Mother had gone home with a mechanical device for chopping tree roots out of drainage pipes and left her offspring to their mission. Arabella should have been getting home herself, to prepare for her going-away party, but instead she persuaded her mother that Andrew couldn’t handle finding Father an appropriate birthday present on his own. Mother had agreed, though reluctantly. As her children had reached their mid-teens, she had begun to feel that each was safer out alone than when they were together.

“I think the lighting section is up here,” Arabella said.

“Will they have something appropriate?” Andrew dragged behind as they climbed the stairs to the store’s upper departments. “They’re kind of staid here, you know. Father never shops here when it’s his choice.”

“We should at least look,” Arabella said.

“I was thinking something kind of technical.” Andrew, annoyed at not coming up with the idea, tried to make up for it by over-specifying the gift itself. “Brass, gimbaled, and with a Fresnel lens. I mean, it should look good even when it’s not on, right? It should look serious.”
She let him prattle. Despite the skylight, Father’s study had a lot of oddly dark corners. He sometimes complained when some old map or fossil was too hard to examine where it was, and had to be hauled over to the big display desk. A well-made task lamp was just the thing.

She could think of him using it while she was away.

But when they got up there, they found the lighting section in darkness, its shelves empty and cordoned off. Arabella stumbled over a length of dropped conduit, and Andrew steadied her by the elbow. She shook his hand off.

“Did you know it was closed before we came up here?” she said.

“No! Really, Arabella. The light is a great idea. But if we can’t do it here . . .” He looked further up the stairs. “There’s something else we can do.”

He’d known the lighting section was closed, but had wanted her to get so interested in buying Father a light that she would go along with whatever ridiculous plan he’d come up with. It was a constant battle, what came from being born within fifteen minutes of someone else but still being completely different from him.

“What else?” she said.

“You’ll see. Up, up.”

She would have liked to refuse, just to bug him. But she didn’t want to think about Father squinting to get his work done, maybe resenting her for having left him in the dark, after she was gone.

So she followed Andrew up the stairs. They grew narrower, the displays less elaborate. She caught glimpses of wire bailers and displays of burlap swatches. The windows that lit the stairs were thick with dust, with dead flies on their sills. The light that made it through was a heavy yellow, as if she was nostalgically remembering this climb even as they were making it.

She felt the rumble of heavy wheels above. Their constant vibration had cracked the plaster walls.

“Is that still running?” Pretending ignorance was a cheap way to annoy Andrew, but it was all she could come up with quickly.

“This is the last day for the lines! You mean you didn’t—”

“Then we better hurry.” Arabella was running up the stairs on “hurry,” and it took him a second to catch on. Then he was pounding after her. Andrew was big, and kind of clumsy, thickly blond to Arabella’s whiplike darkness. But he was surprisingly fast. She needed every second of her head start. They hit the last door together and, each claiming victory, tumbled into the telpher station on the department store’s roof.

The tongue-and-groove walls had been painted over many times, by ever cheaper and thicker paints. Arabella could see traces of pink, blue, and chartreuse peeking through the gun-metal gray. Most of the decorative tiles had fallen off the double barrel vault overhead, leaving white dots of cement.

The ticket kiosk still had its brass cage and its fancy cupola, and the safety barrier still looked like an altar rail, though most of the wooden icicles between the balusters had been kicked out. A notice of the telpher station’s closing had fallen from the kiosk and lay on the floor, marked with dark footprints.

Overhead, a horizontal metal wheel rotated slowly. It pulled a cable in, and then fed it back out, like a pulley. These moving telpher cables crisscrossed the city, pulling light wooden cars filled with passengers from rooftop to rooftop. The car they were waiting for would be coming from the office building there, where there was another telpher station. The moving transport cables dipped down, then rose back up toward it, each matched with a heavy static cable to support the weight of the car, making four in all.
And there was the incoming car as it swung out from the office building station and dropped down on its pair of cables. The overhead wheel that pulled its cable gave an occasional low groan from its poorly lubricated bearings. The car dropped to its lowest point, then started climbing back up to them, like a spider making its way across its web. The arm it hung from curved up and over the cables and rested on them like curled fingers, its support wheels running on the static cable while its grip held the transport cable and pulled it along.

Then it was suddenly there. The cable grip squealed as the telpherman released the inbound moving cable. The car bumped past the wheel into the station. Its support wheels rolled off the static support cable onto the thicker rail in the station. It hung there while its doors flipped open and passengers got on and off, Arabella and Andrew among them.

The telpherman, a young man with dark hair, sat behind and above his passengers. It was his last day on the job, but he showed no signs of sadness, peering down at the passengers as he always did, to make sure no one would get trapped by a door and yanked into the sky on the outside of the car. For a moment, he looked familiar to Arabella, though a further glance at him didn’t bring the memory into focus. She followed Andrew onto the wooden slats of the passenger bench.

Once everyone was safely in, the doors closed, and he released the brake, letting the car slide down the inclined rail and bump past the next return wheel so that he could grab on to the next transport cable with his grip. With a silent swiftness, they were pulled out of the station. Autumn sunlight filled the car.

They crossed above a wide street crowded with streetcars and pedestrians. They brushed past a cupola and caught a glimpse of a private office, filled with dress forms and mannequins, and the back of a man’s bald head as he knelt to pin a hem. The cupola was surrounded by caryatids, arms up as if expressing astonishment, not supporting the green copper roof. They wore brassieres over their Greek chitons: a display of this year’s models. Andrew had his face pressed to the glass.

“They’ll probably stop putting those up when the telpher stops running,” Arabella said. “Who’ll see them?”

“It’s a crime,” he muttered.

Arabella glanced over her shoulder at the telpherman. Dark eyes too, and a strong jaw. Maybe the telpher lines hired for a look, and she’d just seen people who looked like him before.

“Why are the telpher lines getting closed down, anyway?” she said.

“Too fun.” Andrew sighed. “Gets us to too many places someone prefers to keep people out of. Subversive of public peace. Who knows? Like always, they say it’s money. Cost. That’s how they explain any decision they’ve already made.”

