The Broken Lands (44 page)

Don't look back. Don't look back. If you look back you'll fall. Don't run. If you run you'll fall. Don't look back and don't run.

The silver-green explosions raced across the span and ignited the letters that hung from it until each one gleamed through the drifting smoke that was all that remained of Jin's fanfare. If he'd been able to stop, Sam thought that from where he stood he might just have been able to make out the south-facing message, to read it for himself. But there was no time to pause.

Don't look back and don't run.

The ground fell away below him, then gave way to dark water as the footpath rose sharply up to the tower. The planks under his feet vibrated, out of rhythm with his own steps. Sam hazarded a glance behind him at the looming figure of Walker striding with long-limbed steps up the path with Bones following. He turned back and stumbled again as he tried to increase his speed.

He cursed quietly to himself and kept moving.

At the top of the Brooklyn tower, Jin and Walter Mapp stood silhouetted by a fire that burned with lapping blue and red flames. Sam stumbled the last few yards, desperate to move faster, faster, faster, until he was on solid footing. Mapp caught him as he burst onto the tower and turned to stare back the way he had come.

Walker and Bones had reached the midpoint of the footpath.

“They're on their way,” Sam managed breathlessly. He ducked under the rope of the footpath and turned to Jin and just about jumped out of his skin.

“Oh, sorry,” she said indistinctly, and pulled away the red silk mask that covered her mouth and nose. As if that was the strange part.

Her face was ghostly. Her eyelids shone with a slick of some red-gold substance; the same color stained her lips. Across her forehead was a mark that looked something like a stroke from a paintbrush and something like a burn. He'd thought at first that her black hair had gone gray, but then he realized her face was dusted with the same silvery residue.

And yet that wasn't the oddest thing. Under the dust and the markings, her face
shone
. It wasn't the radiance of joy or exertion—it was more like an actual glow, a real illumination coming off her pores like sweat.

She smiled awkwardly. “You're staring.”

“You're glowing,” he said helplessly.

Mapp's voice at his side brought him back sharply. “Sam.”

He fumbled in his pocket for the punched-tin cylinder hanging from its fob and held it out. “You know what to do?”

Jin took the tinderbox. Dim rosy light escaped the perforations. “It should burn, but it's nice and cool,” she said wonderingly. “Weird.”

Sam followed her to the bicycle wheel, its stake held upright on the granite by a makeshift wooden stand. A catherine wheel. Of course. “Something beautiful out of something fearsome,” he said softly.

“I don't know,” came Walker's drawl from the footpath. “Maybe my idea of something beautiful just involves a bit more blood than yours.”

Sam spun around. The gambler leaned nonchalantly on the handrail; Bones's felt-coated frame filled the walkway behind him.

Mapp stepped between Sam and Walker. “Stay back,” he snapped.

“Or what?” Walker demanded. “Or how about this? Or
nothing
. Who the hell are you?” He gave Mapp a searching glare. Then he shook his head in disgust. “Damned headcutters, always sticking their noses in places they don't belong.”

“Light it,” Sam shouted over his shoulder. Jin fumbled the tin case open. Sam heard her gasp. “What?”

"That's right, kid." Walker grinned. "You didn't think it was going to be that simple, did you? You think it just works as easy as that? How big an idiot did you really take me for?"

“Sam, it's—” Jin shook the contents of the cylinder out onto her palm. “It's just cold coal. I don't know where the glow is coming from, but this won't light a fuse!”

“Give it back,” Walker said icily. “Give it back now and do as I tell you, and when this is all over, I'll let you live.”

“No,” Sam protested. “I won, I beat you square. I beat you getting here. I beat you
twice!
”

“Yes, and by the way, I didn't like that.”

“You agreed to the stakes!”

“And I played by them, kid, but that was then and now is something different.” Walker put up a warning finger. “And if I hear you tell me that's not fair, I'm going to be very, very disappointed in you, Sam.”

Sam, who had been about to say that very thing, shut his mouth. “Play me again.”

