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Though her thin-soled shoes were soaked, the cold hardly touched her now. With each step, determination heated her blood. She would find the fragment of the Book and then—
And then what? As far as she knew, she couldn’t do anything without all five of the artifacts—but the ring was in 1902, and Harte was stuck here. She couldn’t leave him, not without releasing time and leaving him to Seshat’s mercy.…
Or maybe she could, she thought as she trudged onward through the slush-covered sidewalks. Maybe she could slip back and get the ring from this Cela Johnson. If she timed it right, she could return before Harte could give in to Seshat’s power or do anything stupid. It would be difficult but not impossible.
With time pulled slow, the streets of lower Manhattan felt like a graveyard. Light glowed from windows, but held in the net of her power, no one and nothing moved. She was alone in a crowded city, a solitary traveler on an impossible quest.
When she reached the Bowery, she couldn’t stop herself from cutting down toward where the Bella Strega had been. She could almost see the city as it had once been, still inscribed there beneath the layers of graffiti and grit. But the Strega was lost to the past, and if she didn’t succeed in retrieving the key to the cipher from Nibsy, her friends would be as well.
The Bowery was lined with the kind of heavy, boxy cars ladened with chrome that were popular in the 1980s. She passed one with its window busted out, another that was missing a front tire. It was no wonder people had called this part of the city Skid Row. Along the streets, the metal gates sealed off shop entrances for the night, but many of the buildings were boarded up and abandoned. She imagined that even if she released time, this part of the city would feel like a ghost town compared to the other versions of the Bowery she had known.
She reached the place where she thought the Strega should have been, but all she found there was a burned-out building. Something clenched inside her at the sight of it. Her eyes stung as she thought of the last time she’d been inside, but she steeled herself against those memories and turned her grief to resolve. Pulling her determination around her like a cloak, she turned her back on the parts of the past that could not be changed. She had to focus, to keep moving, because there was so much that could be different—so much that she might still change. As long as she didn’t fail.
Cutting through the narrow stretch of Roosevelt Park, she finally arrived at Orchard Street. A few blocks more and she found herself standing in front of the building that had once been her home. The storefront on the first floor was still boarded up with plywood covered with layers of graffiti. Someone was curled up in a nearby stairwell with his battered, gloved hands curled around a bag-covered bottle. The building almost looked abandoned, like many of its neighbors, but above, on the topmost floor, a light shone like a beacon.
Esta went to the rear of the building, where a service entrance opened on the staircase that went up the back. She picked the lock in a matter of seconds and then let herself in. She paused, waiting for…
She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. An alarm? Some indication that the Professor—that Nibsy—knew she’d arrived? But nothing happened. The city remained silent. Time stood still. The air around her stirred only with her movement.
It smelled the same. It was such a strange thing to realize, but the second Esta was out of the cold air, memories of the past overwhelmed her. The back staircase had always had a kind of strange odor that she couldn’t place, but now she recognized it as the smell of the tenements, the scent of the past rising up through to the present. Layers of mold and dust that no amount of paint could cover. Even in her childhood, the ghost of this smell had been there, ready to greet her anytime she came home.
But this was no homecoming, she reminded herself as she started up the narrow back staircase. She was there for only one reason—to retrieve the key to the cipher so she could stop Seshat from destroying the world. So she could save Harte.
Professor Lachlan owned the entire building—or he had when she’d been growing up twenty or more years from now. In her own time line, he’d owned the building since the middle of the century or earlier, so she assumed that in this version of the time line, things wouldn’t be that different, especially considering the power he seemed to have wielded in 1920. The slip of paper she was looking for—the missing fragment of a single page—was somewhere within these walls. It had to be. She could search from the bottom up, but she knew she’d be wasting her time. The key to the cipher would be where Professor Lachlan kept all his treasures, secure in the safe on the top floor of the building.
Esta was almost warm by the time she reached the top of the staircase. It wasn’t surprising to find the access door there locked, but she’d been picking locks since she could remember. As the lock gave the satisfying click to signal it had surrendered, she couldn’t help but feel it was almost too easy. She slowly pushed the door open, making sure to keep her wits about her and time firmly in her grasp. So far, her affinity felt strong and sure.
On the other side of the heavy fire door, the entire floor had been converted into an enormous library. By the time she’d left to go back to 1902, Esta had helped Professor Lachlan turn it into the finest, most extensive collection of documents about New York City that no one had ever heard of. Now the library wasn’t quite so full of the city’s secrets. But Esta needed only one secret. It had to be there.
