THE DESCENDING SUN turned the arched granite from gray to red-gold. Cinnabar, Jin thought fleetingly as Constantine piloted the little boat carrying her, Walter Mapp, and Ambrose up to the stone landing at the base of the tower on the Brooklyn side. Pinned to their collars, each of the fellows wore a slip of yellow paper bearing a symbol in red that Jin had brought from the laboratory. She’d sent more yellow slips back with Mike, one each for all of the conspirators.
Jin’s fingers sought out the clay-sealed sphere that held the half-finished dan inside it. The crucibles were still warm to the touch, as if they had been sitting in the sun rather than in the dark of Jin’s rucksack. A feeling of rightness welled up over her, like the thrumming sensation that accompanied a rush of blood to the head.
Mapp tossed a line to a man who came over to see what the little boat with its strange crew was up to. “What’s this about?” the workman demanded as he made the boat fast. He pointed skyward, at the wooden walkway that stretched far overhead. “Sightseers are only allowed on the footpath and the towers.”
Constantine stood up on the gunwale and smiled at him. “Hey, Paul! You forget me already?”
The other man beamed. “Hey, Con! We heard you were laid up!” He grasped Constantine’s hand and hauled him across onto the landing, then turned and called to someone out of sight on the wooden stair that zigzagged up the side of the tower. “Hey, guess who came to say hello! Con Liri’s here!”
Constantine laughed as he helped tie the boat to a cleat set into the stone. “I’m not here to visit with you lot. I got work to do.” In the boat, Ambrose stood, nearly knocking the little craft over in the process, and cleared his throat impatiently. Constantine did a pretty good job of looking chastened. “Er. Sorry— sir. Paul, be a gentleman, will you, and help these folks up with their gear? We got fireworks tonight.”
“Fireworks, says who?” Paul squinted for a better look at Ambrose. “Not to be rude, sir. But we get lots of oddballs that—”
Ambrose moved up onto the gunwale and across onto the stone in two swift steps. Jin, who had been sitting next to the newspaperman and could smell the liquor on his breath, only barely managed to keep from grabbing his arm, so certain was she that he was going to slip and plunge sidelong between boat and stone and drown.
He didn’t, though. He landed perfectly solidly, as if he hadn’t already been drunk before they’d left the hotel (or seasick the whole, tame trip and dosing himself from his flask the entire way). Then he shoved his hands in his pockets, stared down his thin nose at the workman (which was a pretty good feat, since they were about the same height), and said, “Young man, my name is Frederick Schroeder. You may have heard of me.”
The name didn’t mean anything to Jin. They hadn’t actually discussed any specific name for Ambrose to use; the plan had simply required him to look like a dandy and behave like a bureaucrat. But this name plainly meant something to the rest of them.
Constantine shot a frantic look at Walter Mapp. Mapp kept his face composed, but as he raised a hand to scratch under his hat, Jin heard him mutter something that sounded like a curse.
Paul’s eyes bugged out for a moment, then they narrowed as he looked at Ambrose a bit more closely. “Sir?”
Ambrose submitted to the scrutiny with unflappable poise. Then the workman peered at Susannah’s little sailboat, at Mapp—who tipped his hat back and made a salute—and Jin, who gave him a brief smile and hoped she didn’t look as confused as she was.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Ambrose said shortly. “You’re thinking my mustache is quite a bit more impressive in the flesh than it looks in the newspapers. You’re also probably thinking I look younger. And you’re quite right, and I thank you, but we’re in a bit of a hurry here. These two”—gesturing at Jin and Mapp—“have fireworks to set up, and we’re losing the light.” Then he turned to Constantine. “Young man, you assured me there would be none of this nonsense.”
“Newspapers?” Jin whispered to Mapp. “Who’s Frederick Schroeder? What’s going on?”
The pianist answered out of the side of his mouth, without looking away from Ambrose. “Believe it or not, that lunatic is claiming with a perfectly straight face to be the mayor of Brooklyn.”
Jin kept her face carefully neutral. “Oh, no.”
“Yup.”
Meanwhile: “Fireworks?” the workman repeated incredulously. “What’s this about fireworks?”
“Well . . . sir.” Constantine shifted nervously. “Paul, listen, I told him—I told Mr. Schroeder we could keep this quiet. I didn’t really think anybody’d even be here. Help me out.”
Paul was still looking closely at Ambrose. “Seems odd that he’d—you’d—turn up like this, no warning, no entourage—”
“Young man,” Ambrose interrupted, his voice dripping with condescension and impatience, “it couldn’t possibly be any less your concern, but if it will make you feel better about lending your assistance, here are two of the reasons this matter is being handled so quietly. For one thing, your chief engineer and my office are not on the best of terms at the moment.”
“Oh, nicely played,” Mapp mumbled. “That was all over the papers. Maybe there’s a method to his madness after all.”