“No.” Walker straightened and took a step forward. “I'm done playing. We all have to take our place in this world eventually and do the jobs we're set to. Mine is to see this thing done. Hand over the coal.”

B
ESIDE THE UNLIT
catherine wheel, Jin only half- listened to the exchange. The unearthly cold piece of coal sat in her palm. It glowed, and logic told her it should've been seething hot, but it wasn't.

A soft gust of air slid past her cheek, gentle as someone tapping her shoulder to get her attention.

Fangshi.

She didn't hear the word so much as she felt it, in the marks on her face, in the fine powder across her skin and hair, in the smudges and burns on her hands.

A conflagrationeer would know what to do.

I should know what to do.

“I said,
hand over the coal!
” Walker's snarl brought her back to the moment. She looked up and gasped. Sam and Mapp stood between her and the gambler, both shouting at him to leave her alone, ordering him to stay back, hurling threats Jin knew they had no way of making good on.

And Walker stood like a giant over them.

It was just as it had been behind the hotel. Walker was suddenly huge. Gargantuan. His face was a map of pain lines radiating from the jagged patterns of black stippling that covered his nose and cheeks. His skin was bone-pale, and his hands were all knuckle and vein as they flexed into angry curls at his side.

The wind shoved at her, insistent.
Fangshi!

“I'm not,” she whimpered. “I don't know what to do!”

In her hand the coal was like a chunk of ice, burning her skin with cold. She clasped it tighter, somehow sensing that it wanted her to let go.

To her left, the silver-green letters strung across the span sputtered and began to burn out. Any time now, Constantine and Ambrose would start across the footpath, making their way over to meet up with Jin and Sam and Mapp, and Walker and Bones would have themselves five hostages, two of whom were now new pillars of the city. As if they needed any more, when they had Jin.

The last of the letters guttered and died. In that moment, the sky reeled again.

The sensation was like vertigo. The constellations overhead sliced westward like clusters of falling stars, so fast the entire world seemed to be dropping to the east. The noise of Walker and Sam shouting at each other muted, as if Jin were hearing them through a wall.

From the north, a wave of low-lying clouds poured in over the East River like a tsunami, sending a deep bank of fog surging down the waterway.

The wind burst against her, hard this time. Jin stepped away from the fire, out of the reach of the dancing tongues of flame, and stepped squarely on another vial that had escaped from her bag. The spiraling wind flung the powder into the air, surrounding her with the odor of copper salts and tea and oranges.

Fangshi
.

And then Uncle Liao stood beside her.

I'm hallucinating,
Jin thought wildly.

He was . . . transfigured. Jin wondered fleetingly if the indescribable shine on the old man's countenance was the same glow Sam had seen on her own face.

“You're different,” she whispered.

Liao grinned. “As are you, Xiao Jin, if you could only see. But we are still who we are. Form changes, heart does not. Now.” He folded his hands behind his back and regarded her with a look so familiar that, for just a moment, Jin wondered if perhaps she wasn't hallucinating at all. If perhaps this really was her uncle, miraculously arrived to save the day.

But the old man shook his head. “Xiao Jin, there is only you. So why do you hesitate? This is the deadly ground, the dying ground—you must fight or be annihilated. But you are
fangshi,
a master of conflagration and of
waidan
. These men are nothing more than foxes. You are a tiger, but you must fight. You must fight
now
.”

“But I can't be a
fangshi
! This isn't how
waidan
works, is it? There are rituals, aren't there? There's fasting, there are proper days and—”

“Old and powerful and precious traditions.” Liao inclined his head, a brief gesture of respect. “They come to you by blood birthright, but only your experiences can make those traditions your own.” He smiled and waved his hand around him. “Look where you are, firefly. Look
who
you are. You are Chinese, but you are American, too. Your
waidan
will be as different from mine as mine is from the sages who were our ancestors. And this is as it should be. Otherwise, how would the methods you master truly become yours?”

