II

February 18, 1882

I was not mad.

I did, however, suspect I was on my way to becoming so.

Time ceased to pass in a dependable or entirely believable manner when locked in a reinforced cage in the asylum’s cellar, denied even the smallest window by which to discern day from night. The basement stank of the rotting foods that were being prepared in the kitchen, which supposedly constituted as meals for patients. The malodorous aroma of green meats mingled with the scent of mold and mildew and a parade of never-ending bodies. New patients arrived not through the grand rotunda entrance of the asylum, but instead marched through the cellar, where they were bathed in the same filthy brown water as those who came before them, were dressed in clothing intended for prisoners, and then locked away forever.

I had gauged the transition of the last three days by sound and smell alone. Every morning, the new patients, confused and frightened, were stripped of the last of their dignity, and every evening, noxious cooking preceded suppertime—which promised to quell the ache in your belly, if only briefly, before you were up ’til the early hours vomiting and shitting until you were convinced cholera would be the end of you. I knew these routines to be true, because I, too, had been forced to undress in front of an audience. I, too, had bathed in the same cold, slimy water. I, too, had been fed molded breads and rancid meat scraps and deeply regretted it.

On January fourth, special agents of the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., had arrested me on charges of falsifying identification and knowingly misrepresenting magical skills. It had happened once D.C. had begun investigating the death of Old Money son and fellow agent Henry Bligh, who’d turned out to be moonlighting as the city’s newest gangster, Tick Tock. Director Loren Moore had reported the events of the New Year exactly as he knew them to be true, which unbeknown to him, had raised suspicions regarding his best agent.

Gillian Hamilton’s control and influence on natural elements had seemed to be on par with those of Simon Fitzgerald’s, a war criminal who hadn’t been seen since September of 1862. Fitzgerald had been presumed dead all these years, but what if that was a lie? Because who was Hamilton? A man with no home, no family, no past. He had been eighteen years old, applying to the federally mandated regulation because he had hoped to be chosen for the FBMS. He needed a job. And his skills had been rare enough—impressive enough—that he’d gotten that badge and that paycheck, but he’d tempered his formidable magic so as not to present a threat to the government.

For a decade, I’d lived that lie.

And I’d lived it so well that there were nights I almost believed I was Gillian Hamilton.

A special agent.

A lawman.

A good man.

Except, I wasn’t him, and I wasn’t any of those things.

I was Simon Fitzgerald.

A murderer.

A monster.

A bad man.

And they were going to make certain I disappeared.

 

 

After residing in an asylum for over a month, my breaking point had been three days alone in the dark and damp, arms pinned by the sleeves of a pinstripe straitjacket, and forced to get on my knees to eat from a plate on the floor like a dog. I began screaming, and I kept screaming. I screamed until I ran out of breath, until my throat was raw, until I spat up blood. And then I screamed some more. I twisted and tore and fought against my restraints, but without the use of my hands, I couldn’t cast properly. At one point I had managed not so much to create fire, but smoke, and fully intended on singeing the garment, thread by thread, until I could escape, but the cook picked up on the scent of burning cotton and had thrown a bucket of ice water on me.

Afterward, I lay on the floor and cried.

I cried for each and every lie that had, if only briefly, allowed me to glimpse a better life. I hadn’t lived as Gillian Hamilton for fame or riches, but for stability. For a sense of purpose. For perhaps, even, love. I’d been asked by the FBMS as to why I felt the path of deception had been worthwhile, and my response had been that, as a child, I hadn’t ever had a dream, but instead only nightmares of torment, abuse, and horror. The council of top FBMS officials hadn’t understood, and it was then that I knew any further word I took in my own defense was a waste of breath.

Because if you grew up being loved, it was impossible to imagine a childhood of the contrary.

“—very nearly escaped.” That was Dr. Ashland speaking as he entered the room immediately outside my cell. “So we’ve placed him in isolation.”

I quieted and raised my head to listen.

A stranger replied, his voice soft and gentle, “I was under the impression that Simon Fitzgerald was a casualty of the Great Rebellion.”

“That no longer appears to be the case. It seems he deserted after Antietam and has been living in the city under an assumed name ever since.”

