The Broken Lands (9 page)

“Can I . . . do you need . . .” Oh, this was mortifying, but Sam couldn't bring himself to cut his losses and shut up. “Can I walk you somewhere?”

She stopped walking and folded her arms. “Why?”

“It's only that . . .” Sam willed himself not to blush. “Just to make sure nobody else gives you any trouble? You see what just happened, and you were in probably the best-behaved part of West Brighton. I don't know where you're headed, but basically anywhere farther west it gets way, way worse.”

“And you were so helpful with those last two,” she added, deadpan. “Seeing as how I've
never
been in a tough town before . . .” Then she hesitated and eyed Sam for a minute. “Thank you,” she said, finally. “It's very good of you to offer, and I appre­ciate that you mean it. But I try very hard to take care of myself, so I'm going to decline.”

Sam nodded. “I guess I can understand that.”

She looked at him for just a moment longer. “My name's Jin.”

“Sam.”

“Thank you, Sam.”

He nodded again and took a step back. She turned toward the west side of the plaza and started off with the same awkward gait he had noticed before. “Jin. Hold up.”

She stopped, folded her arms, and waited wordlessly for him to catch up.

Sam ignored her impatient look. If she insisted on wandering off by herself, there was at least one thing he could offer. “If you get into any kind of a fix around here, the best place to go is the saloon called the Reverend Dram. It's on a rough street, but they're good people there. They've helped me out of a ton of scrapes. If you ask for directions to it, most anybody will tell you, and even most of the troublemakers'll leave you alone if you say you're a friend of the folks at the Dram.”

Jin gave him another of those long, uncomfortable looks. “There's a fireworks pageant tonight out at the Broken Land Hotel,” she said at last. “It's my display. If you're going to keep worrying, you should come tonight. If the show happens, you'll know I made it back safely.”

“Done,” Sam said, almost before she'd finished speaking. She gave him the barest shadow of a smile and disappeared into the milling crowds on the plaza. When he couldn't see her hat any longer, he returned to find Ilana Ponzi where he'd left her with his table and kit, grinning her little face off. “What?” he snapped.

“Who's the
girl?
” Ilana said in her best schoolyard singsong voice.

“Illy, don't start with me or I'll tell your mother I saw you kiss a newsboy.”

Ilana gave an indignant squeal. “I
never
. . . well.” She twirled the lunch pail around her fingers and pretended to consider. “Maybe you're right. Maybe I do have a newsie boyfriend, and maybe Mama packed this lunch for
him.
”

“Hang on—”

“Too bad, too. It was a good lunch.” Ilana Ponzi skipped away laughing, swinging the pail like a girl on holiday.

 

“So what is it with you and Christophel? He seems to be rather our sort of fellow, all things considered.”

Walker hesitated as the horse-drawn cabriolet carrying the two of them back to Coney Island hit a particularly nasty hole in the road. “There is,” he said carefully, “a lot you don't know, Bones. I say this with utter respect for you and your age and the wisdom of the dust you carry. But . . .” He glanced meaningfully at the carpetbag on the floor by his feet.

The oyster-shell eyes glittered. “But there are gaps. Yes.”

Walker nodded. “Gaps. Precisely. How much, exactly, do you know about jumpers?”

“Only the folklore. I've never met one before today.”

He sighed. “Jumpers, as a class of folk, set me on edge. Part of it, I admit, is the whole not-picking-sides thing. I don't care whether you're for a man or against him, but I like to deal with fellows who can make up their minds. Who have some kind of convictions. I like to be able to tell where they stand.”

“But what do you care, as long as Christophel does what you want?”

“Well, then there's the other matter,” Walker continued, taking his smokes from his pocket and lighting one. “There's how they see, how they think. They're far-seers; time works differently for them. Even if they do what you want, it's impossible to know why they're doing it. You can't know if they're really trying to help you, if they share your motives, or if they're just going along with you now in order to work some kind of unforeseeable betrayal of you and your plans in a decade or two. They're just impossible to know. It's like trying to work out what a cat's thinking when it looks at you.” He paused for a pull on the cheroot. “And then I've also heard . . .”

He hesitated. Bones waited while Walker smoked and put his thoughts in order.

“I've heard they can . . . they can make mistakes,” Walker said carefully. “Because of the way they see, the way they remember; because of how time works for them. I've heard they can get . . . confused. I always understood that to be the reason they weren't supposed to work any kind of conjury.”

“The folklore goes that they gave up that right when they refused to choose sides, back in the old days.”

“That's folklore. I think it has less to do with punishing them for their indecision and more to do with practicality. If it's true that they get confused, not having conjury . . . well, that limits their ability to cause trouble.”

He stared at the cheroot smoking in his fingers. “Of course, Doc Rawhead seems to have found a way around that.” He dropped the cigar to the carriage floor and crushed it under his shoe with a look of distaste. “I just think it's a bad, bad idea to get involved with jumpers. But we have, so that's that.
Jacta alea est.
Let the die be cast. But I'm crossing my fingers.” He grinned. “In any case, at least we've come to a place I'm comfortable with.”

Bones regarded him thoughtfully. “I suppose, then, you'll be handling this portion of the process?”

“The claiming by blood.” Walker's grin curled even more. “Yes. And you'd do well to stay out of my way.”

T
HE TRUTH
was that Jin had a pretty good idea just how bad the part of town she was headed to was. She'd figured that out when she'd first asked the concierge at the Broken Land Hotel how to get there. A grown man, and he'd actually blushed.

