Last Year

12

Jesse woke to a pounding on the stateroom door.

He had slept as soundly as he had slept in months, and it took him a moment to place himself. The train was motionless. End of the line, he thought, which would be the terminal at the Oakland Long Wharf. There was nothing to see beyond the window but a tangle of telegraph wires, a billboard advertising vinegar bitters, and a flat gray sky. But he knew by some animal instinct that the train had brought him home, or close to home: to the shores of San Francisco Bay, a ferry ride away from Market Street.

It wasn’t a good feeling.

Beside him, Elizabeth sat up and said, “What the hell?”

The pounding continued. Jesse had just succeeded in pulling on his briefs when the door flew open. The impatient party in the corridor was August Kemp. In his hand Kemp held a newspaper, which he threw at Jesse’s feet. “We’re fucked!”

It was outrageous behavior. Kemp had burst in on a woman while she was in a state of undress. Jesse suppressed an impulse to throw him out of the room—Elizabeth put a restraining hand on his shoulder—and picked up the paper, a spindled copy of yesterday’s Examiner “What’s this about?”

“Read it and weep. Both of you. Conference in the terminal cafeteria at eight. And Jesse? I want a word with you after that.”

Four years ago this wing of the terminal building had been refurbished by City architects, who had turned it into a glittering arcade with plate-glass skylights and a forest of electrified signage. Ordinarily, the arrival of a City train would have filled it with twenty-first-century tourists. Today it was a ghost town, nobody present but a skeleton crew of nervous-looking City employees and the few dozen passengers and security people Kemp had brought along with him. Jesse settled at one of the empty tables in the cafeteria and unfurled the newspaper Kemp had thrown at him. The story that had alarmed Kemp was on the front page. GUNS OF FUTURITY DISCOVERED, the headline said. Jesse read the article carefully, then offered the paper to Elizabeth.

She gave the close-set columns of type an unhappy glance. “Is it about the Glocks they recovered in Buffalo?”

“In part. But other guns have turned up.”

“Turned up where?”

“Well, the post office found a futuristic pistol in a seized package bound for Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. The Nez Percé are restive—they’re due to be removed to a reservation in Idaho, but they don’t want to give up their tribal lands. How did that play out, back where you come from?”

“I don’t know. I’m not really a history buff. I’m guessing it ended badly.”

“It was only one Glock, with a single clip, but apparently it came with a letter warning of an attack on a Nez Percé camp on the Clearwater River.”

“Like the Blackwell letters.”

“Written in the same hand, some say. One pistol doesn’t amount to much, but the warnings in the letter could have given the Nez Percé a real advantage in a fight. Does that sound like something that might interest Theo Stromberg?”

“Forcing an entire native population to move from its ancestral land is considered a human rights offense where I come from, so yeah. Is that all?”

“Not by half. A similar weapon was found in the hands of a group of Negro Republicans in Caddo County, Louisiana. The pistol was confiscated before it could be loaded or fired, but Congress is making a scandal of it. No one knows whether the gun also came with a letter, because the Negros were lynched before they could be questioned.”

“Jesus,” Elizabeth said.

“Added to that, the labor troubles. There’s been discontent among rail workers ever since the Baltimore and Ohio cut wages. The Cumberland line’s been shut down for days. The Governor of Maryland called in the National Guard, and the troops were fired on in Baltimore. Another Futurity gun was involved, according to some accounts. The facts are still muddy, but politicos are rushing to blame the City for all of this. There’s talk of issuing a warrant for the arrest of August Kemp, though it’s not clear who has the jurisdiction to do that.”

Kemp came into the cafeteria as if summoned by the mention of his name. Jesse and Elizabeth shouldered into the crowd that formed as Kemp stepped up onto a cafeteria bench to address them. He started with a summary of the current situation, not much different from what Jesse had distilled from the pages of the Examiner. “We’re in no immediate danger,” he said, “but this is a problem that’s only going to get worse, and the situation could deteriorate quickly. Our New York site got the evacuation order two days ago—everybody east of the Mississippi is either back at the City or on their way—but we still have vulnerable personnel in San Francisco, and securing their safe return is our highest priority right now.”

The most direct route from San Francisco to Oakland was by water, either via the regularly scheduled ferries or the City’s own steam ferry, Futurity. Ordinarily, tourists were ferried into San Francisco and accommodated at a City hotel on the Point Lobos toll road. All such tourists had been evacuated as of yesterday, but there were City employees still stationed at the Folsom Street docks, and they needed to be at the Oakland terminal by Wednesday morning—because, Kemp said, “that’s when the last train’s leaving.”

Two days from now. An absurdly short span of time in which to locate and recover Kemp’s daughter. Jesse looked at Elizabeth, who shook her head in disbelief.

Kemp went on to parcel out duties to various factions of his security crew and declare the meeting over. He approached Jesse as the crowd dispersed. “I’ve set up a temporary office in one of the function rooms off the east corridor. Follow me there.”

Elizabeth said, “Sir, I—”

“No. Not you. Just Jesse. You can wait here for us. This won’t take long.”

Jesse followed Kemp to a room furnished with a desk and a single chair. Both the desk and the chair were twenty-first-century items, unadorned and bluntly functional. Both men remained standing. Kemp said, “You’ve been drawing a paycheck for what, four years now?”

“About,” Jesse said.

“And you understand your term of employment is about to come to an end?”

“Yes, sir. Obviously.”

“We’ve been generous to you in terms of salary, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you saved some of that? You won’t be left penniless when we shut down the Mirror?”

“I expect I’ll do all right.”

“Your contract specifies severance pay if you’re employed to the end of the City’s tenure. Are you worried about getting that payment?”

In truth, Jesse hadn’t given it much thought. Given the questions surrounding the City’s banking practices, maybe he should have. “You’ve always been as good as your word.”

“I’m sending you and Elizabeth into San Francisco to find my daughter. Right now that’s your one and only job. I know Elizabeth won’t have a problem with it. She’s a loyal employee and she wants to go home with a commendation and money in her pocket. I trust her because I know where her interests lie. But you’re in a different position. This is your home. And right now it could be dangerous for you to be identified with the City of Futurity. So you might be thinking how easy it would be to just walk away, especially with the trouble at the sandlots.”

The sandlots were a patch of unimproved ground outside City Hall, favored territory for rabble-rousers. “Has there been trouble?”

“Last night there was a big rally. Assholes with torches and pick handles, basically, but they stopped short of marching on Chinatown. There might be worse tonight or tomorrow.”

“A few Kearneyites don’t scare me.”

“I believe you, and that’s why I chose you for this assignment. But human nature is human nature. So I want to show you something.” Kemp went to the desk and opened a drawer and extracted a leather drawstring bag. He hefted it to demonstrate its weight and loosened the string to expose a glitter of coins. Eagles and double eagles, mainly. “Gold,” Kemp said. “Not specie. Not bank drafts. This is your severance pay, Jesse. This is what you get when you bring Mercy back. Do you understand?”

Jesse looked at Kemp and the bag and tried to decide whether he was being bribed or insulted or both. Most likely both. “I understand perfectly.”

“Good. Because the rules for runners don’t apply right now. I need you to be absolutely clear on that. Find Mercy, bring her back. Willing or unwilling. I don’t care what laws you break and I don’t care who you hurt. I want her unharmed and on board the last train to the City when it leaves. Do you accept that commission?”

“What about Theo Stromberg? Under the rules, I’m obliged to offer him the chance to go home.”

“I don’t give a shit. Was I unclear about that? Fuck the rules! The rules were made to protect the paying customers, not Theo fucking Stromberg.”

Jesse heard a faint ticking in the ensuing silence. He guessed the sound came from Kemp’s wristwatch. Like the double eagles in the leather bag, the watch appeared to be made of gold. “I understand,” Jesse said.

“Okay. We’re on the same page? Good. Then let’s get you outfitted. There’s no time to waste.”

An hour later Jesse was aboard the ferry Futurity with Elizabeth beside him, standing at the rail as the vessel drew away from the Oakland docks.

He had been given a calico travel bag containing two Glocks with ammunition, a pair of Tasers, a portable radio, and a selection of stun grenades—Kemp seemed to feel Theo might put up a fight. Jesse felt conspicuous in his City-issued trousers and cotton shirt, which seemed too crisp and unsullied to be entirely plausible, and Elizabeth plucked at her Velcro-fitted day dress as if she found it binding. She turned to him and said, “Does this bustle make my ass look fat?”

“No.”

She laughed. “It’s a joke. Sorry.”

“Is it? I’ve seen those magazines tourists leave behind. Women as bony as tubercular mules.”

“Fashion models.”

“You’re not like that.”

“Okay, yeah.”

“You’re much more wholesome and … rounded.”

“Right, thank you. Sorry I mentioned it.”

The sun was bright and a spring breeze kicked up chop in the water. Futurity sounded its whistle and began to move through the traffic of other vessels, a motley assortment of crowded ferries and cargo boats laden with produce, but the only passengers aboard Futurity were Jesse and Elizabeth and a few local hires headed for San Francisco to recover what remained to be recovered from various City-held sites. Elizabeth grew moody, clutching her hat as the vessel passed through scrims of coal smoke toward the scalloped hills. At one point she turned to him and said, “Do you think we can do this? Find Mercy, I mean?”

“Probably we can find her. Whether we can find her before the last train leaves is another question entirely.”

“Do you know where to start? Because I don’t.”

“I have an idea or two,” he said.

Elizabeth lapsed into silence, though she was briefly excited when a humpback whale surfaced off the starboard side of the ferry. Maybe whales were as scarce as bison or passenger pigeons where she came from. Jesse rummaged in his bag and found the iPod she had given him. He put the earpieces in his ears and tried to remember how to instruct the machine to play music. He wanted Axis Bold as Love but ended up with an entirely different suite of songs by the same composer, Electric Ladyland. A song called “Crosstown Traffic” was grinding away like a cakewalk for steam engines and steel barrels by the time the Futurity docked at its Folsom Street mooring. The strange and raucous music seemed perfectly suited to the crowded wharf, but Jesse was careful to remove the earbuds and conceal the device before any locals spotted him with it.

Ashore, they were met by a harried-looking City employee who escorted them through the busy terminal to the street, where a horse and a two-person buggy had been procured for them. Jesse took the reins, and before long they were fighting for a place in a merciless roil of carriages and carts. Elizabeth said, “Where are we headed?”

“California Street Hill.”

“What’s there?”

“The house where my sister lives.”

“We’re going to see your sister?”

“Yes.”

“You know we’re working a deadline, right?”

“I know.”

“So is your sister going to help us find Theo and Mercy?”

“She might,” Jesse said. “One way or another.”

13

Elizabeth knew Jesse well enough to expect an explanation from him. She also knew he wouldn’t give it to her until he was ready. So she relaxed, as much as it was possible to relax while clinging to the seat of a loosely sprung buggy as it was dragged up steep grades by an enthusiastically farting dray horse, and tried to enjoy the ride. There was architecture to look at. Weird old San Francisco architecture, especially as they worked their way from the tobacco-spit districts to the fancier environs of Nob Hill: big houses with stone turrets and what looked like minarets, window’s walks, gabled roofs. Things architectural students would know about. The question she wanted to ask was: How had Jesse’s sister, raised in a whorehouse, come to live in a wealthy neighborhood like this?

Jesse brought the rig to a stop near one of these grandiose stone piles, humming what sounded like a version of Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic.” Jesse had taken to Hendrix in a big way, surprisingly. Elizabeth would have put him down for country and western, maybe classic Dylan, but his tastes seemed more adventurous than that. Fortunately, the playlist she’d downloaded for him was eclectic: For all she knew he might develop a fondness for Kanye West or Taylor Swift. There was no predicting. Nor would she ever find out, given that tomorrow or the next day would be the last of their time together.

She didn’t like to think about that, not least because it reminded her how precarious her own position was. She was going to be one of the last people to leave Kemp’s 1877, no matter how well or badly this expedition turned out, which increasingly felt like being the last person out of a burning building. The road home was long, and it ran through an obstacle course of mountains, deserts, and hostile locals. Home, where Gabriella was waiting for her. Or forgetting about her.

She recalled something her drill instructor used to say: One foot at a time. Which meant, Don’t think too far ahead. Work the problem that’s in front of you. Let other people worry about strategy. So fine: The problem in front of her was Mercy Kemp. Or maybe the problem in front of her was Jesse, who had decided to pay a visit to his San Francisco relations instead of getting on with the search.

He said, “This house is where Phoebe lives. She lives with a woman named Hauser. Abigail Hauser. Have I mentioned her?”

“Obviously not.”

“Abbie is my father’s sister. My aunt.”

“You have a wealthy aunt?”

“Aunt Abbie’s a widow. Mr. Hauser was a partner in Hauser, Schmidt and Odette, a Washoe Valley mining firm. Very wealthy man. He was inspecting a dig near Virginia City when a steam pipe burst and scalded him to death. That was 1866. Aunt Abbie inherited his fortune, but most of it evaporated in the crash of ’73. She still has the house, and she keeps up appearances, but don’t be deceived. She’s only a few pennies better off than the Tenderloin crowd. After my father was killed, this is where I brought Phoebe.”

“I don’t mean to pry or anything, but if your father was related to a wealthy family, how come he was working as a bouncer in a whorehouse?”

“My father and Aunt Abbie weren’t on speaking terms back then. But my father sent us up here for visits, sometimes for as much as a month at a time. It was his way of showing us that life that wasn’t always hard and unforgiving. Aunt Abbie tried to give us an education, which I didn’t always appreciate. But she has a big library, and I took advantage of it.”

“Which I guess explains why your grammar is better than most of the local hires. You always did seem a little too polished for somebody who was raised on skid row.”

“My father didn’t neglect our education. We were raised decently enough.”

“I’m not trying to insult anyone.”

“Abigail Hauser is a Christian woman. A little stiff, but forward thinking and kind at heart. She has principles. I’ve told her a little about you—try not to shock her.”

Jesse drove the buggy up to the front of the house and set the brake, and Elizabeth managed to climb down without snagging her ridiculous clothing on anything. She watched as he walked to the door and raised his fist to knock. It was hard to read his mood. Catch him at the right moment and he was one big human emoji, all joy or rage. But right now his face was blank. He knocked five times. A minute or more went by. Elizabeth adjusted her hat and tried to appreciate the breeze, which was blissfully free of the reek of the city below.

An Asian woman with a duster in her hand, presumably not Mrs. Hauser, opened the door. She gave Jesse a wide-eyed look.

“Hello, Soo Yee,” Jesse said.

Soo Yee’s pleasure at recognizing him evolved into what appeared to be equal parts fear and awe. “Jesse, Jesse, come in,” she said, giving Elizabeth a sidelong glance: You too, whoever you are.

The entrance hall was cool and quiet, rich with sunlight filtered through panes of opalescent glass. A crystal vase holding cut flowers stood on a side table. Soo Yee was a small woman, and the sound of her footsteps on the oaken floor made Elizabeth think of water dripping from a palm leaf. “I’ll tell Mrs. Hauser you’re here,” she said, disappearing down a shadowed hallway. Moments later Jesse’s aunt emerged from a deeper part of the house.

“Aunt Abbie,” Jesse said. Some complicated mix of emotions put a burr in his voice, though he was trying not to let it show. “I apologize for not telling you I was coming. There wasn’t time to write.”

Abigail Hauser was tall and lean. She wore a black bombazine dress and appeared to be in her forties, not young by the standards of 1877, but there was a liveliness and wariness in her eyes that Elizabeth immediately liked. “Jesse,” she said, embracing him. “It’s a surprise to see you, but a most welcome one. And you brought a friend!”

“This is Elizabeth DePaul. Elizabeth, my aunt, Abigail Hauser.”

“Right,” Elizabeth managed. “It’s, uh, nice to meet you.” No doubt failing some important test of etiquette, though Aunt Abbie gave her a genuine-seeming smile.

“This is the woman you wrote about in your letters?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m very pleased indeed to meet you, Miss DePaul. A woman from the twenty-first century! I’m not sure I know what to say … I feel quite out of place.”

“I’m the one who’s out of place. You can call me Elizabeth.”

“Thank you, Elizabeth. I’m Abbie. Come into the parlor and sit down.”

Abbie led them to a smaller room crowded with chairs and ornate sideboards. “Jesse, I know you’ll want to see Phoebe. She’s in her room, practicing her violin exercises. Soo Yee can fetch her.”

“No,” Jesse said, “I’ll see Phoebe soon enough. I’m sorry if that sounds unsociable, but it can’t be helped. As for Soo Yee, I want you to send her down to the city.”

“What for?”

“To fetch Sonny Lau.”

There was a silence. Abbie said, “Are things as bad as that?”

“Well, I don’t know. They might be. You didn’t tell me in your letters that Roscoe Candy is alive.”

“No,” Abbie said, “I didn’t. We knew, of course. But I was reluctant to trouble you about it.”

“Has he been a problem?”

“It was only last year that he emerged from the shadows. I have friends who watch the property market, and they noticed him making purchases in the less respectable parts of the city, just as he was accustomed to do before you shot him. Then Sonny Lau sent word that Candy was back in the Tenderloin, living in a low house with his band of thugs. He seldom appears in public, and no new murders have been attributed to him. If he knows anything about Phoebe, we’ve had no sign of it. Had there been even a hint of trouble, of course I would have contacted you at once.”

“How did he survive, Aunt Abbie? He was gut-shot—pardon me for saying so.”

“You needn’t apologize for speaking plainly, least of all on this subject. I don’t know how he survived. Lesser wounds have killed better men. A cruel joke on the part of nature, I suppose.” Abbie took a bell from a side table and rang it. Soo Yee appeared a moment later. “Soo Yee, will you ask Randal to drive you into town, please? We need to speak to your brother.”

“You want me to find Sonny?”

“Yes, please.”

“And bring him back?”

“Yes. And I gather it’s urgent. So go on now. Quickly, please.”

Soo Yee hurried away. Jesse looked at his aunt and cleared his throat and said, “Perhaps I’ll see Phoebe now.”

“Go on. You know how to find her room, I imagine, even after all these years. Jesse?”

Jesse turned back.

“Are we in danger?”

“I wouldn’t bring danger down on you. You know that, Aunt Abbie. I’ve always kept this house apart from the other aspects of my life.”

And from me, Elizabeth thought.

Abbie said, “Are you in danger?”

“Not yet,” he said.

Elizabeth listened to Jesse’s footsteps as he mounted the stairs. There was a briefly audible bar or two of violin music, which must have been Jesse opening the door to his sister’s room. Then silence.

Which left Elizabeth and Abbie in the parlor trying not to stare at each other. Elizabeth thought she ought to say something polite, but the best she could come up with was, “Thank you for welcoming me into your home.”

Abbie smiled. “I could hardly have left you on the doorstep. Jesse has written me a little about you, Elizabeth. And I’ve followed stories about the City of Futurity as long as Jesse has been associated with it. But I never dreamt I might meet a woman from the twenty-first century. Is it true you’re a soldier?”

“I served in the army, yeah. I mean yes.”

“And you saw combat?”

“I was in signals intelligence. Not really front-line stuff. I was at a base in Iraq that took mortar fire a few times, but nothing serious. And that was a few years ago. I’m a civilian now.”

“And you’ve voted in elections?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“And is it true that a black man was elected to the presidency?”

“For two terms,” Elizabeth said cautiously.

“Please don’t think I disapprove. Before I married Mr. Hauser, I advocated for abolition. I’ve read Mr. Douglass’s writings. And I pay attention to the controversy over women’s rights—I’m a great admirer of Mrs. Stanton, though I disapprove of her statements against the Fourteenth Amendment.” Abbie paused. “Do you understand me at all, Elizabeth?”

“I think so.”

“I don’t fear the future.”

“Okay, good.”

“Even if it includes something as alarming as marriage between persons of the same sex. Which Jesse has told me in his letters that it does. It’s strange, of course, and I would be helpless to defend it to a clergyman, but I think I understand the logic of it. In fact I have a cousin who—but that’s beside the point. What I mean to say, Elizabeth, is that I approve of you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m not sure you approve of me, however. No, let me speak frankly. I’m not sure you ought to approve of me, especially if Jesse has told you anything about me.”

“He hasn’t said a whole lot, Mrs. Hauser—Abbie.”

“My life illustrates the principle that it’s easier to care for strangers than for members of one’s own family. My brother Earl—Jesse’s father—fell out of favor with our parents when I was just three years old. Earl was fifteen years my senior, and the reasons for his disgrace were never discussed with me, but it became obvious that he had married a woman not respectable enough to bring home. That would have been Jesse’s mother. Earl sacrificed the prospect of a career in the family business for the sake of a woman he loved. Maybe that was foolish, maybe it was brave, but I was raised to see it as unacceptable, and I never questioned the verdict. If Earl ever tried to contact my parents, they didn’t speak of it to me.”

“That’s harsh.”

“It was harsh, but I didn’t see it in that light. For me it was as if Earl had died in some mysterious, unspeakable way. I didn’t hear from him—or, to be honest, think much about him—until I married Mr. Hauser. When our engagement was announced in the Boston Daily Advertiser I received a letter forwarded to me from the newspaper. The letter was from Earl. He offered his best wishes and he told me his wife had died. He said he was living in San Francisco, and that I had a nephew and a niece, Jesse and Phoebe. He supplied an address at which I could write to him.”

“Did you?”

“I’m ashamed to say I did not. I was too vain—too naïve—and too much distracted by my new position as a wealthy man’s wife. A few years passed. Mr. Hauser kept a home in Boston, but his business took him west more often than I liked. It suited us both to move to California, though it was a terribly long trip. The next time I gave any serious thought to Earl was when we took up residence in this house. I was all too aware that the address he had given me was within riding distance, in a part of town where nothing good ever happens. The knowledge began to weigh on my conscience. Eventually I relented and wrote him a note. A brusque note, but it told him I was in the city and that I hoped my niece and nephew were well.”

“And he wrote back?”