“Why is he not at Sing Sing?”

Ashland answered, and there was a particular sense of cruelty in his casualness, “He’s completely without his faculties—frenzied about supposed wounds in the magic atmosphere and something he calls quintessence.”

I rolled onto my knees and climbed to my feet as the men sounded like they’d come to a stop at the cell door.

Ashland continued. “Of course, the FBMS has conferred with the best casters and architects on staff regarding his claims. Fitzgerald’s raving mad.”

Best they have.

I’d have laughed if I wasn’t so offended. Not even Director Moore had had an inkling as to what the artificial spells in Tick Tock’s magic ammunition were doing to the raw undercurrent of power, and aside from myself, I’d have considered him one of the top casters on the East Coast. No, the FBMS wouldn’t understand the true danger until they were handed tangible proof by someone of my caliber. And considering my reputation was now worth less than the shit that covered the streets of the Five Points, and other casters on par with myself were, let’s just say, extremely rare, there was no one to warn the Bureau of the imminent threat to the magic community.

I had to wonder if the Bureau would even care if they were presented evidence…. Well, of course, the casters and architects and scholars would very much care. Because that tear in the atmosphere, that gross refuse that was building up like a barrier, it affected us all. But the nonmagically inclined? The politicians who’d put the Caster Regulation Act into effect and founded the FBMS? The ones who held positions on the council? Those were the same bastards who had fabricated the story of my lunacy so as to have a proper place to isolate and confine me until I was needed. I knew it. Could feel it in the marrow of my bones. And until that day came, I was going to be a plaything for Ashland, a sadistic man who’d sooner slice me open to diagram my inner workings than work to cure my supposed madness. Under his continued watch, I’d be lucky to survive until the time came that the US government called for me to kill again.

“It’s my personal theory,” Ashland said to his visitor, “that Fitzgerald’s high levels of magic have had a direct impact on his mania.”

The stranger asked, polite but unconvinced, “How, then, do you explain patients with relatively low casting levels but confirmed and documented lunacy?”

“Well, it’s also worth noting that he’s a known sodomite,” Ashland answered. “And that, of course, will be a factor. But it’ll take further research.”

It was that one word—research—the threat of something worse than the shocks, beatings, ice baths, and isolation that pulled me back from the brink of giving up. I could hear words spoken to me on New Year’s, repeating over and over in that husky monotone….

“Whatever you’ve lived—”

I drew myself up straight, squared my shoulders, and listened as the tumblers in the lock turned and the reinforced iron door swung open. I studied the self-satisfied expression on Ashland’s face as he stared at me from the threshold. He wore an afternoonified suit with the white coat of a physician over it. His companion was about a decade his junior—midforties, I suspected—and very dashing, with auburn hair parted severely on the left side, a touch longer and thicker than how most men allowed theirs to grow these days. He was cleanshaven, with a dusting of freckles along his sharp cheekbones. His eyes were undoubtably his best feature: a bright hazel that shone with an emotion my tired and abused mind couldn’t quite pin down.

Inquisitiveness? Tenderness? A combination of the two that had no apt description in the English language?

“How are we feeling this evening, Mr. Fitzgerald?” Ashland asked.

Drawing my attention away from the second man, I answered frankly, “The cook threw a bucket of water on me.” I shifted within the straitjacket so as to stress its cold and sodden state.

“You were misbehaving,” Ashland chastised, his tone sickeningly sweet, as if speaking to a red-cheeked babe still in its infant dress and not one of the most formidable casters this country has ever seen.

The stranger said solemnly, “He’s likely to catch a chill, Dr. Ashland.” Then, with growing concern, added, “How long has Mr. Fitzgerald been wearing that jacket?”

I looked at him and answered, before Ashland had a chance to speak, “Three days. Of course, the asylum claims to not employ the use of such inhumane constraints.” I redirected my stare to Ashland. “Don’t they?”

“Mr. Fitzgerald killed a staff member, Dr. Barrie,” Ashland said without any sense of perturbation. “There are times that the more severe restraints are necessary.”

“I was defending myself,” I said.

“While attempting to escape,” Ashland replied.

