Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “They never found any of my brother’s weapons,” Farooq-Lane said. She hadn’t realized she was going to say it out loud until she did, and then she almost immediately wished she hadn’t. She hoped Liliana hadn’t heard.

  But Liliana stopped knitting.

  “Do you really want to talk about this?” Liliana asked.

  “No,” Farooq-Lane said. Then, the sword dipping a little in her hand, “It’s all right.”

  “That sword’s deadly and you are afraid of how you like it.”

  Liliana knew her well at every age. Farooq-Lane said, “You didn’t see her face. Jordan Hennessy’s. She wasn’t bringing out a weapon on purpose. Whatever that thing was that I cut … this sword seemed made to destroy it. That’s the opposite of intentionally destroying the world.”

  Liliana began to knit again, jiggling her foot once more.

  “You aren’t going to say anything?” Farooq-Lane asked.

  “You already said it,” Liliana replied in her gentle way.

  Farooq-Lane swung the sword again. “Accidentally ending the world is still ending the world, though.”

  Liliana held the knitting out from her body. It was turning into a sock or a scarf or something long.

  “So they have to be stopped no matter what,” Farooq-Lane said. “Well, controlled. We already know the apocalypse has to be generated by these Zeds. There’s no other explanation for why they keep showing up in your visions, even if we can’t tell what they’re doing.”

  The Potomac Zeds’ acts of industrial espionage were getting bigger and bigger, although the Moderators had had as much luck intercepting them at this as with anything else. It was difficult to divine the purpose, but there undoubtedly was one. Even in light of this, though, Lock had recently announced they were going to return to their previous method of taking out other Zeds. The Potomac Zeds couldn’t blow up transistors and protect other Zeds, he reasoned. By taking up their old methods, the Moderators could stop one or the other instead of just twiddling their thumbs. Back to business as usual, he said, as soon as the location intel was processed on the next vision.

  Business as usual.

  “I’m going to quit,” Farooq-Lane said suddenly. She put the sword back in its scabbard, instantly reducing the light of the chilly backyard to just the subtle dazzle of the twinkle lights strung through the pergola. “I’m going to quit the Moderators.”

  Liliana’s knitting needles clicked faintly as she did another row.

  Farooq-Lane’s heart was thudding in her ears and her hands felt ice-cold. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  It had been a little over a year since Nathan had killed their parents. Since she found out her brother was a serial killer. Since she found out he was a Zed. Since she found out the end of the world was coming. Since she had helped kill Zed after Zed while the fire got closer and closer. She’d lost most of her life with the murders and given the rest of it away to join the Moderators. Without them, she’d have to devise an entirely new future for herself, whole cloth.

  “Liliana,” Farooq-Lane said. “Anything at all?”

  Neatly folding her scarf-sock thing and setting it on the chair, Liliana stood. She walked to Farooq-Lane, took the scabbard from her hand, and leaned it against the pergola support. The twinkle lights made a galaxy of night stars in her eyes as she stepped close.

  Then she gently brushed Farooq-Lane’s hair with the palm of her hand, and she kissed her.

  Farooq-Lane closed her eyes. She put her hands where the knot of the blue fabric was coming loose. The skin there was very soft.

  When the kiss was done, Liliana said, “What are you going to do instead? I will come with you, of course.”

  It was going to be so difficult to do this alone. To take from the Moderators the one supernatural tool they had in their arsenal: Liliana. To leave them blind to trust herself instead.

  But Farooq-Lane’s voice didn’t waver as she replied, “Save the world.”

  A boat ride.

  Jordan supposed she could do a boat ride, although she had to admit she was disappointed. It was very civilized. Very pretty. They’d gotten to Boston Harbor an hour or so before dark, as the sky glowed orange behind the Boston skyline of skyscrapers and clock towers. The icy water lapped darkly against tour boats drowsing at the wharf. The sailboats that were still out this late in the year lay gracefully on the water, their plumage lowered and only bones remaining.

