{1942}

How many afternoons had passed? It always seemed to be afternoon now, around the same time he had escaped from the train.

The sunlight lay like smoke on the hills. The bare trees shone silver. The road dust was golden. And the one road, thin as a pencil line, stretched to the horizon, occasionally snaking around a hill and then running straight again for miles.

All those miles he had walked. And the road never changing. Or maybe in all that time he had never moved—not a mile, not a single foot.

The sun was large and the winds strong, rushing the white clouds across the sky. His bruises were raw, his head ached. His jaw was swollen shut. And his left hand was on fire, throbbing as if it had been hammered on an anvil. His arm itself felt heavy as iron. He had stopped the bleeding where his finger was severed. His finger was still tightly wrapped in his handkerchief, deep in his pocket.

He was exhausted, asleep on his feet, walking in his sleep. Birds sang over his right shoulder, as if they were perched there on a branch. Their high-pitched music was that same snatch of Vivaldi, and it drowned out every other sound in the world.

His shadow hurried before him, often veering off the road, into dry cornfields, or cypress groves with blue soil. But it always returned, preceding him, each time more diminished. Their paths were divergent, but he and his shadow shared the same destination.

He couldn’t say how much time had passed. Couldn’t vouch for what occurred outside of those moments when he found himself sitting silently on a hard bed in the stone house. The house was a single large room. Light poured through the windows. Pine wood burned in an iron stove. A kettle was heating. A woman with blond hair stood across the room, gazing out over a field of lavender. With her back to him, and one hand on her hip, she leaned against a copper sink, running water. The sink was sea-green. Dandelions filled a colander. When he parted his lips to speak, she anticipated it, turning slowly, but against that bright light he couldn’t see her face.

After running from the train wreck, he had hidden until nightfall in the thick forest near Treviglio. When the moon rose, and he found Polaris in the sky, he picked his way through the trees, heading north. As Agnes had predicted, there was a security alert, a massive dragnet. Close by, on the open road, he heard motorcycles and armored vehicles. He had to get away from that place, but he didn’t want to stray too far from the road, or so deep into the forest that he couldn’t find his way out. For that he paid a price, feeling the presence of patrols, hearing their dogs through the crisp air.

Then one morning, nearing Bergamo, he walked out of the trees onto the open road. He was on the verge of collapse, taking his chances. Birds rose in formation. The clouds darkened. Dust clung to his pants. He didn’t pass a single car, truck, or bicycle. And no one on foot. How could this be?

Suddenly his yellow fedora blew off and the wind spun it down the road, across a ditch, over a hedge. When he caught up to it finally, kneeling to pick it up in a field of dry grass, he saw a woman in a white coat at the other end of the field, maybe two hundred yards away. Her blond hair was blowing wildly. She was standing by a stream. Wearing black gloves. Shielding his eyes, he squinted at her through the glare. It was Agnes, he thought. She was alive. Waving to her, he started hobbling across the field. As he got closer, she moved, too, walking downstream toward a stone bridge. He saw now that her coat was not white but tan—a camel’s hair coat.

The same instant he reached the stream, she stepped onto the bridge. The stream was rushing loudly, the boulders along its banks dusted with snow. When she turned into it, the sunlight nearly blanked out her face—as a shadow might obscure it. She was looking at him without smiling, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure …

Then she beckoned him to follow her, and he did, crossing the bridge while she waited on the other side. The bridge arched steeply over the stream. Though it was in a remote place—connecting an overgrown path on either bank—the stones comprising its floor had been worn smooth by many feet. From above, the water swirled black and white, bright forms and shadows undulating, almost human—like a river of souls. Gripping the side of the bridge, Franklin paused to stare at them until she beckoned him again.

She walked on, and he followed. On that side of the stream, the air felt warmer and the light was even brighter. They crossed another field and an orchard and finally arrived at a small house of white stone beside a lavender field.

The field onto which she was still gazing while standing at the sink.

“Agnes?” he said.

She continued to look out the window.

He hesitated. “Angela…”

Still she didn’t move.

Then, quietly, more confidently, he said, “Anita, it’s you, isn’t it.”

She turned and her face came clear—just as it was in the photograph, with olive skin, eyes set wide apart, and full lips. In the twelve years since he had first seen that photograph, her features had not changed.

