know what I mean?”

“A big dude who kicks out troublemakers?”

“Essentially.”

“Kicks them out of the whorehouse?”

“To be blunt, yes.”

“So your father was a bouncer at a whorehouse in San Francisco?”

“Originally in New Orleans. When war broke out he bought us passage to California by way of Cape Horn.” On a decaying freighter that wallowed in heavy seas like a damp cork. Jesse had been eight years old, and he had vomited himself senseless in the storms off Tierra del Fuego. Coming on deck after the weather cleared, dazed and drained, he had mistaken the petrels wheeling over the ship for angels. “He found similar work in the Tenderloin.” Similar but even more dangerous, in a city where women were scarce and the troublemakers tended to be hardened veterans of the gold fields.

“Sounds like a rough life.”

“Because of my size, he made me his apprentice. By the age of thirteen I was working the door at Madame Chao’s on weeknights. I took some knocks.” Some of which had nearly killed him. “I saw my father bloodied more than once and sometimes badly hurt. But coming to California kept him away from Manassas and Shiloh, which was the whole purpose of it.”

Not that it had saved him, in the end.

“Do you think less of him for that?”

Jesse was puzzled by the question. “Think less of him for what?”

“Dodging the war. Not doing his bit for the Union. Or the Confederacy or whatever.”

“His sentiments were Union, but he lived in New Orleans. He was smart to get away.”

“As opposed to cowardly.”

“What would you have had him do, Elizabeth? Abandon me and Phoebe in a New Orleans parlor house and head north to enlist?”

“Who’s Phoebe?”

He had spoken without thinking. “My sister,” he admitted.

“Younger, older?”

“Younger.”

Phoebe had been just two years old when they began the journey to California. She had slept through the storms as blissfully as if the swells were God’s way of rocking her cradle. Briefly, Jesse had hated her for it.

“What about your mother?”

“She died delivering me, just as Phoebe’s mother died delivering Phoebe.”

Elizabeth blanched.

Jesse said, “I suppose women never die in childbirth, where you come from.”

“Not the way yours do.”

“And you’ll hand it over to us next year, I suppose, the medical knowledge that protects your mothers and infants.”

“I guess so.”

“And I guess we thank you. Though I can’t help wondering how many women and children must have died while you waited.”

That sounded harsher than he meant it to. Jesse regretted the words, but Elizabeth didn’t answer, and he saw by the tilt of her head that she was listening to the sounds coming through the open window: passing carriages, the chiming of the railway station’s big clock. Top of the hour. A stilling of voices. High noon. Right about now, down at the bottom of Lookout Street in the Stadium of Tomorrow, the barker would be finishing his spiel about the wonders of the future, the sailor in the lookout tower would be aiming his theatrical telescope at the southern horizon.

Elizabeth caught Jesse’s eye, acknowledging a shared secret. She had talked to Vijay, the helicopter pilot. Vijay had agreed to fly a different route today, west and south of Futurity Station. The customers on Marcus Frane’s sun-beaten bleachers might catch a glimpse of a dark speck moving against the horizon, but that was all they would see.

“Now we wait,” Jesse said.

Frane’s response came in the form of an anonymous note delivered after sunset to the front desk of the Excelsior:

The man you want is Isaac Connaught he drives a coach from the city he is Onslows man.

“Awesome,” Elizabeth said. “Nice work. With any luck we can head back to the City tomorrow. I’ll call Barton and let him know.”

“Do that,” Jesse said. “I’m going out.”

“Going out for what?”

“Some business of my own.”

“What business?”

“Do you trust me?”

“I don’t know. Should I?”

“I’ll be back by midnight,” Jesse said.

He made his way to the brothel where he had met Heddie Finch the night before, dodging the drunks who loitered outside the saloons. He knocked at the door and made it a point to smile when the doorman opened up.

My old job, Jesse thought. He knew it was important to state his business as succinctly as possible. “I’m not a customer,” he said. “I’ve come to see Heddie Finch.”

The doorman was untypically short for his calling, but he made up for it with his enormous width. He looked like a boulder balanced on a pair of bowling pins. “She ain’t here.”

“That’s all right. I just want to talk, but I’ll pay the going rate if I have to. I’m an old acquaintance of hers.”

“Good for you. But she still ain’t here. Plenty of other girls, though. Come in and take your pick, or move along—one or the other.”

Jesse was inclined to believe the man. “Will she be back tomorrow night?”

“She won’t be back at all. She left town. What’s one buggy old whore to you, anyway?”

“Left town?”

“That’s what I said.”

“For where?”

“I ain’t her keeper. She took what little she owns and headed for the train station in a hurry. It ain’t unusual for these gals to pick up and leave, if they think they can get away with it.”

Heddie had always been flighty and easily scared. But never without good reason.

Jesse thought: Am I the reason?

“Now move along, lummox, you’re blocking the door.”

Jesse moved along. He needed to think about Heddie’s hasty departure, but he didn’t want to let the question distract him. He had another task to attend to.

He found the alley that ran parallel to Lookout on the west side. The alley was unlit and fouled with trash and the occasional dead animal, but there was moonlight enough for Jesse to pick his way north, counting buildings, until he reached the back door of Onslow’s shop. No light came from inside. The door itself was heavy and was secured with a rusty padlock. Jesse had no key, but he had the boot at the end of his left leg. It took three vigorous kicks to lift the hasp from the doorframe.

He waited to see whether anyone would respond to the noise, but no one did. The building was dark and seemed to be empty. He took two steps inside and counted to ten, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and even then he could see little more than a few ghostly outlines. He was in a room walled with shelves. A bulky presence in front of him was probably a table. He put his hands out before him and took another step. The shape of the table became more distinct. Cautiously, he swept his arm across the surface of it and found what he hoped had been left there: a finger-loop oil lamp. He pulled off the shade and took a book of City matches from his pocket, little paper lucifers attached to a sandpaper striking board. The lamp was nearly empty of oil, but there was enough in the font to support a small flame.

In the fresh light Jesse scanned the room, which seemed to be where Onslow kept his stock. The shelves were bounteously full. Jesse admired the novelty and variety of what he saw. Then he found a burlap bag abandoned in a corner, and began methodically to fill it.

Coming through the lobby of the Excelsior with the bag draped over his shoulder made him feel like some kind of criminal St. Nicholas. The night clerk gave him a hard stare but said nothing. Upstairs, Elizabeth was waiting for him. “Where’d you go?”

He came inside and closed the door. “Onslow’s back room.”

“You broke in?”

He nodded.

“Uh-huh,” Elizabeth said. She stared at the bag. “So what’s that? I hope to hell it’s not full of Oakleys.”

“I wish it was. It wouldn’t be so cursed heavy.” He emptied the bag on the bed. He didn’t know what a Glock automatic pistol weighed, but he guessed about two pounds. And here were twenty of them.

6

The woman’s name was Zaina Baumgartner, her title was “events manager,” and her job was to arrange stage and screen presentations in both towers of the City—show business, in other words.

Jesse had not known many show people, certainly none from the twenty-first century. He wondered if Baumgartner was a representative example. She was tall and almost unnaturally thin, her gestures were nervous, and she seemed to regard Elizabeth and Jesse as lesser creatures bent on distracting her from the more important things in life. Elizabeth’s first words on stepping into Baumgartner’s Tower One office were, “We need to ask you a few questions.” Baumgartner said, “But I have a screening.”

Four days had passed since Jesse and Elizabeth had arrived back at the City. They had delivered their bag of automatic pistols to the security chief, Barton, whose reaction was a wide-eyed “Holy shit!” Since then Barton had been holding daily conferences with Elizabeth in his office. Jesse had not been invited to these sessions, but Elizabeth had apparently agreed to retain him as her partner: She had called him to accompany her to this meeting with Baumgartner, the purpose of which she declined to explain.

“This is urgent,” Elizabeth said.

Which didn’t stop Baumgartner from walking out of her own office. “The screening is scheduled for five minutes ago. It’s the new version of Manned Flight. All the department heads are waiting! Follow me.”

