The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

I.

Bill Lawson studied the silent city. The photograph in his hands was the size of a postcard, creased at the corners and brittle with age. It depicted a cascade of roofs and chimneys emerging from what appeared to be a fogbank, its upper half obscured by clouds, with something like the spire of a church faintly visible in the distance. After examining the picture for another moment, he returned it to the man on the other side of the desk. “What about it?”

The photo went back into the valise. “Have you ever heard of a prospector called Dick Willoughby?”

“Sure. An old sourdough. Before my time. Willoughby Island is named after him.”

“That’s right.” The visitor, who had introduced himself as Sam Russell, was in his late forties, with handsome features and eyes that looked as if they had been transplanted there from the sockets of a much older man. “He claimed that every year in Glacier Bay, between June and July, a city appeared in the sky to the northwest, above the Fairweather range. He went back three times to get a picture of it. Finally, he came up with this photo. He sold copies of it to tourists.”

Lawson checked to see if Russell was joking, but the older man kept a straight face. “It looks fake to me.”

“Oh, it is.” Russell grinned. “It’s a picture of Bristol in England. Either Willoughby was deliberately lying, or somebody sold him a plate of the city and convinced him that it was taken here in Alaska. I’m inclined to think that he was a victim of a hoax. But that’s interesting in itself. It means he thought that this picture resembled whatever he saw in the sky. You see?”

Lawson decided to ignore the question. “So why are you showing it to me?”

“I want you to fly me to Willoughby Island, so I can take a look for myself.”

Lawson paused before responding. He prided himself on being a decent judge of character, but Russell was hard to pin down. The coat that he had hung by the door was rumpled but expensive, like his traveling case, and the bundle by his feet included a surveyor’s tripod and a camera. He certainly didn’t resemble the hunters or prospectors who tended to come through Juneau these days, the flow of whom had slowed to a trickle in the depths of the Great Depression.

It occurred to Lawson that the other man might be toying with him. People from the outside often assumed that the locals were simple folk, when the opposite was more likely to be the case. Seeing himself through Russell’s eyes, he was aware that he didn’t cut an impressive figure, with his untucked shirttail, oily jacket, and busted nose, and he felt a twinge of resentment at being mistaken for a rube. “I wonder if you’re having a laugh at my expense.”

“Not at all. I just want to be clear about what I’m doing. It seemed better to tell you the most ridiculous version now, so there won’t be any confusion later. But I’m serious. I’ve spoken to other eyewitnesses, and I have good reason to believe that Willoughby did see something in the sky. Even if it’s only an optical phenomenon, it’s worth investigating.” Russell glanced at his watch. “But I should come to the point. I’m interested in doing research on Willoughby Island, and I’m willing to pay cash up front. I’ve been told that the flight shouldn’t take more than forty minutes, which means I’ll be back in time to buy you dinner.”

Lawson remembered that Russell had mentioned arriving from Seattle the night before. “You came a long way for a day trip.”

“There may be a second stop. Or even a third. I’ll tell you once I know more.”

Lawson paused again. Two dueling impulses were at war in his mind, and he finally yielded to caution. “Sorry. I can’t fly you into Glacier Bay. Nobody can. Maybe no one explained it to you, but it’s a national park. I could cut you a deal on a sightseeing trip. But we can’t land.”

Russell absorbed the news without any visible reaction. “It has to be on the ground.”

“Then you can take a boat up there. There are plenty of fisherman on the docks who might agree to it.”

“That won’t work. It took longer for me to get here than I hoped, and I’m at the end of my available window. I can’t waste any time. If you won’t take me, I’ll find someone who will.”

Lawson heard the unspoken implication. There were several other pilots in town who would welcome the charter, legal or not, and the plain fact, which was written on his face, was that he needed the money. He wondered if Russell could sense his desperation, and he found that he didn’t want to give the other man the satisfaction, even if they never met again. “You expect to see a city in the sky?”

“Not really,” Russell said. “But I want the chance. It would mean a great deal to me. And to my wife.”

Lawson was about to respond when he saw a figure outlined against the window that faced the street. A moment later, the door opened, and a woman entered the office. As the two men rose, Russell introduced her. “This is my wife, Cora. She’ll be coming, too. If we can reach an agreement.”

The woman did not sit down. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but she had red hair, green eyes, and a face that would be hard to forget. Lawson saw that she was much younger than her husband, probably no more than thirty, and as he looked at her, he found that he had come to a decision.

Taking a seat again, Lawson began to play with the cord of the window shade behind his desk. “If we’re doing this, it has to be done right. There can’t be any record. I won’t put it down on the flight plan.”

A satisfied look began to spread across Russell’s face. “What do you have in mind?”

Lawson let go of the cord. Opening a drawer, he fished out a stained topographical map, which he unrolled across the desk. Willoughby Island was an oval the size of the palm of his hand, nestled like a turtle in the blue ribbon of Glacier Bay. “Where were you hoping to land?”

Russell pointed. “The southern tip. It’s where the most credible sighting took place.”

“We can’t. The shore is too bold. There’s nowhere to tie up the plane.” Lawson indicated an area to the northeast. “There’s a cove here. Maybe even a floating dock. A fox farm used to be there. It might even be worth my while to check it out.” He glanced down at Russell’s shoes, which turned out to be a pair of good boots. “You’ll have to hike four miles along the beach. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. We can still get you home by dinnertime.”

Russell glanced at his wife, who gave him a short nod. “When can we leave?”

“Ten minutes after I get paid.” Lawson rolled up the map. “Normally, the charter would come to seventy dollars apiece. Let’s call it eighty, given the risk of trouble on my end.”

Before he had even finished speaking, Russell pulled out his wallet, counting eight twenties onto the desktop. Lawson pocketed the money. “You know where the lower city float is?”

“I can find it. Let’s call it half an hour. I need to make a phone call from the hotel.”

“Fine with me. You’re each allowed twenty pounds of baggage.” Lawson stuck out a hand. “Glad to do business with you.”

