“Almost there—” Alice scrambled over a whole front of stone cornicing that had fallen off a building onto the street. Gemma scrambled after her, ears buzzing, feet sore from rubble; they had been making their way down California Street for what seemed like hours. What am I doing? Gemma wondered, passing a couple smeared in brick dust and dragging a trunk between them. Suling and Nellie could be anywhere. I should have waited at Taylor Street. Why am I here? The shock of the earthquake had dazed her senses so completely, she’d followed Alice’s hastily snapped order without even asking where they were going.
The eerie silence over the city still held, but as they made their way off Nob Hill, Gemma’s initial shamed feeling that she had overreacted to the earthquake disappeared. Here, even the quake-hardened San Franciscans were wandering in complete stupefaction or scrambling in utter panic: distracted mothers tugged hastily dressed children along at a worried clip, dogs trotting behind on makeshift leashes attached to belts, and men hurried past with bundles tied in sheets under one arm. The street was fissured with cracks, and the tidy houses leaned against each other or over the street below like listing drunks.
And everywhere, everywhere, the smell of smoke. No more blue sky to be seen—smoke from the lower Market Street area had blotted out the sun.
“Alice, I need to go back. I can’t just—” But Gemma’s protests were drowned out as someone shouted Miss Eastwood! Alice began to run, Gemma ran after her, and then there it was, the looming bulk of the California Academy of Sciences. Two of Alice’s subordinates ran up, dust grimed and panting.
“—Museum locked—” a frazzled brunette Alice addressed as Emily groaned. “Seth couldn’t find anyone with keys—”
“—vestibule door blocked by wreckage—” That was Seth, a wild-eyed young man in waistcoat and shirtsleeves.
“—but I looked through a crack, Miss Eastwood, and I saw sky. The roof is gone, it is just gone—”
“We’ll try the bridge on the sixth floor of the Commercial Building,” Alice soothed. “It leads to the scientific quarters—” And she drew them off like panicked ducklings. Gemma ventured around the building to Jessie Street at the rear, hearing a roar and wondering if another quake was coming—but this wasn’t the sound of ripping bricks and mortar. It was the rush of fire.
Now she could finally see the flames putting out all that smoke. Red-orange tendrils were creeping their way up Mission, crawling like ivy. Men with hoses and smoke-grimed faces stood on the roof of the United States Mint, spraying down flaming lengths of timber as they dropped, but over everything was the greedy roar of fire.
And Gemma felt her scalp shrink as every nerve in her body shrieked Run.
A balding man in an incongruously neat morning suit rushed past, and she seized his arm before he could disappear into the chaos around the Academy. “Where are the fire engines?” Gemma demanded, her earlier daze now utterly burned away. “The firemen? This city is supposed to have the best fire department in—”
“Quake broke most of the water mains,” the man said brusquely. “They’re hooking their hoses up, but there’s no water flow to be had anywhere.”
“But the men on the Mint over there—”
“Mint’s got an artesian well under the building. Rest of the city isn’t so lucky.”
“This city is surrounded by water and you’re saying there isn’t any way to douse the fires?” Gemma heard her voice scaling up. “Doesn’t that seem like just the tiniest design flaw?”
“Take it to the mayor, ma’am.” He jerked out of her grip. “If you can dig him out. The entire dome of City Hall came crashing down.”
He hurried off around the corner back toward Market as Gemma ran behind calling “Wait—” and there was Alice again, covered in brick dust, still trailing the white-faced Emily and Seth.
“Bridge on the sixth floor collapsed,” she said calmly, “but I ran into the Academy director and he stopped having hysterics long enough to give me the keys.”
“Miss Eastwood, you mugged the keys off him,” Emily objected.
Alice waved a hand, heading for the vestibule with a clanking key ring. “We need to get out of here,” Gemma said, panic racketing through her veins now, the urge to go, go, go, anywhere that wasn’t here. “All of us—” But Alice was already kicking rubble out of her way, jamming a key in the lock, and throwing the weight of her body against the museum door. “Alice—” Gemma yelled, but the damned woman heaved the door open with one shoulder and vanished into the museum without a backward glance.
The massive staircase inside was shattered, chunks of marble littering the floor like fallen gods. Piles of timber, planks, shingles—the roof overhead was gone, a vast jagged hole showing smoky sky above. The huge stuffed head of a horned mastodon sagged drunkenly on one wall. “The collections,” Emily whispered, her gaze traveling in agony up the listing, ruined museum. “Can anything be saved?”
“We’re about to see,” said Alice, hands on hips, gazing up at the smashed, sagging staircase.
“Alice, that is a death trap,” Gemma began. The open staircase climbed up and around the atrium for more than six floors, the steps mostly crumbled away down to the framework. There was no way on earth to walk or crawl up those stairs.