So they hustled to keep up with Ms. Baumgartner as she made for the elevators. “Gearing up for the final year,” she said. “It’s going to be just ridiculously busy. The film we’re screening now is an improved version of the one we’ve been showing to local guests since the City opened for business. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Starting in January we’re booking major talent, local and home. Mr. Kemp wants a Cirque du Soleil show that will perform for both towers. You cannot imagine the complexity! And we’re trying to book local celebrities as well. Maybe a lecture by Mark Twain—”

Jesse said, “Twain? The ‘Jumping Frog’ writer?”

Baumgartner seemed to notice him for the first time. “You’re local yourself, are you not?” She asked Elizabeth, “Should I be discussing this with him?”

“He’s been vetted.”

“Well, then, yes, Twain. Why, do you know him?”

“Not personally.” Twain, aka Sam Clemens, had acquired a certain reputation in Virginia City and San Francisco, not exclusively literary. Clemens had vanished from San Francisco for a few months after a friend of his killed a bartender by breaking a bottle over his head. Nor had Jesse been much impressed by the frog piece when it appeared in The Californian. It was just another mining-camp story, as far as he could tell. But it had been well received, and if City people wanted to see him, then Twain must be destined for a sterling literary career. Unless the City destroyed that career by the very act of announcing it.

“Well, it’s difficult,” Baumgartner declared, bounding off the elevator as the doors opened on the theatrical level. “I’m sure you can imagine!”

Elizabeth said without much real hope in her voice, “We have just a few questions—”

“They’ll wait, won’t they? You can sit at the back of the theater and we’ll talk after the presentation, how about that? Then you’ll have all my attention—I promise.”

Elizabeth shrugged. They filed into the cinema behind Baumgartner, who abandoned them in the back row and headed for the stage. There were only a few people in the seats down front, some of whom Jesse recognized as bosses from the City’s entertainment division. Baumgartner took up a handheld microphone and addressed them from in front of the enormous screen. She told them how difficult it had been to design an introduction to cinema for audiences of the 1870s: “Motion pictures were first shown to the public in the 1890s, and when those people saw a moving train on the screen some of them actually ran away from it. So it’s always been a question of introducing locals to movies in a way they can easily assimilate. That’s why we have a five-night sequence, where the first night is a lecture and some brief examples—it conditions them, so what comes after isn’t so alarming. And that’s only the first hurdle! Think of all the cinematic conventions these people have never absorbed, things like continuity, cross-cutting, close-ups. The version of Manned Flight you’re about to see builds on everything we’ve learned about presenting movies to an unsophisticated audience. It’s simple, it’s relatively short, and by modern standards it’s fairly static. But it’s also viewer-friendly and gauged to impress naïve viewers without frightening them.”

Jesse could only guess what all this meant. Not long after he was hired by the City, he and the other local employees had been given a special screening of the various films offered to paying guests. The shows had impressed him mightily, but she was right about how difficult they had been to understand.

“And Manned Flight is only the first of our enhancements to the film program. Next month we’ll be introducing revised versions of Cities of Tomorrow and Wonders of Science.”

All guaranteed not to provoke undue terror in their audiences. Baumgartner stopped talking and took a seat; the lights dimmed; the movie began. Jesse watched with interest. The scenes of gleaming airships darting among the clouds were as astonishing as they were unsettling, but he liked the animated sequences best: cartoon illustrations of the early years of aviation, featuring mustachioed men of the relatively near future and their comical adventures with flying machines. The sons of our generation, he thought. Sons and daughters: apparently there would be women among the pioneers of aviation.

Elizabeth sat close to him in the darkness, the blue cotton cloth of her City trousers pressed against his thigh. It was a pleasant feeling, which he tried to ignore. City women had a free-and-easy demeanor that did not mean they were either free or easy. That was one of the mistakes local men too often made when they were hired for City work, and it was a fatal one: A single unwelcome advance could put you out the door. Likewise uttering racial or national insults, even if you didn’t recognize them as such. Jesse was fortunate in that regard: His time at Madame Chao’s had taught him how to speak placatingly to people of all extractions, from Samoan sailors to Dupont Gai hatchetmen. Watch your mouth and keep your hands to yourself was the first and firmest rule. And the last thing he wanted to do was insult Elizabeth DePaul, who was, after all, a married woman, even if her husband was currently in prison. But still, sitting thigh-to-thigh with her in the flickering shadows of Manned Flight, he couldn’t avoid the truth that he liked her. He liked her very much, in complicated ways.

Jesse had slept well for five consecutive nights since his return from Futurity Station. He felt freer and less worried, which might be a danger in itself: He couldn’t afford to let down his guard, especially in light of what Heddie Finch had said about the monster Roscoe Candy. Impossible as it seemed, Candy still lived. That was very bad news. Worse, Heddie knew where Jesse could be found, and Heddie had left town the day after she spotted him. Was it possible the news of Jesse’s whereabouts might reach the ears of Roscoe Candy? If so, might Candy come looking for him—or worse, for Jesse’s sister, Phoebe?

The movie ended with a last giddy aerial view of a flying machine dipping its wings toward some vast, impossible city. Then the theater lights came up and Baumgartner spent a maddening quarter-hour glad-handing the assembled managers before she made her way up the aisle to where Jesse and Elizabeth sat. “We can talk in the green room,” she said cheerily. “Thanks for your patience!”

The room to which Baumgartner led them was furnished with a conference table and some folding chairs, a coffee urn, and the clutter of used paper cups. Baumgartner settled into one of the chairs and said, “Well, I think that was successful!”

“No doubt,” Elizabeth said. Elizabeth had asked Jesse to keep quiet during the interview, for the same reason he had taken the lead in Futurity Station. This was her investigation now, on her turf. “It’s amazing how much thought has gone into the film program,” she said.

Baumgartner beamed. “Isn’t it? August Kemp has been personally involved, so we’ve all been doing our very best to get it right. He has a way of motivating people—his enthusiasm is contagious!”

Everyone professed to love Kemp. And most of that love seemed reasonably genuine. August Kemp was apparently one of those wealthy men who inspire devotion in their employees. Most of them. “What about you, Ms. Baumgartner? Are you a hands-off manager, or do you like to get up close and dirty?”

Something in Elizabeth’s voice made Baumgartner frown. “Before we go on, can I ask what this is all about? Mr. Barton arranged the interview, but he wasn’t clear about its purpose.”

“We’re looking at how supplies get distributed once they come through the Mirror. There have been problems with bottlenecks—shipments of nonessential goods clogging up inventory while more important items wait to get tagged.”

“I see. Well, I’m deeply involved in the work, but not so much that end of it. I haven’t noticed any problems if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Specifically, in August your department received new digital projectors?”

“We upgraded all five cinemas. Four-K two-D Barcos. New switchers, new interfaces, everything running off Android tablets—plus more lamps and lenses than we’re ever likely to need.”

“All arrived in a timely fashion, undamaged?”

“Yes! No problem at all.”

“Anything included that wasn’t on the bill of lading?”

“Not to my knowledge. Like what?”

“You unpacked these items yourself?”

Baumgartner hesitated and stroked her nose with the thumb of her right hand—it seemed to be a nervous habit. “Well, some of them. Mostly I leave that to the technicians.”

“Any technician in particular?”

“We have a team.”

“Do unauthorized personnel have access to your storeroom?”

“If so, I’m not aware of it. You’d need the right card to get in. Security, isn’t that your department?”

“And are you on friendly terms with any Tower Two employees outside of the entertainment division?”

“Because of the work I do, I have informal contacts with a lot of people in both towers.”

“Do you have contacts with any local people in Tower Two?”

“Like this one?” She waved her hand at Jesse, as if Elizabeth had brought him in on a leash. “As a rule, no.”

“All right. Let me read you a list of five names, and you tell me if you recognize any of them.” Elizabeth took a notepad from her hip pocket and flipped through pages while Baumgartner fidgeted. Elizabeth read the names slowly, and Jesse watched Baumgartner for any visible reaction.