I glanced at Barrie a final time and said, “Wouldn’t you do the same?”

Barrie’s eyes glittered as he considered me for a long moment, as if he were trying to convey words without speech. But eventually his gaze shifted, and he studied the bare stone walls before lingering on the putrid, hay-stuffed mattress at my feet. “I’m afraid I must ask that we remove Mr. Fitzgerald from the straitjacket.” He said to Ashland, “Surely a pair of platinum gloves will suffice?”

Ashland’s expression darkened, soured as this new, younger doctor who appeared to hold some kind of power that he, the resident physician, did not, made polite demands to better the well-being of Ashland’s latest curiosity. “I suppose that can be arranged.” And with that, Ashland stepped out of the cell.

Barrie remained, watching me.

I shifted my perception to the magic plane. Tendrils of glittering light ebbed and flowed and unfurled around Barrie, marking him as a caster. The raw power shifted, undulated, lapped back and forth between us—a calm and placid creek around him, a storm at sea around me. Underneath the show of energy, I could feel the atmosphere over the Lower East Side pulsating.

Like a heartbeat.

Like blood pumping to an open and festering wound.

“I’m not insane,” I said into the quiet between us.

“No,” Barrie agreed. “You don’t have the eyes of a madman, Special Agent Hamilton.”

It’d been the first time in over a month I’d been called by the name and title I wished were mine, and it sent a sickening rush through my body.

“You don’t remember me,” Barrie said with a smile that might have been disappointment. “You’d been given a good deal of laudanum for pain at the time.” He raised his hands, palms out, and clarified, “Tucson.”

My heart thudded hard against my rib cage. “St. Margaret Hospital?”

He lowered his hands and pressed one to his chest. “Eugene Barrie.”

The doctor who’d salvaged my hands—my very ability to cast—after Milo Ferguson had nearly blown me to kingdom come last October. But how was it that a magically inclined physician, operating out of a scant, church-run hospital in Arizona territory, now found himself in New York City, at the Asylum for the Magically Insane, of all places?

A tear followed the salt tracks staining my cheeks, and I awkwardly wiped my face against my shoulder before asking, “Why’re you here, Dr. Barrie?”

Barrie countered, “Why are you?”

“I falsified my identification to the federal government. I lied about the extent of my casting abilities. The FBMS told Dr. Ashland I was mad, because if I am without my faculties, it’s much easier to oversee and control my actions.”

Barrie frowned. The twinkle in his eyes sharpened like the glint on the point of a knife. “Your skills are incredibly rare,” he said in defense. “Why would the FBMS want to endanger that? One of their own?”

“My skills make me a threat, Doctor. Not only to enemies, but to my own country. The order to lock me up came from the council in Washington.”

“Whatever you’ve lived, it made you a survivor.”

I’d been lying to survive my entire life.

It wasn’t until I’d become Gillian Hamilton that I began walking a tightrope of absolutes, of black-and-white, of law versus lawlessness. I rejected the notion that I could live a morally gray life because I had lived that corruption firsthand my entire childhood. When my country had called abled men to crush the Rebel foes, Congress had agreed that the sacrifice of one for the betterment of the Union was a necessary evil. That they could do the wrong thing for the right reason.

But I had been that sacrifice. I had lived with those consequences.

I had never wanted to be morally gray again.

So in my time at the FBMS, I’d enforced every code and upheld every law. That had even included denying my own tendencies and allowing myself nothing more than the occasional indulgence on the Bowery—but only to be seen and never touched. Because a lawman—a good man—couldn’t admit to such inclinations. My new life of security and stability was also one of penance. I would never be able to atone enough for the crimes I’d partaken in, and so I did not deserve affection, despite how often I had cried myself to sleep wishing for that very thing.

And then I’d met America’s most-wanted outlaw. A deadeye marksman vigilante who robbed and killed and yet was still, somehow, the most observant, kindest, gentlest man I’d ever crossed paths with.

Gunner the Deadly, who reminded me to breathe.

Gunner, who skirted the truth for my own safety.

Constantine, who loved me and told me to never feel guilty for being alive.

Because I was a survivor.

