EIGHTEEN

Foxes and Tigers

SUNSET REDDENED the water to the west as Sam and Jin wound their way through the people setting out blankets and chairs on the lawn in preparation for the evening’s fireworks. They got a few stares, but by and large the crowd was only concerned with finding the best places to sit.

Despite the vague guilt she had about being out there rather than up in the hotel suite, Jin felt a tiny glow of satisfaction. The audience was far bigger than the night before. Word of her Atlantis must have circulated among the guests all day.

She and Sam ducked through the ornamental trees and crossed the space between the piers. Closer to the water, she could see two familiar figures setting up rows of rockets and squibs. Jin resisted the urge to call out and wish them good luck. They’d demand to know why she wasn’t hidden away someplace safe, and she didn’t feel like arguing about it.

They crossed behind the far pier, passed the second row of potted trees, and found themselves on the same deserted stretch of beach where they had danced by the light of her chemical bonfire.

Sam sat in the sand with his back against the driftwood trunk. “How are you feeling?”

She turned, surprised. “Fine.”

He was looking at her with concern in his eyes. They were so very green—the kind of green that was almost impossible to replicate in the sky. “I figured you’d be worried. About your uncle and Mr. Burns.”

“Oh.” She sat a short distance away and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I am, but I suppose I believe Uncle Liao.” She put a hand to the back of her neck, touched the stickiness of the red grease pencil he had used to draw the talisman. “I don’t know why I should, but somehow it makes sense to me.”

“That thing he drew on you. The paper he made me drink. Does it feel—should we feel different, somehow?”

She had been trying to figure that out herself. “I’m not sure.”

“Because the symbol looked a lot—to me, at least—like the one on the banner in one of the corners of your uncle’s tent.”

Jin pictured the flags Liao always hung up after they raised the laboratory. “It might be, now that I think about it.” She started with a sudden realization. “In the carriage, when you were telling me about seeing the two men lurking around the wagon, you said they couldn’t go into that tent, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. You think it was because of that symbol?”

“I’m not sure. The talismans are supposed to give protection, but I always figured that was more like a tradition than anything real.” She rubbed the scarlet pigment between her fingers, and wondered.

They sat in silence for a moment or two and watched the sun fall below the western horizon. It occurred to Jin that just because she didn’t like talking about her past didn’t mean that other people felt the same way. “Would you like to tell me about your father?” she asked hesitantly.

Sam had been staring up at the first few stars. Now he looked at her for a moment. Then he shrugged. “I don’t want to bore you.”

Which wasn’t quite the same as a no, Jin realized. “I think I would like to hear. But only if you want to tell.” The look he gave her was dubious, but not evasive. “Really,” she added.

“He worked on the bridge,” Sam said. “When the caissons for the towers were still being sunk.”

“What is a caisson?”

“It’s what they used for the foundations of the towers. They were boxes without bottoms, kind of like diving bells, only the size of a city block and made out of pine and iron and oakum.” Sam held his hand out, palm down and cupped into a sort of bell shape.

“They built the towers bit by bit on the top of the boxes, which weighted them down and sent them to the bottom. Then they took compressed air and filled the boxes, which drove out the water. Then a crew went down into the box through an air lock and started digging out the floor while another crew piled stone for the tower on top, and little by little, the caissons sank deeper. The crew inside kept digging until they reached bedrock, so the foundations would sit on solid ground. Then, when they had them where they wanted them, they filled the caissons with cement and the foundations were done.”

“So your dad was on the crew digging out the floor?”

Sam nodded. “He worked in the Brooklyn caisson until it was done, then he went to work on the New York caisson. Right up until he died.”