The library was lit by a single desk lamp that sat on an enormous oak table at the center of the room. It had been only a few weeks ago—years from now in the future—that Professor Lachlan had used that same table to show her all five of the Order’s artifacts. That had been the moment she finally understood what he had been working toward and the first time she’d seen them all together.
The wide table was covered with the usual stacks of newspapers and books. It wouldn’t change much, Esta realized. It was like he didn’t care about hiding the treasures he’d collected. But then… maybe he doesn’t. Maybe Professor Lachlan didn’t care what she saw because he had always been waiting for her to return for the one thing he knew she would need. Or maybe he was just a sloppy old man who never learned how to take care of his own house.
Either way, the sheer amount of stuff to look through felt overwhelming. If the fragment she was looking for wasn’t in the safe, she’d have to search the whole library. And if it wasn’t there, she’d have to search the rest of the building as well.
It will be in the safe. There was nowhere else Professor Lachlan would keep it. Other than maybe on his own person. Would he have risked carrying around a tiny scrap of fragile paper for decade after decade when he could keep it securely locked away? She doubted it.
On the far side of the library, a painting hung on the wall where the safe should be. It hadn’t been there during her childhood, but Esta recognized it. Depicted in finely swirling brushstrokes, Isaac Newton sat beneath a tree with the fabled Book in his hand and two moons above him in the sky. She made her way past the precarious stacks of books and papers until she was standing in front of the painting. The last time she’d seen the painting, it had been hanging in Dolph Saunders’ apartment. She’d helped steal it from the Met for Dolph—for her real father—but it wasn’t the painting she was interested in. It was what lay behind it.
Esta removed the painting carefully and set it aside, but her spirits sank when she saw what waited for her. She’d hoped it was still too early for Professor Lachlan to have installed the biometric safe he’d had when she was growing up. She’d hoped it would be a simpler mechanism, and one she could easily crack, but the flat panel on the front of the safe glared back at her instead. There was no tumbler, no lock for a key. No clear way into the safe.
Then something caught her eye—hanging on the wall nearby were two shadowbox frames, one holding a pair of bronze mirrors inscribed with Chinese characters and another with a glinting silver dagger that had once been Viola’s.
Esta’s heart lurched. It didn’t matter that her two friends would have likely been long dead anyway. Professor Lachlan had no right to these items. He didn’t deserve them. Worse, she knew that he hadn’t come by them accidentally. Jianyu and Viola’s belongings would never have found their way into Professor Lachlan’s possession if he hadn’t somehow been involved with their deaths.
She took a paperweight from the table and used it to break the glass in one of the frames. Then, careful not to get her finger anywhere close to the blade, Esta lifted Viola’s knife from the velvet backing. Its handle was strangely cool to the touch and too heavy for something so delicate, but it was exactly what she needed. She thought Viola would more than approve.
Returning to the safe, Esta jammed the tip of the thin blade into the hairline seam of the safe, and then carefully, she began to cut. The knife sliced through the iron safe as easily as it had once sunk itself into a zinc bar. Methodically, she worked the blade around the door of the safe, tracing the opening until… there.
The instant the door fell away, something popped, and a second later smoke began to seep from within the safe. Opium. Or something like it, from the scent. She didn’t have Harte’s ability to hold her breath for endless minutes, but she had a little time. Looking at the thick stack of papers and notebooks within the safe, her stomach sank. She’d have to hurry.
OLD FRIENDS
1902—Bella Strega
James dismissed Werner and Logan once they had deposited Jianyu on the low couch in his apartment. It was well past dawn now, and the light from the early morning was enough to see by without using an oil lamp. Thanks to Werner, Jianyu was still unconscious, but in a matter of seconds—his breath finally returned to him—he woke. James watched, unconcerned and unmoved, as Jianyu gasped, lurching upright so violently he nearly fell off the couch. It gave him more than a small satisfaction to see the confusion in Jianyu’s eyes and then the fear when he realized where he was.
“Sit down,” James commanded at the first glimmer of warmth from Jianyu’s magic. “And don’t bother with that disappearing trick of yours. There’s nowhere you can go in this city that Logan won’t be able to find you again, unless, of course, you’re willing to part with those mirrors of yours.”