“Gray looks good on you.”

I would not die today.

I would not die inside these walls.

I would die free and on my own authority.

To Barrie, I demanded suddenly, “Get me out of here.”

He blinked in surprise. “Mr. Fitzgerald—”

The sharp echo of heel on stone warned of Ashland’s approach.

I hastily said, “I have done terrible things in my life, but if there’s one thing I excel at, it’s self-flagellation. I do not need Ashland’s barbaric practices to hate who I am. What I reported to the FBMS was true—artificial magics were introduced to the city during the New Year festivities. I have no evidence but my own account, but I swear to Christ, it’s polluting the raw magic stream and will inevitably cripple casters like us. Yes, Dr. Barrie, I knew you were a caster the moment you stepped foot in this room. I have to stop that barrier from spreading before it’s too late. If you hold no compassion for a fellow magic-user, please at least consider empathy for an ill-treated patient.”

Barrie looked like a man coming undone—his sense of duty as an upstanding citizen at war with his obligations as a doctor and whatever affinity he might have felt toward a fellow caster. He wrung his hands together while opening and closing his mouth like a landed fish.

And then Ashland reentered. He carried a massive pair of mechanical gloves, similar in construction to those worn by street gangsters, but these absurdly heavy concrete blocks were used to imprison the magically inclined and were often reinforced with the element most opposite their nature. In the case of someone like myself, where no magic was too difficult to master, they invested in platinum, which didn’t melt like brass, nor conduct like silver, and took acids like aqua regia to dissolve. There was a lock located on the wrist that, when turned, forced the hands to ball into fists, hindering casters from blasting free from the confines.

The magic in the room bloomed as a burly staff member entered fast on Ashland’s heels, and I figured him to be the same caster with the impressive wind spell that’d blown me on my backside the night I’d nearly escaped. The bastard on loan from the penitentiary shoved Barrie out of the way and rounded on me. He put one massive arm around my neck in a chokehold while he began to unfasten the jacket with his other hand. I was forced up onto my toes with the motion, trying in vain to claw at his arm but was hindered by the long sleeves of the jacket. I coughed, gasped for air—all the while Ashland watched, completely devoid of emotion, whereas Barrie’s face was that of poetic tragedy. I’d be so lucky to survive the transition of jacket to gloves, as the closer this brute got to freeing me, the harder he strangled me.

Please, I screamed in my head. Please, please, get me out of here!

And just like that, almost breathless, Barrie blurted, “Dr. Ashland!”

Ashland turned his attention to his younger counterpart.

The final clasp on the jacket popped free.

And I flung my arms wide, wrenching stones and mortar from the walls with a formidable earth spell. The thick, crude edge of gray gneiss struck the man at my back with a sickening snap of bone. His chokehold released and he collapsed to the floor. Ashland shouted for help, stones volleyed back and forth, colliding and bursting and raining shards of sharp rock, quarried by the very prisoners of this island, down on him and Barrie. I lowered my arms to my sides with a jerk, a gale tearing the jacket in two down my front and ripping the long sleeves from my arms.

The wind screamed.

The earth shattered.

I crouched down beside Ashland, who was cowering on the floor, grabbed him by the thick silver hair on his head, and forced him to look at me as I said, “‘Cowards die many times before their deaths.’ Consider this your first.”

I let him go with a shove.

And ran.

 

 

Night on Blackwell’s Island was a frightening sort of darkness. Shadows were so thick that there was a density to them as they slid between my fingers, like holding hands with the dead—those who tried and failed for freedom before me. The vestiges of the poor, the criminal, the insane, leading me toward the skyline of Manhattan to continue my atonement. To keep righting the wrongs I’d contributed to in the past. To protect the magic community from this same abuse so the next little boy born into the squalor of the Lower East Side, testing at unfathomable casting levels, wasn’t subjected to the same horrors that had befallen me.

If my breaths were to matter, if I were to look good in gray—let it be for the next generation.

For their dreams to be of marshmallows and peppermint candies, hopscotch and marbles, reading and arithmetic. For their nights to be warm and their days bright. For their bellies to be full and their hearts loved. For their fathers and mothers to kiss their fingertips.

