“Do not tip your hat,” Monday warns.
Mirabel taps the folder that’s supposed to help you tell your doctor where it hurts, then the picture of a severed hand, emphatically and repeatedly, so the Voice sounds deranged in its affectless calm as it reiterates like a skipping record, “Hand. Hand. Hand. Hand,” but I knew what Monday meant.
“This isn’t something I can just casually work into conversation,” I tell her.
“Old books say to use your feminine wiles,” Monday advises.
“I don’t have any feminine wiles.”
Monday points to her chest with both index fingers.
I look to Mirabel for help, but she’s in the Body Parts folder already. “Breast,” her Voice intones, and then we can’t discuss anything anymore because we’re all laughing too hard.
Mirabel thinks the papers we’re looking for might be in Monday’s library, in which case the person to find them is Monday. But she also thinks they might be hidden in the plant, so we need someone who can sneak in and look around without being noticed, in which case the person is definitely not Monday and can’t be Mirabel. In which case the person is me.
The miracle comes from the unlikeliest of places: World History. Mrs. Shriver long-jumps us from the Atlantic slave trade to the industrial revolution. At first this cheers me up. At least the industrial revolution isn’t enslaving humans. At least it isn’t war. It’s human ingenuity and forward progress, inventions rising up from society, unpredictably, like hairstyles—at least, that’s Mrs. Shriver’s spin on it. But as the lecture goes on, I slowly realize the industrial revolution is a war. Mrs. Shriver wants it to be revolution like the Renaissance we left a couple months ago—great leaps forward made by humans being clever. But the more she talks, the clearer it becomes: the revolution in “industrial revolution” is like the revolution in “American Revolution,” revolution like war. It remapped small towns and big cities and nations, destroyed communities, willfully refused to consider the long term in favor of immediate blood and power, and demanded the sacrifice of scores upon scores of soldiers for the glory of the men getting rich. It was the industrial revolution that conscripted towns like mine and consigned their citizens—us—to the bottom of every pile yet to come.
So I am thinking of armor. I am thinking of arrows and muskets and cannons. I am thinking of the longbow and the M16, armadas of ten thousand ships, rows of white crosses repeating into infinity, which is why when Mrs. Shriver calls on me to catch me out for daydreaming by the window instead of paying attention in class—“Mab, something on your mind?”—I accidentally blurt out the answer to that question.
“Why aren’t factories like museums?”
She’s amused. Bored maybe. Gives me an indulgent smile and decides to play along. “I don’t know, Mab. Why aren’t factories like museums?”
“No. It’s not a joke. Remember last month when you showed us all those pictures from the British Museum? Helmets. Guns. Swords. All that stuff?”
“Right. What does that have to do with factories?”
“Other artifacts of war go in museums. Why don’t punch clocks or conveyor belts or fake emergency exits? Why aren’t munitions factories and mill floors and chemical plants preserved the same way, like for tourists to wander around and have perspective on history and stuff?”
Mrs. Shriver looks at me for too long before answering. “No one would pay to go in,” she says finally. “Plus, what would you sell at the gift shop?”
But after class River steals up next to me and whispers, “You want to see the inside of a chemical plant?”
I am about to tell him that wasn’t the point I was making when I realize the point I was making was entirely beside the point. I nod mutely.
He smiles then blushes then smiles a little more widely. “I can totally get us a key.”
Two days later I am on my way to tutoring after school—Mrs. Radcliffe and Petra and I have compromised on once a week—when River takes my elbow and steers me to an old, disused classroom.
“Pick a hand.” He holds out both in closed fists. I hear Mirabel’s Voice intoning, Hand. Hand. Hand. Hand.
I pick a hand. He turns it over, peels it open. It’s inevitably empty. Obligingly, I tap his other fist. It’s empty too. He grins at me. I grin back. Can’t help it. He reaches behind my ear, comes out with a fist, opens it. Empty. I’m still grinning, waiting patiently for the reveal. He’s patting himself all over, looking confused and increasingly alarmed, but it’s not until he starts cursing under his breath that I realize this isn’t part of the trick. He takes both my shoulders in both his hands, looks into my eyes, and says very seriously, “Can I please turn you to face the wall?”
“Not a chance.”
He waves his arms in the air frantically like he’s walked into a swarm of gnats and, when that yields nothing, undoes his top two buttons, pulls both arms inside his shirt, and wriggles around like the weekend Monday and I spent trying to take off our bras without taking off our tops as if this were a necessary life skill. No luck. River looks at me dolefully. I smile.