“Same here.” Russell’s grip was firm. He retrieved his coat from the peg and left with his wife, whose eyes lit briefly on Lawson’s on the way out. She had not spoken a word since her arrival.

Half an hour later, they were in the plane, heading out into the channel for takeoff. On his way to the docks, Lawson had made a stop at the grocer. It had been a lean couple of months, and he had been tempted to stock up on treats, restricting himself to a bag of sandwiches, a Horlick’s rum fudge bar, and a few squares of mintcake, one of which he devoured in front of the store.

His plane, a yellow and blue Stinson on Fairchild floats, occupied a rented hangar at the southern end of town, past the docks on high pilings where boats and fishing vessels were tied up at the pier. As he descended the wooden steps to the shoreline, he had been pleasantly conscious of the bills in his pocket, as well as the expectation that there might be more to come.

Somewhat to his surprise, Sam Russell and his wife had turned out to be familiar with the rituals of departure. Without being instructed, they kept their bags on their laps, placing the weight toward the front of the plane, and as he opened up the engine and rocked the stick back and forth, his passengers swayed along with it, helping him to jockey the floats up onto their steps for takeoff.

They broke loose from the surface, the water rising in a fine spray around them, and then they were airborne. As the plane climbed, Lawson looked back at the others. “We’ll fly over Douglas Island to the channel, then head across the Chilkat Range. Should be on our way down in half an hour.”

Russell nodded and returned his gaze to the window. Cora kept her eyes fixed on the landscape below.

Lawson turned to the windshield again. He decided to take a scenic route, bending up and around the Beartrack Mountains before heading down into the bay. He suspected that the Russells would be gone before long, but there was still the outside chance that they might decide to stay. A pilot could survive on just one regular charter, and if he failed to land this one, it might be his last chance for a while.

The flight passed without any conversation. Below them spread a spectacular vista, with the forests on the mountainsides giving way to the snowfields of the ridge top, which was white even in the middle of July. The glaciers descending to the sea, with their compressed layers of thousands of years of ice and snow, were a deep emerald. It was a sight that could reduce even the most jaded travelers to awed silence, but if the Russells were impressed, they kept it to themselves.

Before long, they neared their destination. Lawson zeroed in, checking the approach as he circled around toward the cove. The island was four miles from north to south, the thick spruce woods on its eastern edge ascending to low mountains, bounded on all sides by the waters of Glacier Bay. To the northeast were two smaller outlying islets, one of which was joined to the larger island by the gravel bar where he planned to bring them down.

As they descended, Lawson saw that the floating dock was still there. He made the landing upwind to reduce his forward speed. Once the floats were on the water, he cut the propeller as low as it would go and steered the plane like a boat to the pier, where he cut the engine and climbed out.

As Lawson secured the lines, Russell and his wife picked their way toward the shore. Gulls were pecking on the pebble beach, and a flock of murrelets circled overhead. The temperature was in the high forties, with just a few tufted clouds to the south, although he knew that the weather could change without warning.

Lawson tied up the plane and went to join the couple, up by the fox farm that stood against the thin black trunks of the spruce. It consisted of a log cabin, a warehouse, and a line of trap houses stretching along the edge of the water. Islands throughout the state had been leased to raise blue foxes in the twenties, with the animals left to roam freely before being trapped. The depression had destroyed the fur market overnight, and now most of these farms were abandoned.

Going closer, Lawson saw that Russell and his wife seemed tense, but he knew better than to comment on it. “Everything good?”

Russell turned south. “I’ll hike down there on my own. Cora will stay behind to get some work done. The log cabin looks sound enough. I assume that you’ll stick with the plane?”

Lawson nodded. “I’ll pick through these shacks to see if there’s anything worth saving. But I can get you set up here first.”

This last remark was addressed to Cora, who looked back coolly. “I’ll be fine.”

It was the first time she had spoken to him directly. He looked back without lowering his eyes. “You know where to find me. I’d like to be in the air by eight, so we can get back before dark.”

“Then I’d better be on my way.” Russell appeared to hesitate, as if hoping that Cora would decide to come along after all, but she only picked up her bag and walked toward the cabin. He hefted his own pack onto his back, balancing the tripod on one shoulder, and began to hike down the beach. After a minute, he rounded the bend in the shore and was gone.

Lawson saw that Cora had already entered the cabin and closed the door behind her. He headed off, whistling tunelessly, and made his way to the warehouse that stood nearby.

For the next few hours, he explored the farm at his leisure, pausing in the late afternoon for a sandwich and another bite of mintcake. He had hoped to find some tools or equipment to use or resell, but it had all been picked clean. The warehouse was bare except for two chairs, a chopping block, and a vat that had once been used to cook salmon heads into feed for the foxes.

He stuck his head into the nearest trap house. It was nailed together out of unfinished lumber, four feet to a side, with a ramp leading up to an entrance on the second level. Food had been set out twice a week. When it was time to harvest the pelts, a cleat holding up the floor was removed, allowing it to tilt down under the fox’s weight, depositing it into the trap on the lowest level. Then a counterweight would return the floor to its original position, ready for its next victim.

As he was picturing this, Lawson felt the walls of the shack vibrate around him. Stepping outside, he saw that the wind had picked up, and the birds on the beach had vanished. He turned to the south. At some point over the last hour, the clouds on the horizon had grown darker and more threatening.

Lawson sized them up. Then he went up to the cabin and rapped on the door. After a pause, Cora spoke from inside. “Come in.”

He entered the cabin, which was a cramped, dim space with bare beams crossing the ceiling. Cora had hung her coat from one of the pole racks, and as she rose from the table by the window, where she had been writing something in longhand, he saw that she was wearing a white collared shirt under a wool sweater and a tight pair of trousers. “What is it?”

Lawson stuck his thumb toward the sound of the wind. “You’d better go up the beach to look for your husband. If you see him, tell him to hustle. Don’t go too far. If he doesn’t show up soon, we’ll be here overnight.”

Without waiting for a reply, he left the cabin and headed toward the dock. The wind was sending up a noticeable chop, and the plane was beginning to bob up and down on its lines.