“Oh.” Sam had never said his father was dead, of course, but somehow Jin felt she ought to have figured out that much before now. Playing cards on the waterfront probably wasn’t something kids with proper families did, even here, so close to New York. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“No, it’s okay. I don’t mind. It’s nice to talk about him.” Sam stretched out his legs and looked across the water. “The air pressure gets higher, the deeper you go, and the New York tower had to be sent really deep into the riverbed. On the Brooklyn side they only had to sink it down forty-five feet or so. On the New York side, they had to sink it almost twice as far.” He shrugged again. “People were getting sick the whole time, of course. Everybody knew spending time under pressure wasn’t good for you, but usually it just meant some pain for a few hours. The men in charge were very careful, and nobody died working on the Brooklyn side, or even for a long time on the other one. It was when they hit around seventy feet, that’s when my dad started feeling sick.” He paused. “You really want to hear about this?”

She nodded. “If you want to tell me. Only if you want.”

“Well, you told me your story.” Sam folded his arms. “They call the caisson disease the Grecian bends, or sometimes just the bends for short. For Dad, it started with cramps in his legs after he’d come up. He said working in the caisson was bizarre and frightening sometimes, but the pain didn’t happen until after he was back on the surface. When it did, he said it hurt like some giant was tearing him apart at the joints.” He shuddered. “I saw it come on, once. I would meet him in a saloon off Fulton Street when he would come back across to Brooklyn after work.”

“Your dad met you in a saloon every day?” Jin asked. “How old were you?”

“I guess by then I was almost thirteen, although we’d been meeting there since I was eight or nine, all the way back when Dad started working on the first caisson. My usual was a glass of milk.” He gave her a little smile. “Dad wasn’t a big drinker. The doctor had all kinds of rules for keeping healthy under pressure, and he didn’t like the men to drink, but they all did. Every one of them believed a shot of whiskey would do more to help them recover at the end of the day than any of the coffee and bunk rest the doctor prescribed. And that saloon was as good a place to meet as any. A friend of Dad’s tended the bar there. He used to pay me a nickel a week to clean up while I waited. Then one day Dad just . . .”

He frowned. “I remember his face going gray, like lead, before he started throwing up. By the time he fell over, he was sweating like I’d never seen a man sweat. Huge cold drops all over. He said something, but I didn’t understand what it was. Then he started screaming. Someone went for a doctor, and the doctor knocked him out with morphine.

“We got him back to the house where we were rooming,” Sam continued, his voice going a little dull, “and everybody told me he’d be fine in a few hours. The doctor said the pain had to run its course, so it was best that he just sleep through it. But then a few hours after that he went into convulsions, and an hour later he was dead.”

“That’s terrible,” Jin said quietly. But Sam had a faraway look, and she wasn’t sure that he heard her.

“I’d learned some card games from the men Dad worked with.” He smiled dimly. “Cards, and a pretty good collection of German and Irish curses to go along with the Italian ones I knew. A couple years ago, a kid from the tenements, a fellow I played cards with a lot, told me he was going to Coney Island. He’d worked on the engines that they’re using now to spin the cables up until he got hurt, and he figured Coney was a good place to try next. I mean, lots of fellows are out of work in Brooklyn, just like everywhere. But here—well, Constantine knows how to sail, plus we figured there were hotels like this one being built that would need waiters and cooks and shoeshine boys, there were restaurants that would pay you to dig clams on the beach, there was talk about racetracks and Tammany Hall hacks who would pay a kid a dollar to carry picnic baskets for them. Dad was gone, and my mother had been gone since . . . I think she died when I was three or four, so there was really no reason not to pick up and give this place a try. Plus I basically only survived that first year without Dad because of what Constantine taught me about cards. So we came here together.”

He rubbed his face hard. “My dad made two twenty-five a day in the caisson just to die in the most unbelievable pain imaginable, so this place sounded pretty good to me. And here I am. I will say this, I live a lot better than we did in Brooklyn, although I’m not sure how Dad would feel about the way I do it.”

“You play games with people who want to play games, in a town by the sea.”

“It sounds nice when you say it that way, but you left out the part where I take their money. So many folks are out of work, and the ones who aren’t are having wages cut, or are on strike to keep their wages from being cut. . . . It feels like the wrong time to be living off people who really don’t have money to be gambling with.”

