The Broken Lands (28 page)

“What are you thinking about?” Sam asked.

“I was thinking about whatever it is that lets them find people based on what they're speaking of.” Her eyes flitted along the length of the cables. “I was thinking about how to break it.”

“How?” Sam followed her gaze, but all he saw was the un­finished bridge. “With . . . that?”

She nodded. “It seems to me that all you'd have to do, really, is get enough people talking about the right things.”

On the little boat, Susannah looked up from the rigging to listen.

“Well, for starters,” Sam observed, “we don't know what they're listening for.”

“Not exactly, but we can make some pretty good guesses.
His
name. Whatever the proper term is for what Hawks and Susannah are.” She opened the book and tapped the word
Conflagrationeer
on the title page. “Maybe this? Something we were saying at the Reverend Dram registered, even though we were being so careful. If we could come up with a . . . a
message
or something, using enough of the words they're listening for, a message thousands of people could see and read, that would make them talk . . .”

It wasn't a bad idea, but there was one major problem. “But how on earth could we possibly get enough people saying those words at once to make any difference?”

“That's where the bridge comes in,” Jin said thoughtfully. Her eyes flitted back and forth along the length of the glittering galvanized wire being spun into the strands that would form the massive suspension cables. “It's moving, isn't it?”

“The wire?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. They're using the bridge like a spinning machine. The wire goes back and forth between the anchorages.” The Brooklyn anchorage was too far inland for them to see from where they stood, but Sam pointed toward it anyway. “Each time it goes across, another length of wire is added. So many wires make up a strand, and so many strands make up a cable.”

“How do you know all that?”

“Constantine—a fellow I board with—used to work on the crew that assembled the engines in the anchorages. And my father worked on the bridge, too.”

“Hmm.” Jin scratched her head. “So something could be pulled across fairly easily, then.”

“I don't follow—”

She waved her hand. “Let me think about it for a bit. Looks like Susannah's ready for us.”

They climbed aboard and Susannah cast off the boat from its hidden mooring. Ships were thick out on the river as she and Sam rowed the little craft into the channel. Then she let out the sails expertly and they were on their way.

The trip downriver to Norton's Point took about an hour. Jin stared up at the towers of the bridge until they were out of sight, then she buried her nose in her book. She refused to talk any further about thwarting whatever method Jack's men were using to search the city. So Sam spent the trip sitting with Susannah at the helm of the little skiff.

“How does it work?” he asked. “How do you become . . . whatever it is you call what you are?”

“I don't think it always happens this way, but I inherited it. Sawyer did, too, and Frederick Overcaste. We all took on the positions at about the same time: Sawyer in 'sixty-two, Overcaste in 'sixty-four, and me last of all five years ago. I inherited from my father, and Arabella's father passed on at the same time, while I was working in her house. That's how we managed to hide the truth.”

 

The trip downriver to Norton's Point took about an hour.
 

“Three of you in such a short time? How did that happen?”

She gave him an odd look. “The war, Sam.”

“Of course.” Then he did some math. “But when you . . . the war had been over for, what, six or seven years when you inherited, hadn't it?”

“So they tell me,” Susannah said quietly. “But not everyone behaves as though it's been over that long. My parents died at the same time, and I blame both of their deaths on the war. My mother, particularly. I prefer to think she died as part of a struggle for our country and not just because someone was angry and chose the first Negro woman whose behavior he didn't like as the target of that anger.”

They sailed on, and Sam thought back to what Ambrose and Tom had said about why the city was so vulnerable to Jack's plan.
Folks are angry, still,
Tom had told him.
Folks are scared, and folks feel like punishing each other, and I don't think many of 'em are clear about what they're mad for.
Then Ambrose:
They're the
other
kind of mad. All of them. They're less than a score of years removed from the worst thing that has ever happened to this country.

“What does it mean to be a . . . what you and Hawks are?” he asked after a while. “What will you do to stop the city from falling?”

Susannah sighed. “That's just the problem. I really have no idea.”

He gaped at her. “You . . . you don't know?”

She shook her head. “This,” she said shortly, “appears to be the flaw in the grand plan to keep one of us hidden. I don't think it occurred to anyone that, when the attack came, it would happen so fast there would be no chance for the five of us to come together and form a strategy.”

“But how is that possible, if you exist to protect the city?” Sam protested. “If that's the one thing you're supposed to do?”

“Well, it isn't the only thing.” She reached up to touch the taut canvas of one sail. “Each of us has a role in holding the city together, even in peace. We each have something we keep all our lives, so that it is never lost, and then we pass it on. My role is to be the keeper of lore.” She smiled faintly. “Ever since my father died, all of the stories of New York and Brooklyn have filled me up like water in a jug. Sometimes they overflow, and I see them even when I'm not looking.”

Susannah peered at him then, and Sam saw something happen to her gray eyes: they slipped out of focus just a little, and although she was staring directly at him, he had the sense that she was seeing something more.

“You sit on a rooftop in Smoky Hollow with a blond boy, playing cards,” she said softly. “The wind picks them up and up they go, swirling away. An owl swoops down and plucks a jack out of the air, and flies away with it to the south. The blond boy tells you that's him, flying away from the tenement. You pick up a black-haired jack and fling it into the wind after the owl.”

“That happened,” Sam whispered in wonder. “That was the night I decided to move to Coney Island with Constantine.”

“You play cards with a man in a blue summer suit who tries to cheat you, but you see what he is doing and you switch the cards on him, so that when he plays the card he stole, it wins the game for you.”

