“You’ll do,” Elizabeth said as he climbed into the coach and settled on the bench opposite her. He was grateful for the comment, but she was hardly in a position to judge. Her own clothes were imitations and, to Jesse’s eye, looked it.

The carriage was also a replica, assembled in the twenty-first century and imported through the Mirror. From a distance it would be indistinguishable from an ordinary hackney coach, but it rode differently: the City people had installed a complex suspension. But the coach didn’t have to fool anyone. It was part of the fleet of coaches and horse-drawn omnibuses that conveyed guests from the City to the train station on a weekly schedule.

The coach jolted as the driver urged his team through the gate and away from the City. Rain streaked the windows, rendering the Illinois prairie in a molten palate of greens and yellows, and Jesse’s mood wasn’t much sunnier. Trouble ahead, he thought. Or, to be fair, maybe not. Maybe he could winkle out enough facts to satisfy Elizabeth and her bosses, and his life would resume its prior course uninterrupted. But there were other possibilities.

Last night he had dreamed of his sister Phoebe. Again. The same dream, as familiar as it was terrible. He had been back at Madame Chao’s, and there had been a room in flames, and Phoebe in a box, and his father spilling blood from his cupped hands.

He had awakened in a cold sweat. He showered and dressed, then made his way to the commissary for breakfast. He told Dorothy, the war widow who worked the counter at Starbucks, that she might not be seeing him so often now that he was being moved to Tower One.

“New job,” she said, “that’s nice! Making a name for yourself. You look like it, too.”

“This is special. They dressed me for a trip out to the depot.”

“As a fashion plate?”

“I’m not at liberty to speak of it,” Jesse said, meaning he didn’t want to.

“You’ll have the ladies all agog, that’s certain.”

One lady who was not all agog was Doris Vanderkamp, taking a break from her work cleaning guest rooms. Doris’s on-again, off-again case of the grippe seemed to be in abeyance today, and her face was more pretty than haggard, dark curls framing mischievous eyes. She joined Jesse at his table without waiting for an invitation. “Well, well, well! Jesse Cullum, spiff as a new dime. Almost enough to make a girl miss him.”

“You’re looking fine as well, Doris.”

“All this time I figured your only aim in life was to collect your wages and smile at the boss. But it turns out you’re ambitious.”

“Pretty soon you’ll have fewer opportunities to insult me, so you might as well get the job done while I’m here.”

“I don’t mean to insult you—at least not at the moment. But you’re an inconstant lover, Jesse, you have to admit it.”

He wasn’t much of a lover at all. His entanglement with Doris had been born of his desire, her availability, and a certain spirit of recklessness that had arisen between them like a summer storm. There had never been a future in it. He suspected Doris had known that long before their intimate friendship ran on the rocks. Her consequent resentment of him was a form of social theater, for which she possessed a remarkable talent.

“I hear they partnered you with a big old girl from the twenty-first century,” she said. “Some female ogre with pants on.”

“Ogre’s not an apt word. Though she’s not as small and pert as you.”

“That’s a pretty thing to say.” Doris reached out and covered his hand with hers. “I forgive you nothing, you idiot.” Then she took a handkerchief from the folds of her dress and blew her nose into it. Her cold was coming back, Jesse thought.

*   *   *

“I had a word with Dekker this morning,” Elizabeth said.

Jesse turned his gaze from the window. The rain came down hard and heavy, as if children were pelting the coach with gravel. The City’s helicopter would remain in its hangar today. Outdoor events would be postponed and rescheduled, and both of the indoor pools in Tower Two—one for women, one for men—would be crowded with guests, who seemed to take a particular pleasure in bathing in heated water while a storm beat at the high glass walls.

But all that was behind him. Ahead, the streets of Futurity Station would be awash in mud and worse.

Dekker, Jesse thought: the man who had insulted him and then attempted to crush his hand. “Was he in a better mood today?”

“Pretty much the opposite of a better mood. After you talked to him in the food court? His pass card went missing. He had to call the security office to get a new one. The old one turned up this morning, stuck in a flowerpot on the commissary floor.”

“I’m sorry to hear of his troubles.”

“Dekker blames you.”

“On what grounds?”

“There’s a security cam video of him hassling you, but it’s from the wrong angle, so it didn’t prove anything—assuming that’s when you lifted the card.”

“Are you suggesting I stole it?”

“I think, if you did steal it and dump it in a flowerpot, it would have served that asshole right. But I didn’t see you do it, and I was sitting less than a yard away. Are you a pickpocket?”

Jesse considered the question. He didn’t want Elizabeth to think of him as someone who had gone around skinning wallets in his earlier life. Nor did he want to lie. “What you’re talking about sounds more like sleight of hand.”

“What, like stage magic? So you’re a magician?”

“No. Nor was my father … but he learned a few card tricks in his youth.”

“And that’s how you lifted Dekker’s pass without anyone noticing, including Dekker?”

“I imagine, if I had done such a thing, I might be reluctant to admit it.” In fact he was angry at himself for having done it at all. It had been an intolerable risk for a trivial act of revenge.

“Your secret’s safe with me. Dekker can’t prove anything, and everyone in Tower One security except Dekker thinks it’s pretty funny.” She thought for a moment. “It’s important to you to keep your job.”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean, yes.”

“Any particular reason?”

“None that I care to discuss.”

“Okay. That’s interesting, though, about your father being a magician.”

“He wasn’t a magician. He earned his keep by opening doors. Do you come from a family of soldiers, Elizabeth?”

She laughed. “No. My father was an electrical engineer until he smoked himself into a premature coronary. My mother worked as a beautician, but these days she mostly watches Fox News and goes to church.”

“I’m sure they’re fine people.”

“I’m glad somebody’s sure.” Moisture in the air had made the windows opaque, and Elizabeth scrubbed the glass with the heel of her hand. “But you know the saying? ‘All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’”

“Who said that? Some wise man from your century?”

She shrugged. “I think I heard it on Oprah.”

*   *   *

Futurity Station was a smudge on the northern horizon now, as if someone had run a sooty finger across the wet Illinois plains. If Jesse craned his head he could see the rest of this convoy of coaches and horse buses bending toward the rail town like ants to a cabbage. And when the veils of rain parted he could see a skyline of wooden structures, the largest and tallest of which was the three-story Excelsior Hotel, where they would be spending the night.

The depot’s smell preceded it. Jesse saw Elizabeth wrinkle her nose. Two years ago the City had installed waste disposal amenities for Futurity Station, but the town had rapidly outgrown those niceties. The weather could only have made it worse, Jesse imagined; the streets would be flooded and wet air would enclose the stench like a dome. “Sometimes I wonder why you’re here at all.”

“I’m here to make sure you don’t screw up.”