Jin watched him as he stared out at the water. “I think your father would be glad that you make a living that doesn’t require you to work in pain,” she said quietly. “And he might point out that you aren’t stealing money from those people. They want to play, so they’re choosing to take the risk.”

“My dad was never in pain while he worked,” Sam said quietly. “You saw the towers, Jin. When this bridge is finished, it’s going to be one of the great wonders of the world. And my dad gave his life for it. His blood’s in that bridge. That means something.” He shook his head. “I’m proud of him, that’s all. I’d like to believe he’d be proud of me, but even if I manage to do more good than evil in the world, it isn’t likely I’ll have anything to show for it. Not like that.” His face was solemn, but his eyes glittered with pride for his father’s accomplishment.

“It really is beautiful,” Jin said at last. “The bridge. It’s a thing of wonder, you’re right.”

He scratched his head. “You know, Constantine would make a good . . . whatever you call what Susannah is,” he mused. “The friend who brought me out here. You’ll never meet another kid who feels so responsible for so many people. And his blood’s in that bridge, too. That’s where he got injured.” Sam sat thoughtfully for a moment, then turned back to her with a smile. “Your turn.”

“To do what?”

“Tell me something. But something that makes you happy this time.”

“Oh.” She thought for a moment, then announced, “I can tell where I am in the country based on what kind of hotcakes they have for breakfast.” Sam burst into laughter, which made Jin smile, too. “Last year at a display we did in Chicago a man accidentally set a lady’s bustle on fire with a handheld sparkler,” she added, just to see Sam laugh some more. “Her backside went up in flames faster than a pile of hay, thanks to all the horsehair in her dress. That was pretty good entertainment.”

This time he laughed with his head thrown back and his eyes squeezed shut, and Jin watched, delighted.

She told him about seeing the lines of prairie schooners, the covered wagons carrying settlers out West, each time Fata Morgana crossed the great open spaces of the middle country. She told him about those vast wide lands, the tall grasses that undulated across them like waves on the sea, the skies so big they seemed as endless as the ocean itself. And as she spoke, other recollections came back to her like lost treasures that had been waiting in her memory to be found again and shared.

“Have you ever played Go?” she asked when she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Still smiling, Sam shook his head. “Don’t know it.”

“It’s an old, old game. Uncle Liao taught me. It’s not a card game, but you might like it.”

“Want to teach me sometime?”

“Yes.”

The smile was gone from his face now, and he was looking at her with such seriousness in those green eyes that her heart sped up, thudding in her throat. “Jin,” he began, his voice just a little uneven. But before he could say another word, a white light shot into the sky overhead, cutting through the air with a whine.

Jin turned to follow its progress until it disappeared, grateful for the distraction. A second later the deepening dark burst into golden brilliance.

She smiled. Gold, shining in the night for her, a gentle hello from Uncle Liao.

“You’ll hurt your neck, twisting it like that,” Sam said quietly. “Come sit here.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Jin rose, crossed the small space between them, and sat. She felt his eyes on her the entire way.

As the next volley of rockets sailed up to paint the heavens, Sam reached for the hand that sat clenched on her knee. Jin stopped breathing for a moment, but all he did was trace the burn patterns and scars with his fingers as he turned his face up to watch the starbursts overhead.

When she had made sure, by peeking out of the corner of her eye, that he was still looking up rather than at her, Jin eased herself back against the driftwood, letting her shoulder and arm line up next to his so that they were just touching. Then she turned her face up, too.

 

After the fireworks ended, they sat in the dark for a long moment, her hand still clasped in his, both studiously staring skyward as if there was something more to see than the dissipating smoke of Liao’s finale.