And because I do, he smiles back. And because I do, or maybe just because he’s embarrassed already, he doubles down. He yanks off his belt dramatically, lassoes it in the air a few times, and wiggles his hips back and forth, around and around. But that’s as far as he can go.
“Please?” He twirls his finger in a circle and hopes I will follow suit. “The first rule of magic is misdirection.”
“Of the audience.”
“At least close your eyes.”
“If my eyes are closed, how will I see what happens next?”
River blazes red, unbuttons his khakis, starts excavating around down there, first in his pants, then in his underpants. I try to pretend the reason I’m blushing is because I’m laughing so hard.
Finally his hand reemerges from his underwear. “Ta-da!”
“Neat trick.”
“It’s all in the sleight of hand.”
“I can see that.”
“For you.” He holds it out to me gallantly, offering me the key to, well, everything.
“Thank you,” I say. “You carry it.”
So I skip tutoring.
It seems impossible, but it’s true: I have never before followed anyone on a bike. Petra has a car and even when we were little never had a bicycle. “You know how my mother feels about outside,” she always said when I complained. When I ride with Monday, I go first or at least alongside. When I don’t ride with Monday, I ride alone. So it’s all new to me: the way a person’s shoulders and back flex beneath his shirt as he shifts through gears on his handlebars, the way a person’s calf muscles ball like cookie dough and release, ball and release. I have to pedal hard to keep up.
He slows so I can pull alongside him. “Can I ask you a question?” he says.
My heart speeds, and it’s not from exertion. Are you flirting with me just to make me easier to manipulate? Are you being nice to me because you’re using me? Are you tricking me into taking you into my family’s lair so you and your crazy sisters can destroy us?
“How come no one in this town celebrates Halloween?” he says.
It’s November already today. We’re a week closer to the twenty-second and still have no idea what’s coming.
“We used to. When I was little.” It’s hard to shrug when you’re leaning over handlebars. “Maybe people figured we had enough demons around here already. Maybe there were too many ghosts to make dressing up like one seem fun anymore.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” But it shouldn’t, not to him anyway. And probably this is the strangest thing of all: we’re not so strange anymore. He’s getting used to how things are around here. “Kind of a bummer for little kids though.”
I try to shrug again. “It’s too far between occupied houses to trick-or-treat anyway.”
He looks so sad about that—about that—that I change the subject. “So are you just super trustworthy or what?”
“Completely,” he answers at once. “I’m completely trustworthy, Mab. I would never betray you.”
Which is not what I meant.
“Your father,” I clarify. “Your father must trust you. He doesn’t lock his phone. He leaves the key to the plant just lying around.”
“The key’s completely hidden. In fact, the key is under lock and key. A second key I mean. Not the same one. That would be stupid.” He grins. “He didn’t leave it lying around. I sleuthed it out.”
“In two days?” I’m impressed.
“One.”
“One?”
“One day to find it. One day to copy it and put it back so he wouldn’t notice—it’s a good thing Mirabel already told me you have to go to church to get a key copied around here. But it only took dinner to trick him into giving up the clue.”
“Are you a magician or a detective?” I ask.
“Both. The plant has dozens of keys. It’s not like he carries them around in his pocket. But there’s one master, and I needed to know where it was. So I lost mine.”
“Your what?”
“My keys. So then he has to make a big production at dinner about how I’m growing up, and a man keeps track of his things, and a man has responsibilities, and now I’m sixteen years old, and it’s reasonable to expect me to be mature enough to keep track of my own house key, and how can he buy me a car if I keep losing my keys.” All this in a mock-deep voice, looking down his nose at me, poking the air with his index finger like he’s scolding a dog, and riding impressively one-handed. “Then Dad’s all, ‘You should do what I do. Devise a system. My house keys and car keys go on a hook by the front door. I hang them back in their spot the minute I get home, and then when I’m ready to leave again, you know where they are? Right where I left them and right where I need them to be. Smart, right? Remember the garden shed in the backyard in Boston? We kept that key at the backyard door. Work keys? Locked in the bottom drawer of my desk in my office. Get it? Backyard, shed. Work, desk. Simple.’ So then my mom in her super-sarcastic voice finally goes, ‘But where do you keep the key to your desk?’ And he’s all, ‘Behind Uncle Hickory. Of course.’”
“Who’s Uncle Hickory?”
