Skyline Page 20

  “Yeah?” a sailor asked with a slow drawl. “Where?”

  Monroe pointed through the wall to where the bomb had been. Then, as if Monroe were a magician, the pier shook and the wall blasted open, shrapnel ripping across the wood. Men and women alike screamed, some knocked down by flying chunks of wood. “Go!” Monroe shouted as he brought his hand down from his face. “Out!” He turned on his heel to shout to all the family members waiting to wave off the boat. “Fire!”

  Now they ran. The captain rushed inside. Sailors threw ropes on board. Family members squeezed around the fire as it licked the wooden floor. Bill paused to grab a small child and leaped through the flames to the street outside. Charlotte kept her hand firmly in Felix’s, not letting go. She’d brought him here; he wasn’t prepared for anything like this. He was her responsibility.

  Behind her, the ship gave two quick blasts of air. It was moving, even as the flames ate away the pier.

  Outside, the family members collected, watching smoke pour from the pier. If the flames got to the boat, Charlotte and everyone else would hear. There’d be explosions or squealing or some other unimaginable noise. She didn’t know exactly what would happen if the fire found the boat.

  She sure as hell didn’t want to find out.

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  In the first few seconds of traveling home, the pier was consumed in the fire. A massive hole left behind with only a few wooden poles sticking up from the water. A new version was constructed—there was no way of knowing when—of a dull bronze instead of pink granite. The other piers were renovated to match the metallic Pier Fifty-four until all were disassembled.

  When time slowed, only a singular long slab of concrete remained. As it had been in the early 2000s, the surrounding piers were nothing more than poles in the water.

  A cab laid on its horn, screeching to a halt behind them. It honked and honked and honked, all four of them stumbling away from the car. A jammed highway had sprung up in the past eighty years.

  Heart pounding, Charlotte tugged her family safely back to the sidewalk beside the concrete pier. Together they headed to the crosswalk to cross the highway safely. Monroe pressed the button, but his gaze remained on the concrete pier.

  The light turned, but he didn’t move. Charlotte had to pull him along, across the road. This was him, mourning for buildings when they’d just saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But then, that was what he was supposed to remember.

  She wished there were more for him to sink his teeth into. He was distracted, and they didn’t need that. No longer did they have a specific date from Paris, only a suggestion of how to find Ana. She needed Monroe focused.

  Where one arm of the Mid River had been, there was now the West Side Highway, several parking lots, and a few glass apartment buildings rising in the distance. The two popular cafés were gone. The sidewalk was empty, devoid of tourists. The city had been reclaimed, but the recovered buildings didn’t sparkle with grandeur. Aside from the few apartment complexes, the buildings were low and grimy: warehouses, marketplaces, and the NYC Department of Sanitation.

  “It’s the city as it should be,” Charlotte said as they reached the opposite sidewalk.

  Monroe didn’t reply, but he stayed alongside her, walking east toward the middle of the city. With the Mid River gone, they couldn’t take a boat to the Plaza. They’d have to hail a cab, take the subway with a few transfers, or walk. As evening approached, each option sounded worse than the next. They’d be stuck in traffic regardless, crammed in with thousands of bodies or cars.

  “This sucks,” Monroe said, his voice exhausted. The destruction of the pier must’ve hurt him more than Charlotte realized. They hadn’t just wiped out New Yorkers’ memory of history, they’d actively made history worse. It was one thing to know that the pier had been ruined once, another to become its destroyers.

  Charlotte stopped. “Is there anything close by? Anything we saved that …” She didn’t know. Anything that he’d appreciate? That would prove that all of this was worth it? She wanted to race headlong to the Plaza, the closer of the two monuments left. But not with Monroe like this.

  Monroe bit his lip, eyes traveling up the street. The few closed stores sold fabric, and no storefront caught his interest. But in the distance, above the street, light filtered down from a metal bridge.

  “The High Line,” Monroe whispered.

  “It was here before the Blast?” Bill asked.