There was none he could detect, but he was distracted by the last name Elizabeth read: Mick Finagle. Finagle was a Tower Two security guard, the one toward whom Jesse’s old girlfriend Doris Vanderkamp was currently directing her affections.

“No,” Baumgartner said curtly.

“Are you sure?”

“Not absolutely sure. I’m introduced to people on a daily basis, for all kinds of reasons, and I don’t always remember names. But nothing rings a bell. Honestly, this is starting to feel like an interrogation.”

“Are you aware of any contraband circulating among the staff in your department?”

“Contraband?”

“Drugs,” Elizabeth said.

She had chosen a moment when Baumgartner was once more reflexively rubbing her nose. Now her hand fluttered under the table like a startled bird. “What are you suggesting?”

“Are illicit drugs, such as cocaine, circulating in the entertainment division in Tower One?”

“Certainly not! I mean, as far as I know.”

Elizabeth penciled something into her notebook. “Okay. Thank you, Ms. Baumgartner. We may need to speak to you again, but that’s all for now. In the meantime, if you think of anything that might be pertinent, please contact me. Anything you choose to say will be held in the strictest confidence.” She lowered her voice and added, “We’re not interested in punishing anyone. Management is aware of how hard you work on behalf of the City. We just need to be aware of what’s coming through the Mirror, and we’d be grateful for any help you can give us.”

A threat and a promise in one package, Jesse thought. Neatly done. He followed Elizabeth out of the room, leaving Baumgartner dumbfounded and twitching. In the privacy of the staff elevator he said, “So what does Baumgartner have to do with guns?”

“Barton thinks the weapons came through the Mirror along with a shipment of theatrical gear. It’s reasonable to assume illegal drugs might be coming in by the same route. Baumgartner’s coke habit isn’t the secret she thinks it is, and it gives us leverage.”

“Coke?”

“Coke, yeah, you know: cocaine. When she powders her nose, she literally powders her nose. You understand?”

“Why would anyone bring cocaine from the twenty-first century?”

“What do you mean?”

“When she could just send someone to the druggist in Futurity Station. Coca wine, coca tooth drops, powdered cocaine—”

“Holy fuck,” Elizabeth said.

Wednesday night was Netflix Night in the Tower One Staff Common Room. Elizabeth might be there, and that was a temptation, but Jesse had attended the event last week and hadn’t felt especially welcome, so he took advantage of the free time to cross over to Tower Two and visit the commissary. He was hoping to run across Doris Vanderkamp, preferably not in the presence of her new beau.

Doris was unpredictable, but on slow weeknights she typically lingered in the commissary waiting for company to drift by. And true to form, here she was, working her way through a bucket of fried chicken and dropping crumbs onto the pages of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. “Interesting story?”

Doris glanced up, her dark hair bouncing like a nest of coiled springs. “You.” She sniffed and returned her attention to the paper. “Seems like the Spaniards caught up with Boss Tweed.”

“May I sit?”

“Don’t know why you’d want to. Everyone says you go around with that big-shouldered Tower One woman nowadays.”

He settled into a chair. “And you go around with Mick Finagle.”

“Are you jealous, Jesse Cullum?”

“Of course I’m jealous. Any man would be.”

“Liar.” But she gave him a grudging half smile.

“Have you seen him lately?”

“Who, Boss Tweed?”

“Mick.”

“How would that be any business of yours?”

“None, except that I need to talk to him.”

Doris closed the newspaper and pushed it aside. “What do you need to talk to Mick about?”

“About that head cold you can’t seem to get rid of.”

“Are you drunk?”

“You know me, Doris. I’m the original teetotaler. I don’t drink hard spirits. I also avoid Vin Mariani and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. But back in San Francisco—”

“In your earlier life. Which you’re always so careful not to talk about.”

“Back in San Francisco I knew folks who went to Chinatown from time to time. What they learn there is that a pipe can be a good deal easier to pick up than it is to put down. And I’ve seen what happens when such people don’t get what they need. Sweats, shakes, the runny nose. They try to make it up with laudanum or patent medicines, or they boil poppy heads for tea.”

“Nice friends you have. No wonder you don’t mention them more often.”

“Now, I’m not suggesting you’re one of those sorry souls. The Doris I know would never fall to that level. But your symptoms tell a story. What would I find, I wonder, if I searched your dormitory room? A bottle of laudanum, maybe, lurking at the back of a cupboard?”

“What you would find would be my shoe, planted in your fundament.” But her belligerence was forced. “Jesse, what’s this all about? Speak plainly; I’m not good at puzzles.”

“We both know things come into the City from time to time. Things the City people don’t approve of. Some of the restaurant girls and show people have habits worse than yours, Doris, and if some nervous dancer needs a dose of paregoric I don’t see any earthly reason why she shouldn’t have it—though the City people are prudish that way. But when it gets too obvious to overlook, when it leaks from Tower Two to Tower One? Bad things start to happen. Rooms get searched. People get fired.”

“What’s all this got to do with me?”

“It has to do with Mick. I don’t suppose Mick’s the only one doing business with the druggist in Futurity Station. But he’s one of them. Don’t deny it—his name is already on a list. And knowing Mick, he’s not doing anyone any favors. Mick’s not much more than a glorified teamster, but he has the mind of a businessman. An eye for profit and the quid pro quo. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Which tends to make other people—innocent people—people like you, Doris—a party to his affairs. And those same people risk getting drowned, if Mick’s boat sinks.”

“His boat’s sinking, is it?”

“He doesn’t make you pay for those little bottles of Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, does he?”

“You bastard—you have been in my cupboard!”

“You and I were intimate friends, Doris. An intimate friend notices things.”

“Like I noticed you crying like a baby in your sleep?”

“I think Mick brings you your paregoric, and in exchange you do him some kind of favor. Maybe something as trivial as carrying a package from one place to another. His pass card won’t let him into the guest floors, but yours will. Suppose someone gave you a little something upstairs, and Mick told you to hand it off to Isaac Connaught, the coach driver. Has anything like that ever happened?”

Doris had utterly forgotten Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. She bared her teeth in an expression that would not have looked out of place on a Bengal tiger. “I will have your guts for garters if you get me fired from the City!”

The part about carrying packages had been little more than a guess, though it was rumored that Doris had had a brief dalliance with Connaught before she started her affair with Jesse. “I want to prevent you from being fired, if it’s at all possible. That’s why I’m here. Yes, Mick’s boat is sinking, and you need to get clear of it as quick as possible. I can help you.”

“Maybe his boat is sinking because some great huge lummox torpedoed it.”

“I work for the City like everyone else. I’m doing my job. If you want to keep on doing yours, you ought to cooperate.”

“You can’t fire me!”

“I can’t, but the people who can fire you will be looking at you very closely, very soon. Let me tell them you’re being cooperative.”

“Whatever that means!”

“It means we should have a frank conversation. For instance, about those packages you delivered to Connaught. What was in them, Doris?”

For a long moment he was sure she was going to slap him. Then she rolled her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know. They’re always wrapped. Pasteboard boxes in brown paper, to look like something I might carry in or out of a guest’s room.”

“All right. These packages, are they heavy?”

“Some heavier than others.”

“How often do you pick them up?”

“Once a week, the same day the guests leave.”

“Always from the same room?”

“No. Mick tells me which room. Always one that’s just been vacated. When I make up the bed I look underneath. If there’s a package I carry it down to the stables and hand it off to Connaught. Honestly, that’s all.” Her anger had drained away. “I guess it’s enough to get me fired.”

“Not if you’re willing to tell the story twice.”

“Tell it to who?”

“A security boss called Barton in Tower One.”

Her eyes widened. “I can’t cross over to Tower One!”

“I’ll escort you.”

“What do you mean—now?”

“The sooner the better.”

She cast a long glance at the newspaper, as if she wanted to hide under it, then pushed away from the table. “If we’re being so damned honest with each other … what’ll happen to Mick? Because I don’t want anyone to think I gave him up just to save my skin.”

“No one will think that.” He took her arm before she could call him a liar yet again. “Come on, Doris. Don’t be afraid. You always said you wanted to see the other tower.”