“Almost at once, and he begged a favor from me. He said Jesse and Phoebe were healthy but in need of education and decent circumstances, neither of which he could provide. He wondered if they might be allowed to come live with me.”

“That’s a big ask.”

“I’ve never heard it put that way—but yes, it certainly seemed like a ‘big ask.’ I resented it, and Mr. Hauser wouldn’t hear of it. But Mr. Hauser passed away only a month later. We had no other family in the city. So, belatedly, I did what my conscience had been urging me to do. I couldn’t take the children and raise them as my own, but I offered to take them periodically, especially if Earl thought they were at risk. He brought them to me a few days later. Their first visit lasted for six weeks, over the hottest part of the summer.”

“It must have been strange, seeing your brother again after so many years.”

“It surpassed strange. It was daunting. Chastening. Earl had lived a hard life. His clothes were ragged and his breath smelled of liquor. We spoke very briefly, and although we corresponded sporadically after that, we never became close. But I tried to think of my brother as a good-natured man who was walking a difficult path. His love of his children could not have been more obvious. He nearly wept when he left them with me.”

“You got along with them okay?”

“They were wary at first, and so was I. Ultimately, yes, we got along. What they lacked in discipline they made up for in natural curiosity. But, Elizabeth—” Abbie bowed her head and clutched her hands in her lap. “I could have done so much more.”

Women like Abbie had a vocabulary of hand and head gestures, explicitly feminine ways of expressing guilt or anger. Elizabeth couldn’t fake that stuff and found it difficult to read. But Abbie’s regret seemed authentic, as far as she could tell. “Phoebe lives here now, Jesse said.”

“Phoebe has lived here since the day her father was murdered.”

“When Jesse took her away from the burning, uh, house.”

“Jesse and Sonny Lau brought her to me. I summoned the doctor who treated her.”

“Sonny Lau is the Tong hatchetman?”

“Jesse’s friend. And Soo Yee’s brother. Yes. That was a terrible day. Phoebe’s injuries were terrifying. The doctor is a war veteran, and he knows all the ways a human body can come to harm. But even he was shocked. He sewed her up as well as he could, but he couldn’t save her left eye. Jesse left town after that, because he knew Candy’s men might try to hunt him down and kill him, and he didn’t want to lead them here. It was sheer luck he was hired by the City. Luck for Phoebe and for me, I mean. Every investment I inherited from Mr. Hauser more or less vanished in the financial crisis, and we would be in a difficult position if not for the money Jesse sends every month.”

“But you can afford to keep Soo Yee as a servant.”

“It was an agreement Jesse made with Sonny Lau. A job and, in effect, a Western education for Soo Yee, in exchange for which Sonny uses his familiarity with the criminal element to keep watch for any threat that might arise. If Candy’s henchmen had started hunting for Phoebe or Jesse, Sonny would have warned us. And if we need to get in touch with Sonny, we can do so through Soo Yee.”

“Like now,” Elizabeth said. “So why do think Jesse wants to talk to Sonny?”

“I’m very much afraid to ask. Don’t you know?”

The conversation was interrupted by the sound of footsteps: Jesse and Phoebe, coming downstairs.

Elizabeth had pictured Jesse’s younger sister as shy and damaged. But it was obvious as soon as she entered the room that Phoebe wasn’t shy. She went straight to Elizabeth and offered her hand, which Elizabeth shook. “You’re the woman from the future!”

“Call me Elizabeth.”

“Thank you! I’m Phoebe,” said Phoebe.

Phoebe wore a blue silk scarf tied into a kind of skewed hijab that concealed the left side of her face. The only injury that showed was some scarring above her lip. But Phoebe’s good eye was lively and alert, and her smile was obviously genuine. “Pleased to meet you,” Elizabeth said.

“You’re from the future.”

“Yes.”

“Have you ridden a flying machine?”

“Phoebe,” Abbie said, “you mustn’t put our guest through an inquisition.”

“Oh, I’m sorry—”

“It’s okay,” Elizabeth said. “Yeah, I’ve ridden a few flying machines.”

“How amazing!”

“You get used to it. At least, most people do. Not everybody likes flying. For me, there’s almost always a moment when I look out the window and think, wow, I’m thirty thousand feet over Idaho or whatever.”

“I’m sure I would feel the same way,” Phoebe said. “And is it true your people are shipping pistols to the Indians?”

Abbie was visibly scandalized. But it didn’t seem like an unreasonable question, Elizabeth thought, given what had been in the newspapers. “Not ‘our people’ exactly. Those guns were smuggled through the City against regulations.”

“Don’t you support the cause of the Nez Percé? From what Jesse wrote about you, I thought you might.”

“I don’t know much about it. Where I come from, it’s more or less agreed that the Indians got a bad deal. Worse than a bad deal. But I don’t see how shipping them pistols is supposed to help.”

“Apparently someone disagrees.”

Apparently so, Elizabeth thought.

“Perhaps,” Abbie said, “we can discuss something less contentious? Phoebe, why don’t you tell Elizabeth about your study of the violin.”

Which Phoebe proceeded to do, at length. It became a monologue about the difficulty of arranging lessons and her problem learning to hold the instrument correctly, with tacit reference to her facial disfigurement. Despite the relentless talk, or maybe because of it, a less confident Phoebe began to show through. Her shoulders tensed and her voice took on an anxious edge. Finally Abbie said, “Thank you, Phoebe.”

Phoebe fell silent, looking abashed.

“I’d like to hear you play sometime,” Elizabeth said.

Phoebe brightened. “Do you play an instrument?”

“No. I enjoy music, but I’m just a listener.”

“What is it like, the music of the future?”

“Well, we have all kinds. Ask Jesse. He was listening to some of it today.”

Phoebe turned her good eye on her brother. “How is that possible?”

Elizabeth said, “I gave him a thing that plays recorded music. It’s in his pocket.”

“May I see it?”

Jesse looked alarmed. “I don’t think—I mean, the kind of songs it plays—”

“We don’t have to play Hendrix for her,” Elizabeth said. “I loaded all kinds of stuff on that iPod. Here, give it to me.”

Jesse passed her the device, frowning. Elizabeth scrolled through the playlist. She had put together the contents with Jesse’s taste in mind—or what she had imagined Jesse’s taste might be—but she had also tried to include representative music, not just personal favorites. Songs that were big even if she didn’t especially like them. So what was suitable for a teenage girl circa 1877? The sound track to Elizabeth’s adolescence had included a lot of LL Cool J and Cypress Hill, maybe not the best choices. Pressed for time, she cued up Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” It was a song Elizabeth remembered only dimly, but it was up-tempo and optimistic and she guessed Phoebe would find the lyrics too obscure to be truly shocking. “You’ll need to put these in your ears,” Elizabeth said, holding up the earbuds. “I can help you.”

Silence ensued. No one moved. Elizabeth was briefly bewildered. Then she realized Phoebe couldn’t put the buds in her ears without taking off her scarf.

Finally Jesse said, “It’s all right. Elizabeth knows what happened. Elizabeth was a soldier, Phoebe. She’s seen all kinds of things.”

Phoebe said, “Is that true?”

“Yes. But you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“No. Please! I want to hear the music.” Phoebe unwrapped her head in a single decisive motion, balling up the scarf in her lap. “There,” she said defiantly. “Well? Have you seen worse?”

Elizabeth had once visited a friend at Landstuhl Regional, the big US military hospital in Germany. A guy named Felipe, a division MP. Shrapnel from a mortar had carved off his right arm and a chunk of his face. The surgeons had saved Felipe’s life, but he was looking at the prospect of multiple rounds of prosthetic and reconstructive surgery. “Yep,” Elizabeth said flatly. “I’ve seen worse. Okay, so these little plastic thingies? They go in your ears.”

Phoebe’s disfigurement was evidence of a vicious attack. From the number and pattern of the scars, it looked as if she had nearly been scalped. Her vacant eye socket had healed badly, with knots of scar tissue filling the violated space. “How strange,” she said, taking the iPod in her hand. “How does it know when you touch it?”

“Beats me. You’d have to ask a geek. I mean, an expert.”

“You don’t know how it works?”

“I know how to work it, and I have a vague idea how it works, but I’m not an electronics engineer. It’s like—you understand a steam engine, basically, right? But if I asked you what a particular piston or valve does…”

“Yes, I see. But how marvelous it is!”

“I’m going to keep the volume, the loudness, pretty low. You can adjust it if you want.”

“What will I hear?”

“Just a song. Nothing fancy. A song that was popular once, back where I come from.”

Elizabeth hit play.

What seemed to strike Phoebe first was the simple novelty of reproduced sound. She sat upright, openmouthed, unmoving. Then, a minute or so into the song, her fingers started to move—counting beats, Elizabeth guessed—and her O-mouth compressed into a fascinated smile. No one spoke as the song ran out its four minutes and change. By the time it finished, Phoebe was grinning. “It’s wonderful! But it stopped.”

“You can play it again if you like.”

“May I?”

Elizabeth showed her how. The second time through, Phoebe closed her eyes and tapped her buttonhook shoe against the floor. Abbie leaned toward Elizabeth and said, “She seems to enjoy it very much. Is it possible I could—?” She mimed putting earbuds into her ears.

“Of course,” Elizabeth said. Assuming the iPod’s battery was up for it.

She turned to Jesse then, thinking about the other tech devices in his bag—in particular, the radio that was their only real connection to Kemp’s base at the Long Wharf in Oakland. Because another hour had passed, and they were no closer to finding Mercy Kemp. She would have to check in soon—what was she supposed to say? But the expression on Jesse’s face stopped her.

Not that he was showing much obvious emotion. His stoneface emoji was fully engaged. But Elizabeth knew him well enough to read the clenched jaw, the rapid blinks. There was a lot going on inside him. Happiness at seeing his sister, she guessed. Pleasure at the way Phoebe responded to the music. But darker things, too. Echoes of his own trauma. Maybe guilt. Phoebe would spend a lifetime learning to deal with what had happened to her at the hands of Roscoe Candy, but Jesse would spend a lifetime dealing with the knowledge that he had failed to protect her from it.

So no need to mention August Kemp or the fucking radio. At least not right now.

Not until Sonny Lau showed up, which happened a couple of hours later.

14

Phoebe had changed in ways Jesse found both pleasing and dismaying.

Her disfigurement was no surprise. Her missing eye was a tragedy, and her other wounds had healed badly, but those marks and scars weren’t what troubled him. Something nervous and wary had taken up residence inside her. She talked too eagerly, or not at all. She laughed as if laughter hurt her throat. Jesse supposed it was a symptom of the disease Elizabeth called PTSD. Jesse himself had caught it from his last encounter with Roscoe Candy, and it was natural that Phoebe, who was more sensitive, had come down with a more serious case. There was no easy cure, according to Elizabeth.

Jesse felt his own old rage churning inside him, faded memories suddenly burnished to a high shine. He nearly jumped out of his chair when Soo Yee came through the front door with Sonny Lau behind her. It was as if his years at City had never happened, as if he was still the whorehouse boy who ran with the boo how doy. Aunt Abbie stood up and said, “Come with me, Phoebe, we’ll make ourselves useful in the kitchen. Elizabeth, would you like to join us?”

“No,” Jesse said before Elizabeth could answer. “She stays.”

His aunt and sister left the parlor by one door as Sonny entered by another. Jesse gave his old friend an evaluating look and got one in return. Sonny had become a man, thicker and more muscular than Jesse would have anticipated. And while he had always been a careful dresser, Sonny’s taste in clothes appeared to have sharpened: He wore a knee-length frock coat, a poppy-red vest, and a silk four-in-hand tie. His braided queue dangled as far as his waist. If he was carrying knives or pistols, they were well concealed. Sonny put out his hand, and Jesse shook it.

Sonny spared a glance for Elizabeth. “Who’s the woman?”

“She works for the City of Futurity,” Jesse said, “just like me.”

“I heard as much.” Sonny’s English was deliberately, almost aggressively formal. “Is she from the future?”

“She is.”

“I would have thought she’d be wearing trousers or smoking a cigar.”

“Pass on the cigar,” Elizabeth said. “But yeah, I wish I’d packed a pair of jeans.”

“Can we speak in her presence?”

“Yes.”

“Freely?”

“Yes.”

“Without being interrupted?”

“Well, I hope so,” Jesse said.

“Good. I expect you called me here to talk about Roscoe Candy?”

“That,” Jesse said. “But not just that.”

“What else?”

By way of an answer Jesse reached into his calico travel bag and took out a Glock 19 and set it down on one of Aunt Abbie’s gleaming sideboards. “Have you ever seen a pistol like this one?”

Sonny Lau stared at it. “What an interesting question.”

Sonny didn’t know how Roscoe Candy had survived his gunshot wound. It must have been a near thing, he said, because after the burning of Madame Chao’s whorehouse Candy had disappeared for almost three years. And when he did eventually turn up, consolidating his old San Francisco properties and occasionally strutting down Market Street with a cohort of Sacramento thugs in striped jerseys, he was gaunter and grayer than he had been before. Tong men who had dealt with him said Candy still suffered chronic pain from his wound and was obliged to wear a truss he had ordered all the way from Chicago. None of this had improved his temperament, though it had changed him subtly. Candy had once seemed to delight in his own wickedness, but the new Roscoe Candy was differently vicious: He hurt people more methodically and with less emotion. He still cut his victims, Sonny said, but now he cut them as professionally and as indifferently as a butcher cuts a beeve.

None of which meant Candy had forgotten about Jesse Cullum. As soon as Candy was back in San Francisco he had offered a generous reward to anyone who spotted Jesse or could provide news of his whereabouts. “He expected you to come back sooner or later,” Sonny said, “as a dog returns to its vomit. Have you been seen?”

“I only just arrived.”

“Candy has eyes all over town. That’s something you’ll have to reckon with, if you stay. Especially if you stay here.”

“I won’t be staying here.”

Sonny cocked his head. “You didn’t come back just because of Roscoe Candy, did you?”

“No.”

“He’s only a complication.”

“I hope that’s all he is.”

“Soo Yee could have told you most of what I just told you. I thought you called me here because you wanted help going up against Candy. But that’s not it. So what do you want from me?”

Jesse didn’t answer, only glanced at the pistol on the sideboard as if it were an explanation. Sonny said, “Ah, that. May I hold it?”

“Go ahead.”

Sonny picked up the Glock, keeping his fingers away from the trigger guard. He weighed it in his hands, puzzled over the clip, admired the metalwork. “It’s a well-made thing. As pretty as it is dangerous. A City thing.”

“Seen one before?”

“Not with my own eyes.”

“Heard of one?”

Sonny nodded slowly. “I’m not supposed to say. But yes. Little Tom has one. The heads of the other Six Companies also claim to have one.”

Jesse exchanged a look with Elizabeth, whose expression was a gratifying combination of genuine surprise and oh-I-get-it-now. “They acquired these pistols recently?”

“I don’t know, but I first heard of them a month ago.”

“How did they come to possess them?”

“About that, no one speaks. Why? Do you want me to find out?”

“I’m looking for the man who brought these guns into the city.”

“Again, why? What’s your business with him?”

“He doesn’t belong here, Sonny. He needs to go back where he came from.”

“Are you a bounty hunter now?”

“Bounty hunter for the City, you could say.”

“The City of Futurity is drying up faster than spit in a desert. You must be in a hurry to find this man.”

“We are. And I don’t like to impose on our friendship by asking for more than you’re willing to give, but—”

Sonny Lau said, “You’re not my friend.”

Jesse was startled. “Say that again?”

“Honestly, what’s Jesse Cullum to me? I have lots of friends. Most of them know better than to ask difficult favors of me. But you’re not my friend. You may be older now, but you’re still just a shirttail whorehouse bouncer with shoulders like a buffalo’s and cast-iron balls. A worthless piece of Tenderloin shit with more pride than sense. You want me to risk my reputation and my career by poking my nose into the business of people who could have me killed just for looking at them the wrong way? I wouldn’t do that for a friend. No true friend would ask. Only an impertinent bastard like Jesse Cullum would ask.” He grinned. “And Jesse Cullum’s one of the few people I would do it for.”

Now that the conversation had passed on to mutually congratulatory masculine bullshit and reminiscences, Elizabeth gave herself permission to leave the room. She took the bag of tech gear with her, after putting the Glock back inside.

Abbie Hauser’s mansion was big but Elizabeth got the feeling that a lot of the rooms had been closed off and abandoned. There were, as far as she could tell, two live-in servants, Soo Yee and a middle-aged black man, Randal, who had put in a brief appearance after driving Soo Yee to town and back. A staff of two was probably picayune stuff by Nob Hill standards. Abbie and Phoebe were in the kitchen helping Soo Yee fix the evening meal, something that probably didn’t happen in the tonier households.

Elizabeth retreated to the entrance hall, where she took the clunky two-way radio from the bag and pushed the button to connect her to August Kemp. He must have been waiting for the call, because there was no hesitation, just a flat electronic beep followed almost instantly by his voice: “Elizabeth? Where are you?”

“Somewhere up Nob Hill, actually.”

“You have something to tell me?”

“Just that we’re making progress.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We have a lead.”

“You found Mercy?”

“Not yet, but we have a line on somebody who’s been distributing Glocks, presumably Theo Stromberg.”

“Do you know whether Mercy’s with him?”

“We’re working on that assumption, but we don’t know for sure.”

“How soon can you find out?”

“It depends on our informant. I doubt we’ll find out much more until tomorrow.” Which might be absurdly optimistic, but she wasn’t sure Kemp could bear the weight of the truth right now.

What followed was a pause so lengthy she began to suspect the radio was defective. “The thing is,” Kemp finally said, “there have been some developments. Major upheaval. Rail strikes everywhere, malcontents greasing the tracks and fucking with signal lights. The Chicago yard workers are coming out in sympathy. Worse, Hayes has mobilized federal troops to arrest me and occupy the City.”

“Can they do that?”

“Not before we evacuate. We can hold them off. But it’s making everything a lot more difficult. Pretty much every editorial writer in the Union blames us for instigating a labor revolt and a race war, thanks in large part to Theo fucking Stromberg. I had to send the last City train back to Chicago this afternoon.”

“You—what?”

“Don’t worry. I have other means of extracting us when the time comes.”

Suddenly all Elizabeth could think about was Gabriella. A thousand miles of physical distance and a century and a half of Hilbert space stood between Elizabeth and her daughter, a divide deeper than any of those misty Sierra Nevada canyons they had crossed on the way here. Now Kemp was telling her he had torched the only bridge. “Other means?”

“Look, obviously I have no intention of being stranded. I’ll get you home, Elizabeth. You and Mercy both. I promise. But first, you have to find Mercy.”

Elizabeth mulled over the news while Jesse said good-bye to Sonny Lau. The tong man left with barely a glance at her, probably confused about the role a badly dressed white woman might have to play in this game of guns and threats. She was a little confused about it herself.

She wanted to tell Jesse what Kemp had said, but they were called to dinner before she could speak to him privately. It was a lengthy meal—Soo Yee served each course with great ceremony, and Jesse made a point of praising everything—but to Elizabeth it just seemed like Something Soup followed by rounds of Boiled Something. Other means, she kept thinking. Soo Yee turned up the gaslights as daylight faded (here was something else that made Elizabeth feel uneasy, all these little fires burning in their sconces like promissory notes of disaster), and Abbie began to talk about the future. Or, as she pronounced it, The Future, the words spoken reverently, as if she were talking about a sacred grotto in some Greek myth. “I think some people resent the City of Futurity because they feel chastised by it, especially since those rogue letters have been published. But I wonder if that’s fair. If there is such a thing as moral progress, the future will inevitably seem to admonish us for our sins.”

The remark was meant to be flattering, or at least to communicate Abbie’s open-mindedness, but it sounded too much like the kind of high-minded bullshit August Kemp’s copywriters produced for the press back home. “I’m not admonishing anybody,” Elizabeth said.

“No, Elizabeth, of course not. All I mean to say is that, for instance, concerning the rights of women—”

“Okay, stop. I mean, there’s some truth in what you’re saying. I can vote, which is great, and we don’t get yellow fever and we don’t hang people for stealing horses, but the idea that what I have waiting for me back home is some kind of Utopia? No. Sorry.” This wasn’t how polite conversation was supposed to go, but Elizabeth felt as if she had lost the ability to steer the words, much less stop them. She flashed on all the times when her friend Chanelle had come over to the house, Friday nights when Gabriella was still in her crib, how they would share a couple of glasses of wine or even a joint (furtively, in the bathroom, with the ventilator fan turned up to carry away the smoke) and complain about Elizabeth’s jailed husband or Chanelle’s troubles as a Walmart sub-manager, letting the indignation boil over until it turned into laughter or tears. “It’s true I was a soldier, but you have no idea what it means being a woman in the armed forces, the kind of crap you put up with on a daily basis, and sometimes worse than crap, sometimes very much worse, and good fucking luck if you try to complain about it. I’m a veteran and a single mom, and the reason I’m here isn’t because I enjoy outdoor plumbing and coal smoke. It’s because this is the only job that’ll pay the rent on my falling-apart house and buy groceries for me and Gabriella and maybe leave enough after taxes that I can think about moving as far as possible from my crazy ex before he gets out of prison. Which is something else we have a lot of—prisons—though you won’t hear Kemp boasting about it. We also have wars, not big scary wars but little wars that go on for years and years and never seem to accomplish anything. Wars without victory, whatever victory would amount to. And good luck if you come home needing help, because the VA hospitals—they, uh—”

Jesse and his aunt Abbie were staring. So was Phoebe. Even Soo Yee had gone stock-still in the servants’ doorway. Elizabeth’s urge to talk evaporated as suddenly as it had come.

“I’m sorry,” she finished. “I mean, if I used offensive language.”

Silence followed, one of those weighty silences that accompany a weapons-grade breach of etiquette, until Phoebe spoke up: “Jesse said in his letters that even the best people of the future are freer with their language than we’re accustomed to. He made it sound quite comical, the way he described it.”

“Yeah, well, maybe not so comical at the dinner table. I apologize. It’s been a long day.”

“He often wrote about the unusual words he heard at the City of Futurity. Didn’t you, Jesse?”