  As habit, Jordan thought about how she would paint her surroundings, which brush she would use to draw those fine, fine hairs of rigging etched delicately against the sky, but it was a bit of a dull exercise. It was too obvious a scene, chosen by too many artists and photographers over the years. Because it was pretty.

  Pretty was good, she told herself. Nice was good.

  Just a little disappointing.

  “Matthew, actually buckle that life vest. Actually. Buckle. It,” Declan Lynch said. He looked quite at home here on the water, quite at home here in Boston altogether, a handsome Irish American fellow with a head of tamed curls and those narrow, squinted eyes of a Celt. Collared shirt, nice sweater, good jacket, all of a piece with the pretty skyline and the boat and the water. Hennessy would hate him so much, Jordan thought. Congratulations, she’d say, you’ve found Boring White Man #314.

  A date in Boston Harbor would only underline Hennessy’s point. Because it was nice. Because it was pretty. Because you could read about it on the tourism site and purchase tickets. Because it was a thing everyone might like.

  How romantic. Hennessy’s voice would drip with judgment.

  Jordan had to make do with imagining Hennessy’s voice since she hadn’t called. Why hadn’t she called? Jordan knew she was alive and well, because Ronan had called Declan. Well, and because Jordan was still standing.

  Silence from Hennessy was as worrisome as words.

  “How do you know I wasn’t made to float?” Matthew was saying petulantly.

  “Mother Mary,” Declan said with exasperation. “Do we have to do this every day? Just say you want a therapist for your birthday.”

  “Do you still call it a birthday if it’s the day you just, like, appeared?” Matthew asked.

  Jordan contemplated inserting herself into this discussion but decided it was more about brothers than it was about the dreaming. She knew more about one of these things than the other.

  “Everyone just appears at some point, Matthew,” Declan said, removing the last of the lines securing them to the pier. “Jordan, are you tied down?”

  She saluted him.

  They were off. The engine drowned out the protests of the seagulls overhead and the voices of pedestrians on the wharf they left behind. The water chopped up white and gray and black behind them. The Atlantic Ocean hissed cold winter wind from the darkening horizon. It wasn’t entirely civilized, Jordan supposed. Because the temperature was too wild, and Declan drove the boat a little too fast across the waves for romantic sightseeing.

  Why did Jordan care what Hennessy would think anyway?

  She didn’t, actually. She just missed her.

  While Matthew huddled on the back of the boat with a bag of potato chips, Jordan eventually got tired of the chill and joined Declan at the wheel, behind the relative protection of the windshield.

  “Where did you learn to drive a boat?” Jordan asked, voice raised to be heard. It would be easier to talk if he cut the engine, but he seemed intent on a destination, clipping past various wharfs and frequently glancing over his shoulder to get his bearings. “Your father?”

  Declan laughed. “A senator I worked for taught me. He said it was a life skill.”

  “Zombie apocalypse?”

  “Fundraising opportunities.”

  “Same difference.”

  Declan smiled thinly at the ocean. “It’s that catch-22 of money. People feel better about donating money to people who already have it. Did you find anything out today?”

  For weeks, Jordan had been throwing her
self against the question of sweetmetals. She’d returned to El Jaleo again and again, trying to understand the rules of it. How far its influence extended, if it varied from day-to-day … how it did what it did. It wasn’t the only Sargent she visited, either. She tracked down as many Sargents as she could, to see if any of them were sweetmetals, too. It wasn’t difficult to find a Sargent in Boston; this had been his city when he was in the States. He’d painted the murals on the ceilings of the MFA and the walls of the public library. Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Massachusetts Historical Society had portraits of movers and shakers. The Peabody Essex, the Addison, and the Worcester had more portraits, many watercolors, many, many sketches. She saw pieces she’d copied before, like his splendid and somewhat eerie Daughters of Edward Darley Boit at the MFA, and saw many others her fingers itched to copy, like a facile watercolor of alligators at the Worcester. She saw dozens upon dozens of his works.