“For another,” the impostor mayor continued, “the city of Brooklyn wishes to celebrate the progress of the cable work and demonstrate its faith in the steel being used, and it wishes to do so without the city of New York becoming involved.” He looked to Constantine. “I suppose your friend here is from New York,” he said sourly.
The workman straightened up with a disdainful look on his face. “No, sir. Born and raised in Brooklyn.”
“Well, then, for God’s sake, man, why on earth are we still talking? Assist us and we’ll put New York to shame! What do you say?” Ambrose held out his hand. “Care to be deputized into the East River Pyrotechnic Scheme?”
Mapp nodded. “Very nicely played,” he whispered to Jin.
Paul gave Ambrose one more close look. Then he grinned and shook his hand. “Yes, sir. It’s an honor, sir.”
“Excellent.” He nodded at Jin and her crates of gear. “You may begin by helping this young artist with her paints.”
“Right-o. You just tell us where you want them, miss.”
Gratefully, Jin handed Paul the first of the boxes. “The top of the tower, please.”
Constantine let out a breath he must’ve been holding for a good long time. “Thanks, Paul.” He clapped the workman on the shoulder. “I’m going to ferry the mayor across to the other side now. Can you show Jin and Mr. Mapp here how to use the buggy? They’re going to run the fireworks across the middle from either end.”
Paul gave Jin an incredulous look. Then he shrugged. “Nothing to it, Con. Good to see you up and around, friend.”
“Constantine.” Jin grabbed his sleeve as he climbed back aboard the boat and steadied it so that she and Mapp could get out. “Are you clear on how to finish the letters you’re taking to the other side?” She glanced up at the looming rock of the tower. “And are you okay to climb all the way up there?”
“You mean my leg?” He shrugged. “If it gives me any trouble, I’ll go up the same way your boxes will.” He pointed to where Paul and Mapp were busy loading the crates onto a wooden platform attached to a cable that disappeared overhead. “I’ll look a bit like a sissy, but I figure this isn’t the time to worry about that.” He grinned. “After all, I’m the smith now. I’ve got a city to look out for.”
When everything that needed to go to the top of the Brooklyn tower had been unloaded, Constantine held the boat steady for Ambrose to board again. Then, with one last wave, they cast off and were headed for the New York tower.
“Just this way, folks,” Paul called from the stair, which on closer inspection Jin realized wasn’t a stair at all but a series of ladders. “The crates’ll come up by lift, but it’s a long hike for us. Rest when you need to, yell if you need help.”
“No offense intended, Jin,” Mapp grumbled from her side as he stared up at the ladders, “but I keep on waiting to like this plan, and it keeps on throwing things like this at me.”
Sam had told Jin the towers were nearly three hundred feet tall, but until now, standing below one of them, she’d really had no idea what that actually meant. Now it looked as if she were about to ascend straight up a mountain.
The lift with the crates lurched and started upward. Jin and Mapp looked at it longingly as it rose out of reach. “Why didn’t I just take that way up?” she mumbled. Oh, well. Too late now. She started climbing. Mapp followed a few rungs behind her.
Each ladder rose to the floor of a plank platform above, which allowed for a moment’s rest as they crossed to where the next ladder waited to lead them up to the next level. Three flights up, Jin’s legs and arms were already aching. Before she was halfway to the top she wanted to cry for the men who had to climb up and down several times a day, six days a week, and evidently, occasionally on Sundays, too.
Thinking of it that way made her not want to cry so much because of the agony in her feet.
“You all right back there?” Paul called down. Jin, taking what seemed like her hundredth break, waved from the platform where she sat. Brooklyn stretched out before her, gouged by the tower’s massive shadow.
“Mr. Mapp? You still alive?” she shouted.
“Technically,” came his voice from somewhere below.
Jin pounded on her thighs with her fists, stood, and started climbing again.
When she reached the top of the tower at last, she had only a moment of relief before the first gust of wind hit her, shoving her a full three feet backwards before she managed to recover. Someone grabbed her arm and dragged her away from the edge as another gust surged across.
“The winds keep up just about like this all the time,” Paul warned. “Got to take care not to let them knock you about.”
Jin nodded, already working out how she was going to have to adjust the rockets she planned to set off to compensate for the wild airflow.
The space at the top of the tower was roughly the size of a small city block. Despite what Paul had said about there not being much work going on because it was Sunday, there had to be about ten people up there—a couple workers, a few well-dressed men, and even a pair of women who must’ve been sightseers—all of them watching curiously to see why on earth there was suddenly a Chinese girl in their midst.
Stretching away in either direction from the tower floor, a wooden plank path with rope handrails crossed the granite surface. There were also the two downstream cables that were being made, the first of many that would suspend a roadway below someday: two ropes of steel that ran parallel to the footpath. Beyond that, though, there was nothing. Just a sheer drop all the way down to the river.
