The Dog and Pony Cafe had awful coffee. Sunset remembered it from her first time there, with Chrysalis. She ordered it anyway out of a sense of deja vu. It was somehow simultaneously too sweet and too bitter, like the sugar took a few seconds to remember it had work to do, and then overcompensated. Rainbow Dash, for her part, was drinking some special foreign-brand cola. The unique bottle bragged about how packed with vitamins it was.
The sounds of a thousand engines blurred together, rose and fell in chaotic, random intervals like gusts of wind or constantly rolling waves. At least, until someone started the world’s most impromptu call-and-response with three short blasts on their horn. It was echoed further down the street, and the call was taken up by an endless chain of equally frustrated drivers in a circuit around the entire city.
The other Sunset’s bus drove by. At least, she thought it was the same bus. The number was the same. She’d remembered it. 5480. Or she was lying to herself, that was always possible, too. Sunset wasn’t on it this time around, of course. It was a different time of day, a different year. A lot of things had changed for everyone involved.
Sunset idly spun a quarter on the cafe table, not paying attention to how it landed. She’d gotten as far as Manehattan. That was about where her plans ran out. She wasn’t even sure where Chrysalis was, and if she had known she’d have had no idea how to confront her about all of this.
“So what: are we going to like, hit her with a rolled up magazine or something?” Dash asked between long sips through a straw. “I mean you seem pretty sure she’s dangerous or whatever, but how do you know she’d even hurt her?”
Sunset pinned the quarter down with her middle finger. She let out a sigh and scraped the face around on the table for a few moments. “The night I came through the portal,” she said, through a bit of hesitation. “I’m almost positive she was going to burn down the school.”
A choking sound escaped from Dash’s throat, and she took a few moments to cough out the soda she’d inhaled. Sunset just rested her chin in her hand and tapped her cheek, waiting. She’d come to terms with this years ago.
“What!?” Dash asked, before she’d fully regained her composure. “Are you serious? That’s like...that’s insane!”
“Chrysalis had some glass bottles in her backpack when I met her. She told me they were soda. They weren’t.”
There were a few long seconds of near-silence between them, interrupted by muffled, trailing coughs before she finally responded, “Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.” Sunset picked up the quarter and flicked it to send it spinning again. She leaned back in her chair and stared up at the buildings as they rose over each other. Her eyes breezed past the tall point of a skyscraper, and she paused long enough to flick back to it. She yanked her phone out of her pocket and clicked it on. A few seconds of staring was all it took. She slapped some money on the table and stood up. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” Dash had her straw between her teeth. “Go where?”
“Hotel,” Sunset said, hopping the railing to the sidewalk. “We’re going to need some height.”
The top floor of the hotel Sunset had booked stuck out over the surrounding buildings enough to give a pretty spectacular view of the skyline. There was even an outer hallway that seemed designed for the purpose. She made for the east side and held up her phone when Rainbow Dash finally caught up.
“Okay, so eighteen stories up. What’s the deal?”
Sunset pointed at the picture on her phone, the one of Chrysalis and her doppelganger. Or, the person she was a doppelganger of. She’d been so focused on the look Chrysalis was giving the camera she’d almost completely forgotten to look at the rest of it. “Look, here. Behind them.”
Dash squinted. They were standing in front of a window. “Right,” Dash said, clearly not getting it.
“That building,” Sunset said, “We can see it from most places in the city. It’s a landmark.” She pointed out their own window, and indeed the same building she’d noticed from the street was visible. “If I can get two buildings as a reference, I should be able to triangulate almost exactly where they took this picture.”
“Remind me never to send you selfies. Ever.”
Sunset slapped a folded map of the city that she’d gotten from the hotel lobby against Dash’s chest. “Help me with this thing.”
“Geez, fine.” Dash opened the map and held it up against one of the windows. “This good?”
“Perfect.” Sunset fished a marker out of her bag and started highlighting locations. The hotel they were in first, then the tall building. She looked at the picture again. She could just make out the roof of another building around Chrysalis’s head: a red terracotta color that stood out. After a minute of scanning the skyline—which Dash protested as she’d been forced to readjust her grip on the map several times—Sunset thought she spotted it.