“Yes, but the banisters look sturdy,” Alice said reasonably. “Solid bronze. And look at the space between the banister posts, that’s wide enough for a woman’s feet. If I go up that way, on the outside of the stairs—”
Gemma really did shriek then. “Are you completely insane?”
“I am not letting my life’s work and a legacy of priceless botanical samples burn up and be lost to the world of science forever just because this city has unstable geological foundations and an inadequate water dispersal system.” Alice hung her lunch bag on the mastodon’s listing horn. “Seth, you’ve got feet like boats, you’ll never wedge your boots in those banisters, so head back outside and find my workroom window. Emily, go with him, I’ll need two of you below the window there. Gemma—”
“Don’t bother arguing with Miss Eastwood,” Seth advised, heading out with Emily. “You’ll never win, ma’am.”
“Gemma, I could use your help.” Alice swung herself up onto the outside of the stair railings. Her feet in their walking boots wedged between the metal banister posts, and then she began to step upward along the edge of the stairs, foot by foot. “If you could assist Seth and Emily here on the ground—”
“I’m going back to Taylor Street, you mad-scientist lunatic, and so should you! No one here should be risking their life for plant samples,” Gemma shouted.
“What we risk our lives for is our friends.” Alice paused a moment, hands white-knuckled around the banister. “Lord knows I’ve tried to be your friend, and I was hoping you might consider helping me save my life’s work—work that contributes in some small way to the world of knowledge, which is worth risking life and limb for, even if it isn’t as glamorous as a spotlit stage. But I haven’t really seen you help anyone but yourself, so perhaps I was expecting too much.”
Gemma felt a rush of blood sweep her entire face.
Alice gazed up at the climb ahead of her, clearly already forgetting Gemma. “I really do wish I’d lobbied harder for a workroom that wasn’t on the sixth floor,” she muttered to no one in particular, and began edging upward.
Friends let you down, Gemma remembered telling herself when she first came to Taylor Street, resolving to keep her new neighbors at a distance. The only person a woman can rely on is herself.
But somehow she found herself grabbing the bronze rail and heaving herself up, wedging her foot in the gap between banisters.
“You don’t have to follow me,” Alice said, edging ever higher. “Go help Emily and Seth if you feel like—”
“I don’t want you to fall,” Gemma said, dry-mouthed. “Besides, someone’s got to make sure you get down from there.” And she took the first step up as her skirts swung out over empty space.
Somewhere around the fourth floor, Gemma found herself singing. She didn’t want to look down because if she did she might never move again; she didn’t want to look up because then she’d realize how much farther there was to go and then she’d really never move again. She didn’t want to focus on how her sweating hands were beginning to slip on the bronze railings, or how her feet were cramping inside their boots every time she wedged them between banister spokes—if she did that she might stop breathing, and the best way to keep breathing was to sing, so she sang under her breath.
“Beethoven?” Alice asked from three steps higher, edging steadily along. “‘Prisoners’ Chorus’?”
“Verdi,” Gemma said, hauling herself up another foot, then another. “The ‘Requiem.’ I’ve studied the soprano solo role, though never performed it. Libera me, Domine de morte aeterna—”
“I’ve heard the Mozart Requiem in concert, but never the Verdi,” Alice remarked.
Some chunk of rubble, dislodged by her boot, toppled off the staircase and fell. Gemma couldn’t help counting the seconds until she heard it smash on the floor below. A long way below. She swallowed, and kept singing, the midregister mutter of the soprano’s last-movement lines: “In die illa tremenda, quando coeli movendi sunt et terra—”
“What’s that part from, in the ‘Requiem’?”
“It’s the soprano sort of praying at the very end, after all the fireworks and her big B-flat at the climax. Her voice just hovers above the chorus.” Gemma risked holding on by one hand for a moment, so she could wipe the other on her skirt. Sweat was creeping down her arms inside their sleeves, down her spine inside her shirtwaist, down her legs under her petticoats. “She’s spent the entire movement screaming not to die, screaming for salvation, and now she’s begging. Deliver me, Lord, from eternal death, on that terrible day when the heavens and earth must be moved—”
“Goodness, that’s quite apt.” Alice’s foot slipped as she edged upward, and she jerked downward, barely catching herself on the bronze railing. Gemma’s hand flew out, grabbing Alice’s and steadying it on the rail. If Alice fell, she’d pull Gemma with her; they’d fall together, spiraling around each other until they hit marble below—
But Alice’s grip held, cords in her wrists tightening as her foot found the shattered step again. “Keep singing, Gemma,” she said, as evenly as if she were plucking poppies on a botanical expedition. “Keep singing.”
