“I don’t know for certain it’s loaded. But there’s no point just showing it to him. As I level it, he’s almost on me. I pull the trigger and the pistol jumps in my hand.”
Elizabeth said, “You shot him.”
“I shot him.”
The emptiness of that declaration: It had felt the same way when it happened. A vulgar anticlimax. Roscoe grabbing his pendulous belly and screaming, falling to the floor next to Jesse’s father and writhing there, the flensing knife forgotten even as Jesse kicks it away from his flailing hands.
“And Phoebe was in the wardrobe?”
“Yes.”
“Was she all right?”
“No.” After a time he added, “She’d run away from Roscoe’s highbinders when they came into the house, but not before one of them cut her. Maybe Roscoe himself. Her face was—well. She lost an eye.”
“But she was alive?”
“She was alive.”
“And Candy?”
“The hatchetmen heard the gunshot and came boiling up the stairs, but I took Phoebe out a back window. The flames were spreading fast. I left Candy in a burning house with a bullet in his gut. I imagined there was no way he could survive.”
“But he did.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“You think it’s true?”
“I don’t see how. But I suppose stranger things have happened.”
“And … Phoebe?”
“I hope to see her soon.” He had no more words to offer, on this or any other subject, but he realized Elizabeth was staring at him. “What is it?”
“Your hands.”
His hands were in his lap, clenched so tightly the nails had drawn blood.
* * *
Jesse cleaned himself up in the passenger car’s absurdly luxurious bathroom. By the time he rejoined Elizabeth he was calm again.
They moved to the club car for a meal. There were only a half dozen other diners present, all from Kemp’s security staff. The waiter, a local hire who must have been accustomed to serving crowds of well-heeled twenty-first-century tourists, greeted Jesse and Elizabeth with the nervous volubility of a man who knows he’s about to lose his job. Outside, the sun had retreated behind the mountain peaks. Jesse wasn’t especially hungry but he ordered what Elizabeth ordered, steak and a salad and a beer. She said, “This thing about you not drinking—”
“You know I’m not a teetotaler. I never claimed to be. I just don’t drink to the point of stupidity.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“That I drink beer?”
“It makes you seem a little more human.”
“As opposed to?”
“Never mind. You realize this is our last night on the train? We’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow morning.”
“Yes.”
“In the middle of an emergency evac procedure. And once we get this thing with Kemp’s daughter sorted out—”
“You’ll go home. I know. But we don’t have to dwell on it.”
“I guess we don’t.”
“May I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Back where you come from, someone like me must have lived and died. Exactly as I would have if the City had never appeared. Is that true?”
She hesitated. “Actually, I Googled you a couple of times.”
“I probably shouldn’t ask what that means.”
“Historical records and all that. But your name never came up.”
“There was no record of me?”
“No. I’m sorry, Jesse. I guess that must feel weird.”
“I’m flattered you thought to look. But no, I’m not sorry there was nothing to find. Better men than me have lived and died unnoticed. It’s not a bad company to be in.” Though it was a melancholy thing to contemplate, as the light faded from the sky.
The waiter delivered their salads. “Another question,” he said.
“Ask.”
“I asked it once already. It’s the one about the Mirror and who invented it.”
“Ah,” Elizabeth said. “Okay. Kemp doesn’t like us talking about it, but I guess we’re past that now. But it’s complicated, Jesse. There’s the official story. There’s the real story. And there’s the conspiracy theory.”
“Tell me the real story.”
“I would, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Well, then what’s the official story? And who declared it official?”
“The official story is that the Mirror technology came out of a research project at DARPA. DARPA’s an agency that does cutting-edge scientific research for the military. DARPA supposedly stumbled on a way of creating what the wonks call ‘material translations in ontological Hilbert space’ while working on ultra-high-energy lasers. No, I don’t know what that means any better than you do. The idea is that they discovered some weird new physics that, unfortunately from their point of view, turned out not to be weaponizable in any practical way. So the core concepts were farmed out for civilian research and potential commercial applications. So far, the only enterprise that’s managed to turn a profit with the technology is August Kemp’s. Kemp’s people patented a technique for scaling up the Hilbert translation, making it possible to send large objects from our own universe to one that resembles our past.”
“The Mirror, that is to say.”
“The Mirror.”
“But not everyone accepts this story?”
“Well, the Mirror looks pretty strange even by twenty-first-century standards. It’s not like rockets. People understand rockets—a moon rocket is just a Fourth of July rocket, scaled up. But the Mirror? Traveling into a past that isn’t actually our past? Basically unprecedented. So a bunch of alternative theories started to circulate, usually involving aliens or the Antichrist. But one story in particular got a lot of traction. It goes like this. Shortly after 9/11—you know about 9/11?”
“An attack on New York City by Mussulman fanatics.” Jesse had overheard enough talk among the tourists to make that obvious deduction.
“After 9/11, national and local security agencies start looking hard at anyone with suspicious ID or travel histories. Supposedly, two dudes with no fixed address get red-flagged by some such agency, and when they’re brought in for questioning they turn out to be not entirely human. They’re only a little over five foot tall, their IDs don’t check out, a medical examination reveals all kinds of weird physical anomalies, and when they’re questioned they clam up—even under torture, according to some accounts. But their movements are traced back to a house where investigators find something even stranger concealed in the basement: a version of the Mirror. In this story, DARPA is assigned the work of reverse-engineering the technology, basically taking it apart and figuring out what it does and how it works. Amazingly, they succeed at that. You see where this is going?”
Jesse said, “You were visited from some version of your own future. The visitors were arrested and their Mirror was impounded.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you think there’s any truth to it?”
“Probably not, but how would I know? In some versions of the story the visitors died in captivity. In others, they’re being held in a secret government facility—Area 51 or like that. Like most of these fringe theories, there’s not much evidence you can pin down. The most plausible corroboration comes from a highly classified Defense Department memo, part of a batch of documents leaked by a whistleblower a few years ago. But the language is ambiguous. It might be talking about ordinary terrorist detainees, not post-human gnomes from the far reaches of Hilbert space.”
“The story was never confirmed or disproved?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Why, in that case, would a runner tell me to ask August Kemp who invented the Mirror?”
“I guess to fuck with you. Or to fuck with Kemp. This runner you talked to, was he politically motivated?”
“He was planning to prevent the conception of a man named Hitler, not yet born.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. So yes, politically motivated. Like the anti-Mirror movement back home, most of these political runners take the conspiracy theory seriously. They think Kemp knows the truth and is hiding it so he can exploit the technology to his own advantage.”