“My great-uncle. Remember that super-big, super-ugly oil painting in my dad’s office? Point is, his tone—like Where does anyone keep a desk key? Behind Uncle Hickory. Duh—shows you exactly what kind of weirdo my father is. And the reason he drives my mother crazy.”
“What if your mom hadn’t asked where he keeps the desk key?”
When he turns his head to look at me, the hood of his sweatshirt blows over his eyes, and he sits upright to pull it back off his face, riding in the sun with no hands, eyes closed, open as a dying tulip. He laughs. “What kind of magician would I be if I couldn’t bust open the lock on a desk?”
“The kind who loses the key in his underpants?”
He beams. “Exactly.”
When we cross the river and pull up at the plant, though, the cockiness fades a little and then a lot. There’s a truck parked out front, an old beat-up Ford pickup.
“Shit. Someone’s here.”
“Would your father be caught dead in a twenty-year-old Ford F-150?”
River laughs nervously. “Not even twenty years ago.”
“Then I think we’re fine.” I’m striding toward the front door like we own the place. In fairness, one of us does.
“Mab, stop. He must have security on already.” River grabs my sleeve. “I didn’t think he would yet, but we’ll have to get in some other way.”
I keep walking. I don’t recognize the pickup, but I’m not worried.
At the door, there is indeed a security guard behind giant mirrored sunglasses, sitting on a desk chair that looks totally out of place outside though I guess a security guard in a lawn chair would be even stranger, and there’s no one here but us so there’s no need to stand. River is still clutching at my sleeve, still begging me to turn back, even though, clearly, we’ve already been seen. I look to see if security has been issued a gun. He has.
“Mab,” he says. “Mr. Templeton.”
“Hey Hobart,” I say. “How’s things?”
“I’m not—” River starts, but Hobart’s answering my question.
“Not bad. Got a job.” He spreads his hands to show me, as if I couldn’t already see, as if I didn’t already know.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. How are you?”
“Fine,” I say. “Same.” Even though that’s less true by the moment.
“Your sisters?”
“Them too.”
“Glad to hear it.” A short pause. “You kids headed in?”
“Yup,” I say.
He turns to River. “Your dad know you’re here?”
“We’ve even got the key,” I assure Hobart and gesture at River to show it to him.
“No need, no need.” Hobart reaches around us and unlocks the front doors, glad to be of service. But on our way inside, he puts a hand on my arm.
“Mab, listen.” I pause and do. “This job? Your mom knows, but she doesn’t know, you know? She doesn’t know I started yet. If she’s upset, would you tell her? I just really, really needed it.”
I was picturing derelict, dusty expanses, nails and washers and stray parts scattered across a stained and cratered floor, cobwebs and mouse shit and broken glass, hulking machinery so out of date even I would recognize it was beyond repair. I was picturing leaking, cracked, and broken because that’s what Apple said. But what I see is shocking, and the longer we look around the more shocking it gets.
There is, at first, no hint of a chemical plant, no hint of a plant of any kind. It looks like an office but an office in a magazine, much nicer than anything we have in Bourne. There’s a lobby with comfortable-looking chairs and sofas surrounding a thick gray rug with splashes of red like uneven sunburn, a coffee table with fans of never-read magazines, a water dispenser with cold and hot and a variety of tea bags and cocoa packets and sweetener choices, a matched set of mugs, a coffee maker. A fireplace. Behind that, offices and conference rooms, some glass-walled so you can see inside, some with the glass frosted so you cannot.
“Wow” is all I can manage.
“That’s what you’re supposed to say,” River tells me grimly. “Come on. This is just the front office. That’s not what you wanted to see.”
It’s not? I have no idea what I wanted to see.
“Let’s find your revolution,” he says.
A series of corridors, all pristine. Shining. A series of rooms, and River’s key opens them all. One holds nothing but office supplies. Another paper towels and tissues and toilet paper. Another is filled with brand-new desks and chairs wrapped in plastic like sandwiches. Another is empty save for maybe a dozen phones trailing cords from the wall and dotting the carpet like weeds.
Finally, behind another nondescript door, row after row after row of filing cabinets, filing cabinets to the moon. This is the room I’ve come for. This is the room Mirabel’s sent me to find. But even if it’s in here, even if I knew exactly what to look for, I’m no closer to Duke’s buried paperwork now than I was at our house. It could be right in this room, inches from my fingertips, but given all the time there is between now and the end of the world, I’d still die in there before I found it.