“And that was how I won the money for Con and me to board with Mrs. Ponzi,” Sam told her, eyes wide. “I remember every hand I played against that fellow.”

Susannah nodded. She blinked, and her eyes focused on him again. “It's one of your stories; and your stories, and your friend's stories, and mine, and those of all the others who live here—those are the things that make up the city's history. And I'm the keeper of those tales. They live in me.”

“So you know . . . everything that's ever happened here? To everyone who's ever lived here?” He stared. “How can you keep all that in your head?”

“It's not in my head,” she said with a shrug. “It's in my body and my blood. It is who I am. That part of my role I understand. The matter of how I can protect myself and the city from this assault is what worries me now.

“The city has never been under this kind of attack before. It's possible Hawks will simply send me back into hiding, figuring if at least one of us stays out of view, the city could stand—but,” she mused, “how long would it take, waiting out such creatures? Creatures like that don't give up easily, and they found me so quickly . . .”

She shook her head. “No, it doesn't make sense. There must be something I can do. Unfortunately, the only person who can tell me is Hawks, and the last thing we should do is be in the same place . . .”

Susannah beached the skiff just north of Norton's Point, and Sam hopped out and dragged the prow of the boat up onto the sand. “Little bit of a walk now,” he said, “but we're almost there.”

Jin caught his arm. “You go on ahead. There's someone here I need to see before I come back to the saloon.”

“Does this have to do with the plan you're cooking up?”

“Yes. I'll explain later.”

He looked at her dubiously. “You really think I'm going to leave you in Norton's Point, Jin?”

“Yes, because right now you need to get Susannah to safety, and I'm not going with you.” She smiled. “Don't be a pest. I will need some of Hawks's money, though.”

“Jin—”

Susannah put up a hand to silence him. “Excuse me if this sounds snappish, Sam, but time's too short for you to waste it being chivalrous. We all have bigger things to worry about than getting set upon by everyday crooks. Jin will be fine. Let's go.”

This, of course, was perfectly true. Vaguely embarrassed, Sam nodded, dug in his pocket for the bag of greenbacks and coins, and handed it to Jin. “Fine. You win. Hurry. Meet us at the Reverend Dram.”

He glanced over his shoulder once as he and Susannah began their hike across the dunes toward West Brighton, but Jin had already disappeared into the waving grasses that bordered Norton's Point to the north.

J
AMES
H
AWKS
was pacing. Jasper Wills was cleaning the mahogany bar obsessively, working around Ambrose while the newspaperman leaned on his elbows and drank his way through a bottle of rye. Tom Guyot sat next to Walter Mapp's piano with his tin guitar, and the two were improvising something that sounded as though it was based very loosely on “Aura Lea” when one of Hawks's boys opened the door for Sam and Susannah.

“Well, well, well.” Mapp swiveled on his piano stool and faced Sam with arms folded. “We figured Jin would turn up with you, seeing as how she's been missing ever since you left, but I don't believe I've met this young lady.”

“This is Susannah . . .” Sam frowned. “Sorry, Susannah, I didn't ask your last name.”

“Susannah Asher.” She glanced around the room, found Hawks. She took his letter from the pocket of her apron and held it out. “You sent this to Arabella van Cortelen, but I believe it was intended for me.”

Hawks took the letter, opened it, closed it again, and eyed Susannah. “Asher? I don't know that name, I'm afraid. Arabella's predecessor was a friend of mine.”

“Asher was my mother's surname, and I've used it my entire life, but I inherited my post from my father.” Susannah waited, watching Hawks steadily as the tall man examined her face, her gray eyes, her light skin and hair.

“Thomas van Cortelen,” he murmured. “Thomas was your father?”

“Yes.” Susannah's voice cracked just a little.

Hawks's expression softened. “I can see it now,” he said quietly. “You do take after him.”

Abruptly Sam remembered how Susannah and Arabella had embraced, both of them crying, just before Susannah had fled the house. Her voice wasn't breaking for her father. It was breaking for the sister she'd lost only hours before.

“Well, this is heartwarming,” Mapp drawled. “Where's Jin, Sam?”

“Norton's Point. But before I explain that, I have to tell you about Red Hook.”

The group clustered around the table again while Sam narrated the afternoon's events, from nearly being run off the road by the four-in-hand to the sprint to Columbia Heights and the flight through the tunnel to the river. Then he told them about Jin's musings on the possibility of breaking the strange listening mechanism that had led Jack's men so easily and so neatly to the van Cortelen house. “She thinks she has a way, but she wouldn't tell me much,” he finished. “Whatever she's up to in Norton's Point, it has something to do with it, though.”

“It's not a bad idea,” Hawks said thoughtfully, “if she can actually figure out how to do it. Although I wish she had trusted us enough to tell us before she snuck off to Brooklyn with you.”

Tom chuckled. “Would you have let her go?”

“Probably not,” Hawks admitted. “And I don't suppose you know what became of Mike, do you?”

Sam shook his head. “I'm sure he got clear. He was in the carriage.”

Hawks rubbed the back of his neck. “I don't know that we can count on that.”

At the piano, Mapp nodded in agreement. “And if they get ahold of Mike, they'll have ways of making him give up our location. Anyhow, from what you overheard in Red Hook, it's probably only a matter of time before they realize what they're seeing in Coney Island is more than just neighborhood gossip about the killings.” He stood and stretched. “We need a new base of operations.”