  “A few years before,” Monroe said, “yeah. I didn’t even think it’d remain. This is the original, before they rebuilt it.” His eyes widened, following the metal walkway north, into a building. Through it, he saw something. “Char, can we … ?” He bounced on his toes, biting his lip, staring at Charlotte until he had to look back up the street.

  “Of course,” Charlotte said. He raced away, and Charlotte clutched Felix’s hand. “He needs this,” she told him.

  Felix rubbed his short, tight curls, his forehead a field of worry lines. “I do, too, I think. A quick reset.”

  “Something nice, for once,” Bill added. Instead of kidnappings, sudden divorces, and death.

  They followed Monroe up Tenth Avenue. He leaped all the way, looking back, looking forward, a hesitant smile on his lips. Wherever they were headed, it was somewhere big. He came to a stop, breathing hard, outside unassuming glass doors. Above, the building was marked with three stone letters: NBC.

  “Oh,” Monroe said, wrinkling his nose when they arrived. “We look like shit.”

  Monroe’s hair was bedraggled and unkempt. Bill’s mustache looked dusty and old instead of its usual black. Even Charlotte’s white shirt had turned gray from ashes. With his thick eyebrows pinched upward, Felix just looked frazzled.

  After a moment, Monroe shrugged. “Eh, welcome to Chelsea Market.” He opened one of the glass doors, and cool air rushed to greet them.

  Inside, the market smelled of warm bread, hot coffee, and humanity. Every possible seat was taken, most people holding plates, since they couldn’t find a table. Stores lined the way, glass windows showing their wares. A nearby bookstore spilled out into the wide hallway, rolling shelves cluttering the entry.

  “It said NBC outside,” Bill said, reaching a hand out toward Monroe. “Was this an old broadcasting station?”

  “Actually, no,” Monroe said. He rubbed his hands together. “It stands for the National Biscuit Company. Or, as we know it, NaBisCo.”

  “Nabisco,” Bill repeated, working through the syllables. “I never knew that.”

  “Right? God, I’d forgotten how cool this was before the Blast. After it, some of the farther stores”—Monroe pointed down the way—“remained, but a lot of them closed down. The owner couldn’t turn half the building into a waterfront without tearing the whole thing apart. But they had plans.”

  “Plans that don’t matter anymore,” Charlotte filled in. Before the Blast, she and Monroe had come here a few times, but she didn’t realize how much he loved it. They’d simply come for crepes and left.

  “Over twenty different bakeries merged to create Nabisco,” Monroe explained as he tugged Bill away, the historian in him bubbling out. Charlotte slowed, smiling as a few tourists drifted alongside, listening as he told this building’s history.

  “Thank you, Felix,” she said, still clutching his hand. “For coming. For understanding.”

  He shook his head, a single arm flexing as he brought a hand up to scratch his scalp. “I still don’t. I wish you’d told me so long ago. That Charlie could’ve come, that …” He must’ve seen the worry in her eyes, because he corrected, “I know you’ll save him. I have no doubt. I just wish this were easier for you.”

  “Me too,” Charlotte said. But of course it wouldn’t be. Relationships took work. Why else had it been so easy to let all of hers fall to the wayside? She had plenty to do without entertaining Monroe, without caring for Felix, without taking Charlie out on mother-son dates.

  They closed
the gap and listened as Monroe noted the surreal portraits from a current art exhibition on the wall. He stopped for some ice cream and brought back cones. From then, they didn’t enter any stores or buy anything. They marveled at a building that they had snatched from Ana’s bombs.

  When the four of them reached the end of the winding hallway and stepped into the fading sunlight outside, Charlotte said, “Tell us more, Monroe. Tell us about all the buildings we’ve saved.”

  She didn’t ever want him to stop. She wanted to be the listener he needed, always.

  Historical facts spilled out as Monroe led them north and east to the edge of the reduced Mid River. But he didn’t rush. There was plenty of time to soak in the regained city.

  Monroe illuminated place after place, one building’s past leading to another. He described the Hotel Pennsylvania, the Seagram Building, St. Peter’s Church, places of New York’s ancient history. And then he brought them to the recent past, pointing to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where dozens of famous comedians got their start.

