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 right.”
“That’s why you wanted us both down here. Because we’re in the painting.”
“Well…” Mirabel starts but then she gives him a half shrug that suggests he might be correct.
“That’s not fate, that’s…art history,” Zachary protests.
“Who said anything about fate?” Mirabel says but she smiles as she says it, the glamorous old-movie-star smile that looks frightening in the firelight.
“Aren’t you…” Zachary pauses because Aren’t you Fate? sounds like too absurd a question to ask even when casually discussing past lives and despite the fact that he already almost believes that the woman in front of him is somehow, crazily, Fate. He stares at her. She looks like a regular person. Or maybe she’s like her painted doors: an imitation so precise as to fool the eye. The shifting firelight falls on different pieces of her, allowing the rest to disappear into shadow. She looks at him with dark, unblinking eyes and smudged mascara and he doesn’t know what to think anymore. Or what to ask.
“What are you?” Zachary settles on and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
Mirabel’s smile vanishes. She takes a step toward him, standing too close. Something changes in her face, as though she were wearing an invisible mask that has been removed, a personality conjured from pink hair and snark as false as a tail and a crown from a faraway party. Zachary tries to remember if he has ever felt the same nameless ancient presence from her that he felt with the Keeper and somehow he knows it was always there and that the vanished smile is older than the oldest of movie stars. She leans in close enough to kiss him and her voice is low and calm when she speaks.
“I’m a lot of things, Ezra. But I am not the reason you didn’t open that door.”
“What?” Zachary asks even though he is certain he already knows what she means.
“It is your own damned fault that you didn’t open that door when you were however old, no one else’s,” Mirabel tells him. “Not mine and not whoever painted over it, either. Yours. You decided not to open it. So don’t stand there and invent mythology that allows you to blame me for your problems. I have my own.”
“We’re not here to find Dorian, we’re here to find Simon, aren’t we?” Zachary asks. “He’s the last thing lost in time.”
“You’re here because I need you to do something that I can’t,” Mirabel corrects him. She shoves the sword at him, hilt upward, forcing him to take it. It’s even heavier than he remembers. “And you’re here because you followed me, you didn’t have to.”
“I didn’t have to?”