“But we have to deliver the runners to Kemp’s boat.”

Jesse said nothing.

“Tonight,” she said.

“I’ll take a horse of my own. You can take the runners to the dock. They’re not resisting. Hire a cab.”

“But you won’t get paid.”

Jesse gave her a scornful look.

“Anyway,” she pressed, “if Candy’s at your aunt’s house he’ll have his troops with him. You can’t take him on alone.”

“Can’t I?”

“You don’t have to. I’m a veteran. I’ve been trained. I can handle weapons.”

She had his full attention now. He put his hands on her shoulders. Big hands, but cold. “There’s no time for this. I thank you, Elizabeth. But you have a daughter to go home to.”

“Even if I miss the boat, Kemp won’t leave me behind.”

“Won’t he?”

“Not if we have his daughter.”

Jesse was slow to answer. “You can’t—”

“Yes I fucking can,” she said, realizing she meant it.

“Why would you take such a risk?”

“Because Kemp was wrong, he’s always been wrong, this isn’t a fucking diorama—it’s real, you’re real, Phoebe is real, this is a real place, and I’m in it, I’m right here, I’m real, too, and I can help.” And you can’t stop me, she added silently.

Jesse just stared. His hands tightened on her shoulders, as if he was about to push her away.

But he didn’t. “In that case,” he said, “we’re wasting time. Get Mercy and Theo into a carriage. Any carriage but the one we came in. And don’t forget the weapons. I expect we’ll need them.”

*   *   *

Two panting horses pulled the stolen rig up the slope of Nob Hill.

The people who lived here called it California Street Hill. But it was Nob Hill to the people who lived south of Market, Jesse had said, and Nob Hill was the name that would stick. The angle of the grade and the finite strength of the horses made their progress agonizingly slow, which meant Elizabeth had time to glance over her shoulder from time to time. California Street offered a comprehensive view of the business district, the rattletrap neighborhoods south of it, and all of the Chinese quarter. Which was burning.

Elizabeth counted at least five individual fires. “It looks like the mobs went after the Chinese theaters,” Jesse said. “Some of those shows go on for days, in installments. A lot of people inside.”

Fire bells rang out a continuous clangor. In places the flames had turned whole streets incandescent, like hostile zones on a digital grid. “Will it spread?”

“It might.”

“Will it come up here?”

“Most likely not. At least not tonight. I guess none of this was in your history books?”

Not exactly, no. This version of 1877 had come undocked from history and was drifting into uncharted space. Elizabeth’s guess about what came next was no better than Jesse’s.

She sat with Jesse on the driver’s bench of the carriage. Mercy and Theo were enclosed in the cab, if “cab” was the correct name for the passenger box of the vehicle. When Aunt Abbie’s house came within sight Jesse tugged the reins, looking for a place he could stop without either blocking traffic from the burning city or revealing himself to any hostile forces watching out for his approach.

Abbie Hauser’s late husband, for all his wealth, had not built the finest house on California Street. That prize would have gone to a building farther up the hill, the mansion of someone named Leland Stanford, an Addams Family spook house inflated to the size of an aircraft carrier. Abbie’s house was more human in scale but just as baroque, a quarry’s worth of stone folded into tesseracts of Italianate complexity. “Okay,” Elizabeth said, “what now?”

Jesse gazed at the house a few moments more. “You see the lights in the second-floor windows, south side?”

“So?”

“Most of those rooms haven’t been used since Abbie was widowed. Phoebe and I used to play hide-and-seek in them. They were never lit up at night.”

“Abbie or Phoebe might have gone up there to see the fires.”

“They would have more likely gone to the widow’s walk,” Jesse said, meaning the balcony surrounding a stone turret at the highest part of the house.

“So what conclusion are you drawing?”

“I’m betting Candy and his men are already inside.”

He said this in a flat voice, but Elizabeth knew him well enough to hear the envelope of rage around the words. “So it’s basically a hostage situation. We have to find a way to get Abbie and Phoebe out without getting them killed.”

Jesse nodded, but he counted off on his fingers: “Phoebe. Abbie. Soo Yee. And the hired man, Randal, if he was present when Candy’s hatchetmen moved in.”

“We don’t know how many men Candy has.”

“No.”

“I’ve been trained in counterterrorism and hostage-rescue operations,” Elizabeth said, which was sort of true. She had received basic infantry training, though her SIGINT work meant she’d spent most of her tour of duty behind a monitor. And when she joined the nominally civilian company that provided security to the City of Futurity she had gone through a truncated version of the FBI’s Quantico training, including simulated responses to simulated attacks in a grid of fake doors and walls representing a generic urban environment. “We need a plan,” she said, already conducting a mental inventory of the contents of their traveling bag: four flash-bang grenades, four automatic pistols with spare clips, one unsold Taser, a sheath of plastic pull-tie wrist restraints—plus a radio, their essential link to August Kemp. Thin pickings, but better than nothing.

“I’ll go in and kill Candy and his men,” Jesse said.

“That’s—not a real plan.”

“I disagree.”

“So what am I supposed to do, wait in the carriage?”

“Yes.”

“Waste of resources, Jesse. If you go in by yourself, that means I have to go in on my own after you get killed. If we do this together—”

“You’re a soldier, I understand that, and I’m thankful for your help. But I know the house better than you do. I can get close without revealing myself.”

“So, without revealing yourself, can you find out roughly how many men Candy has and where they’re situated with respect to the hostages?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then do that. Scout the house, come back here, and we’ll make a plan that uses what we have to maximal effect.”

“One thing we don’t have is time.”

“So keep an eye on your watch. If you’re not back here in thirty minutes I’ll assume you’re dead or captured.”

“And what if I am?”

“I’ll act accordingly.”

“What does that mean?”

She wasn’t sure what it meant, to be honest. “Let’s try to avoid finding out, okay?”

He stared at her. Then he nodded and took out his pocket watch. “Thirty minutes?”

“Starting now.”

*   *   *

Jesse understood that the urgency of his task and his fear of failing at it might interfere with clear thinking. So for the purposes of this scouting expedition he tried to pretend he was still the fifteen-year-old who had taught himself the secrets of the house well enough to come and go at will, undetected.

The house had seemed huge to him back then, the very definition of a rich man’s palace. Today he knew better. Mr. Hauser had never been quite as rich as he appeared to be, and the house on California Street was a modest one compared to the grandiose stone piles other millionaires had erected before or since. Nevertheless, the construction reflected the Comstock Lode money that had fueled it: It was big, boastful, smug in its complexity. It was not unusual for California Street nobs to surround their properties with walls, often for no other purpose than to spite a neighbor by blocking his view—Hauser’s silver-mining wealth had probably been great enough to allow for such extravagances, but his Bostonian sense of propriety had kept him from indulging it to its fullest extent. As a result Aunt Abbie’s mansion possessed only a handful of spare bedrooms and no more than a half dozen common rooms serving as library, parlor, study, dining room, etcetera. There was a small section set aside for servants’ quarters, not much used now that the employed staff was reduced to Randal and Soo Yee. It was also down to Hauser’s comparative modesty that the stone wall surrounding the house on three sides was only a little taller than Jesse’s head. It had never presented much of an obstacle to him, even when he was an inch or two shorter. And he knew all the least conspicuous angles by which to approach and scale it.