He couldn’t determine how many days had passed, but he knew that every one of them had begun with his emerging from a deep sleep, sitting up in the hard bed and seeing her standing across the room by the window.

The kettle began to whistle. She spooned tea into a blue clay pot, then added the boiling water.

Soon the tea’s fragrant scent filled the kitchen. It was familiar to him, like cloves and myrrh, but harsher, stinging his eyes at first. It’s the red tea, qoff, that Persephone brewed in New York, he thought. It didn’t surprise him that Anita Snow would be drinking it.

His left arm was in a sling, the bandaged hand packed with unguents. Whenever he moved his hand, it still burned.

“I know a doctor,” she said in her distant, musical voice, “an Alexandrian named Remat advanced in his practices, who is in Brescia. I took the bus there this morning and showed him the finger. But he said too much time had passed, it could not be reattached.”

Franklin shook his head, still trying to clear it. “I never thought it could.”

“Such things are possible. They will happen one day.” She hesitated. “I did not bring the finger back. I—”

“That’s all right,” he said, lying back again, wincing with pain. “I don’t want to know.”

And so he never learned that, after leaving Dr. Remat’s office, she had gone to the Museum of the Risorgimento near the bus station. She went into the gallery that featured the relics of the heroes of various conflicts—the Battle of the Two Sicilies, the Austro-Prussian War, the War of 1859—that culminated in Italian unification. Pistols, sabers, medals, and whole uniforms were displayed. Also, Garibaldi’s boots, the pocket watch of King Victor Emmanuel II, and the pen with which Prime Minister Cavour signed the Treaty of Zurich. But there were more grisly items, such as severed ears and digits. And it was into a jar with a remnant of the finger of General Emilio Manzone, hero of the Battle of Magenta, that she dropped Franklin Flyer’s pinky. It remained undisturbed there for eighteen months, until June 1943 when the museum was leveled during the Allied bombing of Brescia.

After the tea steeped, she poured two cups and brought him one in bed. He sipped it and once again felt his limbs grow heavy, as if the blood itself were slowing in his veins. Then he looked up into her face. It always appeared the same to him—as unchanging as the photograph he had carried over the years. Despite their strange intimacy now, together under the same roof, he felt—to his amazement—that he still had only a single angle available to him from which to approach her. As if she were truly two-dimensional, an image that might at any moment dissolve before his eyes.

“Who are you?” he asked one afternoon, watching her rinse dandelions in the colander.

“You know who I am.”

“Anita.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. Tea was steeping in the pot beside her.

“When you worked at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,” he began, and she looked back out the window at the lavender. “You did work there?”

“I was at that museum,” she nodded. “I have been to many museums, many cities.”

“And now …”

“Now, Bergamo.”

“You’ve been here for some time.”

“Yes, for some time,” she said, bringing him a cup of tea.

He drank it and fell asleep.

He had many dreams in that stone house. At first, the same dream: he was on a train, and his fellow passengers were his various antagonists from over the years, fascist sympathizers all: Justinian Walzowski, Andy Teresçu, Martin Perry and Otto Zuhl, Dr. Volonz and Señor Guiterrez, Hugo Belzer, Karl Marius, Herman Ganz, and of course Tommy Choylo. Only Bill Timmons was missing. They were all traveling to the Shetland Islands, through a tunnel beneath the sea, to take him out of Scalloway Prison. And Choylo, a knife in one hand and a noose in the other, was boasting that the moment Timmons was set free, Franklin would enter the prison and take his place.

“And the only way out will be suicide,” Choylo concluded, “but we’ll help you on that score.”

When Franklin clenched his fists and lunged at him, Teresçu and Marius grabbed his arms. “You already got me to kill,” Franklin shouted at Choylo.

Then he dreamed of himself on another train. It was moments before the tornado would lift the locomotive which had given him his name and deposit it in the sea. He was searching for his mother. He knew she would soon be knocked unconscious in the corridor while he himself, as an infant, remained tucked into a sleeping berth, insulated by blankets. His mother once told him that an old Seminole woman had midwifed him. She described her vividly: "She had a crooked nose and long white hair, she smoked a pipe, and on her wrist there was a tattoo of a two-headed snake.” Had this woman existed solely in his mother’s imagination? He would never know. Shortly before Zoë's fateful trip to Seattle, when Franklin was old enough to know enough to ask what she was doing on a train so late in her pregnancy, she replied simply, “Trying to get home. Anyway, didn’t you know, you arrived a month early.” He hadn’t known. “I had planned to be home for my ninth month,” she went on. “But I believe that train ride induced my labor.” Wandering the dimly lit coaches as the Franklin Flyer roared through the seaside mist, the tornado whirling toward it from the west, Franklin too was trying to get home, back to Vita and her garden and the clapboard house by the ocean filled with the scent of jasmine.

