Ashmore City

The first thing Venn did when he woke up was scream.

It was not a scream of pain. It was a high, startled, disbelieving shriek, the sound a man makes when he steps off a curb that is not there, and it brought Zoe bolt upright on the floor of a cramped and dusty office with her heart in her mouth and her hand clawing at a bow that was not on her back.

"Legs!" Venn was shouting. "I've got legs! Plural! Look at them! Both of them!"

He was sitting on a green leather sofa, a lanky young man in a charcoal pinstripe suit, with a snap-brim hat tilted over one eye. He had his trousers rolled to the knee. He was staring at his own calves as if they belonged to a hero from a story: two brown, strong, living legs, with the long tendons running down them and the ankles and the feet. He flexed his toes. He wiggled them. He gave a sort of strangled sob.

"It's the Dimension," said Jin, from the desk. He was in a tailored vest and a pair of round tortoiseshell spectacles, with a green eyeshade pushed up on his forehead, and he looked, as Zoe had suspected he would, like a small-town bank clerk. His voice was very gentle. "It's remade us. For the role. It's, ah. It might not stay."

"I don't care if it stays." Venn was laughing and crying at once. "I don't care if it lasts an hour. I'm going to run, Jin. I'm going to run down the street."

"Please don't," said Jin. "We're supposed to be discreet."

…

The office was called Suite 4.

It was on the third floor of a tenement at 118 Larkin Street, up three flights of creaking stairs and along a hall that smelled of boiled cabbage and wet wool. The door had a pane of frosted glass with lettering on it, backward from the inside: A. MORAN & ASSOC. — PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS. Inside there was a desk, a sofa, a hat rack, a pair of battered filing cabinets, a gas ring and a kettle, a bottle of rye in the bottom drawer, and a window overlooking a street full of rain.

And Archie was standing in the middle of it all in a trench coat.

He had not yet moved. He stood with his hands at his sides and the brim of a gray fedora shadowing his eyes and an expression on his face so exactly the expression of a man in a film that Zoe, glancing up, nearly laughed aloud.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing."

"You're making a face."

"It's a good face." She was smiling openly now. "You look like the cover of a paperback. You look like a man who's about to say, Kid, in this town it's always raining."

"I would never say that."

"You'd say it in a heartbeat, you'd say it with a squint."

Archie put his hand over his eyes. Under the hat, his ears were going red.

He looked, she thought, and was a little startled at the thought, younger. The deep lines at the corners of his mouth had eased. His cheekbones were still sharp, but his skin had a kind of warmth to it that it had not had at the lab. There was a pocket watch on a chain in his waistcoat. He had been, she realized, a man who did not like the way he looked, and had stopped noticing; and now something in the Dimension had noticed for him and, gently, set it right.

She glanced down at herself.

"Oh, wow," she said.

She was wearing a dress. It was a dark red crêpe, cut on the bias, nipped at the waist and flaring a little at the knee, with a row of small covered buttons running up the front. Her hair had been set in soft waves. There were stockings with seams. There were shoes, with heels. She turned slowly to the dusty mirror on the back of the door and stared.

"Okay," she said. "I'd like to formally say that this era had taste."

"You look," said Archie, and stopped.

"What?"

"You look very good," he said, rather quickly. "Very, ah. Period-appropriate."

Behind them, Venn gave a wolf whistle and was immediately elbowed by Jin.

…

There was a knock at the door.

It was a firm, practical knock, three raps, and it was followed at once by a voice that did not wait to be asked. "Mr. Moran! I know you're in there! I saw the light!"

The four of them froze.

"Hide," whispered Jin.

"Where?"

"I don't know, we're in a one-room office—"

The door opened. A woman stood in the hall, a small, upright, square woman of perhaps sixty, in a black dress and a faded blue cardigan, with her gray hair rolled in a bun and a ring of keys at her waist. She looked at the four of them with extreme disapproval. She looked at the open window. She looked at the rain-damp patch on the carpet.

"You've brought friends," she said.

"I'm, ah," said Archie. "Yes?"

"Three weeks' rent." She held out her hand. "Mrs. Pruitt. I own the building. I own the stairs, I own the hall, and I own, God help me, the roof over this ridiculous room. You've been gone ten days, you owe me twenty-one dollars, and you left your kettle on." She sniffed. "Who are these?"

"Associates," said Archie.

"Associates." Mrs. Pruitt weighed the word. She turned her eye on Venn, who was still clutching his own knees and grinning wildly, and then on Jin, in his clerk's vest, and then on Zoe, in the red dress. Her mouth did something complicated. "Well," she said at last. "The young lady looks respectable. The tall one looks as though he's lost a bet. And you—"

"Yes?" said Jin faintly.

"You look like a man who knows what a ledger is. That's something." She snapped her fingers. "Twenty-one dollars. I'll take half now."

They scraped it out of the drawer between them. It came to eleven dollars and some cents. Mrs. Pruitt counted it twice, nodded, and made to go.

At the door she turned. For a moment the stern face gentled, and Archie saw something in it that he'd missed. It was not warmth. It was a kind of fixed, careful watchfulness, as of a woman who has seen people vanish from this building before.