  Several of them gave her the general feeling of a sweetmetal, but only three felt strong enough to actually be useful to a dream in need of energy. El Jaleo, Boit’s daughters, and an only recently discovered painting, a dramatic nude of Thomas McKeller, the Black man Sargent used as his primary model for his MFA murals. The latter had been hidden away in Sargent’s private collection for years, and his real relationship to the man in the painting remained so.

  She was no closer to understanding how sweetmetals worked. And if anyone knew anything about them, they weren’t talking to her.

  “Several of the Monets are sweetmetals,” Jordan said. “At the MFA.”

  “Water lilies?” Declan suggested.

  “One of the cathedrals, if you can believe it. The lilies gave me nothing at all.”

  Her first theory had been that a piece’s sweetmetal value was linked to its artistic merit, but she’d had to abandon it for lack of evidence. Several of the pieces that felt the strongest to Jordan at the Boudicca demonstration were the least artistically accomplished, after all, and there were many masterpieces that left her cold in the sweetmetal department. Her next theory? She had no next theory. She’d decided her next step was to do a deep dive into the backgrounds of each of the sweetmetals she found, to see if there were clues there, but then Declan had invited her on this boat ride.

  Boat ride.

  It was a fine distraction, she told herself. She shouldn’t let herself feel hurried by Boudicca’s timeline. By Hennessy’s silence.

  “Have you thought about stealing one?” Declan asked casually. Not from the Gardner, but from somewhere.

  “Of course.”

  “Which?”

  “Easiest would be nicking one like Sherry Lam’s, but it hardly seems worth the crime, does it? It’s not got a lot of oomph to it. If I stole one, I’d go big.”

  He leaned the wheel to the left, sending them deeper into the harbor. “Tell me how you’d do it. Blue-sky thinking.”

  Jordan ducked under his arm on the wheel in order to sit on his lap. He matter-of-factly sorted out her voluminous ponytail as she leaned her head back on his chest to gaze up at the shifting evening sky. He bent his head prayerfully, eyes still on their destination. Now mouths and ears were close enough for speaking at regular volume in this fast-moving boat. “The Provenance Game always makes the most sense to me.”

  Provenance was the real work of a forger. The show your work of the art world. Beauty was nothing without bloodline. Creating the art in the style of a master was only the first step. Then came paperwork and research, fastidious work that began and ended with a story. A forged piece couldn’t just spring into being; no one would believe one had suddenly found a new Monet, a new Cassatt, a new whatever it was. An alibi had to be invented, proven, knit into truth. Where had it been all these years? The more desirable the work, the better the story had to be. Hidden in a recluse’s private collection. Misattributed for years by bumpkins. Discovered in a hidden basement after a house fire.

  But one could not just invent reclusive collectors or uncertain bumpkins or hidden basements. The forger had to find ones that already existed and slide the story in, making as small an incision in the truth as possible in order to promote unscarred healing to the timeline. Sometimes, depending on the buyer, this was as simple as including a news clipping of a recent manor house fire. For good museums or discerning buyers, bills of sale or insurance claims for stolen works or letters from contemporaries mentioning the work or photographs of the work next to relatives of the artist sometimes needed to be forged.

  Provenance.

  “The crux of it, the crux of the plan,” Jordan said, “would be convincing the museum what they already had on their wall was a forgery, had been a forgery all along. Probably I’d get a slick young fella with good teeth to convince them the original was swapped at some prior time, ideally before their tenure, so no hard feelings. I’d pick a year before it had got the hardest scientific evidence, the most scrutiny, all that noodly stuff that would make it tricky to forge. Before it was X-rayed. Lead soap damage analysis, all that. I’d convince them all the things they’d been studying and writing up in their academic papers were actually attributes of the forgery, that the original has entirely different layers and damage.”

  Declan had followed along beautifully. He said, “You’d need a whipping boy.”

  “Of course.” She was always surprised by how well he knew this sideways world; he just didn’t seem to fit the part. She supposed that had been the point of his camouflage all along. Look like a man who takes his dates to cheesy tourist attractions. Be a man who steals paintings. “You’d have to place the blame for the first theft on someone who is currently there or stands to suffer from it.”

