He sighs through his nose and sets down the magnifying glass with a click and looks at her with his eyebrows raised in a question he doesn’t bother asking.
“My hands are paper cut. And blistered from the lantern I’ve been carrying.” She holds them up as evidence. “It took two hours to find what you wanted. I’ve been gone two hours. For two hours’ worth of work, you’d think I deserved a thank-you. Wouldn’t you think that?”
His fingers are as long as knitting needles. They lift the magnifying glass again, but before he peers through it, his eyes settle on the window, where the owl waits. “You may leave now.” He spits out his words like chips of ice.
She nods at his plate, his bowl. “You haven’t eaten.”
“I said you may leave. Now. Thank you.”
When the door clicks closed behind her, he rises from his desk and approaches the window. He lifts the latch and holds out his arm for the owl to climb upon. He can hear the ticking of its cogged wheels, the creaking twist of its knobs and gears, beneath which he detects a grinding that might be dust, the dust that creeps into everything. Later, he will have to unscrew the owl, brush it out, wipe clean and oil its guts.
But first he draws the curtains. The room falls into deeper shadow. He holds up his arm, as if to send the owl into flight. Instead it goes rigid. Something clicks and snaps inside it. Its eyes glow, circles of light. A milky projection spills quaveringly across the wall. Without expression he studies the march of the death parade, the crowd of people surrounding it, until the owl’s eyes dim and the projection sputters off and leaves him in darkness.
*
Simon hates what his father has become, but he doesn’t hate him. They share good memories. They share a complicated love. They share the same blood. And this is what compels him to do what he does next.
He brags that he knows his way around any door and into any room in the Sanctuary. Their new mayor talks often about how everyone needs to do their part, now more than ever, contribute to the common good, specialize in a trade, and Simon likes to think that this is his role: he is a thief, the very best of thieves. Light-fingered and considerate. He doesn’t hurt anyone, not like some brute in an alleyway. And he never leaves behind a mess—splintering a door, upending a drawer—never takes more than needs to be taken, redistributing wealth.
But what he never brags about—what he never tells anyone—is that not only can he sneak his way into any corner of the Sanctuary; he can also sneak out.
His father is the one who told him about the sewers, the many tunnels that run beneath the ground, all of the entries cemented over. For safety, it was said. So that nothing could get in. “And so that no one, not a one of us, can get out of this reeking pit,” his father said. He was always saying things like this, calling the Sanctuary a prison, the politicians its wardens.
It was in the museum that Simon found the passage. He liked to go there sometimes—after hours, when no one could follow him around and yell at him for getting too close, for touching the artwork and artifacts. He liked to touch. But he never stole from the one place that belonged to everyone. Late at night he would crawl through a window and wander the many long, high-ceilinged rooms and put his face right up to the paintings, run his fingers along the brushstrokes. He would duck under the ropes to an exhibit—petting the scaled spine of an alligator, clacking his fingers across the keyboard of a dead-eyed computer, climbing into the Toyota on display to twist its many knobs and wrap his hands around the steering wheel. One time he fell asleep inside a covered wagon exhibit.
People said Lewis—the thin, strange man Simon saw sometimes at a distance—kept company with the devil. They said he studied black magic. They said he knew everything that ever happened and would happen. They said nothing escaped his notice in the Sanctuary. The owl was one of many spies, the rats and bats and cockroaches also in his service. Simon did not believe them enough to stay away from the museum, but he believed them enough to stay away from his quarters on the upper level. He looked often over his shoulder and one time startled at the sight of a lantern floating down the staircase, a figure descending and speaking softly, maybe talking to himself or maybe uttering some incantation.
Simon ran then, bolted down to the basement, a vast storage area filled with wooden boxes, draped paintings, dust-cloaked specimens. He hid there for hours. A faint dripping caught his attention and he found in the floor a grate—and beyond the grate, a metal ladder that descended into darkness.
It was several weeks before he gained the courage to return and wander the tunnels below—and several weeks more before he discovered another grate with moonlight coursing through it. He climbed up to find himself outside the Sanctuary, along some ruined street where houses and storefronts had collapsed upon themselves and trees rose through blisters in the asphalt. He outsourced his thieving then. As if he was a ranger. From buildings and cars he pirated metals, plastics, leathers, to then pawn to vendors at the bazaar. If anyone ever asked where he came upon such a thing—a toaster, a phone, a trumpet, DVDs, a plastic tote full of eyeliner and brick-hard foundation, things that often had no value outside of curiosity—he would say he found it. That’s all. He found it.
Just as he now finds his father. Chained and kneeling at the altar. Simon has been here before, what he believes to be some sort of town square, the altar at its center once a fountain, with the crumbled faces of children as spouts. The stone is painted with the blood of those chained here before his father.