"The case is on your desk," she said. "I've left it as you had it. It's been twenty years, Mr. Moran. Nobody else will touch it." She paused. "I don't know what you're really doing. I don't ask. But it's the only thing in this district that's been left unfinished, and I'd like to see it done."

She went out, her footsteps creaking away down the stairs.

"She knows," said Zoe, after a pause.

"Knows what?"

"That something's wrong." She had her arms wrapped around herself. "Everybody here knows, don't they? It's in the way they look at us. Like they've been waiting."

Nobody answered. Outside, the rain came down on Larkin Street.

…

The file lay in the middle of the desk, in a neat manila folder.

THE ASHMORE GRAND DISAPPEARANCE. Subject: Thomas J. Crane. Age 38. Last seen on the night of November 9th, in Room 614. No forced entry. Hat on the bed. Whiskey unfinished. Case open: twenty years.

Jin read it through, and then again, with a pencil, tapping it against his lip. Venn paced behind him on his new legs and could not stop, and kept stopping to stamp the floor, and starting up again.

"Twenty years," Jin said at last. "Here." He did a quick sum on the blotter. "But Matteo vanished fifteen years ago, in the lab. Time doesn't run at one speed between the two worlds, and it's different in every Space. Twenty years in Ashmore could easily be fifteen outside." The pencil tapped faster. "If Crane went in with the first volunteers, the numbers line up. He's a Guardian. Has to be."

"The Guardian of this Space," said Archie. He had sat down on the corner of the desk without noticing. "The thing we have to find. Like Elena. Someone who's stuck. Someone who doesn't remember who he is."

"Or does, and can't say."

"Either way." Archie looked at the brim of the hat in his hands. "It's the same job. Find him. Make him remember. Help him." He glanced up at the others, and for the first time he said it as an order and not a question. "Together."

"Together," said Zoe.

"Split up and cover more ground? Hotel and police?"

"That's what a detective would do," said Jin, with the air of a man quoting scripture. "Venn and I will take the precinct. See what the police reports say, who was the investigating officer, whether there are witnesses. Archie, you and Zoe take the Grand. The chambermaids. The register. The clerks."

"Why do we get the hotel?" said Venn.

"Because you're a poor liar," said Jin. "And I need you at my elbow where I can see you."

…

Rain, again, on the streets.

They walked the long gray blocks between Larkin Street and the Ashmore Grand beneath Archie's one umbrella, which was not enough. Zoe had to walk close. She said nothing about it, and neither did he. Their shoulders touched. Wet lamplight ran down the gutters. The neon signs said OYSTERS and DANCING and A. KOWALSKI, TAILOR, and the people on the pavements passed them, not looking, and Archie, who had spent three weeks as a stranger in this city in another version of the world, found himself noticing everything.

A woman on a corner, selling roses out of a bucket. A man in an oilskin hauling nets. A pair of boys sharing a newspaper on a tram bench, reading the sports page aloud. The baker, Mr. Ostrowski, unloading flour sacks in front of his shop, who nodded to Archie as he passed, a plain, courteous, neighborly nod.

They're real, Archie thought again. They live here. This is somebody's whole city.

"Archie."

"Mm."

"Can I ask you something?" Zoe was looking straight ahead, at the wet street, at the hotel's lit marquee two blocks down. "Were you scared? At the end. In the throne room."

He thought about it. It was a fair question. He had thought it was a stupid one, at first, because the answer was so obvious. But it was not obvious. It was complicated, and she had asked it carefully, so he gave her the truth.

"Yes," he said. "Terrified."

"You didn't look it."

"I always look calm. It's a talent. It means I'm shaking so hard I can't move." He tried a smile. It came out lopsided. "I was more scared of the door, though."

"The door?"

"The little one. Behind the throne. I had it all worked out, you know. Eleven steps. I counted." He looked down at his hands. "I knew I could make it. I could feel how easy it would be. I'd have been out before anyone noticed." He swallowed. "And what I kept thinking was, I've done this all my life. I walk out of the room. I tell myself it's good judgment. And I didn't want to be that anymore. I didn't want to be alone."

The umbrella dripped between them.

"I'm more afraid of being alone than I am of anything in that castle," Archie said. "That's the truth. I didn't know it until I was standing there. I don't think I've ever said it out loud."

Zoe stopped walking.

She turned to face him, in the rain, in the red dress, with the water running off the umbrella's edge and darkening her shoulders, and she looked at him for a long, strange, steady moment.

"That's the first time," she said slowly, "that I've ever heard you say something true."

"I've said true things."

"You've said correct things. You say correct things all day long. You've got a whole architecture of them." Her voice was soft. "That one was different. That one cost you something."

He did not know what to answer. He felt as though the street had tilted slightly.

"Thank you," said Zoe. She took his arm and drew him on, and her hand was warm through the sleeve of the trench coat, and she said nothing more. But she did not let go, all the way to the Grand.

…

They did not see the man in the window.

He stood three stories up, on the dark balcony of a building across from the hotel, in a long dark coat and a low hat, with a small instrument in his hand that clicked once, softly, as they passed. The face under the hat was a smear. It had the vague unfinished quality of a thing the Dimension had not yet decided how to draw.

He watched them go in at the revolving door of the Ashmore Grand.

Then he turned, and went in through the balcony window, and the rain closed over the place where he had been.