Echo City Read online

  "Son of a bitch!" I threw the dish towel across the room as hard as possible, just missing Fresca. "I like how you turn all of this around and make it look like I'm the one who's being irrational, when you're the one who's lied to your closest friends for decades."

  "This is ridiculous," Irmingard said. "Why is it even an issue now, for any of you? Millie has been your friend for years. She's saved my life I don't know how many times."

  Seth had remained on the sidelines; now he spoke. "She draws energy from the world around her to maintain herself. And she kept this from us. That's significant; it's a violation of what we stand for. We have no idea how she's affecting the magical ecosystem wherever she goes."

  "Lots of us affect the world in various ways," Irmingard shot back. With my emotions better under control, I risked a peek at her and saw that she'd balled her fists in anger. "The O'Connor sword draws energy, Muirin! I've seen Bill fight; I know how it works."

  "One can make a strong argument," Seth said softly, "that no matter our feelings for her personally, removing Millie from the world is part of our mandate, something we have to do for the world's benefit."

  Millie chewed her lip and said nothing, but Irmingard nearly exploded. "You mean killing her?"

  "Of course not; I mean sending her back to Shadow New York," Seth said. "I'm not making any decisions without discussing it with the others—"

  "Well, I am!" Irmingard stormed to the door. "Millie, come on! We're leaving."

  Seth touched Millie's arm; she shrugged his hand off. "You needn't leave," he said.

  "No, I rather think I must," she said, and followed Irmingard out the door.

  There was a long, awkward silence afterwards.

  "I don't think it should have been handled like that," Muirin said at last.

  "What would you suggest?" Seth demanded. "Call a conclave, bring her in front of it?"

  "Well—yes." Muirin narrowed her eyes at him. She looked—approving, actually. "Unless you wanted to warn her before alerting the others."

  "I think it's only fair, don't you? There's no telling how some of the more orthodox among us are going to react. I don't want to see her become a fugitive without at least giving her a head start. We owe her that, and perhaps more."

  I honestly couldn't figure out how I felt about it myself. I was still sick with anger at Millie, but my victory tasted like ashes. I'd really done it: I'd sicced the Gatekeepers on Millie, one of their own. And they were willing to run with it. On the other hand, the fact that they knew her gave her more of a chance than anyone else in her position would have had. It was a harsh reminder that I was holding onto a snake that could just as easily twist around and bite me.

  Fresca said, "Well, if she is taking Tweed's side over ours—"

  "She is," I said, through the lump in my throat.

  "—then she'll warn him, and he'll know we're up to something."

  "Time to go, then," Seth said quietly. "The game is afoot."

  Fresca and I left Muirin and Seth going over final elements of strategy in his apartment. Fresca carried a fat envelope of photocopies, and the hounds went with us. Muirin would join Fresca in Harlem later; I would be busy elsewhere.

  The park lay gold and scarlet in its eternal autumn, rippling with color in the evening light. A cool breeze kicked up leaves around our feet as Fresca and I walked to the doorway to the Harlem Renaissance. The hounds prowled around us, but even with their huge white bodies as a silent honor guard, I felt small, unprotected, and afraid. All around us, everyone was intent upon their private ghostly business, as if nothing was wrong—to them, of course, it was another day like any other. All the days were the same in this place.

  "Do you think there are shadows of us here?" Fresca asked. "Other Kays and Frescas?"

  "Wow, that's not a freaky thought at all." But there was something strangely comforting about it. If anything terrible happened, now or later, a part of us would still live on, beneath the shifting aurora sky.

  A mildly transparent chestnut vendor in a winter cap with ear flaps offered us a see-through paper cone of snacks. We shook our heads, though I wondered as we left him behind what would have happened if we'd bought them. How real was the food here? St. Clair's wine had seemed real enough ...

  "When all this is over, we should come here just to look around," Fresca said. "It's beautiful. You could spend your life here and still not see everything."

  "It wouldn't make you afraid? Being here?"

  She thought about it, and shook her head. "I'm done being afraid."