The line lifted and came into a larger station with glass canopies and elaborate wrought-iron work. Unlike the simple return wheels of the department store station, these wheels were powered drive wheels, and the vibration of the engine could be felt as soon as they stopped.

At a gesture from Andrew they stepped out. From here the department store they had left was a vague gray bulk on the other side of the main shopping district. The advertising banners on its side, fluttering in the breeze, were unreadable.
This was some kind of terminal stop, because everyone got out. The car rattled onto a switch, released on moving transport cable, rolled a few feet down a support rail, grabbed on to another cable, and, empty, zipped off in some secret direction, along with its driver.

“All right,” Arabella said. “What’s here?”

“Lights,” Andrew said. “Lots of other stuff too. We should be able to find the perfect thing.”

* * *

The store should have been quiet and organized, but instead it was in chaos, with cabinets open and their contents strewn about. Several people sat on the floor, crumpling sheets of newspaper and stuffing them into boxes.

A young woman with a long skirt, and her hair tucked under a kerchief to keep the dust off, shrugged at Andrew’s question. “We packed those things up . . . when? Greg?” Someone answered, though Arabella couldn’t hear the words. “A week ago. Fragile. We couldn’t wait.”

“But why, Jill?” Andrew said. “Why are you leaving here?”

“When the lines go down, where are our customers going to come from? There’s a freight elevator way down the hall, but it’s a hike just from there. We have to move. Don’t worry, we’ll tell all our loyal customers where we went. We’ll have a big party. Tell you what, I’ll put those lights on sale for you.”

“But that will be too late.” Andrew was in despair.

“Take a look around. Maybe something else will catch your fancy. Now, if you’ll excuse me. . . .” Arabella expected her to deal with some packing crisis, but instead Jill paused, head cocked, listening for something, before moving off. Arabella got the impression Andrew was used to getting more attention from this woman. He sometimes came home with battered ancient objects. Now she knew where at least some of them had come from.

Andrew stood, at a loss.

“If there’s nothing here, there’s nothing here,” Arabella said.

“You’re in a hurry to get home.” Andrew sounded resentful. “Planning your party. There’s a lot to do.”

Arabella did, in fact, have a lot to do. She was nowhere near as up on her packing as she should have been. The busy efficiency of this store put her to shame. This Jill could probably have everything in Arabella’s room done in under fifteen minutes.
But she was desperate not to get back. Her train to the mountains left early the next morning. She couldn’t alter that, but she could make sure she didn’t waste the short time she had left here in the city that was the only home she knew. The quick failure of Andrew’s plan was a real disappointment, because it meant that their house was the only place left to go.

“Isn’t there anywhere else we can go?” she said. “Anyplace else with a light for sale?”

Andrew shook his head.

“Hey, Andrew!” It was Jill, holding something wrapped in a sheet of old newsprint. “I found this buried in back, under some fossils. If you want it, you can have it.”

She unrolled the newspaper to reveal a dark metallic cylinder, maybe a foot long and a couple of inches in diameter. It could have been a club, or the handle to a tool, though it looked too fragile to be either.

From his face, Arabella could see that Andrew was wondering whether to pretend he knew what it was.

Jill saved him the trouble. “An arc-light electrode. A rare one, too—magnetite-titanium. I have no idea where it even came from.”

“But . . . there must be a lot more to an arc light. Where’s the rest?”

“No idea! If you want it, take it. I’ve given you all the information I have on it. Examine everything about it carefully, and you might learn something.” Jill paused again. This time she did hear something, some change in the thumping and vibration of the telpher station overhead. “Otherwise dump it near the back door. Just come to the new store when you can and make a real purchase.”

This time she moved with quick purpose, to the stairs and out of the store.

Arabella now saw that the newspaper held a full-page engraving, something with the shattered beams of something collapsed and people fighting on the ruins. Andrew wrapped the cylinder back up before she could get a better look. What else could he do but keep it?

He looked around. “There must be something else we could pick up. . . .”

“No, Andrew.”

They were only fifteen minutes apart in age—their parents had never revealed which of them had emerged first—but he knew when to accept her authority.

Up on the platform that same dark-haired telpherman, his boots gleaming, had hauled out an older car, lacquered a dignified red. It hung from the support rail as he fussed with its grip. It looked enticing, but this car was heading on, away from the department store and home. There was a lot to do at home, and Arabella was desperate to avoid all of it.

Arabella could see that Jill had been listening for just this car. She stood in the sun at the edge of the platform, picking tiny pieces of parchment and rotted leather from her jacket. She’d pulled her kerchief off, to reveal light brown hair, held in two thick braids pinned around her head.

“Departing in five minutes!” the telpherman called. Passengers who had gotten up from their seats on the platform settled themselves back. Even in its heyday, patience and a willingness to accept the unexpected had been a requirement of telpher passengers.
The telpherman jumped energetically off his car and strode over to Jill. They leaned on the railing next to each other, looking out over the cityscape. It was too far to hear anything, and there was really no way to get closer without being obvious, so Arabella found a way to distract herself.

“Let me see that electrode.”

“It won’t look any different.”

“Just let me see it.”

With ill grace, Andrew handed it to her, and she unwrapped it. She wasn’t interested in the electrode, but in the newspaper engraving that Andrew had so cavalierly ignored. She thought Jill had been quite clear that there was more information to be found there. Andrew might have known Jill better, but Arabella was sure she understood her better.

The engraving on the sheet showed a collapsed telpher station, shrouded in mist. You could see iron wheels and snapped cables. Above it loomed a wall made of heavy stone blocks. The artist had lavished a lot of attention on every shattered board and twisted piece of metal.

“The Fall of Carcery Station,” was the title.

Around the picture of the collapsed station were five little scenes, in ovals:

A scene of the same station in darkness, with men in evening wear fighting on it, their shadows black and sharp-cast behind them by some great light.

A telpher drive wheel and steam engine wreathed in smoke and steam.

A party or ballroom with a lot of elegantly dressed people standing and looking out of a window at something, their shadows also black and long, though not as crisp as those of the others fighting on the struts.

