Then she goes to the hallway and checks to make sure it is empty before closing the door and gathering her breath and saying, “Show me.”
* * *
Ella asked how long Simon would be, how long it would take him to break into the Dome, creep through its many rooms, find whatever it is Lewis meant for them to discover. You must expose what is hidden in the Dome, he wrote to them — and there the letter trailed off.
Simon told her he might not find anything at all. And he didn’t know how long it would take. He would do his best and doing your best takes time. This sort of thing can’t be rushed. The necessary silence of his trade came with stillness, slowness. He might be two hours or he might be four hours.
“Four hours, then,” she said. “I’ll start to worry after four hours.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t want you worrying and I don’t want to feel rushed.”
“Four hours. It will be dawn in five, so you’ve got no choice but four.”
She tries to sleep but can’t. Of course she wonders what he might find — locked away in some closet or hidden in a drawer — whatever secret might serve them. But that seems secondary to him coming home to her. Home — that’s how she thinks of the museum — as belonging to them both. They share a room — with beds opposite each other — just as they share meals and duties and conversation. She might bully him, but with tenderness, every rough shove another opportunity to touch, every hard word a breath between them shared.
She waits in the kitchen — a long room crowded with cupboards and counters — where he will enter through a side door. She paces the floor and then collapses in a chair and rests her head in her hands. She imagines him whipped. She imagines him dead. She imagines him trapped somewhere, hiding beneath a bed or in a closet while people move all around him. She hates to admit it, but she cares about him, feels about him as she would a cherished possession, not wanting to let him out of her sight.
Dawn comes. There is a soft knock. The knob rattles. She hurries from her chair and yanks open the door and hisses, “Where have you been?” Her eyes take a moment to adjust to the light, blinking through a red haze, and then she makes sense of what she sees: Simon standing before a hooded figure.
“What’s this?” Ella says, her whole body suddenly numb. “What’s happened?”
Simon drops his eyes and lifts his shoulders in a shrug. Ella looks to the figure for answers. The hood holds a shadow, the face lost to it. “I’m supposed to just let you in?” Ella says, and Simon says, “Do it, please,” and she steps aside to accommodate them, then checks the alley before closing and bolting the door.
She doesn’t know what to do. She alternately wants to smack Simon and smash him into her chest as if to smother him with her heart. But before she can act on either impulse, the figure pulls back her hood, revealing the white-blond hair and sharply cut face of Danica Lancer.
There is a held breath of a moment before Danica says, “Let’s sit down, everyone.”
They gather at a table in the corner of the kitchen. Simon and Ella sit on one side and Danica on the other. “We certainly have a lot to talk about.” She looks at them and talks to them as a mother would her disobedient children. Ella knows that Danica wants them to feel that way, as children, because children do as they are told. Lewis would do the same to Ella and she would not tolerate it then and she will not tolerate it now. She crosses her arms and pinches her mouth into a frown.
Danica says, “No one knows I am here, and no one will know I was here, so long as we all understand each other.”
The second bell is ringing. The day is brightening, beginning to heat up. Sweat dots their temples. Danica reaches below the table then and withdraws a black dagger like a nightmarish piece of cutlery. “You must realize how complicated this situation is.”
Ella has a biting way of speaking when she says, “I realize that very well, thank you.”
“I am grateful to you for delivering the letter, but I am worried about you too.” Danica runs the blade along her arm, tracing its bare length, pausing a moment in the pale hollow of her elbow, continuing to the snaked veins of her wrists, across her palm, to the very tip of her middle finger, where she scrapes away some sand embedded beneath the nail. “You know things about me you shouldn’t. You know things about me that could get me killed.”
“We’re even, then,” Ella says. “You know things about us could do the same.”
Danica’s eyes narrow. Ella knows what’s going on behind them. Danica believes, as a rule, women want to be her, and because they cannot, they choose to hate her. She knows Ella hates her and hate is a great motivator for foolish behavior. Ella tries to release some of her hate by turning to Simon and saying, “You said you could be quiet as a cat. You said you could sneak in and out of there like a shadow.”
He wilts with every word, his posture conveying his apology.
Danica says, “Where do we go from here, children?”
“I don’t understand.”
“The boy says Lewis asked you to spread news of their success.”
Ella stabs Simon with her elbow. “Are you an idiot? Do you want to die? Why did you tell her that?”
He does not respond except to shrink even further into his chair and look at her sidelong.
“He had a blade on him. He didn’t have much of a choice.” Danica twirls the dagger in her palm, spinning it like a clock dial. She wants them to look at it, to acknowledge the power and the slicing threat of it, but Ella refuses, keeping her gaze steady.
Danica says, “In these desperate times, it’s hard to know how people will respond to that kind of information. If they learned that there was water — if they knew the expedition had traveled safely to it — they might do nothing. Or they might do something. Something dramatic. Fiery.”
Ella shifts in her seat but keeps her face flat with seeming disinterest. “Fiery?”
“Would you like to start a fire? I think we can help each other start a fire. This city is dry enough that it should burn right up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand, dear?”
“Your husband is the mayor. Why would you want to threaten his power?”
She slams the dagger into the table, where it hums upright like an exclamation mark. “Because I hate him.”
Chapter 34
IT HAS BEEN a long time since Lewis saw the moon. How long, he doesn’t know, because its cratered face is his clock and calendar. Ever since they crossed into North Dakota, ever since the oil-black clouds thickened, they have been cut off from its rhythms, lost in time. The new moon is when it is darkest, when its surface is shadowed. In myth, in folklore, in witchcraft, it is associated with death. Since they are living in a world absent light, they are living in a permanent new moon. They are living with death, Reed’s.
The ground is frozen, so they don’t bother to bury the body except with a gray mound of snow. No one utters any words — except for Lewis, who says they ought to carry on. He believes they are a half day’s hike from Bismarck. “That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?” He is not the type to utter hopeful phrases, but Clark has gone silent and he feels the need to serve as her mouthpiece, lift their spirits and pressure them onward.
They trudge on and they can see so little, with the snow ripping up and down, left and right, a swirling vertiginous gray-black blur. And they can hear even less, with the wind gusting and the snow making a constant patter against their hoods and hats.