Another blast of wind buffeted Jin. She clutched involuntarily at Paul’s arm, and he patted her hand. “You’ll get used to it. Wind’s not as strong as it feels, once you know to expect it.” He nodded back in the direction of the lift. “And here’s your boxes. Where would you like them?”
“Near the southern cable.” She peered across to the New York tower, but it was too far away to tell whether or not Constantine, whose task it was to fix the explosive lances to the letters for the message on the northern-facing cable, had made it to the top yet.
“Passing through, folks,” Paul bellowed, making his way to the spot Jin had indicated with the first of her crates in his arms.
Walter Mapp appeared at her side. He took off his hat and wiped sweat from his forehead. “Next time I make a climb like that,” he wheezed, “there’d better be angels waiting with a rare steak and a bottle of Armagnac.” He took a few deep breaths, then began moving their supplies with Paul.
“The buggy,” Jin began as she followed along behind them. “How does it work?”
“Take a look.” Paul led her to where one of the cables trailed off the tower surface and into the central span across the river. From it hung a small wooden platform with a handrail around it. It was small, maybe ten feet by six feet.
“We use this to go across and clamp the strands together,” Paul said. “It should work nicely for you. Plenty of space for your tools. You let yourself out with a rope.”
Jin thought through the steps that needed to play out: she’d finish setting the explosive charges on the letters first; then hang them using the buggy, with Walter Mapp helping to pull her across to the New York tower, where hopefully Constantine would be ready with his letters. Then she would return the same way on the second cable, stringing the message as she went, and arrive back here to finish work on the dan and the other necessary components of the cinefaction.
Walter Mapp came to stand next to her as she looked at the buggy. “Well, that’s not too bad,” he said. “Looks pretty sturdy.”
And it did. It looked big and very sturdy—until she looked past it at the cable spanning the incredibly vast distance between the towers. The New York side of the cable was all but invisible. And then there was the petrifying height of it; the river was hundreds of feet below.
Jin crouched for a moment, unable to stand as a sudden dizziness hit her.
“You all right?” Paul asked kindly.
She nodded, steeled herself, and stood back up. “I need some time to finish the fireworks. Do you think when I’m done you could help set us up in the buggy?”
“Just yell when you’re ready.”
“You need anything from me?” Mapp asked.
Jin shook her head. “Just quiet. I need to clear my mind.”
As she began fixing the explosive lances on the letter frames, her thoughts turned to the cinefaction, the unfinished dan in her rucksack, and Uncle Liao.
Where are you, Uncle? I wish I could ask you so many things.
Lance after lance, letter after letter. Her breath fell into an easy rhythm with her hands and she let her mind wander, recalling snippets of pages she had read in the Port-fire Book.
Let the bellows be smooth and deep over the plane of the mysterious and the golden. Let the nine repetitions refine the work through nine revolutions and nine signs of fire.
She imagined writing about what she was doing right now in the unique code of the book. Make one of five and one of three and one of eight and one from all. Line them with the slow fire and the fire that bursts. She thought of the particular shade of green she had crafted for the illuminated words and smiled to herself.
Make the second fire so that it burns like a friend’s eyes.
Back in Coney Island, the game went on. Sam was almost beginning to enjoy himself. Once he’d won the hand by having his saints throw their heads, he started to get ideas.
“Oh, come on, now,” Walker protested when Sam played four saints that had bees in their portraits. There were a surprising number of those.
“Unless you’ve got five ministering saints to counter those, I just stung your Marshal to death,” Sam said mildly. In a sense, Santine was turning out to be a bit like the rock, paper, scissors game.
“He’s already dead,” Walker grumbled. “He’s a martyr. That’s the point.” But he flicked the Marshal off the table to join the Advocate he’d lost earlier. Sam breathed a sigh of relief. With one of the Marshals out of play, another of the avenues for Walker to win the game was now closed.
He glanced at the shadows stretching across the ground. The sun was going down. Surely Jin had reached the bridge tower by now.
Time to finish Walker off.
Bones, apparently, had had the same thought. He’d been prowling around the edge of the game for the past hour like a caged animal. Now he came to scowl down at them. “Walker,” he growled, “time is getting short.”
“Damn right,” the gambler agreed. “I didn’t want to have to do this to you, kid, but this game has lost its charm for me. When you start winning hands with bee stings, you have to be stopped.” And he threw down five cards, one by one.
The second Sam saw the first of them, he dropped his hands to his sides, utterly dismayed. The play was called thirty pieces—it was something like a royal flush in poker, made up of saints from the suit of silver coins.
Walker slapped down the final card and looked at Sam with a barely concealed smirk on his face. “Only one counter for that, and I happen to know you don’t have the Devil’s Advocate, ’cause you excommunicated him.” And, as if Sam had forgotten that, Walker pointed to the two cards lying face-down on the ground.
