He walked away without looking back. Abandoning his post, Jesse thought, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. All sorts of things were being abandoned. It seemed like everyone was going home, or leaving it.

19

The next leg of the flight was faster but more terrifying, more terrifying because faster: The fixed-wing airship flew more like a bullet than a bird. It was probably the largest single thing to have been imported through the Mirror, and Jesse was not surprised Kemp had kept it hidden from local tourists and the press. One did not, in this vehicle, float. One hurtled.

He closed his eyes and gave himself over to his fatigue. The pain in his wounded right arm had become a hot rhythmic pulse, Morse code stuttering a single letter, but he managed a few rounds of dream-haunted sleep despite it. He dreamed of the days of his life divided into leaves and bound into a book that could be read only backward. He dreamed of those gnomes Mercy believed in, visitors from a century even more distant than the twenty-first, and in his dream they marched out of the frame of a vanity mirror, pale and serene as clouds, and one of them (it might have been male or female or both or neither) stood before Jesse and told him that all things change and in the end nothing endures but change itself.

After an incalculable time the airship landed at another remote strip, somewhere in Illinois but west of the City, where he helped transfer Phoebe to another helicopter for the last leg of the flight. Jesse was tempted to sleep again, and he dozed a little, until a band of daylight struck his eyes as the helicopter made a banking turn: Morning had come. He tried to make himself alert as he glanced around the cabin. Mercy Kemp and Theo Stromberg were safety-belted next to Elizabeth and the dark-skinned physician, Talbot. Phoebe was strapped to a gurney—alive, though she looked as pale as death—and August Kemp rode near the front of the airship, wearing a headset that allowed him to communicate with the pilot.

Reluctantly, Jesse steeled his nerve and looked out the window.

The view by daylight was as disorienting as it had been by night. The sun had just cleared a reef of cloud on the eastern horizon. Empty prairie scrolled beneath the airship, green with wild grass and stitched with the silver thread of rivers and creeks; a flock of passenger pigeons wheeled over a blue-green bog in the shadow of a low hill. Ahead, two distant needles caught the rake of the sunlight: the twin towers of the City of Futurity. Talbot had taken a digital device from his pocket and was holding it to the window—recording video, Jesse assumed, just as the twenty-first-century tourists habitually did.

Elizabeth left her seat and moved next to Jesse. She had been talking to Mercy and Theo—more like shouting at them, given the unrelenting noise of the engines—and sparing occasional sour glances for August Kemp. Jesse’s understanding of the argument between Kemp and his daughter had deepened over the past day. His first impression—of Mercy Kemp as a pampered daughter who needed rescuing from the consequences of her fashionable radicalism—had been too hasty. Mercy wasn’t stupid or obviously foolish, and her presence here was more than an act of petulant rebellion. It was a disagreement about money and power and purpose, imported (like so many other bewildering things) from the age of the Mirror. Mercy believed her father was extracting profits shamelessly while dodging responsibility for the crisis he left in his wake. And as far as Jesse could tell, that was true.

But it had ceased to matter to him. His business now was with Phoebe, saving her life by any means possible. After that, Phoebe, if she lived, would go back to Aunt Abbie, and Jesse would revert to what he had been before he ever stumbled into the City of Futurity: a drifter, without employment or prospects, but generally sober and good with his fists. Maybe he would go back to San Francisco, now that Roscoe Candy was truly dead; maybe he would live and die where God had put him, in the gap between Pike Street and Dupont.

Elizabeth leaned into his shoulder. “Something’s going on!” she shouted. “Kemp’s talking to someone at the City, and he doesn’t look happy!”

Jesse glanced forward. She was right. There was no way to know what Kemp was saying, but he looked like a Thomas Nast caricature of an infuriated Irishman.

“Probably about that,” Elizabeth said, nodding at the window. Jesse turned to take a second look just as Talbot crossed the aisle, aiming his phone in a new direction.

They were close enough to the City now to see that the newspaper stories had not been exaggerated. A small army was arrayed before the wall, with what looked like caissons and supply wagons enough to fight another Bull Run. Smoke rose from cooking fires as men in blue uniforms milled about, treading the prairie grass to bare earth. The airship made a sweeping turn, revealing powder scars on the City’s gaudily painted wall where it had been struck by cannon fire. Struck, but not breached—the wall was massive, and the City had its own small army of uniformed men arrayed along the top of it.

From this altitude it all looked peaceful enough, until a federal cannon gouted flame and a canister exploded just short of the gate.

The City’s soldiers fired a volley in response, and the troops at the vanguard hastily pulled back, but their artillery emplacements were beyond range of the wall-top gunners, and now they began to fire in earnest. Smoke and dust rose from the battleground as if a giant had pounded the earth with his fist.

Kemp shouted into his mouthpiece again, and the airship veered toward its landing pad outside Tower Two.

*   *   *

They touched ground with a bounce that suggested the pilot’s haste. Outside, a committee of grim-faced security personnel waited for the rotors to slow. All other open space within the boundary of the City walls was empty. Jesse had seen the City grounds deserted during snowstorms, or in the hours before dawn, but never on a sunny morning like this, and the reason was as obvious as it was shocking: at least a couple of artillery rounds had overshot the walls and struck the north face of Tower Two, shattering windows and scarring the concrete façade.

He waited until Phoebe’s wheeled bed had been hoisted out of the airship, then followed Elizabeth and the others to the lobby doors. The medical facilities were in Tower One, where visitors from the future customarily stayed, so Kemp’s security team hustled everyone down an inclined ramp to the underground tunnel connecting the buildings. A pair of junior medics took charge of Phoebe, one at each end of the gurney, with Talbot following close behind, as Elizabeth came up beside Jesse and said in a low voice, “This is worse than I expected.”

The siege, she meant. He said, “The wall is bound to come down sooner or later. There’ll be federal troops in both towers before long.”

“It’ll be bad for Kemp. Back home, I mean. He’ll try to blame all this on Theo, of course. But if it gets out that City employees fired on American soldiers, even in self-defense, Kemp will be out of business for good.”

She had told him on the train—days ago, though it seemed more like months—that Kemp’s first City of Futurity had ended badly: Three people had been killed when a former Confederate soldier entered the City’s pavilion at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and opened fire on the crowd. It wasn’t much compared to what was happening here, but it had emboldened activists like Theo Stromberg and raised questions about the ethics of time travel. “If any of this gets into the press back home—I mean the bank fraud, the riots, the attempt on Grant’s life, this siege—it’ll be all over.”

“Will Kemp be put on trial?”

“Maybe not a criminal trial, more likely a Congressional investigation, but yeah—that’s what Theo Stromberg’s hoping for.”