Lawson set to work at once, winding a cable around the float struts and the forward spreader bar and securing it to the pilings. He tied additional ropes to both wings, and then he used the bilge pump to fill the pontoons with water. Finally, he got out his overnight gear. In the back of the Stinson, there was a bundle of egg crate slats that he kept for makeshift repairs. He stuck them under his arm, sealed up the plane, and headed back to the fox farm.

A light rain was falling. Checking the log cabin and the warehouse, he saw that both seemed reasonably sturdy. After a moment’s thought, he went into the cabin and set down his equipment. Using a mintcake wrapper for kindling and a few of the wood slats, he started a fire in the barrel stove. Then he pulled up a chair, lit a cigarette, and settled in to wait.

Cora returned fifteen minutes later, her hair plastered against her head from the rain. “He’s not back?”

Lawson motioned toward the second chair. “You should rest. No point in taking off in weather like this. We’re spending the night, no matter what happens.” He anticipated her next question. “I’ll sleep in the warehouse. There are two more bags. If we’re lucky, your husband will make it back before dark.”

He offered her a smoke, which she took. Sitting close to the fire, she looked toward the shuttered window. Outside, the rain was lashing down in sheets. Lawson ground out his cigarette. “If he’s smart, he’ll find somewhere to wait out the storm. He should do fine under the trees, as long as he’s got wool socks and underwear. It shouldn’t get much below forty. Once this blows over, he can follow the shoreline back. Not much of a chance he’ll get lost.”

Cora didn’t respond. After a minute, he handed her one of the sandwiches, which she took, and offered her a swig from his flask, which she declined. As the wind howled against the cabin like a living creature, Lawson tried to get her mind off of it. “How long have you been married?”

For a second, Cora looked as if she hadn’t understood the question. “Six months.”

He wanted to ask how she had ended up with this man, but he bit it back. “I guess this wasn’t the honeymoon you wanted.”

For the first time, she smiled at him. “Actually, it’s exactly what I had in mind.”

Lawson wasn’t sure what to say in response. On the table, Cora had spread out a few pages of handwritten notes, along with the photo of the silent city. He indicated it. “You really believe in all this?”

Cora followed his eyes, then looked back. “Are you married, Mr. Lawson?”

Lawson grinned. “Not exactly. Not a lot of eligible girls where I’m from.”

“If you were married, you’d know that it doesn’t matter what I believe.” She paused. “Sam and I have more in common than you might think. We’re both stubborn. It’s hard to get an idea out of his head, even if he has to go halfway across the world to prove it. I’m the same way.”

“What does he do for a living?” Lawson asked. “He wasn’t too clear on the subject.”

“He’s a writer,” Cora said. “You might say that he’s a kind of journalist. For a while, he was working for Scripps Howard. I think you have a mutual friend there. A columnist named Ernie Pyle?”

Lawson recognized the name. In better times, reporters had come up to Juneau once every couple of months to get fresh copy, and he had taken a few of them on glory hops into the interior. “Are you a writer, too?”

“You might say that. Sam and I are working on a book. This will be one of the chapters. Assuming—”

She broke off. For the first time, he saw the strain in her face. “Are you worried?”

“No.” Cora glanced at the shutters, which were shaking against the frame. “Sam can handle himself. He doesn’t take anything for granted. And maybe this will even teach him a lesson.”

She stood abruptly. “I’m very tired. If we’re staying here, I’d like to go to bed.”

“Of course.” Lawson picked up his bag. “There’s firewood in the corner. You can come get me if you need anything.”

Cora held his gaze. “Thank you. I’m sure I’ll be fine. Good night, Mr. Lawson.”

“Good night.” Lawson left the cabin, shutting the door, and heard her slide the bolt home. Then he crossed the short distance to the warehouse, his shoulders hunched against the rain.

Once he was inside, he hung his coat from the rafters to dry. There was a stove in the corner, but instead of lighting a fire, he rolled out his sleeping bag and climbed in, listening to the wind whistling overhead.

Lawson closed his eyes. He had not expected to fall asleep at once, but he did.

A few hours later, he sat up in the darkness. It took him a moment to remember what had pulled him out of sleep. He had been dreaming of the foxes. They had stood in a ring around the warehouse, their golden eyes shining in the darkness, and when he had gone out to meet them, he had seen a woman in their midst, her body white, her red hair tumbling down her back.

She had beckoned him. He had followed, his desire stirring, and his steps had carried him to a trap house on the shore. A voice in his head had screamed at him to stop, but he had continued on, walking up the ramp toward the black hole of the door. He had entered, the smell of blood strong in his nose, and it was only when the floor fell out from under his feet that he knew—

Lawson shook his head, coming fully conscious, and only then did he realize what had awakened him. He had heard a noise from outside. A second later, it came again, faintly audible over the wind rattling the building. It was the sound of wood splintering and breaking.

He climbed out of his bag, stuffed his feet into his boots, and yanked his coat from the rack. Stumbling out of the warehouse, he ran down the slope of the beach to the water. The wind had risen to a full gale, and the rain was pouring down hard, but when his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that two of his lines had come loose, and the plane was standing on its nose in the water.

Lawson sprinted forward. Before he had covered ten paces, there was a crack, and the plane was borne up by the wind. It did a loop and a snap roll, as if controlled by unseen hands, and then it plummeted and crashed with a shudder into the gravel bar at the end of the island.

II.

Cora found him early the next morning. Lawson had managed to get the plane partway up the slope of the beach, and he was laying out his equipment on the shore when she approached, wrapped up in her coat and scarf. “Sam didn’t come back last night. Have you—”

She broke off as soon as she saw the extent of the damage. “Can it still fly?”

Lawson straightened up. He was aching all over, and this wasn’t a conversation that he particularly wanted to be having. “Not like this. A chunk came off the tip of the propeller. One of the wing struts is buckled, the ribs are broken, and there’s a big crack in the windshield. We’re stuck. For now.”

Cora appeared to consider this, the wind carrying strands of hair away from her face. “Have you radioed for help?”

Lawson didn’t bother saying that he had spent the last few hours trying not to lose the plane altogether. Instead, he gestured at the radio that he had started to unpack. “Give me a hand.”

