Mercy’s mother had been wholly uninterested in August Kemp’s business affairs, but Mercy had been ardently curious about them, if only because business was never discussed in her presence. She knew her father was a wealthy man and that he owned many hotels and resorts and other properties around the world; she knew he had been married more than once, and she had met, if not especially liked, most of her step-siblings. And she knew he had friends in high places, including the high places of national politics. (A Democratic Speaker of the House had once spent the night in the guest bedroom. He turned out to be an obese and hilariously flatulent but otherwise perfectly ordinary man: The most interesting thing about him had been his job description.) It was during a late-night conversation between her father and two solemn-looking men in business suits that Mercy had first heard him mention the visitors from Hilbert space.
Much of what he said was incomprehensible to her, and not only because she heard it through the grate in the bedroom above her father’s study. But in those days she had been keeping a diary (saved to a thumb drive she hid on her bookcase behind a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), and she recorded in it what she believed she had heard. So, years later, when the truth began to leak out, either through rumors or by way of certain documents published by Wikileaks, it had only confirmed what Mercy had already guessed.
She was a first-year student at Stanford when the Department of Defense documents were published on the Internet. By that time it had become obvious to everyone in the family that Mercy was not the purse-dog-bearing Upper East Side fashion clone some of her half-sisters had become. She often talked to her father about current affairs, and he had seemed vaguely proud of her precocity, but any attempt to engage him about the Mirror—his first paratemporal resort had just opened—was met with a wall of platitudes and generalizations.
So she had formed her own ideas about the so-called visitors, presumed to have died in custody in 2003 or 2004. Wikileaks and her diary agreed: Where the visitors came from, humanity had survived a massive global die-back in which population numbers had plummeted to eighteenth-century levels. The survivors had responded by modifying not only the terrestrial environment but the human genome. Arguably, although they were descended from Homo sapiens, they had made themselves a distinct species. And they regarded twenty-first-century humanity with a combination of sympathy and contempt.
As they should, Mercy thought. But her father and his powerful friends didn’t see it that way. What her father saw was the catastrophic ascendance of an effete, genetically engineered socialism. Hijacking the visitors’ technology to build the City of Futurity had been his cry of defiance and denial.
She had said all that to him, back when he closed down the first of his Gilded Age resorts and before he opened the current City. He had told her she was foolish, that she had fallen under the influence of radicals, that she could believe such nonsense only because his money had sheltered her from what he called “the real world.” (She wondered: Which one?)
The argument had turned into an angry mutual repudiation. They hadn’t spoken since then. But he had worked hard to track her down and bring her to safety, now that the City of Futurity was sinking like an ocean liner gored by an iceberg, and she appreciated that, even if his motives were more calculated than sentimental. On some level, August Kemp still cared about her. Duly noted.
“I’ll have a Beechcraft ready to take off inside of ten minutes,” he said.
“The sooner the better, for Phoebe’s sake.”
“That’s the name of the injured girl?”
“Yes.”
“What is she to you?”
“Does it matter?”
“I was hoping she could be treated here—”
“And what, abandoned? What’s she supposed to do, pick up her saline drip and hike across the Sierra Nevada?”
“We’re not far from a rail spur. I could make arrangements. I’m not heartless. But neither am I in the business of rescuing random locals.”
“We’re not talking about random locals. We’re talking about one particular person.”
“I know that. Drop the condescending tone, Mercy. You’re not on any moral high ground here. Your boyfriend is the one who smuggled in weapons. Like dropping matches into a barrel of gunpowder.”
She refused to be drawn into an argument. “Phoebe needs to go to the City.”
“If that’s the case, I won’t object.”
“And I’ll stay with her until she’s stabilized.”
“We’re closing the Mirror. There are time limits.”
“This isn’t a negotiation. If you want to take me home in cuffs, you might as well call the guards now.”
He stared at her. “Be careful what you ask for.”
Jesse, Elizabeth, and Theo followed Phoebe as the City doctor wheeled her to the more distant of two concrete blockhouses, this one set up as a makeshift hospital. The doctor wore a plastic name tag announcing him as A. TALBOT, and he took Phoebe into an adjoining room Jesse and the others were not allowed to enter.
Minutes passed. A guard—a local hire with an automatic rifle lax in his hands—blocked the exterior door, but there was only one of him, and he looked more sleepy than dangerous. Jesse exchanged a few desultory words with Theo Stromberg, who kept hitching up a pair of trousers he had been allowed to borrow from Randal’s quarters back at the Nob Hill mansion, until Talbot came out of the back room and said, “She’s stabilized for travel—which one of you is her family?”
Jesse stood up. “I’m her brother.”
“Can you tell me her name?”
“Phoebe Cullum.”
“And you are?”
“Jesse Cullum.”
“Okay. Well, here’s how it stands. We’ve stabilized Phoebe, but she needs surgery, so we’ll transport her to the City. If the infirmary is intact, she can be treated there. But getting the bullet out of her and patching the internal damage isn’t the end of it. Far from it. She’s going to need post-surgical care. And that’s going to be a problem, given that the City is about to be evacuated and abandoned. Am I correct in assuming she’s a local?”
“Yes.”
“Then she’ll have to stay on this side of the Mirror, and you’ll have to care for her.”
“As long as there’s life in me,” Jesse said.
“I can set you up with antibiotics, sterile bandages, and some basic instructions, including how to handle a surgical drain. But after that, you’ll be on your own. If there are complications—”
“Is that likely?”
“It’s a real possibility. Infection, renal failure—you won’t have the resources to deal with that.”
“You mean she might die.”
“I want to give you the tools and knowledge to prevent that. But she’s going to have a long recovery even under the best circumstances, and you should be prepared for all possible outcomes.”
“That’s a gentle way of putting it.”
“I’m sorry I can’t be more positive. We’ll do everything we can for her, Jesse. Right now we need to get her on the plane for the next leg of the trip.”
Theo spoke up: “You said something about the infirmary maybe not being intact?”
“It was fine when I left there two days ago. But there were already federal troops with artillery caissons outside the wall.” Talbot hesitated. “You’re Theo Stromberg, aren’t you?”
“Why, did Kemp put up a wanted poster?”