The Broken Lands (5 page)

It was a monstrosity, and only if you let your eyes go slightly out of focus when you looked at it did it coalesce into a rational-seeming whole. But it had a kind of majesty about it.

Constantine, whose leg was bothering him, had decided to stay behind, and the closer Sam got to the hotel, the more out of place he felt. “Your friend's definitely expecting you?” he asked as he and Tom hiked up the circular drive toward the wide pink marble steps to the lobby.

He'd never been inside any of the big hotels, but it hardly seemed likely they'd have anything polite to say to a teenage card sharp and a man who . . . well, who looked like Tom did. He didn't precisely look like a tramp, but he wasn't what most of the highbrow types at the east end would figure for a productive member of society. Not that much of anybody who actually lived or worked in the western parts of Coney Island looked like a productive member of society either, Sam had to admit. Himself included.

Tom ambled up the stairs, leaning on his cane, and smiled broadly at the doorman. The doorman's face froze at first, furrowing into a scowl, but then it warmed. He grinned and tapped the brim of his hat as he pulled the door open. Tom returned the salute and strolled inside.

Sam stumbled as he followed. It was just the same as with the sharper back on Culver Plaza yesterday. Rightly or wrongly, Sam knew, the doorman's first impulse had been disapproval, just as the sharper's initial impulse must've been to pound Tom into dust. No matter what people said about the evils of slavery now, they generally weren't any nicer to black folks than they were to immigrants. And even though Sam had been born in Brooklyn, he looked Italian enough to know a little about that.

But something happened when Tom looked at people. It happened in the lobby, too. Tom didn't sweep across the floor like the rich folks did, as if they thought they were entitled to the bowing and scraping of the hotel workers and the doffing of every hat in the room. He walked just the same way he'd walked in West Brighton, and yet the room reacted as if he had suddenly grown tall and straight and young and . . . and
white
instead of old and bent and black.

“It's a mystery,” Tom said agreeably, as if Sam had been thinking out loud all that time. “But then again, I'm a guest here.”

Sam stumbled. “You're a . . . what?”

“I know. Seems awful strange, doesn't it?”

Sam caught himself agreeing before he managed to think about how insulting that would seem, but Tom only laughed. “No offense taken. Look.” The old man pointed to a placard on a stand in the middle of the atrium.
WELCOME, SOLDIERS OF RESACA
. “I gather the owner of the hotel had family on both sides. Just like a lot of folks did.”

Now that he was looking, Sam realized there were a number of men and even a few women in the atrium who didn't look like the typical wildly rich guests he was used to seeing at this end of the island. Some wore wild roses in their lapels, and some wore little sprigs of briar, but it wasn't really what they wore that set them apart. There was a sort of . . . well, a
haunted
quality about them, and immediately Sam decided that these must be some of the soldiers of Resaca. With their drawn faces and eyes that appeared sad even when they smiled, they looked like people who had seen some terrible things in their lives.

In fact, they sort of looked like they might still be seeing them.

The blond man named Ambrose sat in the dining room, poring over a newspaper at a table beside a huge window overlooking the waterfront. “There's your friend,” Sam said, pointing. “Guess I'll head back.”

Tom patted his shoulder. “How about you join us, Sam? You eaten today?”

Sam hadn't, and before he could protest, he found himself sitting between Tom and the newspaperman named Ambrose, feeling very self-conscious as a jacket-and-tie-clad waiter appeared out of nowhere and began depositing a large breakfast on the table before him. Dishes steamed as their domed silver covers were removed. On a cart beside the table a gleaming samovar promised coffee. In each polished surface, Sam saw his face reflected with a look of utter confusion and insecurity. How had he wound up sitting here?

“It's Sam, isn't it?” Ambrose passed him a cup of coffee. “Chat if you like, relax if you don't. Eat, either way. And quit looking like you snuck in under somebody's coat. Neither of us get meals like this usually either, but here we are. You're among friends, and we're glad to have you with us.”

“Which is saying a lot,” Tom added, “because Ambrose generally isn't what you'd call the warm and friendly type on any given calendar day.”

“Very true,” Ambrose agreed, taking a flask from his pocket and dosing his coffee with it.

“Thank you, then.” Sam picked up the cup Ambrose had offered him, then eyed the creamer and sugar bowl that stood just out of reach. He hesitated. “Can I—could I trouble you for the cream and sugar, sir?”

As he stirred in a scandalous number of sugar lumps, Sam began to relax. He let his gaze wander past the table and across the lawn that stretched between the hotel and the beach.

A gilded cart trundled along one of the garden paths, drawn by a small gray pony and glittering in the morning sun. An old Chinese man in a red silk robe and cap with a long, thin braid hanging down his back led the pony by its halter. There was a name painted on the side of the cart under the gingerbread of the eaves, and a girl perched on the roof.

Her hands were full of fire.

“By God,” Ambrose said, following Sam's stare. “Is that the Fata Morgana Company? What on earth are the odds, Burns and Liao turning up here?”

Tom must have replied, but Sam paid no attention to the men at his table, only to the girl outside. There were details he would remember later: her long, black hair falling out from under a newsboy's cap, the name on the cart and the motto painted below it (
Fata Morgana: Arte et Marte
), the color of the sparks flying from her palms (blue, a shade only a touch lighter than the water behind her), the fact that they must have been fireworks of some kind and that she appeared to be trying to make them stop.

Just then, however, all that registered was that she was a girl, and there was a world of fire under her fingertips, and she wasn't afraid.

Tom tapped Sam on the shoulder and slid a handbill onto the table in front of him.

 

The Broken Land Hotel

Presents

 

F
OR A
L
IMITED
E
NGAGEMENT OF
T
HREE
D
AYS
O
NLY

THE WORLD-FAMOUS

FATA MORGANA
FIREWORKS COMPANY!

