Survival in the dark had come with a price. A little bit of her mind, a little bit of her soul. All of her ignorance. She would never see the world the same way, now that she knew something like Rime existed. She looked to the soaring condos along the south side of the street, the towers, the stone monolith of the Ritz-Carlton, and wondered what else the city was hiding. How many more monsters were out there, concealed in a crowd of eight million people? How many more killing rooms and makeshift surgeries were hiding behind closed doors?
From now on, she would always wonder. And she would probably never know.
She felt a little better in the green, as they turned along Center Drive and made their way into the park. It was a perfect rectangle of cultivated, groomed nature in the heart of the urban sprawl, two and a half miles long, half a mile wide. Go deep enough and the city would disappear behind the lush trees and rolling hills. A perfect illusion.
And thinking of illusions made her think of magic. Like the magic that kept a skinless man alive. Or what she did to him, the power that flowed from her palms and boiled the air, fueled by her anger and her instinct.
Witch.
All roads led her back to the dark. The one she walked now was bright, paved, and clean, rounding a bend with the Chess and Checkers House dead ahead. The visitor’s center was a stout rotunda of red and beige stone. Outside, rustic wooden timbers cast lines of shade across a row of stone chess tables, flanked by long green benches. There were already players at war and hustlers on the prowl, looking for a fresh challenge. Chess clocks ticking and pieces in motion.
“What do you think?” Tyler asked.
Nell rubbed her chin. She took a long, slow look across the green.
“It’s some kind of a dead drop,” Nell said. “If I’m understanding the message, this wasn’t their emergency rendezvous point. This was the place the Culpers would go to find out where the new emergency rendezvous is, if they got compromised and had to burn everything down.”
“We’re looking for an address,” Tyler said. “Could be chalked on a wall somewhere, hidden on a slip of paper under a rock…needle in a haystack.”
Nell lowered her hands, resting them on her hips.
“Then let’s start sifting. The answer is here somewhere. We’ll split up. Be careful and watch your backs. Give a shout if you notice anything weird.”
Or anyone weird, Seelie thought, eyeing the players. Rime was a perfect mimic who could wear any face he wanted. He just had to slice it off first.
No one gave her a second glance, though, as she made her way around the bend of the rotunda. Her fine-tuned creeper sense stayed quiet. She studied the bricks, hunting for anything out of the ordinary: a word, a symbol. She considered an iron trash can in passing and hoped that wasn’t the drop. Definitely the last place on her search list.
She put herself in the Culpers’ shoes. They were being hunted, and from the context of their messages, they knew who Dieter Rime was and what he was capable of. The dead drop would have to be a place their agents could access quickly, but subtly. A place where they could blend in, get the address, and fade away fast, in case the opposition was staking out the park.
That brought her around again, full circle, to the chess tables. People came and went all day long. The perfect spot to sit for a few minutes and read a hidden message or conceal some deft deceptions under the cover of playing a game. She wandered over to the empty table at the far end and crouched low, checking beneath the sculpted stone. A slip of paper, or an envelope maybe, taped to the underbelly. All she found was a piece of petrified gum.
She crouch-walked to the next table. Then the next. This one had a couple of players in midgame. One, an old man with tired eyes, gave her a curious look.
“City table inspector. Manhattan Bureau of Chess Table Regulation.” She snapped a salute. “All is well here. Carry on.”
This wasn’t working. She faded back. Her hunch was wrong, but she still couldn’t shake it. She gave the tables one last look, clinging to her intuition.
One of the tables, second from the last, wasn’t quite right. She