took his place.
“Miss Greenwood helped me sleep. I dreamed that I was home, that I woke up there. I dreamed that I went down to the street and smelled the bread baking, and that’s when you started following me. I went to Central Terminal and took the first train into the country. I dreamed it well enough for you to follow me. You’ve been asleep for so long, I think you don’t remember what it feels like to be awake. I’m still asleep. You’re asleep, too. And I’m pretty sure that’s just your accordion in your hand. With your eyes closed, you must have taken the wrong thing off the wall. Still, I wish you’d stop pointing it at me.”
Arthur had grown more agitated while he listened, and his whole body was shaking now. “I don’t believe any of this,” he said.
“I saw you murder Lamech,” Unwin said. “Miss Palsgrave recorded the dream—she knows you killed him, too. Do you think she’ll stay loyal to you after this? Do you think any of your watchers will?”
With a growl Arthur pulled the trigger, and the gun leapt in his hand. The shot shook the bed, shook more leaves out of the trees. It was so loud it woke Unwin and Arthur both.
Unwin sat up and felt his chest—no wound, only wet leaves. He brushed them away and checked his watch: it was just after six o’clock. Back at the Cat & Tonic, the alarm clock he left had woken Enoch Hoffmann.
Woken Sivart, too. The detective was standing beside the bed, hat low over his brow, his gun aimed at the overseer. Arthur looked down at his accordion. He was holding it by the bass strap with the bellows unlatched and dangling, so that the other end nearly touched the ground.
“I don’t know any songs for this,” Arthur said.
Sivart rubbed the back of his neck. “I am so tender. Charlie, couldn’t you at least have given me a pillow?”
Miss Greenwood stepped into the clearing, limping badly on her bad leg. She went to stand next to Sivart. Her exhaustion had developed into something else, something hard and cracked. The look in her shadowed eyes, when she saw Arthur, was full of a strange fire.
Unwin leaned over the edge of the bed and started putting on his shoes.
“Idiots,” Arthur said. “You know what that madman’s doing to my city. To our city. You need me.”
“Like hell,” Sivart said.
“Mr. Unwin, you saw the third archive. What the Agency always needed was an honest-to-goodness record, not just of our work but of the city’s work. Its secrets, its thoughts, its dreams—good and bad. They’re down there in our basement, the whole shebang. It’s only because of Hoffmann that any of it’s necessary. He’ll twist the world out of whack if we don’t keep a watch on things.”
For a moment Unwin found himself wanting to be convinced. It would be safer for everyone, he thought, to keep those records, to make more of them, to document everything they could see, to possess forever the solutions to those mysteries for which each person was treasury, keeper, and key.
But if everything is knowable, then nothing is safe, and the sentinels are unwelcome guests, mere trespassers. Not an antidote to the enemy—only his mirror.
“Hoffmann’s taken care of,” Unwin said. “Screed has him by now.”
Sivart looked furious when he heard that. He came over to Unwin and said, “Ben Screed? That jokester? It isn’t his case, Charlie, never was. You shouldn’t have done that.”
Arthur seemed to have given up on them and was watching Miss Greenwood attentively. He righted his accordion and held it with both hands. “How’s that one go, darling?” he said, running his fingers over the keys. “The one we used to play when it was almost time to go?”
She drew a gun from the pocket of her red raincoat. It was the antique pistol she had taken from Hoffmann’s trophy room. “Almost time to go,” she said.
Arthur filled the bellows and played a few chords. “Wait, wait,” he said. “I’ve almost got it.”
He and the others turned at the sound of another person coming up the path. Something glinted in the shade—a pair of eyeglasses, Emily Doppel’s. She must have followed the sleepwalking overseer, maybe even sat next to him on the train. She had Unwin’s pistol in one hand and her lunch box in the other.
She took a long look at everyone in the clearing. Unwin wondered whether she could have created the same scenario