So hard to think about it. Every time he tried to put the scattered pieces of his thoughts together, other things floated up to the forefront of his memory. Gaby telling him good-bye, Gaby running for her life. Gabrielle’s gaze flicking away past him as though he were unrecognizable pixels on the TV screen. Sonny Walters’ face, the Smile, floating forward on the audience’s roar of contempt. Nothing seemed to banish these images.
With a defeated sigh, he rose, toweled himself dry and set about dressing in his new clothes.
He tried to let the view from his window distract him. The ninety-third floor of the Monarch Building afforded him an amazing panorama of tall, bizarre buildings and tiny cars moving along the tree-lined avenues.
He loosely knotted his tie and reminded himself that it was not the ninety-third floor. It was “up ninety-two.” If he were to take the elevator down to the twenty-fifth floor, that would be “up twenty-four,” even if he started out above that floor. The ground floor was “down,” the basement was “down one.” It didn’t make much sense, he didn’t like it, and he knew he’d never remember it; but trying to figure out all the differences was a helpful distraction.
Differences. Like the skyscrapers all around the Monarch Building. Half of them were cylindrical towers, capped with pointed cones for roofs or with battlements like the tops of medieval castles. The other half tended to be more like the skyscrapers he was used to, comforting in their squareness, though they all had the kind of art-deco-era architecture he associated with the Empire State and the Chrysler Building.
Some of these were odd, all bright and garish. The one opposite the Monarch Building was a checkerboard of alternating squares of white and green marble; back home, no one could have found investors to build something so ghastly. He hoped not, anyway.
The Monarch Building itself took up a city block, without the setbacks that characterized the Empire State Building and other skyscrapers from its era. It was an unsettling black and had broad ledges every twenty stories; he couldn’t see the next one down, but had given them a good look on their return last night. On each ledge was a line of white marble statues of monsters like griffins and rampant dragons, men and women in medieval dress, odd symbols he could not recognize.
A single sharp rap on his door interrupted his thoughts. “Come in.”
Doc entered. He wore the same clothes as last night, and though no sign of lack of sleep marred his face, Harris thought he could see a certain weariness in the man’s posture. “Are you ready to go?” Doc asked.
“I guess. Where are we going?”
“A construction site. I’m looking for someone who can help us. I want him to see you, to convince him that the gap between the two worlds has indeed been bridged.”
In the elevator down, Doc handed him a paper bag and a strange ceramic cup—it was capped by a hinged top like a beer stein. In the bag was a pastry something like an eclair, but the filling was meat and the breading reminded him of a bagel. The stein was filled with a thick, hot liquid as bitter as bad coffee, but tasting like unsweetened chocolate. Harris grimaced over the flavor but guessed that it was strong with the caffeine he needed.
In the basement garage, Fergus slid out from underneath Doc’s top-down two-seat roadster and cheerfully told him, “It’s ready, sir; all patched. Try not to drive over the potted plants next time.” Harris wondered if the mechanic ever slept.
This car, lower than Jean-Pierre’s but just as long, had a different sound to its engine, a throaty growl that told Harris that it was a different class of vehicle. As he and Doc roared out of the basement garage, it sounded like a leashed lion. Harris washed that thought away with the last of the bitter chocolate. “Did you get any sleep?”
“No.”
“Well, thanks for driving, then. Did you get anything figured out?”
“Yes.” Doc turned right onto the main street the Monarch Building faced and blasted his way into the southbound traffic. Harris estimated that this would be somewhere near Fifth Avenue if he were home. But the real Fifth Avenue would be southbound only instead of having two directions of traffic separated by a tree-filled median. It wouldn’t be thick with the antique autos he was growing used to. There would be lanes painted on asphalt instead of a brick surface with metal tracks set into it for the frequent rail-bound red buses they passed. Taxis wouldn’t be Christmas green. One vehicle in twenty wouldn’t be a horse-drawn cart, for Christ’s sake.
“Well, what?”
“First, unfortunately, none of the men we took has talked. I doubt they will; they are a very confident lot. They’re in the prison of the Neckerdam Guard now.
“Second, though, I do have results from your valence tests of this morning.”
Harris grimaced. The last thing Doc and Alastair had done before he’d been allowed to go up to his room was take him into a small side laboratory and load him into a preposterous upright glass cylinder capped with electrical apparatus. Harris hadn’t been alarmed until the two men drew on thick goggles with lenses that were almost black.
Then they’d fired up the equipment, the noise of transformers and discharging electricity striking fear into Harris’ heart. That was only the start; things got worse when a continuous chain of green lightning poured into the cylinder and washed over him, rattling Harris’ teeth and standing every hair of his body on end.
But that had been over soon, and they’d sent the shocked (and, he suspected, smoking) Harris up to his room immediately after.
Doc continued, “The Firbolg Valence was zero. Meaning that you’re not Gifted. You can’t influence your surroundings except through normal means.”
“You mean, not like Alastair does with his medicine.”
Doc nodded. “But you have a Tallysin Aura like none I’ve ever seen. That’s what Alastair sees around you. With normal people—” he ignored Harris’ bark of laughter “—it shows up among the Gifted. In your case, when I subjected your aura to analysis, it indicated that you were . . . from somewhere else.” They roared by another red rail-bus, and Harris barely glimpsed the man dancing merrily atop the vehicle.
Harris glared. “I told you that last night. So tell me, where is this ‘somewhere else’ of yours?”
There was a stoplight on the median ahead. It was different from the ones Harris was used to. It didn’t change colors; a black-and-white sign swung out of the pole’s summit, reading “Halt.” Doc’s car and the other traffic slowed to a stop at the corner.
Doc took his time answering, not speaking until long after the “Halt” sign snapped back into the pole and was replaced by “Go.”
They left one cluster of skyscrapers and too-tall round towers behind and headed into a second one, near what should have been the financial district. Harris looked around to see if he could spot any familiar landmark, but there was nothing until a side street gave him a glimpse of the distant Brook—the Island Bridge.
“Some of the old stories say that there used to be two worlds,” Doc said; his voice sounded as though he were reciting. “The fair world and the grim world. On one lived the fair folk, on the other the grim folk. And it was easy to go from one to the other.
“The fair folk were our ancestors, in our thousand clans: light, dark, and dusky. Smaller than people today, of course, and knowing many things that modern man has forgotten. Ignorant of many things modern man has learned.