Cora listened to his instructions, her lips pressed tightly together. Lawson had already cut a pole from timber on the beach, and he told her how to unwind and string up the antenna. As Cora held the pole upright, he fiddled with the receiver unit. It was a used Lear set that he had bought last year, after the Civil Aviation Authority had mandated that two-way radios be installed on all planes. Until then, he had relied, like most bush pilots, on his telegraph keys, and he still had doubts about the new system, which had proven distinctly unreliable.

The receiver was silent. Not even static. He gestured for Cora to move the pole to another spot on the beach as he switched to the transmitter unit. Checking the dials, he saw nothing. He fiddled with it for a few minutes, then stood up. Either there was a faulty component, which would mean taking it all apart and testing each piece, or the entire set was out of commission. In either case, it meant that they weren’t likely to get any help from that direction.

Cora set down the pole. “Someone will look for us if we don’t come back, right?”

“Normally, sure.” Lawson rose. “If a plane doesn’t turn up on time, they’ll wait one day, maybe two, before starting a search. But not here. You heard what I told your husband. It’s illegal to land in a national park. I didn’t put our destination on the flight plan. As far as anybody else knows, we went on a scenic circle tour over the glaciers. No one will be looking for us on Willoughby Island.”

Lawson fished out his cigarettes, which he had kept safe in an inside pocket. He saw that he had seven left. When she refused his offer of one, he lit it for himself and shook out the match. “We have two options. Either we wait and hope that somebody stumbles across us by accident, which doesn’t seem too likely. Or we fly out of here on our own wings.”

Cora studied the wreck of the Stinson on the shore. “You can fix it yourself?”

“Sure,” Lawson said. “I’ve seen worse. But I don’t know how long it will take. It sure won’t be today. We’ve got enough food to last for a while. So you might even say we’re lucky.”

Her face hardened into a look of resolve. “I’m going after Sam. Are you coming?”

“You go ahead. I’ve got to stay with the plane.” Lawson stooped to pick up a five-gallon can. “Take this to the cabin. Our emergency rations. Rice, hardtack, bullion cubes, milk powder. There are matches and flares, too. When you go out, bring some matches. If you need help, light a fire on the beach. Use spruce boughs. They should give you plenty of smoke. I’ll come for you.”

“Thanks.” Cora took the can into her arms and headed for the cabin, picking her way up the sand. Lawson looked after her, waving away the mosquitos, until she was out of sight. Then he glanced up at the sky again. The gulls were back, and the air was calm, but he knew how quickly that could change.

He turned to the plane, trying to get his thoughts in order. Most of the repairs were fairly routine, but the propeller presented a trickier problem. Six inches had broken off one of the laminated wood blades. If he tried to take off with an unbalanced propeller, the forces could rip the engine right out of the plane, and if he couldn’t get it working again, nothing else would matter.

Keeping that fact tucked in the back of his mind, Lawson set to work. He drilled holes on either side of the break in the windshield and laced them together with wire, patching up the makeshift suture with tape. Earlier that morning, he had found an old gas can in the warehouse. After flattening it out, he nailed it to the top of the wing spar, then folded it over the leading edge and fastened it to the bottom. The result was a kind of truss that he hoped would keep the wing together long enough for him to cover the fifty miles to Juneau.

Lawson took a step back to assess the battered Stinson, which had consumed so much of his life for the last decade. He had come to Alaska at twenty, a restless kid drawn to the blank page of the north, and had learned to fly planes on his own time while working at a reindeer slaughtering plant. Finally, he had gone into business for himself, buying a wrecked plane for a dollar and raising the money to fix it up from local store owners and dentists, all of whom believed that Juneau was bound to benefit from its position on the map.

They had been half right. Lawson had been at an age when he believed that he was bound to do well if he worked hard enough, but the depression had made nonsense of his intentions. For a while, he had flown fish trap patrol for the canneries, and when that had dried up, he had turned to less reputable charters. Reporters didn’t come on glory hops these days, so he ferried men out to the mines instead, sometimes serving as a kind of unofficial recruiter, going to beer parlors and cigar stores and asking the owners to point out customers whose pockets were empty.

Then there were the really bad jobs. Once he had flown three prostitutes to a shack on floats that was towed from one mine to another. The youngest had been no more than sixteen. Another profitable charter, if it was available, was flying a dead body home, which was guaranteed to pay both ways. One time he had retrieved a fisherman who had been decapitated when his scarf was caught in a turning shaft. He had carried the head back in a hatbox.

Lawson blinked away the memory. He still had to fix the cabane strut that held the wing to the fuselage. With some difficulty, he managed to straighten it out, using an old axe handle as a splint, which he bound securely with more wire. When he was done, he removed the propeller and wrapped it up, along with the broken tip. All the while, he kept a mental tally of the cost of the repairs, which would more than swallow up whatever he had hoped to earn from the Russells.

He ate half of his fudge bar and smoked a cigarette before heading back for the cabin, the propeller tucked under one arm. In his other hand, he carried his combination gun, which he had retrieved from under his seat in the cockpit. It was what the locals called a game getter, with both rifled and shotgun barrels, and holding it made him feel marginally less helpless.

Lawson knew that there was no way that his partners would cover the cost of fixing the plane. He hadn’t taken a salary in years. Instead, they paid him with stock in the company, which was effectively worthless. To survive, he dug clams and occasionally lived off his emergency rations. He had always accepted that he was on his own, but he didn’t know how much longer he would last. There always came a time when the world was done feeding you, and then you were ready for the trap house, the floor falling from beneath your feet when you least expected it.

A stiff wind was blowing, making it hard for sound to travel. There was no sign of Cora or her husband. Lawson went into the warehouse, where he set his gun on the chopping block and unwrapped the propeller. It would be best, he saw, to make a pattern of the broken tip, which would allow him to figure out where to cut down the other blade. He didn’t have a pencil or paper, but then he remembered the notes that Cora had spread across the table in the next building.

