The Fire Chronicle (24 page)

The old man gave a snort. “We’ll see what happens, won’t we? We’ll see, we’ll see.…”

He released her arm and shuffled off down the hall. Kate
waited there a moment longer, the music moving through her, unsettling her. Then she turned and hurried away.

Outside, it was still snowing. More than a foot had fallen during the night, though most of the snow had been tramped down and pushed to the edges of the sidewalk. Kate’s breath plumed before her, and she burrowed her hands deep into the pockets of her coat. Abigail did not seem bothered by the cold. She carried four or five empty canvas bags over her arm and was repeating aloud the things they had to get.

They had just started off when there were cries of “Hey! Wait!” and Jake and Beetles came huffing up.

“We’re coming with you!” Beetles said.

“Did Rafe tell you to watch me?” Kate asked, sounding as annoyed as she felt.

The boys looked at each other, then at her. “No.”

“Uh-huh, you two are terrible liars.”

“Well,” Beetles said, “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. But we ain’t gonna tell. Not even if you torture us.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “You can chop off our heads, cook ’em, eat ’em; we still won’t tell you!”

“That’s right!” said his friend. “Ha!”

“Oh, come on,” Kate said.

It turned out to be fun having the boys along, and the four of them spent the morning going around the city from store to store, taking care of the items on Abigail’s list. Their first stop was a cheese shop, where Abigail bought two medium-sized
blocks of cheese, ignoring the boys’ pleas to buy the massive wheel of cheese in the window, which was larger than any of them and would’ve had to be rolled back to the church like a wagon wheel.

“Boys,” Abigail muttered to Kate. “That’s why I keep the money.”

After that, they went to the pasty shop and ordered five dozen pasties of different sorts—ham and cheese, potato and herbs, cheese and potato and mushroom—and, after a great deal of begging, with Jake and Beetles finally agreeing to do all of Abigail’s chores for a week, she bought them each a sausage and onion and cheese pasty. “I would’ve gotten them pasties anyway,” Abigail confessed to Kate as they walked through the falling snow eating their hot turnovers, with the boys before them each extolling the virtues of his own pasty while peering into the other’s and pronouncing with great regret that his friend had been tricked and his pasty was filled with chopped-up rat butts. And they went to a chocolate shop, and the smell of the cooking chocolate made the air seem itself like a delicacy, and Abigail bought five pounds of chocolate to use for cocoa. The owner was a jovial fat man who gave the children steaming mugs of hot chocolate, and they sat on oak barrels in the front of his store, watching the snow fall past the window, the men and women hurrying by with their bundles and packages, the horse-drawn carriages clopping along the street, tossing up clumps of grayish-white slush. And they went to a pie shop, where Abigail placed an excitingly long and complicated order, which they would return for later that afternoon, and then it was on to a shop that sold varieties of cider, and
the boys bemoaned the fact that they hadn’t been given the job of going to the sweetshop or the fireworks shop, as everyone knew they were the two best.

“Pshaw!” Abigail sniffed. “You be glad you got what you got by coming with us! Left to yourselves, you’d’ve been peeling potatoes all day.”

By noon, Abigail’s bags were stuffed to bursting and divided among them, and the boys were complaining that their feet hurt and they were hungry, and Abigail said they had one more stop, down in Chinatown, and they would get lunch there, and as she said it, the boys looked at her, exclaiming, “Wait, you’re getting firework makings for Scruggs, ain’t you?” And Abigail smiled and said, “Rafe gave me special orders ’fore I left,” and the boys whooped and led the way.

As they came into Chinatown, they found the streets packed with noodle stands inside canvas lean-tos, small vendors selling massive, twisted roots of various colors, jars with dried and blackened leaves, one vendor who seemed to be selling nothing but teeth, ranging from the impossibly tiny to a yellow canine as large as Kate’s arm. Men and women bustled past in padded jackets, the men with long, tightly braided pigtails hanging down their backs. Everywhere Kate looked there was something interesting to see, and she wished Michael and Emma were there with her.

“Hey!” Beetles shouted. “There’s Rafe! Hey, Rafe!”