She plugged in a quick internet search which fed her a result almost instantly. Apparently, it was another landmark specifically because of that roof color. Go figure. She got the address, found it on the map, and navigated the forest of Dash’s head and arms to get that marked, too. She looked out the window again just to make sure she had it in her mind, then gave Dash’s shoulder a quick pat. “Alright, break time. Let’s head back to the room.”
Rainbow Dash nearly collapsed as she let the map drop. “Finally. AJ’s gonna owe me for this one.”
“You make a fantastic easel.”
“Gee thanks, maybe I’ll consider a change in my career path.”
Back in the room, Sunset was letting Dash rest on the bed while she hunched over the desk. The spine of a cheap, thin guidebook served as a straightedge, and she set about trying to find an approximate target.
From the picture, the buildings looked nearly lined up with the red building in front. That narrowed down the area quite a bit. Then some more searching turned up the fact that there was another very tall building in that area that certainly wasn’t in the picture. That narrowed it down further. By the time she was done drawing on the map she’d gotten down to about four blocks. The last thing to do was to narrow down the possible buildings.
Sunset drummed her fingers and looked over her shoulder. Rainbow Dash was snoring quietly on the bed, so she just grabbed the pad of paper provided by the hotel and scribbled down a quick note. ‘Checking out this area, call if you need me.’
A few more taps at the desk later, she set her brow, pushed herself to her feet, and headed out.
There aren’t a lot of buildings in Manehattan with roof access. Some people think it’s a liability issue. Roofs aren’t safe, so building owners could be held responsible if someone tried out for a Darwin Award and wasn’t met with a half-dozen locked doors along the way. Actually, it’s a little less humanistic than that.
It’s expensive to build a roof that’s meant to support people for long periods of time. Coding for it means extra support beams, different materials that aren’t likely to wear under foot traffic, permit charges out the wazoo, and more maintenance than is usually worth the note on the apartment listing.
For Sunset, this meant over an hour of searching and asking around for a good viewpoint near her four-block search area from a high enough point and from the right-enough angle that she could point out which buildings could give the view from the window in the picture. Eventually someone just pointed her to a fire escape and shrugged off her ‘are you serious’ stare.
Arms burning and legs heavy, Sunset finally trudged to the lip of a sufficient roof and stared at the not-quite-uniform quilt of concrete and brick. She checked her landmarks, and sure enough the angle between them was nearly a perfect match for her target. In front, she saw her backstop building and started counting out possibilities. Two, three, four...no, not that one. There was a taller building in the way. That one then.
It was too disappointing, how quickly the count went. Sunset frowned and, just to justify the extra trip up the building and give her legs a chance to stop screaming at her, took a few notes on what the buildings looked like and prioritized them based on vague guesses at which ones would give the exact picture she was looking for. Then it was back to the street.
The first was pretty easy to find. It was right down the street and taller than all the buildings on its block. It had single-handedly eliminated at least three other possibilities. When she arrived, though, she found it was a corporate office and definitely not residential. A security guard politely informed her to move on unless she had an appointment, and the small armory of pepper spray and a baton and a taser all backed up his suggestion.
Around a corner and across the street was her second best guess. It was an ambitious tower, reaching up higher than its neighbors in a greedy effort to siphon more rent payments down to one landlord. She was a bit wary of the place, like if she breathed on it wrong the top half would topple over. It wasn’t actually dilapidated, but just looking at the entrance, with the unpainted chipped stone and mischievous scribbles suggesting a lack of close care, she was glad she didn’t live there. She marked down the address and continued down the street.
On a whim, when she came to the corner she looked back over her shoulder. At the far end of the block, at a newspaper kiosk, a rough curtain of green-blue hair was chatting with the owner.
Sunset’s blood ran cold. She found herself not breathing and took in a deep gasp. The figure started to turn, and Sunset caught a glimpse of a burst of color in her arms before she bolted around the corner and pressed her back against the wall. Panic welled in her throat. She forced herself to calm down—it didn’t work—long enough to poke the camera of her phone around the corner and get a look.
It was Chrysalis. It was definitely Chrysalis. She had stopped, however, halfway down the block. At the building Sunset had just been observing. And she was holding a bouquet of flowers.
Sunset had found her double’s building.