He left the warehouse and entered the cabin, which was empty. There were a few unused sheets of notepaper and a pencil by the window, along with a pile of other documents. Lawson was picking up a blank page when his eye was caught by a newspaper clipping at the top. It was an article from the Washington Daily News, dated earlier that year, and it carried Sam Russell’s byline.

Lawson looked at it for a long moment. He knew that he needed Russell and his wife more than they needed him. If he got them out of here in one piece, he might be able to make one last try for their business. And the best way to win them over was to figure out what they really wanted.

Going to the door, he bolted it. Then he sat down at the table and began to look at the papers more carefully, hoping that they would tell him something more about the couple he had flown to the middle of nowhere.

The first few clippings were all accounts of the silent city, taken from periodicals like the New York Tribune and the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. There were pages torn from books by Miner Bruce and Alexander Badlam, and a thick volume by a writer named Charles Fort. Then came several scientific papers, one by Oliver Heaviside, another by J.J. Thomson, and a third with the translated title “Simplified Deduction of the Field and the Forces of an Electron Moving in Any Given Way.” Lawson tried to read it and quickly gave up.

But the other articles were easier to understand. So was the final item that he found, buried under the rest of the material. It was Russell’s wallet. Lawson had already invaded the man’s privacy in other ways, so it seemed like only a small step from there to looking inside. Taking out all the bills, he rifled through the stack. There were at least three hundred dollars.

Lawson was tempted. He didn’t think that he could take all of it, but peeling off a few twenties didn’t seem unreasonable, if only as compensation for the plane. In the end, it was the memory of Russell’s strangely old eyes that decided him. Russell was the kind of man, he reflected, who would keep track of what he carried. And perhaps there would be better ways to get at the money.

He stuffed the bills into the wallet again. Taking out the broken tip of the propeller, he traced it carefully on the page, then put the pencil back where it had been lying on the table. His best hope was to cut down the other tip so that it matched. There was no balancing machine between here and Juneau, so he had to eyeball it as close as he could and hope that it would get him off the ground.

It was growing dark by the time Cora returned. Lawson had put a pot of rice on the fire, and he was smoothing down the rough edges of the broken tip as he waited for it to finish cooking. Earlier, he had gone outside and looked toward the mountain range to the northwest, but he had seen nothing unusual in the sky.

Lawson glanced up as the door opened. Cora seemed exhausted, her hair loose around her face, and he was suddenly reminded of his dream from the night before. “No luck, I take it?”

She shook her head. Collapsing into a chair, she accepted a cup of broth, and when the rice was ready, she ate a bowl of it without speaking. Lawson saw that she was holding herself together, but he still chose his next words with care. “If he doesn’t get back tonight, I can come with you tomorrow, as soon as I get the propeller back on the plane. He’s probably just lost in the woods.”

“Sam’s not lost,” Cora said tonelessly. “All he had to do to find his way back was follow the shoreline north. If he didn’t come back here, it’s because something happened to him.”

“We aren’t going to find him in the dark. If he doesn’t turn up, we can take the plane to Juneau and come back with a real search party. If I can get us off the water, we’ll make it to town. And if not—”

Lawson stopped. Looking into her face, he saw real fear there. Even if Russell came back, she might not want anything to do with Alaska again, and this was the best chance he would ever have to convince her otherwise.

He broke what was left of the fudge bar in two and offered her the larger piece. After a beat, she took it. Lawson chewed on his own half for a minute before speaking again. “I wanted to ask you something.”

Cora glanced at him warily. They were seated close to the barrel stove. “What?”

“I want to know what you’re really doing here. Your husband gave me his version, but I don’t think that he came all this way to prove that some old sourdough saw a mirage.” Lawson fed a chunk of wood into the fire. “I’ve seen strange things over the ice. All pilots have. There’s nothing unusual in that.”

Cora seemed to weigh her words. “This isn’t an ordinary mirage. It’s what they call a Fata Morgana. I’ll show you.”

She took a piece of paper and the pencil stub from the table. For a second, she seemed to study the pencil in her hand, and then she turned to him again. “You’re sure you’re interested?”

Lawson gave a slight shrug. “It passes the time. And I like hearing you talk.”

He saw her blush. Cora lowered her head and drew a diagram on the page. “It’s called a superior mirage, which means that it appears higher in the sky than the original object. You tend to see them in cold climates, over something like an ice sheet. It causes a layer of cold air to form under a warmer area, which is the opposite of the usual arrangement. A thermal inversion.”

As she spoke, the weariness seemed to leave her voice. “Light from the object is refracted when it hits the inversion, which bends it along the curve of the Earth. If you’re in the atmospheric duct, you can see it from hundreds of miles away.” She put the pencil down. “That’s what Willoughby saw.”

Lawson pretended to study the drawing. “And what was the object behind it?”

“Maybe nothing. A Fata Morgana can be caused by as little as a stretch of coastline or a land formation. The spires that people see are produced by turbulence in the air. Nothing more to it than that.”

He decided to play his last card. “That’s a pretty good story. Now tell me the truth.”

Cora looked up sharply. Something was stirring behind her green eyes. “Excuse me?”

“The truth,” Lawson repeated. “You didn’t come here for a mirage. When I asked for the money for the charter, your husband didn’t blink. He thinks there’s something real here. I’m not saying I believe it. But if you’re serious, you need someone like me to help you.”

Cora continued to look at him. Finally, she seemed to decide. “Have you heard of a man called Charles Fort?”

Lawson remembered the name from the book on the table, but he decided not to mention it. “I don’t think so.”

Cora turned toward the fire. “He was a writer, too. Like Sam, but more so. He spent his life in museums and libraries, looking for accounts of unexplained events. There was a club that got together at his apartment to talk about the unknown. Fort didn’t welcome the attention. He didn’t like being held up as an authority. But Sam cared about him a lot. And so did I.”

In the firelight, her face was difficult to read. “Fort died seven years ago. He just collapsed. Leukemia. I went to see him in the hospital before he went. It’s where I met Sam. All I knew was that he wanted to take up where Fort had left off. Fort never traveled or did any investigations on his own, and he tried to cover too much at once. Sam thought that you should focus on one problem at a time. The silent city seemed like a good place to start. Fort even gave him his blessing.”