“The printable ones,” Jesse said stiffly.

“And I committed them to memory,” Phoebe said. Elizabeth was chastened by how hard the girl was working to make her feel better. “Smartphone. Video game. Cool and uncool. Elizabeth?”

“Yes?”

Phoebe’s smile curved under her scarf, up into the papery white scar tissue there. “I think you’re cool,” she said. “I think you’re awesome.”

15

In the morning Jesse prepared to venture into the lower part of the city. He left the buggy he had arrived in with the servant Randal and arranged to borrow Aunt Abbie’s more spacious carriage and two horses from the stables.

He had slept apart from Elizabeth even though it might have been their last night together. It couldn’t be helped—Aunt Abbie’s views on courtship were modern but not infinitely elastic—and he wasn’t sure Elizabeth would have wanted his company in any case. The news that Kemp had sent the last train east had unnerved her. She was worried about getting caught on the wrong side of the Mirror. It was a reasonable fear, but it had made her sullen and temperamental. When he asked whether she had slept well, she said, “Not really. Nice bed and all, but this mansion? The wallpaper, those creepy little bronze statues everywhere? It looks like every haunted house in every horror movie that ever came out of Hollywood.”

Jesse couldn’t imagine a home as spacious and well-appointed as Aunt Abbie’s ever seeming haunted, a word he associated with séances and European castles, though Elizabeth might have a point about the statuary—he remembered his own uneasy fascination with the miniature bronze of the Capitoline Wolf on the table at the top of the stairs.

He hoped Elizabeth’s judgment hadn’t been affected by recent events. In truth, he wasn’t sure how helpful her presence would be. She was a deft hand with a pistol, he had learned that from experience, but they might need to go places where a woman would be unwelcome or outrageously conspicuous. But nor could he proceed without her. Kemp had sent her on this mission for many reasons, not the least of which was to make sure Jesse persisted in it.

Jesse told his aunt and his sister he’d be back to see them soon. Probably he would. But first he had to find Miss Mercy Kemp and deliver her to her wealthy father. And after that—unless he wanted to live the rest of his life in abject fear—he would have to come to terms with Mr. Roscoe Candy.

Only then could he consider the future. Not the City future, not the flying-machine future. His own future.

Should he have one.

He had arranged to meet Sonny Lau at noon in a trinket shop off Dupont Street.

Jesse adjusted his slouch hat to shade his face, but he felt vulnerable and exposed holding the reins as the carriage rattled down California Street. After four years at the City of Futurity, the streets of San Francisco seemed both utterly strange and intimately familiar. As they approached Chinatown he half expected to see his younger self darting through the crowds, all the red-painted doorways once again known to him, the cellar cigar-rollers, the eating houses with smoked ducks and pigs’ heads hanging in their windows, the houses where you could buy a bit’s worth of twice-laid opium, the noisy Chinese theaters, the gambling houses with their spring-lock doors: a foreign land that was simultaneously his native land. San Francisco defied geography the way the City of Futurity defied time.

Editorial writers liked to play up its squalor, but by daylight the Chinese quarter was safe enough to walk through and attracted plenty of white tourists. Jesse braked the rig at a curb not far from the trinket shop where he was supposed to meet Sonny. He wished now that they had arranged to meet at a place where Jesse was less likely to be recognized—Cliff House, say, or Woodward’s Gardens. But the trinket shop was busy and there were enough tourists in it to make the presence of another white man and woman unremarkable. The proprietor, an old man with a queue that dangled below his waist, nodded at Jesse, exchanged a few words with his equally ancient wife in what Jesse recognized as Dupont Gai dialect, then disappeared behind a beaded curtain. Moments later the curtain parted again, just long enough for Sonny Lau to beckon Jesse and Elizabeth inside.

Beyond the curtain was a small room furnished with a simple table and a few scuffed chairs. Sonny was courteous enough to pull out one of those chairs for Elizabeth, though he gave her the same puzzled look he had given her yesterday. “I talked to Little Tom,” he said.

His See Yup boss. “About the pistols?”

“Yes. He owns one. And he knows where it came from. Each of the heads of the Six Companies received one, along with a letter saying the Companies need to unite because we’re going to be attacked by Kearneyite mobs and the police.”

This was the connection Jesse had come to the city hoping to discover. His hope had rested on three established facts. The first fact was that Theo Stromberg was physically present in San Francisco. The second fact was that Theo liked to send Glocks to parties he considered oppressed and endangered. The third fact was that San Francisco’s Chinese population fell into that category. Kearneyites and others had been stirring up mob warfare against the Chinese for years. So, Jesse had reasoned, there was at least a chance Theo had sent weapons to the Six Companies.

But none of that would matter if Theo had been careful enough to cover his tracks. “Is that all?”

“You think Little Tom would waste his time talking to me if there wasn’t more to it? I told him there’s a man from the City who wants to find out who mailed the guns.”

“You mentioned me?”

“Not by name, but I had to tell him something. Little Tom is curious by nature, and the pistol aroused his curiosity as soon as it came into his hands. Like you, he wanted to know where it came from.”

“And did he find out?”

“Yes.”

“He knows how to find Theo Stromberg?”

“Yes. And it didn’t take him long to make a connection between Theo Stromberg and those letters the newspapers have been publishing. But that was as far as he took it. Little Tom doesn’t see anything to be gained by involving himself in the business of the City of Futurity.”

“I don’t care about Little Tom. It’s Theo we want. Can you give us a street address?”

“Make an offer.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you want this man, offer us something in return.”

“What’s the going price for that kind of information?”

“Make an offer, I’ll take it to Little Tom, and if it’s acceptable he’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“I can’t dicker at one remove. I don’t know anything about Company bosses or what they want. The only Chinamen I know are highbinders and sing-song girls—no offense.”

Elizabeth spoke up: “This Little Tom, does he like his Glock?”

Sonny gave her a condescending stare. “I believe he does.”

“Would he like another one? Suppose we offered him another pistol from the future, a different kind. You think he might take that in trade?”

“You have such a thing?”

“Yes.”

Sonny Lau looked at Jesse. Jesse thought about the contents of the calico travel bag and guessed she was talking about a Taser. Jesse had taken Taser training when he was hired as City security. It was an unimpressive weapon, in his opinion. “Tell Little Tom we’ll give him an X3 handheld electroshock weapon in exchange for the whereabouts of Mr. Theo Stromberg. Tell him it’s the only X3 in the state of California.”

Sonny looked skeptical. “Is there really such a pistol?”

“Yes.”

“When can you bring it?”

“Whenever he’s willing to make the exchange. The sooner the better, from our point of view.”

“Better for us, too. All this talk about mobs, it’s not just talk. Last night there was a big crowd at the sandlots, screaming about burning down Chinatown. Tonight it might be more than talk. Meet me back here, two hours.”

Jesse’s pocket watch had been given to him by August Kemp especially for this job. The watch looked like any other cheap pocket watch, but its inner workings were digital, meaning the watch didn’t tell time so much as calculate it. It was more reliable than a conventional watch, but it ticked just as loudly, for the sake of verisimilitude. Jesse took note of the time as he left the trinket shop. Two hours. He wondered if Sonny owned a reliable watch.

Elizabeth climbed aboard the carriage, still struggling against the bulk of her counterfeit dress, and Jesse drove them from Dupont Street to a place near Market, a nameless alley next to a draper’s warehouse. The alley wasn’t much wider than the carriage itself, but it was usefully private. Brick walls blocked the sunlight and kept the air cool, as if the morning’s fog had lingered in the shadows. It was a place where no one would see them, a place where they could speak freely. He said, “It’s like that double exposure you told me about.”

“What?”

“You once told me about a double exposure—two photographs developed on one paper.”

“I know what a double exposure is. What about it?”

“All this neighborhood seems like a double exposure to me. Familiar but strange. Do you take my meaning? But maybe it isn’t the neighborhood. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the double exposure. That boy who lived in a Tenderloin parlor house, and whatever the City of Futurity made of me.”

“We’re both double exposures, in that case.”

“Are we?”

“That’s what the City does to you. Last time I was home, back in North Carolina, it felt like I was the one out of place. I mean, God knows I don’t belong here—no offense—but it was like I didn’t belong there, either.”

“What you said at the table last night, about the future—is it really so bad?”

“I was just tired of Abbie looking at me like I’m the ambassador from Utopia. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“But is it as bad as you said?”

“I don’t know. It depends. Not necessarily. But it’s definitely not paradise.”

“I figured that out quite a while ago. If the world you come from was paradise, you wouldn’t be such a cool hand with a pistol.” He tried to think of a way to speak his thoughts that wouldn’t seem sentimental or maudlin or offensive. “So you’re not the ambassador from Utopia, and Dupont Street sure as hell isn’t paradise lost. But I’m glad you could see a little of the place where I grew up. We’re what the world makes us, Elizabeth. Two cities made me, Futurity and San Francisco. And it pleases me that you exist in both of them.”

Her expression made Jesse suspect he had not entirely avoided sentimentality. “You know,” she said, speaking softly but startling him nonetheless, “it’s going to burn.”

“What?”

“San Francisco. All these buildings, Jesse. All of them. First an earthquake, then the fire.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

“When?”

“In 1906. April, I think, but I’m not absolutely sure. I should have Googled it when I was back home. But if you’re still here, twenty-nine years from now? Take a spring vacation.”

He looked away. There was a Kearneyite handbill plastered to the brick wall beside him, one of many such he had seen this afternoon. It advertised tonight’s mass meeting at the sandlots. Beside it was another handbill, written in Chinese letters. He couldn’t read it, but he recognized it as a chung hong—an announcement of impending war. “We might not have to wait thirty years,” he said, “to see it burn.”

Back at the trinket shop, the owner waved Jesse and Elizabeth through the beaded curtain to the room where Sonny Lau was already waiting. Sonny’s expression was somber, and Jesse wondered whether he ought to expect bad news.

Sonny said, “Do you have the pistol?”

Elizabeth took the Taser from the calico bag. The Taser was an awkward weapon and not a lethal one—both drawbacks, in Jesse’s opinion. It would incapacitate a man briefly but make an enemy of him for life. But he didn’t share these reservations with Sonny, whose eyes widened at the sight of the thing. It had a suitably intimidating appearance: black and yellow, fang-toothed, ready to spit venom.

Sonny weighed the Taser in his hands as Jesse explained how to operate it. It required no ammunition, he said, but what he did not say was that it would need recharging, which would be impractical for another half century or so. Sonny said, “I’m instructed by my employer to make the exchange if the weapon seems authentic.”

“It’s authentic, all right. They don’t come any more authentic than this one.”

“All right,” Sonny said. “If you say so.”

“So you can tell me where to find Theo Stromberg?”

“Little Tom traced the package containing the pistol to its source, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Elizabeth spoke up: “How do you trace a package in this day and age?”

“Bribery,” Sonny said, giving her his by now familiar look of bewildered condescension, “and the threat of violence. How else?”

“Where is he, then?” Jesse asked.

“Little Tom was surprised to discover that the package had been sent by a man living in a hotel on Montgomery Street south of Market. Not the worst hotel in the city by a long stretch, but nothing like the best. The man has been living there for more than a year, along with a woman he calls his wife.”

“Did Tom or any of his men approach him?”

“My employer kept this knowledge to himself. At first he assigned men to watch the hotel, hoping to learn something more revealing. But the man and his wife spend most of their time in each other’s company. They leave the hotel for meals, or to take long aimless walks, or to attend the theater. The man often mails letters, though he never seems to receive any. He pays his rent promptly. Little Tom saw no advantage and much risk in attempting to contact him. Does that sound like the man you’re looking for?”

“Close enough. All we need is an address.”

Sonny Lau passed over a folded slip of paper, and Jesse put it in his pocket.

The business was done. Sonny tucked the Taser into a leather carry-all. “I’d lay low for a while after this, if I were you. Little Tom asked a lot of questions.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Only as much as I had to. I told him someone I knew had been hired by the City of Futurity to hunt for a fugitive. That you had approached me and asked me to negotiate this exchange. I invented a name for you. But curiosity has been aroused. I may have been followed here. You ought to know that.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Or so Jesse hoped. “I thank you for taking the risk.”

“There’s always risk. Risk is unimportant, as long as the house won’t be endangered.” The house on California Street, Sonny meant: Phoebe and Aunt Abbie and Randal and Soo Yee.

“Good,” Jesse said, standing.

“You’re happy with what I brought you?”

The address on the paper might be fraudulent, though Jesse doubted Little Tom would stoop to hustling a City agent. Or it could be a trap. Roscoe Candy had business connections with the See Yups, though they didn’t love him. But if anyone could be trusted, it was Sonny Lau. “I’m in your debt.”

They shook hands then, more as old friends than to seal the bargain, but Sonny still looked troubled. Jesse said, “Are you in danger?”

“No more than any of us. Today the highbinders are tying up their queues and sharpening their hatchets. Try to be somewhere else after dark.”

The handshake ended. Sonny turned to Elizabeth and made a curt bow. “Pleased to have made your acquaintance.”

“Likewise,” Elizabeth said.

Jesse left the carriage at a livery stable on Market and walked with Elizabeth to the address they had been given. It was a three-story hotel on Montgomery near Market, just as Sonny Lau had said: not the plush Grand Hotel, which had impressed a younger Jesse as probably the finest hotel in all creation, or the even plusher Palace, which had been constructed in his absence. The Royal, as it was called, was older, less elegant, not exactly shabby but as close as it could get to that description while justifying the price of its rooms. The lobby smelled of oiled wood and boiled cabbage, halfway between a church and a cookhouse. The clerk behind the desk was a bald man with a vast gray beard and pitiless eyes. He looked at Jesse and Elizabeth, and at the calico travel bag in Jesse’s hand, and seemed to find their presence in his domain plausible if not entirely convincing. “A room for you and your lady, sir?”

The price he quoted seemed high, but renting a room was the easiest way to gain access to the upper floors, and in any case it was Kemp’s money they were spending, not their own. Jesse didn’t want to put his true name on the register, so he signed as “John Comstock and Wife.” He was aware of the tension in Elizabeth’s body as she waited, the way she scanned the empty lobby as if it might at any moment fill up with hostile forces, wary as a lioness closing in on her prey.

“So do we knock on the door?” she asked as they climbed the stairs, having waved off a disappointed elderly bellboy. According to Sonny’s information, the room in which Theo and Mercy were staying was on the third floor. Number 316. “Or do we knock the door down?”

“Might as well knock first,” Jesse said. “See where it goes from there. Assuming anybody’s home.”

At the third-floor landing he took a pistol from the travel bag and made sure it was loaded and ready to fire. Elizabeth did the same, keeping the weapon in her hand but concealing it against the billow of her day dress. Outside the door marked 316, Jesse put the bag on the floor within easy reach. He glanced at Elizabeth, who nodded her readiness. Now we come to the cusp of the thing, Jesse thought. He kept the pistol in his left hand and knocked on the door with the knuckles of his right. Four sharp raps.

Long seconds passed. Then the latch rattled and the door opened inward, revealing a young woman. Mercy Kemp. She fit the description and matched all the pictures in the dossier. She was tall, like so many of these twenty-first-century women. She wore a pale yellow dress of no particular distinction. Her blond hair was shorter than most women wore it. Her face was flawlessly symmetrical and her skin was almost supernaturally unblemished. “Yes?”

Jesse said, “Miss Mercy Kemp?”

“You must be from the City.” She turned away and called out, “Theo! They’re here.”

It seemed prudent, as they came inside and closed the door behind them, to keep their weapons visible. But Theo Stromberg offered no resistance. “What were you expecting,” he asked, nodding at Jesse’s pistol, “a fire fight? You won’t need that.”

“I hope not. But I’ll hang on to it for the time being.”

Mercy and Theo stood together by the room’s long window as if framed in a photograph. Theo Stromberg, for all the deviltry he had committed, looked about as menacing as a hummingbird. He was a wiry man, and he gave the impression that there wasn’t quite enough of him to fill his clothes. He was clean-shaven and dark-haired and nervous. Like Mercy, Theo would not have seemed remarkable if you passed him on the street. But put these two together and they looked unmistakably like visitors from the future—unformed, too perfectly made, lacking all the scars and marks that distinguish real people from store-window mannequins.

On top of a bureau was a leather travel bag, open but almost fully packed. Most of what it contained was women’s clothing, presumably Mercy’s wardrobe. “Getting ready to go somewhere?”

“Yeah,” Theo said amicably. “Home.”

It wasn’t clear what he meant by that. Elizabeth said, “We’re here to take you into custody.”

“Fine, good,” Theo said.

Mercy added, “We expected my father to send someone. I’m surprised it took so long. We’re finished here. We’re ready to go with you.”

“Another day and you’d have missed us,” Theo said. “We figured we should head east before the strikes shut down rail service west of the Mississippi.”

Elizabeth said, “You’re telling us you’re willing to go back?”

“We don’t want to be stranded here. That was never part of the plan. So when we heard the news—”

“What news?”

Theo looked at Mercy, Mercy looked at Theo. Theo pointed at a copy of the Chronicle lying on a chair, pages askew. Jesse took his eyes off his nominal captives long enough to spot the pertinent headline at the top of a long column of dense type:

Elizabeth didn’t trust the apparent docility of the captives—if Theo had offered even a hint of resistance she would have been happy to put him in wrist restraints—but she left them under Jesse’s surveillance and took the radio into an adjoining room.

She pictured her signal bouncing from Montgomery Street to Oakland, flying across the bay like a weightless bird, outstripping the ferries and freight boats. Radio before Marconi. She guessed Marconi was just an Italian kid in short pants circa 1877, if he had even been born yet. Something else she could Google at her leisure, if she ever got home.

A voice she didn’t recognize answered her call and told her to stay on the air. Then there was an interval of noise, cosmic rays crackling down from distant stars, until Kemp’s voice drowned it out. “Elizabeth? What’s your status?”

“We have her.”

A pause. Then, “Thank God. Oh, Christ. It was a close thing, Elizabeth, I won’t shit you about that.”

“We have Theo, too. They both say they’re willing to come back. No argument.”

“Theo’s a liar. Don’t take him at his word. Especially not as long as my daughter is under his influence.”

“Understood. But I’m assuming you want us to bring them both in.”

“Obviously, but it’s Mercy who matters. Keep that in mind.”

“We will.”

“Okay. Things are a little chaotic here—”

“It was in the papers,” Elizabeth said, “about the siege.”

“We’re dealing with it. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Fucking reporters, half the time they’re just making shit up. It’s true Hayes has an infantry brigade at the gate. Some laid-off local employee told the Chicago papers about the attempt on Grant’s life—Congress and the press are making a big deal of it, on top of everything else. But we still have a few friends in high places. We’ll make it back safely, I promise, but time is tight.”

“So what happens next?”

“We’re dealing with local hostility here on the Oakland side. The City’s docks and property are more or less under police control right now, so we’re working out of private facilities the authorities don’t know about. Getting you out of San Francisco is going to be a little tricky. We should be able to have an unmarked boat for you at the Market Street wharf by nine tonight, but we’re still working out the details. Can you stay where you are for another few hours?”

Elizabeth wasn’t sure how to answer that. Jesse might have stirred up a hornets’ nest by bartering with the tongs. But it was hard to imagine hired killers storming the Royal Hotel. “I guess we can sit tight.”

“Stay by the radio and be ready to move when you get the word. How far are you from the docks?”

“Jesse would know better than I do, all this horse traffic, but maybe half an hour, three-quarters of an hour?”

“Okay, noted. As for Jesse, tell him he’ll be paid when you deliver Mercy to the boat. He doesn’t need to come across the bay with her. Once I have my daughter back, his work is done. And that’s the last you’ll see of him. Understood?”

“Understood,” she said, hating him for making her say it.

Jesse didn’t like the idea of waiting in the hotel for orders from Kemp. This was a place known to his enemies, and every instinct he had learned as a bouncer’s boy told him to keep moving and stick to the shadows.

But orders were orders. He was only hired help, and he would be hired help for a few hours more, until Kemp, or someone from the City, paid him off with a bag of double eagles and a handshake. Then he would be his own man again. And Elizabeth would go home to her daughter. And the rest of his life, which seemed to Jesse like an ominous void waiting to be filled, could begin.

In the meantime there was nothing to do but sit at the window of the hotel room and watch the sun creep down behind a billboard advertising Kopp’s Pills for Cough and Grippe. It was the time of day when San Francisco’s respectable citizens began heading for their comfortable homes and lockable doors, while everyone else—that is to say, the city’s majority—prepared to conduct the kind of business that thrives after dark. Elizabeth, seated across the room from Theo and Mercy and cradling her pistol in her lap, seemed not to want to talk. But Jesse was bored and saw no reason to suppress his curiosity about the two runners. He’d talked to many runners in the course of his work, and he didn’t despise them as a class. So when Theo ventured to ask a question—“How exactly did you find us?”—Jesse said, “The City tracked you to San Francisco. There must have been postmarks on some of those letters you sent.”

“That’s not surprising. And we weren’t exactly hiding. But how’d you track us to the Royal?”

“Talked to one of the Six Companies. They like to know the whereabouts of the people they do business with.”

“Okay, I get that, but how did you connect us to the Six Companies?”

“The weapons you’ve been giving away tend to end up in the hands of people with grievances. Hereabouts, that’s one of two groups—Chinamen and wage workers. I happen to know some people in Chinatown, so that’s where we started. If that didn’t pan out I would have talked to the Kearneyites.”

“What if I hadn’t given pistols to either group?”

“Then we wouldn’t have found you so quick, and you wouldn’t be going home.”

“Well,” Theo said in his piping voice, “you’re wrong on two counts. One, I would never put a weapon in the hands of the Kearneyites. Denis Kearney talks a lot about the working man, but he’s a fucking racist. The way it worked out where I come from, Kearneyite mobs attacked the Chinese and a lot of innocent people got killed. It seems likely to happen here just the same. Second, I have no desire to stay behind after the Mirror closes. If that’s what August Kemp thinks, he has no idea what I’m all about.”