Jin had spent the entire hour of the display, which she had thought would make her feel better, in a state of stomach-twisting confusion. She wanted so badly to curl herself under Sam’s arm and tuck her head onto his shoulder the way she had when they’d danced on the beach. Except that in a matter of days she would be gone—and that was assuming they both survived tomorrow. Except that it had been six years since anyone had kissed her, and those memories needed to stay buried because not a single one of them was good. Except that she kept on finding herself in situations normal girls simply didn’t get into, and if just once Sam misunderstood why she was there and thought that, because they were alone on this deserted stretch of beach and she had let down her guard—

“Why did you go rigid all of a sudden?” he asked. Instinctively she tried to pull her hand away, but he tightened his grip. “Jin, wait. Just sit here with me.”

“Why are you here?” she whispered. “Why am I here?”

“I don’t know why you’re here,” he admitted. “But I’m glad you are. The best I can figure is, I think maybe we’re friends, and maybe we don’t have to worry about the rest.”

“Friends don’t hold hands.”

“Well, not all of them, certainly. I do have friends I absolutely will not hold hands with.”

Against her will, Jin laughed.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sam said at last. “I don’t know what’s bothering you, exactly . . . but it’s late, and we have a long day tomorrow. Come on.” He stood and pulled her up after him, and it was then, just the second she was on her feet, that he kissed her. She burst into tears, shoved him away, and scrambled over the driftwood and up the beach toward the piers and the Broken Land, her feet slipping awkwardly in the sand.

He followed as she sprinted toward the hotel, and caught up with her just as she reached the edge of the gravel outside the stables. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop. “You know you can’t go back there now.”

She shook off his grip and stumbled across to the wagon. Just before she reached the door, however, two things happened, one right after the other: Uncle Liao stepped out onto the top stair, and a voice spoke up from the dark on the other side of the gravel.

“Well, isn’t this perfect.” Jin turned to find a red-haired man in a white suit stalking toward her. “And here I thought if we wanted to talk with somebody from Fata Morgana, we’d have to hunt you down.”

 

Sam skidded to a halt as the man strode toward the wagon. He scanned the darkness around them, but the bald man in the long felt coat was nowhere to be seen.

Liao took Jin by the arm and pulled her into the wagon behind him. Then he folded his arms and regarded the newcomer. “We have not been introduced.”

The red-haired man gave a sarcastic little bow. “I go by Walker. Once I was called Redgore. I’m in the market for some conflagration services.”

“Let my niece and the boy go, and then we will discuss this business.”

Walker grinned, baring what looked to Sam like two full rows of teeth. “No, I don’t think so.”

Liao grinned back. “You’re a fox, Mr. Walker, prowling through the jungle before a tiger and thinking the creatures that flee are running from you and not the bigger menace at your back. I am not to be ordered around by foxes.”

Walker stiffened. Liao grinned a little wider, as if he were baring fangs rather than perfect white teeth. “Or by tigers, either,” Liao added, “but that is none of your concern.”

“Old man,” Walker said coldly, “this is not a fight you want to start.”

Sam’s heart burst into a drumroll. Something bad was about to happen. If Walker was the killer who had torn the two Coney Island bodies to pieces, no matter how good a game Liao could talk, he couldn’t possibly stand a chance against him.

He looked past the old man at Jin, hoping he was wrong, hoping she knew something he didn’t. His racing heart sank. Jin’s eyes were wild with terror.

“Uncle,” she said, her voice so weak it was nearly inaudible, “please.”

Liao ignored her, and his next words made Sam feel faint. “Stand aside for the children to leave, and I will do you the courtesy of listening to your request before I laugh and blast you from my doorstep.”

Across the red-haired man’s cheeks a spattering of freckles began to darken. “Are you sure you really want to be threatening me?” All in a moment, red slashes radiated from the dark marks into a webwork of angry welts across his face.

Liao shrugged and folded his hands into his sleeves. “I would prefer not to threaten you. I would prefer we speak as gentlemen. But even the sage knows one may occasionally be forced to use arms in the name of good. I will hurt you if I must.”

“Now you’re just boring me,” Walker growled. And then he launched himself at Liao.

