The Warning

Ashmore City woke slowly that morning, and not all of it at once.

The rain was the first thing to go wrong. It had fallen on Larkin Street for twenty years without a pause, and now it stopped, and the silence was so complete that people came out onto the pavement in their slippers to look at the sky. It was a thin and washed-out blue, streaked with cloud. A shaft of sun came through, crooked and tentative, and fell across the wet cobbles, and a small girl in a yellow mackintosh stood in the middle of the road holding out both hands to it as if she had never seen anything so strange.

"Mama," she said. "It's warm."

Her mother, on the step of the bakery, put a hand to her mouth.

Mr. Ostrowski came out in his apron and stood beside her. He looked up. Then, awkwardly, because it was not a thing a baker does in the street, he took off his cap. Down the block, Mrs. Pruitt had opened her parlor window and was standing in it with a duster in her hand, quite motionless. The newsboys were silent. The tram driver had stopped his tram. For a long moment the whole of Larkin Street stood with its face turned up to the pale new light, like a congregation.

"Well," said Mrs. Pruitt, to nobody, and her voice cracked in the middle. "It's about time."

…

They found Thomas in the cellar, sitting on an upturned crate before the white door, as if he had been there all night.

He had washed his face. Someone, Bridie perhaps, had found him a clean shirt and an old tweed jacket, and he sat very straight in it, with his hands on his knees. He looked ill. He looked also, Archie thought, as though a great weight had come off him, so that what remained was thinner but more upright, a man who had finally put down a bag he'd been carrying for twenty years.

"Don't look at me like that," said Thomas. "I'm fine."

"You're gray."

"I'm remembering. It's tiring work." He gave a crooked smile. "Sit. The four of you. I want to say a few things before you go, and I'd rather say them seated."

They sat, on kegs, on crates, on the cold stone steps, with the lamp between them. Upstairs, they could hear the muffled sound of the regulars sweeping up broken glass. Someone had started a kettle. Someone else was humming the lullaby.

"I'll be a Guardian now," Thomas said. "That's how it works. I'll stay here, in this Space, and hold the door. The city has settled around me. I can feel it. It's like a coat I've put on." He looked at his hands. "I won't say I'm happy about it. But I think I understand it a little better than I did. The people here are real. They have been all along. Mrs. Pruitt is real. Dolores is real. They loved this city, and I was the thing in the middle of it that wouldn't let it breathe." He shook his head. "I'd like to make it up to them. That's something I can do."

"What about your daughter?" said Zoe.

Thomas's face did something complicated. He took a long moment before he spoke.

"If you finish this," he said. "If you find the road's end. I'm told there may be a way to go back. I won't hope. It's too sharp." He rubbed his thumb over the crescent scar. "But if there's ever a chance—if you ever find yourself in a position to tell Nell that her father didn't walk away—"

"We'll find her," said Zoe. "I promise."

"Don't promise things you can't do, girl."

"I'm not," said Zoe, very steadily. "I'm promising things I will do."

Thomas looked at her. Then he laughed, short and soft, and wiped his eye with the back of his wrist.

…

"Now," he said. "The warning."

His voice had changed. Archie felt the air in the cellar shift, as it does before a storm.

"I'll tell you what I know, and I'll tell you what I only feel. I want you to hear the difference." Thomas laid his hands flat on his knees. "What I know is this. The Guardians are all different. I was stuck. Elena was stuck. But we weren't mad, not really. We were frightened, and we were lonely, and we were—pushed. There are others out there who have been alone much longer, and in worse places. I don't know them. But I can feel them, a long way off, like lights seen through fog." He drew a breath. "One of them is very close. In the next Space. And he is not what Elena was. He is not what I was. He has been going slowly wrong for a very long time."

"Gregor," Jin said quietly.

"Is that his name?"

"Elena said there were three of them. Gregor, Matteo and her. If you're Space Two and she's Space One, it follows that Gregor's the next."