But River is on to the next door anyway. It opens to a garage like an airplane hangar full of forklifts fitted together like vertebrae, tires full and black as ticks. You can tell just by looking that, unlike the equipment on the torn-up grass outside, these have never been driven. You can tell just by looking they have never even been turned on. The door next to that reveals another enormous garage, this one of demolition equipment—bulldozers, backhoes, dump trucks, excavators—some dirt-caked and mud-splattered, some fresh and untouched and yellow as buttercups. If real backhoes shipped like toy ones, most of these would still be in their original packaging. I realize: This is not a factory that’s been through a war. This is a factory gearing up for one.
At last we reach the floor of the plant, the heart of the beast. We’re up above it on a kind of walkway enclosed in glass, peering down like far-off gods. There’s something very strange about looking out windows and seeing inside. You expect trees when you look out a window. Or, if your view is unlovely, then cars, parking lots, the outside of the house across the way. But to look out a window and see in is dizzying. Also, because we’re so high, the floor so far below, I can’t quite make out what I’m looking at. But slowly it resolves. Vats upon vats upon vats, pipes snaking into their tops, out from their bottoms, crisscrossing in layers of chrome and steel, bending hard at right angles and veering away, plunging into the floor only to re-emerge somewhere farther along, like loons. They are punctuated at intervals even as railroad ties by bolts that rise like nipples from their rounded hulls.
I don’t know if Apple was wrong or lying or being lied to herself, but this place is not a leaky mess in need of repair. This place is perfect, pristine, and ready to go.
I’m having trouble catching my breath.
“You okay?” River looks at me, worried.
I nod. He takes my hand. This does not make it any easier to breathe.
“You’re kind of pale.”
“I’m fine. Really.” He looks unconvinced. “It’s not what I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?”
A fair question. Smaller. Dirtier. Brokener. Less whole.
Less ready.
“It’s so…” I trail off because I cannot tell him any of that, can I? But he seems to get it anyway.
“They hauled so much out of here. You can’t believe the cursing my father does into his phone every day. All new this, all new that, tear out those, get rid of that other thing. They had to fly in some kind of special cleaning crew.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess the stuff that was already here was too old?”
“For what?”
“For whatever they’re going to make next.”
And when I don’t say anything to that, he says, very gently, “What did you think reopening the plant meant?”
I shake my head. I do not know.
He smiles. “Don’t worry. We’ll find what you’re looking for.” He holds out his fists, and I choose one. He opens it, empty, waves it over the other, also empty, and shows me the first again with its prize gleaming in the center of his palm. “After all, we have the key.”
So I lean over and kiss him.
I don’t know why.
It’s terrible. Atrocious. My sisters would scream if they saw. My mother would be dismayed beyond the power of speech. But I can’t think what else to do. Being in here is so overwhelming and strange that what’s steady and safe is actually River. Though he’s new and the plant’s older than I am, comparatively speaking he’s what feels familiar and comforting. Possible.
And even though my mother would label me treasonous right now, I’m here on her quest. She started it. She’s the one who told us to find out what we could from River. Plus, he’s betraying his parents more than I’m betraying mine, and he’s done it for us, for me. Stealing those emails, stealing that key, these are the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me. When I started kissing him, it was just spontaneous, a thing to do, an opportunity—and maybe the only one I’ll ever get—but now it might be something more than that because after I start I don’t stop. It was kind of him to bring me here. It was kind of him to worry about me. It was kind of him to promise me his key. I doubt he did it so I’d kiss him. But I don’t know why he did do it. Or, really, why I am either.
It’s terrible, it is, but also it’s amazing.
First he tastes surprised.
Then he tastes euphoric.
Or maybe it’s not taste but some new sense that’s feeding that information straight into my brain. When he puts his arms around me, I can feel him pressing that key against my lower back. When I put mine around his shoulders, I can feel those muscles that flexed when he changed gears. I can feel his mouth, outside and in, and his breath, bated as mine.
We kiss for a little while which is surprising because when you think about your first kiss, you think of it like a finite thing, measurable, contained, begun in a blink and over just as fast, but this is not contained. This sprawls and wanes, except the waning is actually waiting, the begging of more to come, and then more does come, and that’s all part of it, a small thing that proves to be part of a much larger, growing one. Expanding. Like the universe. But eventually, we part.
When we do, he takes my hand again. “It’s not really a museum, I guess.”
“No,” I agree. Museums preserve the old. This is all new, gravely new. “More like a monument.”
He smiles like I’m making a joke. I’m not. “To what?”
“To what’s to come.”