The Broken Lands (11 page)

The boy named Sam was hovering, all concern and awkwardness. She couldn't bear it. “Did you see?” she whispered harshly, scrubbing at her face with her sleeve.

He shook his head. “I didn't see it. Mr. Mapp was the only one who went.”

“Did he
tell
you?”

He hesitated and glanced over at the huddled men, plainly willing them to finish their conversation and come to his rescue.

“It's no good, dwelling on it.”

“I can't get it out of my head anyhow. At least help me make sense of it. What could . . .” Jin took a deep breath. “What could
do
that to someone?”

He looked like he was trying to figure out something comforting to say. Jin put on her most forbidding face and stared him down. There was no comfort for this. There was only the hope of making sense of it. That's how it felt, at least.

“It was pretty bad, huh?” he said at last.

She sighed and took another little sip from her glass. There was no way to answer that. No way that would convey what she had seen, anyhow.

“Walt didn't say anything about what he thought happened,” Sam said quietly. “But he told me about the body, and the writing.”

This was new. “What writing?”

“You didn't see it? It was on the wall, where the—where it was lying. Let me remember and get it right. It said—”

“That's enough talk of this wretchedness.” Uncle Liao swooped in, waving his hands like a man trying to stop a fight. He pointed a finger at Jin's mostly untouched glass. “Little sips, I said!”

Jin ignored him. “What was the writing?”

“Xiao Jin!” Liao thundered.

“Zhe shi shenme yisi?”
Jin shouted back, astounded by her own anger. “I'm not leaving until you tell me what this means!”

“It means that a creature may walk like a man and still have a beast's heart, Xiao Jin,” Liao retorted. “That's all it means. No more.”

“That isn't enough! If you had seen it, what I saw . . . If you knew what I have caught behind my eyes—” She banged a fist against her forehead. “If you did, you'd do whatever it took to give me some kind of peace!”

“How will knowing what a murderer wrote on a wall give you peace?” Sam asked softly.

Jin shrugged, suddenly exhausted. “I don't know. I only know I'm going to be thinking about it every moment of the day and night no matter what.”

Everyone in the room turned to Liao. He gave her a long look, then turned to where Walter Mapp leaned on the back of the piano and gave him a curt nod.

Mapp tapped the fingers of one hand on the piano. “It said,
Claimed by blood for Jack Hellcoal.
”

Jin began to shake again. Tears pricked at her eyes for the third time in a single day. It was absurd. The words clarified nothing for her. Why, why the tears again?

“What does it mean?” she whispered.

Mapp shrugged. “Darlin', I haven't the foggiest.”

Jin nodded. Then, unable to hold it back any longer, she burst into tears.

“
Lai he yi he.
Little sips,” Liao said again, much more gently.

Obediently, Jin took another sip and tried not to cough. Fiery liquid slid down her throat, burned away some of the desperate aching sobs.

“Good girl, firefly.” Liao patted her shoulder. His knotty old hand was shaking, too. “Now again.”

Jin sniffled and wiped her eyes. “Can't imagine you really want me drunk and setting off rockets, Uncle Liao,” she mumbled. Panic hit, quick and sharp. “My bag—what time is it?”

“Don't be absurd. It's for recovery, not for boozing you up.”

“My bag,” Jin said again, shoving the ice pack into Mr. Burns's hand and the glass into Sam's. The second she was on her feet, a wave of nausea hit and she nearly fell back into the chair. “Mr. Mapp! I had a bag with me. Did it—”

“Sit right back down, young lady,” Mapp ordered. “Your gear's safe and sound. It's right there, on the bar.”

“Oh, thank goodness.” She allowed herself to be guided back into the chair while Sam rushed to retrieve the bag.

Liao plucked it from his hands. “Yes, and what, precisely, is this errand that takes you into some kind of shantytown hellpit? And why did you not at least take the
laowai
with you? It isn't as if he has anything better to do than keep you company.”

“Hey,” Mr. Burns protested weakly.

“You disagree?” Liao snapped. “You would have told our Jin no, you have no time to make sure she doesn't get herself killed?” Burns opened his mouth, but then thought better of answering. Liao took one of his long breaths, then turned back to Jin, holding up the bag like an indictment. “What kind of cat are you keeping in this bag?”

“Atlantis. But different than we usually do it.” Despite everything, Jin smiled and settled back in her chair. “If we get back in time for me to build it before tonight.”

Liao looked like he was trying hard to maintain his expression of disapproval, but at this his face cracked into a reluctant smile. “Spoken like a true
daoyao ren.
” He glanced at Mr. Burns. “Our Jin has a cinnabar heart,” he said. “It is too brave for her own good.” He gently took Jin's bag from her. “Little sips, now. Then we will go to work so that you may build your Atlantis.”

 

The creek that bordered Coney Island to the north and separated it from the rest of Gravesend had huge stretches of empty banks on both sides, overhung with stunted trees and lined with weeds. Less than a quarter of a mile from civilization, yet certain spots along that creek felt like wilderness. In one of those isolated little pockets of marshy ground, Bones stood a few yards up the bank while Walker, stripped to the waist, rinsed blood from his arms.

The freckles there were black as ink, and angry red lines connected them, raised marks like scratches or welts. His back, too, was a network, an elaborate tracery of those same welts. If they hadn't been so geometrically precise, they would've resembled whip marks.

Walker's face, reflected in the scarlet-scummed water, looked utterly disfigured. The freckles there stood out black now, as well, forming a swirling and jagged pattern around his eyes and across his nose, scored by more of the lines. His red-rimmed eyes burned, but he was smiling.

“That,” he said cheerfully, scrubbing gore out from under his fingernails, “was fun.”

