“What good will that do?” Jia said. “You’d only be able to warn Nobel of Captain Vincent’s arrival, and I’m not sure how helpful that will be.”
Jia was right. He needed to understand what Nobel had done for Captain Vincent in order to figure out how to fix it.
Matt sat down on the doorstep and Jia sat next to him. The sun was lowering in the sky, and the Empire State Building looked like it was on fire. They’d been sitting there for ten minutes or so when a young girl came up the path, her arms loaded with packages. Matt squinted at her. She was pale with white-blond hair. Her head was down so Matt couldn’t fully see her face, but as she neared them on the path she looked up at Matt and Jia with ghostly blue eyes, very familiar. She smiled at them and waved.
“Pike!” Jia shouted. She jumped up, but at that very moment the door flew open and Nobel stepped out with a rolled-up newspaper.
“Get away!” he shouted, swatting them both with the newspaper. “Don’t you talk to my niece!”
“Ouch! Your niece?” Matt said, trying to shield himself from the newspaper baton. “Pike is your niece?”
Pike rushed toward them. She jabbered something in Swedish and all three of them froze. Matt couldn’t have been more surprised if he had seen a fish speak French. Pike was speaking to Nobel. She sounded excited and passionate and she was pointing at Matt and Jia. Nobel spoke back to Pike, looking warily at Matt and Jia. From his tone, Matt guessed that he was telling Pike that he and Jia were dangerous and not to be trusted, but Pike was adamant. She stomped her foot then blew past both Matt, Jia, and Nobel and went inside.
Nobel sighed, then cast a dark look at Matt and Jia. “Come on, then,” he said in a bit of a growl. “My niece insists.”
Alfred Nobel’s house was modest but comfortable. There was a sitting room to the right and to the left a dining room. Before them looked to be the kitchen area. Matt saw no signs of a laboratory, or anything remotely related to chemistry. In fact, most of the house had been turned into a giant library. Everywhere there were books, books lining the walls, piled on the floor and stacked on tables. It reminded him of Wiley’s library on the Vermillion, all the books stacked into towers and buildings from around the world. He remembered how he’d gone to visit him to find some information, and how kind and helpful Wiley had been to him. There had been others with him then, he thought, but he couldn’t remember who.
Pike was unraveling the packages she had been carrying. Matt was not at all surprised to see that it was all yarn. Looking around the house now, he saw evidence of a lot of knitting. Baskets of yarn and knitting needles, blankets and sweaters and socks and hats.
Matt was still marveling at Pike’s presence here, the fact that she was Alfred Nobel’s niece. Now he understood why Pike had been so fascinated with that book. She’d seen Alfred Nobel’s picture and recognized him as her uncle. That was why she had leaped over to the Vermillion. It wasn’t because of Captain Vincent or any sense of loyalty to him. It was because of her uncle. What he didn’t understand is how she got on the Vermillion in the first place and what, exactly, was her purpose in being there.
“Marta says you are friends to her,” Nobel said, still looking at them with distrust.
“Her name is Marta?” Jia asked.
“You don’t know her name?”
Matt and Jia both shook their heads. “We always called her Pike,” Jia said. “It’s a nickname one of the crew on the Vermillion gave her. I’ve never heard her talk before.”
Nobel grunted. “Well, she understands English perfectly, and a good deal of German and French as well, but Marta is a stubborn girl and will not speak anything but Swedish.”
Pike—or Marta—spoke something in a tone that Matt felt was somewhat cheeky. “What did she say?”
“She said Swedish is the tongue of her mama and papa and she will never speak another.”
That explained it, then. As far as Matt could remember, they’d never traveled to Sweden while on the Vermillion and none of them spoke Swedish.
“Come and sit,” Mr. Nobel said, motioning to a chair in the sitting room.
Matt sat in the chair. A photograph of a young man sat on the table next to him. He looked much like Alfred Nobel, though younger and clean-shaven. Matt was guessing this was his brother, Emil, the one who had died in the explosion in his laboratory.
“You have a lot of books,” Jia said.
“Literature was my first love,” Nobel said. “I wanted to be a writer, a poet, but my father thought it was impractical. And he was right, in many ways. It is impractical, but the desire is irresistible, to link words into rhythmical phrases that carry powerful meanings and ideas . . .” He brushed his hand over a book sitting beside him.
“Science and chemistry have poetry, too, I suppose. The combination of the earth’s elements in various ways has its virtues and beauties, to make possible what was once thought impossible.”
Matt understood that feeling. Everything that had happened to him he had once thought impossible. Some of it had been good. He never would have met Jia if he hadn’t built the Obsidian Compass, but he also knew terrible things had happened. Great losses, even though he couldn’t remember exactly what those losses were. He pulled out the bits of fabric from his pockets. They were more like a jumble of threads now, and they were faded, but even so, they still had an otherworldly quality to them, a faint glow.
Nobel leaned in and Matt heard his breath catch. “Time tapestries,” he said.
“You’ve seen this before?”
“Yes, though I have never been able to touch or access it myself. Captain Vincent