A bearded man falling back in the mist that often swirled in low-lying Carcery Square, one arm outstretched, the other on his forehead as a strut or a bar fell from somewhere above.

And at the top, an elegantly dressed young woman operating a large searchlight, pulling back on it hard, one foot up on its high heel.

* * *

The engraving was beautiful. But why was that woman with the light wearing a ball gown? It seemed an inappropriate outfit for what looked like hard work.

“Is this your light, here?” Arabella pointed to the young woman.

“What? Where?” Andrew turned his attention to the sheet. Then he spent quite a few minutes looking at it, grunting to himself, so Arabella glanced over at Jill and the telpherman.

Jill sat on a bench, arms crossed. The telpherman had vanished.

But where had he gone? He certainly hadn’t come back by them, and his car still hung locked to the overhead rail, while the increasingly impatient passengers paced back and forth.

Jill looked up as the telpherman clambered down from above, holding a bucket. Bird feathers stuck to his jacket, and a couple floated to the ground. She looked like she’d like to brush a few more off, but instead glanced into the bucket and then turned away, irritated by what she saw there.

“This must be from the night it happened!” Andrew gestured with the electrode, and a vagrant puff of breeze blew the newspaper off his lap.

It skittered toward the railing. But the telpherman, quick and lithe, was on it in an instant. He folded it carefully and handed it, not to Andrew, who stood with the electrode nervously in his hand, but to Arabella, with a slight bow. He had a lively face, with surprised eyebrows and warm brown eyes.

She really thought she had seen him somewhere before.

“Where are you two headed?” he said. “Some of the lines are coming down. You should be careful what you try to get to.”

“Back where we came from, I suppose,” Arabella said. “We were looking for a desk light here, as a gift. Something unusual. But they’ve packed them up.”

“The Balloon Market. You’ve probably heard of it. That’s the place to go for anything unusual.” He glanced over Arabella’s shoulder.

“Time for me to get back.” Jill held her pocket watch in her fist like a weapon. “I have a store to pack up. As they say, best of luck in your future endeavors.” She slowed just a bit as she got to the stairs, but the telpherman just shrugged.

“This next car goes right past the Balloon Market,” he told Arabella. “But you’ll have to hurry if you want a seat.”
With a couple of steps, he was back up on the back of the telpher car.

“Huh,” Andrew said. “Carcery Station, what this engraving shows, is right across the square from the Balloon Market. Father told me the story, how the station came down, when I first got interested in telpher lines.”

“They might have lights at the Balloon Market,” Arabella said.

“But don’t you have to get home . . . ?”

“Don’t argue with fate! Just explain what the electrode has to do with it.”

They just made it on the car before the telpherman’s clamp gripped the cable with a squeal.

“I’m not sure I’m really going to be able to explain the electrode,” Andrew said.

“Just tell the story.”

“I don’t know how Father got interested in the telpher lines. Particularly in the early days, when the whole thing was just getting started.” The car was crowded, so Andrew and Arabella were pushed together in a corner, just below the telpherman’s seat. “But he learned a lot about them, and not just from books. He must know people.”

Father always seemed to know people. A lot of them came to loud parties at the house, and one or two of them ended up in his office—as if the parties were just an excuse to get a someone upstairs. Sometimes Arabella would wake up at night and hear quiet conversation after the rest of the party had gone silent.

“People needed an easy way to get across town,” Andrew said. “The streets were packed. Then someone looked up at the rooftops and saw the obvious solution. Once they figured out the wheels, the cables, and the cars, it was a rush to get the cables up. It’s easy to install a wheel, and if you have a strong floor, you can put a little steam engine in under it. The original cars were just old carriages with grips installed on their roofs. Pretty light, and cheap to replace if one fell to the street. So, once you’d put some cable stays on two different roofs and hung up the support cables, you had yourself a telpher route. Then you had the fastest way to get from one place to another.

“So they went up everywhere. Companies formed telpher lines, with collections of routes, and competed on where they could take passengers. The biggest one, the one that got most of the good routes early, was Greensward, Abattoir & Harborworks. But at least five big lines were organized. They fought for business. And one of the ways they fought was by sabotaging each other’s routes. If a route was out of operation for a while, its passengers found another line to ride, even if it was less convenient.

“The Black Hill, Cromlech, Execution Square & Imperial Baths line was known for having the best saboteurs. Their gang was called the Spider Monkeys. And they were led by a man named Gibbon.”

“Gibbons aren’t spider monkeys,” Arabella said, before she could stop herself.

“What?”

Now that she’d started, she had to finish. “Spider monkeys are New World monkeys. Gibbons are Old World—”

“You’re so smart you probably even know the meaning of the word ‘pedantic.’ ”

Arabella bit back on a retort. She didn’t want a fight, not now. Despite her irritation, she found herself wanting to hear Andrew’s story. Not just for the no-doubt-exciting adventures of the Spider Monkeys and their misnamed leader. They had an arc-light electrode with a mysterious history, and here was a picture of a young woman operating what was clearly an arc light. That she was wearing a ball gown and . . . Arabella looked closer . . . really great shoes while doing it made learning the story even more urgent.

“I’m sorry, Andrew. Please go on.” No one ever gave you credit for not doing something you could easily have done. It really wasn’t fair.
Andrew said nothing for a moment, but he needed to talk more than he wanted to punish her by not talking.

“Here’s the kind of thing Gibbon and the Black Hill Spider Monkeys did,” Andrew said, finally. “There was a guy working in Hann’s office, name of Pardo. He was a back-office guy, worked the numbers for Hann’s line, Greensward, Abattoir & Harborworks. He was the one who planned the building of Carcery station, which made Greensward dominant in the north of the city. But what he really wanted to do was run a telpher car. Wanted to impress a girl, or something. He begged Hann, but Hann refused. Finally, desperate, Pardo bribed a Greensward telpherman to let him run a car on the Fire Tower-Summer Garden route.”

