Bye, buddy, she thought as she pushed the button, a metal disk the size of her fist. The door to the cremation chamber opened, sending a wave of heat over Sloane’s body. The casket slid into it, and just as Walter had warned, there was a flash of light as it caught on fire. Then the door to the cremation chamber closed, and it was done.
Sloane took the train back from the crematory in her usual disguise: baseball cap pulled down low over her eyes, glasses, a scarf wound around her neck up to her ears. When she had first visited Chicago as a child, the trains had been a marvel, coasting high above the street and glinting in the sun. She still rode them when she could, preferring their potential anonymity to the certainty of being recognized by a ride-share or taxi driver. Today she chose a seat by a window and watched the sun go down behind the towering glass and metal of the Loop.
It was a short walk back to the apartment, but she took the long way around the block. There had been a crowd of reporters and photographers outside their building that morning, and Sloane had elbowed her way through them on her way to the car Matt had called for her, but she didn’t feel like doing that again now. Instead, she walked down the alley, past overstuffed dumpsters, discarded furniture, and narrow garages to their building.
But before she unlocked the gate, she spotted movement in the courtyard beyond the fence, followed by a camera flash. Cursing, Sloane shoved her keys back into her pocket and went to the building next door. It was easy enough to climb on top of the dumpster and hop over the wooden fence into their patch of unmowed grass. She climbed three flights of stairs to the top of the three-flat, then used a nearby broom to nudge open the trapdoor to the roof.
There wasn’t a ladder nearby, but Sloane could do a pull-up in a pinch. She had to stand on a chair—borrowed from someone’s back patio—to reach it, but she managed to climb onto the roof. It was level with her building’s, the gap separating them only three feet wide. Sloane had made the jump before when reporters had gotten a little too gutsy. She ran, leaped, and landed with a stumble on her own roof.
It was all second nature now, finding new exits and new ways to approach a problem. Sloane was a picker of locks and a solver of puzzles. She had defaulted to practical means to get things done even after they could use magic; it just seemed safer, given what had happened the first time she wielded it.
Sloane heard a voice when she opened the back door, a sharp soprano that didn’t sound like Ines or even Esther, who wouldn’t be landing at O’Hare until that evening anyway.
Agent Cho was sitting on the sofa, a cup of tea in her hands. She looked different outside of the geodesic dome, wearing jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, her hair loose around her shoulders. After what had happened, it probably shouldn’t have surprised Sloane that she had turned up, but it did. Neither Henderson nor Cho had ever come to their apartment before.
But then, none of them had died before.
“Hello, Sloane,” Cho said, looking grave.
Matt, sitting across from Cho on the old rocking chair that had belonged to his grandmother, looked up at her like he had only just realized she was there.
“How’d it go?” Matt said. He got up and pressed a kiss to her cheek. The familiar smell of cedar and aftershave washed over her, and she wanted, suddenly, to curl up with him on their bed, to find comfort in the rustling of their clothes coming off—to feel anything except this yawning hole inside her where Albie used to be. But the strict metal of the ring around her finger reminded her that when this funeral was over, she needed to end their engagement. It wouldn’t be fair to Matt to let herself find comfort in him now only to break his heart later.
“It went,” Sloane said. “What’s going on?”
“Eileen came to . . . offer her condolences,” Matt said, settling back into the rocking chair.
“Oh.” Sloane looked at her. Cho’s mouth twitched into a frown that looked less like grief and more like . . .