"Then that's who it is." Thomas nodded. "I can't tell you what he'll do. I can only tell you he'll be harder than either of us. He won't recognize you. He'll be watching for something, and it won't be you."

"Watching for what?"

"That's what I feel, and I don't know." Thomas's brow furrowed. "There is someone else. I told Archie. He's outside the Dimensions, and he's looking in, and he has been for a very long time. I thought, at first, it was Luca. It isn't. This one has a different taste. Cold. Careful. Like a man counting money in a dark room." He looked up. "He's reached the next Space already. I felt it when he touched it. And I think he's offered Gregor something."

Nobody spoke.

"You think William's already contacted him," Archie said. His mouth was dry.

"I don't know a William."

"He's the man at the lab who installed the monitors. The one who smiles at numbers."

"Then perhaps." Thomas held his gaze. "I'm only telling you to be careful. I'm telling you to go slow, and look first, and not walk into that place with your heart on your sleeve." He paused. "Elena wasn't dangerous. I wasn't. But Gregor... I don't know."

…

It was Jin who broke the silence, and he did it in a way that surprised them all.

"I believe him," he said. "I believe it. I want to say that clearly." He took off his glasses. "I've been wrong before in my life, and each time I've been wrong the same way. I trusted the numbers and didn't trust the voice. Thomas has twenty years in this city. He's felt the Static come. He's the only person here who's ever touched the outside. When he says there's a man counting money, I think we ought to ask who owns the money."

"And I think," said Venn, "that William's a snake."

"You've said that."

"I'll say it again, I've been saying it since the second day. He's got a smile like an insurance policy." Venn rubbed his hand over his short hair. "He never looked at us, man. Not once. He was looking at the screens."

All of them turned toward Archie.

He had not meant to be the one to decide. He had meant to listen, and nod, and keep his own counsel. But he looked at the three faces turned toward him in the lamplight, the thin, tired, determined face of Jin, the broad open one of Venn, the steady dark eyes of Zoe, and found that they were waiting.

"I think we should be careful," he said slowly. "I think we should look before we go."

"Archie—"

"But I also think I'm not going to decide that for all of you." He drew a breath. "We'll talk about it on the other side. All of us. Properly. I don't want any of you to walk into a door because I said so."

Zoe's mouth curved. It was almost a smile. "That's the first time," she said, "you've asked."

"I'm learning."

"Slowly."

"I'm a slow learner."

…

They said goodbye in the cold gray light of a morning that had begun to be warm.

Mrs. Pruitt stood at the head of the cellar stairs with her arms folded. She did not say goodbye. She said, "I'll keep the room for you," and then, after a pause, "I'll keep the kettle off," and went away very quickly. Dolores pressed a paper bag into Zoe's hands, a sandwich, three apples and a flask of tea, and held on a moment too long. Bridie shook Jin's hand. The usher gave Venn a hat. Fitz played a lullaby on the piano, slowly and all the way through, and when he finished he said, in a voice that trembled, "I've been waiting to get to the end of that for twenty years," and put his head down on his arms.

Last of all, Thomas came forward.

He reached into the pocket of the tweed jacket. He drew out a short stub of pencil, a battered carpenter's pencil, worn down to a nub, a little chewed, with a flat red barrel. He put it in Archie's palm and closed his fingers over it.

"I had that on me when I came," he said. "I've no idea why it stayed. It's yours."

"Thomas, I can't—"

"Draw something," said Thomas Crane. "Don't wait."

Archie looked down at the pencil. It was warm from the man's pocket. He turned it over and felt, in the ridge of the wood, the faint rough print of another hand's grip.

"I will," he said.

"Good lad."

The door glowed at the end of the cellar, white as a page. Archie put his hand on Zoe's. She turned her palm up without being asked, and their fingers locked, and behind them Venn took Jin by the elbow, and the four of them stood before the light.

"Go carefully," Thomas called after them. "And come back. Come back, damn you. I mean to see the end of this."

"We will," said Zoe.

The door opened.

Once more the light took them, and the world fell away.