A man and two children sat opposite, a picnic basket at their feet, a champagne bottle and loaf of bread sticking out. The girl glanced at her father, patted him on the shoulder, and then rested her head there. He stroked her hair and stared out of the window. The boy, younger, read an illustrated book.

“Gibbon heard about that. He heard about everything. So, knowing he had an inexperienced telpherman to deal with, he pulled a trick. The night before Pardo was going to take the grip of that route, Gibbon and the Spider Monkeys climbed the Harem Stairs with some repair equipment they’d liberated from their own line. They added an extra switch on the ceiling of the station there. They drilled a bolt into the big stone tower that supplied water to Clepsydra, the old municipal water clock. They connected a cable to the bolt, and then laid it from the water tower to the Harem Stairs station, hiding it under weeds and scraps of the junk that collects under telpher stations. It was risky, but they got away with it.”

“I’m not sure I understand how that worked,” Arabella said.

“There’s an example right up here,” Andrew said. “I’ll show you.”

The cables climbed up to the bell tower of the deconsecrated Cathedral of St. Hippolytus. The building was famous because of the horse sculptures that decorated its tower and roof. Their heads were thrown back, their manes streamed in the wind, and their hooves were raised up, as if to smash down on an enemy. St. Hippolytus had been torn apart by horses. Arabella didn’t know who to admire more: the martyrs for their devotion, or their murderers for the endless inventiveness that had earned the gratitude of generations of artists. Most deaths gave little scope for art, or even a wallpaper border.

The telpher builders had crammed a station in under the mouths of the ponderous bells. The upper areas of the church were now a hostel for the elderly, and it was here that the father and his children got out, with their champagne-and-bread-containing picnic basket. Arabella only hoped that, when she got old, her children and grandchildren would remember the champagne when they came to visit.

“Look up,” Andrew said.

Under the beams of the roof ran a bunch of rails, which fanned out like the branches of a tree. Their own car hung from one of them. In a station, telpher cars were essentially upside-down one-railed trains. Several routes ran from the St. Hippolytus station. Just as in a railway yard, the rails would bend slightly when a worker in the station yanked on a switch, and like someone crooking a finger at an open birdcage to get a parakeet to climb onto it, encourage the car to roll onto them. They sloped slightly, so that the car would keep rolling. At the end of each rail was the wheel and moving transport cable of the actual route. The telpherman would slide the car onto that moving cable, engage the grip, and be pulled out of the station.

“The Spider Monkeys just added another switch and cable,” Andrew said, as their own car was pulled out from under the bells of St. Hippolytus. “There are some unused ones up here, to routes that have been taken down. It’s easy to miss, particularly if you’re more interested in stoking up the steam engine to get the wheels turning in the morning.”

“When Pardo’s car came along, Gibbon and his boys distracted the station workers, tightened the cable, and pulled their own switch in. Pardo was too busy trying to work all the unfamiliar gear to notice that the bump onto the rail was much bigger than it should have been. And by the time he did realize what had happened, it was too late. There was no moving cable, so there was nothing for his grip to connect to. He slid down the support cable that led to Clepsydra, and his car sank right into the big water clock, under the big bronze numbers that marked the hours. It wasn’t a busy route, but a few passengers still had to float around, getting their toes nibbled by carp, until someone could fish them out.”

“Poor Pardo,” Arabella laughed.

“Poor Pardo for sure. Hann had him thrown into Carcery, the old city prison.”

“That seems harsh.” Arabella was startled. “Pardo was just trying to be a rough, tough telpherman. He just had the bad luck to run into some real rough, tough telphermen.”

“Hann was furious,” Andrew said. “Who’d trust a telpher line that had cars that could get lost? And the lines were fighting for passengers. Hann and Greensward were just getting ready to open a station in Carcery Square that would open up routes north in the city. The other lines had nothing that would compete. That was actually what Pardo had been working on when he decided to show off. I hear they gave him a cell overlooking it. The cables ran right under the prison wall, because those big blocks of stone were strong enough to support it.”

From St. Hippolytus their car had swooped across a city park and now passed through the upper bleachers of the Arena, where people had built high leaning houses far above what had once been the killing field, which was just a tiny oval from up here. It was now a swamp, where herons stalked frogs.

There was a bustling community up here, raising fish in the old cisterns that had once stored water to hose down unruly crowds. Arabella saw their golden scales and wide eyes drying on a mesh once used by a gladiator to try to catch his opponent. The fall of the telpher lines was going to change these people’s lives for sure. Would these descendants of the people in the cheap seats stay here, eventually developing their own language and culture, living on rainwater and fish? Or would they make the long trek down to street level?

Two other people got off here, leaving Arabella and Andrew alone in the car.

“Now, somewhere along the way, Gibbon had met Hann’s daughter,” Andrew said. “She had fallen for him. I guess she and her father didn’t get along. Because when Gibbon asked her to help him get up to the Greensward Carcery Station before it was finished, she agreed.

“Maybe she just liked the puzzle. The station was crucial for Greensward’s operation, so Hann had it guarded night and day. Since it hung from the side of the prison, and wasn’t yet operational, they were posted on the ground. But she figured out a way. She and Gibbon ran a single line from a nearby cemetery up under the right wing of a statue of a mourning angel memorial, with a support hanging from the elbow of the arm that hid the angel’s eyes, then up through the boughs of a couple of trees and up to the top of Carcery Tower, where Hann had allowed her to install an experimental light she was working on. So, one night, Gibbon attached his hanger to—”

“Wait a minute.” Arabella had had just about enough of unexplained motivation. “Hann’s daughter. Her father was head of Greensward.”

“That’s right.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me anything else about her?”

“Like what?”

“Like . . . everything. Did she have a name?”

“Um.” He thought. “Dulcie. Her name was Dulcie.”

“Are you just making that up to placate me?”

“Would I do something like that?”

“Andrew—”

“No, no kidding. It really was her name. Okay, Dulcinea, probably. Dulcie Decorum, her father’s workers called her. Some of them thought she was stuck up.”

“I’m sure telpher workers were noted for their classical educations. Dulcie disliked her father enough to help someone sabotage the centerpiece of his line?”