He had this dream night after night—or maybe he just dreamed it many times in a single night—but he never found his mother, or the Seminole woman, or himself as an infant. And he always woke before the tornado struck. He remembered two old wives’ tales he had heard as a boy: that if you die in a dream, you simultaneously die in your sleep; and if you meet yourself in a dream, you are immediately reborn as someone else. Either way, the dreamer was in no position to report what had happened to him. So who was to say these phenomena weren’t commonplace? I’m still alive, Franklin thought, and I haven’t—yet—turned into someone else.

Then one day he awoke, the sun streaming in as usual, and she wasn’t at the sink, gazing out the window, but naked in bed, with her back to him. He touched her shoulder, the skin smooth and dry, and her hair, soft and surprisingly cold. They stayed in bed all day, but she didn’t stir—the only time he ever saw her sleep.

Another day he spied her through the window, far off in the field, cutting lavender and dropping it into a basket. She was wearing her camel’s hair coat and her blond hair flashed in the sun. He was standing at the sink, a pocket mirror propped on the counter, shaving with a straight razor. He hadn’t shaved in a while and his beard came off in thick strips. His hair had been cut off—she must have done this while he slept.

“I had to shave your head to tend your wounds,” she replied when he inquired.

She brushed her own hair at night, always sitting by the open door with her back to him, watching the stars flicker to life and the moon rise over the orchard. As always, she was silent. She never spoke to him unless he first addressed her.

She began brewing tea more than once daily, and each day he grew a little stronger. Still, though, he slept many hours and generally felt dazed. And he continued to dream deeply, revisiting the past. Often he found himself viewing the Ice & Fire Assurance Company Building from the roof of the Globe Building. And then soaring into the sky. Other times, he was walking the Manhattan streets in the dead of summer, stepping into his own shadow with the sun at his back, looking for a job. Or waiting for Narcissa outside a bar in freezing rain in Chicago. Once, he woke in a cold sweat after finding himself scrambling to find Archie and escape the ice cutter Mariana as it sank off Antarctica.

At the end of his stay in that house, he awoke—for the first and only time—in the middle of the night. The room was like a cavern, lit up gold. Burning candles lined the walls. Incense filled the air— a sharp ginger scent, familiar to him. On the table by the sink there were two black statuettes. With a start he recognized Horus, with his hawk’s head, and behind him, Set, deep in the shadows. Outside he heard a low hooting and an owl with silver-tipped wings flew past the window.

Then he saw her, silhouetted in the corner on her knees. Slowly she rose and turned into the flickering candlelight. Franklin was startled by her outfit: onyx earrings and bracelets and a black dress with silver and gold threads flowing across the chest in curlicued rows, like the waves on a river. It was exactly what Persephone had been wearing on that long-ago New Year’s Eve when he had first seen the statuettes of Horus and Set. She walked over to Horus and Set in a swirl of incense smoke, her long hair glowing, her eyes half-lidded. Her perfume too was like Persephone’s—desert rose—so pungent it stung his eyes.

She beckoned him to join her, and he did, transfixed by Horus’s black eyes. Then he saw Set staring at him and suddenly he knew the identity of the animal whose head was atop his body. The youthful features—long nose, triangular jaw, almond eyes—were only slightly more defined than those on the statuette he had seen in New York. But that was enough. They represented, not a bear or lynx, or some long-extinct creature from the Nile Valley; no, the head of Set, God of the Night, belonged to the cruelest and deadliest beast in the animal kingdom. The Egyptians had known that the only true totem for the power of darkness must be man himself.

She watched Franklin taking this in. Then she stepped up close and parted her lips and he kissed her, her mouth yielding, tasting like smoke and honey. And for an instant when she pulled back from him, he saw Agnes’s face and remembered Persephone’s words: "Horus is the Day and Set the Night. Horus the light that may embrace us, Set the fallen world in which we swim.”

