Echo City

by Layla Lawlor

  "I'm not leaving you!" Irmingard's voice rose in fury.

  "—out the back, get to the next street—there's a Maersk logo on the side of the container, and a doormark."

  "I said I won't go."

  A screech echoed across the street, along with a tremendous clang like a washtub being thrown into a wall. The daylight, already dim, dimmed still further.

  Millie braced herself in the doorway and fired her shotgun out into the storm. I flinched as the noise of the blast echoed, deafening, in the factory's interior.

  "Go! You can both stand here until they circle the factory—" She racked another shell. "Or you can go." She looked over her shoulder, and the smile she gave Irmingard was soft and fond. "I have nine lives, remember? I'll meet you back at the car."

  Something clattered over our heads, and out of nowhere, a woman dropped down from the catwalk above us—ten feet to the floor, landing lightly with a flex of her knees like something out of a martial arts movie. She had a revolver in one hand and a stubby red stick in the other.

  Millie whirled around to point the shotgun at her.

  "Don't be an idiot; I'm on your side. Worry about them, not me!" She flashed me a quick smile. "Hi again."

  It was Lily-Bell. Today, rather than her beige explorer's hat, she wore a colorful scarf around her head and a black turtleneck. Lily-Bell Taylor, ninja edition. My great-grandmother. I couldn't speak.

  "Come on," Lily said, pointing along the wall. "Stairs up to the second floor. There's a door."

  "I don't know of any door there." Millie swung the shotgun back and forth between the door and Lily, as if uncertain which one represented the bigger threat.

  "Well, you don't know everything, do you?" Lily joined Millie in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder, ignoring Millie's wary look. The red stick was a road flare; she struck the cap to ignite it. "Why are you still here? Climb!"

  "Don't!" Millie told us.

  "Trust me or not," Lily retorted, "but we're about to be overrun with Tigers and I'm offering you a way out."

  That was enough; we ran for it, with Lily-Bell and Millie close behind us, covering our retreat. Irmingard released my hand in order to run, and the cold slammed into me like a physical force. We pounded up the metal stairs to the second-floor catwalk, all four of us.

  "Where now?" Irmingard cried. Through the metal grate under my feet, I saw movement on the factory floor—Tigers on all fours, prowling inside, looking around and then up.

  "Out of the way, please." Lily holstered her revolver and pushed past us on the narrow catwalk. The windows were boarded over. She began whistling softly—I recognized the tune, "Strawberry Fields Forever"—and drew a machete from a huge sheath on her belt, wedging the blade into the crack under one of the sheets of plywood and using it as a lever.

  Light and warmth streamed through. I glimpsed Millie's face, wearing a look of complete and utter astonishment. As soon as the space was large enough to crawl through, Irmingard eeled under, then reached back to enlarge it. Millie and Lily-Bell went last. I heard a snarl of frustration; then the plywood snapped shut and we were all standing on the sidewalk outside the window of one of the buildings along Shadow New York's version of Central Park. Right across from Strawberry Fields, in fact. Melting snow dripped off my sodden jeans and sneakers.

  Millie turned to point her shotgun at the building behind us, but Lily shook her head. "We're safe," she said, sheathing her machete. "They can't follow us. At least not that way."

  "That's not possible," Millie said flatly. "The doors don't work like that."

  "Of course it's possible." Lily brushed dust off her headscarf and calmly retied it. Somewhere in the commotion, a pendant of silvery metal, shaped like a snowflake, had bounced out of her tight black sweater; she tucked it back down her collar, so that only the chain was visible. "There are still safe doors, even in these difficult days. It's just a matter of finding them."

  Millie looked like she wasn't done asking questions, but Irmingard frowned at her and then turned to Lily. "Thank you for helping us, ma'am."

  "My pleasure," Lily said graciously.

  "It's not that I'm ungrateful," Millie said, and smiled, though it looked a trifle forced. "It's that I know better than to trust strangers who come through unfamiliar doors. I'm sure you agree."

  "I do. For one thing, what did you do to get the Tigers after you like that?"