  He was remembering everything he’d known before. The city may have changed—the Blast’s impact had lessened—but everything that came before was fair game. Now even more important because the rest of New York could never care as much as someone who’d lost what they had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE PLAZA HOTEL

  JUNE 25, 2023

  Spotlights illuminated the Plaza, pristine and white against the darkening Central Park behind it. Eight wide steps led from the entrance down to the waters of the Mid River. If she and Monroe hadn’t witnessed its rebuilding process, Charlotte would wonder whether the building had actually been lost in the Blast. After they defused this bomb—only two to go—it would never be lost at all.

  “Now where?” Monroe asked, then rolled his eyes. “When. See, Felix? I’m still having a little trouble with it.”

  Charlotte spread her hands, palms up. “Paris didn’t say.” She tugged the crumpled scrap of paper from her pocket. “All he said was that we should’ve been looking in hidden places. And that Ana would arrive sometime crowded, so she’d blend in.”

  “Which could be anytime,” Monroe said. “But if she wanted to be hidden …” He tapped a finger at his lips. “She wouldn’t go to prehistory; she’d stand out like a sore thumb. And once this place is the Plaza, they’ll have security full-time. So, maybe”—he scrunched up his nose—“early 1865?”

  The Plaza’s official, documented history began the moment it was built—1883—so Charlotte wasn’t sure what was before that. But a smaller building likely wouldn’t have had the Plaza’s money for security. It seemed sensible enough.

  She twisted the astrolabe to January 1865 and released. On Charlotte’s left side, the Plaza deconstructed itself floor by floor, faster and faster, until its replica appeared across the street, the Mid River gone in a flash. There the Plaza stood, grand and white and tall, until it, too, deconstructed in a heartbeat. Smoke billowed out for a millisecond, and a smaller hotel appeared in its wake. Time restarted, and even that hotel wasn’t there. Instead, the foundations were replaced by nothing more than a lake, iced over and enclosed by a fence. The sun shone down from the east, no skyscrapers yet built to cast shadows.

  “Guh,” Monroe said, wrapping his arms around himself.

  Charlotte did the same, rubbing her shoulders for warmth. “What’s here?” she asked. “You think it’s in the lake?”

  With a frown, Monroe shook his head. “I thought maybe the rink, but—”

  “It’s too exposed,” Bill said. “Even in summertime. Trust me, I’ve been. Without electricity? Any light of Ana’s would’ve been pretty obvious in the night. No way she’d be here in the daytime.”

  Bill had been thorough. Monroe had the knowledge, but Bill had been here. He’d probably looked from several angles, spinning through a night at a time to make sure.

  “I guess she could’ve sunk it during the summertime,” Bill said. Charlotte didn’t really want to go for a swim anymore. They couldn’t get away with diving gear in this time period; they’d have to visit the basement of the Plaza just to get in.

  “No, no, you’re right.” Monroe tugged his ponytail, watching the frozen lake, the chill forgotten for now.

  “It’s not in the Plaza either,” Bill said.

  Where else could it be? Not the Plaza, not what existed before the Plaza. “And you’re sure not prehistory?”

  “Shhh,” Monroe said, closing his eyes. Behind his eyelids, his eyes flicked back and forth, like they would when he was dreaming as a kid. But as his forehead wrinkled down, furrowing deeper and deeper, it was obvious he wasn’t seeing anything important.

  “What if we just go through each year?” Charlotte suggested. “Watch the Plaza age until you get an idea?” Anything to find the bomb. And to get away from the cold.

  With a sigh, Monroe opened his eyes. “Maybe.”

  Month by month, Charlotte sped them through the history of the Plaza. The lake melted in summertime, froze back up, and was covered by dozens of skaters all in black. Then walls went up, and the smaller hotel was erected before their eyes. It finished building, a few years passed, and the small hotel disappeared in a puff of smoke. A few months later, the first stories of the new luxurious Plaza began to rise.

  Monroe clutched Charlotte, eyes wide. “I know where she is!”

  “Where?” Charlotte asked. Bill’s eyes gleamed; he was as eager as her. Felix’s eyebrows raised, hopeful.

