his hands, its pages sealed together with something sticky that turns out to be honey.
“Lost cities of honey and bone,” he remarks.
“Technically it’s a Harbor, though most Harbors are city-like,” Mirabel clarifies as Zachary returns the unreadable tome to its resting spot. “I remember this courtyard, it was the Heart of this Harbor. They would hang lanterns from the arches during the parties.”
“You remember this?” Zachary asks, looking out over the empty city. No one has been in this place for a very long time.
“I remembered a thousand lifetimes before I could talk,” Mirabel says. “Some have faded with time and most of them seem more like half-forgotten dreams but I recognize places I’ve been before when I’m in them. I suppose it’s like being haunted by your own ghost.”
Zachary watches her as she stares out over the broken buildings. He tries to decide if she looks more or less real here than she did waiting in line for coffee in the middle of Manhattan but he cannot. She looks the same, only bruised and dust-covered and tired. The firelight plays with her hair, pulling it through tones of red and violet and refusing to let it settle on a single color.
“What happened here?” Zachary asks, trying to wrap his thoughts around everything, part of his mind still swirling in a golden ballroom. He prods another book with his toe. It refuses to open, its pages sealed shut.
“The tides came up,” Mirabel says. “That’s how it goes, historically. One Harbor sinks and a new one opens somewhere higher. They change themselves to suit the sea. It never receded before but I suppose even a sea can feel neglected. No one was paying attention anymore so it wandered back to the depths where it came from. Look, you can see where the canals were, there.” She points at a spot where bridges cross over a stretch of nothing.
“But…where’s the sea now?” Zachary asks, wondering how far down the nothing goes.
“It must be farther down. It’s lower than I thought it would be. This is one of the lowest Harbors. I don’t know what we’ll find if we have to go deeper.”
Zachary looks at the book-covered remains of a once-sunken city. He tries to imagine it filled with people and for a moment he can picture it—the streets teeming with people, the lights stretching out into the distance—and then it is a lifeless ruin again.
He was never at the beginning of this story. This story is much, much older than he is.
“I lived three lifetimes in this Harbor,” Mirabel says. “In the first I died when I was nine. All I wanted was to go to the parties to see the dancing but my parents told me I had to wait until I was ten and then I never got to be ten, not in that life. The following lifetime I reached seventy-eight and I did more than my share of dancing but I was always going to be mortal until I was conceived outside of time. People who believed in the old myths tried to construct a place for that to happen. They attempted it in Harbor after Harbor. They passed down theories and advice to their successors. They toiled down here and on the surface and they had a lot of names over the years even as their numbers dwindled. Most recently they were named after my grandmother.”
“The Keating Foundation,” Zachary guesses. Mirabel nods.
“Most of them died before I could thank them. And in all that time no one ever considered what would happen afterward. No one thought about consequences or repercussions.”
Mirabel picks up the sword from where it rests on the ground. She gives it a practiced twirl. In her hands it appears featherlight. She continues to spin it as she speaks.
“I—well, a previous me—smuggled this out of a museum concealed down the back of a very uncomfortable gown. It was before metal detectors and guards don’t check down the backs of ladies’ gowns as a general rule. Thank you for returning the book, it had been lost for a very long time.”
“Is that what we’re doing here?” Zachary asks. “Returning lost things?”
“I told you, we’re rescuing your boyfriend. Again.”
“Why do I feel like that’s not—wait,” Zachary says. “You’d seen the painting.”
“Of course I had. I’ve spent a lot of time in a bed that faces it. It’s one of Allegra’s best. I did a charcoal study of it once but I could never get your face