He had a strong grip. I pressed harder.
He laughed, a friendly sound. “We’re both ghosts. Where else would you work if you legally don’t exist? I’m fairly sure that Milo’s scrubbed his digital footprint so clean that he wasn’t even technically born. We have that much in common.”
“That makes sense,” I said, because he was still shaking my hand.
“I should probably also apologize for my brother. Do know that I never told him to kill you.”
My fingers were starting to go numb. “I’m pretty sure I’m just the collateral damage there.”
“Right, of course. Of course.” A strange look passed over his face, and then vanished. “Sorry.”
“So. Phillipa?” I asked. “Are you two . . . close? Do you know why she’d want to see us?”
“Not really,” he said. “We haven’t spoken since I died.”
I risked looking over at Holmes. She hadn’t moved, except for her hands, which were pressed against her sides. She didn’t look nervous or scared. She didn’t even seem like she was cataloguing him, the way I’d expected her to, taking in whatever changes the last two years had worked on him. What her betrayal had done. Whether he hated her for it.
She was just looking at him.
“I got your birthday card,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”
“I hope you didn’t mind that it was in Latin. I didn’t mean it to seem pretentious. I just wanted to—”
“I know. It reminded me of that summer.” Her eyes brightened. “That’s what you intended, right?”
August Moriarty was still shaking my hand. More accurately, he was holding it, because neither of us was moving anymore. He was staring at her like she was a penny at the bottom of a well, and I—well, I was staring at the space between them.
“I need this back,” I said, and pulled my hand away.
August didn’t appear to notice. “You must be exhausted from your trip. Both of you. You’re here for the week, yes? I’ll have Milo’s body man show you to your room so you can settle in. You had lunch on the plane? Excellent. And tonight—well, there’s a bar we should go to. Some things I’d like your opinion on, there.”
“Aren’t we going to talk about this Phillipa thing?” I put every bit of venom I was feeling into her name.
“Is the bar the Old Metropolitan?” she asked him.
“It’s Saturday night, so it’s where Leander would be.”
“We’ll go tonight. I can’t imagine what he’s— I can’t wait any longer than that.”
“The Old Metropolitan,” August said, and there was a surprising thread of bitterness in his voice. “You just knew that, didn’t you? How did you guess?”
“I never guess.”
I cleared my throat. “We could have just asked my father. He’s been getting daily updates from Leander since October. I’m sure he has a list of places for us to look. And can we talk about Phillipa? What does she want with you?”
Neither of them even glanced at me.
“Walk me through it. How you knew it was the Old Metropolitan,” August said, drawing her over to a bench between the elevators. He sounded intrigued, and something else, something darker. “Step by step, and slowly. Charlotte, it had to be a guess.”
“It’s Saturday night,” she repeated. “And I never—”
“No, you don’t,” I said, but I was saying it to no one.
I DECIDED TO FIND MY WAY TO MY ROOM ON MY OWN WITHOUT waiting for Milo’s “body man,” whatever that was. I couldn’t stand between Holmes and August for another second.
But it wasn’t difficult to orient myself. Most of the doors on the hall were keycode-locked—honestly, I didn’t want to know what was behind them—until I tried the one at the end of the hall.
I opened it. I took a breath.
It was like being back at Sciences 442. Like being back in Holmes’s room in Sussex. It was like being back inside Charlotte Holmes’s head.
The room was dark; unlike her lab at Sherringford, this one had a window, but it was tinted so dark that no natural light crept in. A series of lamps snaked down from the ceiling. Some half-finished chemical experiment was laid out on a table, with a set of burners and white powder measured out into piles. No shelves, but books everywhere, piled up beside an overstuffed armchair, behind the sofa, on either side of a white plaster fireplace, and inside its grate, too, like kindling. I picked one up from the pile beside the door. It was in German, with a bisected cross on its cover. I set it down.
In one corner, uncomfortably close to the chemistry set, someone had brought in a twin bed. It was clearly a new addition, much nicer than the shabby furniture surrounding it. It was clearly meant for me.
I decided to camp out on Holmes’s bed instead.
Milo (or his men) had built a loft for her, a bed bolted high up into the wall, as small and remote as the crow’s nest of a ship. From up there, she could survey her tiny fiefdom. I wondered how old Holmes was when Milo gave her this room. Eleven? Twelve? He was six years older; he’d have been eighteen, at the beginning of building his empire, from the timeline Holmes had given me. And he’d given her a space of her own in that new life. As I climbed up the loft’s ladder, I tried to imagine a miniature Holmes doing the same, a flashlight clenched in her teeth.
She must have felt like Milo’s first mate, surrounded by his loyal men, in a ship’s cabin of her own. Untouchable. Away from the world.
I knew what I was doing. By taking over her perch, I was gunning for a confrontation. Some sign that she still knew I existed. Watson, she’d say, lighting a cigarette. Don’t be a child. Get down here, I have a plan.
August Moriarty wasn’t a child. He was a man. That had been my first impression, and the one that ultimately mattered. I couldn’t help seeing him as a standard by which I’d already failed. If he was the finished sketch, I was the unfinished space around it. Let me put it this way: I was five foot ten on a good day. I had on faded jeans and my father’s jacket. I had twelve dollars in my bank account, and still, somehow, I was along for the ride, and the ride was in Europe, where my best friend paid for everything and spoke German to the driver and I tried not to feel like the cargo she’d strapped to the top of the car.
Time passed. Thirty minutes. An hour. I hated this line of thinking, but it was what I’d been left with.
To torture myself, I wondered what Phillipa Moriarty could possibly want with Holmes. Why she would agree to a lunch. I mean, I wasn’t stupid. I had a few solid ideas—death, dismemberment—but going through Milo’s mercenary company made me think she wasn’t up to serving violence. A détente, maybe? Maybe she knew where Leander was being kept. Maybe she was going to tell us that she wasn’t siding with Lucien in this ridiculous war.
Maybe she’d found out that her little brother August was alive.
As an act of desperation, I took out my phone to text my father. What do you know about Phillipa Moriarty?
The response was prompt. Only what’s been in the papers, and you’ve seen that, too. Why?
What about a bar called the Old Metropolitan?
Leander went there on Saturdays to meet with a professor from the Kunstschule Sieben. One of the local art schools. A Nathaniel. Gretchen was another name that came up quite often.
The forgers Holmes had mentioned. Any other places I should know about?
I’ll email you a list. I’m happy to hear that Milo’s taking this so seriously.
I was pretty sure that Milo wasn’t, and that he’d shoved us off on August because of it. I put my phone away.
After a minute, I pulled it back out.
When you were working with Leander, did you ever feel like you were his baggage? Like he’d insist on taking you along on a case, and then he’d run off and solve it without you?
Of course. But there’s a way to stop feeling like that, you know.
How? I asked.
I don’t know when my father became someone I trusted to go to for advice. It was an uncomfortable feeling.