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Nibsy’s library.
He’d seen this room before, back when he still hadn’t trusted Esta and had used his affinity to breach her defenses. Later, she’d told him more about the collection in that room, a collection she’d helped to gather for the man she’d called Professor Lachlan. She’d told him, too, about what the Professor had tried to do to her in that very room after Harte had sent her back to her own time, thinking she would be safer there.
All of Nibsy’s secrets were in that library. The answers he needed were hidden there, and in the end, he’d find them all. But before he began searching, a large table in the center of the room covered with piles of newspapers and books caught his attention. Alongside the piles was a familiar glint of steel.
Harte took Viola’s knife from the table and turned the stiletto blade over in his hand as he thought about the steel door on the second floor. He started to head back toward the stairs when he noticed the doors of an elevator on the far side of the room. There hadn’t been elevator doors on the other floors he’d searched. Intrigued, he went to press the button to call the elevator, and a second later he heard the groaning growl of cables as the elevator approached. When the doors opened, he entered the cage carefully, ready for another trap. When nothing happened, he examined a row of numbered buttons. He pressed one, testing it, but realized it had been stabilized somehow. He pressed another, and it was the same. The only button that actually depressed was the one for the second floor. He depressed the “2,” and the elevator shuddered as it began to descend.
When the doors opened, Harte found himself in a windowless vestibule lit by a flickering yellowish bulb. On one side was a row of four closed doors. Across from the doors, a long, broad desk faced a windowless wall. Black-and-white television screens had been stacked on the desk, four across and three high. He stepped closer to examine the pictures flickering on them and realized he was looking at the empty rooms of the building. There was the back entryway, still filled with the fog that had attacked the second he’d entered. The library. The interior of the empty elevator. The living quarters on the third floor.
Someone could have been watching him the entire time.
There was one other screen that depicted a room he had not yet found—a dark cell with a single cot illuminated by a thin beam of light. Someone was huddled there. He couldn’t tell from the flickering footage who the person was or whether they were breathing.
His hands felt damp and unsteady as he took hold of Viola’s blade again and moved toward the first of the locked doors. Again, he felt the telltale brush of ritual magic. Cold emanated from the steel doorways. None had knobs or handles or locks, but Harte didn’t need them. He didn’t care who knew he’d been there.
Jamming the knife into the first one, he wrenched it open and found himself looking into an empty room. It wasn’t the room on the screen, though. He tried the next and found a room of boxes. The next was a room that looked a little like the hospital in San Francisco. It held a narrow hospital bed with a bare, stained mattress and a metal stand draped with the same odd tubing that had been attached to his arm. It also wasn’t the room on the screen.
There was one door left.
Glancing back at the screens, he saw the lump on the bed hadn’t moved. He’d been making enough noise that it should’ve woken whoever that was. Unless they were already too far gone to move.
His hands shook as he placed the tip of the blade between the door and the jamb and wrenched the final door open.
The room was larger than it looked on the screen. Deeper. Darker, too. There was only a single source of light—a spotlight that illuminated the cot on the other side of the space. The figure lying there didn’t move or stir at all.
Harte’s breath felt tight in his chest as he took a step into the room. And then another. He waited, trying to listen for any sign of breathing or life.
The attack came from behind. Before he realized what was happening, something had been thrown over his head, blinding him, and arms like vises clamped around his neck. They squeezed. Tighter. Tighter still. He grabbed for his attacker, clawed at the strong arms that held him, but weak and unsteady after weeks of illness in California and days of not sleeping, Harte was barely able to stay on his feet, much less throw off his attacker. Before he could fight them off, his vision started to blur. He dropped the knife in a last attempt to pull away his attacker’s arms.
Growling in rage, he tried to free himself. But he knew it was too late. He’d been caught by surprise. He’d failed Esta once again. It was the last thing Harte thought before everything went black.
PART II
STEALING SECRETS
1902—East Thirty-Sixth Street and Madison Avenue
It had been nearly three months since Jianyu had sent Cela to safety outside the city, and he was no closer to discovering what Newton’s Sigils could do or why Nibsy wanted them. Each day that passed felt like a wasted opportunity, and with each week, the situation in the city grew more tenuous. Over the summer, the Order had only grown more desperate to find their lost objects, and as their desperation grew, so too did their violence.
Perhaps it was good that Cela was outside the city, Jianyu thought. But it had been weeks since he and Viola had received word from her. Abel usually brought news, but with the demands of his job as a porter during the busy summer travel season, his trips into the city had become less frequent. Jianyu knew that Abel had people checking on her, watching over her, but she wouldn’t be able to send word if she needed help.
And, even if she could, there would be no way for him to help if word ever came.
He tried to put thoughts of Cela out of his mind and focus on the task before him. Across the street, J. P. Morgan’s Madison Avenue mansion loomed. Sweat slid down his back despite the hint of a chill in the late-September afternoon. After weeks of searching, he had narrowed his focus to Morgan himself. That day in the Flatiron Building, it had been Morgan who had immediately recognized the importance of the missing discs. Morgan had been the one to discover they were missing, and he had also been the one to name them—Newton’s Sigils—and to explain that without them, the Order could lose control of the Brink.
If Jianyu had stayed a little longer, perhaps he would have already had the information he needed. But that night Jianyu had been too concerned about Cela and Abel, about whether Viola had reached them in time, to tarry for long. The details had not seemed important, not when his friends’ lives were in danger.
Now that information had become essential.
It had been years since Jianyu had thought of himself as a thief. There might have been a danger in gathering the city’s secrets, but he had always considered the work done for Dolph Saunders as something more than simple theft. After all, secrets could not be stolen, not truly. Not when they were given away by those careless enough to speak them aloud. What might be told in the ear of one man could travel for a hundred miles, and whose fault was it if he happened to catch a whisper on the wind?
Thievery, true thievery, was different, and Jianyu had enough experience with it in his youth to know the difference. The cracking of a lock, the lifting of an object precious to its owner—precious as well to someone who would pay. The heaviness of guilt and the breathless thrill of danger that came alongside the action. He knew these well. He had learned them young, and they had cost him everything.
The act of breaking into a local merchant’s house back in Gwóng-dung had been the event that had forced him to leave his homeland and come to this wretched country. Or rather, it had been the fact that he had been caught that had set his life on its current path. If not for that one fateful night, he likely would still be raiding homes along the Zyu Gong.
In truth, he would likely have been long dead. Young thieves did not last long in his province.
Jianyu had been in Morgan’s house before, at least three separate times, and he had come to understand the rhythm of the servants as they went about their tasks for the day. He was familiar with the wide hallways and towering ceilings, could navigate easily through the maze of rooms to Morgan’s personal library. He was ready.