“He thinks you’ll face legal trouble if you go home.”

“He can bring charges, sure, but on fairly trivial grounds—transporting dangerous goods, trespassing on City property. The weapons I arranged to smuggle through the Mirror were legally purchased, and there’s no law about what I can do with them on this side. I mean, Kemp imported weapons, too, in the hands of his security people. They say a local was killed by City agents at Futurity Station last year. Is Kemp going to answer for that? No—not back home, not in a court of law. Given that, does he really want to initiate a lawsuit that’ll put my testimony into the public record? I hope he does, but I doubt he’s that stupid.”

Jesse didn’t react when Theo mentioned the man killed at Futurity Station. Nor did Elizabeth. But it raised a question. He said, “Some of those Glocks ended up in the wrong hands, didn’t they?”

The glow of moral certainty vanished from Theo’s face. “Not everyone in my supply chain was reliable. I had to work with locals and low-level City employees. The guns were never supposed to be more than symbolic. One pistol, one clip, a dramatic way of proving to the people I wrote to that the warnings I sent them really came from the future. But more weapons came across than I ever intended.”

“A piece or two got sold that shouldn’t have, in other words.”

“Apparently.”

“Private buyers.”

“I suppose so.”

“Including the man who tried to shoot Ulysses S. Grant. Which is another reason you might be eager to get out of 1877.”

Theo didn’t have an answer for that.

Out on the street, the shadows had grown and merged. The air was still, the sky the color of blue ink. A horse car rattled up Montgomery. From time to time, passing men glanced up at the hotel. Jesse said to Elizabeth, “Too many people know this room number. We already rented a room upstairs—we should go there.”

He was afraid she might accuse him of paranoia, a twenty-first-century word for unreasonable fear (and apparently a common malady in that world). But she nodded curtly. “Good thought.”

Mercy Kemp looked at her bag. “I can finish packing—”

Jesse said, “You won’t need all that, and we’ll travel lighter without it.”

She gave it a moment’s thought and shrugged. Sensible attitude, Jesse thought. Moments later they were in a nearly identical room one floor up. According to his pocket watch, another hour had passed without further word from August Kemp.

It seemed to Jesse that Mercy had a little of her father about her. It was nothing obvious, just her quick brown eyes, a sort of economy of motion, a hint of the elder Kemp’s natural authority. Jesse knew she was a woman who had once been made to feel special and permitted to expect obedience from others, but there was something chastened in her, too—a humility she must have learned, not inherited. He asked how she had come to join Theo in the adventures that had landed her in a hotel south of Market.

She shrugged. “I believe in the cause.”

It sounded like a well-rehearsed answer to a foolish question. “The cause of bankrupting your father?”

“The cause of letting people know what he’s doing here and stopping him from doing it again.”

“By ‘here,’ you mean San Francisco?”

“I mean your whole world.”

“And what’s he doing to it, in your opinion?”

“Exploiting it, corrupting it, deceiving it, and abandoning it as soon as he’s extracted enough gold to turn a profit.”

“He might say he’s given as much as he’s taken.”

“I’m sure he would. But that would be a lie.”

“Do you hate your father, Ms. Kemp? Did he raise you badly?”

“That’s a People magazine kind of question.” She gave him an impatient look, then sighed and said, “I don’t hate my father. I mean, he wasn’t around a lot, so maybe I have some issues. But that’s not why I joined the movement, and it’s not why I’m here.”

She seemed reluctant to say more. “Well, I won’t press—”

“She’s a truther,” Elizabeth said.

Mercy sat upright. “That’s an insulting word.”

Elizabeth said, “Truthers are conspiracy theorists. Mercy’s a time-travel truther. She thinks the government’s covering up the real source of the Mirror technology.”

“It was invented by gnomes from the far reaches of Hilbert space,” Jesse said. “Isn’t that what you told me?”

Mercy’s indignation turned her face a brickish shade of red. “They weren’t ‘gnomes.’ They were normal for where they came from. They were kept in captivity for a couple of years before they died.”

“No one’s ever proved that,” Elizabeth said.

“Because the evidence has been suppressed. But the facts are coming out piece by piece, and it makes the elites nervous.”

Jesse said, “What facts are those?”

“The fact that our entire political and economic system is driving us into a lethal dead end.” Mercy turned to Elizabeth. “The people you call ‘gnomes’ came from almost a thousand years in our future. They’re small because, where they come from, everybody’s small. Their bodies are unusual in a lot of ways, according to the autopsies, which were never officially released. They process food more efficiently than we do. They’re built for survival in a hot, depleted environment. That’s an uncomfortable truth for anyone who wants to go on doing business as usual, given that business-as-usual is cooking the planet. But it gets worse, for people like my father. The visitors’ economic system is different, too—egalitarian in a way that makes wealthy and powerful people uncomfortable.”

Jesse turned to Theo. “Do you believe this as well, about the utopian gnomes?”

Theo looked uncomfortable. “I haven’t seen the kind of evidence Mercy’s seen. But I agree that there needs to be a whole lot more transparency. And, you know, the irony is pretty inescapable.”

“What irony is that?”

“That we suppress information about the future on the grounds that making it public might create chaos. But somehow it’s okay for us to come here and stir up the exact same shit. It’s a double standard.”

“My father’s doing things here that are inexcusable,” Mercy said. “You should be angry at him.”

I may yet work myself up to it, Jesse thought.

By the time it was fully dark, two fire wagons had gone rattling and clanging down Montgomery Street. There was nothing else the window view could tell him, but it was a safe bet that there was trouble in Chinatown, just as Theo had predicted. Jesse was relieved, then, when the radio emitted a chirp that indicated an incoming message. Elizabeth put the device to her ear and said “yes” or “okay” at various intervals; then she tucked the radio into the calico travel bag and said, “We’re supposed to be at the Market Street wharf by ten o’clock. An unmarked boat will take us across the bay to Oakland.”

Jesse checked his pocket watch. Ample time to make the deadline. “All right,” he said. To Mercy and Theo: “We have a carriage big enough to carry us all. If anyone’s watching they’ll see us leave the hotel, but I can’t do anything about that—we only have to get to the stable around the corner on Market. Once we’re in the carriage we should be safe enough, though we might need to take the long way around if there’s trouble between here and the wharfs. Understood?”

Nods all around.

“Downstairs, out the door, up Montgomery to Market. I’ll reclaim the carriage, then we head for the docks. All right?”

No objections. The ladies put on their hats.

Jesse opened the door of the room and surveyed the hallway beyond. The Royal Hotel wasn’t a complicated building. He could see the entire corridor from the north end to the stairway on the south, and there was no motion but the flicker of the gaslights. “Come ahead,” he said.

They made it to the third-floor landing before they encountered anyone else. In this case it was a man in a top hat, escorting a woman who looked too furtive to be his wife. The man was clutching a room key in his right hand.

The couple walked past the door marked 316, Mercy and Theo’s old room. Jesse wouldn’t have given it a second thought, save that the woman tugged her companion’s sleeve and said, “What kind of hotel is this? This door’s had its lock broken.”

Elizabeth guided Mercy and Theo a little ways down the stair, out of sight. Jesse waited for the top-hatted man to convince his female friend to continue on to their own room. Once they were out of the corridor he made a cautious approach to 316.

The door was ajar. And yes, the lock had been forced—with a crowbar, it looked like. The wood of the jamb was splintered and broken.

Jesse pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The room was empty. Nothing had been disturbed except Mercy’s suitcase, the contents of which had been dumped on the floor. All else was as they had left it earlier in the day. The thieves had not found what they had come for.

Because what they came for, Jesse thought, was us.

The break-in wasn’t entirely surprising. The question was, who was behind it? Little Tom or some other tong boss, looking for more City weapons? Or Roscoe Candy, looking for revenge?

They passed through the lobby of the Royal into the street, where the evening air smelled of refuse and wood smoke. The pedestrians on Montgomery were mostly male and mostly respectable, none obviously threatening. Haphazard light and deep shadow provided cover but made it harder to spot potentially hostile strangers. Jesse walked a little ahead of Mercy and Theo; Elizabeth walked a pace behind them, as if she were afraid they might dart away into the crowd.

The traffic on Market Street was denser and even more lively, but the livery stable where he had left the carriage bore a crude sign that said CLOSED. There was no visible light from inside. Jesse pounded his fist on the barn-sized door, but no one came. Which was worrying. There were animals inside—he could hear the nervous whinnying that followed his knock—and at this hour there should have been a hostler there to tend them. He looked at Elizabeth, who shrugged.

The big door wasn’t chained, so he pushed it open. The reek of horses and fouled straw wafted out of the darkness, along with the sound of the animals shuffling in place. There was no lantern at hand. Jesse had been carrying his pistol on his belt under his shirt; now he took it in his hand and kept it at his side. “Stay by the door,” he told Elizabeth. “Keep Mercy and Theo where you can see them.” She nodded and drew her own pistol from a pocket sewn into her day dress.

Jesse hugged the shadows as he began to move deeper into the building. On his right was a row of stalls; on his left an assortment of carts, wagons, and carriages. A tall window at the rear of the shed admitted enough reflected light to allow him to navigate without bumping into anything. As he passed a small alcove he spotted an oil lamp resting on an anvil, as if it had been left there in haste, and he paused long enough to lift the mantle and light the wick with a paper lucifer of the futuristic kind. The lamp gave off an acrid glare that penetrated into the dark places of the shed and made it instantly obvious why no one had answered his knock.

The stable hand who had accepted Jesse’s horse and carriage only a few hours ago lay motionless, sprawled behind a quenching barrel in the blacksmith’s alcove. The blacksmith in his apron lay facedown on a drift of urine-soaked straw, arms akimbo. The throats of both men had been cut. Their blood had collected in rusty pools. It had been there long enough to begin congealing.

Jesse felt himself grow cold—a literal coldness, a winter wind that seemed to travel from his heart to his extremities.

Some years ago, a knife-wielding Placer County miner had assaulted one of Madame Chao’s girls because she couldn’t make his pecker stand up. Jesse had helped his father evict the man. It hadn’t been easy, and he had taken a few cuts in the process, but the miner got the worst of it. Later, Jesse had tried to describe to his father the feeling that had come over him during the fight, a radiant chill that didn’t make him weaker but made him strong. I know all about that, his father had said: It was a Cullum trait, a blessing and a curse. Helpful in a fight because it numbed the nerves and left the mind cool and clear; dangerous because it made you less likely to turn and flee—almost always the wisest course of action.

Tonight Jesse didn’t turn or flee, just took the lantern in the icy fingers of his right hand and gripped his pistol with the icy fingers of his left. The coppery stink of shed blood was obvious to him now. It was what had made the horses skittish: They snorted and shuffled at every move he made, which convinced him that there was no one else here—no one living—except himself.

And he still needed a vehicle and an animal or two to draw it. So he pressed on until he found Aunt Abbie’s carriage, parked at the back. He was about to call in Elizabeth so she could help him put a horse in its traces when a faint odor caused him to pause and open the carriage door.

A body tumbled out and folded at his feet.

The smell of blood became overwhelming. The horses in their stalls rolled their eyes and began to rear and kick.

Jesse brought the light of the lantern to bear on the corpse’s face.

The dead man was Sonny Lau, though he wasn’t easy to recognize. His throat had been cut and his tongue pulled out through the bloody gap.

16

Elizabeth stood with Mercy and Theo at the stable doors like a good soldier, keeping an eye on passing strangers. Jesse was taking too long, though she could hear him moving down the straw-littered length of what was essentially a large barn, accompanied by the various unintelligible noises made by horses in their stalls. She glanced inward when a flicker of light caught her eyes. He must have found a lamp. Then a span of silence, more motion, ultimately a muffled thump.

Then Jesse was back at the entrance, beckoning her and the two runners inside.

He closed the doors behind them. She could see by the glow of the lamp that his face was clenched into an expression of shock and rage so intense she had to suppress an urge to back away. “What happened?”

He took her aside and answered her question in a monotone. He had found three corpses, he said: two men dead of knife wounds and Sonny Lau mutilated in the cab of their carriage. Sonny had been killed in the signature style of Roscoe Candy: “It’s his calling card,” Jesse said.

Anger boiled off of him like the reek of an overdriven motor. Although, Elizabeth thought, the metallic tang in the air probably had some other source. Reluctantly, she acknowledged the stink of spilled blood. “So what do we do?”

“We can’t use the carriage, it’s a charnel house, but we can steal another of these rigs. Help me harness the horses, and then—”

He trailed off. “What?”

“I don’t suppose you can drive one of these? Or maybe Theo—if he knows the way to the docks—”

“What are you saying?”

“Think about what happened. We left Sonny at the trinket shop. Sonny might have followed us, but why would he? My guess is that Candy’s men caught him not long after he talked to us. Maybe they were watching him the whole time.”

“Why would they be watching Sonny Lau?”

“Candy might have known that Sonny had a connection to Madame Chao’s. And if Candy’s men were watching Sonny, they would have raised a red flag if he met with an out-of-towner matching my description.”

“We saw Sonny twice today, and nobody stopped us.”

“By the time Roscoe got wind of it we were probably already headed for the Royal.”

Elizabeth pictured Sonny Lau as she had last seen him, an arrogant young Asian guy dressed like a riverboat gambler, and tried not to imagine how he must look now, butchered gangland-style by Roscoe Candy. “What do you think he told them?”

“As little as possible. Sonny would have put up a fight. But he’s only human, Elizabeth. In the end, he probably told them whatever they wanted to know.”

“Including the room number at the Royal.”

“But when they came looking for us, the room was empty. So they would have asked Sonny a few more questions.”

“Why here?”

“This is the closest livery stable to the hotel. Candy might have been lying in wait for us. But he’s not a patient man by nature.”

“You think he killed the stable hands, then Sonny?”

“Probably the other way around—killed Sonny on an impulse, then killed the witnesses. Leaving Sonny in the carriage was a message, aimed right at me. Candy wants revenge. He doesn’t care about Mercy Kemp or the City of Futurity.”

Elizabeth stared at him as the implications began to sink in. “They asked Sonny why you were in town. They asked how you contacted him. They would have asked—”

“About Phoebe.”

“He wouldn’t have given her up, would he? His sister lives in the house, too.”

“We don’t know what Sonny might have said. He might have given up Phoebe to protect his sister. And they left his body for me to find, because Candy knows the first thing I’ll do is go to Phoebe. They set a trap, Elizabeth. And I don’t have any choice but to walk into it.”

“But we have to deliver the runners to Kemp’s boat.”

Jesse said nothing.

“Tonight,” she said.

“I’ll take a horse of my own. You can take the runners to the dock. They’re not resisting. Hire a cab.”

“But you won’t get paid.”

Jesse gave her a scornful look.

“Anyway,” she pressed, “if Candy’s at your aunt’s house he’ll have his troops with him. You can’t take him on alone.”

“Can’t I?”

“You don’t have to. I’m a veteran. I’ve been trained. I can handle weapons.”

She had his full attention now. He put his hands on her shoulders. Big hands, but cold. “There’s no time for this. I thank you, Elizabeth. But you have a daughter to go home to.”

“Even if I miss the boat, Kemp won’t leave me behind.”

“Won’t he?”

“Not if we have his daughter.”

Jesse was slow to answer. “You can’t—”

“Yes I fucking can,” she said, realizing she meant it.

“Why would you take such a risk?”

“Because Kemp was wrong, he’s always been wrong, this isn’t a fucking diorama—it’s real, you’re real, Phoebe is real, this is a real place, and I’m in it, I’m right here, I’m real, too, and I can help.” And you can’t stop me, she added silently.

Jesse just stared. His hands tightened on her shoulders, as if he was about to push her away.

But he didn’t. “In that case,” he said, “we’re wasting time. Get Mercy and Theo into a carriage. Any carriage but the one we came in. And don’t forget the weapons. I expect we’ll need them.”

Two panting horses pulled the stolen rig up the slope of Nob Hill.

The people who lived here called it California Street Hill. But it was Nob Hill to the people who lived south of Market, Jesse had said, and Nob Hill was the name that would stick. The angle of the grade and the finite strength of the horses made their progress agonizingly slow, which meant Elizabeth had time to glance over her shoulder from time to time. California Street offered a comprehensive view of the business district, the rattletrap neighborhoods south of it, and all of the Chinese quarter. Which was burning.

Elizabeth counted at least five individual fires. “It looks like the mobs went after the Chinese theaters,” Jesse said. “Some of those shows go on for days, in installments. A lot of people inside.”

Fire bells rang out a continuous clangor. In places the flames had turned whole streets incandescent, like hostile zones on a digital grid. “Will it spread?”

“It might.”

“Will it come up here?”

“Most likely not. At least not tonight. I guess none of this was in your history books?”

Not exactly, no. This version of 1877 had come undocked from history and was drifting into uncharted space. Elizabeth’s guess about what came next was no better than Jesse’s.

She sat with Jesse on the driver’s bench of the carriage. Mercy and Theo were enclosed in the cab, if “cab” was the correct name for the passenger box of the vehicle. When Aunt Abbie’s house came within sight Jesse tugged the reins, looking for a place he could stop without either blocking traffic from the burning city or revealing himself to any hostile forces watching out for his approach.

Abbie Hauser’s late husband, for all his wealth, had not built the finest house on California Street. That prize would have gone to a building farther up the hill, the mansion of someone named Leland Stanford, an Addams Family spook house inflated to the size of an aircraft carrier. Abbie’s house was more human in scale but just as baroque, a quarry’s worth of stone folded into tesseracts of Italianate complexity. “Okay,” Elizabeth said, “what now?”

Jesse gazed at the house a few moments more. “You see the lights in the second-floor windows, south side?”

“So?”

“Most of those rooms haven’t been used since Abbie was widowed. Phoebe and I used to play hide-and-seek in them. They were never lit up at night.”

“Abbie or Phoebe might have gone up there to see the fires.”

“They would have more likely gone to the widow’s walk,” Jesse said, meaning the balcony surrounding a stone turret at the highest part of the house.

“So what conclusion are you drawing?”

“I’m betting Candy and his men are already inside.”

He said this in a flat voice, but Elizabeth knew him well enough to hear the envelope of rage around the words. “So it’s basically a hostage situation. We have to find a way to get Abbie and Phoebe out without getting them killed.”

Jesse nodded, but he counted off on his fingers: “Phoebe. Abbie. Soo Yee. And the hired man, Randal, if he was present when Candy’s hatchetmen moved in.”

“We don’t know how many men Candy has.”

“No.”

“I’ve been trained in counterterrorism and hostage-rescue operations,” Elizabeth said, which was sort of true. She had received basic infantry training, though her SIGINT work meant she’d spent most of her tour of duty behind a monitor. And when she joined the nominally civilian company that provided security to the City of Futurity she had gone through a truncated version of the FBI’s Quantico training, including simulated responses to simulated attacks in a grid of fake doors and walls representing a generic urban environment. “We need a plan,” she said, already conducting a mental inventory of the contents of their traveling bag: four flash-bang grenades, four automatic pistols with spare clips, one unsold Taser, a sheath of plastic pull-tie wrist restraints—plus a radio, their essential link to August Kemp. Thin pickings, but better than nothing.

“I’ll go in and kill Candy and his men,” Jesse said.

“That’s—not a real plan.”

“I disagree.”

“So what am I supposed to do, wait in the carriage?”

“Yes.”

“Waste of resources, Jesse. If you go in by yourself, that means I have to go in on my own after you get killed. If we do this together—”

“You’re a soldier, I understand that, and I’m thankful for your help. But I know the house better than you do. I can get close without revealing myself.”

“So, without revealing yourself, can you find out roughly how many men Candy has and where they’re situated with respect to the hostages?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then do that. Scout the house, come back here, and we’ll make a plan that uses what we have to maximal effect.”

“One thing we don’t have is time.”

“So keep an eye on your watch. If you’re not back here in thirty minutes I’ll assume you’re dead or captured.”

“And what if I am?”

“I’ll act accordingly.”

“What does that mean?”

She wasn’t sure what it meant, to be honest. “Let’s try to avoid finding out, okay?”

He stared at her. Then he nodded and took out his pocket watch. “Thirty minutes?”

“Starting now.”

Jesse understood that the urgency of his task and his fear of failing at it might interfere with clear thinking. So for the purposes of this scouting expedition he tried to pretend he was still the fifteen-year-old who had taught himself the secrets of the house well enough to come and go at will, undetected.

The house had seemed huge to him back then, the very definition of a rich man’s palace. Today he knew better. Mr. Hauser had never been quite as rich as he appeared to be, and the house on California Street was a modest one compared to the grandiose stone piles other millionaires had erected before or since. Nevertheless, the construction reflected the Comstock Lode money that had fueled it: It was big, boastful, smug in its complexity. It was not unusual for California Street nobs to surround their properties with walls, often for no other purpose than to spite a neighbor by blocking his view—Hauser’s silver-mining wealth had probably been great enough to allow for such extravagances, but his Bostonian sense of propriety had kept him from indulging it to its fullest extent. As a result Aunt Abbie’s mansion possessed only a handful of spare bedrooms and no more than a half dozen common rooms serving as library, parlor, study, dining room, etcetera. There was a small section set aside for servants’ quarters, not much used now that the employed staff was reduced to Randal and Soo Yee. It was also down to Hauser’s comparative modesty that the stone wall surrounding the house on three sides was only a little taller than Jesse’s head. It had never presented much of an obstacle to him, even when he was an inch or two shorter. And he knew all the least conspicuous angles by which to approach and scale it.

He came up and over on the north side of the property, landing in a patch of overgrown moonshadow that had once been Aunt Abbie’s azalea bed, with the family’s small greenhouse situated between him and the mansion. He crouched there for a while, in case he had been seen. The half moon hanging over the house cast a light that was both useful and dangerous.

