Twenty years ago, survivors had dug beneath the hills, creating a network of tunnels that began just half a day’s journey in the direction they were walking already. “He wouldn’t,” Asyl said. “Never.” Victory City was her own birthplace.
“Why not?”
Without answering, she jumped to the ground, unfastened the door of the tent, and went inside. The walls glowed, and he could see her shadow. He knew she was removing her protective gear. “Because that would be a compromise,” she said from inside, her voice slightly muffled.
“And outlaws never compromise?”
“If they do, what’s the point of being an outlaw?”
Silence from inside the tent for a moment, and then he heard her begin her nightly prayers, thanking out loud the God who had pulled her from the pit and set her in a place where she could not burn.
To give her privacy, John Gund walked away from the tent, away from the filling station. He felt a vestigial urge for a campfire, and wondered at it. These days, flames meant something else to him. They were not special. All day, every day, he burned things.
A cement-block structure stood twenty feet away, its fire-marked walls uncollapsed. He walked through the gaping doorframe into what he imagined had been a small cafe. Long ago, traveling salesmen would have sat before cups of coffee, slices of pie, chicken-fried steaks, and boxed mash. Checkered oilcloth on the tables. A radio. Now, there was nothing but piles of charred rubble. At the back of the space, the door to the old kitchen stood open, miraculously preserved but hanging askew on damaged hinges; he knew from experience that the room back there would be a dark husk or, if not, that anything of value would have been cleared out by a scavenging party. He stuck his head in and saw, to his surprise, that most of the back wall looked relatively undamaged. There was a stove and some empty shelves and even two kitchen chairs, whole. Looking around, he saw rubbish in the corner, ration packages and empty cans.
People had stayed here. Not pyronauts, but certainly people who’d traded with pyronauts.
Someone had dragged in the chairs—why, only Asyl’s God could tell them.
John Gund pulled the nearest chair away from the stove and brought his booted foot down savagely on one of the wooden legs, breaking it off with a splintering crack. Yes, this would catch easily. He carried the legs outside, made them into a pile. Asyl had fallen quiet—praying silently, perhaps.
He didn’t use his flame pistol. Instead, he struck one of the matches he kept in a tin with a photo of his mother and her sister, arm in arm in front of a house he could almost remember growing up in.
“I’m going to Vic,” Asyl announced. “As far as the watchtower, at least.” She said the words through the tent wall, knowing he could hear her outside. “Tomorrow.”
Ten cards would have told her.
This is you.
This is your disguise.
This is your past.
This is your future.
This is what is above you.
This is what is below you.
This is your house.
This is your lover.
This is your riddle.
This is your answer.
How Hel wished the deck were with her. She knelt on the ground between two graves, orienting herself by the angel over her shoulder. The wet grass froze her; her fingers itched. She wanted her knife back, but more than that, she wanted answers.
For Truth to work, the reader must first be sure of what she is asking.
Where was the book?
But it wasn’t so simple. Other questions clouded Hel’s mind, confusing the mantic properties of the cards that she did not hold. Questions layered like sodden leaves beneath the surface of a placid lake, questions she’d already asked over and over. Where was The Shipwreck? Why had Sleight died? Why had Hel’s number come up? Why had she found Vikram and then driven him away? Why must she suffer this world, so familiar at every turn, yet so alien?
Where was Jonas?
You never heard any answers if you asked a dozen at once like that. You had to think small. You had to settle. Settle in.
She didn’t recognize the man as he approached, though maybe she should have known him by his bouncy walk, his skeleton frame. Her first deluded, hopeful idea was that new voyagers were passing through the old barrier. But no, he was just one person, wearing jeans and an army-style coat with the collar turned up, the hood of a sweatshirt worn underneath protruding, pulled up. No one at home wore a hood. Sweatshirts didn’t have hoods. If he came from her world, he’d be wearing a hat. Always, these little details oriented her. The ground under her feet remained solid, the sky gray, mundane, and devoid of the blue-lightning trace of the Gate.
Never for a moment did she think he might be a ghost. She didn’t believe in ghosts.
The man coming toward her was Dwayne Sealy.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Weeks had passed since their only meeting, but she knew him now, and he clearly knew her too.
He shrugged, shoulder to shoulder with the angel. “Saw you get out of a cab on the boulevard just now. Followed you from there.”
“Did Vikram send you?”
“No. I had no idea you’d be here.”
“I don’t believe you.” The more she thought about it the angrier it made her; the idea of Vikram declining to help her when she needed it, sending a stooge to keep tabs on her only after the crisis subsided. “Fuck him! In fact, you and Viki can fuck each other! Get a cancer and fuck each other to death!” She felt foolish yelling like this, from her knees in the dirt. She struggled to her feet, eye level with Dwayne, who looked unimpressed by her outburst.
Actually, now that she thought about it, she remembered how she’d declined to try Vikram’s phone number in the station house. How could he have known she needed his help? And besides that, what could he have done? Her chest throbbed, not with anger but with faint stirrings of guilt.
Dwayne backed away. “Have some respect,” he said. He gestured with an out-thrown arm. “Look around you. I’m here to see my brother’s grave.”
“Really?”
“You UDPs. Think everything’s about you, all the time. Even Vikram. I like the man, but come on. There’s a whole world of pain and suffering and shit.” He started to walk back down the path in the direction from which he’d come. “You don’t have a monopoly on it.”
“Where are you going?” Hel asked.
“I said already. My brother. He’s in New Calvary.”
Suddenly, she did not want to be left alone. “Hold on,” she said to his retreating back. “Wait. I’m coming with you.”
“What if I told you I needed some peace and quiet?”
“Oh.” Now she felt doubly foolish. She stopped. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
He let out a breath. “It’s all right. You can come if you want.” He turned to her. “Seriously, come. I’ve got some news from Vikram, anyway. If you want to hear it. But I gotta do my thing first.”
Together, they threaded their way through the graves and left the old part of the cemetery, crossing on foot underneath the BQE, then proceeded along industrial Fifty-Fourth Avenue, its packaging companies and shipping companies, a business on the corner that sold custom neon signage. Without speaking, he led her under the LIE and onto Forty-Eighth Street and back onto hallowed ground.
Newer graves here. Granite instead of slate and marble. Dwayne seemed to know exactly where he was going. His jouncy walk, his fists inside his pockets—they seemed endearingly boyish to her. Yet he’d scolded her and she knew she deserved it.