“But why?” I waved the gun a little wildly, watched his eyes track it nervously. “I’m not doing you any harm. Why not just leave me alone? What do you want?”
He gave a coy shrug, smiling at my frustration, my fear.
I was abruptly, entirely sick of it—of secrets and lies and almost-truths, things I half knew and half suspected, patched-together stories that were never told in order from beginning to end. It seemed to be an unspoken agreement in the world that young girls without money or means were simply too insignificant to be told everything. Even my own father had waited until the very last moment to tell me his whole truth.
Enough. I felt the weight of the gun in my palm, an iron authority that meant—just for a moment—I could change the rules. I cleared my throat. “Mr. Ilvane. Please sit down.”
“Pardon me?”
“You can stand if you like, but you’re going to tell me a very long story, and I’d hate for your legs to tire.” He lowered himself to the earth, legs crossed and face sullen.
“Now.” I steadied the barrel directly over his chest. “Tell me everything, from the beginning. And if you make any sudden movements, I swear I’ll let Bad eat you.” Bad’s teeth were bared and shining blue-white; Ilvane’s throat bobbed in a swallow.
“Our Founder came through his fracture in the seventeen-somethings, in England or Scotland, I don’t recall. He possessed an uncanny ability to sway people to his cause—it didn’t take him long to rise up in the world, and to see the world for what it was: a mess. Revolutions, upheavals, chaos, and bloodshed. Waste. And at the root of it all there were the aberrations—unnatural holes letting in all sorts of mischief. He began to repair them wherever he found them.
“At first the Founder worked alone. But soon he began recruiting others: some like himself who were immigrants to this world, others who simply shared his interest in cultivating order.” I pictured Mr. Locke, young and ambitious and greedy—an ideal recruit. It must have been easy. “Together we made it our business to cleanse the world and keep it safe and prosperous.”
“And to steal things, of course,” I added.
He made a come-now sort of pout. “We found that certain objects and powers, when used sparingly by wise hands, could aid us in our mission. As do more material forms of wealth—all of us worked to gain positions of prestige and power. We pool our money and fund expeditions into every corner of the world, looking for fractures.
“By the sixties we adopted a name and a respectable function: the New England Archaeological Society.” Ilvane made a little ta-da gesture with his hands and continued with earnest urgency. “And it’s been working. Empires are growing. Profits are rising. Revolutionaries and rabble-rousers are thin on the ground. And we cannot, will not, let a spoiled little interloper like you ruin all our efforts. So tell me, girl—what objects or powers do you have?” His eyes on me were damp and bright.
I took a step backward. “It—that doesn’t matter. Now, stand up—” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do—march him back into the city and deliver him to Jane like a cat depositing something unpleasant for her owner?—but Ilvane smiled suddenly.
“You know, your father thought to thwart us. Look what happened to him.” He clucked his tongue.
I stopped moving. I may even have stopped breathing.
“You killed him, didn’t you.” All that grown-up-sounding authority had leaked out of my voice.
Mr. Ilvane’s smile grew wider and sharper, foxlike. “He’d found us a fracture in Japan, as I’m sure you’ve realized. It was generally his custom to wander around inside for a day or two and return with a few interesting trinkets for Locke, and then depart. But this time he lingered. And I grew bored of waiting, bored of wearing this hideous thing—” He tapped his breast pocket above the old-woman mask.
“One day he caught sight of me on the mountainside. He recognized me.” Ilvane shrugged, falsely apologetic. “The look on his face! I’d say he went white as a sheet, but with that complexion of his…‘You!’ he cried. ‘The Society!’ Well, really, imagine being surprised after seventeen years of being kept on a leash. Then he said some rather intemperate, tiresome things. Threatened to expose us—who would believe him, I ask you?—raved about saving his little girl, told me he’d keep this door open if it was the last thing he did… All very dramatic.”
My pulse whispered no-no-no. The gun was trembling again.
“Then he rushed back to his camp like an absolute madman. I followed.”
“And you killed him.” Now my voice was less than a whisper, a strangled breath. After all this hoping and waiting and not knowing, after all this—I pictured his body frozen and forgotten, picked over by seabirds.
Ilvane was still smiling, smiling. “He had a rifle, you know. I found it in his things, after. But he didn’t even try to reach it—he was writing when I dragged him out of his tent, writing as if his life depended on it. Fought me tooth and nail just to put his journal back in its box. Honestly, you should be thanking me for relieving you of such an unstable fellow.”
I could almost see his hand, dark and ink-twined, scratching out those last desperate words: RUN JANUARY, ARCADIA, DO NOT TRUST. Trying to warn me.
Now Ilvane’s smile prismed and blurred in my sight.
“I set the fracture ablaze. It was dry pine, went up like a torch. Your father wept, January, he begged, before I shoved him through. I caught sight of his hands, briefly, flailing back through the flames, then nothing. He never emerged.”
Ilvane watched me as he finished, his eyes hunger-bright. He wanted tears, I knew. He wanted heartbreak and despair, because my father was trapped forever in some other world and I was permanently, terribly alone. But—
Alive, alive, alive. Father is alive. Not wracked and rotting on some foreign hillside, but alive, and finally gone home to his own true world. Even if I would never see him again.
I closed my eyes and let the twin waves of loss and joy crash over me, let my legs go limp and my knees crunch to earth. Bad’s nose snuffled worriedly at my neck, checking for injuries.
Too late, I heard the scuffling sounds of Ilvane moving. My eyes snapped open to find him scrabbling sideways for his knife and the copper compass.
“No!” I shouted, but he was already running back toward the city, a black-and-red shadow darting through the grass. I fired the gun high into the night, saw him duck, and heard the echoing pound of his feet on the empty street. He disappeared into the tangle of abandoned houses.