“If he’s spent years looking into it, why is he coming up to Alaska only now?”

“You shouldn’t underestimate him. Sam wanted to put together all the pieces before he came. And he realized from the beginning that there was more to the story than even Willoughby knew.”

Cora went to the table and pulled out the picture of the silent city. “Look at the photo. It’s an obvious hoax. An ordinary picture of Bristol. But before Willoughby started selling it to the tourists as the real thing, other witnesses had already claimed that the city was Bristol, too. Bristol is more than four thousand miles away. There’s no way that a mirage could come even a tenth of that distance. So what was it about the city in the sky that reminded them of it?”

Lawson looked at the picture again. He saw no more there than before. “You tell me.”

“Bristol is a city of spires. Some eyewitnesses even claimed to recognize a church called St. Mary Redcliffe. It’s got a row of pinnacles and a spire with a cross. Like this.” Cora sketched a vertical column with four smaller lines projecting from the top. “The accounts differ. But they all mention the spires.”

“You said that the spires were probably just caused by turbulence in the air.”

“That’s true of some Fata Morgana images, but it doesn’t make sense here. A cold mass of air over ice would be relatively still. All of the accounts say that the city was stationary. It would hang there in the sky for more than twenty minutes. And it appears in late June and the middle of July, near the summer solstice, when sunset lasts the longest, which would draw out the phenomenon. The men who witnessed it weren’t fools. Whatever they saw was real.”

Lawson began to see that she was just as cracked as her husband. “So what was it?”

“There are plenty of descriptions, but they don’t agree. Some witnesses say that the city looked like Bristol, but there are others who compare it to Montreal, Toronto, or even Peking. Others say that whatever it was, it wasn’t European. You know what that says to me?”

Lawson had a hunch, but he was more fascinated by the light in her eyes. “What?”

“It reminds me of a famous detective story. Maybe you’ve read it. A voice is overheard arguing in a room. One witness thinks it was talking in German, another in English, another in Russian. None of them can speak the language themselves, but they think they can recognize it by the sound. The speaker turns out to be an orangutan.” Cora smiled. “And if people say that a city looks like Bristol, Montreal, or Peking, they’re really all saying the same thing without knowing it. It’s something strange. Alien. Or from another time. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

This last question took him by surprise. He wanted to warn her not to throw away her life on this, but he only shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“I don’t mind.” Cora regarded him with evident amusement. “I’ve been doing all the talking. Tell me. What made you come out to Alaska?”

He had rarely been asked this before. “There wasn’t much for me on the outside.”

“That’s what I thought. It draws people who have been pushed to the margins. They have nowhere else to go. The same is true of ideas. Some of us end up on the fringes. It can become a sickness. You know why prospectors go mad? It’s because you have to be nuts to go looking for gold in the first place. You could say the same thing about writers. Sam and I both know this. But I love him, and I don’t want to lose him. Anyway, you knew all this before I even said a word.”

Cora held up the pencil. “You went through my papers. Did you take the money?”

Lawson felt his face grow warm. “You can count it. If I looked at your notes, it was because I wanted to know what the hell I was doing here. I stand to lose a lot on this trip, and I had to know why.”

He came forward until they were close enough to touch. “If it matters, I believe you. Or at least that you’re telling the truth. Hell, for all I know, maybe Willoughby really did see a city from the past—”

Behind him, the door of the cabin opened. When he turned, he saw the shape of a man outlined against the darkness.

“You’re wrong,” Russell said. “It wasn’t a city of the past. It’s a city of the future.”

III.

Russell lowered himself into the nearest chair and began to unlace his boots. Lawson saw that he was carrying his right leg stiffly, and that something had been bound around his knee so that it strained against the fabric. Russell noticed him looking and grinned. “Give me a hand with this, will you?”

As Cora stood watching from the corner, Lawson helped the older man roll up his trouser cuff, which was stained with fresh mud. When the knee was revealed, he saw that Russell had wrapped it in a brace of some heavy material in which he had punched holes, lacing it together with the drawstring from his knapsack. Then he realized that it was the leather cover of a book, its title stamped on the spine. It was The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort.

Russell’s grin widened. “Fort would have appreciated it. Every writer likes to think that his work will be useful.”

He undid the lacing. Underneath, his kneecap was discolored by an ugly bruise, with red welts, like teeth marks, running to either side. Lawson took the flask from his pocket and offered the other man a drink, which he accepted. Then they sat in silence as Russell ate a bar of mintcake.

When he was done, Russell looked at his wife for the first time. “I’m sorry, Cora.”

Cora remained standing. She seemed visibly relieved but also determined to tamp it down. “What happened?”

Russell laughed. “The next time I act like I know what I’m doing, just whisper the name of this island in my ear.” He looked ruefully at his sprained knee. “I didn’t see the storm coming. By the time it hit, all I could do was hunker down in the woods. I spent the night there. It wasn’t too bad. When I set out in the morning, I slipped on a patch of mud, and my knee came down on a foothold trap that someone had thoughtfully placed at that very spot.”

Lawson nodded. “The trap houses get most of the foxes. For the rest, you use snares. And for the really stubborn ones—”

“—you set out steel traps,” Russell finished. “I guess that makes me a stubborn fox.”

He tested his leg and winced. “When I went down, I was probably two hundred paces from shore. It took me half the morning to cobble a brace together. I still can’t put any weight on it. Even with the tripod as a crutch, I didn’t get to the beach until it was almost dark. You were looking for me?”

“I spent all day calling for you,” Cora said quietly. “Shouting into the wind.”

“We must have just missed each other. I didn’t mean to worry you. Maybe it serves me right. But I got what I needed.”

Russell unbuttoned his shirt and withdrew a folded map, which he had been careful to keep dry. Cora was avoiding her husband’s eyes. Lawson wondered if she would say anything about what had passed between them, but he also saw that it didn’t matter. As Russell opened the map, he had the look of a man who was ready to stake everything he had on it, like a prospector about to pour his life into a doubtful claim, even if countless others had failed there before.