He closed his eyes and kissed her again, running his hand through her cold hair. He felt as if he were weightless suddenly, suspended over a vast chasm. When he opened his eyes, he was back on that road with the golden dust that stretched to the horizon. It was afternoon and the sunlight was blinding. The trees shone silver.

The air was sharp. His overcoat and suit were clean and his shirt was pressed—without a trace of blood—but his left arm was in a sling and his hand was bandaged. On his shaved head his fedora was pulled low. He was standing at the very spot where the wind had blown it off and carried it down the road, across the ditch, over the hedge.

He went around the hedge. The large field was empty as before. At the far end he saw the stream, but no bridge. He crossed the field, his legs stiff, his heart beating fast. The dry grass, the trees and boulders, were unchanged, but the stream itself was nearly dry. The swirling currents were reduced to shallow puddles among skull-like stones.

He picked his way carefully over the streambed to the opposite bank. He walked on until he caught sight of the orchard and the field of lavender—both bare now—but there was no sign of the stone house, just a rotting pile of straw and a tree struck by lightning. And then, for the first time since he’d escaped the train, he heard signs of the war: a formation of low-flying planes over the hills and a distant rumble of tanks. And far more ominously, as he retraced his steps, hurrying out of the open field, he heard small-arms fire, barking dogs, a police whistle—the sounds of a patrol.

He would brush close to other patrols over the next three days—once so close that he heard two men shouting in German— as he made his way north by northwest. When he could, he slept fitfully in the forest and scavenged food, mostly crab apples and carrots, from the farms he passed. He didn’t dare go into an inn or knock at a farmhouse door. At one point, he considered selling his coat, to get enough lire to buy a meal, but thought better of it. Though it was the shorter route, he had instinctively chosen not to go due north, toward the Alps, where he might have frozen, and instead headed for Lake Como. As it was, he was always cold, especially when he rested, making himself beds of pine needles and leaves. He avoided entering towns and villages, but he skirted Lierna, Dervio, and Colico before reaching the strip of land between Lake Como and Lake Mezzola. From there he followed a narrow winding road to the border and then a footpath through the mountains into Switzerland, eventually crossing a frozen river near the village of Grono.

All the while he wondered how long he had been at the stone house. In his feverish state, had that been the strangest dream of all? The fact remained that someone had dressed his wounds, shaved his head, cleaned his clothes. He also possessed something now that he certainly didn’t have on him when he ran from the train wreck. He discovered it the first time he stopped to rest, in a wooded ravine outside the town of Caprino.

He sat on a fallen birch, scraping the mud from his shoes and turning his collar up against the wind. First he checked the underside of his lapel, where he had pinned Leda’s gold scarab. Choylo had taken his passport, wallet—everything—but they missed the scarab, and it was still there. Then he searched his pockets, hoping to find a few coins. Instead, in the inside pocket of his jacket, he came on a bronze talisman, a miniature—identical to the last detail—of the statuette of Set in the stone house. Set with a human face, he shuddered, who was staring at him again from the palm of his hand.

At the tiny post office in Grono, while sending a telegram to the American consul in Geneva, he saw in astonishment that the date displayed on the daily calendar was Thursday, January 19, 1942.

It felt like a year, but it was six weeks to the day since he had left Milan.

When the postmaster asked him for twenty francs, he sat down on the wooden bench, eased his arm out of the sling, and told him to reverse the charges.

An attaché at the American consulate in Geneva was the first person to tell Franklin he thought he had been killed. Franklin knew that when he resurfaced it would be a terrible shock for those closest to him, notably Arvin and Eunice. Coming on the heels of Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war, the public reporting of his death by the Italian press (that he had been arrested in Milan and shot trying to escape) in American newspapers became a footnote to the Japanese attack: yet another example of Axis perfidy. The Italian government rebuffed inquiries from Washington while alleging, with indignation, that Signor Flyer had not been what he appeared to be. The American consul, highly skeptical when a man claiming to be Franklin Flyer contacted him, was shocked when Franklin actually walked into his office. Franklin made sure Carstone and Donovan at OSS were informed discreetly of his reappearance. They would make sure everything was kept under wraps until, safely stateside, he had the chance to see his friends and family privately. Carstone wanted him to travel directly to Washington, to be debriefed, but Franklin refused.

