his bedroom after he died, the pages with his favorite buildings dog-eared. La Sagrada Família had been one of them.
“So this Resurrectionist,” she said. “If I see him—and I assume I’ll know him when I see him—what should I do?”
“What you should do is learn basic defensive maneuvers with your siphon,” Kyros said. “There is a shield that is simple to learn that seems to buy people time when they face him. It keeps him from performing his favorite working.”
“And what’s that?”
“He collapses lungs,” Kyros said, in the same frank way he had told her about the army massacre. “It is difficult to get them to reinflate before a person suffocates, and they are unable to do it themselves since they can’t make noise.”
Sloane suppressed a shudder. “Okay,” she said. “So—shield.”
“Here,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
He put a hand on her elbow and steered her into an alley clogged with cardboard boxes and sacks of trash. She would have protested if she hadn’t been so eager to see the shield. Kyros held his hand out from his shoulder, palm facing Sloane, and whistled between his teeth at a pitch so high she clapped her hands over her ears. Sloane wondered how such a sound was possible until she saw something glint in Kyros’s mouth. A false tooth? A piercing? She couldn’t tell.
Whatever it was, at its whistle, the air appeared thicker, the way it did when gas leaked from a stove. Sloane watched it ripple in front of Kyros with each exhale.
She reached for it, almost unconsciously, the child in her always eager to discover by touch. It felt viscous, silky, like still water.
“It won’t stop him,” Kyros said, his voice muffled by the barrier between them. “But it will delay him.”
“Too bad I’m such shit with siphons,” she said.
“You should endeavor not to be ‘such shit’,” Kyros said, a determined set to his jaw. “Or you put yourself and everyone around you in danger, particularly if you insist on leaving the safety of the Cordus Center unaccompanied.”
“Point taken.” She got the feeling Kyros didn’t like her very much.
Kyros dismissed the shield with a grave look, and they kept walking.
They passed some businesses that looked familiar: bakeries, sandwich shops, pizza places. It wasn’t until she walked past a coffee shop with a blue awning that she realized she was looking for a Starbucks . . . and wasn’t finding one. This place was called Jack’s Magic Beans, and the logo was, of course, the white outline of a beanstalk disappearing into a cloud.
At the intersection of Randolph and State, she realized the Walk signal was not the glowing white man she was used to but rather a piece of metal that flipped over every time the signals changed, displaying a series of layered circles. The Stop image was a solitary circle. She wondered how they were visible at night.
As they approached Michigan Avenue, Sloane tilted her head back and looked for the black building that stood at the bend in Lake Shore Drive, but she couldn’t find it. In its place was a wide glass tower with a hole in the middle—and hovering in the center of the hole, with space on all sides, was a sphere made of the same glass and metal as the rest of the building.
“How . . .” She felt strange, like she wasn’t standing in her own body anymore. “How—”
“Oh, that. I’m not sure how it works,” Kyros said, sounding amused. “Magic, obviously, but I’m unclear on the specifics.”
“It’s not an illusion?”
“No. Would you like to go in?”
Sloane shook her head. No, she did not want to stand in a giant floating glass sphere. She put a hand to her aching temple. Across the street, she spotted something familiar—the Chicago Cultural Center—and walked straight toward it, not even glancing at the Walk signal to make sure her path was clear. It was too much, too fast. She needed to sit, needed to breathe.
Kyros chased her across the street and up the stone steps. The cultural center was old—which, she was realizing, meant that both universes would likely have it in common—a neoclassical building with a row of arches topped by a row of columns, like layers in a cake. But it was the inside that made it one of her favorite places, the domes of Tiffany glass that glowed colorful and beautiful in the morning sun. That and the space’s persistent quiet.
Just inside, she found a bench made of cool marble and sat, putting