He left Doris with Barton, who promised she wouldn’t be fired if what she told him was honest and helpful—a promise Jesse hoped he would keep.

He was in bed by eleven o’clock, and he dreamed of Madame Chao’s house in San Francisco.

Jesse is seventeen years old. His father is drunk, but not bad drunk.

“Working drunk” is how Jesse thinks of it. The smell of whiskey hovers over his father like a sullen angel. It’s the end of a long night—within grasping distance of dawn—and Jesse’s father has been on the door of Madame Chao’s for many hours. Jesse has been serving drinks in the parlor: His aversion to alcohol makes him a reliable employee, which Madame Chao appreciates.

The parlor is empty of clients. Most of Madame Chao’s girls are upstairs, though Ming and Li are on the sofa, conducting an earnest conversation in Dupont Street patois. Jesse, collecting empty glasses, listens with half an ear as his father speaks. It is one of his father’s mumbling monologues, a tutelary speech directed at no one: The only evidence of his drunkenness is that he doesn’t care who’s listening. Tonight it’s something about whalers. “Whaleboat men are the worst.” From the point of view of a whorehouse bouncer. “Stinking of carcasses and train oil, strong as bulls from lofting their irons … coarse and ugly from months confined among men no better than themselves, arms thick as hawsers, hard on the women and harder still in a fight…”

Jesse and his father and his sister, Phoebe, share an attic room, stiflingly hot on summer nights like these. Jesse is ready to sleep but he dreads the walk upstairs, passing through layers of increasingly hotter air to lie and sweat through the restless hours until a distant noon bell wakes him. He prays for morning fog, the benediction of an ocean breeze.

The last glass has been returned to its cupboard and Ming and Li are dozing in each other’s arms when there is a knock at the door: three loud, insistent pounds. Jesse’s father rouses from his introversion and takes his station. He slides the wooden cover from the peephole and puts his eye to it. He mutters something inaudible, probably a curse. He says to Jesse, “Go fetch Madame Chao.”

Then he opens the door, and Roscoe Candy enters the whorehouse.

Jesse doesn’t hesitate. He’s up the stairs in an instant, rattling the door of Madame Chao’s room. A smell of burning flowers seeps around the jamb, acridly sweet and almost rancid, like a fire in a funeral parlor. Madame Chao (who encourages Jesse to call her Big Sister) has smoked her evening opium. Madame Chao has a healthy respect for the poppy and is meticulous in her habit. She won’t touch the pipe before midnight or after dawn. And even now, Jesse knows, she won’t be incapacitated. But she might be dangerously slow. He calls out, “Big Sister!” into the darkened room. The creak of bedsprings. A lazy pendulum of footsteps.

Madame Chao’s face is an obscure history, written in parchment. She’s been running this house for more than two decades, but no one knows much about her. The squat brick house called Madame Chao’s has been here since before the rebels took Fort Sumter. It was here when the ’49ers arrived. It’s older than the Catholic church on Mission Street, Jesse’s father likes to say, and Madame Chao—well, Madame Chao is older than God. She blinks at him from the darkness: “Yes?”

He whispers Roscoe Candy’s name. Big Sister frowns and narrows her eyes. “Evil man. All right, I’m coming.”

She dresses quickly. Descending the stairs, she leans on Jesse’s arm. At the age of fifteen he towers over her, but she still makes him feel like a child. No one in the house questions Madame Chao’s authority. Visitors occasionally do, but they generally come to regret it.

Roscoe Candy might be an exception. Roscoe is making himself a big man in the Tenderloin. He has all the necessary traits: a high opinion of himself, contempt for his enemies, a small army of enforcers. And—of course—money. Money from the gold fields, Jesse has heard, acquired mainly through claim-jumping and intimidation. Not enough money to impress respectable San Francisco, but enough to make a big noise in the Tenderloin. Candy is buying saloons and whorehouses from Broadway to Market.

In the parlor, Jesse’s father stands unhappily at his post by the door. Roscoe Candy is on the sofa now, casually groping Ming. He has a hand up her silk chemise and a nasty grin on his face. He looks like a fat clown, with a striped schoolboy cap on his head and his red checked vest straining at its buttons. But he’s not a clown. He’s as tall as Jesse’s father, agile and strong despite his fat. Under his frock coat he carries a flensing knife of steel and bone ivory. He has made himself a legend with it, using it to disembowel more than one of his enemies. Men from the gold fields still call him Roscoe Gut-Cutter.

Jesse senses that his father both despises and fears Roscoe Candy. This makes Jesse ashamed and curious. Jesse wonders how he would take down Roscoe Candy, if he ever had to do such a thing. A hand with a knife in it is dangerous, his father has taught him. The hand as much as the knife. Watch the hand. Jesse would watch Roscoe’s hand. He notes that Roscoe is right-handed: That’s the hand he’s using to squeeze Ming’s breasts.

“Ming,” Madame Chao says, “stop bothering this man and go upstairs. Now!”

Ming escapes, careful not to show her relief. Roscoe Candy fixes his eyes on Madame Chao. “Shoot, she weren’t bothering me.” His voice is incongruously high-pitched, like the yelp of a small dog. “I like a little yellow girl now and then. Diddeys that would fit in a teacup, that one. Sweet little thing.”

“Not open for business,” Madame Chao says.

“Well, that ain’t the kind of business I want to conduct just now anyway.”

Candy and Madame Chao begin an earnest, low-pitched conversation. Jesse wants to know what it’s about, but he can’t make out the words. Madame Chao speaks soothingly but fingers the jade bracelet she wears around her left wrist: She’s nervous. Candy’s meanness simmers under his words like a kettle coming to boil.

Jesse sneaks another glance at his father, who seems relieved that Roscoe just wants to talk. His eyelids have crept back to half-mast. His mouth moves as if he is whispering to himself. It’s this last habit that worries Jesse most. Jesse knows his father is a working drunk and that liquor has been a part of his daily life since before Jesse was born. But it seems as if liquor affects him differently these days. It takes him deeper into himself. Maybe because of his age, Jesse thinks. His father is no longer young. Nor as fast as he once was. In body or mind.

But his father snaps to attention when there is a noise on the stairs.

Jesse follows his glance: Phoebe has come down from the attic room.

Jesse’s father has been careful to insulate Phoebe from the work of the house, though she is in no way ignorant of it. Madame Chao has been cooperative, maybe because she’s fond of Jesse’s father. Phoebe knows better than to come downstairs after dark or before the first light of morning. But maybe it’s first light now. The night has certainly seemed long enough.

Madam Chao looks up. Roscoe Candy looks up. Phoebe freezes on the stairs.

She’s eleven years old, dressed in her plain cotton nightgown, which is torn in places. Phoebe’s mother was a pretty mulatto woman whom Jesse barely remembers, and Phoebe’s skin is the color of wheat ready for the harvest. Her hair is dark and lustrous, and her eyes are brown. She has been having her female bleeding for three months now.

Phoebe seems startled to find a stranger in the parlor at this hour, and she turns away hastily. Jesse is horrified to see that her nightgown, long overdue for replacement, is torn from hem to thigh. Nothing Madame Chao’s girls would blink at. But Roscoe Candy lets out a long appreciative whistle. “I didn’t know you kept such girls here—I thought it was all yellow-for-the-white trade. Are you doing business I don’t know about?”

“No business,” Madame Chao says curtly. Madame Chao speaks eloquent English but puts on the patois for customers and people she doesn’t like. “Not business girl.”

“Everything’s business,” Roscoe says, smiling in a way that bares his teeth. His face is round, his features small. The devil’s face, Jesse thinks, as it might look if you painted it on an egg.

“Not for sale,” Madame Chao insists.

“Grooming her for some other customer?”

Madame Chao has no response.

“She’s just ripe,” Roscoe says plaintively.

Phoebe isn’t stupid. She turns and flees upstairs. Jesse looks at his father. His father gives him a warning look.

“Does she come with the house?”

“Not for sale. Not the girl, not the house. You have plenty of saloons, plenty of fuckhouses. This one is mine.”