To arrange his arrival in New York, he turned to Joe Szabo, who he knew was tough enough to handle shocks worse than seeing a dead man come to life. Joe had been operating in the night world, the terrain of Set, his entire adult life. It was Joe he wanted to meet him, and he cabled him from Lisbon the night before he boarded the Clipper. And so Joe was awaiting him at the marine terminal of the Municipal Airport on the night of January 23, he and his armed driver in a black Cord sedan with the engine running.

When Joe saw Franklin approaching, his heart leapt. The sling, Franklin’s limp, his shaved head—none of that dampened his feelings. But the moment he embraced Franklin, he sensed just how drained his friend was. Franklin didn’t seem to have lost weight, or even strength, but somehow he felt less substantial—as if the very elements that composed him—bones, muscles, even spirit—had been altered. Joe couldn’t put this into words at that moment, buffeted by icy winds outside the terminal, but it unsettled him deeply. The ride into Manhattan didn’t make it any easier. All the way in, on the parkway and then over the Williamsburg Bridge, Franklin barely said a word. He asked that they stop by his apartment so he could change his clothes and pick up a few things. Then he wanted to go to his office.

When they entered Franklin’s apartment, it was bathed in pale light. The air was stuffy, but the furniture was polished and the plants were watered. Everything was as he had left it.

“Your friend Beckman’s wife Eunice made sure the maid came up twice a week,” Joe said, fiddling with his hat by the door. “She wanted it to be nice for you.”

Franklin walked into his bedroom and took out a fresh shirt and suit. He eased out of his sling in the bathroom and with his right hand washed his face. He had last looked in the mirror there two months earlier, when he shaved before leaving for Europe. Now he studied himself: the bags under his eyes, his skin pale as the wall tiles, the stub of his pinky.

He dressed quickly, and Joe came into the bedroom offering to help. It was the first time he had seen Franklin without his fedora and with the sling off. He glanced at the scars on his head, then spotted the gap on Franklin’s left hand and whistled under his breath.

“Those bastards really worked you over,” he muttered.

Franklin nodded. “In the short time they had, they did what they could.”

He went to his study, climbed onto a chair, and took down a box from high in a closet. He rummaged through it for a minute before he found what he wanted.

Soon afterward, Joe’s long sedan pulled up in front of the Ice & Fire Assurance Company Building in a light snowfall. It was ten minutes before midnight. Beneath the street lamps, the building’s limestone glowed, the mica in the sidewalks sparkled. In the rear seat, Joe turned to Franklin.

“You want me to come up with you?”

Franklin shook his head.

"Keep this car. Marko will take you wherever you need to go.”

“Thanks, Joe. For everything.”

“For what?” He patted his arm. “Jesus, I’m glad to see you. We thought you were a goner. When the papers ran your obituary, I figured, nah, it’s not possible. Then, as time went by…" He shrugged. “I should’ve known you would outfox ‘em.”

“Yeah,” Franklin said, looking away.

They got out of the car and Joe said, “Frankie, don’t forget to catch some sleep.”

Franklin nodded.

The elevator attendant took him up to the sixtieth floor and he walked down the marble corridor to Flyer Enterprises.

He nodded hello to the night receptionist, who went slack-jawed at the sight of him, and walked, not to his own office, but to the photo lab at the opposite end of the floor. Along the way, writers and researchers for Front Line, working on deadline, watched him pass their cubicles in disbelief. One woman stifled a cry. Some illustrators filtered out of a conference room, pushing back their green visors, cigarettes dangling, and followed him.

“Mr. Flyer?” the eldest of them, a heavyset man in a cardigan, called after him.

Franklin had thought through everything he planned to do that night, but he had overlooked this—his employees’ reaction to his resurrection.

He stopped to shake the illustrator’s hand. “Hello, Sherman.”

“Good god,” Sherman stammered.

“You guys know better than to believe what you read in the papers,” Franklin said lightly.

“Wait until Carmen hears.”

“And the guys at the press,” one of the other illustrators said.

Franklin realized he had to telephone Arvin before someone else did.

“Wait a few minutes to tell them,” Franklin said to the puzzled illustrators. Then he hurried into the photo lab.

It was a large room, bathed in red light, filled with the acrid smell of chemicals. A sink was running. Dozens of negatives were clipped on taut wire. At the counters that lined the walls there was room for a half-dozen technicians, but only two were in there, working the graveyard shift. One was enlarging prints behind a curtain; the other, a young man in a white apron bent over a developing pan, gasped when he saw Franklin.

