Rabbits(53)

“What?” I asked.

“Are you two playing the game?”

Chloe and I did our best to keep our expressions neutral.

“Well then,” Swan said, “you’d better hurry.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because you’re running out of time.” Swan followed the twins out into the hallway and shut the door behind her.

As soon as I heard the door click into place, I ran over and locked it.

I turned around to find Chloe standing in the hallway behind me.

“What the fuck, K?” Chloe asked.

“Yeah.” What the fuck was right.

Chloe pulled out her phone. “Come on, come on,” she said, urging whatever app she had activated to hurry up and load as she sat down and started putting on her shoes.

“What are you doing?”

She looked up with a grin. “Putting on my shoes.”

“I can see that, but why? Where are you going?”

“We are going to follow them.”

“They could be anywhere by now.”

“They’re right here,” she said, and held up her phone to reveal a blinking green dot on a map.

“You’re tracking them?”

“Yep.”

“How?”

“We’re living in the twenty-first century, K. It’s a free tracking app. I connected Scarpio’s phone.”

She finished putting on her shoes, grabbed her coat, and stepped out of my apartment. I heard her yell out “You drive” as she hurried down the hallway toward the elevator.

I grabbed my coat and followed her, even though I was pretty sure the whole thing was a terrible idea.





18


    NOW ONWARD GOES


We followed the blinking green dot on the map as it moved away from my apartment in Capitol Hill and down toward the water. We had no idea what kind of vehicle they were driving, so I did my best to stay a couple of blocks behind the dot on the map as it blinked its way through the city.

They eventually stopped moving, right in the middle of a parking garage off Union Street.

I guided Chloe’s car into in the parking garage and waited. It didn’t take long before the dot started moving again, much slower this time.

They had to be on foot.

We parked the car and followed until the dot stopped again. It looked like they’d reached their location. They were somewhere inside the Seattle Art Museum.

On the weekend, clerks would be busily swiping credit cards and slipping purchases into shiny museum gift bags, but it was a Wednesday and the museum had only been open for about an hour, so things were fairly quiet.

“Where are they, exactly?” I asked as we moved slowly past the gift shop along a wide white concourse.

“There’s a lot of concrete. Sketchy Wi-Fi. The app can’t get properly connected.”

“Well, it shouldn’t be hard to pick out those weird Matrix twins.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Chloe said, and then the two of us began a methodical section-by-section sweep of the museum.

There was a lot of open space, so we were able to move through the building fairly quickly. There was no sign of Swan or the twins.

“We lost them,” Chloe said, and sat down on a bench next to an exhibit guide.

“Yeah,” I said, “but how? They have to be here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

I started looking over the exhibit guide, mentally checking off everything we’d seen, when I noticed something.

“An Exploration of Heaven and Hell?” I said. “I don’t remember that one.”

“We saw the sign upstairs. That display isn’t open.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Now onward goes,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s something that Alan Scarpio said to me in the diner.”

“What does it mean?”

“It says here that the Exploration of Heaven and Hell exhibit contains some parchments on loan from the Museum of Prints and Drawings in Berlin, and a handful of works from the Vatican library.”

“Great. We’ll have to stop by when it’s open.”

“Some of the parchments are Sandro Botticelli drawings.”

“And that’s important because?”

“Because Sandro Botticelli was responsible for creating almost a hundred works of art on parchment related to Dante’s Inferno.”

“I’m afraid we’re back to who gives a shit.”

“The first three words of the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno are ‘Now onward goes.’?”

“Fuck,” Chloe said. “Way to bury the lede.” She jumped up, grabbed my hand, and yanked me back toward the escalators.



* * *



—

As we carefully approached the cordoned-off area that contained the Exploration of Heaven and Hell exhibit, we noticed a number of small No Entry signs on stands set up around the perimeter. About five feet or so behind the signs, two extremely wide pieces of thick, dark gray canvas about the size of theatrical stage curtains hung from the ceiling like the wings of a giant moth.

Chloe pulled the closest piece of canvas aside and peeked into the exhibit area.