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 herself 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.