“Do you think I’m dangerous? Like Javiar?”

“I don’t know you well enough to say. But on slim evidence, no, I don’t think you’re dangerous.” She added, “In that way.”

Clearly, she knew she was treading on troubled ground. But Jesse guessed she wanted to clear the air. She valued honesty. After a moment’s thought he said, “You twenty-first-century women remind me of whores.”

Elizabeth stiffened in her chair. Her eyes went narrow and hard.

He said, “That’s not an insult. I don’t mean you have loose morals or that you’re venal or contemptible. I was raised around whores, and for the most part they treated me well. What I mean is, whores tend to speak frankly. They see much, and they take a cynical view of things. Listening to their talk spared me a host of polite delusions. It made me harder to fool, and it forced me to think honestly about myself. Do you understand?”

She was a long time answering, but she said, “I guess so.”

“I think you’re an honorable woman, Elizabeth. And I hope things go well for you and Gabby.”

“Okay. So what would you say to a whore who asked you about your bad dreams?”

“I would thank her for her concern,” he said, “and I would tell her it’s a subject I don’t care to discuss.”

*   *   *

Futurity Station was a different town after dark. It was still a circus, Jesse thought, but it was a night circus now: fewer lion tamers, more cooch shows. Storefronts closed and saloon doors opened. Lookout Street was crowded with men, many of them spitting tobacco with carefree abandon, and on the side streets gaslights gave way to torches.

Onslow’s store was shuttered now, but there was a saloon around the corner. Jesse went inside and was assaulted by the smell of adulterated liquor and cigar smoke and the bodies of unbathed men—four years of sanitized City life had made him as sensitive as a woman.

The saloon served beer at tables, like a German establishment, but featured frontier attractions: faro, poker, California pedro. Jesse spotted Onslow standing at the bar. He turned away and took a table at the far end of the room and paid for pickled eggs and a pitcher of beer.

He thought about what Elizabeth had said about PTSD. The letters, she had explained, stood for post-traumatic stress disorder. Post, a Latin word meaning after. Traumatic stress, self-explanatory. Disorder, because the people of the future liked opaque words; since the condition was treated in hospitals, Jesse guessed the word was a euphemism for disease.

Did that mean he was suffering from a disease? Maybe so, by Elizabeth’s standards. But it didn’t feel exceptional enough to qualify as diseased: His condition wasn’t exactly uncommon. The whole nation has PTSD, Jesse thought. It was a plague that had started at Fort Sumter and grown virulent at Manassas. Its nightmares were lynchings, Indian wars, and the pick-handle brigades that hunted Chinamen on the docks of San Francisco. And if we ever wake up from such dreams, he thought, then yes, we’ll likely wake up screaming.

Onslow drank continuously and methodically for most of an hour, his back to Jesse. He didn’t stir from his barstool until three men entered the saloon and approached him. One slapped him on the back as the other two laughed amicably. Onslow accompanied them to a table. Jesse tried to memorize the features of these men, insofar as the flickering light of the kerosene lanterns permitted. Two of the men were strangers to him, but one looked tantalizingly familiar. He couldn’t be sure … but he thought it might be the coach driver, the one who had handed down his and Elizabeth’s bags after the trip from the City of Futurity.

He left the saloon before he could be recognized in return. He needed time to think.

He thought about the man who looked like the coachman. If he was a City hire he would probably be staying at the Excelsior. Maybe the desk clerk could identify him, or maybe Elizabeth could talk to Barton about it. Jesse stood in the dimness beyond the torchlight, in the shade of a wooden building he took to be a brothel by the sounds emanating from it, and watched the saloon for most of another hour, but the coachman didn’t emerge. He was about to give it up when the door of the building behind him flew open and a woman stepped out to empty a slop jar into the alley. He turned and exchanged a look with her, and before he could walk away she said, “My God, is that Jesse Cullum?”

He stared, speechless.

“It is!” she said.

He knew her, of course. Her name was Heddie Finch. She used to work at a white bordello on Pike Street, back in the Tenderloin. “Well, Heddie,” he said. “You’re a long way from home.”

She stepped away from the light that shone through the half-open door. It seemed to dawn on her that Jesse Cullum might not want to be recognized. “How are you, Jesse?”

“I’m all right. You?”

She shrugged. “I left San Francisco after the trouble. A lot of us did. Some went to Sacramento, or back east. I ended up here. But not permanently, if I can help it—Illinois winters are colder than a nun’s cunt. I swear, Jesse, I thought I’d never see you again, not after—”

She registered his expression and stopped speaking.

“I’d appreciate it,” he said, “if you didn’t mention my name to anyone.”

Whispering now: “They still talk about you in the Tenderloin. The man who shot Roscoe Candy. We all thought you was dead.”

“I left right after I killed him.”

Her eyes went wide. “Is that what you think? Oh, Jesse! You shot him all right. Dead center. But you didn’t kill him, worse luck.”

5

Jesse braced himself for bad dreams. Running into Heddie Finch had provoked all kinds of troublesome memories. But from the moment he put his head on his pillow, he slept as soundly as if he had dosed himself with laudanum. When he next opened his eyes Elizabeth was standing by the bed, fully dressed, and sunlight streamed through the window curtains.

Another bright, cloudless day, cooler than the one before. Over breakfast Elizabeth described her wireless conversation with the security chief Barton back at the City. Barton had thanked her for what they had learned, but his only advice was to “keep Onslow under surveillance.” Spy on him, in plainer words. But Jesse had a better idea. “Do you carry your phone when you go out?”

She nodded. Jesse supposed it was tucked into some hidden compartment of her day dress, probably secured with Velcro.

“Will it work from anywhere in Futurity Station?”

“As long as it’s within range of the repeater on the roof of the hotel, yeah. Why?”

“Keep it with you. We may need it. The first thing I want to do is talk to the owner.”

“The owner of what?”

“Of this hotel. Or at least the manager.”

“What do you think the manager of the Excelsior can tell us?”

“He can tell us who runs this town.”

*   *   *

The hotel manager, a cadaverously thin man whose name Jesse promptly forgot, was reluctant to speak to them until Elizabeth reminded him that they were from the City.

The manager escorted them to his office, a room furnished with a few chairs and a pedestal desk with a chased silver inkwell on it. “We have excellent relations with the City of Futurity. We allow you to install your machines, we let you inspect the kitchen, we let you poison the bedbugs—I don’t know what more you could possibly want.”

Jesse said, “There’s no problem with the hotel. Everything’s very satisfactory. You’re doing a fine job.”

“Well, we try.”

“When you say ‘we’—?”

“Speaking for my staff and myself. The hotel is owned by a partnership in Chicago, as I’m sure you know.”

“The Excelsior is the town’s preeminent business, isn’t it?”

“I like to think so. We’ve been here since the beginning, when the agents of the City and the railroad first put these lots up for sale.”