“Listen carefully.” Collum spoke quietly, hazel gaze trained on his sister’s face. “We don’t know what we’re going to find up there. But we have to keep it together, no matter what, aye?”
I understood what he was implying, though it felt like a punch to the diaphragm. If Blasi’s people had killed these men in cold blood, there was no telling what they’d done to the others.
It took Phoebe another second. But when the realization hit, all the color drained out from behind her freckles. Without a word, she whirled and started to dash up the stairs. Collum snatched her back.
“No.” He swore as she kicked, catching him in the thigh with the pointed tip of her boot. “We can’t just go barreling up there with no—”
Far above our heads, a door slammed. We froze as heavy footsteps echoed down the stairwell.
“That big mulatto done knocked out one of my goddamn teeth.” The muffled complaint bounced off the walls and rolled toward us. “I swear I’ma kill that somebitch.”
“Yeah, well,” another voice replied. “Once the Swede shows up I’m gone peel me a few pieces off that old Scotchman. Bugger sliced my arm up good and proper ’fore I got him tied up.”
They’re still alive! The thought screamed jubilantly inside my head.
In the dusk of the stairwell, my gaze shot to Phoebe. Her eyes had gone wide, frightened but relieved.
Alarm shot through me as a rough laugh rolled down the stairs. Another voice shushed the first two. “Shoot anyone that ain’t got the code word.”
“Come on,” Collum whispered. “We’ll have to find another way in.”
When Phoebe only stared up toward the nearing footsteps, Collum jerked on her arm. “Phee!”
My friend whipped around. Her normally open, friendly features had tightened into a look I’d only seen once before. Unadulterated fury. “Fine,” she spat. “But how are we supposed to get in there?”
Before we left home, I’d glanced over the historic blueprints of Tesla’s Fifth Avenue building, along with those of other structures along the street. I closed my eyes and let the images flow across my vision.
“I, uh . . . think I know a way,” I told them. “But we have to hurry. Let’s go!”
Without another word, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and took off down the street. I ignored their hushed cries as I prayed I was right, and that they’d trust me enough to follow.
Breaking into the building two down from Tesla’s was no challenge for Bran’s lock-picking ability. In moments, we’d climbed up to the roof and stepped over its lip to the flat top of the building next door.
But now, as Bran, Phoebe, and I stood on the edge of the rooftop staring across at Tesla’s building, I realized my brilliant idea had encountered a bit of a snag.
“So.” Phoebe gave me a sidelong look. “The alley . . .”
I looked down, down, down to the passageway bisecting the two buildings. “Yeah.”
“How wide?” Collum, keeping well back from the edge, called.
Phoebe squinted. “Seven, eight feet, at least.”
Collum made a strangled noise that—?coming from anyone else on earth—?I would’ve termed a panicked mewl. He had one arm wrapped tight around a sturdy chimney, and his broad, freckled face looked paler than the moonshot clouds above his head.
But Collum was Collum. He wasn’t going to let a little thing like crippling fear get in the way of duty.
“Well, we’d better figure something out soon,” he called, after a quick look at his pocket watch. “We’ve thirty-eight minutes until fire takes the building.”
Already, a faint scent of smoke was filtering up from below. According to the research, the basement fire had taken its time to spread.
Initially.
But once the flames ate their way up through the oil-encrusted floor of the ground level machine shop, the conflagration exploded, taking only moments to engulf the entire structure.
Even now, we might . . . might . . . have been able to stop the fire. To save a priceless accumulation of incalculable genius.
But days before we’d left on our journey to the past, it’d been Tesla’s own number-one fanboy who’d nixed the idea for good.
“Much as it pains me, we’re going to have to let it happen, aye?” Doug told us, around a mouthful of Moira’s “parrich.” “With such a well-known event, any intervention won’t succeed, and in fact, we might make it worse. As a verra wise man once said, ‘Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously. Life, uh . . . finds a way.’”
“That’s beautiful, Doug. Really profound,” I said to the suddenly and curiously hushed group around the table. “Who said that? Was it Sir Wa—”
Phoebe laughed so hard she fell off the bench. Collum was choking on a spoonful of inhaled oats, and I didn’t think it was a damn bit funny when I learned the “poetry” that had touched my heart came from a blockbuster hit about freaking dinosaurs.
“I’m sorry, you guys,” I said as I stared down at the alley far, far below. “I thought we could just step across. I had no clue.”
“Well,” Bran said, “suppose it’s plan B then.”
The relief on Collum’s face dropped away when Bran hurried over to the first building’s roof and disappeared inside the door we’d left propped open. He returned moments later, carrying a long, narrow plank, a thick coil of rope, and several iron crowbars. He propped the beam up onto the lip of the roof, and carefully slid it across until it created a bridge between the building we were on and Tesla’s.
“Problem solved.” Bran clapped once. “But please. Mind the gap.”
Phoebe smacked a palm to her forehead. “Gawd. Tell me you did not just say that.”
At that moment, with his fiendish grin and wind-disheveled hair, Bran looked like some debauched lordling out for a night on the town. Everything inside me clenched as he turned and stepped out onto the board.
“It’s good solid oak,” he said, edging toward the open air between the buildings. “Not that processed trash they use in our time. Lucky, that.”
“You,” I said, “have lost your mind.”
“Do you have any other ideas in that miraculous brain of yours? No? Then we go this way.”
He hurried back and hopped off the plank. “Good luck for us they were renovating, yeah?”
Humming under his breath, he secured one end of the rope around the nearest chimney. Hoisting the coil onto his shoulder, he stepped onto the plank again and began to dash across to the other side.
The plank wobbled.
I made a noise as Bran froze. But then he smiled. “No worries, dove.”
Without another word, he began inching out until he was standing dead center over the drop between the two buildings.
“See?”