“Brr!” Orion shook snow from his hair.

“Freezing,” I agreed. “But you don’t have to feel the cold. Ghost, if you want.”

“No. There are certain advantages to having a body.”

For a second, I could feel it: the chill of delight. Snow tingled on my cheeks. Then I realized that Orion’s black eyes were too bright. “Without lips,” he said, “how could I say goodbye to you?”

I took a step back. Buttoned my coat. Reached for the edge of the opening above me, ready to hoist myself into the predawn sky. “Goodbye.”

His face dimmed, yet he lifted his fingers to my neck and fastened the last button on my collar. “Goodbye. Be back by nightfall?”

I nodded stiffly, then pulled myself up, kicking a snowdrift down onto Orion’s head.

He spluttered. “You’ll pay for that.”

I looked down at him, unsure if he was joking. He reached for the hatch. “By the way,” he said. “You’re welcome.”

The gravestone shut.

For a moment I simply stood in Graceland Cemetery, surrounded by pearly gray light and lacy black trees. Then I walked away.

It should have been easy to thank Orion, but I never had, not once since he’d defended me at the trial. Not when he gave me a tour of the Sanctuary. Not when he showed me how to access the earth’s surface.

I owed Orion. I would have to be very careful around him.

But not today.

It was a Tuesday morning, two weeks since Conn and I were supposed to meet. I had the foolish hope that maybe Conn would show up at the meeting point: 3:23 p.m., at the corner of Michigan and Van Buren. That’s what I’d do, if I were him. I’d go there every Tuesday, same time, same place. So that’s what he should do, if he was smart.

If he thought I was still alive.

If he thought I hadn’t decided to break my deal with the IBI.

As I said, it was a foolish hope.

My boots crunched on the snow. A sheer layer of ice had frozen over it, and I could feel it hold my weight for a fraction of a second, right before it cracked. And over and over, with every step.

It was strange to be so aware of my weight. Of the quiet miracle of gravity. That I had feet and that they touched the ground. But when I opened the cemetery gate, looked back, and saw my footprints in the snow beneath the pink line of the rising sun, I knew that this was how I wanted to be. Cold and heavy and there. A ghosted Shade wouldn’t have left footprints, but I didn’t want to be a ghost. I wanted to be myself.

The gate clanged shut behind me.

I knew where Michigan and Van Buren was. That part wasn’t hard. It was in the Loop, the heart of downtown Chicago, just south of the Art Institute. At least, in my world.

The tricky part was getting there. I was so far north that I’d have to find some kind of ride. I adjusted my wig, letting the long brown curls trail out from underneath the raised hood of my coat, and slipped on the sunglasses. I headed west.

The streets were quiet. There were no buses. A car whizzed down the street, Indy 500 style, and I was sure I’d hear a police siren, but none came.

I searched for the familiar steel frame of the elevated train. The skies were empty.

No buses. No trains. Only a few cars, as far as I could tell. But there had to be public transportation. I just couldn’t see it.

I spotted a few early morning commuters, stepping outside of low houses so flashy it was hard not to stare. My Chicago was gritty, a city born out of steel, railroads, and meatpacking plants. It’s big and brown and gray. But these homes were painted like gingerbread houses with candy-coated roof tiles. Slick pink window frames. Stained-glass windows. Lily would have loved it.

And then there were the people. Dressed in wraparound coats with fur collars, narrow-waisted jackets, long gloves, canes. Everyone. Even my coat, I realized, subtly fit the fashion.

I figured that one of these people had to be heading toward the L, so I followed a man with stovepipe trousers. He briskly turned the corner and dropped down out of view. The sidewalk seemed to have swallowed him up.

Of course. There must be a traditional subway. One tunneled underground, like most city metros.

I strode toward the spot where the man had plunged downward and saw nothing but a rectangular metal plate in the middle of the sidewalk. I tapped it experimentally with one boot, then stood on it.

And screamed.

It plummeted beneath me, hurtling down like an elevator with cut cables. I looked for walls to hold on to, but there weren’t any and it wouldn’t have mattered if there were, because the plate had locked onto my feet with a force that held me completely rigid. I was frozen in place.