Before Sam could even begin to think how to react, the old man flung his arms out of his sleeves, and with a concussion of blinding light and deafening sound, did exactly what he’d threatened to do and—there was no other way to describe it—blasted Walker backwards and across the gravel.

“Go now,” Liao snapped. Sam looked up at him and did a double take. It might just have been a trick of his eyes, the lingering result of the cold blue light of the flare, but the old man appeared to actually be glowing.

Jin sprinted out of the wagon and past Liao to Sam. From the opposite direction, Walker, his impeccable white suit blackened and smoking and his whip-marked face charred, stalked toward them. Liao’s blast must have thrown him nearly all the way across to the back wall of the hotel, Sam realized—but that wasn’t even the most shocking thing.

As he approached, Walker got taller.

He towered over them. He towered over the wagon. He was, suddenly, a giant.

And then Liao stepped back into the wagon’s doorway. In the space of a blink Walker launched himself at the old man. The world warped—the giant figure somehow never seemed to diminish, yet as he closed in on Liao the two men looked to be the same size again.

Liao blasted him back once more, and this time Sam caught the brief glint of a glass vessel that burst against the red-haired man’s chest and exploded into flame.

Walker, his impeccable white suit blackened and smoking and his whip-marked face charred, stalked toward them. 

Lights were coming on in the hotel. Faces appeared against the glass of dozens of windows. From the direction of the beach, there were voices, lots of them, as people who’d been watching the fireworks drifted toward this new commotion.

“Go,” Liao shouted again, and as Walker picked himself up off the gravel once more, Sam took Jin by the arm and hauled her away.

She fought him for a few steps, shouting her uncle’s name, but by the time they got around the corner and had to push against the tide of gawkers rushing to see what all the flashes and bangs were, she was stumbling along with him, silent tears pouring down her face.

A sky-rending crack sounded from behind the hotel just as they reached the tradesman’s entrance. Sam tightened his grip on Jin’s arm. “He’s going to be fine,” he whispered.

He didn’t really believe it, though. Mere explosives couldn’t possibly hold a monster like Walker at bay.

“It’s not going to work,” Jin said dully as she allowed herself to be pulled into the elevator. “It’s not going to work, none of it. How could it? How could anything work against that . . . that—”

“It is going to work.” Never mind that he’d been thinking exactly the same thing.

“It’s not. Even if I can do it, all it can possibly accomplish is to stall the inevitable. That thing back there—”

“It’s the plan we have.”

Jin stared at him. “And then what?”

I have no idea. “And then . . . well, and then we have to hope Tom and Mapp and the rest of them come up with something.”

On the fifth floor, Susannah Asher barely managed to get the door open before Jin was shoving past her and through the suite to the window. Sam mumbled apologies and followed. Outside and below, the Fata Morgana encampment had gone still and dark.

Susannah came to stand behind them. Her expression reflected in the window was concerned. “I saw the explosions,” she said softly. “Everything all right?”

“No,” Jin murmured. “Not really.” She searched the shadows outside, looking for any sign of the battle they had just fled, any indication of how it had ended. There was nothing, nothing but furrows in the gravel and drifting smoke.

“I figured it out.”

Jin turned to Susannah. “Figured what out?”

“How new . . . vacancies are filled among us.” She rubbed her eyes as if there was a headache pounding behind them. “The memories—they’re there, but they’re hard to call forth without something to bring them to mind. But Mike loaned me this.” She held up a pair of spectacles on a golden chain.

“They were Jim Hawks’s.” For the first time Jin noticed Mike sitting on the sofa, arms folded tightly. “I took them after—you know.”

She swallowed. “Yes, I know.” In all the confusion, in all her worry about Uncle Liao and Mr. Burns and what it meant if she was a conflagrationeer, she’d managed to forget entirely that Mike had lost his—his what? His boss, his mentor, maybe even his friend? “I’m sorry, Mike,” she said carefully, hoping it wasn’t too little, too late. “I should have said so earlier.”

He shrugged, face closed, and nodded for Susannah to continue. “Anyway.”