No one came to chase him, so he moved slowly and more or less silently along the base of the wall until he could see the front of the house. Two carriages stood in the drive. They were flashy and expensive-looking, just the kind of conveyances Roscoe Candy favored. How many men could he have brought with him in these two vehicles? Not more than ten, Jesse thought, probably fewer, but he made ten his provisional assessment. Say ten criminals including Candy himself, which—if Abbie, Phoebe, Soo Yee, and Randal were all present—made fourteen people in the house. Ten villains and four hostages. (Assuming Candy kept the hostages alive, a traitorous fraction of his thoughts reminded him.)

Where exactly were the hostages? To answer that question he would have to get inside the house. He checked his pocket watch, but in the pale moonlight it was all but unreadable. He guessed at least five of his allotted thirty minutes had passed, and he wished he’d held out for forty.

Years ago, when he had first taught himself to sneak in and out of this house, Aunt Abbie had been a sterner presence in his life. It had been no secret that she thought of her niece and nephew as half savages, raised amid corruption by a drunkard. Jesse’s habit of roaming the streets at will had been anathema to her, as her Bostonian sense of propriety had been to him. Prevented from leaving by the customary exists, he had been obliged to resort to other means.

He had been younger then, and less well fed. The years he had spent as an employee of the City of Futurity had put weight and muscle on him, not that he had been small to begin with. He doubted he could shinny up a drainpipe without tearing it free of its moorings. But there were many ways inside, some of which involved the kind of climbing that turned his strength into an asset. The easiest of these was the one that looked most difficult: by way of the high turret of the house.

Mr. Hauser had hired a prominent San Francisco architect to design his home, which was to say he had hired someone who combined the skills and sensibilities of a stonemason and a lunatic. Aunt Abbie once told him the building’s “elements” had been copied from European architectural history, including the turret, a miniature tower that projected from the second story and poked its cap above the highest roof. The turret housed two circular rooms, one above the other, and the uppermost of the rooms opened onto a narrow balcony, the widow’s walk, that formed a half circle where the turret projected from the flat stone walls.

The turret looked as unassailable as the medieval towers it was meant to emulate. But looks were deceptive. The turret route had been Jesse’s most reliable way in and out when he wanted to go undetected, precisely because everyone assumed it was unclimbable. In fact the route was perfectly simple: from the top of the greenhouse to the crenellated stone wall, where gaps in the masonry made for natural foot- and handholds, to the gently sloping roof of the stables, to the angle where that roof met the innermost point of the widow’s walk, then up and over the railing and through the door. No harder now than it had ever been, but there was a complication: It seemed that Roscoe Candy had posted a guard on the widow’s walk.

Jesse spent a couple of minutes watching as the guard did a lazy tour of the walk and stopped to light a cigar. A stupid move, but the behavior of Candy’s men had always reflected their leader’s cockiness. The flare of the man’s match showed a bearded face, a slouched hat. As soon as the guard turned to walk the other way, Jesse crossed the exposed patch of lawn to the corner where the greenhouse met the wall of the mansion, deep enough under the contours of the turret to conceal him from sight. The greenhouse was a low structure, barely tall enough to stand up in, once used to winter perennials but now empty. It was an arrangement of iron struts supporting sheets of leaded glass; the trick, he had learned, was to put your weight where the struts were. Jesse stood on his toes and reached until he got a grip on the outer edge of the greenhouse roof; then he used the adjoining wall to help lever himself up.

The next part of the climb was safely hidden from the widow’s walk but exposed to anyone who might step out onto the lawn, so he moved up the wall as quickly and quietly as he could. The quarried stone had been crudely cut, and his shoes dislodged cascades of pebbles, an unavoidable noise, though the street sounds helped to conceal it. Jesse was obliged to freeze in place when one such pebble rang against a pane of greenhouse glass below him. The guard paused, peered into the shadowed garden, and eventually went back to his rounds—no harm done, but it cost time.

Jesse’s arms and thighs were burning with fatigue by the time he gained the lower end of the sloped roof, but from there he made fast progress: across the shingles to the place where the widow’s walk met the wall, a quick vault over the ironwork railing, then he was behind Candy’s guard, who sensed his presence and began to turn at the same time Jesse put an arm around his throat and tightened it into a choke hold he had learned in his City training.

Jesse’s father had taught him never to kill an enemy, unless his enemy was the kind of snake that could be rendered harmless no other way. Jesse figured all of Candy’s hatchetmen qualified as snakes. He wrestled to the man to the floor and planted a knee on his back and wrenched the man’s head sideways until something broke. When he was sure the man was dead, he took the guard’s revolver and added it to his own arsenal, consisting of a Glock tucked under his belt, spare clips in one pocket of his pants, and a flash-bang grenade in another—everything he could carry without weighing himself down or leaving Elizabeth defenseless.

Time was passing. Jesse saw through the windows that the upper turret room was empty. He stepped inside and shut out the night behind him.

Elizabeth checked her watch.

Fifteen minutes had passed since Jesse had left. Half the time allotted for his scouting expedition. Long enough to plan her next move. She climbed down from the driver’s seat of the carriage and opened the door to the enclosed cab where Mercy and Theo were sitting.

All she had told them was that the trip to the docks had been delayed and that Jesse needed to “clean up a problem” before they could leave San Francisco. Probably they assumed it was something connected with the riots in Chinatown. She guessed they’d be willing to sit tight while Jesse and Elizabeth tried to secure the hostages, but she couldn’t be absolutely sure of that. Theo was a professional troublemaker, after all. So she climbed into the carriage and locked eyes with him. “Take off your pants,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I need something to wear that won’t get in my way, unlike this fucking dress. And I need you and Mercy to stay put and not leave the carriage. So, two birds with one stone. Give me your pants, Theo.”

Theo blinked and said, “I’m not sure they’ll fit you.”

Theo was built like a prep-school tennis player, so the remark might have had some warrant. But he bought his clothes locally and they didn’t look especially close-fitting or well tailored. Plus, he was pissing her off. “I’ll risk it.”

“Look, I promise I won’t—”

“I’m not negotiating here. This is not a request.”

For a moment she thought he was going to resist, which might have required physical persuasion, perhaps at Taser-point, but Theo seemed to run that scenario through his mind and realize how well it was likely to go. So Elizabeth ended up with the trousers and Theo ended up in a pair of cotton shorts, huddled in a corner of the carriage and glaring indignantly.

Elizabeth’s fake dress opened down the side along a single Velcroed seam, so it was relatively easy to wiggle out of it and shuck herself into the pants. Which were, yes, uncomfortably tight across the thighs and a little difficult to button. She put the dress back on over them, as camouflage; she could step out of it easily enough when the time came. “Now give me your hands,” she said.

Theo looked ready to work himself into a fresh round of outrage. “Why?”

“Do you have to ask?”

She flex-tied Mercy to Theo at the wrist. She was wagering they wouldn’t leave the coach, given that a woman handcuffed to a man without pants would draw instantaneous attention. Then she checked her watch again. Jesse was due back in less than ten minutes. Still no sign of him.

Jesse moved more confidently now that he was inside the house.

He managed to navigate the spiral staircase from the upper room of the turret without causing the risers to groan or squeal. The room below was a circular space furnished only with a few small oval windows. The door to the second-floor corridor had been left slightly ajar, admitting a faint wedge of light. He peered through the gap.

The corridor was vacant. Gaslights blazed in their sconces, their glow reflected in yellow highlights on the brass-and-copper fittings of five bedroom doors and the walnut side table that decorated the landing above the grand staircase. The two doors nearest the landing were Phoebe’s and Aunt Abbie’s bedrooms. All these doors were closed, and everything looked normal enough, except that a vase on the side table had been overturned, spilling water and wilted violets at the base of the brass miniature of the Capitoline Wolf. And he heard the sound of voices from somewhere below. Men’s voices, with the burl of smoke and meanness in them.

He had to face a stark possibility: that Abbie and Phoebe and Soo Yee and Randal might already be dead. Roscoe Candy had known the murder of Sonny Lau would draw Jesse to the house. He had come here with his men, bullied his way inside, and cowed the occupants. He might then have abused and violated the women or simply killed the hostages outright. It would have been characteristic behavior. On the other hand, Candy might have wanted to keep the captives alive as leverage in case something went wrong. Or—perhaps most likely—Candy might have decided to postpone the brutalization and murder until he could force Jesse to watch.

Jesse didn’t bother consulting his watch. He guessed his allotted time must be nearly up, but he had hardly learned anything useful yet. And retreating the way he had come would only waste more vital minutes. He needed to do something practical.

As he was deliberating he heard footsteps ascending the staircase. A man came up to the landing, one of Candy’s henchmen, some ex–placer-miner past his prime, it looked like, with a bandolier of bullets across his chest as if he were playing a Mexican rebel in a music-hall review. The man’s movements were slow and approximate: He might have been drinking. Maybe all these men had been drinking. Jesse hoped so. But if that was the case, they must have brought their own liquor. Aunt Abbie ran a dry household.

The bandit knocked twice at the door of Phoebe’s room. It opened, and another man peered out.

“You can go on down and get something to eat,” the bandit said, “but you’d best hurry. The old woman’s larder is none too generous. Any of them giving you trouble?”

A question that quickened Jesse’s pulse.

The other man responded with a mumble that sounded like a no. What was happening here, Jesse realized, was a changing of the guard. The hostages, maybe all of them, maybe just some, were alive and were being held in Phoebe’s room.

Suddenly the bandit gestured down the hall at the turret rooms—at Jesse himself, as it seemed. “Wheeler seen anything from his perch?”

He was talking about the lookout on the widow’s walk. Wheeler must be the name of the man Jesse had killed. “If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.”

“Somebody ought to take him a chicken leg.”

“Wheeler can go hungry for all of me.”

The guard who had been relieved headed down the stairs for his meal as the bandit stepped into Phoebe’s room and pulled the door shut behind him. Jesse waited until the only sound he could hear was a steady murmur from below. Then he left the turret room and moved down the corridor, just as if it were 1870 and he was sneaking back from some nighttime mischief. When he came to the landing he peered out as far as he dared but saw no one in the entrance hall below. It sounded as if Candy and his men had occupied the front parlor and made it their headquarters.

He turned back to the side table where Aunt Abbie’s flower vase lay on its side next to the bronze miniature, the one Elizabeth had called “creepy,” the Capitoline Wolf, from a story about Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin founders of Rome, who were supposedly protected and suckled by a she-wolf. It was the suckling the sculpture depicted. Two cherubic infants with their faces upturned to the wolf’s wine-sack-like dugs. Either a very big wolf, Jesse thought, or very small infants. The bronze was heavy. Jesse picked it up by the wolf’s blunt muzzle and raised it over his head. With his right hand he knocked at Phoebe’s door, not quite loudly enough to be heard downstairs.

The bandit opened the door and put his head out. He began a word that might have been “What,” but the final consonant had not yet emerged before Jesse brought down the Capitoline Wolf on the man’s head. This was followed by gasps from inside the room, but the reaction was fortunately muted. Jesse caught the bandit’s body as it fell and lowered it to the floor, pushing it inside so he could close the door behind him. The Capitoline Wolf was still in his hand, the wolf’s dugs flecked with blood. He was ready to use it a second time if necessary, but the bandit’s head was clearly broken. After a sort of guttural hiccup, the man stopped breathing.

That was the second of Candy’s men Jesse had put away. He looked up from the body to the hostages. There was no need to count them. Phoebe, Abbie, Soo Yee, and the hired man, Randal. Of these, all were alive except Randal.

Randal had been shot very neatly through the heart, and at close range, judging by the blood and spent-powder stains on his vest. The three women appeared unhurt, apart from a purpling bruise on Abbie’s cheek. Soo Yee was in a bad way, trembling and clutching at the hem of the comforter where she sat on Phoebe’s bed, but she seemed not to have been physically abused. Phoebe was also obviously frightened, and her scarf had been taken from her, so that her scars stood out against her pale skin like the crenellations of a desert landscape, but her good eye was furiously alert. “Thank you,” she whispered.

None of them rushed to embrace him, perhaps because of the bloody Capitoline Wolf in his hand, and that was good, because as much as he wanted to stay here, he could not. Not without making a hostage of himself. Nor was it practical to take these women out of the bedroom. There was no plausible way out except down the stairs and through the gauntlet of Candy’s soldiers, which was, as the City people liked to say, “not doable.”

But he might be able to pick off a few more thugs before initiating a full-blown shootout. So he put the Capitoline Wolf on the floor and nudged it into a corner, pulled the corpse of the bandit to a less conspicuous position behind the bed, put a finger to his lips to emphasize the need for quiet, and asked a single question: “How many?”

“I think ten men altogether,” Abbie whispered. Phoebe closed her eyes as if counting the assailants in her mind, then nodded in agreement.

“All right,” Jesse said. “Wait for me.”

Then he slipped back into the hallway and headed for his hiding place in the turret room. He was halfway there when gunfire broke out downstairs.

The deadline came.

The deadline passed.

Five more minutes followed it into oblivion.

No sign of Jesse.

Elizabeth was alone. Profoundly alone, existentially alone, as alone as she had ever been in her life: She had no backup, the Mirror was half a continent away, and not even August Kemp could find her unless she radioed him her location. Which she was not prepared to do, at least until this problem was resolved. By her calculation, the City boat that was supposed to carry her and the runners back to Oakland had probably just docked. Within minutes Kemp would get a they’re-not-here call from the foot of Market Street. And several varieties of hell would then break loose.

Not her problem, not right now. She was about to walk into a firefight. The last time Elizabeth had fired a weapon in earnest was when she had taken out the gunman at Futurity Station. Before that, all her targets had been cardboard silhouettes. The men she was about to go up against had learned their skills differently. They had practiced their marksmanship on warm flesh.

On the other hand (or so she told herself), they were ignorant criminals armed with knives and antique revolvers. She had the advantage of superior knowledge, superior armaments, and surprise. She might be able to kill at least a few of them before they had time to put up a unified resistance.

Unfortunately, “killing a few of them” was the only plan she had. If Jesse was still operational, it would help. If not—

She promised herself she’d retreat if the battle became too one-sided. A memory of Gabriella hung in her mind’s eye, Gabriella when she was still a baby, barely old enough to grab the edge of a chair and haul herself upright, tumbling down on her diaper-padded bottom as often as not—Gabriella, she told the memory, I’ll be home soon. Even if it meant leaving Jesse for dead.

But until that choice was forced upon her?

She had work to do.

She remembered the layout of the house from the night she had spent there. A drill sergeant had once told her she had “excellent tactical memory.” Basically, she was facing a house occupied by an unknown number of lethally dangerous men who were expecting to be attacked. Her sole advantage was that they were not expecting to be attacked by a woman. It made a frontal approach possible.

She walked up the drive in plain sight, her Velcro dress covering the borrowed trousers, her ludicrous hat on her head, the calico travel bag clutched in both hands like a purse.

What surprised her was how close she managed to get before anything happened. Had the bad guys failed to post a lookout—were they that confident? Or had Jesse already reduced their numbers? No matter—she was nearly to the front steps when the door opened. Three men stepped onto the veranda, forming a thou-shalt-not-pass scrimmage line in front of her. They were dressed like gamblers, and their body language gave off a smug don’t-fuck-with-me vibe. All were conspicuously armed, though they kept their pistols holstered. The man in the middle said, “What do you want here?”

Elizabeth widened her eyes in mock surprise. “Is Mrs. Hauser at home? Abigail Hauser?”

“She’s indisposed just now. What’s your business with Abigail Hauser?”

“Well, I don’t like to say. But I borrowed money from her last year, a great deal of money—she was very generous—and I’ve come to pay it back.”

Two of the men seemed to find this declaration fantastically funny, judging by their efforts to keep a straight face, but the one in the middle managed to sustain a somber expression. “Well, Mrs. Hauser can’t be disturbed, but I’ll give her the money if you like. Is it in that bag there?”

Behind this banter lurked Elizabeth’s memory of what had happened to Sonny Lau and her knowledge that these men had participated in it. The pretense was bound to fail before long. “Yes,” she said, “it’s here,” reaching into the bag. “And there’s a message that goes with it.”

“All right, then, what’s the message?”

What the bag contained was a Glock with a full clip. “The message is, Sonny Lau says hello.”

She had shot the first two men before the third recovered enough presence of mind to reach for his Colt, and his hand failed to make it as far as the grip before he joined his friends. Then Elizabeth was running around the side of the house with the familiar shooting-range ache in her wrist and her heart doing gymnastics in her chest. She had just killed or critically injured three strangers. Two with wounds to the upper torso, not survivable without immediate medical intervention, and one with a head shot, so obviously deadly that nothing short of divine intervention could repair it. But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that.

She had half hoped more of Candy’s henchmen would come boiling out at the sound of gunfire—more easy targets—but that didn’t happen. They were presumably smart enough not make that mistake a second time. And that gave her a fleeting moment to think about what would happen next.

The house was set far enough from the street that the gunfire failed to draw attention, the sound probably muted by hedges and walls or lost on passersby distracted by the Chinatown inferno. So she was still on her own. The calico bag was empty (she had dropped it as soon as she took out the gun), but its other contents were concealed on her body under the fake dress. Which she ought to think about losing, for mobility’s sake, now that it had served its purpose as a distraction. Then maybe a flash-bang through the window she was crouching under, which would create enough chaos for her to circle around to the back. And from there—

She never completed the thought.

She felt the pressure first, a pricking just under her rib cage. She flinched away reflexively and felt a second pressure, an arm encircling her throat, now tightening like a noose, and where had this come from, how could she not have heard or seen the man approaching? A question that ceased to matter as soon as it occurred to her. “Drop your gun,” a voice said, intimately close to her ear, a male voice, unhurried and unafraid. “Right now.”

A voice accustomed to being obeyed. Her fingers opened. The Glock thudded into moist earth.

The pressure under her ribs was the point of a knife. Her head was immobilized but she could see the hand, the hilt, a wedge of steel brighter than the darkness around it. The hand moved slightly; the blade advanced a fraction of an inch. It had already pierced her skin. The pain wasn’t bad. Yet. But she felt a drop of blood trickle down under her layers of clothing. She gasped for breath against the arm that clamped her throat, and the arm tightened.

The voice (and she was almost certain it belonged to Roscoe Candy) whispered, “You’re the one that was with him, aren’t you? You’re Jesse Cullum’s woman.”

She couldn’t get air enough to give him an answer. He seemed not to expect one. The tip of the knife was in her, and now it went a little deeper. Her eyes clouded, some combination of hypoxia and tears, and she thought again of Gabriella, so impossibly far away.

Then the tongue of the knife touched bone, her bottommost rib, sending an electric arc of pain through her body, and her spine arched, driving the knife deeper.

Then, suddenly, the pain relented.

“Come inside,” Roscoe Candy said, “where we can talk.”

Jesse stayed in the lower turret room with his eye to the door after the shooting stopped. Elizabeth, he thought, but there was no way of knowing what she was up to, and although he could charge down the big staircase with guns blazing—he gave it some thought—such a move would likely leave him dead and the hostages in danger. So he bit his lip and watched the corridor for several long, futile minutes, trying to make sense of the agitated voices drifting up from down below.

After a few interminable minutes more, he heard the sound of multiple footsteps on the stairs.

A crowd came up to the second-floor landing. Jesse counted seven people all together. Five of them were Candy’s henchmen, all cut from the same cloth: men with the upper-body strength of miners, all dressed in flashy clothing and all conspicuously armed. They varied in the details—younger, older, bearded, clean-shaven—but they were uniformly unhappy, snarling and gritting their teeth at whatever had just happened.

After them came Roscoe Candy himself. It had been years since Jesse had set eyes on him, and Candy had diminished in the interval. Part of that was surely an illusion: The memory was larger than the man. Some of it was a genuine physical diminishment. Candy had not died of the wound Jesse had inflicted on him, but the wings of death had brushed him. He wasn’t the bean-shaped, muscular force of nature he once had been. His belly had shrunk and looked lopsided. His face was scrawnier. But his wide, deceptively gentle eyes—like the glass eyes they put in porcelain dolls, Jesse thought—had not changed. Nor had his taste in clothing: He wore a red-and-white-striped jersey, like a sailor’s jersey, and a striped schoolboy cap. Nor had he lost his love of honed blades. He carried a long-bladed knife, like a flensing knife, in his hand. He was holding it at Elizabeth’s throat.

Elizabeth was the seventh person on the landing, and she was Roscoe Candy’s captive. Her dress was soiled and stained with blood. The blood came from her left flank, just under the ribs. The wound was messy but apparently not disabling—and a deep cut in that place would have taken her down quickly. She was pale and seemed frightened but not panicked. Her eyes repeatedly strayed to the knife in Candy’s hand, as if she were wondering how best to take it from him. Which, for all Jesse knew, she had been trained to do. But she didn’t know Roscoe Candy. How famously fast he was with a blade. How difficult to deceive or surprise.

Candy’s men were arguing fiercely. Jesse caught the name Wheeler, the name of the lookout on the widow’s walk. Wheeler had been remiss in his duties was the gist of it; Wheeler had failed to warn them of something, presumably Elizabeth’s approach. Candy nodded at one of the five men and said, “Wake up that dog and send him down—tell him I want a word with him. And you stay up there and keep your damned eyes open. If this one’s come for us,”—meaning Elizabeth—“the other won’t be far behind.”

The designated man headed down the hallway, straight toward Jesse’s hiding place in the turret room. The others approached Phoebe’s room, inside of which they would find one of their men dead—testimony to the fact that Jesse was already in the house and prepared to fight. But he could do nothing about that right now.

He hurried up the iron staircase to the upper room and out onto the widow’s walk, stepping over the body of Mr. Wheeler, whose open eyes had gone cloudy. The moon shone down through a red, smoky haze. Jesse put his back to the wall and waited.

Candy’s henchman came up the staircase as subtly as a buffalo, every footfall a bell-like clank. He came through the door onto the widow’s walk and looked at the corpse of Wheeler at his feet and blinked as if he thought Wheeler might only be asleep, at which point Jesse shot him through the head. Unpleasant residue flew between the struts of the iron railing to the shadowy garden below.

By now Candy must have discovered the body in Phoebe’s room. Had he also heard Jesse’s gunshot? Maybe, maybe not. Jesse didn’t want to be cornered, so some misdirection was called for.