“That,” Bones corrected, “was possibly excessive.”

“Not if the point is to get people talking,” Walker retorted. He dunked his head under and yanked it out again, shaking the water off and finger-combing his hair back. “Do you know how many people are lying dead somewhere, waiting to be found? Can't have our work blending in with the rest.”

“You're the expert.” Bones held out Walker's shirt and jacket. “What now? Can we stop our hell-raising for an hour and get ourselves dinner before the next bout of carnage?”

“Dinner?” Walker laughed. “How can you be hungry at a time like this?”

“We haven't eaten today. My needs are simple, but I have them. Let's go get ourselves a beefsteak or some such.”

“Suit yourself.” The red marks were fading now, and the ink-black pointillism across his face had faded, too. Now he just looked massively freckled.

“Not hungry?” Bones asked dryly.

By way of an answer, Walker merely tweaked the bow of his neat ribbon tie, straightened his collar, and grinned.

J
IN
, L
IAO
, and Mr. Burns departed the Reverend Dram with the afternoon sun just beginning to sink in the sky. When they had disappeared from Mammon's Alley and were on their way back to the swank east end, Sam slid onto a barstool alongside Walter Mapp, facing Jasper Wills across the long mahogany. “What's it mean, really? The scrawl about this Jack person?”

Mapp swiveled on his seat and regarded Sam with affronted eyes. “You accusing me of lying to that poor girl when she asked me a direct question?”

“You avoiding mine?”

“That was the general idea, yes. I don't know what it meant, Sam. I'd have told her if I did. She's right, poor kid. Everything matters when you're trying to make sense of something senseless. I'd have given her whatever I had, if I had anything at all.”

Jasper Wills poured something into a glass and passed it across to Sam. Remembering Jin's glass of whiskey, he took a slug, doing his best to look like it was no great thing. Then he gave Jasper a withering look. It was sarsaparilla.

“You like this girl?” Mapp asked, turning his own glass on the bar.

“Some boys were hassling her and she . . .” He gestured, trying to find words for the beautiful puff of fire that had driven the boys off. “It was like a dandelion, only it was this fireball.”

“Okay, Sam.” Mapp straightened and pushed away his glass. “Look, this is probably just another bit of the same old nastiness.”

The same old nastiness,
meaning the periodic violence that sometimes seeped eastward out of Norton's Point. It wasn't, though, and they both knew it. The words on the wall made it not the same old anything.

“Probably nothing more,” Mapp went on. “Still, if it isn't . . .” He turned to face Sam. “You know who would be a good person to talk to? That Tom Guyot fellow.”

Sam had been nodding along. Now he stopped, confused. “Why?”

“He isn't what you think he is, for one thing.” The piano player stood. “And he knows the roads, and if the Jack on the wall is the Jack I think he is, Tom might just be able to tell us something. If he's still in town, that is.”

“He's in town.” For the second time, Sam unfolded the handbill.
The
Fata Morgana Fireworks Company, Arte et Marte!
“I think I know where he'll be tonight.”

 

At the other end of the island on the grounds of the Broken Land Hotel, near the livery stables and well out of view of any of the guests, Jin took out Tycho McNulty's parcels and explained to Liao what she wanted.

Side by side they worked, grinding the ingredients of Jin's special formulas in mortars and blending them gently with one of the big white feathers Liao kept in his workbench drawer. Then they began the task of making up new explosives from their old stock, with Liao painstakingly emptying the contents of tubes and rockets and Jin making new stars, the little wrapped packets holding the incendiary compounds inside each firework. After that they started stringing individual fireworks, stars and cases, tourbillions and port-fires, together into more complicated things: furilonas, caprices, chequer pieces, and devils-among- the-tailors. All the different sorts of combustible artistry that would come together to form Jin's program of miracles.

“Xiao Jin,
gande hao!
Did you do this on purpose?” Liao called as he began stringing a fuse onto a double guilloche, a huge spinning windmill. “I am so pleased that none of these formulations will need to dry.”

Jin smiled from the workbench where she was building a compound firework that, when lit, would erupt like a water fountain. Of course she had done it on purpose; anything that needed to dry would take hours, and would be useless for the evening's display. But Uncle Liao didn't really need to be told that. He al­ready knew.

Liao's gnarled hands manipulated the fuse like a spider weaving a web, his long, thin braid hanging over his shoulder and his face folded into a scowl of concentration. Jin watched him for a moment. “You think it will do what I want?” she asked. “Tell me, truly.”

He answered without looking up. “You think I would let you proceed with it if I did not? Xiao Jin, it is not such an outlandish idea. Water-fires have been made before.”

That, of course, she knew—artificiers from hundreds of years ago wrote of rockets that skipped like a stone across the water, or even dove under and resurfaced, still burning, to rise into the air and explode.

Side by side they worked, grinding the ingredients of Jin's special formulas in mortars and blending them gently with one of the big white feathers Liao kept in his workbench drawer.
 

“But not by us.” Their usual Atlantis program was beautiful, but it didn't use water-fires. And she certainly didn't need to point out to Uncle Liao that what they were now planning—what she had figured out how to do—was something far more complicated, something she'd never heard of anyone doing before.

“Indeed,” Liao said. “It is a high form of artifice, to blend opposites like fire and water in this way. Which reminds me: where did you find the formulas? For the powder, for treating the fuses, for the spur-fires and the rest?”

Jin glanced at the bowl that held what was left of the special black powder they had used: gunpowder she'd compounded using one of the unusual ingredients she'd bought from Tycho McNulty. “They're based on a recipe out of the book,” she said slowly. “But I made some changes.”