“Thanks, Angel. You did great.” Chapel tried the gloves on until he found one that fit comfortably over his robotic hand. He held it up and showed it to Julia. She nodded in approval.
He went to the cabin door and started wrestling it open again, prepared now for the cold. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go meet an elderly schoolteacher, and there’s no time to lose.”
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+39:44
They caught a cab and fought traffic all the way through the center of Chicago. Chapel checked his watch constantly as they struggled through the streetlights but there was nothing for it. He had to do this, and it didn’t matter how long it took.
“You were almost relaxed, back on the plane,” Julia told him. “I was so wound up I kept wondering how you could be chill at a time like this. Now you’re just as keyed up as you were last night when we landed in Atlanta.”
He watched the streetlights and the shadows alternately paint her face. “It’s an army thing. Our unofficial motto is ‘Hurry up and wait.’ You spend a lot of time in the army sitting around somewhere wondering when you’re going to be called up, when the next firefight is going to happen. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn to compartmentalize. You recognize when you’re safe and you can let your guard down. It happens so infrequently that you have to take advantage of it when it does happen.”
“I feel like I’m never going to relax again,” Julia said, pulling her shoulders in. “I keep expecting to fall down. I know that everything that’s happened, everything I’ve done is going to catch up with me. I’m just waiting for the hammer to drop.”
Chapel nodded. He’d seen what extreme stress could do to people. He’d seen soldiers come back from firefights whooping and hollering with adrenaline, and before they’d taken their boots off they were already lost, dropped down a hole into their own thoughts. Sometimes they never climbed back out of that hole.
“The only treatment for what you have is to keep moving,” he told her. “Your body’s smart. It knows how to keep you alive, if you listen to it. Right now it’s telling you not to lie down, not to rest.”
Julia frowned. “That’s not a great solution either. That’ll give you ulcers and migraines and who knows what else.”
“Hang in there,” he told her. “This will be over at some point. Then you can figure it all out for yourself.” It was the best comfort he had to offer her.
The cab took them up Lake Shore Drive to a neighborhood called the Near North Side. It was a region of mansions and town houses, everything covered with a sheen of old money. And ice. Some of the houses still had icicles hanging from their eaves.
“It felt like summer was right around the corner, back in Atlanta,” Julia said, like she was talking to herself. Maybe she just wanted to change the subject.
The cab pulled up in front of a town house, and they stepped out into a knife-edged wind. Lake Michigan filled half the world around them, and gusts that rippled its surface buffeted them almost constantly.
“Coat or no coat, I want to get inside,” Julia told Chapel.
“I’m with you there,” he said. He went up to the door of the town house where Eleanor Pechowski was staying and rang the bell. The door was answered almost instantly by an older man wearing thick glasses and a sweater vest.
“You must be Captain Chapel. Please, come inside,” the man said. He kept one hand hidden behind the door while he looked out at the street, scanning up and down the rows of parked cars.
“What have you got there?” Chapel asked, nodding at the concealed hand.
The man frowned in embarrassment. He opened the door wider and Chapel saw he held a long sword. “Just come in, please. I’m Julius Apomotov, and this is my house.”
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: APRIL 13, T+39:52
Chapel and Julia stepped inside and Apomotov closed the door behind them, struggling to shut it against the wind.
The house’s foyer was all polished wood and sparkling glass chandeliers. Tapestries hung on the walls and a suit of armor stood next to a stairway leading up. The sword clearly belonged with the armor.
“The best I could find, under the circumstances,” Apomotov said, lifting his weapon. “I’ve never believed in guns.” He squinted, his eyes magnified by his thick glasses, and then shook his head. “That is, I believe they exist, but—” He shook his head again, in frustration. “Never mind.” He glanced down at the sword in his hand as if he didn’t know where it had come from. For lack of anything better to do, he dropped it in an umbrella stand. “Come in, come in. Eleanor is waiting for you. She’s holding up remarkably well, under the circumstances.”
He took their coats and hung them in a closet near the door. Then he stood there for a while, one hand lifted in front of him as if he was going to point at something. He snapped his fingers. “Chapel. Chapel. I had a student named Chapel once. Mark Chapel. Quite gifted. Any relation?”
“I’m not sure,” Chapel said. “My family’s from Florida.”
“Oh good God, no, no relation then,” Apomotov said. “Mark wouldn’t be caught dead beneath the Mason-Dixon line. Through here, please. He was a Connecticut boy, bled Union blue if you cut him.” Apomotov stopped in place and turned to look at them. “Not that I ever cut him. You understand.”
“Of course,” Chapel said.
Apomotov led them into a wide parlor behind the stairs. It was tastefully decorated, except for the hundreds of crossbows hanging on the walls, each of them suspended on individual wires from the crown molding. “There,” he said, waving at a couch on the far side of the room. An elderly woman there was struggling to stand up and greet them.
“Eleanor Pechowski, I presume,” Chapel said.
“You must, absolutely must, call me Ellie,” the woman said, coming over to take Chapel’s hand. “You’re Chapel, of course, the one that very nice young woman keeps saying is my shield against trouble in these dark times. And who’s this? Who’s this?” she asked, looking at Julia.
“She didn’t introduce herself,” Apomotov said. “I thought it best to let her in anyway, under the circumstances.”
“I’m so sorry,” Julia said. “I’m Julia Taggart.”
“Ah!” Eleanor Pechowski — Ellie — said. “Aha! Your name precedes you, dear.”
“I, uh, I take it you knew my father,” Julia said, looking uncomfortable.
“And your mother as well. Come, sit. Have some refreshment. Julius, be a dear and fetch more cups.”
The elderly man nodded and headed off deeper into the house.
“An absolute gem of a man,” Ellie said when he was gone. “One of the leading lights in Russian medieval studies, a scholar of no small renown. Demented now, of course, quite as crazy as a moth meeting its first lightbulb but still a stellar human being. Took me in when I was told my own — far more modest — apartment wasn’t safe anymore. Why aren’t you two sitting down?”
Chapel hurried to take a place on a divan near a roaring fire. Julia joined him, sitting closer than he’d expected.
“You’ll take something to drink, of course,” Ellie said, sitting down herself and lifting a teacup from a table near her. She tucked her legs up under herself on the couch. Chapel saw she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and that there were holes in the toes of her pantyhose.
“Tea would be… lovely,” Chapel said.
Ellie snorted in derision. “At this hour? It’s whiskey or nothing. Now tell me — exactly — why you are here.”
She fixed Chapel with eyes that could have bored through steel plate. Even if he hadn’t known, he would have guessed right away she’d been a schoolteacher once.