“Anyway. The spectacles helped me remember how Hawks came to be one of us.” Susannah handed the glasses back to Mike. “The role was offered to him by the previous keeper of sanctuary, when that man knew he was near the end of his life. And that man was offered it by another steward, after the sanctuary keeper of the generation before died without finding a successor. So I think,” she concluded, “I think that I can offer stewardships to fill the empty places. And I think I can offer four of them. Overcaste forfeited his place when he betrayed the city. I just have to decide on the right four.”

 

Bones stood on the darkened beach with arms folded and watched a battered and charred Walker limp toward him. “Looks like that’s another suit done for,” he observed dryly.

Walker held up one warning forefinger and dropped to the sand. He sat for a moment, then fell over backwards, breathing hard.

“I take it your meeting with Liao didn’t go as well as you anticipated.”

Walker said nothing, but this time he made another, ruder gesture.

“So we begin our final day with no conflagrationeer.”

Still lying in the sand, Walker sighed and took out his cigarette case. He lit one of the cheroots and smoked in silence.

Bones turned toward the hotel to watch another figure as it approached from the lawn. Overcaste came to stand next to him and peered hesitantly down at Walker. “Is . . . everything—”

“Tell me,” the bald man cut him off.

“They went inside, both of them, through the tradesman’s entrance,” Overcaste said, still looking at Walker’s smoke- and ash-stained form. “There were too many people in the way; I couldn’t see what floor they went to. The boy left. The girl’s still in there, I think.”

“Burns?”

“Didn’t see any sign of him.”

Finally, Walker spoke up. “I am really, really getting tired of this place.”

 

On Mrs. Ponzi’s rooftop, Sam and Constantine and Ilana sat outside their window listening to the Saturday night noises of carousing from the wilder streets of West Brighton. “So what do you think?” Sam asked, watching Constantine deal a hand of poker. “Could it work?”

“After everything you just told me, the letters on the cable part sounds perfectly logical.” Con set down the remaining cards and swept up his hand. “I mean, compared to the rest of it. Yeah. No reason it couldn’t work. The bit about stringing letters and lighting ’em up, I mean. The rest of it sounds utterly insane.”

“Is it . . . is it true?” Ilana picked up her cards one by one and arranged them in her hand.

Sam slapped her fingers gently. “How many times have we told you not to do that? You give something away every time you move a card.”

“But is it true?”

“I don’t know, Illy,” Sam said, cards on his knee. Then he sighed. “I believe it. I think that’s maybe the best I can say.”

“I don’t understand it, though,” the girl protested. “This is America. It’s the nineteenth century. This all still sounds like something out of a fairy tale.”

“From a kid who still believed in fairy tales up until last year—”

“Sing small, Con, or I’ll tell my mother you broke her Palissy serving dish.”

“I don’t even know what that is!”

“It’s bad, that’s all you need to know.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Can we get back to the topic at hand?” He looked at Constantine, then at Ilana. “Can I count on you tomorrow? Will you help us?”

“Of course we will,” Ilana said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Crazy or not, we’re with you.”

“Go right ahead, speak for all of us.”

“I beg your pardon, Constantine, did I get your answer wrong?”

“No, Miss Wiseacre, you did not. Are we playing, or aren’t we?” Con stretched out a foot and kicked Sam’s leg. “Start us off.”

Sam worried the corner of the leftmost card in his hand between his thumb and forefinger. From their perch he could see west to the lights of Norton’s Point, where the evening was well under way, and miles off to the east, the pale glow that he knew emanated from the Broken Land Hotel, where he had reluctantly left Jin in Susannah Asher’s care with a promise to return in the morning to help assemble the fireworks for the message.

“It’s such a little island,” he murmured. But he was thinking about what Ambrose and Tom had said, about how an attack upon New York and Brooklyn now, even in this modern year of 1877, could be enough to tear the United States apart.

Such a fragile thing, this country.

“Sam.” Ilana tapped his knee gently. “Play.”