“I guess so. Her mother had died when she was young, and he had no real interest in her, had her raised by nannies and tutors. When Dulcie showed her ability to invent things that were useful for his business, it seemed to annoy Hann rather than please him.” Andrew unfolded the newspaper to reveal the young woman who Arabella now knew was Dulcie Hann operating the light. “Like this arc light. Instead of the usual carbon electrodes, it used a new kind, with magnetite and titanium. Lasted longer, gave brighter light. But after all that, Hann wouldn’t let her use it for telpher operations. Just, like, for social events and stuff. No wonder she decided to get back at him. Gibbon was just the way that turned up.”

“Hey. So that electrode you got from Jill—”

“Is the same one.” He hefted the thick black cylinder. “At least I think so.”

They both looked up as the telpher car’s grip released on the cable, and it coasted to a halt, nowhere near a station. It dangled by the cornice of an office building. They could hear the quiet scrape of the moving cable as it moved past the loose grip.

Through the windows Arabella saw an office with rows of desks and black filing cabinets. A man with slicked-back hair talked to a woman in a pencil skirt as she tried to get a thick file out of the lowest drawer. He watched her as she tugged, but didn’t offer to help. Men and women sat at wood desks, pounding on typewriters. They didn’t look up as a boy pushed a silver coffee urn past them on a cart, pouring cups with sleepy precision. A paper airplane sailed by and landed on a desk.

The telpherman climbed out of the car. Andrew and Arabella exchanged a glance, then looked out of the window. The telpherman pulled himself smoothly over the cornice.

“Is something wrong?” Arabella asked.

“Not at all. Do you have an appointment you need to get to?”

“The Balloon Market. Don’t you remember?”

“I’ll just be a moment.” And he was gone.

Arabella took the opportunity to look into the bucket the telpherman had carried down from the roof at the station with the antique store. In its bottom were four pigeon eggs, two pinkish, one bluish, one more blue green, smeared with bird droppings. Why had just the sight of them annoyed Jill the antiques dealer?

“So,” Andrew said, “One night, Gibbon went into the cemetery with a hanger, which was really just a grip with places for your hands and feet. The younger guys used them to check for cable damage, stuff like that. As he was hooking it onto the hidden cable, he almost fell into a newly dug grave, right at the angel’s feet. The angel was a memorial to prisoners who died without getting released, and this was another sacrifice to it. But whoever had dug it had stuck to their job and not noticed the cable in the bushes. Gibbon got on the hanger and pedaled up to Carcery Station.

“He’d brought a bar breaker, so it didn’t take him long to snap some of the crucial support struts that held the station onto the side of Carcery. The station sagged and tilted out of alignment, far enough that it would take weeks to repair the damage. Then he went a little too far. He loosened a return wheel. It was heavier than he thought. It fell right through the floor of the station and crashed to the street, pulling a lot of the station with it.

“That finally woke up the Greensward guards. He had to get out of there. But the wheel had left a big hole between him and his hanger. The only way to get to it was to climb up and across the upper line of cells, above the stations. The prisoners were pretty much awake now. They cursed, they begged him to help them escape, they tried to grab him when he crossed their cells. Then, he almost fell into a cell. The bars were loose. But he could see that there was a prisoner in there, silent and unmoving.

“Maybe it had been the stress of all the hours preparing for escape, or just the fact that those cells were exposed to the weather, and notoriously unhealthy. That man had managed to get close to freeing himself, but would never make it. He’d never get out of that cell alive.”

“Dead.” Arabella thought about it. “The empty grave under the angel!”

Andrew grinned. “You know, I’ve never held with those people who think you’re slow.”

“That’s very loyal of you.”

Arabella could see that their driver was now in the office talking to the woman in the pencil skirt, who finally had the huge file spread open on her desk. The man with the slicked back hair pretended to be detailing his precise order to the bored youth with the coffee cart, but snuck glances at what she and the telpherman were doing. She smiled at the telpherman, blinking and tilting her head, and finally handed him a telephone. The telpherman dialed, said a few words. Then he hung up and put the phone down.

“The body of the dead prisoner lay there on its pallet, waiting to be taken down to an anonymous grave in the cemetery. And the delay had given the Greensward boys a chance to close in on him. He was close to capture. Then Gibbon had an inspiration. He unwound the funeral shroud and hauled the body out through the window. With a few quick twists of the emergency line all telpher workers carried with them, he attached the corpse to his repair hanger and set it on its way down the wire.

“The slope of the wire meant it really looked like a living person was in control of the hanger. It must have been a sight, a dead man dangling from the wire, whizzing through the trees at night. The Greensward team saw it, and naturally thought it was Gibbon, making his escape. They all chased after it, wanting to be in at the kill.

“Word of Gibbon’s situation got out to the Spider Monkeys, and they came out to Carcery Square in force. The Greensward guys, having realized by this time that they’d been duped, fought back. When the police finally brought it under control, Carcery Station was completely destroyed.”

The telpherman in the office made a few more faces at the woman at the desk, but he was clearly done, and interested in getting back to his car. He danced out, making a joke of it. The other man sipped his coffee solemnly, saucer in hand, and watched him go. The woman, now annoyed, curled her thumbs together and flapped her hands like a bird’s wings at the telpherman’s disappearing back.

“The newspapers whooped it up. You know: rioting workers, irresponsible management, physical danger, violations of prison security—the result was government regulation, by popular demand. They broke the independent telpher lines, calling them ‘bandits,’ unified them, and brought them all under city control, as part of North Metropolitan Aerial Transport. Most of the Spider Monkeys, and the others, were fired.”

That only seemed reasonable to Arabella, though she wasn’t going to say it. “What happened to Gibbon? How did he get away?”

“He didn’t. He got hit over the head with a falling strut early in the festivities, and it knocked him unconscious. By the time he came to, he was the only telpherman left on the scene. They arrested him. And threw him into Carcery.”

“I believe that’s what you call ‘irony,’ ” Arabella said.

“Well, maybe you do. By the time Gibbon got out, there wasn’t any place for him. He went abroad, to work on steamships.”

