Jesse thought about all those threads of time laid side-by-side like fibers in a rope, each thread a world with an identical history. The Mirror was a device that braided histories together, so that human beings and physical objects could pass back and forth. It amounted to time travel because every accessible world was identical to the source, but less ancient. A nearby history might be only a few seconds or minutes less old, so that traveling to it would seem like traveling a few seconds or minutes into the past. More distant histories were separated by years, centuries, eons. But as Elizabeth had said, there were practical limits to what a Mirror could do. Traveling to a nearby history required relatively little energy but an impossible degree of precision. Traveling to a very distant history required little precision but an absurd amount of energy.

What kind of energy it required Jesse could not begin to guess. But he knew, intuitively, that the Mirror was the most remarkable thing the City people had produced—more remarkable than a helicopter, more remarkable even than a photograph of the icy plains of Mars. It was more than a machine—it was a metaphysical machine. It was a steamship that plied the winding rivers of heaven itself.

*   *   *

Phoebe was crying.

That was unusual. Phoebe was twelve years old, and she took pride in her maturity. She had taught herself not to cry when she was unhappy. But she was crying now, and Jesse was frustrated because he couldn’t locate the source of the sound.

The walls were on fire.

The walls were on fire, and his father stood in the center of the room, cupping blood in his hands. His father’s expression was sorrowful. He bowed at the waist like a man at prayer.

“I tried to stop it,” Jesse said, or tried to say.

Phoebe was inside a steamer trunk, he realized. He went to the trunk to open it. But it was locked, the key was nowhere to be found, and the brass fittings were too hot to touch.

“I’m sorry,” Jesse’s father said.

He opened his hands. Blood and unspeakable things dropped to the floor.

In the trunk, Phoebe screamed.

*   *   *

“You’re safe,” someone said.

Jesse became aware of the room, the stink of his own sweat, the rawness of his throat, the cotton sheet coiled around him like a rope.

“You’re safe.”

It was Elizabeth who spoke. And she was holding his hand. Or at least compressing his hands against his body in a kind of wrestling grip, so that he couldn’t lash out at her. “Thank you, I’m awake now,” he managed to say, and she released him and took a wary step back.

He was profoundly embarrassed. “Elizabeth, I’m sorry…”

“Nothing to be sorry for.” She was a dark presence in a room lit only by moonlight. “You okay now?” Her voice was soft and had no anger in it.

“Yes.”

“All right then.”

She went back to her own bed.

No further words were spoken. Outside, the rain had stopped. A cooling wind came through the window. Elizabeth’s bed creaked as she turned on her side. Jesse pulled his blanket around his shoulders and stared into the darkness and waited for morning.

4

He woke at dawn. He dressed and washed and waited while Elizabeth did the same, then escorted her to the hotel’s dining room. She insisted on taking all her meals here, where City officials periodically inspected both the food and the kitchen. Jesse objected that this would anchor them to the Excelsior, but Elizabeth wouldn’t be moved: “You people don’t have practical refrigeration. You put lead oxide in your milk and God knows what in your sausages. You call dysentery ‘the summer complaint.’ So this is where we eat, period, full stop.”

He didn’t argue. He was still ashamed that he had troubled her with his nightmare, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak about it, and she didn’t raise the subject. Which was just as well, since they had the day’s work ahead of them.

*   *   *

Futurity Station was more circus than town, Jesse thought. Like a circus, it had an air of impermanence and expedience. And like a circus, its main sources of revenue were dreams, deception, sex, and theft.

Their plan was to pose as a married couple, not quite well-heeled enough to afford admission to the City, who had come to Futurity Station for a glimpse of the flying machine and to buy any futuristic contraband they could lay their hands on. This morning they would get the lay of the land by way of a leisurely stroll, and the weather was ideal for it: vivid sunlight and a pleasant warmth, the town’s gaudy signs and wooden sidewalks all washed clean by last night’s rain.

The town had two main streets, one parallel to the train tracks and one perpendicular to them. The first street was called Depot, the second was called Lookout. Most of the respectable establishments—hotels, a barber, an apothecary shop, a Methodist church—were situated on Depot, west of the train station. Lookout Street was home to saloons, pawn shops, penny theaters, music halls dedicated to burlesque shows and minstrelsy, and, at its southernmost extremity, rows of bleachers where customers could buy a “guaranteed best” view of the regularly scheduled fly past of the City airship.

Jesse and Elizabeth began by dawdling along Depot Street. Any hour before noon was early for a town like Futurity Station, but the sidewalks were far from empty, and daylight hours were especially suited for the respectable tourists they were pretending to be. It was the element of pretense that worried Jesse. He had reminded Elizabeth as tactfully as possible that she must not swear or swagger or express her opinions too freely or do any of the ten thousand other things City women did without thinking and which might, in the year 1876, raise eyebrows or start riots. Her response had been to roll her eyes and say, “So they tell me,” which had not entirely reassured him.

But she carried herself convincingly enough as they strolled, taking his arm and keeping to his side. Her skirt and bodice must have made her uncomfortable in the warm weather, but the City outfitters had also provided her with a straw hat with a flat brim and blue ribbons, which disguised her short hair and gave her some protection from the sun. They stopped briefly at an apothecary shop with a soda fountain, and she put on a plausible show of interest in the patent medicines on the shelves and the array of red and blue bottles of all sizes, but when the druggist asked whether he could serve them she smiled and said, “No, thank you, maybe we’ll stop by on our way back to the hotel.”

At the western end of Depot Street they passed a shop offering novelty items and curios—it looked too respectable to be a source of contraband weapons, but something in the window caused Elizabeth to pause and tug him toward the door. A table inside was stocked with books claiming to be guides to the City or fictional accounts of future history, most with stamped covers featuring lurid or fantastical illustrations. Elizabeth picked up a novel that gloried under the title America’s War with Mars. “I guess H. G. Wells is screwed,” she murmured.

He didn’t know what that meant, but he smiled in response to her smile.

The proprietor of the shop, a skinny man with a mustache and a striped shirt, bustled out from behind his counter. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Elizabeth said, “There’s a book in your window … at least, I think it’s a book.” She pointed. “May I see it?”

The shopkeeper made a tragic face. “I’m not sure you would like to, frankly.”

The book in question was made of paper without boards, like a pamphlet. But it was thick. The title of the book was The Shining. “It sounds as if it might be religious,” Elizabeth said.

“Quite the contrary, I’m sorry to say. It’s an authentic book of the future, left behind by a visitor, but the contents aren’t suitable for a female reader. If it weren’t such a significant artifact I should be ashamed to sell it.”