Snap, snap, snap.

I stumbled over an upturned root in my slippered feet and nearly tumbled head over heels. I caught myself on the trunk of a tree within the thicket surrounding the edge of the island, leaned over on my knees, and took deep breaths of freezing air. The pale glow of the lighthouse shone from the most northern tip of the island. The asylum stood at my back, and the wails and screams of patients echoed all the way to the water’s edge. There was no doubt I’d scared them after literally shaking the foundation of the building, but I couldn’t linger on that thought. The staff was already searching for me, their calls and whistles steadily growing louder.

“Fitzgerald,” hissed a voice somewhere in the nearby darkness.

I spun, raised one hand, and produced enough of a glow—like embers in a dying fire—to see who’d followed so close on my heels. “Who’s there?” I demanded.

And then the outline of Eugene Barrie’s face appeared from the tangle of bare tree limbs. His hair was in disarray, and dark blood seeped steadily from his nose, like he’d been swiped by one of the stones in the cellar. He held both hands up in an act of submission, saying, “Apologies for startling you.” He was breathing hard, like he’d been in hot pursuit from the moment I’d escaped.

“I’m not going back,” I cried.

“No,” he hastily agreed. “No. I believe you.”

The glow in my hand dimmed until Barrie was nothing more than a black smudge on a canvas already smeared with charcoal.

Barrie further clarified with “I can feel it—the barrier. Like there’s a struggle to borrowing the raw energy. Isn’t that right?”

Relief like I hadn’t felt in so long coursed through my body, my knees nearly giving out. Barrie must have been more powerful than I’d initially suspected, in order to have picked up on the still-subtle changes to the barrier’s state. “Yes. Exactly. And it’s getting worse.”

“What will you do?” Barrie asked.

I’d begun to shiver and chafed my arms as I said, “I need to get to California.”

“Where can I find you?”

“Wh-what?” I instinctively took a few steps backward as Barrie began to loudly tromp through the dead and frozen underbrush toward me.

“You don’t have proper attire,” he explained, his face illuminated briefly by the distant and rotating lighthouse lamp. “Let alone the means in which to book charter on an airship.” He delicately dabbed at his bloody nose with the sleeve of his suit coat. “Isn’t that so?”

I’d only had two objectives that night: escape and survive. Because if I could accomplish those, pilfering clothes off a frozen wash line and pocketing a drunkard’s wallet were skills that, once learned, a street rat never forgot. But there was no denying that boarding a continental airship as a wanted man would be… difficult.

Barrie said, “I’ll report to Ashland that I didn’t find you—but I heard splashing. You underestimated the cold. And with the current, they might not find your body washed up ’til daylight. I’ll catch a ride on the morning steam shuttle back to the city, but you must tell me where I can find you.”

My gaze shifted momentarily over Barrie’s shoulder. The screech of metal whistles grew to ear-piercing volume. “Why?” I finally asked.

“Why what?”

“Why are you helping a criminal?”

Barrie wiped his nose again. “I don’t believe it’s fair to call twelve-year-old Simon Fitzgerald a criminal when, as far as I understand it, it was not your will to join the Army.”

“I was ten.”

Barrie motioned with one hand in a “my point exactly” gesture. “And Gillian Hamilton saved an entire town of good, God-fearing people from an engineer hellbent on blowing them up. Neither of those men sound like criminals to me.”

My throat had nearly seized up. “I’m a sodomite.”

Barrie glanced at his shoes, at me, and then said with a note of finality, “I don’t much care about that.”

Perhaps the glimmer I’d caught in his eyes had been that of humanity.

“Pilly’s,” I answered. “On the Bowery. Ask for O’Dea.”

Thunder rumbled ominously, lightning flashed overhead, and the air whipped and cracked and tore around me. I was lifted off my feet just as Barrie was thrown backward from the onslaught, and he toppled into the snow and underbrush.

“If you try anything,” I called over the gale, “you won’t find me. Understand?”

Barrie nodded solemnly from his prone position on the ground.

With that, the wind screamed and I shot through the air across the East River, like the magically charged bullet from a Waterbury pistol.