Cornered, Madame Chao has thrown down the gauntlet. But she’s not defenseless. She pays protection to one of the Six Companies. Roscoe Candy ought to know that.

“Well, maybe I’m negotiating with the wrong person, in that case.”

Roscoe stands up. He heads for the door. Jesse’s father steps aside to let him pass. But Roscoe pauses and walks to Jesse, stands in front of him. Roscoe is nearly as tall as Jesse and twice his weight. Roscoe puts his chin up and pouts out his lower lip. “I don’t appreciate the way you’ve been staring at me.”

Jesse knows better than to argue. He says, “I’m sorry.”

And then he is on the floor, his ears ringing and his vision uncertain. Roscoe has clubbed him with one of his big fists, and Jesse didn’t even see it coming.

“Remember me,” Roscoe says.

Jesse will. But what he will remember even more acutely is the casual way Roscoe Candy strides to the door, and the way Jesse’s father bows his head and opens it for him.

Jesse woke from the dream sweating.

It wasn’t a dream so much as a memory—a memory enacted in the theater of his mind as if it were one of those moving pictures Ms. Baumgartner was so proud of. All of it had happened almost exactly as he had dreamed it. It was a memory refusing to be forgotten.

Just like the other dream. The one that always made him scream.

He glanced around the darkened room, still groggy. This wasn’t his old dormitory room in Tower Two, it was his new room in Tower One—only slightly different, the bathroom door here instead of there, the closet to the left rather than the right. Disorienting. For a split second he thought Elizabeth might be standing over his bed, as she had stood over him in their hotel room in Futurity Station. But of course she wasn’t. It was a silly thought.

He put his head into the pillow and slept dreamlessly until morning. There was no sunlight in this windowless room to mark the dawn, only the insect buzz of the electrical alarm, followed by another buzz from his paging device: Barton, telling Jesse to come to his office ASAP.

Jesse arrived just behind Elizabeth. Barton was waiting inside, and so was August Kemp himself.

Kemp was smiling, so the news would likely not be bad. Jesse reminded himself again that Kemp was a powerful businessman, though he lacked what Jesse thought of as a tycoon’s demeanor. He wore blue jeans and a shirt without a tie, and he addressed his employees as if they were his social equals. But the future people often behaved that way. To Jesse they seemed like children who had grown up without ever learning how to comport themselves as adults. But appearances were deceptive. Power was power, whether or not it wore a tie.

Barton said, “There have been some developments in the investigation and we’d like to bring you up to speed.”

Kemp seemed to find this declaration too abrupt. “Actually,” he said, leaning against the plate-glass window with his hands in his pockets and a God’s-eye view of the Illinois prairie at his back, “we want to thank you for your hard work. You were absolutely essential to our success here. Great job, both of you.”

Barton said, “Here’s where we stand. Jesse, you sent us Doris Vanderkamp, who was hugely helpful. Doris admits she acted as a go-between for Isaac Connaught and Mick Finagle. She gave us Finagle, and when we called in Finagle he broke down and basically told us everything. The contraband has been coming through the Mirror concealed in shipments to the theatrical division. Baumgartner turned a blind eye in exchange for regular deliveries of cocaine from the pharmacy at Futurity Station, supplied by Connaught. The contraband itself was mostly personal electronics and solar chargers, but it included some weapons. That’s how a lunatic came to make an attempt on Grant’s life with an automatic pistol. As for the shooter, Grant’s people don’t want the event publicized—we turned Stedmann over to a U.S. marshal and a couple of Pinkerton men, to dispose of as they see fit. All that’s left is making sure none of this ever happens again. Questions about any of that?”

“About Doris,” Jesse said. “I told her she wouldn’t be fired.”

“We sent her to the City clinic for detox. There’ll be follow-up testing, of course, but if she can stay clean, she can keep her job.”

“Thank you,” Jesse said.

“Anything else?”

“What about the rest of the contraband weapons?” Jesse couldn’t help thinking of the bag of Glocks he had lugged out of Onslow’s back room. “Apart from would-be assassins, who’s buying them?”

“We’re looking into that,” Kemp said. “But now, today, this morning, we’re taking one of the ringleaders into custody, and we thought you and Elizabeth ought to be present.”

Jesse said, “Where do we find this miscreant?”

“He works at the Mirror,” Kemp said.

In the corridor connecting Tower One and Tower Two there was an elevator operated by a red-and-yellow-striped card reader: for employees of Jesse’s status that meant NO ADMITTANCE. August Kemp, on the other hand, owned an all-pass card: The doors slid open for him as if operated by invisible servants. Jesse followed Elizabeth inside, where there were only three choices on the elevator’s push-button array: MIRROR LEVEL ONE, MIRROR LEVEL TWO, MIRROR LEVEL THREE.

Kemp pushed ONE. “I assume,” he said, “you two have had the standard employee briefing about how the Mirror works.”

“For what it’s worth,” Elizabeth said.

Kemp smiled. “I don’t understand it, either. Maybe no one does. No one but the physicists, and they seem to have trouble explaining it in English. But if you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them.”

After a long descent, the elevator slowed. The door opened on a vast space.

Jesse’s father had once taught him a trick: if something confuses you, imagine describing it to a five-year-old. Jesse pictured Phoebe as a child, the quizzical expression she had so often worn. What’s the Mirror chamber look like?

Well, he imagined telling her, it’s deep under the ground, for one thing. Like a cave or a coal mine. So it has no windows. But it’s not cramped or close or crude like a coal mine. Picture a room as big as two or three cathedrals and square as a box, bathed in artificial light. And clean—cleaner than a rich woman’s kitchen, despite the constant work that obviously goes on here. The floor is crowded with machines made for lifting and carrying and for less comprehensible functions. The men tending the machines wear white cotton pants and shirts, as if they’re about to whitewash a barn, and badges to identify them. The room has four walls, but one of them consists almost entirely of what they call the Mirror. Because it really does look just like a mirror. A mirror in the shape of a half circle, ten stories tall.

“It reflects the light,” Jesse said, an observation that sounded simple-minded, but he was startled by the effect, as if the already enormous chamber of the Mirror were twice its actual volume.

“It doesn’t always,” Kemp said. “It’s transparent when anything’s passing through, reflective when we maintain it at minimal power. There’s a scientific explanation—something to do with the energy gradient between conjoined universes—photons bounce right off the interface, apparently.”

“Thank you,” Jesse said, not that Kemp’s words meant anything to him. “And the future’s on the other side?”

“In a manner of speaking. The Mirror bridges a distance of approximately one hundred and forty-five eigenstate-years through ontological Hilbert space. What’s on the other side eventuated from a world identical to yours, but it’s not your future.”

Whatever else it might be, Jesse thought, the land beyond the Mirror was Elizabeth’s home. The place she would go when she returned to her jailed husband and her daughter. A mere one hundred and forty-five eigenstate-years from here, as the crow flies.

The room is so huge it does peculiar things to sound, he imagined telling Phoebe. Voices and machine noises seem small and far away. But there’s a hum under all those other sounds, soft but powerful, like the drone of a gigantic bumblebee. The air smells of metal, the way a copper kettle smells if it’s been left out in the sun.

“What’s important,” Kemp said, “isn’t what makes the Mirror work but what it does. The use we put it to. That’s what I’m proud of. I was on the other side when we opened it for the first time. And it didn’t open onto this room, I can tell you that. It opened onto pure black Illinois earth. Ancient silt and glacial till. Groundwater came pouring out. So the first thing we did was dig. We tunneled out a foundation for the entire resort, pumped it dry, stabilized it, began to build on it. Jesse, you were among the first local people to show up on our doorstep. But by then most of the work had already been done. Our people had already gone out to establish our claim to the land, to buy the property we needed to buy—to bribe the people we needed to bribe, where there was no other choice. How the Mirror works is a mystery to me. But what we built around it, that’s what I understand. That’s what I’m proud of. And that’s why it pisses me off when some asshole decides he can walk all over me just because he wants to sell iPhones to the locals.”

There was real anger behind the words. Kemp wasn’t entirely the amiable mannequin he appeared to be. “Which greedy asshole are we taking into custody?”

