and let people know that we’re going to be good neighbors.”
In other words, they were expecting bad press and wanted a team of cheerleaders to get out ahead of it. Nell had never met a PR flack who had the time or the patience to do a deep dive on a potential puff-piece reporter. They could tell with a quick skim of her bogus website that “Liz Bisland” was bubbly, relentlessly positive, and could be relied upon to show their company in the best light possible. That was exactly the kind of “journalist” they needed right now.
There’s a bait for every fish, she thought.
“Well, I’m honored to do my part.”
“Let’s see,” he said. A keyboard rattled in the background. “I can get you…fifteen minutes with our director of new technologies this afternoon, at…two forty-five? She also has a half-hour block open next Tuesday morning, that’s this coming Tuesday. Alternately, we’re doing a press event on the sixteenth, that’s a Friday, at seven p.m., and I have a few spots left on the guest list. That’s a guided tour and presentation, but there’ll be plenty of time for questions afterward.”
She pretended to think about it, clamping down on her excitement.
“I think I can shuffle some appointments around and take that 2:45,” she said.
He sighed with gratitude, the happiness of a man whose main responsibility was playing Tetris with executives’ schedules.
“Awesome,” he said. “I’ve got you penciled in, and we’ll see you this afternoon.”
“I’ll be there with bells on,” Nell told him.
22.
Remnants of her dream chased Seelie into the waking streets of the city. Manhattan wore its revolutionary heritage with pride; you could see it in the vintage brownstone mansions, in the old countinghouses and taverns that now played host to gastropubs and tech companies. Down in the Financial District, in a tight warren of one-way streets where Manhattan’s orderly grid turned to tangled chaos, Federal Hall was a Greek temple standing in the shadow of towering skyscrapers.
Everywhere she turned, she saw the ghosts of old New York. She stood in the heart of the founding fathers’ city—its bones hallowed ivory and stone, its rib cage made of stern Ionic columns—and witnessed the wonders that blossomed from its corpse. Chrome and granite towers like hothouse flowers, rising up toward the summer sun.
Everything real, everything true, grew from the foundations of the past. She was no different, she supposed.
She couldn’t let her nighttime vision go, or maybe it was the other way around. She chewed at it while she walked. Most of it was simple dream stuff, as substantial as a forkful of cake before bed. Between Arthur’s revolutionary obsession sticking in her mind and her near-death experience, of course she imagined the missionary dressed like one of the Sons of Liberty. If Arthur had been a NASA buff, she would have seen his killer in a spacesuit.
But then there was Patience. Seelie still pictured the girl in her mind’s eye, clear as a photograph. All the figments in Seelie’s dreams had faces and voices snatched from her waking life…but not Patience. Not that she could remember.
The mystery would keep. She had a job to do. A job she was underdressed for, but she’d have to make it work. Seelie’s usual outfit was some combination of jeans and a T-shirt; that was a consequence of living out of a backpack, relying on a wardrobe that folded tight and traveled easy. She owned a single dress. It was light and breezy, black with white polka dots, just this side of rockabilly, and she’d picked it up at a thrift store for four bucks. The name on the tag belonged to a fashion house that had gone under in the eighties. It fit perfectly, which was why she rarely wore it. She wasn’t sure if she could find another like it, and she wanted to make it last.
All she had to pair it with were her sneakers. With space at a premium, she couldn’t afford to carry a change of shoes around in her pack. She caught her reflection in a plate-glass window and brushed at her bangs, letting them dangle carefully unkempt above the frames of her glasses. She definitely looked more like an art-school student than a cog in the corporate machine, riding the decidedly casual end of business casual, but she figured she could fake it.
Seelie stood at the corner, facing a wall of slug-slow traffic, and waited for the light to change. She gazed up at her final destination. It was