Jin forced herself to nod. “Uncle—why didn't you tell me what you really were, what the book really was?”

“If you had read the text and thought you understood it, you would not have understood. And no teacher can give you the Way, for the teacher who claims to understand it does not understand. But here you are, and without knowing what it meant to do so, you have anointed your eyes and your mouth and you carry the mark of your first elixir on your forehead.”

She had forgotten. Jin touched her forehead, the place where she had burned herself with the red oil from the
dan
.

Liao smiled and nodded. “The elements have spoken, Xiao Jin. Listen! They have named you
fangshi
with the voices of the air and the water and the fire and the stone and the metal. You are a conflagrationeer, and that coal is no match for you. You are a
fangshi
of
waidan,
and these men are no match for you. Do what you know you can do.”

He touched her shoulder, and Jin could've sworn she felt the pressure of his gnarled hand. “I am proud of you always, firefly. Be what you are.”

And then, as if he had never been there, he was gone. The wind died, the stars froze in their courses, and Walker's voice rose abruptly to fever pitch, as if Jin had stepped out of time and returned to find the world waiting for her before it continued on its way.

“Stop wasting time,” Walker was snarling. He stalked toward Jin.

Sam leaped to put himself between them again, and Walker lunged for him, wrapping his knotty hands easily around his neck.

Bones knocked Walter Mapp aside with one hand as the pianist tried to hold him back. “I've had
enough,
” he bellowed.

“So have I,” Jin whispered, and this time, when the wind spun up from her ankles to whip around her like a cloak, she gave herself up to it. This time, when the otherworldly voices murmured the word, she answered.

If I am
fangshi,
I can ask this of you.

The wind barreled across the tower at Bones, pounding into him just as if someone had thrown a knee to his midsection.

A battered silver pocket watch clattered to the granite floor, the same one that Walker had dumped out of his carpetbag on top of a moldering pile of human remains three days earlier, just before he had ordered it to rise up and shape itself into the figure of Bloody Bones.

“No!” Walker shrieked. He let go of Sam and dove for the watch.

“Again,” Jin said, and once more, the wind punched into Bones like a gale. His sand-and-dust body disintegrated as instantly and easily as a blown dandelion puff, leaving nothing more than a long felt coat and a pile of sand.

“Bones!” Walker, suddenly diminished to normal human size, dug through the pile for the watch.

Meanwhile, Jin curled her fist around the fragment of coal and felt it crack. She tightened her grip, and with one hand crushed the chunks down to rough powder. The freezing ache from holding the cold coal waned.

An awareness of power surged through her.
I am
fangshi, she thought.
Let's see what that's really good for.

She held up the hand with the coal dust. Walker focused his wary eyes on her as he pocketed the watch and got to his feet.

“Don't do anything stupid,” he warned.

“Watch and see,” she whispered. Then she turned to face the catherine wheel, opened her palm, and blew across it. The wind came, just as she'd known it would. The wind took the coal dust and flung it outward, a shimmering puff of black.

“What are you doing?”
Walker screamed.

Jin took her flint lighter from her pocket and flicked it to life, and a tongue of fire surged along the path of coal dust to touch the fuse at the outer edge of the wheel.

When she turned back, Walker had an iron grip on Sam's neck again, the boy's lapels twisted in his fists and his wrists crisscrossed under Sam's chin. “That was stupid, but you can still save the kid. Complete the cinefaction and claim the city for Jack. Let me hear you say the words, right now.”

She smiled as the first tendrils of the spreading fog curled across the stone beneath their feet. “I don't think so. But let him go now. Let them both go, and I'll let you live.”

 

Jin's smile was terrible. Even as he was gasping for air, even as the blood flow in his throat was cut off, Sam felt Walker stiffen. The gambler gave an unconvincing laugh. “Don't let's fool with each other, girl.”

Without taking her eyes off of Walker, she raised a hand to Mapp, who had gotten back to his feet. “Mr. Mapp, it's best if you just stay where you are.”