He took from his pocket one of the two flash-bang grenades he had brought with him. The flash-bang, also called a stun grenade, was a simple device: a black canister about the size of a can of beans, with a bright metal ring hanging out of it. Like the Taser he had sold to Little Tom, it was one of a class of weapons the City people called “nonlethal.” The concept of a nonlethal weapon had sounded idiotic to Jesse when he had first been introduced to it—what was a nonlethal weapon supposed to do, annoy your enemies?

No. In the case of the flash-bang, it was supposed to render your enemy temporarily blind, deaf, and disoriented—for thirty seconds or so, maybe longer if you factored in surprise and lingering confusion. But this particular flash-bang didn’t need to do any of that. It just needed to be loud.

Jesse depressed the safety lever, pulled the ring, and dropped the grenade over the railing of the widow’s walk.

He didn’t wait for the concussion but hustled into the turret and began to take the stairs two rungs at a time, no longer worried about the noise he was making. Plenty more noise to come, he thought. The grenade was on a two-second delay. It detonated as he was halfway between the upper and lower turret rooms. The stone walls of the house were impervious to anything short of artillery fire, but the concussion was audible even here. With any luck, it might have broken a window or two.

He reached the door to the hallway in time to watch from hiding as Candy’s men reacted. Three men boiled out of Phoebe’s bedroom with Roscoe Candy’s curses following them: “Find that son of a bitch before the whole of California Street comes crowding in to see what blew up,” which was a real possibility, Jesse hoped, though the city’s fire brigades and police were almost certainly busy in the Chinese quarter.

The three men headed downstairs, guns drawn. Which left Candy and one other man in the room with the hostages. Which sounded to Jesse like tolerable odds. Unfortunately, his only option was a frontal assault. Phoebe’s room had but a single door, and Candy was more than shrewd enough to have anticipated a hostile approach.

But the time for subtlety was past. Jesse took a Glock in each hand and ran down the hallway. At Phoebe’s door he slowed and swerved and hit the door, which wheeled inward, revealing one of Candy’s gunmen braced against the opposite wall with a revolver aimed and ready. The gunman fired first, and Jesse felt the bullet as a sharp blow to his right arm, but it only turned him a little and he was able to get off a shot that passed through his opponent’s throat. The gunman gawked blankly and slumped down the wall, leaving a smeary trail of blood. Jesse ducked to make himself a smaller target and swiveled to survey the room, and here was Roscoe Candy himself, a gleam in his eye and a smile on his face and his flensing knife still pressed to Elizabeth’s throat. “Put your pistols down,” he said.

Jesse hesitated. But he had no real choice but to obey. And he didn’t have to ask what Candy’s next move would be. Candy would cut Elizabeth’s throat and force Jesse to watch her die.

“Now,” Candy said.

Jesse held the pistols by their grips and bent at the knee, keeping his eyes locked on Candy’s. Peripheral vision told him a few interesting things. Including the fact that Phoebe, Abbie, and Soo Yee seemed not to be present.

“They’re in the closet,” Candy said. “Your sister, the old lady, the slant-eyed girl. But are they alive or are they dead? That’s the question!”

It was not a question Jesse wanted to consider. He placed the City pistols on the carpet and straightened up.

“Now empty your pockets.”

Jesse’s pockets were full to bursting. He had Wheeler’s pistol, spare clips for the Glocks, another flash-bang, and his iPod. He removed these items, taking as much time as he guessed Candy would tolerate, and spared a glance at Phoebe’s closet.

It was a big space, he knew. Unless her habits had changed over the last five years, Phoebe didn’t keep much in it. Three people could stand in there and feel only moderately crowded. Or it could hold three corpses, stacked like cordwood. Jesse sensed no motion from inside. Heard no sound of movement.

“You can’t help them,” Candy said.

Jesse was careful about where he put his weapons as he arrayed them at his feet. Wheeler’s pistol behind the two City pistols. The stun grenade behind that, almost at his heels. He touched the power button of the iPod as he set it down at the front of this collection. The screen lit up as he straightened, icons arranging themselves in a grid of Easter-egg-colored squares. Candy frowned and took a sidelong step, pulling Elizabeth along with him, as if the device might fire a bullet at him. “What is that?”

“It’s harmless,” Jesse said.

“Step away from it.”

“It can’t hurt you.”

“Step back, you dog! I know better than to trust you.”

Blood had begun to flow down Jesse’s arm from the place where Candy’s henchman had shot him. His right hand was slick with it. The pain, radiating from a place between his elbow and the ball of his shoulder, wasn’t unbearable. But three of his fingers had gone numb, a bad sign.

Misdirection, he thought. Something his father had once said, teaching him larcenous card shuffles. Misdirection, the invisible weapon. He took a step back, just as Candy had ordered him to. The heel of his left foot came to rest on the pin of the flash-bang. Candy was troubled and distracted by the eerie glow of the iPod and failed to notice.

But Elizabeth noticed. Even with Candy’s knife at her throat, she managed to cant her jaw in a shadow of a nod.

Footfalls sounded on the stairway beyond the door, Candy’s men coming back to report on the situation downstairs. Maybe Candy wanted them here to see what happened next, beginning with the death of Elizabeth. Jesse’s margin of time had run out. He held his empty hands before him in an imploring gesture. “Please,” he said.

Candy’s madly joyous expression grew even more gleeful. “If you mean to beg, Jesse Cullum, go right ahead! I won’t stop you!”

“Please,” Jesse repeated. The heel of his right foot trapped the pin of the stun grenade and he stepped on the barrel of it with his left, compressing the safety lever as he kicked it away from the pin. The flash-bang rolled behind him, toward Phoebe’s bed and perhaps under it—he dared not look to see where it had gone.

“Please what?” Candy demanded.

One second. Two seconds.

“Please go to hell,” Jesse said.

Elizabeth jammed her hands between her throat and Candy’s wrist. She squeezed her eyes shut, and Jesse did the same.

Shutting his eyes gave him a little protection from the flash, a fiery red starburst, but not from the bang. The bang did what it was designed to do—it boxed his ears, disabled his sense of hearing, induced dizziness and confusion, and interfered with rational thought.

When Jesse opened his eyes, the room was reeling around him. Smoke gusted up from the floor in a sickening chemical reek. He was deaf, but it wasn’t a silent deafness, it was a deafness made out of the ringing of a hundred church bells and the roaring of a thousand dynamos. He saw, in a rolling succession of lightning-flash images:

Elizabeth, who had stumbled out of Candy’s embrace, tugging frantically at the Velcro seam of her trick dress (an angry red line on her throat where Candy’s knife had touched her, but only a drop or so of blood)—

Roscoe Candy, his schoolboy cap askew and both hands empty, his flensing knife on the floor where he had dropped it, weaving in place—

And the door of the room, the knob of which began to rotate as one of Candy’s remaining henchmen turned it from the hallway.

Jesse lurched toward Candy, leaving an open line of sight toward the door for Elizabeth. Elizabeth was peeling off the dress, revealing a cotton undershirt, a pair of ill-fitting men’s trousers, and a small arsenal strapped to her body.

Jesse recovered fully functional vision and a degree of muscular control at about the same time Roscoe Candy did. The murderer locked eyes with him, and Jesse sensed the furious calculation going on behind that reptile stare. He’ll go for the knife or one of the guns, Jesse thought. But which?

Candy was a knife man. Always had been. The knife, Jesse thought. He dived for it himself, hoping to turn it on its owner.

But he had miscalculated. Candy went for the nearest pistol, dropping to the floor with his right arm outstretched and fingers scrabbling at the grip.

Elizabeth had managed to raise her own pistol just as the door flew open. She squeezed off multiple shots, sounds fainter than a parson’s farts to Jesse’s tortured ears, but he felt the concussions in the air like a series of blows.

Jesse took the flensing knife in his hand. The handle was still warm where Candy had been holding it. Candy had got his hand on the grip of the pistol and his finger inside the trigger guard, but before he could raise it Jesse rolled on top of him, kneeling on Candy’s gun arm and pinning him in place with the weight of his body. He brought his other knee hard up against the place Jesse had hurt him once before, that old but still vulnerable wound, and Candy howled loudly enough for Jesse to hear him above the sound of phantom bells.

Elizabeth fired two more shots, perhaps needlessly. The door wheeled fully open, revealing two men dead and another clearly dying—and no one else in sight.

Jesse put the knife to Candy where the point could pass between the slats of his ribs to his heart. No mistake this time. No hesitation. He punched the blade past bone and gristle and the glutinous resistance of dense flesh. He leaned into it, using his weight to keep Candy’s right arm immobilized. Candy flailed fiercely, his heels kicked the carpet, his body bucked like a bull at a Wild West show, but Jesse pushed and kept pushing, surprisingly hard work, like butchering some leathery old hog, until the knife was buried right up to the guard.

It had found a vital point. Roscoe Candy died screaming, but not before he managed to squeeze off a few shots from the pistol, in the only direction he could point it: at the door of Phoebe’s closet.

17

Mercy Kemp wasn’t frightened until she heard the detonations from the California Street mansion.

Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She had spent much of the last two years in a generalized state of anxiety, bordering on fear. Living as a runner, with a man who might as well have had a target painted on his back, had conditioned her to it. But the idea that she could actually be left behind, that she might be permanently stranded in this instantiation of 1877, had only recently begun to feel real. And it felt particularly terrifying now that she was cuffed to Theo Stromberg, in a closed coach on a street above a burning city.

Theo hadn’t taken any of this gracefully, but that wasn’t surprising. Mercy’s infatuation with him had long ago shriveled into an abstract admiration for the work he was doing. From the beginning of their journey into this tranche of Hilbert space, Theo had proved himself to be dogmatic, narcissistic, and arrogant, a textbook pain in the ass. And she was resigned to that. Fact: Important work was often done by unpleasant people. “Can you see anything?” he asked for the third time.

Mercy peered around the edge of the isinglass shade, but nothing had changed. She could see the spectacularly ugly Italianate mansion into which Jesse Cullum and Elizabeth DePaul had apparently vanished, she could see the glow of the distant fires, and she could see the gathering crowd. “No.”

The flex-tie handcuff chafed her wrist. Theo kept tugging at it, pointlessly—even gnawing at it with his teeth at one point—though this only made the irritation worse. Mercy had stopped sleeping with Theo (that is to say, fucking him; they still shared a bed when it was necessary) three months into their sojourn here. Despite that, the collegial aspects of their relationship had remained more or less intact. She had composed more than one of his famous letters for him, and she knew why they had to be written. Though she had always been uneasy about the guns.

“The guns are tokens,” he used to say. “To prove we’re who we say we are. The progressive papers might be satisfied with a few fulfilled prophecies, but what does that mean to Chief Joseph or a black family in Grant Parish?” He had never included more than a single clip of ammunition with any of the Glocks he shipped to endangered communities. “It’s a way of saying, expect violence. Of saying, we have seen the future, and it fucks you over, and some of us aren’t okay with that.”

The part about expecting violence was undeniably true. That violence was erupting all around them, in the repeal of Reconstruction, the murders in the South, war between workers and the railroads—in the mob attack on Chinatown, maybe even in this Nob Hill mansion. She had heard two detonations in the last few minutes, the first and louder of them accompanied by a burst of light. She remembered, two summers ago in Paris, a seminar for activists that had taught her the basics of noise cannons, kettling, tear gas, and concussion grenades. Bright light, big noise, no flame—was it actually possible that Jesse or Elizabeth had detonated a flash-bang?

She wasn’t sure what to make of Elizabeth DePaul, who worked for Mercy’s father but who seemed a little more thoughtful than the job description would suggest. Jesse Cullum was even more enigmatic, a local hire whose term of employment was obviously coming to an end and whose loyalty to August Kemp had probably reached its best-before date. Which was maybe why they had come here to do whatever they were doing, rather than taking Mercy and Theo to the docks as had been arranged. Some urgent and violent errand of Jesse’s, Mercy guessed, which must have gone bad in a big way, if grenades were being deployed.

But on a purely intuitive level, for no defensible logical reason, she wanted to trust Jesse Cullum. Elizabeth, on the other hand … had Elizabeth really learned that this slice of Hilbert space was not Frontierland? Or was she still clinging to the illusion the City fostered, of the past as a kind of disposable virtual reality, a dream that vanished as soon as you took the goggles off?

“We might have to get out of here,” Theo said; this, too, not for the first time. “If things get completely crazy.”

“But not yet.”

“But if we do have to get out, even without this fucking wrist cuff—”

“You can tie my jacket around your waist, so you won’t get arrested for public indecency, if that’s what you’re wondering about.”

But what then? Where would they go? Theo’s accomplices in this world, mostly runners, had set up bank accounts he could draw on in an emergency. But the evacuation of City people from both coasts had thrown that network into disarray. All but the most fanatical runners had already decamped for the plains of Illinois.

We’re a long way out on a thin limb, Mercy thought; and it was making Theo crazy.

She looked outside again. Events at the house had attracted the attention of the crowd that had gathered to watch the fires consuming the Chinese quarter. But the house was surrounded by walls, and although the gates were open, the onlookers stayed outside them, out of some instinctive deference to the property and prerogatives of the rich. Nothing new, she was about to tell Theo, but then a figure lurched out of the darkness, heading straight for the coach.

A meaty hand landed on the door handle and yanked it open. Jesse Cullum leaned inside.

Mercy almost failed to recognize him. His expression was a mask of grief or outrage, and worse, his face was speckled with blood: There was a dime-sized spot of it above his right eye and smaller dots clustered around his cheek, as if he had been flecked with a blood-brush. He looked at Mercy but didn’t seem especially interested in her. “Sit tight,” he said in a flat voice. “I’ll drive the rig up to the house. Once we’re inside, you can talk to your father by radio.”

His right hand was bloody, too. The blood, oily black by moonlight, seemed to be leaking from the cuff of his shirt, also sodden with blood. “Are you hurt?”

“A little. There are people inside who are hurt worse.”

“I can help,” she said.

He looked at her dubiously.

“Seriously,” she said. “I volunteered at a hospital when I was doing pre-med. I’m not squeamish, and I can do basic first aid.”

“All right,” Jesse said. He closed the door, climbed onto the driver’s bench, and set the carriage in motion.

Elizabeth improvised a compression bandage for Phoebe’s wound while Jesse was out retrieving the carriage.

He came back into the house with Mercy and Theo trailing behind him, rubbing their wrists where Jesse had cut away the flex cuffs. Mercy rushed to the sofa where Phoebe was lying, muttering something about her med-school training. Elizabeth was skeptical—she had pegged Kemp’s daughter as the kind of dilettante who wears Prada to a sit-in—but she stood back while Mercy examined the unconscious girl. “Good job stanching the wound,” Mercy said, “but you must know she needs more than a bandage.”

“Her name is Phoebe. And yeah, I do know that.”

“She’s bleeding internally, her pulse is weak—she needs serious medical attention as soon as possible.”

“Obviously. I was about to radio your father.”

“Call him now,” Mercy said, which was fairly presumptuous for someone who had recently been cuffed to a guy without pants. But there was nothing wrong with the advice.

Elizabeth nodded. “I will. In the meantime you should look after Jesse’s arm.”

“If he’ll let me. Are there any other injuries?”

“Nothing serious. There’s a stack of bodies upstairs, but the survivors are all down here.”

“What about you?” Mercy was eyeing Elizabeth’s shirt where she had bled into it.

“When you have time,” Elizabeth said.

Elizabeth took the radio to an adjoining room. The radio reminded her of an antique mobile phone: It had a collapsible antenna, which she extended to its fullest length, and she stood by the window to use it, as if it might work better if it had a clear view toward Oakland.

This wasn’t the easiest call Elizabeth had ever made, but it was probably the most urgent. The voice that came crackling back at her was August Kemp’s, and he was pissed. “Where the fuck are you? You missed the rendezvous—what’s your status?”

“We’re halfway up Nob Hill, and we have injured requiring evac.”

“Is Mercy—”

“Mercy’s all right. She’s here, she’s okay, but there’s no way we can get her to the docks tonight.”

“Okay … so who’s injured? You?”

“Jesse and I sustained minor injuries, but we’re basically okay. But we have a young woman who took a bullet and needs attention ASAP.”

“A local?”

“She was hurt while we were on City business.” Not strictly true, but it was a useful lie.

Kemp said, “We’re not in the business of patching up locals.”

Mercy Kemp came into the room. Elizabeth turned to face the window. A reef of cloud had rolled in from the sea, reflecting the glare of the Chinatown fires, as if the clouds themselves were about to burst into flame. “She’ll die without help.”

“I’m truly sorry to hear that, but there’s nothing I can do.”

“We have a moral obligation—”

“You picked the wrong time to lecture me about morality. Give me your location and I’ll arrange to evacuate you and my daughter. And here’s a clue: The next words out of your mouth should be ‘yes sir’ and ‘thank you.’”

Elizabeth stared at the radio. This was going south even faster than she had feared.

Mercy put a hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Let me talk to him.”

“What?”

“Just let me talk.”

Elizabeth was annoyed, but anything that might change Kemp’s mind was worth a try. She showed Mercy the send/receive button and handed over the device. After that, all she could hear was Mercy’s end of the conversation:

“It’s me.”

Pause.

“Yes!”

Pause.

“No, I want to go back. But—”

Pause.

“I understand that, but we have a medical emergency.”

Pause.

“No!”

Pause.

“Bottom line, I’m not leaving this house unless she does.”

Pause.

“Of course I know what it means! This isn’t negotiable.”

Pause.

“I’m standing by a door, and there’s nothing stopping me from walking out of it.”

Pause.

“All right. Yes, all right.”

Mercy handed the radio back to Elizabeth.

August Kemp said, “You heard that?”

“This end of it.”

“My daughter is acting irrationally. I need you and Jesse to take her into custody. I trust you can do that without hurting her. Handcuff her if you have to.”

“Sir—”

“What?”

“I’m not in a position to do that.”

“Say again?”

“It’s not currently possible to comply with that order.”

“Bullshit!”

“It’s the situation on the ground.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. After everything she had been through today, the prospect of losing her job seemed trivial. But she had probably just guaranteed that outcome. She heard Kemp talking to someone else, barking out unintelligible orders with his thumb still on the transmit button. Then he said, “Get your runners ready for transport. We’ll discuss this face to face.”

Jesse stood by his sister, watching her. Her bleeding had been stanched and her wound bandaged, but she was still unconscious and grievously hurt.

One of Candy’s bullets had passed through the door of the closet and pierced Phoebe’s gut. He had found her slumped and gushing blood, and he had carried her to the parlor sofa, cradled in his arms as if it were not too late to protect her, as if the idea of protecting her had not become a foolish joke. He stood over her now, calculating all the ways he could have prevented this. He replayed the memory of his struggle with Candy as if it were one of the songs in the iPod Elizabeth had given him, until he felt a gentle touch at his shoulder.

“Come away,” Aunt Abbie said. “Elizabeth and Miss Kemp need to prepare her so she can be moved.”

It was a common belief that women were useless in an emergency, but Jesse had known it for a lie long before he went to work for the City of Futurity. Abbie was just one more item of evidence. Women were soft, it was said; they tended to faint or succumb to hysteria; but Jesse had often seen in the women he knew something precisely the opposite: a polished, refractory hardness. He forced himself to turn away and allowed Aunt Abbie to steer him to the room she used as a library.

He had much to apologize for. In a single night he had made a charnel house of her mansion and changed the course of her life irrevocably. But she refused his mumbled contrition. “The people responsible for the carnage are dead, Jesse, and if not for you I might be dead in their place. Don’t take on the weight of Mr. Candy’s sins.” She said this confidently, though her hands, Jesse saw, were shaking. He wondered if she was coming down with PTSD. It would be a miracle if she were not.

“Aunt Abbie … what will you do now?”

“When you call me Aunt Abbie you make me think of the boy you were when your father first delivered you here. Do you remember that day? How wide your eyes were when you walked into this room! You said you’d never seen so many books in your life. And in the end, it was easier to let you read them at whim than to give you a proper education. Don’t worry about me, Jesse. My home was invaded by armed criminals, who will trouble us no longer. No one will mourn for them and the police will be grateful, on balance, to find them dead. Anything more difficult to explain, such as the use of unusual weapons, I intend to blame on you and your connection to the City of Futurity—assuming you’re safely far away. Is that all right?”

“Blame me for bank failures and bad weather, too, if it serves you. I don’t mind. But what about the house? It’s damaged, and it’ll become notorious if the newspapers take up the story.”

“I’m not bound to this house. Notorious or not, it can be sold. I wouldn’t be sorry to go back to Boston, if it comes to that. This was a good place for Phoebe, on the whole, but now—” Her words stopped as if they had hit a wall. “Do you think she can be saved?”

“The City people know how to save her.” It was not as positive an answer as he would have liked to give.

“Is that where you’ll take her, the City of Futurity?”

“That’s where they have the tools and machines to save her life.”

“According to the newspapers, the City is under siege.”

“Don’t believe everything you read. I expect August Kemp knows how to find his way inside.”

“I hope so. But, Jesse—” She became stern. “I don’t hold you responsible for what happened to your sister, or to Randal, or for anything else that went on here. But I’m entrusting you with Phoebe, and I do hold you responsible for what happens next. You must do your very best to help her, and if in the end you can’t help her, you must comfort her. Save her or soothe her dying. Will you do that?”

They were terrible words to pronounce, terrible to hear. “I won’t abandon her.”

It was a binding promise. Aunt Abbie nodded. Jesse said, “How is Soo Yee?”

“She’s in the kitchen, keeping to herself. Randal was killed in front of her, and she hasn’t spoken since she learned of Sonny’s murder. Soo Yee has a place with me as long as she wants it, of course…” Before Jesse could speak again she looked over his shoulder at the window, startled. “My goodness, what’s that light?”

Jesse left his aunt in the library and hurried up to the widow’s walk. Elizabeth was already there. The radio was in her hand, and she was talking to it.