Sam raised his hands and looked at the cards he held. “Yeah. All I have are these.” And he laid down his cards one by one: a motley assortment of fairly useless holies. “And, of course, I have these two.” He was just about to play his last legitimate card and the Liar, which he’d shaken loose from his sleeve when he’d dropped his arms, when he saw it. Gregory, Nicholas, Anthony, Seraphim, Menas. All five of the cards he’d just played were what were called Thaumaturges. Wonder workers: saints who performed miracles.
I could even tell you stories of players discovering new ways to win in the middle of a game, Tesserian had said. They say you just see a solution where there wasn’t one before, and it works. It happens, but it’s rare.
Sam’s heart pounded fast. The absurd idea that had just occurred to him, impossible though it seemed, lay perfectly within the logic of this game. If he was right, he could possibly—just possibly—beat Walker without cheating. It meant a huge leap of faith, though.
Sam put his two remaining cards face-down on the table. The top one was the Liar. He slid that one aside. Then he took the other card and turned it face-up onto the pile of Thaumaturges.
Walker’s jaw dropped. Sam took a deep breath and looked down. Then his jaw dropped, too. He knew perfectly well what he’d held, and the last card should have been a minor saint painted with a unicorn. What lay on top of the Thaumaturges was the Devil’s Advocate.
Sam let out the breath he’d been holding. Relief surged through him so hard he felt dizzy.
“No,” Walker gasped. He reached down and flipped over the two cards he’d flicked off the table: a Marshal and a Nothelfer. No Devil’s Advocate.
“This isn’t possible,” he protested, staring at the cards.
Sam shrugged and smiled. “It’s a miracle.” Except it wasn’t. He’d figured out how to win. The cards had done their work, but only because Sam had seen what they could do.
The game was over. He had won.
Tesserian let out a cheer and clapped him on the back. “I believe you owe the boy his winnings.”
Walker got to his feet, freckles darkening on his skin, and held out his hand to Bones.
“Walker,” Bones said, menacingly.
Walker snapped his fingers. Bones rolled his oyster-shell eyes and put the punched-tin tinderbox into the gambler’s hand. He tossed it to Sam. “I suggest you get to moving.”
Sam caught the little tinderbox in shaking hands. It was cool to the touch, but through the punches in the tin he could just make out a rosy glow.
Then he registered what Walker had said. “What?”
“I said, I suggest you get to moving.” He dusted off his suit trousers and rebuttoned his jacket. “We’ll give you a half-hour head start.”
“What?”
“You won the game,” Walker said through bared teeth, “and for that I’m giving you what we agreed upon. If you had dared to try and win with that”—he turned over Sam’s last card, the unused Liar—“I would have killed you right then.”
The gambler’s fingers curled around the edges of the crate, as if he was forcing himself not to tear out Sam’s throat that very minute. “But you didn’t, so I’m going to give you what you won, and a little time.” There was a soft creak of protest from the wood. “But that’s all.”
Sam swallowed hard. So he had known all along.
Walker smiled a horrible, angry smile. “Of course I knew, you little rat. I saw your clumsy palm-off. I was just arrogant enough to think I could beat you anyway. And for that, I’m coming after you, and I’m going to rip you to pieces before that girl’s eyes. I’d get moving if I were you.”
Bones took his watch from his pocket and glanced at it. “Twenty-nine minutes left.”
Sam ran.
Far above, in the hotel, Susannah Asher, Tom Guyot, Ilana Ponzi, and Mr. Burns clustered around a window. They watched Sam spring up, knocking over the crate and scattering cards everywhere, and leap into a full-bore sprint away from Walker, Bones, and a third man they didn’t know.
“I hope Mike’s ready.” Susannah sighed. “I still don’t feel right about not being there. At the bridge, I mean. I don’t feel right about just . . . just sending people off like this and waiting around in safety, hoping they don’t get themselves killed.”
Mr. Burns smiled at her. “That’s what you’re supposed to feel when you order people into battle. It’s to your credit that it doesn’t sit quite right in your heart.”
She dropped onto one of the couches and let her head fall into her hands. Ilana came to sit beside her. “Can I do anything for you, Susannah?”
“Will your mama be worrying about where you are right now?” Susannah asked, words muffled by her palms.
“No. I told her I was helping a friend catch up on her sewing and that I thought I’d stay the night.” She put her arm tentatively around the other girl’s waist. “I’d like to wait with you, if that’s all right. I don’t want to be anywhere else, alone and wondering what’s happening.”
Susannah nodded. “I wish we could see Jin’s fireworks.”
Across the room, Tom watched the two girls with a sad expression on his face. He slipped a hand into his pocket and felt for the coin on his watch fob. Then he sat, picked up his guitar, and began to play.