“Well, I’m not going to point at him. You see the forklift parked by the cargo elevators? He’s the guy tying down a palette of boxes.”

Jesse identified the slablike white doors of the cargo elevators. It was hard to make any reliable judgment from this distance, but the smuggler was obviously a large man.

“We have a security detail standing by on the second tier if anything goes wrong. But I thought you two might like to do the honors.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, sounding genuinely pleased.

“We just need to escort him upstairs for interrogation. No big deal. But you might want to keep your flex cuffs handy. All right? Let’s do it.”

Kemp strode across the floor with Barton beside him and Jesse and Elizabeth hurrying after. Jesse was careful to keep his eye on the smuggler, who went on loading cartons onto an aluminum skid until Kemp was within thirty feet of him. Then he looked up and froze in place.

“He’s made us,” Elizabeth said.

So he’ll stand or he’ll run, Jesse thought. Not that there was anywhere to run to.

The gap closed to twenty feet. The smuggler stood upright, watching them approach. Then his eyes narrowed. Jesse saw it coming. The smuggler broke and ran. But he didn’t run away—he came at August Kemp, and he came at him head-on.

Jesse and Elizabeth sprinted forward, trying to put themselves between Kemp and the smuggler. There wasn’t time for anything subtle. Jesse threw his body into the smuggler’s path, and the smuggler’s own momentum did the rest of the work—he tumbled headlong over Jesse, though not before planting a knee in Jesse’s ribs. Jesse rolled and managed to pin the man under him long enough for Elizabeth to lean in with her plastic cuffs and secure his hands behind his back.

The smuggler’s attention remained focused entirely on Kemp. “Fuck you,” he said. Jesse stood and hauled the man to his feet as Kemp’s standby security detail came hustling down the stairs from the second tier, a belated thunder of booted feet on metal treads.

Jesse brushed himself off and took stock. No harm done. He might have bruised a rib, but nothing was broken. “Good work,” Elizabeth said.

“All I did was get in the way.”

“No, you were great,” Kemp said, only slightly shaken. “Thank you, Jesse. One of the best hires we ever made. You too, Elizabeth.”

Which was fine, but it left Jesse with an unanswered question. The smuggler had come at Kemp as if he hated him and no longer needed to conceal it—more like a partisan with a grievance than a guilty grifter. What had Kemp done to make an enemy of a man whose name he barely knew?

He took a last look at the Mirror as they moved toward the elevators. All of the chamber was duplicated in that vast mirage, and his own reflection was part of the minutiae of it, a tiny figure in a cavernous space. Then a Klaxon sounded, and the workers in white suits began to clear the floor—preparing for a fresh shipment to come through, Kemp said. Jesse hoped to see the Mirror open onto the world beyond it: the fabled future. But the elevator door slid shut before that happened.

The investigation was over, Barton had said, nothing left but the tidying up. But some of that tidying had to be done at Futurity Station, and he wanted Jesse and Elizabeth to do it.

So they traveled to the rail town with a convoy of departing guests late on a Wednesday afternoon. The crowds that had been drawn by Grant’s visit were gone now, which meant they could book adjoining rooms at the Excelsior. Elizabeth will have her privacy, Jesse thought as they checked in, and I’ll have mine. Come morning they would talk to the town’s druggist about reporting any future spike in the sale of coca or opiate compounds, and then they would attempt to recover any contraband that remained in Onslow’s back room.

They arrived in time for a meal. The light of sunset through the curtained windows of the hotel’s dining room added a roseate glow to the gaslight, but Elizabeth seemed broody and distant over supper. Jesse guessed she was thinking about her home, and he tried to distract her. “August Kemp seems pleased with us.”

“Good for August Kemp.”

“So you don’t worship at his altar? Everyone else seems to.”

“It’s not Kemp they worship, Jesse. It’s his bank account.”

“I’m sure he’s a wealthy man.”

“Multibillionaire, according to Forbes.”

Jesse tried to imagine what that could possibly mean. What did a billionaire buy with his money, up there in the twenty-first century? Airplanes? Spaceships? Entire planets? “How did he make his fortune? Not exclusively from the City, I imagine.”

“By inheriting a family business, first of all. Big holdings in the hospitality industry, high-end resorts and cruise ships mainly. But Kemp wasn’t some kind of trust-fund baby. His father groomed him to take control of the business, and he turned out to have a talent for it. He expanded into some really difficult markets, shouldered out some high-powered competition. There’s Kemp money in that orbital hotel they’re building, for instance. But the City is his personal obsession.”

“Men such as that tend to make enemies.”

“What he went through to build the City, of course he made enemies.”

“What do you mean? What did he go through?”

“There were all kinds of legal and regulatory obstacles he had to deal with. The safety of the Mirror. The whole question of people carrying things through and bringing things back. What Kemp brings back is mainly gold, so how is that regulated? From the legal point of view, is Kemp importing gold? Not from any recognized foreign country, no. So is Kemp pulling gold out of a hole in the ground—is the Mirror a kind of gold mine? None of the written regulations apply, and Kemp had to lobby hard for laws that would work to his advantage. And you can’t imagine the number of interest groups who want to piss in the pot, even over trivialities. Antique dealers, for instance—they didn’t want a flood of Duncan Phyfe sideboards and Currier and Ives prints driving down the market. That’s why anything a tourist brings back from 1876 gets an indelible stamp and a registry number. There are layers and layers of this bureaucratic stuff. Labor laws—Kemp hires a certain number of locals, like you, but does he pay them minimum wage? And is that calculated in our currency or yours? What’s the exchange rate? A fair wage by 1876 standards looks like a slave’s wage in twenty-first-century dollars.”

“I guess all that kept him busy,” Jesse said.

“That isn’t the half of it. Medical considerations. No offense, but you can’t visit 1876 without a shitload of vaccinations. The CDC argued for an enforced quarantine on anyone coming back through the Mirror. Kemp dodged that one, but we still have to be careful—even a single case of smallpox or yellow fever would be enough to shut us down. One of the first things Kemp’s people did, even before the foundation of the City was laid down, was to send over an epidemiological team to sequence influenza viruses and prepare vaccines.”

“I apologize for our diseases. We’d do without them if we could.”

“Plus all the ethical considerations. The whole question of treating you guys as a tourist destination. And thereby fucking with your history, which might be morally objectionable. Or not fucking with it, which also raises moral questions. So yeah, Kemp ran into lots of opposition, including an entire political movement aimed at stopping him. Which he crushed, or marginalized, or simply ignored.”

“The man we took into custody,” Jesse said. “The smuggler. Do you suppose he’s one of Kemp’s enemies?”

Elizabeth hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

“He came for Kemp as if he bore a grudge against him.”

The hotel’s dining room was nearly empty now. A waiter trod softly between the tables, floorboards creaking under his feet. Beyond the window, a carriage passed in a gentle music of hoofbeats and harness reins. “Probably just some slacker,” Elizabeth said, “looking to make a little easy money.”

But that wasn’t the whole story, Jesse thought. She knew more than she was saying.

Autumn was beginning to show its muscle. Jesse’s room in the Excelsior was chilly even with the windows shut and the curtains drawn, and he had piled the bed with blankets. Elizabeth, in the adjoining room, had left the connecting door ajar—in case of trouble, Jesse thought with some embarrassment: in case his demons visited during the night.

He fell asleep quickly and woke an uncertain time later. He hadn’t been dreaming, or at least he didn’t think so. But here was Elizabeth, standing at his bedside. She had lit a lamp in her room, and its soft and uncertain light came through the open door, just enough to see that she was hardly dressed and that the expression on her face was solemn. He summoned his wits and said, “Did I wake you?”

“No. Couldn’t sleep. Can I sit?”

On the bed, she meant. He nodded and shifted his legs to make room for her. The bed frame creaked as she settled onto the mattress. He waited for her to speak. After a long moment she said, “Tell me what you think of me.”

“I’m sorry—I don’t know what you mean.”

“What do you think of me? Simple question.”