Arabella waited a moment. “Is that it? What about Dulcie? What about the light?”

“I don’t know, Arabella. That’s what I know.”

“We’re just going to have to know more, then.”

“Sorry for the delay.” The telpherman hopped back into his seat and engaged the grip.

 

The old ballroom that held the Balloon Market had an astoundingly high ceiling, most of it panels of glass that showed the sky. Just then, there were only five balloons, partially inflated and bumping for escape: two large cross-country tubes and three smaller utility gasbags dangling repair equipment and spare parts. Just below were the arched galleries where the older folks had once gathered to watch the younger people dance. Those were now piled with compressors, dismantled mooring masts, and other massive support gear.

Past a couple of food sellers near the entrance, dealer booths crowded what had once been the ballroom floor. Arabella and Andrew were both out of place here. This was a market for actual ballooning, or lufting professionals: miners in remote areas, arctic explorers, and, of course, the operators of cross-desert tracked balloon lines, trying to make a living connecting remote locations. Arabella saw a desert balloonist, goggles up on her headdress, heavy gauntlets in shoulder straps in true desert buzzard style, examining some equipment dangling from chains.

“Any ground gimbals?” she asked the proprietor, a short woman with eyes rimmed in black kohl. “They need to be transportable.”
The proprietor used a lot of pomade on her dark hair, so it didn’t move when she shook her head, which she gave the impression of doing often. “Nah. I do mostly task lighting. He might have something.” She pointed at a neighboring booth.

Andrew walked over and looked up at a collection of lighting equipment that projected from an actual moored balloon, suitable for a single observer. “What are the maintenance requirements for those?”

The woman couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Maintenance? Where are you taking it? The North Pole?”

“It’s a gift for my father. For his office.”

“His office is inside, right? Not in a volcano or something.”

“Well, yes.”

“So I don’t care if his pet cockatiel perches on the chain and fouls it daily. It’s built to take real work. Okay, a bit of light oil every month or so wouldn’t go amiss. Not too much, or it will get on your nice clothes.” She examined Andrew with a bit less sympathy than he was used to. “But you’re the wrong customer for this equipment. Please don’t waste both our time. There are some luft-style gadgets by the back wall, mooring pitons and the like. Don’t do much, but look impressive. One of those would be a better choice.” She saw someone in the crowd. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some real business to attend to.”

Unable to think of anything to say, Andrew retreated in defeat to the shelter of same hanging lufting fabrics. Arabella followed, and found the woman desert balloonist examining gimbals. She had a line of three diamond-shaped scars on her right cheekbone, marking some level of achievement Arabella didn’t understand.

“Instantly responsive!” the salesman enthused. “Keeps you pointed into the prevailing wind at all time. They used these for recovering the wreck of the Arethusa, and you know how stormy it is there. Eighteen watermelon balloons with pointed noses. Even the late fall gales didn’t knock them down—they kept pointed right into it.”

“They never recovered the Arethusa.” The woman was really quite small, Arabella saw. The quilted boots, protection against hot rock, made her taller.

“That was pirates, miss, not the storm. They came down the wind when things were at their worst. The salvage crew scuttled the ship just in time, though. The pirates got nothing.”

“They got your balloons.”

“Not a technical failure, is what I’m saying. This gimbal was in no way responsible.”

She examined it, seeing its degrees of freedom, where it stuck and where it moved smoothly. Then she hefted it. “How much does this weigh?”

“I’ll have to look at the specs. . . .”

“Too heavy. If I wanted to spin around on top of a mountain, maybe. But I’m trying to run a mobile business.”

“We should go,” Andrew said. “There’s nothing for us here.”

“If you say so.” Arabella was reluctantly aware that people were waiting for them at home. But surely they couldn’t go there, not yet. . . .
“Give me a peek at that engraving,” she said.

Andrew gave her a suspicious look—he’d gone from regarding it as mere electrode wrapping to a valued personal possession—but opened it for her.

She looked around at the ballroom. It still looked much as it did in the picture, down to the two statues that flanked the entrance: a mammoth and a sabertooth, rampant and facing each other, the ancient native animals that had been in the city’s coat of arms since it was nothing but swamps inhabited by long-limbed bears that swam up and scooped explorers out of their galleys like connoisseurs slurping oysters.

But the date . . . Seventeen years before, not long before they had been born, in fact, but the day after the Golden Fleece Ball, which had been, as Arabella knew, the peak of the old social season. And it had been held right here in this room. The floor under their feet, where you could see it, still showed its high quality, polished and springy. You could dance here all night and not get sore feet.
And there was Dulcie. Arabella had searched through those finely dressed people gathered at the windows, and finally found someone she was sure was the young engineer. It showed her from behind, but the pattern of the low-backed gown seemed the same as the one worn by the woman operating the light. What connection had she had with the fall of Carcery Station? She certainly had been here that same night, able to see it as it happened.

Light flared through layers of gauzy aerial fabric, like the sun rising through sea mist. Arabella and Andrew peeked around, to find the light seller, unexpectedly, smiling and gesturing them over.

“The chain lights are for close-in work when you can’t actually get close in.” She demonstrated how the armored bulb could be lowered from the arm, exactly as if they’d been friends all along. “When the wind is high, you don’t want to get close up to the rock or the ice face or whatever, but a general arc light is just distracting. Are you interested in the matching impact drill, maybe? And these remote claws come as a graduated set of five, but are as smooth as any you’ll find.”

She didn’t look entirely sincere, Arabella thought. What had made her change her mind about selling lights to non-professionals? Feeling a bit perverse, Arabella decided to test the woman’s patience.

“I’d like to test one at altitude,” Arabella said.

“What?”

Arabella looked up at the tethered display balloon. “Pay me out, and let’s see how the light works.”

The woman narrowed her eyes, but whatever was making her help them was pretty strong. She finally shrugged.

“Go ahead, then. Check it out.” She gave one sharp shake of her head as Andrew tried to step forward. “Only one of you. And I’m not giving rides here. Check out the operation and purchase what’s appropriate. Now, excuse me. There’s something I need to take care of.”