Two of Candy’s men had died here, but Jesse had dragged the bodies into the turret room and out of the way. Sooner or later, an undertaker would be called to remove the numerous dead. The blood that had been tracked underfoot would be difficult to get rid of, but he guessed it could be done. Memories were harder to eradicate. He could hardly blame Aunt Abbie for wanting to close the house and sell it. It would be many years before the sum of its tenants exceeded the sum of its ghosts.

The light that had startled Abbie was moving up California Street from the south, a circle of artificial daylight swinging like a bucket at the end of a rope. Its source was airborne. Jesse said, “A helicopter.”

Elizabeth kept the radio to her ear, but no message was coming through at the moment. “Yep.”

“Did it come all the way from the City?”

“Hardly. The helicopter at the City isn’t the only one Kemp imported. It’s not even the only aircraft. There are at least two fixed-wing planes stashed at isolated hangars within range of both coasts. Multiple redundancy.”

“First I’ve heard of it,” Jesse said. There had been rumors, of course, but there were always rumors, some more plausible than others.

“All the aircraft and associated gear came through the Mirror before construction on the towers was finished—probably before you were hired. Kemp was never going to let himself get caught in Manhattan or San Francisco without a guaranteed escape route. And a Plan B, and a Plan C, in case of emergencies.”

“Like this.”

“I doubt he imagined an emergency quite like this. But yeah.”

The radio crackled again as Mercy came up the stairs from below.

Jesse looked out at the crowd in the street. The Chinatown fires were burning brighter than ever, but the crowd had turned its attention to the airship’s fulgent glare and clattering roar. The helicopter’s searchlight flitted over the homes of the wealthy like the attention of a jealous god. A few people began to run haphazardly or to crouch behind walls, and Jesse hoped no one would be bold or stupid enough to pull a gun and fire at what frightened them.

“There’s no protected place to land,” Elizabeth said, raising her voice above the noise, “so they want to do a rooftop evac, like they do with flood victims.”

Mercy stepped up next to Jesse. “Do they have a litter?”

“A Stokes basket, yeah,” Elizabeth said.

“Tell them to send it down first. I don’t want my father dropping a security team on us.”

Elizabeth relayed the request and listened to the answer. “They say they’ll lower the basket for casualties as soon as you’re safely on board.”

“Not acceptable. There’s no way I’m going aboard before Phoebe. If I see anything but a basket coming out of that helicopter, I’ll be out the front door and running.”

Jesse’s respect for the woman went up another notch. Mercy looked as skinny and insubstantial as the women whose pictures appeared in glossy twenty-first-century magazines, but she possessed considerable grit.

The airship was almost directly overhead now. Its metallic underside glittered balefully, and it broadcast a false daylight that turned the lawn a phosphorescent green. “No, he’s right here,” Elizabeth said, and handed the radio to Jesse.

Jesse accepted it reluctantly. The next voice he heard was August Kemp’s. “Elizabeth says you’re injured. Is that true?”

“My right arm, but I can still use it.”

“And my daughter is there with you?”

“Yes.”

“Listen carefully. Don’t speak, just listen. I don’t want you to hurt her, but I want you to take her into custody. Right now. Handcuff her if necessary.”

Jesse pretended to think about it. Neither Mercy nor Elizabeth had been able to hear the exchange, but both eyed him warily. He let a few more seconds slip by. Then he said, “I won’t do it.”

He waited another long minute, but Kemp said nothing further. He gave the radio to Elizabeth. She pressed its buttons, without result. Then a man wearing a helmet and orange-colored overalls appeared in the side door of the airship, swinging out a metal-frame bed—Elizabeth had called it a Stokes basket—on a system of ropes and pulleys. Jesse hurried into the house, calling out to Theo and Aunt Abbie to help him carry Phoebe up the stairs.

18

Aboard the airship there was a City physician, a solemn black man, who examined Phoebe without speaking. She had been sweating and moaning when Jesse carried her up the stairs, but the doctor administered a drug and plugged a bag of fluid into her arm, and soon enough her eyes closed and her face became peaceful.

Jesse would have thanked the man, but the roar of the helicopter was as oppressive on the inside as it had seemed from the outside. Meaningful communication was almost impossible for anyone not wearing a headset, and Jesse had not been given one, so he sat wordlessly on a bench in the cramped interior as the doors were sealed and the airship hurtled higher into the air. Through the small window at his shoulder he was able to see the whole of San Francisco below him, brightest where it was burning, and all the moonlit land and the sea that enclosed it, until vertigo made him turn away and close his eyes.

When he felt well enough to look again, there was nothing but a plain of cloud, as wide as the world and flowing like an ethereal river. Mercy had bandaged his wounded arm for him, and he cradled it against his body to minimize the pain. After a time the clouds opened to reveal misty hilltops, moon-shadowed valleys, moon-blue rivers, a perspective that belonged by right to God himself; and it made him feel lonesome and fragile to be suspended over this abyss of air by nothing more than burning vapors and whirling steel.

It wasn’t a prolonged journey. A helicopter couldn’t fly all the way from San Francisco to Illinois without refueling, apparently. The airship gradually lost altitude until it was hovering over a patch of pavement somewhere in the western desert: a landing strip marked with yellow lights, a horizon of dry hills under a firmament of fierce, bright stars.

Mercy Kemp’s clothes were bloody from the first-aid work she’d done—the entire cabin of the helicopter reeked of blood and hot metal and spent gunpowder—and she had exchanged fewer than ten words with her father since the rescue. Instead she had elected to sit with Theo and let herself drift in and out of sleep.

She was still shaking off her fatigue when she stepped onto the landing pad and was surrounded by a phalanx of security people in City uniforms who separated her from Theo and the others. Theo began to object, loudly, and Jesse Cullum looked ready to attempt a rescue if she needed it, but her father stepped out in front of the procession and said, “I want to have a word with my daughter in private. There’s a fixed-wing aircraft being fueled, and in a few minutes we’ll all be on it, all of us, so calm the fuck down. Nobody’s being left behind.”

So he said. But Mercy was inclined to believe him. Abandoning employees and runners wasn’t his style, especially when he knew she’d carry the story back home. “It’s all right,” she called back to Theo.

She followed her father to a windowless room in a concrete-box building, where she sat in an office chair while he received a verbal report from the station’s radio operator. The news was all bad. Pitched battles between railroad workers and federal troops had turned Baltimore into an inferno. There was rioting in Charleston, for reasons as yet unclear. In the South, dozens of black towns and neighborhoods had been burned by hooded vigilantes. The coal miners of Schuylkill County were on strike; Pinkerton men hired as strikebreakers had killed fourteen men and three women in the town of Shenandoah. Documents seized at certain banks had substantiated charges of counterfeiting and financial fraud against the City. John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould—prominent men who had been dining with her father and bragging about it only a few months ago—had publically called for the arrest and trial of August Kemp.

Which obviously wasn’t going to happen, at least not in this slice of Hilbert space. As soon as they were alone in the room, Mercy said, “This is worse than last time, isn’t it?”

Her father stared at her. His eyes looked sunken, as if he hadn’t slept for days. “I’m not prepared to discuss that with you.”

Not that he had ever been a heavy sleeper. As a child Mercy had often heard him moving around their Long Island house after midnight, a comforting sound once she learned to recognize it. Five bells, all’s well, Daddy’s making his rounds. She was a light sleeper herself. As a teenager she had occasionally played the game of being awake when he was awake and moving from room to room without revealing her presence—watching TV in the basement while he plodded around the kitchen; fixing a snack in the kitchen when he was at work in his study. On rare occasions, important people visited; when that happened, and especially when conversation continued into the small hours, Mercy had amused herself by pretending to be a spy, eavesdropping from the top of the stairs or the nook behind the basement door.

Mercy’s mother had been wholly uninterested in August Kemp’s business affairs, but Mercy had been ardently curious about them, if only because business was never discussed in her presence. She knew her father was a wealthy man and that he owned many hotels and resorts and other properties around the world; she knew he had been married more than once, and she had met, if not especially liked, most of her step-siblings. And she knew he had friends in high places, including the high places of national politics. (A Democratic Speaker of the House had once spent the night in the guest bedroom. He turned out to be an obese and hilariously flatulent but otherwise perfectly ordinary man: The most interesting thing about him had been his job description.) It was during a late-night conversation between her father and two solemn-looking men in business suits that Mercy had first heard him mention the visitors from Hilbert space.

Much of what he said was incomprehensible to her, and not only because she heard it through the grate in the bedroom above her father’s study. But in those days she had been keeping a diary (saved to a thumb drive she hid on her bookcase behind a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), and she recorded in it what she believed she had heard. So, years later, when the truth began to leak out, either through rumors or by way of certain documents published by Wikileaks, it had only confirmed what Mercy had already guessed.

She was a first-year student at Stanford when the Department of Defense documents were published on the Internet. By that time it had become obvious to everyone in the family that Mercy was not the purse-dog-bearing Upper East Side fashion clone some of her half-sisters had become. She often talked to her father about current affairs, and he had seemed vaguely proud of her precocity, but any attempt to engage him about the Mirror—his first paratemporal resort had just opened—was met with a wall of platitudes and generalizations.

So she had formed her own ideas about the so-called visitors, presumed to have died in custody in 2003 or 2004. Wikileaks and her diary agreed: Where the visitors came from, humanity had survived a massive global die-back in which population numbers had plummeted to eighteenth-century levels. The survivors had responded by modifying not only the terrestrial environment but the human genome. Arguably, although they were descended from Homo sapiens, they had made themselves a distinct species. And they regarded twenty-first-century humanity with a combination of sympathy and contempt.

As they should, Mercy thought. But her father and his powerful friends didn’t see it that way. What her father saw was the catastrophic ascendance of an effete, genetically engineered socialism. Hijacking the visitors’ technology to build the City of Futurity had been his cry of defiance and denial.

She had said all that to him, back when he closed down the first of his Gilded Age resorts and before he opened the current City. He had told her she was foolish, that she had fallen under the influence of radicals, that she could believe such nonsense only because his money had sheltered her from what he called “the real world.” (She wondered: Which one?)

The argument had turned into an angry mutual repudiation. They hadn’t spoken since then. But he had worked hard to track her down and bring her to safety, now that the City of Futurity was sinking like an ocean liner gored by an iceberg, and she appreciated that, even if his motives were more calculated than sentimental. On some level, August Kemp still cared about her. Duly noted.

“I’ll have a Beechcraft ready to take off inside of ten minutes,” he said.

“The sooner the better, for Phoebe’s sake.”

“That’s the name of the injured girl?”

“Yes.”

“What is she to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I was hoping she could be treated here—”

“And what, abandoned? What’s she supposed to do, pick up her saline drip and hike across the Sierra Nevada?”

“We’re not far from a rail spur. I could make arrangements. I’m not heartless. But neither am I in the business of rescuing random locals.”

“We’re not talking about random locals. We’re talking about one particular person.”

“I know that. Drop the condescending tone, Mercy. You’re not on any moral high ground here. Your boyfriend is the one who smuggled in weapons. Like dropping matches into a barrel of gunpowder.”

She refused to be drawn into an argument. “Phoebe needs to go to the City.”

“If that’s the case, I won’t object.”

“And I’ll stay with her until she’s stabilized.”

“We’re closing the Mirror. There are time limits.”

“This isn’t a negotiation. If you want to take me home in cuffs, you might as well call the guards now.”

He stared at her. “Be careful what you ask for.”

Jesse, Elizabeth, and Theo followed Phoebe as the City doctor wheeled her to the more distant of two concrete blockhouses, this one set up as a makeshift hospital. The doctor wore a plastic name tag announcing him as A. TALBOT, and he took Phoebe into an adjoining room Jesse and the others were not allowed to enter.

Minutes passed. A guard—a local hire with an automatic rifle lax in his hands—blocked the exterior door, but there was only one of him, and he looked more sleepy than dangerous. Jesse exchanged a few desultory words with Theo Stromberg, who kept hitching up a pair of trousers he had been allowed to borrow from Randal’s quarters back at the Nob Hill mansion, until Talbot came out of the back room and said, “She’s stabilized for travel—which one of you is her family?”

Jesse stood up. “I’m her brother.”

“Can you tell me her name?”

“Phoebe Cullum.”

“And you are?”

“Jesse Cullum.”

“Okay. Well, here’s how it stands. We’ve stabilized Phoebe, but she needs surgery, so we’ll transport her to the City. If the infirmary is intact, she can be treated there. But getting the bullet out of her and patching the internal damage isn’t the end of it. Far from it. She’s going to need post-surgical care. And that’s going to be a problem, given that the City is about to be evacuated and abandoned. Am I correct in assuming she’s a local?”

“Yes.”

“Then she’ll have to stay on this side of the Mirror, and you’ll have to care for her.”

“As long as there’s life in me,” Jesse said.

“I can set you up with antibiotics, sterile bandages, and some basic instructions, including how to handle a surgical drain. But after that, you’ll be on your own. If there are complications—”

“Is that likely?”

“It’s a real possibility. Infection, renal failure—you won’t have the resources to deal with that.”

“You mean she might die.”

“I want to give you the tools and knowledge to prevent that. But she’s going to have a long recovery even under the best circumstances, and you should be prepared for all possible outcomes.”

“That’s a gentle way of putting it.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be more positive. We’ll do everything we can for her, Jesse. Right now we need to get her on the plane for the next leg of the trip.”

Theo spoke up: “You said something about the infirmary maybe not being intact?”

“It was fine when I left there two days ago. But there were already federal troops with artillery caissons outside the wall.” Talbot hesitated. “You’re Theo Stromberg, aren’t you?”

“Why, did Kemp put up a wanted poster?”

“No. I saw you speak at a rally. Chicago, summer of 2016.”

“You attended a rally and then went to work for August Kemp?”

“I’m an old army medic, Mr. Stromberg. I like field work, and saving lives isn’t political. Given how Mr. Kemp’s first resort turned out, I took the job when it was offered it to me. I thought this one might need my services.”

“Looks like you weren’t wrong,” Theo said.

Talbot wheeled Phoebe out of the blockhouse toward the new airship, and Jesse followed behind Elizabeth and Theo.

The guard at the door gave a little contemptuous sniff as they passed. Jesse turned back. “You have something to say?”

“No sir. Not to you.”

“Last day on the job?”

“It looks that way. I was hired out of Carson City six months ago. Just to sit around this patch of nowhere in case I’m needed. Which I never was. I told them I’ll make my own way to the railhead after they turn the lights out. As for the City of Futurity, those goddamned towers can fall down for all of me. Better if they do. You’re one of us, you must know what these people are.”

“And what are they?”

The guard spat a plug of tobacco into the darkness. “Whores, fancy boys, Chinamen, niggers…”

“They pay your salary, friend.”

“Not much longer they don’t.” The guard shouldered his rifle. “Nor yours, either.”

He walked away without looking back. Abandoning his post, Jesse thought, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. All sorts of things were being abandoned. It seemed like everyone was going home, or leaving it.

19

The next leg of the flight was faster but more terrifying, more terrifying because faster: The fixed-wing airship flew more like a bullet than a bird. It was probably the largest single thing to have been imported through the Mirror, and Jesse was not surprised Kemp had kept it hidden from local tourists and the press. One did not, in this vehicle, float. One hurtled.

He closed his eyes and gave himself over to his fatigue. The pain in his wounded right arm had become a hot rhythmic pulse, Morse code stuttering a single letter, but he managed a few rounds of dream-haunted sleep despite it. He dreamed of the days of his life divided into leaves and bound into a book that could be read only backward. He dreamed of those gnomes Mercy believed in, visitors from a century even more distant than the twenty-first, and in his dream they marched out of the frame of a vanity mirror, pale and serene as clouds, and one of them (it might have been male or female or both or neither) stood before Jesse and told him that all things change and in the end nothing endures but change itself.

After an incalculable time the airship landed at another remote strip, somewhere in Illinois but west of the City, where he helped transfer Phoebe to another helicopter for the last leg of the flight. Jesse was tempted to sleep again, and he dozed a little, until a band of daylight struck his eyes as the helicopter made a banking turn: Morning had come. He tried to make himself alert as he glanced around the cabin. Mercy Kemp and Theo Stromberg were safety-belted next to Elizabeth and the dark-skinned physician, Talbot. Phoebe was strapped to a gurney—alive, though she looked as pale as death—and August Kemp rode near the front of the airship, wearing a headset that allowed him to communicate with the pilot.

Reluctantly, Jesse steeled his nerve and looked out the window.

The view by daylight was as disorienting as it had been by night. The sun had just cleared a reef of cloud on the eastern horizon. Empty prairie scrolled beneath the airship, green with wild grass and stitched with the silver thread of rivers and creeks; a flock of passenger pigeons wheeled over a blue-green bog in the shadow of a low hill. Ahead, two distant needles caught the rake of the sunlight: the twin towers of the City of Futurity. Talbot had taken a digital device from his pocket and was holding it to the window—recording video, Jesse assumed, just as the twenty-first-century tourists habitually did.

Elizabeth left her seat and moved next to Jesse. She had been talking to Mercy and Theo—more like shouting at them, given the unrelenting noise of the engines—and sparing occasional sour glances for August Kemp. Jesse’s understanding of the argument between Kemp and his daughter had deepened over the past day. His first impression—of Mercy Kemp as a pampered daughter who needed rescuing from the consequences of her fashionable radicalism—had been too hasty. Mercy wasn’t stupid or obviously foolish, and her presence here was more than an act of petulant rebellion. It was a disagreement about money and power and purpose, imported (like so many other bewildering things) from the age of the Mirror. Mercy believed her father was extracting profits shamelessly while dodging responsibility for the crisis he left in his wake. And as far as Jesse could tell, that was true.

But it had ceased to matter to him. His business now was with Phoebe, saving her life by any means possible. After that, Phoebe, if she lived, would go back to Aunt Abbie, and Jesse would revert to what he had been before he ever stumbled into the City of Futurity: a drifter, without employment or prospects, but generally sober and good with his fists. Maybe he would go back to San Francisco, now that Roscoe Candy was truly dead; maybe he would live and die where God had put him, in the gap between Pike Street and Dupont.

Elizabeth leaned into his shoulder. “Something’s going on!” she shouted. “Kemp’s talking to someone at the City, and he doesn’t look happy!”

Jesse glanced forward. She was right. There was no way to know what Kemp was saying, but he looked like a Thomas Nast caricature of an infuriated Irishman.

“Probably about that,” Elizabeth said, nodding at the window. Jesse turned to take a second look just as Talbot crossed the aisle, aiming his phone in a new direction.

They were close enough to the City now to see that the newspaper stories had not been exaggerated. A small army was arrayed before the wall, with what looked like caissons and supply wagons enough to fight another Bull Run. Smoke rose from cooking fires as men in blue uniforms milled about, treading the prairie grass to bare earth. The airship made a sweeping turn, revealing powder scars on the City’s gaudily painted wall where it had been struck by cannon fire. Struck, but not breached—the wall was massive, and the City had its own small army of uniformed men arrayed along the top of it.

From this altitude it all looked peaceful enough, until a federal cannon gouted flame and a canister exploded just short of the gate.

The City’s soldiers fired a volley in response, and the troops at the vanguard hastily pulled back, but their artillery emplacements were beyond range of the wall-top gunners, and now they began to fire in earnest. Smoke and dust rose from the battleground as if a giant had pounded the earth with his fist.

Kemp shouted into his mouthpiece again, and the airship veered toward its landing pad outside Tower Two.

They touched ground with a bounce that suggested the pilot’s haste. Outside, a committee of grim-faced security personnel waited for the rotors to slow. All other open space within the boundary of the City walls was empty. Jesse had seen the City grounds deserted during snowstorms, or in the hours before dawn, but never on a sunny morning like this, and the reason was as obvious as it was shocking: at least a couple of artillery rounds had overshot the walls and struck the north face of Tower Two, shattering windows and scarring the concrete façade.

He waited until Phoebe’s wheeled bed had been hoisted out of the airship, then followed Elizabeth and the others to the lobby doors. The medical facilities were in Tower One, where visitors from the future customarily stayed, so Kemp’s security team hustled everyone down an inclined ramp to the underground tunnel connecting the buildings. A pair of junior medics took charge of Phoebe, one at each end of the gurney, with Talbot following close behind, as Elizabeth came up beside Jesse and said in a low voice, “This is worse than I expected.”

The siege, she meant. He said, “The wall is bound to come down sooner or later. There’ll be federal troops in both towers before long.”

“It’ll be bad for Kemp. Back home, I mean. He’ll try to blame all this on Theo, of course. But if it gets out that City employees fired on American soldiers, even in self-defense, Kemp will be out of business for good.”

She had told him on the train—days ago, though it seemed more like months—that Kemp’s first City of Futurity had ended badly: Three people had been killed when a former Confederate soldier entered the City’s pavilion at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and opened fire on the crowd. It wasn’t much compared to what was happening here, but it had emboldened activists like Theo Stromberg and raised questions about the ethics of time travel. “If any of this gets into the press back home—I mean the bank fraud, the riots, the attempt on Grant’s life, this siege—it’ll be all over.”

“Will Kemp be put on trial?”

“Maybe not a criminal trial, more likely a Congressional investigation, but yeah—that’s what Theo Stromberg’s hoping for.”

“And will you be called to testify?”

She seemed startled by the idea. “I guess it’s not impossible.”

“Would you testify against Kemp, even if it cost you your job?”

“I wouldn’t lie to save him. And he’s already pissed at me, so losing the job is probably a done deal. Sure, I guess I’d testify. Theo’s a fanatic, but he’s right—Kemp’s reckless, he hurts people, and he ought to be stopped.”

The tunnel was busy with City operatives rushing back and forth, some riding on electrical carts, some laden with boxes or luggage. Large-scale goods too valuable to be abandoned would have been taken to the Mirror by way of the enormous freight elevators at ground level, while City personnel and any remaining civilians lined up for the less gargantuan staff elevators here. It looked as if the City’s twenty-first-century employees had all been moved to Tower One to wait their turn to leave, while local hires were segregated in Tower Two to wait for something else—the inevitable entry of federal forces, to whom they could surrender, presumably, and plead innocence.