No, it was not. It was far from a simple question. He said, “I think you’re a brave and competent woman. Why do you ask?”

“You said City women reminded you of prostitutes.”

“Only in their frankness.”

“Only that?”

She must consider the question important or she wouldn’t have come to him in this state of undress. He tried to answer honestly. “There was a time when I thought your men had no conception of honor and your women had no conception of decency. But that’s not true. It’s that you hold these ideas differently. You’re not afraid to say what you think. And you don’t hold out chastity as a virtue.” He hesitated, feeling foolish. “Is that correct?”

“As far as it goes.”

She shivered and drew up her shoulders until the tremor passed. “You’re cold,” he said.

“Uh-huh. Can I come in?”

He opened the blanket for her. She couldn’t have missed seeing the aroused state of his masculinity, even in this subtle light. But the sight seemed not to shock or offend her. She pulled the blanket over herself and pressed herself against him.

After a few silent moments she said, “Do you have a condom?”

One of those French letters they sold by the box at the City pharmacy. “No.”

“Then it’s a good thing I brought one.”

Once again she astonished him. And she went on to astonish him some more.

By the long light of morning the town seemed transformed. Or maybe I’m the one transformed, Jesse thought. The season’s last tourists moved through the streets in chattering clusters, men in straw hats and women in bustles with sun umbrellas (“Like an impressionist painting,” Elizabeth said, whatever that meant), the summer making its last faint show, a fragile warmth fretted with wood smoke. He could have walked all day with Elizabeth on his arm. But they had work to do, even though the events of last night, of which they were careful not to speak, made the duty seem trivial by comparison.

Futurity Station’s pharmacist was a small, round man, easily cowed: The merest hint that they represented the City’s interests was enough to reduce him to fawning cooperation. Yes, he had sold coca powder in significant quantities to Mr. Isaac Connaught, but only because Connaught had told him the City dentists were suffering a shortage. Yes, he had found the claim plausible. Yes, he had taken a profit on these exchanges; why would he not? Yes, he would report any such future transactions to an agent of the City. And no, he was not aware of any arrangement Connaught may have made with Onslow. The pharmacist’s obvious nervousness tended to belie the last statement. But the rest was all more or less in accord with what City security had deduced, so Jesse simply shook the breathless man’s moist hand and left.

They walked toward Onslow’s, making no particular haste. “I know so little about where you come from,” Jesse said.

“You’ve seen the movies.”

“I wonder if the movies don’t hide more than they reveal. Before the City ever came, some people thought the future might be a place where everyone was wealthy and happy. And when I first came to the City, I thought that might be true. The nations at peace, the poorest men richer than our own captains of industry.”

“Kind of true,” Elizabeth said. “Kind of not. Mostly not.”

“What about you? Are you wealthy, where you come from?”

“I wish I could say yes.”

“Are you poor, then?”

“I wouldn’t say so. But a lot of my neighbors are what’s called working poor. Single moms holding down two McJobs and maxing out their credit to pay for day care. My neck of the woods, a lot of us are one paycheck away from the trailer park. I’m a little better off than that—I get paid pretty well for the time I spend on this side of the Mirror, which helps. Why do you ask?”

“So many things I don’t know about you.”

“I’m pretty average.” She glanced at him from under her sun bonnet, which she had neglected to tie: the strings dangled fetchingly over her shoulders. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, either.”

“Such as?”

“Like what you do with your money. City wages are pretty good by contemporary standards, right? But you don’t seem to spend much.”

“Most of it goes to support my sister.”

“You mentioned her before. Phoebe, right?”

“Yes.”

“You support her?”

He hesitated. He said, “It’s a long story. Maybe best not told by daylight—not on a pleasant day like this.”

Lookout Street had the aspect of a midway at the end of the season, underpopulated and sad despite its declarations of gaiety. A board had been nailed across the door to Onslow’s shop. The words OUT OF BUSINESS were chalked on it. Onslow himself had probably left town. He’d been tight with the local business leaders, but attracting the wrath of the City would have made him persona non grata. “Keep walking,” Jesse said. They could get into the building more easily from the rear.

It was his second time in the alley behind Lookout: It was uglier but less threatening by daylight. Elizabeth muttered a few curses as they stepped past trash barrels overflowing with encyclopedic examples of everything that met the definition of “waste.” Most noxious was the carcass of a horse, picked to bone and sinew by dogs, from which a thrumming cloud of flies arose when Jesse kicked a stone at it. “Oh, God,” Elizabeth said, covering her mouth.

“Do animals never die where you come from?”

“Of course they do. We try not to let them decay in public places.”

“That must make city life more pleasant,” Jesse said.

The back door of Onslow’s had also been boarded over, but it wasn’t much work to pry off the barrier. The broken hasp still dangled free. Jesse pulled the door open and propped it with a loose plank. He stood on the threshold a moment, listening for any sound that might indicate that the building was occupied. There was only silence.

He stepped inside, Elizabeth behind him. “It’s been cleaned out,” she said.

As expected. All the shelves were empty, nothing on the crude table but the dusty oil lamp Jesse had lit on his last visit. Nothing to see, he thought. At least until Elizabeth spotted the hinged door under the table.

The little door was two feet square and equipped with a simple rope handle, and he had missed it in the darkness during his last visit. Jesse shifted the table and yanked the rope. The door clattered open. There was darkness underneath.

“Should have brought a flashlight,” Elizabeth said.

“Light the lamp and hand it to me.”

He crouched on the floor. When Elizabeth handed him the lamp he hovered it over the hole. A sour-smelling plume of air rose from the dimness. “It’s not a cellar,” he said. “Just a space somebody dug out of the clay.”

“Is there anything in it?”

“Boxes.”

“Boxes of what?”

“Empty boxes. Lots of empty pasteboard boxes.” He grabbed a few samples and hauled himself to his feet.

He put the boxes on the table. Elizabeth picked one up and inspected it. It was a twenty-first-century box, as colorful as a lithograph and about the size of a brick. GOLD DOT, it said in bold lettering. PERSONAL PROTECTION. It also said 9MM LUGER and 147 GR.

“Hollow points,” Elizabeth said appreciatively. “Twenty rounds to a box. How many empty boxes down there?”

“Well, I don’t know how deep the hole goes.”

“Jesus! And you think it was just gun collectors buying this stuff?”

“Collectors, souvenir hunters, wealthy curiosity-seekers—anybody with money, I imagine, up to and including our would-be assassin. A Glock is the perfect item of contraband, in some ways. Much of what you people bring with you is incomprehensible to us, but everybody knows how a pistol works. And the Glock takes these specialty rounds, so Onslow’s customers would have had to come back to him from time to time, if they were using their pistols in earnest.”

Jesse might have discussed it further, but he was distracted by a noise from the alley. Someone stumbling over something metallic, followed by a low and urgent “Hush.”

He exchanged a look with Elizabeth. No need for words: She was good that way. She stepped into a corner of the room where she wouldn’t be immediately visible to anyone coming through the door. Jesse looked around for anything he might use as a weapon. He took up the oil lamp and held it behind his back. There was time for nothing more.

Two men came into the room from the alley, one after the other. Both were big men, cheaply dressed. Jesse recognized neither of them. The one in the lead—barrel-chested, almost six feet tall—carried a handgun. Not the futuristic kind. It looked like an ordinary Colt. Lethal enough, Jesse thought. The man behind him was armed with a leather cosh.

Jesse held out his empty right hand in a warding gesture. One advantage to being left-handed was that his opponents tended to watch the wrong hand. Misdirection: a useful skill his father had taught him. The gunman gave him a scornful smirk. Jesse kept his eyes focused on that grin as he took a half step forward and swung the lamp out from behind his back.

He caught the gunman’s pistol hand in a square blow, shattering the lamp’s glass mantle and carving bloody gashes in the gunman’s forearm, but the man kept his grip on the weapon. So Jesse stepped inside the gunman’s reach and clutched his damaged wrist and twisted until the Colt clattered to the floor. He was vaguely conscious of a ripping sound as he did this—that was Elizabeth, separating the Velcro folds of her skirt to gain access to the pistol she kept tucked inside it. And he was aware of the second man, right arm raised to bring the cosh down on him—he was in no position to do anything about it—and he was aware of the thunderous discharge of Elizabeth’s gun, the sudden reek of hot powder, a ringing in his ears as loud as a fire siren. And then nothing at all.