  "We were going to Greenwich Village in the 1960s," Irmingard said.

  Lily's eyebrows went up. "Oh. Well, that would do it. It's been severed from the rest of the city."

  From the dismayed looks on the faces of the other two, I assumed that this meant something to them. I didn't understand what had happened, but "severed" sounded pretty final. "I had a friend there," I said blankly. Sort of. I didn't know Taliesin and Gwyn very well, but the idea that they were just gone was a little hard to take.

  "The neighborhood is fine, it's just inaccessible through the usual routes," Lily said. "You're Kay, right?"

  I nodded, and Lily smiled.

  "There's someone who wants to see you. I was sent to find you, actually."

  "Me?" I said, surprised.

  Irmingard stepped closer to me, interposing her slight body between me and the stranger. "Now wait a minute."

  "This is a terrible idea," Millie said flatly. "I don't know where you want to take us—"

  "You? No," Lily said. "We are parting ways here. Kay, you may come with me, or stay with them if you'd prefer. The invitation is only for you."

  "Kay," Millie snapped, "don't go anywhere with her."

  "I'm her—" I began, then broke it off, flustered and uncertain.

  "She's my great-granddaughter—aren't you?" Lily said. "Yes, I know what you are to me, Kay. I appreciate your concern for her, both of you and I know that you have no reason to be confident that she'll be safe with me—"

  "Every reason not to, actually," Millie said. The shotgun was pointed at the ground, but her shoulders were tense; I'd seen how fast she could have that thing in position. "At the very least, Kay, for God's sake don't go off with her alone. We'll come with you."

  "Not an option, I'm afraid," Lily-Bell said, her voice polite but firm. "If you're worried about her running around the city without a guide, don't worry; I'll take her back to New York for you."

  "That's not what I'm worried about," Millie said.

  "Who wants to see me?" I asked.

  "I'm sorry. I can't tell you that; I'm simply here to take you there." Lily smiled at me. "It's entirely up to you, Kay. I certainly won't force you. For what it's worth, I give you my word that you will not be harmed, and while you're with me, I'll do everything in my power to protect you." She laid two fingers over her heart. "I haven't a Bible, but I swear by our shared blood."

  Irmingard touched my leg anxiously. "Kay, don't."

  I swallowed, but curiosity was too much for me—that, and the opportunity to talk to my great-grandmother, to spend time with her. "I'll do it."

  Millie's jaw went tense. "Can you at least tell us where you're taking her?"

  "I think I know," I said, looking at my great-grandmother's face for confirmation. "We're going where you're from, aren't we? The Harlem Renaissance?"

  "Harlem, 1926," Lily-Bell confirmed. "And we won't be long. You can even wait for her here, if you want to."

  I felt like a kid with an overprotective, hovering mom—or three of them. "Guys, I appreciate the concern, but it's really not necessary."

  Irmingard hugged me around the waist. "I guess this wasn't the tour of the city that we wanted to give you. We'll have to do it for real sometime soon, okay? And please be careful."

  "Super careful," I promised.

  Millie didn't say goodbye. The two of them watched me walk away with Lily. Now that we were side by side, I could see Lily was as tall as me.

  "In all honesty," Lily said, "your suspicious friend is right. You shouldn't trust strangers in this city."

  "Except for you?"
<
br />   "Even me."

  "You're my great-grandmother."

  "I could still be a Tiger," Lily said. "You never really know."

  "You?" I looked at her carefully. She was an attractive woman. She not only looked like her photograph, but also resembled pictures I'd seen of my Grandma Geraldine as a young woman. "All the Tigers I've seen were ..."

  "Monsters? They become that way, it's true, when Tweed is done with them. But they start out just like the rest of us. Human. Well ..." She held up her hand with her gloved fingers outspread. "Shadow-human."

  But still clearly a person. Poor souls, Irmingard had said of the Shadow New York echo-ghosts. As far as I could tell, though, Lily-Bell Taylor was as solid, corporeal, and human as I was.

  "They're really just people? The Tigers?"