The plate slowed, then hovered above a long, metal box. I stopped yelling, and just in time, too, because the top of the box slid back, revealing several people standing in the box’s bright light. My plate dropped through the opening.

I had been deposited directly into a subway car.

There were no seats. Everyone stood against the walls, chatting and ruffling newspapers. It crossed my mind that maybe I should lean against a wall, too, but I wanted to find the map that every civilized society puts in its subway cars.

The car hurtled sideways, flinging me against a wall. The same force that had held me to the plate now sucked my cheek against the metal side of the car. I tried to move. Couldn’t. I was splayed against the wall in a crazy yoga pose. The other passengers stood calmly, having had the good sense to stand in comfortable positions before getting glued to the walls.

The car glided to a stop. I wobbled, suddenly unstuck. The roof slid open. Someone stepped onto a metal plate in the center of the car. He shot through the roof, which then sealed shut.

The car jumped forward, skewed left, and sang with speed.

After several stops, I still couldn’t see a map and didn’t dare ask for help. Finally, after being zipped around and shaken like a fancy Cuban dancer’s maracas, I realized that either I was going to throw up my breakfast of highly caloric water or I had to get off this mad fun-house ride.

I got off at the next stop. I didn’t care where the train spat me out.

It was somewhere along the river. I studied the skyline, searching for a black skyscraper with broad shoulders: the Sears Tower, the tallest building in Chicago. Seeing it would help me figure out where I was.

It wasn’t there. The skyline bristled with buildings that stretched even higher than the Sears Tower, with shapes I recognized from my sketchbook. Thin, elegant curves. They gleamed in the dawn like ice sculptures.

Since I couldn’t have the Sears Tower, along with a fair number of other perfectly reasonable things, I had to be satisfied with the fact that at least the sun told me I was west of the river. The center of this city seemed to be where my Loop was, even if these new skyscrapers had been designed by some fairy tale architect.

I set out to cross the river when my boot touched a brass disk set into the sidewalk. I jerked my foot back. This disk wasn’t a subway plate, though. It was round, much smaller and brighter, and etched with the symbol of a flame. It didn’t seem to do anything. Then I saw another one in the ground, several feet ahead, and another one just after that. It was a trail.

It didn’t lead exactly where I wanted to go, but it was morning, 3:23 p.m. was still many hours away, and even if I had to see Conn, I dreaded it. I dreaded seeing the fine, awful angles of his face again, and eyes that managed to be so clear even when his mouth was full of tricks and lies.

Maddening, to have to work with him. Sickening, that he had fooled me. Impossible, that he was the key to my return home, and my past.

Impossible.

I followed the brass disks. This would be a distraction, something to unknot my nerves. It would also be a weapon. I refused to be so much at Conn McCrea’s mercy, and if there was anything I could do to hold my own against him and not rely so much on the whims of the IBI, it was to learn more about this world.

The disks led to a house that was simple and old, but in pristine condition. I recognized it from my sketchbook, and this alone—that shiver of recognition, with no memory to explain it—drew me closer.

The house was a tourist attraction. Scores of people milled around, talking excitedly. A group of schoolchildren seemed to be on a field trip, and oohed and ahhed as they listened to their teacher, who stood in front of the door. A group of adults gathered in the front yard around a bronze statue of a man raising a torch that burned with a small, living flame. I heard the teacher’s voice rise and fall with authority.

“… Cecil Deacon,” she was saying, “who led the 1871 crusade against the Shades in the Alter where, of course, this house burned down and he tragically died. Hundreds of human lives were lost and the fire left many homeless, making the Alter’s Great Chicago Fire the most traumatic event in the city’s history. Yet it was also ultimately uplifting. We must remember the heroism of Deacon and his followers. They accomplished the unthinkable. They rid their world of Shades.”

“We should do the same,” I heard a man mutter.

“Notice,” the woman continued, “the wooden sidewalks that lead from Deacon’s house. They date back to the early nineteenth century, and very few remain in the city. They are a Chicago Heritage monument, and can be traced back to this house, almost”—she smiled—“almost as if Cecil Deacon is the origin of everything that makes Chicago special.”

