“But you can afford to keep Soo Yee as a servant.”
“It was an agreement Jesse made with Sonny Lau. A job and, in effect, a Western education for Soo Yee, in exchange for which Sonny uses his familiarity with the criminal element to keep watch for any threat that might arise. If Candy’s henchmen had started hunting for Phoebe or Jesse, Sonny would have warned us. And if we need to get in touch with Sonny, we can do so through Soo Yee.”
“Like now,” Elizabeth said. “So why do think Jesse wants to talk to Sonny?”
“I’m very much afraid to ask. Don’t you know?”
The conversation was interrupted by the sound of footsteps: Jesse and Phoebe, coming downstairs.
Elizabeth had pictured Jesse’s younger sister as shy and damaged. But it was obvious as soon as she entered the room that Phoebe wasn’t shy. She went straight to Elizabeth and offered her hand, which Elizabeth shook. “You’re the woman from the future!”
“Call me Elizabeth.”
“Thank you! I’m Phoebe,” said Phoebe.
Phoebe wore a blue silk scarf tied into a kind of skewed hijab that concealed the left side of her face. The only injury that showed was some scarring above her lip. But Phoebe’s good eye was lively and alert, and her smile was obviously genuine. “Pleased to meet you,” Elizabeth said.
“You’re from the future.”
“Yes.”
“Have you ridden a flying machine?”
“Phoebe,” Abbie said, “you mustn’t put our guest through an inquisition.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—”
“It’s okay,” Elizabeth said. “Yeah, I’ve ridden a few flying machines.”
“How amazing!”
“You get used to it. At least, most people do. Not everybody likes flying. For me, there’s almost always a moment when I look out the window and think, wow, I’m thirty thousand feet over Idaho or whatever.”
“I’m sure I would feel the same way,” Phoebe said. “And is it true your people are shipping pistols to the Indians?”
Abbie was visibly scandalized. But it didn’t seem like an unreasonable question, Elizabeth thought, given what had been in the newspapers. “Not ‘our people’ exactly. Those guns were smuggled through the City against regulations.”
“Don’t you support the cause of the Nez Percé? From what Jesse wrote about you, I thought you might.”
“I don’t know much about it. Where I come from, it’s more or less agreed that the Indians got a bad deal. Worse than a bad deal. But I don’t see how shipping them pistols is supposed to help.”
“Apparently someone disagrees.”
Apparently so, Elizabeth thought.
“Perhaps,” Abbie said, “we can discuss something less contentious? Phoebe, why don’t you tell Elizabeth about your study of the violin.”
Which Phoebe proceeded to do, at length. It became a monologue about the difficulty of arranging lessons and her problem learning to hold the instrument correctly, with tacit reference to her facial disfigurement. Despite the relentless talk, or maybe because of it, a less confident Phoebe began to show through. Her shoulders tensed and her voice took on an anxious edge. Finally Abbie said, “Thank you, Phoebe.”
Phoebe fell silent, looking abashed.
“I’d like to hear you play sometime,” Elizabeth said.
Phoebe brightened. “Do you play an instrument?”
“No. I enjoy music, but I’m just a listener.”
“What is it like, the music of the future?”
“Well, we have all kinds. Ask Jesse. He was listening to some of it today.”
Phoebe turned her good eye on her brother. “How is that possible?”
Elizabeth said, “I gave him a thing that plays recorded music. It’s in his pocket.”
“May I see it?”
Jesse looked alarmed. “I don’t think—I mean, the kind of songs it plays—”
“We don’t have to play Hendrix for her,” Elizabeth said. “I loaded all kinds of stuff on that iPod. Here, give it to me.”
Jesse passed her the device, frowning. Elizabeth scrolled through the playlist. She had put together the contents with Jesse’s taste in mind—or what she had imagined Jesse’s taste might be—but she had also tried to include representative music, not just personal favorites. Songs that were big even if she didn’t especially like them. So what was suitable for a teenage girl circa 1877? The sound track to Elizabeth’s adolescence had included a lot of LL Cool J and Cypress Hill, maybe not the best choices. Pressed for time, she cued up Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” It was a song Elizabeth remembered only dimly, but it was up-tempo and optimistic and she guessed Phoebe would find the lyrics too obscure to be truly shocking. “You’ll need to put these in your ears,” Elizabeth said, holding up the earbuds. “I can help you.”
Silence ensued. No one moved. Elizabeth was briefly bewildered. Then she realized Phoebe couldn’t put the buds in her ears without taking off her scarf.
Finally Jesse said, “It’s all right. Elizabeth knows what happened. Elizabeth was a soldier, Phoebe. She’s seen all kinds of things.”
Phoebe said, “Is that true?”
“Yes. But you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“No. Please! I want to hear the music.” Phoebe unwrapped her head in a single decisive motion, balling up the scarf in her lap. “There,” she said defiantly. “Well? Have you seen worse?”
Elizabeth had once visited a friend at Landstuhl Regional, the big US military hospital in Germany. A guy named Felipe, a division MP. Shrapnel from a mortar had carved off his right arm and a chunk of his face. The surgeons had saved Felipe’s life, but he was looking at the prospect of multiple rounds of prosthetic and reconstructive surgery. “Yep,” Elizabeth said flatly. “I’ve seen worse. Okay, so these little plastic thingies? They go in your ears.”
Phoebe’s disfigurement was evidence of a vicious attack. From the number and pattern of the scars, it looked as if she had nearly been scalped. Her vacant eye socket had healed badly, with knots of scar tissue filling the violated space. “How strange,” she said, taking the iPod in her hand. “How does it know when you touch it?”
“Beats me. You’d have to ask a geek. I mean, an expert.”
“You don’t know how it works?”
“I know how to work it, and I have a vague idea how it works, but I’m not an electronics engineer. It’s like—you understand a steam engine, basically, right? But if I asked you what a particular piston or valve does…”
“Yes, I see. But how marvelous it is!”
“I’m going to keep the volume, the loudness, pretty low. You can adjust it if you want.”
“What will I hear?”
“Just a song. Nothing fancy. A song that was popular once, back where I come from.”
Elizabeth hit play.
What seemed to strike Phoebe first was the simple novelty of reproduced sound. She sat upright, openmouthed, unmoving. Then, a minute or so into the song, her fingers started to move—counting beats, Elizabeth guessed—and her O-mouth compressed into a fascinated smile. No one spoke as the song ran out its four minutes and change. By the time it finished, Phoebe was grinning. “It’s wonderful! But it stopped.”
“You can play it again if you like.”
“May I?”
Elizabeth showed her how. The second time through, Phoebe closed her eyes and tapped her buttonhook shoe against the floor. Abbie leaned toward Elizabeth and said, “She seems to enjoy it very much. Is it possible I could—?” She mimed putting earbuds into her ears.