  "Just people," Lily agreed. "People completely in thrall to Tweed, but it takes years—decades—of Tweed's warping influence before they become the things we were fighting just now. Ah, here we are."

  She turned away from the park and approached a brownstone sandwiched between a Gothic cathedral and a glass-fronted department store, part of the wild profusion of Shadow New York buildings lining this version of Central Park. We climbed a short flight of stairs to the door, and Lily-Bell began to sing, low, under her breath. I didn't know the specific song, but it was bluesy and throaty. Very 1920s.

  In the factory, she'd whistled "Strawberry Fields Forever," and we'd come out in Central Park, right next to—

  "The right song opens the doors!" I said.

  Lily paused in mid-note, and laughed, her hand on the doorknob. "That's right. The Tigers use the regular doors, but they don't know about ours. You know about doormarks, right? Key signs and that sort of thing?"

  I nodded.

  "Well, our doors are marked like this." She pointed. Next to the doorknob, a crude almond shape, framing a circle, was scratched into the painted wood. It looked like an eye.

  "And then," she said, "you sing yourself through," and she began to sing quietly again, that low bluesy melody, and flung the door wide, and we stepped into the Harlem Renaissance.

  Chapter 12

  Fresca and I had visited Harlem on our first trip to New York. We walked around and looked at the brownstones, and poked our heads into a couple of museums. There wasn't much to see, not as much as I'd hoped, given the history and culture of the place. It was just like exploring a neighborhood in any big city.

  This—this was the Harlem of history, of legend, the Harlem of Lily-Bell and her contemporaries. I stepped into it and the past rose up to embrace me.

  It was, as always, early evening beneath the shifting colors of the sky, and the street was filled with light: paper lanterns and flashlights and torches and sparklers, a riot of light and color pouring from anything that could make light, driving all the shadows away. (And the Tigers with them, I hoped.) Most of the people in sight were nicely dressed—men in straw boaters or bowler hats and bow ties; women with their short curls flouncing under round hats with curling brims, some plumed with feathers. Most of the people I saw were black, with just a smattering of white faces here and there. The cars in the street were small and flare-fendered.

  The 1920s. I was really here.

  The music filled me, and I drank it in. Jazz and blues spilled from windows in scratchy record-player stylings, rolled from the open doors of nightclubs. My first impression was a strange blend of quaintness and familiarity, the awareness of my own outsider status in this place overlaid with a sense of being home. If I overlooked the 1920s cars, the people on the streets were more contemporary-looking than I expected them to be. I guess we all think of the past as that proverbial foreign country, and in some ways it is, but the braless women and long-haired folk singers of 1960s Greenwich Village had felt much more alien to me than this. The men in particular, in their neatly pressed suits, could have been plunked down in any office setting and wouldn't have looked out of place, aside from their old-fashioned clothing, and I'd seen old men who still dressed that way.

  Of course, young men in the 21st century, black or otherwise, didn't wear suits to go out clubbing, which meant that the women, with their little hats and swirling colorful dresses, were even more modern-looking than their male contemporaries. Some of it—the calf-length dresses, short sleek hairstyles and neatly wound headwraps—wouldn't be unusual on the streets of 21st-century New York. In a regular New York nightlife crowd, of course, I would've expected a whole lot more leather and tattoos and fishnets. The absence of that sort of thing in this bunch, no funky dye jobs or leather-laced cleavage, when they were clearly doing the same sorts of things as any clubgoer where I came from (calling out to each other with friendly profanity, weaving around drunk or stoned or just loose with the promise of a good time) made the whole scene not merely quaint but oddly sanitized. New York with the rough edges sanded off, wrapped up in gentility.

  What seemed so tame to me, I knew, had been considered a hotbed of scandal and iniquity in its day.

  A cluster of white girls in short flapper dresses ran past me, giggling. I turned to stare after them. Those girls, I realized, like most of the other white people scattered in the crowd around me, were slumming. I'd read about white socialites coming uptown to Harlem to gawk at the locals like exhibits in a zoo. It was startling to actually see them doing it. Over there, look Henry, it's a banker, a black banker, of all things! How droll!