“You know who I am, then?” Franklin asked.

The young man nodded, peering warily through his wire-rimmed spectacles.

“Don’t be frightened.”

“I’m not frightened, sir,” he replied, straightening up and drying his hands on his apron.

“What’s your name?”

“Bookbinder.”

“Bookbinder, I need you to do a job for me.”

“Of course.”

From his jacket Franklin took three photographs he had retrieved from the box in his study and handed them to Bookbinder, along with a slip of paper. “There’s one other photograph, in our company employee files, under that name. Please have someone get it and I’ll tell you what I’d like you to do. Then you can tell me how long it will take.”

Fifteen minutes later, Franklin walked out of the building. Bookbinder had told him the job would take about four hours, which gave Franklin time to ride up to Riverdale and return before he was done. The phone call to Arvin he’d made from a cubicle outside the photo lab was the most difficult thing he’d had to do yet. After a stunned silence, Arvin was overcome, and Eunice took the phone from him. Franklin asked about Leda: all she’d been told was that he was missing.

“We never gave up hope,” Eunice said.

When Marko drove the Cord into their driveway an hour later, Eunice and Arvin, in bathrobes, were waiting at the front door, backdropped in light. Arvin had an unlit pipe clamped between his teeth. It was snowing hard now, and both of them held their breath as Franklin came up the walk, floating through the darkness, the snowflakes sticking to his black coat. This time it was Eunice who broke down. She embraced him tightly and, like Joe, immediately felt that he was lighter than he looked.

“It’s really you,” Arvin said.

Franklin reached over and squeezed his shoulder.

“I’m so happy,” Eunice whispered, holding him close. “And I have a million questions.”

“We’ll talk later,” he replied gently.

Not wanting to make it any harder on them, Franklin kept his own feelings in check. But when he went upstairs, alone, to see Leda and Archie, his eyes filled with tears. He remembered to pin the gold scarab to his lapel. On the second-floor landing, it was just as he had imagined it in Milan: a lamp burning, snow falling out the window, wind rattling the trees. He walked to the guest room, a floorboard creaking beneath him, and opened the door. Leda was asleep. A ray of light from the window shone on her pillow. Curled up beside her, Archie cried out to Franklin, jumped down, and ran into his arms.

“It’s okay, Arch. I told you I’d be back.”

Tail twitching, ears erect, Archie looked him in the eye, and with a rumbling growl pressed his head to Franklin’s cheek and nestled onto his shoulder. Franklin inhaled the warm scent of his fur. He felt Archie’s heart beating against his own chest. He leaned over and kissed Leda’s forehead, then sat down on the bed. Unlike the night they had flown out of Gibraltar, her sleep seemed untroubled. Her hands were open, her breathing easy. It seemed so natural that she should be there, and at the same time it felt miraculous.

After a while Leda sensed his presence. She opened one eye, then the other, and blinked in amazement.

“Mon pe´re,” she said sleepily.

“Hello, Leda.”

For a long time she stared at him, then sat up and stroked Archie. “Monsieur Archie is my friend. He sleeps with me every night.”

“Yes, I know.”

She reached out to Franklin and he wrapped his arms around her. “You came back,” she said.

“I promised I would.”

She touched the scarab. “Le scarabe´e. It did keep you safe.”

He swallowed hard. “Yes.” He took it off and placed it in her palm.

“No, you wear it,” she said.

He shook his head. “Now it must keep you safe.”

She closed her hand on it. “And you won’t go away again?”

“Only for a short while. Then I’ll come for you.”

At 4 A.M. Marko was speeding him back down the Henry Hudson Parkway into midtown Manhattan. There was no traffic. It was still dark and the snow was deep now alongside the road. Chunks of ice were floating by on the river, and the bare forests of the Palisades shone white. Archie was beside Franklin in his carrying case; he simply would not allow Franklin to leave that house again without him. Eunice made a pot of coffee, and Franklin sat with Leda until she fell back to sleep. Then he and Archie set out, and when she woke hours later, Leda wasn’t sure she hadn’t dreamed her father’s visit until she found the scarab beside her.

Back at Flyer Enterprises, Franklin let Archie out in his office, putting down his food and water bowls. He returned to the lab and found Bookbinder, in a cone of red lamplight, huddled over a developing pan with a pair of wooden tongs. The other technician was gone, and the far end of the room was pitch-dark.