 

PURVEYORS AND DISPLAYERS OF
WORKS OF CONFLAGRATIONARY ARTISTRY

Combining
Beauty & Legend, History & Science
In a Show of Magical Effects!

 

See
THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS
As It Sinks Below an Incendiary Volcanic Sea!

 

Witness
THE SECOND SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE

 

Including an Incredible Re-Creation of the Byzantines'
MIRACULOUS GREEK FIRE
!

 

M
ADE
P
OSSIBLE BY THE
S
CHOLARSHIP AND
A
NCIENT
C
RAFT OF
T
HE
M
YSTERIOUS
P
ROFESSOR

LIAO
,
Master of Methods,

 

A
ND
H
IS
P
ROTÉGÉE
,

XIAOMING
,

G
IRL
P
RODIGY OF
A
LL
T
HINGS
P
YROTECHNIC
!

 

THIS WEEKEND ONLY, AT NIGHTFALL

 

T
HE
F
ATA
M
ORGANA
F
IREWORKS
C
OMPANY

Arte et Marte!

 

“Perhaps you'd like to come back this evening for the proper show,” Ambrose suggested.

Sam fumbled as he tried to give the handbill back. “Oh, I—”

“As my guest, of course.”

“Ought to warn you that Ambrose never has anyone's best interests at heart when it seems like he's doing something nice,” Tom cut in mildly. “Probably just wants to see how much of his paper's expense money he can burn through in a week.”

“I
am
just being nice.” The journalist put on an offended face. “He's a
boy
. Boys like fireworks. And girls. And probably girls who are fireworkers, especially. Although, admittedly, helping anyone get introduced to a creature of the female persuasion is always a mean-spirited thing to do.”

Tom gave Sam a stern look and a little wag of his finger. “You've been warned.”

 

If Jin had known that anyone watching her pass fire from one hand to the other was thinking it was in some way romantic, she would've laughed. If, that is, it also would have occurred to her to stop concentrating on the fire long enough to laugh—and that
never
would have occurred to her. She was too busy trying to keep the entire wagon and its contents from exploding. That, and cursing Mr. Burns for nearly getting them all killed. He would deny it, but she was sure he'd started these fireworks' fuses burning down by smoking carelessly in the wagon. Again.

Of course, until Mr. Burns finished passing crackers with spitting fuses up through the vent in the roof, all things were still possible, including a fiery death.

Jin reached down into the wagon so the owner of the Fata Morgana Fireworks Company could fill her palms with fuse-tipped cylinders. She ground her teeth together and forced herself to hold her hands immobile while he placed the explosives carefully between her fingers with sparking fuses pointing out to keep them from burning her.

As soon as she had four in each hand, Jin straightened and flung the fireworks skyward, where they burst into blue chrysanthemums. Then she knelt and reached back into the wagon for more. It was the only way she could think to get rid of them without revealing how close she and her company were coming to blowing themselves up.

“Last batch,” Mr. Burns said, loading her up again. He winced each time he had to touch one of the crackers, which made Jin want to throttle him all the more.

“Good thing,” she muttered. By now, the fuses were almost burned down to nothing, and she barely got them out of the wagon in time. The fireworks went off in the air less than a second after she'd let go of them.

The hotel guests that had gathered on the broad front lawn gave a collective murmur of delight and broke into applause. Jin forced a smile and bowed, but behind her lips her teeth were clenched painfully. What she'd just done might've looked like pure spectacle rather than the desperate move it had been, but that last batch had
burned
.

“Jin!” Burns hissed from below. She bowed again and barely got her fingers around the crackers he shoved into her hands, their fuses—good God—
completely
spent.

Jin stifled a scream, shot upright, and somehow managed to launch them far enough away that all she felt beyond the burn in her palms was a little flurry of pinpricks across her cheeks. Then, because she was about to lose her balance anyway, she dropped through the vent into the wagon.

She was prepared for it to hurt, and it did—the old pain in her feet flaring into a red bloom that almost made her forget about the sting in her hands. Almost, but not quite. She dusted herself off and rounded on Mr. Burns, singed hands on her hips.

Outside, the impromptu audience was still applauding what they thought they'd seen: a pretty Chinese girl throwing live fireworks from the roof of a moving wagon; a grand spectacle of entertainment rather than a barely contained pyrotechnical debacle.

Mr. Burns pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up on the bridge of his nose and gave her a look that he probably meant to be sheepish.

“Again?” Jin snarled.

“Nope, nope, nope,” Burns protested. “Not me. Didn't do it. I quit.”

Jin narrowed her eyes and sniffed the air. “If you think I can't tell the difference between tobacco smoke and gunpowder, you're mad.” She turned, eyed the crates along the wall behind her, bent, and there it was. She straightened with the half-smoked cigar in between her finger and thumb. “All it takes is a bit of smolder to meet a few loose grains of . . . of—” She waved one arm to encompass the entire wagon. “It would be hard to find something in here that
isn't
flammable, which is why you may not smoke in the wagon!”

Burns leaned in and eyed the cigar as if it were an exotic insect. “Well, that is
astonishing
.”

“Astonishing,” Jin muttered. “When you say you
quit
—”

“Well, I'm in the
process
of quitting, I should have said.”

“Does your attempt at quitting by any chance involve incinerating us all?”

The wagon rolled to a stop. Mr. Burns reached out, plucked the cigar from Jin's fingers, and stuffed it in his pocket as the door behind her opened and the old Chinese man who'd been leading the pony poked his head inside. He jabbed a long-nailed index finger at Mr. Burns. “No smoking in the wagon,
guizi!
”