The Children(54)

This is what the Architect was after all along. Once she’s alone, Guinevere is caught and taken to that most mysterious and unreachable place: the tower at the top of the Architect’s tree. Suspended above the branches, a circular room lined in glass.

There, she has nothing to do all day but look through the Architect’s telescope. It can be used to see anything, see through anything, to look into the undercity and right down to the bottom of the sea. The more skilled she becomes in its use, the Architect tells her, the more she’ll see.

Of course she’s scared at first. Of course she longs for her brother. But fear and love are the first things to go. Then her brother’s name. Then her own. There’s just so much to look at.

When she’s had her fill she lies down to sleep, and dreams in great vivid tangles of all she’s witnessed. And so the Architect can use and use her, as a sort of dream battery. A conduit through which the City is remade, its streets populating with ever-stranger structures. She’s not quite a Hollow. She’s not entirely Guinevere, either.

This is where Edith Sharpe left her imaginary children: daughter in peril, son stuck in the resin of the ordinary world. Surely the siblings would have been reunited in the end, all their sorrows resolved with a bold rescue mission and tears of relief.

But Edith died. Book six stayed unwritten, the children were left forever in flux. Guinevere at the mercy of the merciless Architect, that cool-eyed vulture in a fashionable suit.

Edith’s readers believed her Ninth City counterpart was the children’s mother. Artistic, warm, a little flighty. Rarely seen and left unnamed. But she was never that benign fictional parent, with her funny jewelry and croissant crumbs, her mouth leaving careless lipstick hearts on the children’s foreheads.

She was always the Architect.





Thirty

Three days until Mother




Guin woke to high sun, a smell of burnt paper, and two texts from her fiancé.

Sorry I missed your call. I was asleep.

I want to see you tonight. Dinner?



It was so humorless, so un-Hank-like, she almost called. But if she did, she’d have to talk.

It’s not like she didn’t know what was wrong. After she sent that old Llewellyn clip, he’d hurried over thinking it was finally happening. At last she would share with him the thing she’d been withholding, whatever it might be. No baggage too heavy for Hank.

He would hold her as she wept therapeutically, brushing her hair back until the sun came up. Then she’d rise from his arms and pick a wedding venue. Book a therapist. Make a lunch date with his mom, allow her to do what she’d been palpably aching to do since Hank started bringing Guin around: mother her.

“Yech,” she said under her breath. She loved Hank. She really did like Patty. But no.

Yes please, she typed. I’ll come to you. Corner place at 8?

Hank was deeply loyal to the weird diner a block from his apartment. The service was terrible, they were always out of half the menu, and it was absolutely a front for something shady. Consenting to eat there was an explicit apology. She waited, thumbs tensed, to see whether it was accepted. Hank replied,

Ok

Oof. She typed, Great, can’t wait to see you! xox. After deleting the exclamation point and the xox, she hit send.

Hank typed. The dots did their mocking little dance, then stopped. With a reluctance she could sense a borough away, he hearted her text.

Oh, Hank. He was actually mad. Enough that he didn’t want to reply, not quite so much that he could leave her hanging. He was a better man than she deserved.

Leaving that segment of her fraying life half sorted, she headed out to meet Nisha Dey.



* * *




The sidewalk tables in front of the coffee shop were packed with neighborhood types. Palming empty cups laced with doilies of latte foam, talking about their site-specific artwork, their deadbeat roommates, their trips to Spain. Guin scanned their faces. No one looked like the photos she’d found of Nisha. She went inside for a coffee, and when she came back out the girl was sitting at the end of a table.

She wore a tank top and dark gold Carhartt overalls. Her hair was bleached at the tips, piled onto her head like a bouquet of black-stemmed flowers. On the table in front of her was a face-down phone and a massive mint-colored Stanley.

Guin raised a hand. “Nisha?”

The girl gave a wary nod and kept right on studying Guin’s face. When Guin was seated across from her, she said, “Guinevere Sharpe.”

Guin recognized the intonation, and let her shoulders drop. “You’re a Ninth City kid.”

“I mean.” Nisha leaned back, arms crossed. “Not so much anymore.”

Guin took it on the chin. “Is that why you agreed to meet with me?”

“Partly. Yes.”

Her regard was unnerving. Guin got the sense of a person who held court at parties, expressing the kind of forceful opinions that made a closed loop. Then Nisha gave a small, reluctant smile and looked very different. “I had your photo in my locker. The one of you and Ennis. I believed in the Ninth City way longer than I should have. I guess, because you and your brother were real, it seemed real, too.”

Guin nodded. The image of Nisha at a college party dissipated, replaced by one in which she had a locker, with the Sharpe children’s faces on its door. When she was younger, softer, not yet one of the last people to see her friend Marla alive.