“Mr. Flyer, I’m nearly done,” Bookbinder said over his shoulder. He was mixing chemicals, intent on his measurements. “The reverse negatives came out fine. Two of the originals—the smaller ones—were tough to handle, but I got them in the end. Mostly for the last hour I’ve been trying to mesh the four negatives. I’ve made a dozen prints—all blurred. I’m hoping this one comes out.” He added the new solution to the pan and stirred it with the tongs. “That should do it.”

Franklin came alongside him and they gazed intently at the single eight-by-ten sheet in the pan. Slowly the outline of a woman’s face took shape: long fair hair, strong cheeks and jaw, full lips curling into a smile, and, last of all, a pair of wide-set eyes.

“My god,” Franklin said. “I was right.”

He’d had a hunch—like a wisp of vapor, a misplaced snatch of memory—the day he crossed into Switzerland, and the fact it had been correct didn’t lessen his astonishment now.

Bookbinder dried the print before a small fan. Then Franklin took it back to his office and propped it against his desk lamp. Archie was waiting for him, crouched on the arm of the sofa. Franklin lay down, exhausted. Day was breaking through the slats of the venetian blinds. He scanned the room, with its familiar touchstones: the blueprint of his paint-shaking machine; his television tube, encased in glass; the covers of the first magazines he had published; and of course his old yellow fedora hanging from its golden hook above the window.

In the last week he had traveled four thousand miles, across the Alps and half of Europe and the freezing Atlantic, but the true distance felt as if it should be calculated in light-years, or millimeters, or whatever measurement applies to the deeper journey of our lives, mapped internally, for no one to see. Maybe we ourselves only glimpse that particular map at moments of exhilaration or terror when a chasm opens and we’re suddenly looking inward, as if from the lip of a precipice—or the edge of a tall building.

Crossing his arms on his chest, Franklin felt Archie settle in by his shoulder. The war seemed far away, yet closer than ever. Everything had shifted now that his own country had been drawn in. He had seen only a sliver of the devastation under way, but from his knowledge of the technology at work and the forces wielding it, he had little doubt about the damage that would be inflicted—not thousands but tens of millions of lives consumed. That night everyone, including Joe and Arvin, had looked at him as if he were returned from the dead, with information only a shade could bring. What that was, he couldn’t be sure. But he knew there was no turning back for him now. He could only move forward—maybe faster and farther than he had ever intended.

About to turn thirty-five, Franklin felt much older. No matter how much of the Egyptians’ qoff he had drunk, and how much he may have extended some of his nine lives, he was sure that, like Archie, he had already used up a good many of them. He tried to imagine what the future held for those dearest to him: above all, Leda, who had already announced (and demonstrated) to Eunice what Josephine Baker had told Franklin—that she would be a singer, like her mother; and Arvin’s son, Franklin, who, if he wanted to, would run this company when his father stepped down. His own past and future seemed to have blurred into one, Franklin thought, but theirs appeared as distinct and palpable as one could expect in a world where people, whole towns—and soon cities— might disappear in an instant. He still believed what his Aunt Vita had read him from her favorite author after Mary Wollstonecraft, Marcus Aurelius: nothing ever disappears, it’s merely transformed. All the atoms in creation configured and reconfigured a billion times over—a snake scale, an iris stalk, a chip of quartz, a man’s jawbone all one. He had relearned this lesson on the crudest level while studying chemistry. Soon afterward he discovered that the same tenets ruled the equally malleable, and far baser, subject of men’s motivations, and—more surprisingly—that they also applied to the truly volatile elements which comprise the individual human spirit. The latter’s metamorphoses, Vita had taught him, was the only mystery worth pursuing—the one that above all others could never be solved.

Franklin had learned many such things in his short life, and had already left behind inventions of his mind that, for better or worse, would help to shape the future for others. Most importantly, though, he had learned that every man invents, not just his particular works, but his own life, with consequences intended and accidental; the question of whether that mortal invention made the most of the material offered up by birth and circumstance, and also pleased its creator on the deepest level, only he could answer in the end.

All the while, in that twilit room, Franklin never looked away from the face that stared at him from his desk, the print that was a composite portrait Bookbinder created from the four photographs Franklin had given him: of Pamela, Persephone, Narcissa, and Agnes.

It was the face of Anita Snow.