Kate saw the older boy at the edge of a vendor’s stall twenty yards away. He seemed like he’d been caught out and was even then contemplating slipping away. But then he changed his mind and turned to face them.

“What you doing here, Rafe?” Jake asked. “You getting stuff for the party?”

And Kate thought, He was waiting here, for me.

“We came down to get fireworks like you told me,” Abigail said. “But we were gonna get lunch first ’cause these two’re bellyaching.”

“Were not!” Jake said.

“Yeah,” Beetles said. “We were worried about you fainting, is all.”

Abigail just laughed. “Ha!”

“Go to Fung’s around the corner,” Rafe said. “It’s the best place in Chinatown.”

“Yeah, sure,” Beetles said. “Fung’s. We know that place. Got a green door.”

“A red door,” Rafe said.

“Oh yeah,” Beetles said. “They musta changed it.”

Then Rafe, looking at Kate, said, “You all go on. She’ll catch up.”

The children hurried away and Kate and the boy were left standing there. She saw snowflakes were melting on his hair and shoulders, and there were dark circles under his eyes. She wondered how much he’d slept the night before, or if he’d slept.

“Those’re the clothes Abigail gave you?” he asked.

Kate looked down, feeling suddenly self-conscious in her shabby wool pants and old boots, the patched shirts and jackets.

“Yes. What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing. I should’ve looked at you before you left the church. Where’s your cap?”

Kate pulled it out of her pocket.

“I didn’t need it. My head wasn’t cold—”

“It ain’t just to keep you warm. Put it on.”

Kate twisted up her hair and pulled the cloth cap low over her eyes. The boy reached toward her face, and she flinched back.

“Hold still.”

He tucked a couple of loose strands of blond hair into her cap, and she felt his fingers brush the tops of her ears.

“All right, lemme see your hands.”

She held them out, and he took them, turning them over. She saw how clean and white her hands were compared to his. There was a small coal fire burning in front of the stand they’d stopped beside, and he bent and gathered soot and ash from the fire and rubbed the warm black powder over her palms and fingers and the backs of her hands. Then he reached up—Kate held still this time, though to her annoyance the trembling in her chest had returned—and brushed his fingers over her cheeks and forehead. She stared at his face as he did so, the deep-set green eyes, the slightly crooked nose, and she noticed how carefully he avoided her gaze. She had the strange sense that he was as nervous as she. He stepped back, clapping off the excess soot on the legs of his pants.

“There. You could walk past an Imp now, and he wouldn’t know you.”

“Thank you,” Kate said, her voice fainter than she would’ve liked.

“So what’s this then?”

It took Kate a moment to understand what he was holding;
and by the time she realized that he had her mother’s locket, that he must’ve taken it from her pocket while he’d been checking her wardrobe, Rafe had snapped it open and was looking at the decade-old picture of her and Michael and Emma.

“Give that back!”

Kate snatched the locket from his hand and clutched it tight in her fist.

“I wasn’t going to steal it,” the boy said. “But you should get a chain instead a’ keeping it in your pocket. You’ll lose it that way.”

“I had a chain,” Kate said angrily. “I traded it for this coat.”

“Yeah? Well, if it was gold like that locket, you got robbed.”

“And you would know all about robbing someone, wouldn’t you?”

Her face was hot, the nervousness gone.

“So who are they? In the picture?”

Kate stared at him, weighing whether or not to respond. “My brother and sister,” she said finally. “The picture’s ten years old. They’re the reason I need to get back.”

“What about your parents? Where’re they?”

Kate said nothing, and the boy seemed to understand. They stood in silence for several seconds, then Kate said:

“So is that it? I’m hungry.”

She started to walk away, but Rafe placed a hand on her arm. “I’ll show you the place.”

He turned down a narrow street and led her to a flight of stairs, at the top of which was a red door marked with a symbol Kate couldn’t read.

“That’s it there.”

Kate started up the stairs, not intending to say goodbye, when the boy said:

“I shouldn’t have taken your locket. I’m sorry.”

Kate stopped. She was two steps above him. She knew for certain then that he had come to Chinatown to find her and that he was indeed sorry. She thought again of her encounter with Scruggs that morning and heard herself say:

“Why don’t you come in?”

He shook his head. “I ain’t hungry.”