  My hand reached for hers, as if by its own volition. Her small fingers were stiff in mine.

  "Kay," Fresca murmured, "we aren't doing this. I thought we were on the same page."

  "Doing what?" I said. "We're holding hands. Like girls do. Friends who are girls."

  "Kay." She freed her hand from mine. "I wouldn't hurt you for the world, and if we go down this road, you will get hurt, and so will I. I can't be what you're looking for."

  "You don't know that."

  "Okay, so you're not what I'm looking for. How about that?"

  "Then maybe I can change," I said.

  Fresca shook her head vigorously, her hair swishing. The green was starting to fade, showing blue underneath, and streaks of her natural black at the roots. "Or you'd resent me for that, and I'd feel guilty, and it would poison us." She smiled a little. "Don't make me be the adult here. I thought you were the responsible one."

  I hesitated, and then curled my hand into a fist, and held it up. She bumped it with hers. "Better?" I asked.

  "Better," and her smile softened.

  We reached the faux-marble building with its brass door handle. "Do you know any 1920s jazz?" I asked her.

  "Don't you?"

  "I'm not a human jukebox." It doesn't have to be technically correct, I reminded myself. Geraldine had used Chicago blues. It only had to be right for you. My mother used to play Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington CDs when she did housework. Surely some of it had to be in the back of my brain.

  I began whistling something that turned out to be "Take the A Train." Good enough.

  "Uh, Kay." Fresca's whisper was low and full of warning. My whistling faltered; I looked up, in the direction she was staring, and saw the sidewalk crowd parting before the great striped bulk of a Tiger.

  And now the flaw in the Lily-Bell method of travel became apparent: it was awfully hard to sing, or whistle, or do anything of the sort when you were scared out of your mind and trying not to attract attention. My first attempts to whistle were nothing but soundless puffs of air through my bone-dry lips.

  Somehow I found the melody again. I closed my eyes and fixed my mind on Lily-Bell's apartment and St. Clair's room of lights, on the flapper dresses and the skunky smell of pot smoke and the scratchy sound of phonographs playing through half-open windows.

  I tore open the door with Fresca clinging to my shoulder, and we stumbled through, slamming it behind us.

  "Oh, thank God," Fresca said.

  Based on the cars and the fashions, we were definitely in the 1920s. But now I wondered: what if it was the wrong 1920s? What if this was another shadow of Harlem, one with no one we knew in it?

  Not much I could do about it, if so.

  "Do you think it saw us?" Fresca asked. Her hand was still clamped tightly on my shoulder.

  "Even if it did, it doesn't know where we went."

  Fresca's grasp shifted to my arm. "How can you be so calm about this?"

  "Am I?" I explored my mental landscape. Huh. I was pretty calm. "I think I'm getting used to it. Let's find Grandma and Madame St. Clair."

  "You're absolutely sure you want to go to her."

  I nodded.

  "Kay, the last time you talked to St. Clair, she sold you out to Tweed."

  "I know. But you should have seen her face, Fresca. She hates him. I think she'll jump at the chance to take him out."

  Fresca was silent for a moment, then she blurted out, "Why
is it different? For you. With St. Clair and Millie."

  "It's not diff—" I broke off. Because it was. "I don't know. Because Millie was a friend, I guess. Because Millie could have walked away, and St. Clair can't. A lot of reasons."

  We found my grandmother by the sound of laughter. She was sitting at a sidewalk table with a small cluster of men and women. A lantern blazed in the middle of the table and more hung all around, driving away any hint of shadow.

  "Kay!" my grandmother said. She held out her hands to me; I rushed forward to grip them and kiss her cheek. From the look of things, the idea that she'd been abandoned in Shadow New York for days hadn't even crossed her mind.

  "I see you've made friends," I said, smiling. She always did, of course. My grandmother landed on her feet like one of Seth's cats.

  Geraldine's eyes sparkled. "Langston, this is my granddaughter Kay, the artist I told you about."

  Langston Hughes? "Uh, I need to find Madame St. Clair, actually," I said. "It's really urgent."