So Orion had been telling the truth about the Great Fire. I stared at the woman, shocked that anybody could be so enthusiastic about the deaths of so many people. And maybe I would have spoken up, but I noticed something.

One of the schoolgirls had an extra shadow. It was the vague shape of a person, longer than the schoolgirl’s, and cast by no one. No one, anyway, that I could see.

I went very still.

Who was it? Zephyr?

Maybe Orion.

Or was it someone else?

It was possible that this was a random Shade, doing some random sightseeing on a random day. That dark blur didn’t necessarily have anything to do with me. There was no reason to think I was being followed.

If this sounds like wishful thinking, that’s because it was.

I turned my gaze from the front door and the children gathered in front of it. I pretended to study the sculpture. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shadow glide away from the girl and bury itself in the greater darkness cast by the house itself.

I snapped my gaze from the statue and strode toward the river.

If I really was being watched, I’d find out soon.

It was easy enough to cross the river, though several cars speeding over the bridge nearly mowed me down. Traffic was picking up. Here, cars zoomed everywhere, and when I was several blocks east, getting closer to Lake Michigan and my meeting point with Conn, cars jammed the streets. I pretended to survey the bumper-to-bumper gridlock, then shot a quick glance down the street, in the direction from which I’d come.

A shadow was slinking through traffic. It seeped into the trunk of one car, spilled out the windshield of another. It was about fifteen feet away, but crept closer and closer.

Toward me.

I hurried east, down quaint wooden sidewalks, my feet rattling the planks. I touched the railing, ran fingers over carvings of flowers and flames, grateful for all this newness, this difference, this everything that made it easier to pretend that I hadn’t noticed a shadow dogging my heels.

I had to lose the Shade. I couldn’t be seen with Conn.

Street signs flew past, ones that should have read La Salle and Dearborn and State, but instead said Deacon, Wildfire, and Blaze.

It was when I reached Grant Park (here, 1871 Memorial Park) that I saw my chance: a farmers’ market set up under bare trees. I pushed through the crowd, ignoring the sharp elbows and rude stares that would soon create yet another problem if those eyes got a little beadier and saw that I was a Shade.

I’m human, I’m human. I pressed deeper into the hundreds of people, hoping the shadow would lose me in the crowd. Please believe me.

I shuffled north past stalls of home-baked goods and winter vegetables and slaughtered chickens. Then the row of stalls ended and the crowd thinned.

I ran. Swung around a frozen pond and headed back to the city streets, to Michigan Avenue. Sprinted up the sidewalk, no longer caring who saw me, not even knowing what time it was or what I would do if Conn wasn’t there, and what I would say to the Shade if he—or she—caught me and asked what I was doing and why I was afraid. I couldn’t say, You. You frighten me, because I’m like you.

And then I was at the corner of Michigan and Van Buren. I stood still, panting.

Conn wasn’t there.

Just a row of stately brownstones that didn’t exist in my world.

My chest heaved, cold air stabbing into my lungs.

A door opened.

“Come inside,” Conn called from the town house. “Quickly.”

24

“You’re shaken.” Conn shut the door behind us.

I didn’t look at him. Instead, I cast a glance around the marble entryway, where an empty fountain stood in the center of the hall. Its silence seemed to make a lot of noise.

“Tell me,” he insisted.

“I didn’t think you’d be here.” I tried to steady my breath. “I mean, I thought maybe. Maybe you’d come every Tuesday at the same time. To check.”

“I came every day.” He let his hand rest on the doorknob. “I practically lived here.”

I walked down the hall into a bright white parlor. Conn had to be lying. Everything looked as if it hadn’t been touched for years. Sheets covered the furniture. A fog of dust lay on the mantelpiece.

“It’s not mine,” he said. “This house belongs to the IBI.” He stood behind me, far too close.

I edged away. Tossed my itchy wig on the grand piano, shoved my sunglasses in a coat pocket. I pulled a sheet off the sofa, revealing blue velvet brocade, and curled into its corner. Maybe it was the luxury that calmed me, or the quiet of the house, which felt like it had been quiet a long, long time. I felt suddenly safe, even with Conn there.