“It’s fancy,” Jordan said.
“Everything’s fancy here. What’s that lady mean about her painting? Why does she think the painting’s bad before it already started?”
“Oh, ’cause it’s not an original,” Jordan explained, opening and closing every drawer and cabinet in the room. “Because she doesn’t want me, you see? She wants John White Alexander, but he’s very dead, which isn’t good for business. So she’s got me, and she wants me to put her li’l daughter in one of his paintings.”
Sherry had hired Jordan through fairly ordinary word of mouth to do one of her least sexy but most common forgeries: historical pieces redone with the faces replaced with clients’. Sherry’s was at least a tasteful request, her young daughter done in the same style as Alexander’s elegant Repose or Alethea, two pieces subtle enough to look like homages rather than out-and-out gimmicks. Jordan tried to avoid painting clients into the Birth of Venus these days.
“Like Photoshop,” Matthew said. “Oh, gosh, oh, no, that sounded mean, I didn’t—”
She laughed. Matthew couldn’t sound mean if he tried. “You’re not far off. It’s not a direct copy, that’s why I’m more swish than the other people doing it. I’m supposed to do the painting Alexander would’ve done if he’d been around, not just a photocopy. His palette, brushstrokes, composition. My brain. Her daughter. New painting.”
“Sounds hard.”
“It’s not. Well, not anymore. It’s just my job.” Swallowing the rest of the fancy coffee, she pushed off the pure-white counter to gaze at the living room walls. No photographs. She wondered if the sweetmetal was even in the house. She couldn’t feel anything; it wasn’t like El Jaleo, where part of her could always tell it was around the corner even before she saw it. Barbara or Fisher had said something about sweetmetals wearing off. Maybe it had worn out.
“It’s a cool job.” He was glancing at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Probably he thought he was being discreet, but he wasn’t. His face was curious. “Cooler than Declan’s other friends.”
“He has friends?” Jordan asked, mouth amused. She doubted this highly. Friends required honesty, which wasn’t a thing Declan had a lot of. “What do they do?”
“Number jobs? Politics. They wear ties. They have these things.” He made a gesture to his face that managed to convey facial hair. “Declan stuff.” Jordan was surprised to see that Matthew seemed to believe in the neutral, boring person Declan presented to the rest of the world. That meant Declan had played that role even at home.
“Do you go to school, Matthew?”
His golden, carefree expression went troubled, and then it went blank. This was a very different expression than the one he’d had before. Something had happened at school, she thought, or something—
Oh no. Something was wrong.
Her mind was slipping out one of the high church windows, up into the sky. She could see clouds, wings, birds, branches—
Jordan dragged herself back to the present. It had been a little bit since she’d had one of her dreamy episodes. Never mind, she thought. It was minor. She could push through it. She had done it before; she could do it again. It was only when they got really bad that other people began to notice she was struggling.
Oof. There it came in a wave again.
Flashes of images moved before her eyes. Images from another time, another place. Real? Unreal? Past? Future? She didn’t know. It was hard to make sense of them and harder still to remind herself to make sense of them.
It only took a glance to see that Matthew was experiencing it, too. He’d put down his coffee and was walking very, very slowly toward the door, shaking his head a little.
What a pair! Both of them were failing badly. Sherry was going to return with her daughter and find them drunkenly draped across her furniture, completely out of their heads. It would be a bad situation with any client. But it seemed worse if it was a client that had even a passing knowledge of sweetmetals and the people who needed them.
Wait a tick, Jordan thought. The sweetmetal. Of course.
She pushed out of a chair (when had she gotten into a chair?) and tried to have a listen. A feel. A sense. If there was a sweetmetal in this house, it would give them back their thoughts until the ley line got itself back together, hopefully. She caught a whiff, she thought.
“Come on,” she told Matthew, grabbing his arm to tug him deeper into the condo. “Focus, if you can. Come on!”
Together, they investigated the condo as quickly and quietly as they could. Here was the library again; they’d gotten turned around. Here a nursery. A bathroom, a closet, a study. Mirrors, art, books. It was hard to remember what they’d already seen. Hard to remember what they were looking at, even as they were looking at it.
Oh, thank God, there it was.
She felt the sweetmetal as soon as she passed the doorway. Stepping inside the room was like stepping into reality itself.
It was an enormous master suite, and the sweetmetal, wherever it was in the room, worked well enough to provide dramatic clarity. It made every detail sharp: every stitch on the duvet, every curl in the carved posters of the bed, every velvet ripple of the curtain.
Both Jordan and Matthew heaved huge sighs of relief as they collapsed on either end of a fainting couch in the master sitting area. Slowly, the two of them rebooted.
She could see this slow-motion return to herself reflected on Declan’s little brother’s face. That confusion turning to relief turning to frustration and then finally turning to normality. It reminded her, sadly, of the girls. They had all done this together, too, when Hennessy waited too long to dream, or when the ley line sagged. Which was happening now? It was hard to say. Hennessy hadn’t managed to get in touch with Jordan yet.
“I didn’t know that’s what was happening to me,” Matthew said. “Before I found out. I didn’t know it was because I was a dream. I’ve never seen anything else do it before. Anything human, I mean. Oh, I didn’t mean to be mean, I didn’t—”
“I know what you meant. Not one of Ronan’s things. A person. I never saw an animal do it before his bird, either, so we’re the same, you and I.”
Matthew just kept frowning at the floor, chewing on his lip pensively, so she stood up and snooped around the room until she found the sweetmetal. It had been pushed under the bed, probably because it didn’t match anything else in this room. It was a black-and-white photograph of a diner with a skinny man in spats standing in front of it, looking at something outside the frame. She could feel that it was a sweetmetal, but she couldn’t tell why. It was like the landscape at the Boudicca party. She hadn’t been able to tell why she liked that one, and she couldn’t tell why she liked this one, either. She pushed it back under the bed where she’d found it.
“I think Ronan dreamed me to be stupid,” Matthew said. “I think I’m stupider than most people. I don’t think very hard; I don’t think.”
“You seem normal to me.”
“You knew to look for that thing under the bed. I was just walking around in circles.”
“Maybe I’m just very clever.”
“Dreamed to be clever?”