  One of the men rose from the table. "I'll take you."

  I could feel Fresca bristling in automatic defense of me. I squeezed her arm. "Thank you," I said. "Fres, why don't you stay here with Geraldine? You can get those cartoons circulating."

  Fresca sighed and deflated. "At least take a dog."

  Two of them followed me anyway, Creiddylad and one with a lilac collar. We walked in silence, my escort and I. Whether I was being taken to another betrayal or to meet with an ally, I wasn't sure.

  And Fresca's words kept coming back to me. Why was it different with St. Clair? Because she hates him as much as we do, I thought. And she had trusted me with her secret, where Millie had not. St. Clair had no need to be honest with me; she could have simply clubbed me over the head and handed me over to the Tigers. But she'd given me honesty. This from a woman who had a long career of manipulating people. I couldn't trust her, but I was intrigued by her. She could be either a very powerful ally, or an equally powerful enemy, and I wasn't sure which yet.

  I might have just delivered myself back into Tweed's hands. It depended on which way she fell.

  I waited in her room of light, but I didn't have to wait for long before she swept in with her usual commanding presence. She took a slim cigarette from a silver case, lit it, and regarded me through the cloud of smoke.

  "Well, well. Miss Kay Darrow, out and about in the world again."

  "No thanks to you," I said, though I cringed a little inside at speaking to her like that. But I didn't think approaching her as a supplicant was the way to go. This woman dealt in power. She respected it.

  "Me? You should be thanking me, little girl. I got you closer to your sword than you could ever have got on your own. Did you get it?"

  "No," I said, "but I'm going to. I'm going to take down Tweed. Or at least help put someone else in a position to do so."

  Her smile was condescending. "Many have tried, little girl. No one has succeeded."

  "There's always a first time," I said.

  St. Clair gazed at me for a moment in silence, her head wreathed in smoke. Then she crushed out her cigarette. "Come with me," she said, and seized my arm in a punishing grip. I was half-led, half-dragged down the stairs, and stumbled out onto the street in her wake.

  "Look," she said.

  I looked, unsure what I was meant to be looking at. The air had the particular warm clarity of early evening, with Shadow New York's cool bite underlying its superficial warmth. The eerie thought occurred to me that the ever-present background chill might be the Stygian darkness between the layers, bleeding through into the world around us.

  But aside from the shifting rainbow sky, it was hard to believe that I hadn't time-traveled to a September evening in Harlem in the 1920s. Antique-looking cars, all shiny and new, rattled past us. A nattily dressed couple—she in a rose-colored flapper dress, he in top hat and tails—were having a quarrel at a sidewalk table, while the short, round maître d' hovered unhappily. Two teenagers who I'm sure were something like the equivalent of modern punks leaned against the wall and passed a cigarette back and forth.

  "You've traveled elsewhere in Shadow New York, haven't you?" St. Clair said to me, her low throaty voice pitched for my ears only. "Where else can compare to this place? Watch them living their lives. Say hello to the people you meet, and they will remember you tomorrow."

  The couple finished their quarrel; the flapper threw down her napkin, tucked her handbag under one long brown arm and stomped off down the street. Millie's words came back to me, about shadow-ghosts playing out the same scene over and over. Would the couple have the same fight tomorrow? The man watched her go, then snapped something at the maître d', and I noticed the resemblance between them for the first time; they must be brothers or cousins. The smaller man put a hand on the jilted lover's arm, and cracked some joke that made him smile. Probably the 1920s equivalent of Women, amirite?

  "They're alive," St. Clair murmured, and I looked at her, at the proud, possessive smile curving her lips. She looked at this street as if she owned it. And perhaps she did.

  "Are they really?" I asked. "Alive?"

  "They are the closest thing I can manage. And more so every day." She beckoned me back inside, without the brutal grip this time. "I told you this city is a great web of energy, with Tweed at the center. But sometimes the fly can learn the spider's tricks. And I am learning. I have been learning for a long time."

  "You're feeding energy back into them," I breathed. "Like Tweed does to you." Lily ... that was why Lily had seemed so alive and real. Which made her death all the more cruel, in retrospect.

