“I’ll let him know.”
But it wasn’t Barton who showed up at Jesse’s bedside that afternoon. It was August Kemp himself, August Kemp the billionaire, teeth as perfect as ivory dominoes and a smile like a squire conferring a knighthood. “Jesse! Good to see you awake. Are they keeping you well fed?”
The lunch cart had just been by. “They gave me tuna salad. And something called Jell-O.” Which was neither solid nor liquid but came in interesting colors.
“Well, fuck that. You can get yourself a steak if you like, as soon as the doctor signs your release form. You put your life on the line for us, and that earned you a big bonus.”
“I thank you,” Jesse said. “What about Elizabeth?”
“She wasn’t hurt. She shot and killed one of your assailants. Elizabeth made an emergency call from Onslow’s store, and we had people on site pretty quick—we keep a response team and a couple of vehicles at the railway depot. It was a huge deal for the locals, seeing you carried away in an armored vehicle. We could have charged admission.”
“Who were the gunmen?”
“According to the survivor, they were hired by a curio dealer in Chicago who had been fencing Onslow’s surplus inventory. The storefront at Futurity Station was just a fraction of Onslow’s business. The Chicago middleman had wealthy customers all across the country—not just for guns but all kinds of contraband: electronics, books and magazines, even clothing. Onslow had been paid for a shipment he failed to deliver—he skipped town as soon as you started to pressure him—and the Chicago dealer sent a couple of men to enforce the agreement. You and Elizabeth just happened to get in the way.”
“The dealer is out of business now?”
“Our people shut him down. You would not believe the kind of stock he was holding. Shoes alone—he could have opened a fucking New Balance store. I had to fire half the inspection staff down at the Mirror and more than a few senior managers in a bunch of divisions. Complete housecleaning.”
“Sorry to have caused such a fuss.”
“You have nothing to apologize for, my friend.”
“Did you give Elizabeth a bonus, too?”
“Better than that. We gave her three months’ paid leave.”
“Paid leave from the City?”
“She’s in North Carolina now.”
North Carolina of the twenty-first century, he meant. “Did she say anything about me before she left?”
“She was down here a few times when you were unconscious and sedated. That was quite a blow to the head you sustained. She was worried about you, but she was also anxious to get back to her family.”
“Naturally so.”
“As for you, you’re not just getting a bonus, you’re getting a permanent pay raise. You’ll be housed in Tower Two again, now that the investigation is over, but you’ll have a lot to show for it.”
“And will Elizabeth be coming back, when her leave is finished?”
“That’s up to her,” Kemp said.
He moved back into his old dormitory room in Tower Two. The room was unchanged since he had left it. What had changed was his social standing.
More than a few Tower Two employees had lost their jobs or been reprimanded for their role in the smuggling operation, even if all they had done was turn a blind eye to a dubious transaction. Many of them blamed Jesse for that. He was treated to cold stares along with his breakfast coffee; former friends were suddenly reluctant to exchange words with him. So he volunteered for night duty and fence-riding, both solitary jobs.
Riding the fence was thankless work, but he liked the open air and the company of his own thoughts. As the seasons changed and the mornings grew cold, the supply room equipped him with a plastic overcoat stuffed with goose down and a balaclava hat like the knitted hats British soldiers had worn to keep their heads from freezing during the Crimean War. In early December a storm blanketed the prairie with snow, deep enough that Jesse exchanged his three-wheeled cart for a vehicle with tracks and skis. Riding the fence took longer under such circumstances and seemed even more pointless: Any would-be trespasser who managed to trek all the way from the Union Pacific depot to the City’s borders in the heart of winter ought to be given a medal for perseverance, in Jesse’s opinion. Often during his work he saw the tracks of wolves. Once, a palsied old cougar met his eyes through the steel mesh of the fence.
During these expeditions Jesse had ample time for thought. He thought about Phoebe, and in his mind he composed the letters he would later scribble on paper (his handwriting was a schoolboy’s scrawl; he had never had much opportunity to practice it) and mail to her along with his bonus money. He thought about the guns and ammunition that had passed through Futurity Depot, and he wondered where they had gone, and who had paid for them, and whether the weapons had ever been fired. And he thought about Elizabeth. And tried not to think about her.
Most days, the sun was at the horizon by the time he headed back to the City, the last light obscured by clouds or diffused into bleak, brilliant prairie sunsets. He worked hard enough to exhaust himself, which ought to have helped him sleep but often did not. On those nights when his terrors woke him, he switched on his electric lamp and sat up—roused to an involuntary vigilance by his traitorous imagination—and waited for the deliverance of dawn.
After Christmas some of the animosity toward Jesse began to wane, and he joined the rest of the Tower Two staff for a New Year’s Eve party in the commissary. All the local employees not on holiday duty were there, every security person, every cook and housekeeper, every waiter and waitress and towel-holder and coat-check clerk, and there was much drinking and a great deal of singing. The hilarity and talkativeness of some of the partiers hinted that the influx of coca powder from Futurity Station might not have entirely ceased. But Jesse didn’t care about that. Some irregularities were to be expected, because everyone knew the new year, 1877, wasn’t just new. For the City of Futurity, it would be the last year. Twelve months from now there would no bunting, no confetti, no party hats or lewd songs. By the time 1878 rolled around, this circus would have pulled up stakes and moved on.
Doris Vanderkamp approached him when the electric clock on the commissary wall marked ten minutes to midnight. Doris had become something of a pariah, too, for her role in exposing the smuggling ring. They had been avoiding each other for that reason. “Dance with me,” she said, a little drunkenly.
She was pretty in her disarray, ringlet curls unraveling at her shoulders. “Are you sure you want that, Doris?”
“I would rather dance with you than not dance at all. I don’t want to be lonely when the year turns. Dance with me, Jesse, just for tonight. You owe me that much.”
The clock turned minutes into seconds, today into yesterday. The boundary between past and future was called the present, Jesse thought. It was where he lived. It was where everyone lived. He took her in his arms and danced.
PART TWO
Runners
—1877—
8
The town was called Stony Creek, but the name didn’t matter. Jesse guessed he’d forget it sooner or later, as he would forget the town itself. Stony Creek was a New England town like every other New England town he had ridden through by rail or buckboard in the last six months, not that he knew much about New England towns except by reputation: dour Yankees, whitewashed houses, teetotaling Congregationalist churches. And maybe that was the case; but the towns, as towns went, seemed pleasant enough from the perspective of an outsider. This one surely did, by the light of a late spring morning.