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.