  St. Clair's only reply was her sphinx smile. We were back in the room of light; she closed the door behind us.

  "But doesn't that mean they're all going to become—" I bit off the question, too late. But she displayed no anger.

  "Tigers? No. The Tigers become Tigers because Tweed makes them so. They are his creatures; they're dreaming his dreams. My girls and boys are dreaming their own—and mine, of course. It's a careful thing. They all have a lifespan, a certain amount of time that they can handle the little influx of energy I give them without being overwhelmed. But then, don't we all? No one expects to live forever."

  "That's true," I agreed. "Can the other Tigers do what you can do?"

  "Not that I've seen so far, but who knows? Perhaps there are many little networks like the one I'm building, biding their time and waiting to challenge Tweed. Well ..." She chuckled. "If I win, I guess I'll have to clean them up later."

  "You don't just want to take out Tweed," I said in amazement. "You want to replace him."

  "A worthy goal, isn't it? They call me Queen of Harlem, you know. That's not bad, but I'd rather be Queen of New York."

  You hope to replace him with another dictator, perhaps? Muirin had said scathingly. And now that I found myself faced with that very dilemma, I thought: So what? She'd probably do a better job. If it was a choice between her or Tweed, I was willing to place my hope in the lesser evil.

  Chapter 27

  I wouldn't find out until later, from Muirin and Taliesin and Seth, how things were going in other areas of the city. Not until later would I hear about Taliesin's narrow escape from Tigers in the Museum of Modern Art, or Muirin, who still didn't entirely have a handle on the finer points of 200 years of U.S. history, stumbling into the height of Tweed's historical influence and barely getting away.

  Me? I was painting.

  Guerrilla painting, actually. I'd heard of guerrilla art, but this was literal guerrilla art. Weaponized art, art on the tip of a bullet.

  The campaign against Tweed was very much a case of "to each according to his abilities." I was amazed how quickly St. Clair and my grandmother were able to get the word out—and how receptive people turned out to be. One person standing up against Tweed ... well, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down, and no one wanted to be that nail. But they suddenly became brave in the company of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands
...

  We were, indeed, going viral.

  Street musicians improvised ditties about Tweed's incompetence, to the tune of popular songs. Theatre companies and puppeteers put on improvised plays. Comedians and radio personalities mocked him. I found myself organizing a loosely connected army of muralists and taggers, defacing public buildings in dozens of neighborhoods with ludicrous caricatures of Tweed and a moth-eaten array of toothless Tigers.

  Our ripples spread outwards from Harlem, and sometimes encountered other ripples passing back. Graffiti in places we hadn't been yet. Rap battles on streetcorners were all themed around Tweed's stupidity now, when I hadn't even been near the 1980s yet. I had the feeling we'd started something that was rapidly growing out of our control. It was an underground river, fed by a thousand tiny streams, gathering force until it would come surging into the streets.

  A handful of us had started a war.

  And, as in all wars, there were casualties. I must have known that going in. I must have guessed. We tried, at first, to use speed and stealth to stay safe. The Tigers didn't know about Lily-Bell's network of special doors; they had no idea how we were getting around. So we tried to stay near a door and fade back if Tigers appeared in the area. Like ghosts, appearing and striking and vanishing. But as the insurgency spread like wildfire, it quickly grew beyond anyone's ability to control in that way. We had strangers recruiting strangers, no one sure where the idea had come from. We had shadow-ghosts echoing songs they'd heard others sing, without understanding their meaning even when the Tigers swept down upon them. We were killing them to save them, and I knew it would haunt my nightmares forever.

  It was a strangely 1800s sort of campaign—appropriate, I guess, since it was an 1800s strongman we were bringing down. Having grown up in an era of instant communications, I found myself adrift in this world that could not be networked. There was no way to communicate between different neighborhoods other than the old-fashioned way: by sending runners through the doors. Even within the same neighborhood, you had to rely upon having functional cell towers or a working telephone system, which most of them did not.