The Last of August

Page 22

Well, it reminded me of Charlotte Holmes. All of him did. In the picture of him I’d seen on his math department’s website, he was smiling in a tweed blazer, and now he was standing here like her looking-glass twin. Before they’d even exchanged a word, it was clear that they had done something to each other, broken each other, maybe, or distilled each other like liquor, until all that was left was hard and strong and spare. They had a history that had nothing to do with me.

Maybe I was reading too much into it. Into him. Things between me and Holmes were tenuous enough already, though, and here was a gust of wind that could take the rest of it down.

A very polite gust of wind.

“Milo’s said some nice things about you,” he was saying as he shook my hand. He had a tattoo on his forearm, something dark and patterned. “Which is interesting, since Milo usually doesn’t notice people that aren’t holograms.”

“I didn’t know the two of you were close,” I said. I had to say something. We were still shaking hands.

He had a strong grip. I pressed harder.

He laughed, a friendly sound. “We’re both ghosts. Where else would you work if you legally don’t exist? I’m fairly sure that Milo’s scrubbed his digital footprint so clean that he wasn’t even technically born. We have that much in common.”

“That makes sense,” I said, because he was still shaking my hand.

“I should probably also apologize for my brother. Do know that I never told him to kill you.”

My fingers were starting to go numb. “I’m pretty sure I’m just the collateral damage there.”

“Right, of course. Of course.” A strange look passed over his face, and then vanished. “Sorry.”

“So. Phillipa?” I asked. “Are you two . . . close? Do you know why she’d want to see us?”

“Not really,” he said. “We haven’t spoken since I died.”

I risked looking over at Holmes. She hadn’t moved, except for her hands, which were pressed against her sides. She didn’t look nervous or scared. She didn’t even seem like she was cataloguing him, the way I’d expected her to, taking in whatever changes the last two years had worked on him. What her betrayal had done. Whether he hated her for it.

She was just looking at him.

“I got your birthday card,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”

“I hope you didn’t mind that it was in Latin. I didn’t mean it to seem pretentious. I just wanted to—”

“I know. It reminded me of that summer.” Her eyes brightened. “That’s what you intended, right?”

August Moriarty was still shaking my hand. More accurately, he was holding it, because neither of us was moving anymore. He was staring at her like she was a penny at the bottom of a well, and I—well, I was staring at the space between them.

“I need this back,” I said, and pulled my hand away.

August didn’t appear to notice. “You must be exhausted from your trip. Both of you. You’re here for the week, yes? I’ll have Milo’s body man show you to your room so you can settle in. You had lunch on the plane? Excellent. And tonight—well, there’s a bar we should go to. Some things I’d like your opinion on, there.”

“Aren’t we going to talk about this Phillipa thing?” I put every bit of venom I was feeling into her name.

“Is the bar the Old Metropolitan?” she asked him.

“It’s Saturday night, so it’s where Leander would be.”

“We’ll go tonight. I can’t imagine what he’s— I can’t wait any longer than that.”

“The Old Metropolitan,” August said, and there was a surprising thread of bitterness in his voice. “You just knew that, didn’t you? How did you guess?”

“I never guess.”

I cleared my throat. “We could have just asked my father. He’s been getting daily updates from Leander since October. I’m sure he has a list of places for us to look. And can we talk about Phillipa? What does she want with you?”

Neither of them even glanced at me.

“Walk me through it. How you knew it was the Old Metropolitan,” August said, drawing her over to a bench between the elevators. He sounded intrigued, and something else, something darker. “Step by step, and slowly. Charlotte, it had to be a guess.”

“It’s Saturday night,” she repeated. “And I never—”

“No, you don’t,” I said, but I was saying it to no one.

I DECIDED TO FIND MY WAY TO MY ROOM ON MY OWN WITHOUT waiting for Milo’s “body man,” whatever that was. I couldn’t stand between Holmes and August for another second.

But it wasn’t difficult to orient myself. Most of the doors on the hall were keycode-locked—honestly, I didn’t want to know what was behind them—until I tried the one at the end of the hall.

I opened it. I took a breath.

It was like being back at Sciences 442. Like being back in Holmes’s room in Sussex. It was like being back inside Charlotte Holmes’s head.

The room was dark; unlike her lab at Sherringford, this one had a window, but it was tinted so dark that no natural light crept in. A series of lamps snaked down from the ceiling. Some half-finished chemical experiment was laid out on a table, with a set of burners and white powder measured out into piles. No shelves, but books everywhere, piled up beside an overstuffed armchair, behind the sofa, on either side of a white plaster fireplace, and inside its grate, too, like kindling. I picked one up from the pile beside the door. It was in German, with a bisected cross on its cover. I set it down.

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