7

Much later, he woke up.

It wasn’t as bad as waking from one of his nightmares, but it wasn’t a pleasant process. There was a feeling of foreboding attached to it, a sense of emerging from a comfortable darkness to some unpleasant and onerous duty, even if it was only the duty of opening his eyes.

“Much later” was a mere intuition, but he felt as if some substantial amount of time had passed. He was in a clean white room populated with sleek, chiming machines—a City room. He was in bed. His right arm was connected by a flexible tube to a transparent bag of liquid, and there was a throbbing pressure in the general neighborhood of his face.

He closed his eyes for another moment or hour. When he opened them again there was a stranger hovering over him, a woman in white. Jesse parted his gummed lips and said, “Are you a nurse?”

“I’m your doctor, Mr. Cullum.”

“Am I back in the City?”

“Yes. Lie still, please. We’ve been keeping you under sedation. Are you in pain?”

He was, now that she mentioned it. He nodded, which made it worse. “What happened to me?”

“Linear fracture of the skull. But you’re doing fine.” The female doctor tapped the keyboard of an electronic device she held in her hands. “If the discomfort becomes difficult to tolerate, don’t be shy about letting us know—we can adjust your meds. We want to keep you here for a couple more days to monitor your recovery.”

Jesse felt recalled to sleep before he could ask any questions of his own. The meds, he thought: medications. Some twenty-first-century anodyne. Sleep, distilled and bottled. Sleep delivered directly into his veins, as soft and pure as winter snow.

He woke again, and this time his first question to the female doctor was about Elizabeth: Was she all right?

“Elizabeth DePaul? We had a look at her when you both came in, but she wasn’t injured.”

“Does she know I’m here?”

“I can’t answer that question. A Mr. Barton in security said he’d come down and explain everything once you’re awake. Do you think you’re ready to see him?”

“I surely am.”

“I’ll let him know.”

But it wasn’t Barton who showed up at Jesse’s bedside that afternoon. It was August Kemp himself, August Kemp the billionaire, teeth as perfect as ivory dominoes and a smile like a squire conferring a knighthood. “Jesse! Good to see you awake. Are they keeping you well fed?”

The lunch cart had just been by. “They gave me tuna salad. And something called Jell-O.” Which was neither solid nor liquid but came in interesting colors.

“Well, fuck that. You can get yourself a steak if you like, as soon as the doctor signs your release form. You put your life on the line for us, and that earned you a big bonus.”

“I thank you,” Jesse said. “What about Elizabeth?”

“She wasn’t hurt. She shot and killed one of your assailants. Elizabeth made an emergency call from Onslow’s store, and we had people on site pretty quick—we keep a response team and a couple of vehicles at the railway depot. It was a huge deal for the locals, seeing you carried away in an armored vehicle. We could have charged admission.”

“Who were the gunmen?”

“According to the survivor, they were hired by a curio dealer in Chicago who had been fencing Onslow’s surplus inventory. The storefront at Futurity Station was just a fraction of Onslow’s business. The Chicago middleman had wealthy customers all across the country—not just for guns but all kinds of contraband: electronics, books and magazines, even clothing. Onslow had been paid for a shipment he failed to deliver—he skipped town as soon as you started to pressure him—and the Chicago dealer sent a couple of men to enforce the agreement. You and Elizabeth just happened to get in the way.”

“The dealer is out of business now?”

“Our people shut him down. You would not believe the kind of stock he was holding. Shoes alone—he could have opened a fucking New Balance store. I had to fire half the inspection staff down at the Mirror and more than a few senior managers in a bunch of divisions. Complete housecleaning.”

“Sorry to have caused such a fuss.”

“You have nothing to apologize for, my friend.”

“Did you give Elizabeth a bonus, too?”

“Better than that. We gave her three months’ paid leave.”

“Paid leave from the City?”

“She’s in North Carolina now.”

North Carolina of the twenty-first century, he meant. “Did she say anything about me before she left?”

“She was down here a few times when you were unconscious and sedated. That was quite a blow to the head you sustained. She was worried about you, but she was also anxious to get back to her family.”

“Naturally so.”

“As for you, you’re not just getting a bonus, you’re getting a permanent pay raise. You’ll be housed in Tower Two again, now that the investigation is over, but you’ll have a lot to show for it.”

“And will Elizabeth be coming back, when her leave is finished?”

“That’s up to her,” Kemp said.

He moved back into his old dormitory room in Tower Two. The room was unchanged since he had left it. What had changed was his social standing.

More than a few Tower Two employees had lost their jobs or been reprimanded for their role in the smuggling operation, even if all they had done was turn a blind eye to a dubious transaction. Many of them blamed Jesse for that. He was treated to cold stares along with his breakfast coffee; former friends were suddenly reluctant to exchange words with him. So he volunteered for night duty and fence-riding, both solitary jobs.

Riding the fence was thankless work, but he liked the open air and the company of his own thoughts. As the seasons changed and the mornings grew cold, the supply room equipped him with a plastic overcoat stuffed with goose down and a balaclava hat like the knitted hats British soldiers had worn to keep their heads from freezing during the Crimean War. In early December a storm blanketed the prairie with snow, deep enough that Jesse exchanged his three-wheeled cart for a vehicle with tracks and skis. Riding the fence took longer under such circumstances and seemed even more pointless: Any would-be trespasser who managed to trek all the way from the Union Pacific depot to the City’s borders in the heart of winter ought to be given a medal for perseverance, in Jesse’s opinion. Often during his work he saw the tracks of wolves. Once, a palsied old cougar met his eyes through the steel mesh of the fence.

During these expeditions Jesse had ample time for thought. He thought about Phoebe, and in his mind he composed the letters he would later scribble on paper (his handwriting was a schoolboy’s scrawl; he had never had much opportunity to practice it) and mail to her along with his bonus money. He thought about the guns and ammunition that had passed through Futurity Depot, and he wondered where they had gone, and who had paid for them, and whether the weapons had ever been fired. And he thought about Elizabeth. And tried not to think about her.

Most days, the sun was at the horizon by the time he headed back to the City, the last light obscured by clouds or diffused into bleak, brilliant prairie sunsets. He worked hard enough to exhaust himself, which ought to have helped him sleep but often did not. On those nights when his terrors woke him, he switched on his electric lamp and sat up—roused to an involuntary vigilance by his traitorous imagination—and waited for the deliverance of dawn.

After Christmas some of the animosity toward Jesse began to wane, and he joined the rest of the Tower Two staff for a New Year’s Eve party in the commissary. All the local employees not on holiday duty were there, every security person, every cook and housekeeper, every waiter and waitress and towel-holder and coat-check clerk, and there was much drinking and a great deal of singing. The hilarity and talkativeness of some of the partiers hinted that the influx of coca powder from Futurity Station might not have entirely ceased. But Jesse didn’t care about that. Some irregularities were to be expected, because everyone knew the new year, 1877, wasn’t just new. For the City of Futurity, it would be the last year. Twelve months from now there would no bunting, no confetti, no party hats or lewd songs. By the time 1878 rolled around, this circus would have pulled up stakes and moved on.

Doris Vanderkamp approached him when the electric clock on the commissary wall marked ten minutes to midnight. Doris had become something of a pariah, too, for her role in exposing the smuggling ring. They had been avoiding each other for that reason. “Dance with me,” she said, a little drunkenly.

She was pretty in her disarray, ringlet curls unraveling at her shoulders. “Are you sure you want that, Doris?”

“I would rather dance with you than not dance at all. I don’t want to be lonely when the year turns. Dance with me, Jesse, just for tonight. You owe me that much.”

The clock turned minutes into seconds, today into yesterday. The boundary between past and future was called the present, Jesse thought. It was where he lived. It was where everyone lived. He took her in his arms and danced.