  “Then you’d sweep in with your ‘original,’ ” Declan said. “And tell them you’re willing to secretly swap it for the forgery on display, and let their negligence stay secret, too, if they help you.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “The Dark Lady play.” He didn’t sound sore that the theft of his mother’s portrait had been what brought them together in the first place. “But you don’t want to do that.”

  “I don’t understand how to live that way,” Jordan said. “I can’t carry around, like, a famous painting while I go about my day in order; I’d be trapped in the same room as it. A painting. A whole painting. Could I cut it into little pieces?” She felt Declan’s body recoil at the prospect. “There’d be no way to find out until you ruined the thing you just worked very hard to steal. And could I live with knowing I’d chopped up a Sargent? Not bloody likely.”

  She shifted her head on his chest; he tilted his chin. She felt his breath suck in.

  “The very concept gives me indigestion,” Declan said. Then he twitched his shoulder to tell her to move. “I need to steer us in. We’re there. Tie us off, can you?”

  To her surprise, they were not at a scenic point or romantic destination. They were at a private pier attached to a development of very choice row houses jutting directly out onto the harbor.

  “Matthew, the painting,” Declan said. “Please don’t drop it in the water.”

  “What’s all this?” Jordan asked as Matthew trundled gingerly up toward them with a parcel in very familiar wrapping: The Dark Lady. The dreamt portrait of Declan’s birth mother, Mór Ó Corra, invested with the magical property of making whoever slept under the same roof as it dream of the sea. The dreamt portrait Jordan had once forged and once stolen and once returned.

  Declan held out a hand to help her step from the rocking boat onto the pier. “I told you I was going to show you a good time, didn’t I?”

  Three exceptionally blond people had emerged from one of the houses—a man, a woman, and a teenager, all of them dressed for the weather, each carrying or dragging a piece of luggage. They started down the pier toward a boat rather larger than the one Declan, Jordan, and Matthew had arrived in, but when the man caught sight of Declan, he stopped.

  “Oh, right, Cody—” the man told the teen, voice raised as he rummaged out a
set of keys and dangled them. “Take that painting from him and put it just inside, would you? By the other things to go out. Lock the door after you. Lock it. Check it this time, please.”

  The teen sulked up to Declan, took the painting of Declan’s mother, and jogged it back to the house as the couple joined Declan, Jordan, and Matthew.

  “I’m going to go get this stuff situated,” said the woman, smiling politely but continuing down the pier.

  “Be there in a minute,” the man said. He and Declan shook hands, casually, lightly, and then, politely, he shook with Jordan as well. He offered a hand to Matthew, too, but Matthew had turned at just that moment to crouch and look over the edge at the water.

  “Sorry for the short notice,” the man continued.

  “It was no problem,” Declan said. “Good way to escape the traffic.”

  “It seems silly to me this can’t be done over email or phone, but this is tradition and I’m not going to be the first to break it, you know what I mean?” the man said. “What do you want to know?”

  Instead of answering, Declan said, “Jordan, Mikkel was on the MFA board for—”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “Fifteen years,” Declan agreed. “He has dealt with several sweetmetals.”

  Jordan looked at Declan instead of at Mikkel.

  A boat ride. A fine, pretty boat ride.

  “There’s quite a bit of legend around them,” Mikkel went on. “I don’t want to say a secret society because that makes it seem organized, and it really isn’t. It is more that anyone who deals in much art quickly learns to tell what is good art and what isn’t, what is going to make a splash, what isn’t. You get that sense in your head for what is worth your time. And it is not hard to tell after a while of dealing with art, high-end art, that some of them are these sweetmetals. They are special, you know? People like them, they have that something. They sell for much more than you would think, because of that something, so it pays to keep your eye out for it. But they are an open secret. You don’t really talk about them. You wouldn’t advertise something as a sweetmetal. It’s—what’s the word? Gauche. The mystery is part of what makes them what they are. There is just a tradition of not putting anything about them in writing if you can help it, and if you do, burn it, it’s all very Ouija board. What do you want to know?”