Taking a pencil and a ruler from his bag, Russell drew a line from the southern tip of Willoughby Island toward the western slope of Mount Fairweather, extending it deep into the interior. Then he drew a second line from the island to the eastern edge of the mountain, covering the same distance. He connected the far ends of the lines to make a triangle. The result enclosed a narrow wedge of territory, roughly four hundred miles long and a hundred miles across, with its vertex on the island itself. Russell tapped it with his pencil. “This is where we need to look.”

Lawson took it in. “So that’s why you came here. To narrow the search area—”

Russell set the pencil down. “Among other things. You can do a lot with an atlas and an armchair, but there’s no substitute for going into the field. If the image of a city appears here every year, there must be something real behind it. And it has to be somewhere in this triangle.”

He glanced at Lawson. “You understand, don’t you? The city is seen above the Fairweather range by observers in Glacier Bay, which means that it lies to the northwest. But it also has to be relatively far. I took the sightings yesterday. The top of the range is three degrees above the horizon from the southern end of the island. You can add another degree or so to suspend the city in the air. Each additional degree of elevation indicates seventy miles of horizontal distance, so—”

He indicated the map again. “The original of the image, whatever it is, is a minimum of two hundred miles away and a maximum of four hundred, which is the upper range for Fata Morgana mirages. And for it to appear where it does, it has to be somewhere in this direction.”

Lawson studied the area in question. “There isn’t much there. Valdez is the only real town, and there are a couple of villages to the north. I can fly you out there, if you like. The plane got pretty banged up. Once I pay for the repairs, I’d be glad to take you wherever you want—”

If Russell got the hint, he didn’t follow up on it. “There’s nothing to see. But there might be something there one day. And it will probably appear where a settlement is now. A foothold for what will come in the future. But I don’t think any of us will live long enough to visit it.”

Lawson wondered if Russell and Cora both somehow suffered from the same delusion. “You lost me.”

“I thought Cora explained it to you. You certainly seemed deep in conversation when I got back.” Russell fixed his wife with an unreadable look. “Do you want to tell him, or should I?”

Cora took a breath. “It isn’t so hard to understand. A mirage bends light rays in space. Under the right conditions, the image can travel down an atmospheric duct for hundreds of miles. And the same thing could happen in time. It would have to be rare. You might only see it in one place, a few times a year, at sunset. But if you’re standing in the kind of duct that transmits images across time, you would see a temporal mirage of what will be there. Not now. But someday.”

Lawson wanted to laugh. There was no reason for any sane man to settle there, much less build a city of spires. They were chasing a castle in the air. He had been doing it for years.

A second later, he realized something else. “You said that you only see it at sunset.”

“That’s what the witnesses say,” Russell said. “In late June and July. That’s why—”

“—you were in such a rush to come out,” Lawson finished. “If you waited any longer, you might miss your window. That’s what you told me. But you also said that you’d have me back by dinner. You were lying. No one would come all the way out here just to take some measurements. You wanted to see the city for yourself. Which means that you always meant to stay overnight.”

Russell looked back at Lawson. “Yes. I wasn’t sure that you’d agree to take me if it meant staying for the night. Once we were on the island, I planned to make myself scarce until dark, and then offer to pay you for the overtime. I wasn’t counting on the storm. The clouds were too heavy. I didn’t see anything at all. It didn’t appear tonight, either. But I don’t need to see it to know that it exists.”

Lawson could only think of the wreckage of his plane, and how it all might have been avoided if they had made it back to town on time. Rising from his chair, he spoke evenly. “We’ll be ready in the morning. Leave as much behind as you can. We aren’t going to be able to carry much weight.”

He left without saying goodbye. Outside the cabin, he stuffed his hands into his pockets, the rage now spreading freely through his body. They had played him for a fool, and he wanted to have nothing to do with either of them.

Lawson went into the warehouse and closed the door. The combination gun was still lying on the chopping block.

He picked up the gun. Hefting it, he told himself that he would only ask Russell to pay for the repairs. There was no reason to threaten violence, except as a last resort. He had the upper hand. They weren’t going back without him. A real town was worth more than an imaginary city.

A second later, an unfamiliar voice began to whisper in his head. It said that no one knew that the couple was here at all. The flight plan had only stated that he was taking two passengers on a scenic circle tour. He had not been required to list them by name, and he had not entered any additional remarks.

He thought again of the cash in the wallet, and how little would remain for him in Juneau when he returned, even if he managed to fix his plane. And as much as he tried, he could not push this new thought away.

There was a knock at the door. Lawson set down the gun, feeling a sudden wave of sickness. “Who is it?”

“Only me.” The door opened to reveal Cora outside. “I’d like to talk to you.”

Lawson took a seat, indicating the second chair by the chopping block. He tried to keep his voice steady. “Suit yourself.”

Cora came in and shut the door behind her. When she saw the gun on the table, her mouth seemed to tighten incrementally, but she made no mention of it. She lowered herself into a chair. “Sam’s sleeping. His knee is in pretty bad shape. He’ll need to see a doctor when we get back.”

“I know one in Juneau. He’s pushed my nose back into place a few times. What else did your husband say?”

“He thinks I’m mad at him.” Cora eyes strayed down to the gun again. “You’re sure we can take off tomorrow?”

“I’ll get you back if I can. Provided that we come to an understanding.” When Cora failed to respond, Lawson went on. “There’s a lot of damage to the plane. Since I only got caught in the storm because your husband wandered off, it seems fair that you cover the cost.”

Cora appeared to take this in. “And what if we decide not to pay you anything?”

“Then we aren’t going anywhere,” Lawson said. “I’m happy to stay as long as necessary. There are deer in the woods. I know how to take care of myself. But I wonder if you do.”

Cora smiled. “Don’t try to frighten me. We’ve been through more than you know.”