Kemp’s people arrived at a doorway that marked the border between Tower One and Tower Two, where a pair of security men had been stationed to scrutinize everyone who passed through. The men doing the scrutinizing, Jesse realized with dismay, were his old enemies from Tower One, Dekker and Castro, two men who done as much as anyone to convince him that the future had not abolished vindictiveness or petty jealousy.

August Kemp stood next to Dekker as his party began to pass through. Phoebe on her gurney, pushed by the medics, then Elizabeth, Mercy Kemp, Theo Stromberg, then Dr. Talbot—but Kemp stepped forward and put a hand on Talbot’s chest and said, “Your phone, please, Doctor.”

“My phone?”

“For security reasons. You’ll get it back once we’re home.”

He would get it back with all the dangerous images purged from it, Jesse thought. Talbot looked like he might object, then sighed. “If you insist,” he said, handing the phone to Kemp, who passed it into the meaty hand of Dekker, who pocketed it, grinning. Talbot was allowed to pass. Then it was Jesse’s turn.

Except that it was not. “Hold on, chief,” Dekker said.

Kemp took Jesse’s arm and steered him aside. “I’m afraid we can’t allow locals beyond this point.”

“My sister’s a local,” Jesse said, “and she’s already beyond this point.”

“Phoebe’s your sister? Mercy didn’t mention that. It looks like Phoebe got caught in the crossfire when you were doing whatever it was you were doing in that Nob Hill house. That was personal business, wasn’t it? No connection to the job you were hired to do.”

Jesse didn’t venture an answer. Beyond the doorway, Elizabeth turned to look back but was hustled away by the press of people.

“I promised Mercy we’d take care of the girl, and we will. And as soon as she’s patched up, we’ll deliver her to you at Tower One. I’m a man of my word. And I promised you something else, didn’t I? This.” Kemp reached into his jacket and extracted a bag of jingling coins. Gold eagles, Jesse assumed, maybe the same bag Kemp had shown him back in Oakland. “Severance pay. I’m not sure you’ve earned it. You put my daughter in danger, and I’d be justified in cutting you off without a penny more than you’ve already been paid. But I’m not vindictive and I don’t hold a grudge. Take it. Go on. Take it, Jesse.”

Elizabeth and Dr. Talbot had already disappeared. So had Phoebe. Jesse considered his options. He continued to meet Kemp’s cynical stare.

But he took the money.

“Some advice,” Kemp said. “That arm looks pretty ugly. Have someone take care of it before it gets infected. And if you’re afraid of how the army might treat you, as a City employee? Don’t be. You’re the man who saved the life of U. S. Grant. A fucking hero! Tell them that. Tell everyone! Talk to the press, play it up. A book, a lecture series—you could make yourself a rich man.”

Kemp pushed through the doorway and was gone. Jesse hung back, watching the passage. Dekker and Castro stood on each side of the door, eyeing him in return.

Jesse waited.

After a few minutes the crowd began to thin. These were the last of the City people, Jesse thought, abandoning Tower Two to the local employees. Soon the crowd was scant enough that the mechanical doors slid shut from time to time, so that stragglers had to use a pass card to open them. Jesse chose one of these empty moments to approach the door again.

Dekker’s grin expanded. He clearly relished the prospect of a fight … perhaps particularly because of the wound to Jesse’s right arm, blood from which had stained the sleeve of his shirt and was leaking through the bandage even now. “Need some help, chief? You’re headed in the wrong direction.”

“I ought to be with my sister.”

“Well, but that’s not possible.”

Castro kept quiet and looked uneasy. Jesse narrowed his attention to Dekker and only Dekker. “I mean to pass through, so you might as well get out of my way.”

“Not happening, bro. As an alternative, I suggest you go fuck yourself.”

Jesse charged him. These twenty-first-century security men were unnaturally tall and densely muscled, but Jesse was a big man for his time and his skills were brutally practical. It gave him a grim pleasure to step inside the radius of Dekker’s beefy arms and deliver a blow that rocked Dekker’s head back and sent a spurt of blood from his nose.

But Dekker wasn’t on his heels for long. He recovered quickly enough to close Jesse in a grip that trapped his injured right arm. And as Jesse struggled, flailing with his free left hand, Dekker began to squeeze. The man’s strength was astonishing. The pressure ignited a furious pain, as if the flesh itself were screaming. Jesse endured it until a new freshet of blood flowed down his forearm to the wrist and began to spatter the tiled floor. Dekker put his mouth to Jesse’s ear and said, “Had enough, chief?”

Jesse refused to speak.

“I can do this forever, asshole. Had enough?”

Jesse managed to nod his head, once.

“Say it. Seriously. Say it.”

“Enough,” Jesse gasped.

Dekker relaxed his grip, but followed with an open-palm blow that rocked Jesse’s head and sent him reeling. “Just head on back to Tower Two,” Dekker said. “They’ll send you your sister when they’re done with her. Chief.”

Jesse gave himself credit for staying upright. The damage to his arm was significant. An ominous numbness, almost worse than the pain, propagated through his right hand. Some of the fingers were reluctant to obey him. He turned and walked away. The sound of Dekker’s laughter followed him as he stumbled down the tunnel.

Dekker was savoring his victory. He would probably continue to savor it, Jesse thought, right up until the moment he realized that in the course of the struggle Jesse had taken from him both his pass card and Talbot’s phone.

Local employees of the City of Futurity had been herded into the commissary in the basement level of Tower Two, where they could surrender en masse to federal forces once the evacuation was complete and the Mirror shut down. None of these people was responsible for August Kemp’s crimes, and in principle none of them had anything to fear from the troops. But guns had been fired in earnest, and City employees were understandably nervous about the consequences of that. The crowd consisted of a hundred people or so, and some of them must have recognized Jesse, but apart from a few startled exclamations they left him alone. Limping slightly, bleeding from his arm, his clothes ragged and bloodstained, he guessed he looked as if he might be followed by an undertaker or a flock of carrion crows.

He spotted Dorothy, the war widow who used to sell him muffins from the Starbucks booth, seated on an upturned trash bin. Her eyes widened at the sight of him, but she was brave enough not to flinch. “Jesse Cullum, is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am. I was away, but I got back this morning.”

“How is that possible—did you fly over the wall?”

She meant it facetiously, but he nodded. “In fact I did.”

“I’m tempted to believe you. You’re hurt!”

“Not fatally. Tell me, have you seen Doris Vanderkamp today?”

“Do you see how few of us are still here? Most of the local hires left as soon as the evacuation was announced. The rest of us took cash bonuses to stay behind and help, for better or worse. If Doris had been prudent she’d be long gone. But when was Doris ever prudent? I saw her heading for the dormitory section a few minutes ago, probably packing up what’s left of her possessions. Jesse, do you know what’s going on? We haven’t heard from management for hours. Has the wall been breached?”

“Kemp’s people mean to hold off the soldiers until the Mirror is shut down. But I’m guessing you’ll see soldiers inside by nightfall.”

She smiled wanly. “I liked it here, Jesse. Oh, I know it was all pretend. The amity, the smiles. Past and future clasping hands in friendship. But it was a pretty dream, wasn’t it?”

Jesse felt a surge of affection for this solemn woman who had served him coffee on countless winter mornings. “For some of us it was. Best of luck to you, Dorothy.”

“And to you, Jesse Cullum, wherever you’re hurrying off to. Have someone see to that arm!”

He found Doris Vanderkamp in her cubicle in the dormitory wing, just as Dorothy had said. The door to her room was half ajar, but he knocked so as not to alarm her. It didn’t work. She saw his face and emitted a small shriek. “Jesse!”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s me.”

She came to him and took his arm—his uninjured left arm, luckily—and steered him inside. He sat on her bed and let a wave of dizziness wash over him. “Lord,” she said, “you’re bleeding like a butchered hog!”

A coin-sized drop of blood stained the bedsheet. He gazed at it dully. “I’m sorry…”

“You need a bandage.”

“I already have one.”

“Then you need a fresh one, or a tourniquet.”

“It’s a kind thought. But what I really need, Doris, is a uniform.”

“What? I thought you said ‘uniform.’”

“I did. A City security uniform.”

“Are you drunk? That’s the last thing you need. All of us here already traded our uniforms for civilian clothes. The army will be inside sooner or later, and you don’t want to get caught wearing City colors. It would only make a target of you. Lie down and let me look at that wound.”

“Did you take medical training in my absence?”

“No, but I can tie a cloth.”

He was tempted to take her advice, at least the part about lying down. But if he closed his eyes he might not open them again for hours. “My case is different. I’m serious—I need a uniform that fits me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What business are you caught up in now?”

“It’s a long story, Doris, I’m sorry. A City uniform—can you get me one?”

“The lockers are full of them.” She sighed. “If you’re willing to wait here, I’ll bring you one. I guess anything would serve you better than that bloody rag of a shirt.”

“One more thing. Do you have paper and a pen?”

She waved at her desk, the kind with which every dormitory cubicle was equipped. “Top drawer.”

“I thank you,” he said. But she had already left the room. Time was slipping away from him. He located a pad of paper embossed with the City logo and a City pen with a rolling point. Paper in his lap, pen in his left hand, he gathered his unruly thoughts and began to write.

He had filled two pages by the time Doris returned with a uniform that looked as if it might fit him. He set aside the pages and let her help him trade his civilian pants for City trousers. That was easy enough. The shirt was more difficult. He took Dekker’s pass card and Talbot’s phone from his pocket and put them on Doris’s desk.

“That’s an iPhone,” she said.

“How do you know about such things?”

“I was courted by a Tower One man last winter, when you were off chasing runners or whatever you were doing. He had a pass card like that. He used it to sneak me into his quarters. And he had an iPhone, too. He liked to take pictures with it. Moving pictures,” she said, waggling her eyebrows suggestively.

Jesse understood that Doris liked to think she possessed the power to make him jealous. “What kind of moving pictures?”

“The intimate kind.”

“The cad,” he said, to please her.

Doris grinned triumphantly. “I didn’t mind! He said there are women who do it for a living, where he comes from, and they’re perfectly respectable, and I’m as good at it as any of them.”

“Seems like you were born too soon.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Far from it.” He clenched his teeth and pulled off his shirt. The shirt and the bandage beneath it and the flesh of his arm had been glued together with blood. Peeling it all apart caused black spots to cloud his vision. Doris sucked in her breath when she saw the exposed wound. “Jesse … I think I can see bone.”

He wished she hadn’t spoken. “Bind it,” he said. “Any old cloth. Tear a strip from my shirttail if you have to. Bind it for me, Doris—I can’t do it myself.”

She looked queasy but followed his instructions. The bleeding wasn’t stanched, but it slowed. He used his old shirt to wipe some of the spilled blood from his arm, and he covered up the rest with the fresh City shirt and the blue City blazer with the City of Futurity insignia on it.

“And I got these for you,” Doris said.

A pair of Oakley sunglasses. The kind he had once considered supremely desirable. Tinted plastic and a thimble’s-worth of aluminum. He put them on and regarded himself in Doris’s mirror.

“You look as City as they come,” she said.

He pocketed the pass card and was pocketing Talbot’s iPhone when an idea occurred to him. “Doris, have you really used one of these devices?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“To make moving pictures?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going up to the observation deck to find out what’s happening. Will you come with me?”

“Those elevators don’t open to us anymore.”

“They’ll open for me. It’ll only take a few minutes. Will you come?”

She seemed flattered and curious in equal parts. “Yeah, all right,” she said.

The observation deck of Tower Two, like the rest of Tower Two, had been designed to impress guests who had never seen a building taller than three stories. Jesse had been up here occasionally during his tenure at the City, and for him, as for most guests, the effect was an amalgam of fascination and dread. The floor was not divided by interior walls, and the outer walls were made of thick transparent glass. It was like standing on an open platform suspended from a cloud.

Not everyone enjoyed the experience. Every week a few visitors, by no means exclusively women, fainted at the sight. Others begged to be taken back to solid ground. And even Doris’s pleasure was not unalloyed, it seemed to Jesse. Or maybe it was the risk of a stray artillery round that made her uneasy.

He went to the north side of the deck, where he could see the wall and the army arrayed beyond it. From this angle it was clear what the City’s strategy had been. The army was separated from the wall by a broad swath of empty prairie, a sort of no-man’s-land, marking out the effective range of a twenty-first-century rifle. The City’s soldiers were posted atop the wall itself, which was more than broad enough to accommodate them, and they were all armed with automatic weapons. Any infantryman who ventured into the no-go zone would be rewarded with a bullet. And City rifles were accurate at distances that made even the finest Winchester seem like a farmer’s musket.

The gate itself was a smaller steel barrier set into the wall, and the soldiers had trained their artillery on that target, perhaps hoping to eventually blow it open and enable a massed charge. Or maybe they were simply restraining themselves in hope of a negotiated surrender: They could have shelled the towers at any time, as a few stray shots had demonstrated.

The steel gate was sturdy, but it wasn’t as massive as the wall itself, and there was enough accumulated rubble at the base of it to suggest a breach was possible. As Jesse watched, another artillery round burst against it. The City’s defenders responded with rounds of automatic-rifle fire.

“Kemp wants to buy time to finish the evacuation,” Jesse said. “The Mirror is a bottleneck. It’s hard to say how long this will last. You can record moving pictures with this phone?”

“For the last time, yes! But I don’t mean to stand close enough to the window to do so. I’ll go back down, if you don’t mind. I feel like a flea on a flagpole.”

“All right, but will you show me how to do it?”

She spent a few grudging minutes adjusting Talbot’s device until it needed only the touch of a finger to begin capturing images. Jesse thanked her. She said, “You’re bleeding again.”

He was, but it wasn’t a problem he could address just now.

“And you’re pale as a ghost.”

“I can take care of myself from here on out. Thank you for your help. You’re a good girl at heart, Doris.”

He thought the words would please her, but she frowned. “Do you mean that?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then say it like I was one of them.”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Woman,” he corrected himself. “You’re a good woman.”

She smiled. “And you’re a gentleman.”

“I left you something,” he said, “back in your cubicle.”

He used Dekker’s pass card to open the elevator for her. She stepped inside and gave him a longing look. Those big eyes of hers were what had drawn him to her in the first place, against his own better judgment. She said, “We were a good pair, weren’t we? While we lasted?”

No, not especially. “Sure, we were.”

She smiled and kissed his cheek. “Keep safe.”

Keeping safe was not an option. But he nodded as the doors closed.

In truth, he would have liked to get off his feet. There was something lulling about this bright, vacant aerie. It provoked an urge to sleep, despite the thunder of guns. The tiled floor began to look like a bed to him. But he dared not give in to that temptation. It was the siren song of his faltering body. He pictured Phoebe in his mind’s eye. Phoebe and Elizabeth. He would sleep when they were safe.

Now the federal cannons began to fire en masse, a concentrated volley that probably represented some frustrated commander’s failing patience, all focused on the main gate. Swaying at the edge of the observation deck, Jesse took off the Oakleys Doris had given him and dropped them at his feet. He raised the iPhone to eye level, peered at its screen and at the diminishing row of bars that predicted its useful life, touched the icon that caused it to record moving pictures. The device captured images of rising smoke and City soldiers firing fierce volleys, the steel gate trembling under the artillery barrage. At least two shells arced over the wall and struck Tower Two as the battle went on, impacts that shook the floor under Jesse’s feet.

He was still recording all this when a vast shape hove up at the periphery of his vision, close enough to rattle the window. It was the City helicopter—the one that used to give rides to tourists—but there were no tourists in it now. As it canted toward the besieging army Jesse saw an open door and figures with rifles at the ready.

It was as if a monstrous but formerly pacific creature had been provoked to deadly violence. The airship crossed the City’s boundary and bore down directly on the federal lines. What happened next seemed dreamlike, framed in the luminous display of the iPhone: federal marksmen firing futile volleys at the airship—the airship tilting to give its own gunners a field of fire—then rounds pouring down from above in a sudden, furious rain. Here was Thermopylae, Jesse thought madly. Here was Bull Run.

Blue uniforms blossomed with blood.

He went on recording until the phone’s screen dimmed to darkness. In a matter of minutes the besieging army was reduced from ordered ranks to terrified chaos, its flags trampled in a panicked retreat. And now the victorious City men began to abandon their positions atop the wall, hurrying down interior stairways and across the open courtyard toward Tower Two as the attacking airship circled back to its landing pad.

Which could only mean that the evacuation was nearly complete.

Which meant Jesse had to hurry.

He used Dekker’s card to call an elevator, hoping the artillery impacts hadn’t damaged the machinery. Hours seemed to pass before the door slid open. He stumbled inside, leaving boot prints in the blood that had puddled at his feet.

Down in the sublevels, in the tunnel that connected the towers, he joined the crowd of men who had just left the wall. He recognized none of them, and none of them recognized him. They were all from the future, new arrivals recruited to act as a rear guard for the evacuation. A few of them saw the blood he was trying to conceal and urged him to hurry to the Mirror or to go to the clinic in Tower One while there were still medics available. It was this last advice he chose to accept. His body had grown mysteriously heavy, but he refused all offers of help. Better not to involve strangers. He found the designated elevator and used Dekker’s card to summon it.

The door opened on a hectic crowd of men and women in white gowns, uniformed security men, distressed civilians. Jesse stepped out of the elevator and tried to orient himself. The Tower One medical clinic had originally been a small part of this arcade floor, but the broad central corridor was lined with cots and gurney beds now; shop stalls had been curtained off to create makeshift surgical rooms where physicians patched up security men who had been injured in skirmishes and civilians who had been hurt by stray artillery rounds. No sooner had Jesse stumbled out of the elevator than a medic pushed a loaded gurney past him: It looked as if casualties were being hurried to the Mirror as soon as they were stabilized.

He caught the attention of a woman in a green surgical gown. “I need to find Dr. Talbot.”

“Are you in from the wall?” She looked him over, and her eyes widened. “You need to be triaged.”

“Talbot,” Jesse insisted.

“I’m sorry, but you need attention right now.”

“Not as much as I need to find Talbot.”

“I don’t have time to argue. Triage is by the fountain. I think Dr. Talbot is working over there,”—she waved vaguely—“in what used to be the spa. Take your pick.”

It was only a scant few yards to the sign that said MASSAGE/HYDROTHERAPY/FACIAL AND BODY SCRUBS, but the journey seemed immensely long. Jesse kept his eye out for Talbot, but in the end it was Elizabeth he found. She came barreling out of the crowd so eagerly that he had to turn away to protect his damaged arm. “Jesse!”

He hugged her, or leaned on her, a little of both.

“I wanted to kick Kemp’s ass when I realized he shut you out, but by then we were deep into Tower One and I figured I ought to stick with Phoebe. They handcuffed Theo and Mercy and took them to the Mirror, but—are you all right?”

Not entirely. He ignored the question and asked where Phoebe was.

“Talbot’s with her” was all Elizabeth would say.

His thoughts had grown unreliable, but he remembered the iPhone. He took it from his pocket and presented it to her. “It’s the one Kemp’s people confiscated,” he said. “I took some extra pictures with it. The kind August Kemp doesn’t want anyone to see.”

Phoebe lay on a table in a back room of the former spa with bags of fluid attached to her body. Her face was alabaster-white, her eyes were closed. Dr. Talbot took Jesse by his good arm and steered him to a chair. “You need attention,” he said.

I need to stay awake a little longer, Jesse thought. That’s what I need. “How is she?”

Talbot took a vial of liquid from the heap of medical supplies on an adjacent table and drew some of the fluid into a syringe. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I can’t help her.”

Jesse focused on the words until they made sense. Even then, he refused to believe it. He had come too far to be dismissed so cavalierly. “With all your futuristic medicine—”

“Jesse, listen to me. I can’t help her here. We X-rayed her, and the internal damage is too extensive for a quick repair. There’s a good chance she’ll survive, but only if she gets careful surgery and post-surgical support. And I can’t give her that—here.”

Five years, Jesse thought. For five years all he had done, from working at the City to killing Roscoe Candy, had been for Phoebe’s sake. To protect her and to redeem her from the ugliness of the world she had been born into. And he had failed. He closed his eyes.

Elizabeth came close to him. “Jesse,” she said. “There are dozens of injured people being taken back through the Mirror. No one’s checking their ID. Do you understand? Jesse? If Talbot puts a tag on Phoebe’s gurney, he can take her through the Mirror. No questions asked. Hell to pay when they find out, but by the time that happens she’ll be getting real treatment. It’ll save her life. But she can’t come back. Once the Mirror’s closed, there’s no opening it again. Do you understand? Jesse?”

He struggled to find the meaning of her words in the increasingly cavernous space his thoughts now occupied. If he understood correctly, she was offering him a ghost of hope. It meant he would never see Phoebe again. But Phoebe might live.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. All right. Take her.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

Talbot hovered into view, still holding a syringe. “She means you’re a plausible invalid. If I hook you up to a saline drip and give you something to make you sleep, odds are I can get you to the other side along with your sister. If that’s what you want.”

The medication to make him sleep might not be needed. His vision narrowed until all it contained was Elizabeth. Her face, her eyes.

The floor shuddered under him. The lights flickered, there were shouts of alarm. At least one of the federal artillery emplacements must have survived the helicopter assault, Jesse thought. Tower One was being shelled.

A Klaxon sounded, everything was in motion now, an oceanic roar of voices, the smell of blood … “It’s up to you.” Elizabeth’s voice, taut as a piano wire. “It won’t be easy either way, but you have to choose.”

He understood that he was being offered an invitation, but to what? To Futurity, he thought; to the diorama world, spaceships and luminous cities; but no, Futurity was a myth. That was a fact the City had taught him. Futurity was nothing but a place. A faraway place. Another country.

Her voice again: “Help me get him on a gurney.”

Hands lifting him.

“Jesse, can you hear me? We don’t have much time. Last call. Where do you want to go?”

The question required an answer. He summoned what remained of his strength. “With you,” he said, or meant to say, but darkness took him before he could be sure.