The woman paid out the line and Arabella floated up along the crumbling plaster of the back wall. She glanced up, hoping to see more of the glass roof, but of course her entire view was of the patched fabric of the utility balloon. It was only now that she realized that when lufters flew, they saw everything but the sky.

But she did get high enough to catch a view of the black stone of Carcery through the high windows at the ballroom’s far end. No trace of the old telpher station that had caused all the trouble remained, but she could see the open stairs leading to the top of the tower, five or six stories above the mass of the prison, where Dulcie’s experimental light had shone down, and where Gibbon’s hanger cable had been attached. At its base were the cells where Gibbon had found the corpse that had allowed him to escape the enraged Greensward workers.

The entire scene that night would have been visible through the mist from up here, if anyone could have spared the attention from the ball. If Dulcie had indeed been here that night, Arabella couldn’t imagine her not keeping track of what was going on over there.
But she was supposed to be testing their potential purchase. She found the pegs that controlled the light. It took her a few tries to figure out, and it wiggled back and forth. She imagined the woman below, rolling her eyes at this incompetence. Arabella finally got it right, and lowered the light smoothly.

Okay, so, that night, Gibbon had pedaled his hanger to the top of that tower, run down the stairs, and started his sabotage of the station . . . that all seemed to work. When he was detected by the Greensward guards, he could easily run back up, get back on the hanger, and make his escape.

But that wasn’t what had happened, at least according Andrew’s story. Gibbon had taken a body and hauled it up those flights of stairs to the top, tied it to the hanger, and then sent it off. Then he had descended the tower again, to be knocked out by a falling strut in the station’s collapse.

That corpse-decoy story made some sense, but not quite enough to satisfy Arabella. Something was missing.

She glanced down. Hidden from everyone on floor level by piles of gear, the lighting booth proprietor was kissing a man. She had one beringed hand on the back of his head, while the other tugged at his dark jacket. Arabella couldn’t see his face, but that was a telpherman’s jacket. His bucket stood amid some oddly shaped mooring weights.

Outside the booth, Andrew stood pretending to examine some lighting accessories, completely unaware of what was going on a few feet from him. Arabella indulged herself by feeling smarter than him, because of what she could see.

The proprietor’s hand brushed the telpherman’s shoulder . . . and came away with a pigeon feather. She stared at it for a second, her black-rimmed eyes almost comically wide, and then turned away from him. Accidentally or on purpose, her heel kicked the bucket and knocked it over. The telpherman scrambled to right it. Arabella had time for one last look around, and then she was pulled down by the mooring cable.

Despite how ridiculous the light was, Arabella rather thought Father would like one. It was better suited for peering down dark crevasses on some windswept glacier, or supporting a rescue mission for a downed balloon in some midnight-black taiga, than for reading the newspaper. But, of course, that was the point.

There was an argument going on when she got down.

“But it’s perfect,” Andrew said.

“Too perfect for you,” the woman said. “I have some commercial customers who are going to be needing those lights. I was just notified.”

“But we were here first.”

“You were here. I wouldn’t say first.”

“What happened?” Arabella asked.

“I got a rush order for the full set is what happened,” the woman said. “Regular customers, with real work to do. I should have more of these in in a month or so. You can check back then.”

The telpherman must have put in a good word or something, and gotten the light seller to at least pay attention to them, Arabella realized. Maybe he’d even promised to kiss her to seal the deal. But now his influence was at an end. He’d disgraced himself—by revealing his devotion to some pigeon eggs. There was no way they were leaving with any of these lights.

And that was it. Despite the oddness of the place, Arabella had felt a kind of acceptance. But now, as they walked between the dangling cables, it seemed that everyone had turned their backs on them. They’d violated some unspoken rule, and were no longer to be tolerated. Even the desert girl had vanished, off on her mysterious mission, and when Andrew stopped at a sandwich stand near the entrance, it was some effort to even get the counterman to look at him.

Out on the platform it was moving on to afternoon, and despite the cool breeze, the sun was warm on their faces. Arabella found herself delighted to be out for the day with her cranky and often uncooperative brother, whom she loved. It would be the last such day for a long time. She thought about taking his arm. No. That would be going a bit too far.

“Andrew,” Arabella said. “I have a question for you.”

He unwrapped the tomato-egg sandwich he’d finally squeezed out of the reluctant sandwich maker and sighed at its skimpiness. “It’s about the story, isn’t it? Well, you might as well. Better than having you keep looking at me all knowing and pitying.”

He wasn’t going to stop her like that. “How did Gibbon get that body out of its cell and all the way up to the top of the tower?”

Andrew took her question seriously and looked up at the tower, that odd bit of Gothic decoration on an otherwise grim block of black stone. He frowned, and she could see him running through the possibilities.

“Okay,” he said. “It would have been a physical challenge. Not impossible, but hard. What’s your alternative?”

“I’m just having trouble believing that Dulcie deliberately allowed Gibbon to destroy Carcery Station. Even if she was head over heels in love with him, she would have tried to find another way to show it.”

“But she did get him up there. Why would she have done that?”

“Well . . . maybe she needed Gibbon to go up to Carcery and rescue someone for her. Bust her real lover out of prison. Then it makes sense. She hired Gibbon, persuaded him, whatever. He went up there, and he did it. That was why he was carrying that bar breaker, to pry out the cell bars. He did it, and got her guy out, and off on the hanger. Then, looking around . . .”

“He realized that he was up there in an undefended telpher station just ripe for being taken down. Not too bright of your girl, is it? Giving a known telpher saboteur access to her father’s most important station like that.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But she was keeping an eye on things.”

“What? How?”

Arabella told him about the timing of the ball. “I don’t think it’s coincidence that it happened on the very night she was up here, with a good view across the square. Do you?”

Andrew just opened the engraving and pointed to the misty vignette of Gibbon clutching his head and falling backward as a strut hit him. “I guess that explains where this thing came from, then. I just took it for granted.”

