The taxi took the Laurel Hill Boulevard exit. The driver stopped right by the tall wrought-iron gate and Hel handed over all of her money without looking at the meter. She intended to come as a supplicant, pockets and hands empty.
She chose a winding path, always turning toward the place she remembered, though she hadn’t been here since that night. The anniversary—the third anniversary—approached, just a few months away. Would any UDPs come here then? Bouquets lay scattered across the walkways, blown like tumbleweeds by the strong autumn wind. She picked one up. Plastic poinsettias. A winter flower.
The mist played tricks with distance, making the Manhattan skyscrapers look no bigger than the skylines of memorial stones presenting themselves on every side. The breach created by the Gate setup had been somewhere in this section of the cemetery. With no map, she had only fallible memory by which to steer, and all of her recollections of this place originated from the frenzied journey to the evac site in her world. She retained nothing but vague impressions from the hour following her crossing: the blinding lights, the crackle of the emergency blanket someone had put around her shoulders. Still, as Hel walked deeper into the cemetery, the occasional marker looked familiar, the ones old enough to have persisted unchanged. She tried not to read the names of the dead.
At last, a stone angel she might know. She stopped, staring up at the statue, formed to resemble a young woman standing with one hand hidden in the folds of her robe. The angel’s hair waved, motion frozen in stone. Wings extended above her shoulders, folded in, and she held her chin up, head unbowed. Sightless eyes pointed out at the world, dark streaks of sediment staining the stone cheeks like tears, the scars of decades of acid rain.
Hel had always been good with faces. If this wasn’t the place, she would never find it.
This is it, she thought. This is where the tide will reverse. Where time can flow backward.
Teresa Klay suggested that she and Vikram talk at the cafe that occupied part of the ground floor of one of the old Domino Sugar buildings. Over a plate of delicate cookies, he showed her the picture on his phone. “There.” He’d framed the image so as to cut out everything but the magnificent painting itself, but a tennis racket and the spines of some Harlequin romances were visible near the bottom of the image, and in the corner, part of the London subway map poster overlapped the gilt frame. “It’s just sitting in someone’s house. Don’t you think this should be part of the exhibit?”
“The exhibit,” she repeated. “Right. About Ezra Sleight and the lost treasures of the UDPs.” There was something tentative about the way she spoke that gave him pause, until he realized that it was possible that she didn’t grasp the connection.
“It’s the one mentioned in the introduction to The Pyronauts. Did you get a chance to look at it?”
Across the little table, Klay nodded. “Iceberg. Ship. Hand. Yeah, got all that.” Her features were delicate, her pale face overpowered by the frames of her glasses and a halo of fuzzy dark hair. If Vikram had to guess, he would put her at twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but she had the calm self-possession of an old woman.
“Did you know the painting’s been missing for more than a century? The artist, George Lowery, exhibited it in Paris in 1828 after he finished it, and a private collector bid for it and brought it to America. After the collector died, ownership of his house and most of its furnishings, including his art collection, passed to his niece, who was what they called an old maid back then. She started a private school, the one that Ezra Sleight later attended. All this is Before, you understand, so it applies to my history and yours as well. Then the divergences started. In my world, the school folded in the ’30s and The Shipwreck ended up in a museum in Vancouver. But here, sometime right around 1910, it disappeared.”
A bearded server brought the green tea Klay had ordered in heavy ceramic cups. Klay stirred in a packet of sugar, then turned her attention back to Vikram. “Just out of curiosity, how do you know what happened to it in this world?”
“Wikipedia.”
“Excellent.” Her tone reminded him of the one Officer Sato always used when congratulating them for attempting some basic skill that two-year-olds born at the same time the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand entered this world had long since mastered. “I checked out Lowery’s page too, actually,” Klay said. “Back when Dr. Nash first showed me the book. I hadn’t heard of him, so I looked him up. Moderately famous guy in his day. Painted mostly allegorical scenes, right? The Christ child in the jungle, stuff like that? But he’s pretty much unknown here now.”
Vikram felt affronted. “I understand why the man’s work might not be to your taste, but this is a famous painting in its own right, and its documented connection to Sleight seems to me to be of interest—”
“No, absolutely. I agree.” Klay leaned forward. Her eyes were a changeable hazel, subtly lovely. “You’ve made an important discovery, Dr. Bhatnagar.”
“Vikram, please. Anyway, I never finished my PhD.” He slid his own cup around on the table’s surface, mollified despite himself.
“Sure. Vikram. No matter Lowery’s current reputation, The Shipwreck is obviously a fascinating painting, and it will be essential to the UDP exhibit. Where did you say you found it?” He saw she’d taken out her phone. “I think it would be a good idea for a professional to take a look first. Being stored haphazardly with no temperature control really isn’t good for an oil. And we should consider the possibility—forgive me—that it’s not even genuine.”
“I’ve seen it in person. I’m pretty sure it is.”
“And I’m sure you’re right. But what could it hurt to have it authenticated? We can arrange a time for you and I to meet with a conservationist. Just to look it over, before we go any further.”
That sounded reasonable. “All right. It’s at the old Sleight house.”
“That old school? All the way upstate?”
“No,” Vikram said. “The house. Where he wrote his books. You know.”
Klay looked surprised, much more surprised than she had when she’d seen the pristine iceberg on the screen of his phone.
“In Brownsville,” Vikram clarified. “It’s still standing. It’s a dump, but it’s still standing.”
How strange, he thought, watching her note the address in her phone, that Hel had never thought to mention this fact to her.
Asyl tracked Aitch due west, following the curve of the valley. She picked out a trail invisible to John Gund. When it grew too dark to see the ash beneath their feet, they camped outside an abandoned filling station. John Gund set up the tent on the cracked concrete apron where the pumps had been and warmed up rations for them both while Asyl climbed up on top of a twisted metal cabinet that had mostly survived the first burn. John Gund recognized what its purpose was—holding bags of ice offered for sale in the long-ago Before—and knew that Asyl didn’t know, that she didn’t care. She crouched on her haunches, staring out into the darkness.
“He could be getting away,” she muttered. “He can travel at night and we can’t follow.”
“He has no food, and hardly any water,” John Gund reminded her. “He won’t get far.” Between the helmet and the encroaching night, it was impossible to make out her expression, but he could tell from the way her shoulders slumped that she was not comforted by this truth. “I think he must be headed for Vic City.”