Gemma couldn’t remember anything but the last verse, so she sang it over and over. “Libera me, Domine de morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda, quando coeli movendi sunt et terra. Libera me. Libera me.”
Save me. Singing it under her breath, as she climbed and climbed and climbed. Save me. Save me.
Until there were no more stairs, and no more breath, and Alice climbed over the railing and collapsed onto the sixth-floor landing. Gemma hauled herself over that last banister and collapsed right on top of Alice’s legs. She felt a sob building in her throat, and then Alice’s hand came down over her shoulder and she reached up to grip it fiercely tight. They lay there a moment, gasping for breath and clutching each other’s palms for dear life, and then Alice gave a final hard squeeze and let her go.
“Come on, then. We’ve got work to do.”
“Steady . . . steady . . . Pay out a bit of slack, I need to swing it wide around this chunk of broken cornice—”
“Libera me from crazed botanists,” Gemma said, as she gritted her teeth and fed out another loop on the cord coiled around her arm. It wasn’t a proper rope, just a mix of binder twine and hoarded string and laundry cord Alice had ordered Gemma to tie together even as she scooped botanical samples out of their shattered cases into a basket. The same basket was being lowered out the window now toward the waiting Seth and Emily.
“Almost there!” Gemma thought she heard distantly from outside, six floors down. It was the first time Gemma had seen Alice’s workroom, and it looked about as wrecked as the Dutchman’s ship at the beginning of Der Fliegende Holländer: glass-doored collectors’ cases lay shattered, brass weights and terrariums and pots of glue had tipped off their shelves and rolled every which way. But Alice looked positively cheery, pouncing on the piles of flat botanical samples glued to their stiffened cards.
“You know, I couldn’t have told you why I was sorting the rarer specimens off on their own, but here they are, all nicely separated out.” She began packing up another box as Seth and Emily frantically emptied the basket once it hit the ground below. “Hand me those alphabetized envelopes from the Harkness fungi case—”
“We should go,” Gemma said, heart thrumming, after the improvised lift had sent several more loads to the ground below. The smell of smoke was strong enough to scrape her throat, working its way through the Academy’s torn-open roof. And Gemma could swear the roar of fire was audible now, over the sounds of the ruined workroom. “We still need to get down from here. That staircase is holding for now, but any minute—”
“One more basket.” Alice’s hands moved with frenzied haste. A rare orchid sample, glued with exquisite care to its card; a new varietal of the golden broom she’d told Gemma was her favorite . . . “Just one.”
“Alice—”
“One more.” A vine sample from the Meeting of the Waters in Brazil; a rare pitcher plant from Madagascar. “Just one more—”
Gemma grabbed Alice’s favorite Zeiss lens, hanging around her neck on a long black ribbon, and used it to yank the botanist up against her till they stood nearly nose to nose. “Alice, enough. Or you’ll die here.”
Alice’s gaze went over her shoulder to the desk, heaped with papers and notes and scientific journals. “My work,” she said, and the blind stubbornness went out of her voice all at once. She sounded small and shaky. “My work.”
“You’re going to live to be a hundred years old,” said Gemma. “You have decades yet to work and make your mark. But only if you get out of here.” And she yanked Alice Eastwood bodily back toward the crumbling stairs, because she was very certain now: that distant roar was fire, and it was coming closer.
The descent was faster—maybe just because Gemma had burned through most of the fear she had in her body to feel. Alice, climbing down the balustrade ahead of her, kept muttering “The Trask collections from the California coastal islands, I didn’t grab anything from there, I could just quickly—”
“No one’s going back,” Gemma kept saying.
“Priceless specimens—and the water bottle woven by the last of the San Nicolas Island tribesmen, I can’t let that be lost—”
“Too late, Alice, just keep moving.” Gemma had no idea how they didn’t plunge off the staircase to their deaths, because her arms were shrieking now with the effort to pull herself along and her hands were sweating again, and Alice was fifteen years older and had to be feeling it even worse, but somehow they were on the ground, boots on marble, and as she hustled Alice through the rubble toward the outside, Gemma swore she’d never live in a house with a staircase again. Keep it all on the ground, thank you very much. No more stairs.
Of course, the octagon house had stairs, and that was exactly where she’d have to go next.
“Is this all?” Alice was crying out just outside the vestibule, now surrounded by museum personnel and Academy staff. “Is this all we’ve managed to save?”
Emily was making an inventory with a pencil stub, brick dust smeared across her cheeks. “The Academy records, six boxes of Lower California insects, two jars of snakes—”
“Jars of snakes?” Gemma erupted. “Why would anyone save those?”
“—one folio of bird illustrations and one of reptile illustrations,” Emily went on.