“But you haven’t eaten, have you? I mean … I hear this is the best place in Chinatown.”

He looked at her a moment longer, then nodded and stepped up past her and opened the door. A pair of rugs hung from the ceiling a couple feet inside the restaurant, providing a buffer against the cold, and Rafe waited there till Kate had closed the door behind her. For a moment, the two of them were standing close and facing each other in the small space, then Rafe pushed through the rugs, and they stepped into the restaurant.

It was loud, crowded, and smoky, and the air was heavy with the smell of cooking oil, onions, and ginger. There were long tables with benches, all of which were full, and there was a counter at the back for more diners, and behind the counter at least a dozen cooks were taking orders and shouting while passing bowl after steaming bowl out into the waiting hands of the crowd. There were several groups of dwarves scattered among the tables, but most of the diners were Chinese men, all of whom, it seemed to Kate, were speaking at once, and everyone was packed in so tight and close that Kate felt herself retreating from the press of bodies.

“There they are,” Rafe said, pointing to where Jake and Beetles and Abigail were stuffed together at a table and waving.

“There’s no room,” Kate said.

“We’ll sit at the bar.”

And he took her hand and led her through the throng and found space at the counter. They were crammed in tight, shoulders, elbows, and hips pressed against the diners on either side and against each other. There was a short wall separating the counter from the cooks’ area, and Kate watched a young Chinese man dice an onion with such blurring speed that she was sure several fingers would end up in someone’s soup.

Rafe spoke to the cook and, a moment later, two steaming bowls of honey-colored noodles landed before them. The noodles were served in a milky broth, and she could see, but not identify, various vegetables and herbs floating among hunks of egg and chicken. Rafe handed her a set of chopsticks, and she watched how the boy balanced his own between his fingers and the crook of his thumb. He saw her staring.

“They don’t have these where you’re from?”

“We have chopsticks. I’ve just never used them. Especially not with soup.”

He grinned; it was the first time he’d truly smiled at her.

“It kinda involves a lot of slurping.”

He demonstrated, shoveling a wad of noodles into his mouth and then sort of vacuuming up the tail ends. The noise it made was tremendous, and only covered by the fact that everyone around them was doing the exact same thing.

“I guess manners are a modern invention,” Kate said with a smile.

“Try it.”

Realizing that she was starving, and that she hadn’t eaten anything since her pasty with Abigail hours before, Kate applied herself to the bowl. The noodles were thick and squishy, and it took her four tries to get one that didn’t immediately slip out of the chopsticks, and even then she bent close to the bowl, fearful that if she brought the noodle higher, she would lose it. The noodle slapped the side of her cheek as she slurped it up.

“Well?”

She turned to him, a stunned look on her face. “That’s amazing.”

“Told you.” And he grinned again.

For a while, Kate forgot everything but her noodles and was slurping away as loudly as anyone in the restaurant. When she glanced over and saw Rafe lifting his bowl and drinking the broth, she did the same, and after that, she got braver and began lifting the noodles high, sometimes with a piece of egg or chicken, and lowering the whole delicious mess into her mouth; and as crowded and loud and smoky as the restaurant was, and though she was constantly being bumped and jostled, or feeling cold air against her neck when someone pushed through the rugs by the door, somehow it was all wonderful. It was as if Kate had managed to leave outside everything she carried with her on a daily basis, her thoughts of her parents, the need to find them, her constant worry about her brother and sister. Sitting there, wedged at the
counter, she was, however briefly, just a girl in a strange, exciting place with a boy her own age.

“So you’re really from the future?”

“Yes.”

“And the Separation, it works? People forget that magic is real?”

Kate nodded. “Everyone thinks—I used to think—it’s just from fairy tales.”

The boy idly stirred the remains of his soup with his chopsticks. “Well, maybe Miss B’s right then. Though I still don’t see why we should be the ones hiding.”

Kate stared at him. An uneasy feeling began to stir inside her.

“Not all normal humans hate magical people. You can’t judge everyone that way.”

The boy turned on her. The intensity in his green eyes was like nothing Kate had ever seen. It required effort not to look away.

“Course they hate us. What do you think happened to Miss B’s arm? Who you think did that?”