She looked where he pointed. What she had interpreted as a strut from somewhere in the station’s complex structure was, on second glance, actually a tool, the bar breaker that Gibbon had brought up with him to free the prisoner, according to Arabella’s theory, or to damage the station, according to Andrew’s. But it wasn’t falling from anything, it was—

“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “Who—?”

The effect was quite astonishing. The swirling mist in front of Gibbon snapped into clarity: it was a figure, cloaked in white, who held the bar breaker like a club, and had just deliberately struck Gibbon down.

But if you got distracted, by, say, the details of the stone wall behind, or the heavy bolts that connected the station to the wall, the figure became mist again, as if you’d been seeing faces in the clouds.

“Well,” Andrew said, oddly satisfied. “You know who would have been anxious to give our Gibbon one across the skull.”

“Who?”

“Our old buddy Pardo! Who else? Gibbon humiliated him, at Clepsydra. Gibbon couldn’t have known who Dulcie was sending him to rescue, not until it was too late. Think she did that on purpose?”

Despite the fact that she had thought of him as an innocent victim of Gibbon’s cruel practical joke, Arabella had trouble seeing Pardo as Dulcie’s secret lover. An accountant in her father’s offices? But then, that might explain why her father, Hann, punished him so severely for the loss of the telpher car. He might just have been putting an end to an inappropriate relationship.
She imagined Dulcie, in her gown at the ball, watching as her lover emerged from his cell and knocked Gibbon over the head with the same tool Gibbon had used to rescue him. That wasn’t what Arabella had expected at all.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Once Gibbon was knocked out, and Pardo . . . whoever . . . had stolen his hanger and escaped, how would the Spider Monkeys have found out about it?” She pictured the appalled Dulcie running out into the streets in her ball gown, catching her heel on loose cobbles, trying to find those men who had struggled against her father’s interests for so long. . . .
“Your version may be wrong, but not for that reason. You didn’t look carefully enough at the fight scene here.” In the vignette next to the scene of the mysterious figure hitting Gibbon over the head, men in evening wear fought on the struts of the station. Evening wear? No. She saw one, swinging a crowbar, who wore a white apron. Another wore a sommelier’s tasting cup around his neck. . . .
“Telphermen often earned extra money working parties,” Andrew said. “Waiters, servers, ushers. If that party was as big as you say, it probably had half the telphermen in the city working it. Certainly the Spider Monkeys, who were always short of money. If they saw someone take Gibbon out like this, they would have abandoned their duties and been right over there. And, let me tell you, this looks like almost every telpherman in the city. No wonder the place went down.”

A telpher car emerged around the building’s corner, pulled by their own telpherman, pigeon droppings now cleaned from his shoulders. He hooked it onto the static cable. Arabella imagined him formally dressed and wearing a white apron.

Of course. She made her way toward him. When he saw her, he stepped away from the telpher car, as if caught doing something he shouldn’t.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said. “At our house. Last winter. A party. Big one, my mother’s. Mother hates parties, so when she has one, it has too many people at it. I’m getting better at the names, but I still don’t know half of who’s there. When I was little, I would peek down from the top of the stairs, until they chased me up.”

“Drinks table,” he said. “Soda water. The occasional ice cube.”

“You’ll get more responsibility someday, I’m sure.”

“I live on hope.”

Was she remembering the right night? They all blended together in her head. There was always the surf of voices with the occasional louder crash of laughter, the smoke from the big fireplace they usually didn’t use because it drew so badly, the feel of the fur collars, sheepskin, velvet on the heavy coats on the beds. Once she’d fallen asleep in them, and been found by a drunken and self-amused man who kept trying to put the little girl on around his neck until she cried and ran to her room.

But she hadn’t seen their telpherman by the drinks table. She’d caught just a glimpse of him in the upper hall, as he headed for the back stairs. She’d assumed that the wait staff had stored something up there, but now that she thought about it, that made no sense at all. It was a lot of narrow, steep stairs down to the party from there. What could he have been serving that required that kind of secrecy?

“No.” She was sure. “Not at the drinks table. Not downstairs.”

“You startled me,” he said. “You came out of the dark like a ghost.”

She’d been wearing her good nightgown, she remembered with a sense of relief, the one with the embroidery on the hem. Still, she wished she could have been better prepared. . . .

“Shouldn’t you have said ‘like an angel’?” she said.

His smile looked tired. “I don’t think you and I have time for that. But I will say that you did seem . . . weightless.”

“Are you trying to decide?” She took the plunge. “Which of your girlfriends to stay with when the wires go down?”

“No. I’ve already decided. I knew long ago. But I pretended I didn’t. But if I hadn’t already decided . . . ”

“Yes?”

He looked at her. No one had ever looked at her so thoroughly before. Or, maybe, it was just that no one had ever seen her the way she was now, because this particular Arabella had never existed before. Would this Arabella still be around after tomorrow, when she got on the train to her school in the mountains and vanished into whatever experience waited for her up there? Her telpherman might be the only one who ever got to see this particular person.

“If I hadn’t already decided, I might be reconsidering.”

She turned away, afraid of showing a blush. He must know exactly what he could do to her, which was a bit annoying. “That’s just another way of saying ‘angel,’ while meaning ‘ghost.’ You’ve got those eggs, and that’s all you care about.”

“Not all.” He was suddenly brisk. “This car heads north. Only way the line is running now, but there are connections you can make at Fire Tower, at least until sunset. Which way will you head?”

“It depends.” Andrew had come up behind Arabella. “Any lights available that way?”

The telpherman reached up and put something on a cornice above the platform. “Something might well turn up. But maybe you should wait here. . . .”

“For what?” Andrew said.

The telpherman shook his head. “Nothing. But this car has to go.” He raised his voice. “All aboard!”

After sitting down, Arabella unwrapped the sandwich Andrew handed her, and the rich smell of prosciutto and herbs filled the car. If this was what the sandwich seller produced in a hostile mood, those balloonists were lucky indeed. But she was getting distracted by the food. She leaned out just as the car swung away from the platform and looked back to see what the telpherman had left behind.

Balanced delicately on the cornice was a single blue-green egg.

 

Copyright © 2011 Alexander Jablokov