“Jesse, listen to me. I can’t help her here. We X-rayed her, and the internal damage is too extensive for a quick repair. There’s a good chance she’ll survive, but only if she gets careful surgery and post-surgical support. And I can’t give her that—here.”
Five years, Jesse thought. For five years all he had done, from working at the City to killing Roscoe Candy, had been for Phoebe’s sake. To protect her and to redeem her from the ugliness of the world she had been born into. And he had failed. He closed his eyes.
Elizabeth came close to him. “Jesse,” she said. “There are dozens of injured people being taken back through the Mirror. No one’s checking their ID. Do you understand? Jesse? If Talbot puts a tag on Phoebe’s gurney, he can take her through the Mirror. No questions asked. Hell to pay when they find out, but by the time that happens she’ll be getting real treatment. It’ll save her life. But she can’t come back. Once the Mirror’s closed, there’s no opening it again. Do you understand? Jesse?”
He struggled to find the meaning of her words in the increasingly cavernous space his thoughts now occupied. If he understood correctly, she was offering him a ghost of hope. It meant he would never see Phoebe again. But Phoebe might live.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. All right. Take her.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
Talbot hovered into view, still holding a syringe. “She means you’re a plausible invalid. If I hook you up to a saline drip and give you something to make you sleep, odds are I can get you to the other side along with your sister. If that’s what you want.”
The medication to make him sleep might not be needed. His vision narrowed until all it contained was Elizabeth. Her face, her eyes.
The floor shuddered under him. The lights flickered, there were shouts of alarm. At least one of the federal artillery emplacements must have survived the helicopter assault, Jesse thought. Tower One was being shelled.
A Klaxon sounded, everything was in motion now, an oceanic roar of voices, the smell of blood … “It’s up to you.” Elizabeth’s voice, taut as a piano wire. “It won’t be easy either way, but you have to choose.”
He understood that he was being offered an invitation, but to what? To Futurity, he thought; to the diorama world, spaceships and luminous cities; but no, Futurity was a myth. That was a fact the City had taught him. Futurity was nothing but a place. A faraway place. Another country.
Her voice again: “Help me get him on a gurney.”
Hands lifting him.
“Jesse, can you hear me? We don’t have much time. Last call. Where do you want to go?”
The question required an answer. He summoned what remained of his strength. “With you,” he said, or meant to say, but darkness took him before he could be sure.
EPILOGUE
Magnificent Ruins
—1889—
Long ago, in his first letter from Illinois, Jesse had described the towers of the City as “an architecture fit for angels.” And in his last letter he had written, “They will make magnificent ruins.”
And he was right, Abbie Hauser thought. The prophecy had been fulfilled with remarkable speed.
Ten years and more had passed since Jesse’s final communication. During that time she had often resolved to make this visit, and for years she had put it off, distracted by her situation and the daily business of coping with it. And while she dithered, both she and the City had grown old. Her bones ached on winter mornings, her digestion was irregular, intimations of mortality intruded on her thoughts. And the City of Futurity had been given up to wind and rust and nesting birds.
“Is that it?” Soo Yee asked. “There on the horizon?”
Their carriage crested one of the rolling mounds that passed for hills in this part of Illinois, on a road that had once been smoothly paved but had been crazed and broken by seasons of sun and ice. There it was on the horizon, the City of Futurity, dark against the pale opacity of an October morning. Two man-made buttes, as if the Illinois bedrock had lifted its arms to the heavens. Abbie tugged her shawl and sighed. “Yes.”
“Like gravestones,” Soo Yee said.
“Memorials, perhaps. Not gravestones. Phoebe and Jesse aren’t dead, Soo Yee. At least, I don’t believe so. They’re just—not here.”
They were not dead, but this was the place where they had left the sensible world, and that was why Abbie had wanted to come. She carried with her Jesse’s last letter, written under the letterhead of the City, on crisp white paper made soft as cloth by years of handling. She didn’t need to look at it. She had committed it to memory long ago.
Dear Aunt Abbie,
Please forgive my brevity. I have not much time to write. If you receive this letter it will be by the graces of a woman named Doris Vanderkamp. I have also given her a large number of gold eagles in the hope that she will deliver at least some fraction of them to you. Doris is kindhearted but of questionable reliability, so I cannot depend on her to do more than put this letter in the mail, care of your family in Boston in case you have sold the house on California Street. I hope my words, if nothing else, reach you safely.
Several carriages and an omnibus arrived in the courtyard inside the pitted wall of the City.
Abbie had arranged to join a guided group tour, organized by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Illinois Grange and consisting mainly of females. It was an end-of-autumn tour, at a discounted price. The weather was chilly, and low cloud obscured the heights of the two immense towers; but the summer crowds were absent, which Abbie considered a benefit. She left the carriage and joined the crowd of thirty or so women assembling around the hired guide, a young man who worked at the City on behalf of the Union Pacific Railroad, the nominal owner of the property.
Doris Vanderkamp had arrived on the doorstep of Abbie’s Boston family late in the summer of 1877, bearing the letter and three gold coins. Doris had impressed Abbie as less virtuous than Jesse wanted to believe, and those coins had once, quite obviously, had many companions, now absent. But a certain Christian charity of spirit prevented Abbie from resenting the theft, if it could be called that. Doris, an unmarried woman in a perilous world, had surely needed the money more than Abbie ever would. And Doris had faithfully delivered the letter itself, which was more precious than any coin.
“The towers are tall,” the guide said, “but you ladies needn’t worry that they might fall down. They are built around steel skeletons and are immensely sturdy. Buildings constructed in the same manner are rising in our big cities even now. Soon enough, structures tall as these may be commonplace in Chicago and New York! Join me as we enter the lobby of the nearest tower.”
The tower’s doors and windows were dark in the long October light. The buildings had been damaged by artillery fire in the long-ago siege, and a wind like the breath of Boreas blew through their many gaps and hollows.
Phoebe’s wound is being treated as I write. I am at the City of Futurity now. Its two great towers are under siege, and will soon be abandoned—I think they will make magnificent ruins, with time. But I must speak bluntly. If this letter is all that reaches you—if months or years have passed and neither Phoebe nor I have contacted you—you should think of us as lost. Just what that means I cannot at present say.
Abbie and Soo Yee hung back from the crowd as the guide began his work in earnest. First they passed into the grand lobby of what had once been Tower Two, a room as big as a cathedral but cold as the autumn prairie. In its heyday these spaces would have been heated and illuminated by electricity and filled with astonishing displays. The original contract, which Mr. August Kemp had signed with the railroad, had provided for fuel and spare parts to be left behind after the Mirror was closed, to allow the City to operate as a tourist attraction for a few years more. But that genial agreement had come to grief in the City’s final confrontation with the forces sent to arrest Mr. Kemp. Whatever had not already been stripped from the buildings by Kemp’s men had been looted or vandalized by the victorious troops, or shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.