He saw a sign that said ACCESS TO ALL MIRROR LEVELS, but Elizabeth passed it without turning.

“Rule two,” Elizabeth said, “don’t ask for explanations and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

They reached a concrete bulkhead in which a steel door had been set. A sign said, OBSERVE ALL TOWER ONE PROTOCOLS BEYOND THIS POINT. Elizabeth dipped her pass card in a slot and the door sighed open.

“And stay with me,” she said. “Don’t wander off. We have a meeting in exactly one hour with August Kemp.”

August Kemp: a man whose name was familiar to everyone at the City, even low-status locals like Jesse. Kemp was the twenty-first-century financier who controlled the company that had built the City of Futurity. Kemp crossed the Mirror at will, and he had made himself familiar to the powerful and the wealthy of this world—just this summer he had dined in Manhattan with Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller, and in San Francisco with Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins. The idea of a personal meeting with August Kemp seemed as implausible to Jesse as the prospect of shaking hands with the king of the moon.

“Okay?” she said. “Is that copacetic?”

He had no idea what she was talking about. “Yes,” he said.

*   *   *

He followed Elizabeth to another bank of elevators and up a couple of levels to the staff commissary of Tower One. At first glance it could have been mistaken for the commissary of Tower Two. Same windowless enclosed space, many tables, plastic chairs. Similar booths housing similar food vendors, though there seemed to be a greater variety of them. “I’m due for lunch,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

He was. But the booths appeared to be set up for cash, not chits. And the cash changing hands was a specie not familiar to him. “I guess I’ll do without.”

“Are you sure? It’s on my dime.”

“Well, that’s generous. Thank you—I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

“Bento box and a Coke?”

He nodded, though he wasn’t sure she was actually speaking English. She ordered from a booth called California Sushi, and the box she gave him contained contrivances of rice and fish, mainly. He carried his tray to an empty table, and Elizabeth sat opposite him.

He unwrapped his utensils. “Chopsticks,” he said, surprised.

“You can get a fork if you want.”

“No need.” He sampled a ball of rice.

“Where’d you learn to handle chopsticks?”

“I’m from San Francisco. We don’t lack for Chinamen or chopsticks. Is this supposed to be Chinese food?”

“Japanese. Sort of. Fast-food sushi. And ‘Chinamen’ is offensive, FYI.” She mixed soy sauce with a green paste and dipped a rice roll in it. Jesse did the same. The paste was a kind of mustard, apparently. He managed to chew and swallow without breaking into tears.

He apologized for “Chinamen”—he knew better; it had been covered in his orientation course. The word was commonplace, but it risked offending visitors from the future.

“So,” Elizabeth said, “maybe you can guess why we’re going to see August Kemp.”

He was distracted by an overhead video screen. Several such screens were suspended from the ceiling of the commissary, and all of them were showing a baseball game. At least, Jesse guessed it was baseball. The diamond looked right, though the catcher wore a mask and the game was played in a stadium that dwarfed the Roman Colosseum.

Elizabeth sighed theatrically. “What did I tell you about staring?”

“Sorry.” He was tempted to call her ma’am, just to antagonize her.

“I was saying, maybe you can guess what this is all about.”

“It’s about the attempt on Grant.”

“Right. You handled the incident really well. If the guy had pulled the trigger, we would have had a major shitstorm on our hands. Worst case, a dead president, federal investigators knocking at the gate, a major hit to the revenue stream, maybe even an early shutdown. As it stands, no shots were fired and we have the shooter in custody. He’s a local, by the way. Some douchebag who’s still angry at Grant for taking Richmond. The important thing is, you saved Kemp a boatload of money and rescued him from a potential scandal. Which makes you a very shiny object in his eyes. You know about Kemp, right? Majority shareholder and CEO, the big boss, you came to his attention, he’s favorably disposed toward you, and that’s why you’re moving up in the world. All good, except for one detail.”

“The pistol,” Jesse said. “They told Grant it was a Colt. But it wasn’t.”

“The weapon was a Glock 19 with a full clip, most definitely not local.”

“And why is that a problem?”

“Because the shooter came into the City with the most recent batch of local guests, only a few hours before Grant himself. We have him on camera for pretty much every second after he passed through the gate. He didn’t interact with anybody, didn’t go anywhere unusual. So the question is, where did he get the gun? As far as we can tell, it was already in his possession. But they don’t sell Glocks in Shitstain, Missouri, or wherever he hails from. So we need to know how he obtained it.”

“You’re saying the pistol was smuggled out of the City somehow, delivered to the gunman, and the gunman carried it back in.”

“That’s one possibility.”

“So he must have had collaborators.”

“Most likely, yes. I’ve been asked to find out. The investigation will have to look both ways, inside the City and outside of it. And in the conduct of the investigation, it could be useful to have help from someone who’s both reliable and native to 1876. Specifically, you.”

“I see. Well, I appreciate your confidence.”

“I’m kind of agnostic on the subject, to be honest. In other words, yeah, if we set foot outside the gate you might be helpful to me. But until then—and especially here in Tower One—I need to be the one calling the shots. That’s the arrangement, and I hope you’re okay with it.”

“I’m okay with it.”

Jesse guessed she had said everything she had meant to say at that point, because the conversation lapsed into an awkward silence. He went to work on the remaining contents of his bento box. After a while Elizabeth looked at her watch. And Jesse looked at his. Their appointment with Kemp was still a half hour away. She said, “So, uh, you’re from San Francisco?”

“Yes.” Because she seemed to expect more from him, he said, “I was born in New Orleans, but my father took me west at a young age.” She nodded and said nothing. If this was supposed to be polite conversation, she was no better at it than he was. “So where do you hail from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Born in Minneapolis, but my folks moved to North Carolina. I joined the army when I turned nineteen. After I left active duty I settled in Charlotte and started working private security.”

“You were a soldier?”

“Yeah.”

“A soldier in a war?”

“I’m not sure how much I ought to say about that. The rules are kind of relaxed between us, but … well, okay, yeah. In a war. What about you?”

“I was eight years old at the time of First Manassas. My father was eligible but didn’t like to pick sides. That’s why he headed for San Francisco, where he couldn’t be called up.”

“How did you end up working for the City?”

“I was thrown off a train,” he said.

Up on the television screen, a batter wearing a Red Sox jersey hit a ball into a fielder’s enormous glove. Third out. The teams traded places. The game, Jesse discerned from fleeting captions, was being played in Boston. It was a cloudy day in the Boston of the future. Elsewhere in that world, perhaps, female soldiers were riding helicopters and firing Glock 19s. But Boston seemed peaceable enough.

“Oh, shit,” Elizabeth said (and it was certainly true, Jesse reflected, that she had a soldier’s vocabulary). He looked away from the baseball game and saw two men in security uniforms approaching from the direction of the elevator banks. “Castro and Dekker,” she said, scowling.