  “Thank about it,” Monroe said, voice hushed on the early 1900s street. “A time when things were hidden somewhat, without any guards.”

  “Just say it,” Charlotte directed.

  “Take us back to, um, 1883. Early 1883.”

  “Before the Plaza was built?” Bill asked.

  “We saw that, ’Roe. It was just the skating rink.”

  “Not always. For a moment there wasn’t the lake; there wasn’t the early Plaza.” He bounced on his tiptoes. “Don’t you get it? While it was being built! It’ll be nothing more than a big pit for a foundation. With a fence around so no passersby come in and get hurt. You saw it; the Plaza was built twice—in 1883 and 1907—but she has to be in one of those two times.”

  “Okay,” Charlotte said, beginning to nod. Butterflies flew inside her stomach. It felt right, smarter than some lake. Smarter than a well-watched coatroom. “Early 1883.”

  In early 1883, Charlotte flashed them forward one night at a time. After the construction workers went home and before they arrived, Ana would have the place to herself. Through January, the lake was pumped dry. In February, the lakebed was carved into a blocky pit. In early March, a foundation was poured. But each night, there was no minor blip of light, as Charlotte had hoped.

  They’d have to try 1907. Her stomach butterflies had to be right.

  But before the first level was built, Felix squeezed her hand between jumps. “There.” He pointed to an opposite corner. “Only a few hours ago.”

  At the top of the ramp leading downward, Charlotte pressed back against the wall. Felix had to be right; his eagle eyes saw more than just design. So they’d need to stay out of sight. As before, they’d need Ana to finish with her bomb before they started to defuse it.

  Three and a half hours prior, there Ana was.

  Her hair was a little longer than it had been at Pier Fifty-four, on its way to matching Leanor’s later curls if she didn’t cut it soon. All in black, she barely stood out among the darkened foundation. But she had a single light illuminated to help her see. Below was the third bomb.

  This one wasn’t big like the first, or spherical like the last. It was barely bigger than a double-decker peanut butter sandwich. Charlotte’s butterflies tugged inside, trying to escape.

  Ana had changed the design.

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  All around Ana, the foundation wall was smooth, a matte gray. But with a red laser gun, she sliced through, cutting out a sol
id block. She tugged out the cube of concrete, sliced off the outer edge, and set it aside. With no hesitation this time, Ana activated the bomb with her screwdriver. No red countdown illuminated. She pushed the compact bomb into the matching hole, and added the facade to it. From above the pit, Charlotte couldn’t see the thin lines that Ana had cut; the wall looked whole.

  Still Charlotte waited, ready to jump the moment that Ana disappeared. Now that they’d seen her again, Charlotte’s fury returned at once. The tea, the calm she’d gained on their walk had worn off. Ana was the reason Charlie was kidnapped. But Charlotte waited; this would be a hell of a lot easier to defuse once Ana was gone.

  The anachronistic woman stepped away from her work, glanced around, and froze. “Motherfuckers!” She knelt back down and scrabbled at the facade she’d placed.

  No need to wait now. Charlotte dropped her bag at Felix’s feet and leaped away from the boarded-up wall. She ran, stumbling down the dirt ramp that led into the foundation. She heard the scuffs of the others’ feet behind her, but didn’t turn. Ana was hers.

  “’Roe!” Charlotte called without turning around. “Get her astrolabe!”

  “I’ve got the bomb,” Bill said, just as Charlotte anticipated. As in the subway, they were moving in concert, working out a plan on the fly. Felix was scrambling down the ramp, too, fists clenched. Ready to join Charlotte in the fray.

  Shoulder first, Charlotte crashed into Ana, sending her sprawling away from the bomb. Beside her, Bill got to the wall and tugged at the facade. He had this; Monroe would get the astrolabe.

  “You’re not setting another bomb,” Charlotte said, raising a fist. “I’ll make sure of that.”

  “He took our fucking son!” Felix yelled when he reached them, a foot connecting with Ana’s side.

  She slammed into the wall, but jumped to her feet. Stumbled away. “Get back,” she said. But Charlotte grabbed an arm before Ana could get fully away. Threw her back to the ground.