  This being Shadow New York rather than the real thing, the tourists weren't just white Manhattan contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance residents. There were some in the crowd with anachronistic hairdos and clothing, most of them with the translucency and impermanence of ghosts. Someone cantered by on a horse, and trotted right into one of the brownstones, vanishing through the wall.

  Infinite tourists from infinite times. What an awful thought.

  Right, because you're not slumming at all, future girl, my cynical inner self told me.

  At least the diversity of the crowd meant that I didn't draw too much attention in my futuristic blue jeans. Lily-Bell was similarly out of place in her ninja clothes, but didn't look concerned about it. In fact, like Taliesin in Greenwich Village, she seemed to be popular with the people around us, based on the friendly greetings, waves, and the attempts at small talk that she politely fended off.

  "Who is it you want me to meet?" I asked. A streetcorner hawker pressed a slip of cardboard into my hand; I turned around but he'd already vanished into the crowd. It was the beige color of an old manila envelope and printed with typeset lettering:

  Come on up and join us at

  A SOCIAL PARTY

  given by

  J. Walker and Her Sisters

  The Good Times Will Roll

  ~ Refreshments ~

  ~ Good Music ~

  "Madame St. Clair," Lily said, drawing my attention back to her. From her expression, she seemed to expect me to know the name, but I must have looked blank. "Queen of the Harlem gangsters. She runs this neighborhood. We've all been very interested in your weapon, ever since I saw you use it."

  My throat went dry, and I was suddenly, intensely glad Millie had talked me into leaving it behind. "I don't have it with me."

  "That's all right. She just wants to talk, this time."

  This time?

  Lily took me down a flight of stairs to a basement club. She exchanged a soft word with the doorman, who let us in without moving a muscle in his face. We climbed a set of carpeted stairs and another doorman, or bodyguard, or something, this one wearing a white suit and a tidy little hat, let us into a room so brightly lit I had to squint my eyes against the glare. Lights, lights everywhere—Tiffany lamps, floor lamps, candles in sconces. The furniture was white and gold damask, the curtains white. It wasn't a large room—actually, it was quite a small one, with a single curtained window—but the blaze of light made it seem deeper and bigger than it really was.

  Squinting my watering eyes, it took me a moment to see the single occupant of the r
oom, perched on the edge of one of the ornate parlor chairs with a glass in hand. "Lady Paladin," he greeted me, and I recognized the voice, even if I was still having trouble picking out details.

  "Taliesin!"

  He rose and offered drinks to both of us. I declined—showing up drunk to pick up Grandma from the airport wouldn't endear me to Mom—but Lily smiled her thanks for the glass of straw-colored wine he placed in her hand.

  My eyes were finally starting to deal with the brilliance of the room, although I still wished for sunglasses. I'd never seen such lighting overkill in my life. There wasn't a shadow to be seen.

  The white-clad doorman said something quiet to Lily. "Madame is on her way," Lily told us, taking a seat. I sat cautiously on the barest edge of an immaculate chair. I felt like I was making the room grubbier just from being in it.

  "Quite an exciting introduction to the city that you're having," Taliesin said, lifting his drink glass in my direction. He was drinking some kind of amber whiskey today.

  "It's not that different from my normal life." Sad but true. "I'm glad you're okay."

  "Why wouldn't I be? ... Oh." He smiled. "That. Yes."

  "I couldn't say this in front of your friends," Lily said, "but we were the ones who severed Greenwich Village from the rest of Shadow New York. The resistance, that is. We can still reach it through our doors; it's only Tweed's doors that don't work anymore." Her smile broke free.

  I looked back and forth between the two of them. "There's a resistance," I said. Of course there was a resistance. Of course my great-grandmother was mixed up in it, and now, me.

  Lily reached out to give my knee a light tap. "This isn't a recruiting meeting, Kay. We simply want to talk to you. Taliesin helps us sometimes, but he isn't one of us."

  "You've taught me a few things, too," Taliesin murmured.