“Two Guadalupe petrels,” Seth volunteered, toting a stuffed bird under each arm. “And over a thousand botanical samples, Miss Eastwood.” Then, looking at the bins Alice had lowered down from the sixth floor, he said, “Closer to fifteen hundred, maybe.”
“It’s not enough!” Alice made a blind movement as if to go back into the building, but Gemma caught her by the arm. The Fuller Paint plant behind the Academy was billowing flame; sparks were dropping everywhere like malicious fireflies. Across Market Street a block-long line stretched before the bank, desperate people clawing to get at their accounts before the flames consumed everything; a line of soldiers had cordoned off the street. George, Gemma thought in a sudden spasm of panic. George had said he lived south of Market; was he safe? Where was he?
“We won’t even save this much if we can’t move it to safety,” Emily was shouting over the din of the shouting soldiers, the roar of tumbling bricks, the hungry crackle of fire. A confused storm of people moved, then someone managed to flag down an express wagon, all the samples and documents hurled into it. Gemma trudged back and forth until her arms screamed, wanting to scream herself, wishing she could just hurry back to Nob Hill but not daring to leave Alice. The glow of the flying sparks was reflecting in the other woman’s eyes; Gemma didn’t entirely trust her not to rush back into the mouth of the fire and try to save just one more sample, one more plant, one more piece of her life’s work. A soldier tried to tell her she couldn’t cross back over the cordoned-off street for the folio of reptile illustrations, and Alice’s dagger stare sent him stepping backward as if a python had reared up in his path.
“Just take it all back to Taylor Street,” Gemma said once the wagon was loaded, cutting off the argument about where the load of museum samples would be safest. Did academic types ever stop arguing, even in a crisis? Evidently not. “Move it all again if you have to, but let’s just get it all away from here onto high ground. Taylor and Washington,” Gemma told the driver, climbing up into the wagon and perching herself on a box. These fires were still a long way from Nob Hill.
“Three dollars,” said the express wagon driver as Alice climbed up.
“That is highway robbery,” the botanist shouted.
He smirked. “Three dollars.”
Alice threw some silver dollars at him and they were rumbling off. Seth and Emily had climbed into the wagon; the others were all scattering toward safety. Where was safety? Gemma thought. The smoke was now black and billowing, blotting out not just the sun but the whole sky.
“I can’t stay at Taylor Street to get your damned samples unloaded,” she told Alice as the express wagon labored up the cobbled hill. “I need to go back to the octagon house, but—”
“No need for language,” Alice said, marble dust in her hair, cradling one of the stuffed petrels. “And they aren’t damned, they are valuable contributions to the world of—”
“Alice, I’ve risked my neck for you and your plant samples this morning, so don’t you give me any guff.” Gemma fastened a fallen lock of hair out of her face with a jab of a pin. “I have to go back to the octagon house for my things.” She could stay at Taylor Street after that, wait there for word of Suling and Nellie—and make inquiries about George.
“Are you quits with Mr. Thornton, then?”
Gemma didn’t think Alice would normally be so blunt, but it had been something of a trying morning. “He sent my best friend to an insane asylum,” Gemma heard herself saying, ludicrously calm. “So, yes.”
Alice blinked. Seth and Emily were trying not to stare, feigning interest in the stuffed petrels. “Goodness,” Alice said at last, as the express wagon lurched around a corner toward Washington Street. “Why on earth are you risking going back to such a man’s house? Wouldn’t it be wiser to avoid him altogether? If you need to borrow some clothes—”
“I’m going back for my bird.” Gemma found herself near tears, probably long overdue. She was so jangled and tired, so shaky and spent, and this disaster was still unfolding all around them like a hideous fiery rose. “You went into danger for your life’s work, Alice? Well, I’m doing it for my bird. I didn’t dare bring him out of the octagon house this morning because I didn’t know where was safe to go, but now I’m going to bring him to Taylor Street if I have to climb over Henry Thornton’s body to do it.”
Because what else did she actually have? A wardrobe full of dresses that were not hers; a patron and lover she could no longer trust; a best friend still twisting in the wind somewhere, lost in limbo. The only things she could actually call her own were the shredded remnants of her Metropolitan Opera contract and a budgie. And the contract could look after itself, if she could ever rejoin the company, but her poor bird relied on her, and maybe she’d let everyone else down in her life, but she wasn’t leaving Toscanini in Henry Thornton’s house, either to burn if the fires eventually got that far, or to have his neck casually wrung by a footman when Thornton had her things cleared out for a new mistress. “I won’t leave my bird,” she heard herself snarling. “I will not. So I’m going back to the octagon house.”
“I’ll go, too,” said Alice as the wagon lurched its way onto Taylor Street. “May as well save the Queen of the Night.”