The Dark River

Tompkins Square Park had been the traditional site for political protests for more than a hundred years. A generation earlier, a group of homeless people had established a camp there until the police had closed the park and surrounded it with a massive circle of officers. The police then walked toward the center, ripping apart improvised shelters and beating anyone who refused to leave. These days, huge elm trees shaded the park in the summer, and black iron railings surrounded every patch of ground. There were only two surveillance cameras in the park; both were aimed at the children’s playgrounds and easily avoided.

Gabriel walked cautiously through the park and approached the small redbrick building occupied by the gardening staff. He passed through some open gates and stopped in front of a white marble stela with a small lion’s-head fountain at the center. Faintly visible in the marble were the outline of some children’s faces and the words THEY WERE THE EARTH’S PUREST CHILDREN, YOUNG AND FAIR. This was the memorial to a 1904 disaster when a ferry ship called the General Slocum left New York Harbor carrying a group of German immigrants to a Sunday school picnic. The boat caught fire and sank without lifeboats, and over a thousand women and children died.

Maya used the memorial as one of three message boards around Manhattan. The boards gave their small group a communications alternative to the easily monitored cell phones. On the backside of the stela, at the marble base, Gabriel found some graffiti that Maya had left a few weeks ago. It was a Harlequin sign: an oval with three lines that symbolized a lute. He looked around at the nearby basketball court and the small garden. It was seven o’clock in the morning and no one was there. All the negative possibilities he had pushed out of his mind this morning returned with a dreadful power. Everyone was dead. And somehow, he was the cause of it.

Gabriel knelt down like a man about to pray. He took a felt-tip pen out of his jacket and wrote on the monument G. here. Where you?

He left the park immediately, walking across Avenue A to a small coffeehouse filled with old tables, rickety chairs, and a pair of school desks that looked as though they had been found on the street. Gabriel bought a cup of coffee and sat in the back room with his eyes on the doorway. His feeling of hopelessness was almost unbearable. Sophia and the families at New Harmony had been murdered. And now there was a strong possibility that the Tabula had killed Maya and his friends.

He stared down at the scratched surface of the table and tried to quiet the angry voice in his brain. Why was he a Traveler? And why had he caused all this pain? Only his father could answer these questions-and Matthew Corrigan was apparently living in London. Gabriel knew there were more surveillance cameras in London than in any other city in the world. It was a dangerous place, but his father must have gone there for some important reason.

No one paid attention as Gabriel opened his shoulder bag and counted the money in the packet Vicki had given him last night. There seemed to be enough cash to buy a plane ticket to Great Britain. Since Gabriel had spent his entire life off the Grid, the biometric data on his passport chip couldn’t be compared against any previous identity. Maya had seemed sure that he wouldn’t have problems traveling to another country. As far as the authorities were concerned, he was a citizen named Tim Bentley who worked as a commercial real estate agent in Tucson, Arizona.

He finished his coffee and returned to the memorial in Tompkins Square Park. Using a scrap of newspaper he wiped out his previous message and wrote G2LONDON. He felt like the survivor of a shipwreck who had just carved a few words on a scrap of wood. If his friends were still alive, then they would know what had happened. They would follow him to London and find him at Tyburn Convent. If everyone was dead, then it was a message to no one.

Gabriel left the park without looking back and walked south on Avenue B. The morning air was still cold, but the sky was clear-almost painfully blue. He was on his way.

11

Michael finished his second cup of coffee, got up from the oak table, and walked over to the Gothic windows at one end of the morning room. The lead frames of the windows imposed a black grid upon the outer world. He was west of Montreal on an island in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River. Rain had fallen the night before, and a thick layer of clouds still lingered in the sky.