She took out a wallet, removed a wad of bills, and set it on the table. Lawson didn’t reach for it yet. Returning the wallet to her pocket, Cora seemed to feel something else there, which she withdrew. It was the map. She unfolded it on the tabletop, handling it with a strange tenderness. “It’s a shame. We aren’t rich, you know. All we have is Sam’s writing, and that doesn’t pay much. But we still had to come here. When you met Sam, he told you that there might be another stop after this one. If you’ll hear me out, I can tell you where it is.”

“I don’t need you to tell me.” Lawson inclined his head toward the map. “You want to see the towns in that triangle. Even if there’s nothing there now, you want to set foot there for yourself. But I still don’t understand why.”

“It’s simple. These are the most likely locations where the real city of spires will appear. If it isn’t Valdez, it might be somewhere else. We want to leave a message that will prove we were right. I’m still not sure what it will be. We can’t make a public prediction, because that might affect the future itself. Maybe we’ll bury it. Or seal it with instructions to open it under certain conditions after we’re dead.”

“I don’t see the point,” Lawson said. “Nobody alive will know you were right.”

“But somebody would. That’s what matters. We want people to see more than what’s in front of their eyes. To look past the present. That’s what Fort tried to do. If we’re right about this, we can finish what he started. We can predict that there will be a city of spires where no one would ever believe it.”

“That’s what I don’t get. You haven’t said how a mirage can come back in time.”

“It isn’t so hard to understand. You just have to ask yourself what a mirage really is. Light travels from the Sun, strikes an object, and is refracted through the atmospheric duct to the observer. That’s all. But it isn’t just visible light. It’s radiation of all kinds. Radio, for instance. Under the right conditions, signals that would be limited to line of sight can travel for hundreds of miles. Now imagine a class of particle that can move back in time. Let’s say they’re created by some kind of event at our city of the future, like a high-energy collision. Once they exist, they can travel along the atmospheric duct, just like the light from a visible mirage. And if they interact with particles in our time, we might see something. Like a picture of a ghost.”

“But why would it happen at this one spot? Why wouldn’t we see it in other places?”

“I don’t know,” Cora said simply. “But the city itself wouldn’t see any trace of it in its own time, either. It might even be an accident. They would have no way of knowing that they were casting a shadow on the past. Unless, of course, someone from our time left them a message.”

Lawson tried to get his head around this. “But why does it matter to you?”

Cora paused before responding. “It means that the past and the future all somehow exist together. If the future has already happened, then everything we do has already been decided. And maybe it means that the past still exists, in a way we can’t explain, even after we’ve lost it.”

She glanced out the window. “Sam understands this. If we can prove that this silent city will exist one day, it means that we’re all part of a pattern. Sometimes the patterns you see aren’t real, but sometimes they are. Most people avoid the places where the unknown breaks through. But some don’t. Like you.”

Lawson looked across the table at Cora. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I don’t think one person can ever know anything about another,” Cora said mildly. “But you can follow your hunches. Call it intuition, or paranoia, but it’s a mistake to only trust in what you know for sure.”

She paused. “I’ve been thinking of what you said about the foxes. Most are killed in the trap houses. Snares take care of the others. For the last few, you need traps. Those foxes aren’t smarter than the rest. They’re just born suspicious. But what if they tried to warn the others that there was a conspiracy against them? No one would believe it. The foxes think they’re being fed by a loving hand. When it kills them, they think they’re unlucky. They don’t realize that they were bred for it.”

Cora looked at Lawson. “People are the same. They don’t understand the world any more than the foxes do. That’s why you need a few who see things that might not even be there. It’s a delusion that allows the species to survive. Fort was one. I’ve tried to be another. So has Sam. We may never know what that city really is, but we have to ask. It gives us a reason to keep going. Something is coming, whether we understand it or not. Our mutual friend thought you would understand—”

Lawson felt his attention click sharply into place. “What are you talking about?”

Cora smiled. “Sam spoke with him about you. Ernie Pyle. The columnist for Scripps Howard. I gather that he took a trip with you a few years ago. He told us that you were an interesting man. Sam called him from Juneau, just before we flew out to the island, and gave him instructions in case we didn’t come back. And he knew we were flying out on your plane.”

Lawson became very conscious of the gun on the table. “What else did he say?”

“He said that you were the best,” Cora said. “But you didn’t know what you wanted. He said that he once advised you to build something for yourself. Because there aren’t any old pilots in Alaska.”

A long silence fell. Lawson kept his eyes on Cora. Finally, he reached for the table. Cora seemed to brace herself, but instead of the gun, Lawson scooped up the money. He took every single dollar that was there, without bothering to count it, and slid it into his pocket.

Cora didn’t lower her gaze. At last, she rose and left the warehouse without a word.

Lawson didn’t see either of them again until the following morning, as they prepared to depart. As he had instructed, the couple left most of their baggage behind. He saw that Cora was carrying a sheaf of papers, and that Russell was clutching his valise with the notes from the trip.

An hour earlier, Lawson had secured the propeller to the nose of the plane. Once the passengers were seated, he headed out into the water, opening the throttle all the way. As he had feared, the propeller wasn’t cutting as much air as usual. Reaching up, he grabbed a cross member over his head to get more leverage, then pulled back on the stick with the other.

At last, he felt the floats rise up on their steps. The pontoons broke loose from the surface of the water, and then they were up and away, the spray wreathing them as they ascended. Lawson exhaled. The hard part was over, and all that remained was to get back to Juneau.

He took them away from the cove. Before circling back toward the Chilkat Range, he looked north, gazing at the mountains in the distance.

For a second, he thought that he saw something outlined on the side of Mount Fairweather. When he blinked, it was gone. It had been just his imagination, or the distortion of the windshield. But in that brief instant, the future had seemed close enough to touch, and it reminded him of something that Russell had said. If the city was sending its image into the past, it might not even know it.

Lawson glanced behind him. He saw that Russell had the map out again, and that he was looking at it sadly. They would not be visiting the towns to the northwest, at least not this time around.

Cora took her husband’s hand. “There will be other chances. Let it go for now.”

“I know. But I’m still sorry.” Russell studied the map. “I would have liked to have seen Valdez. Or—”

He appeared to pick the name of one of the other villages at random. “Or Gakona.”