Of course, he was also the one who'd suggested she go to Norton's Point in the first place. Hotel concierges not only knew everything; they could find anything. So when Jin, poring through Fata Morgana's little library of pyrotechnics manuals, had realized she could try something remarkable in the display that night if she could only get her hands on a few uncommon chemicals, she'd gone straight to the concierge.

“I need to find some things,” she began, and rattled off what must've sounded like the kind of shopping list only an embalmer or somebody mixing up knockout drops would assemble. The poor fellow had turned about five shades of red and purple, then told her to try Norton's Point.

“You can get p-pretty much anything there,” he'd stammered. “I'd go soon, though—it's at the opposite end of Coney Island, and it isn't what I'd call safe for a . . . a young lady . . . in the evenings.”

So Jin went.

Every place is the sum of its parts, most of which are its inhabitants; and navigating any place is all about figuring out how to walk among those people. But there are also certain tricks to moving safely through the rough parts of most towns. Jin knew them all.

Of course, it's always best not to find yourself in those areas in the first place. When that can't be avoided, the second best thing is not to look like a stranger. Strangers draw attention. Jin, of course, looked like a stranger everywhere, so she had to settle for the third best strategy: look as much at ease as possible, while still very clearly not letting your guard down. Look aware. Look ready, without appearing to anticipate trouble. Look confident, without showing swagger. Swagger just begs to be proven wrong. And while eye contact sometimes helped and sometimes didn't, Jin had long ago decided that keeping her head up and her eyes open was always safer than the alternative.

Still, she was pretty sure there was nothing this breezy seaside island could throw at her that could top
Jiu Jinshan,
“Old Gold Mountain,” San Francisco. The neighborhood where she'd grown up there had given her a pretty thorough grounding in squalor and iniquity.

As she walked on, West Brighton dwindled, sandy streets diving into beach grass and gnarled trees. Buildings began to look a little more haphazard and temporary as they leaned into the breeze off the water. Jin angled her hat over her eyes and wished, for the fifteenth time, that she'd brought her bicycle. Four miles out and four miles back . . . her feet were going to mutiny. Already, they were starting to ache.

The ramshackle houses became a ramshackle cluster, and then suddenly the cluster became a claustrophobic little pile of hotels, restaurants, and saloons. The area smelled of sour beer and garbage and old oyster shells and fish heads left to be picked over by scavengers, and something familiar that Jin couldn't quite identify—but it was always in a place like this that she smelled it, a place where her guard went up instinctively and where she always felt the memory of
Jiu Jinshan
poking fingers down her throat. She rubbed her jade bracelet, the only thing she had taken with her when she'd left. The gesture always helped to boost her confidence.

The muttered insults from the boys back near the middle of town were endearments compared to anything anyone was likely to say to her here. The respectable types would ignore her, but they were vastly outnumbered.

There were sideways looks and ugly smiles from the men she passed, many of them reeling already, and uncomfortable glances from the occasional women. Jin knew what those glances meant. The kind of women who lived or worked in places like this might put up brave and saucy fronts for their neighbors and customers and each other, but they were still human and female. Whatever protective instincts they refused to feel for themselves still crept out from time to time. She could see them hesitate over whether they should try to warn her about where she was.

Confident, without swagger. Eyes open, head up. Jin reached one hand into the bag she wore slung across her shoulder and touched the familiar shapes inside until she found her list of chemicals and a little glass tube with a bulb at one end. When she took her hand out of the bag and unfolded the list, the tube was nestled in her palm, invisible but ready.

The vague information she'd pestered out of the concierge amounted to little more than a name. “I don't know the man myself,” he'd said. “Our guests don't tend to be after the sort of things he sells. But everybody in Coney Island knows who he is.”

Jin sighed and put the paper with the name and her list back in her pocket. She was going to have to break another of her many rules for rough parts of town: never ask for directions.

She waited until a woman in a bustled dress slipped out of an unmarked doorway next to a saloon. The lady and her dress both had the same look to them: beautiful, but worn. Jin forced down a quick flutter of panic at the thought of what kind of business that unmarked door probably led to, and crossed the street.

“Excuse me,” she whispered.

The woman looked up sharply. “What is it?”

“Do you know where I can find a man named Tycho McNulty?” Jin spoke quickly, before the woman could work through the preconceptions people always had when a strange foreign girl addressed them. Sometimes they got angry at being spoken to. Sometimes they assumed talking to you was going to be too difficult to bother with.

But this woman hesitated and gave Jin a long look. She was trying to hide it, but there was concern there. “What for?”

“I need chemicals.” It was absolutely true, but Jin knew perfectly well that the lady would assume she needed the chemicals for something far more frightening than explosives.

The lady would probably also figure that she and Jin had something in common. Jin forced that thought down deep and met the woman's now openly concerned gaze.

“Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

Jin nodded. “Do you know where I can find this McNulty?”

The lady took a deep breath. “Take your next right. Look for a door with green paint and a brass plaque.” Then she did something shocking. She reached out one gloved hand and clasped Jin's shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

Jin had just enough time to stare, startled, at the broken stitching on the thumb of the woman's glove before she was gone, hurrying up the street in her tired dress.

Jin watched her for a moment, utterly stunned by the gesture. She could still feel where the woman had touched her shoulder. The first few tears fell before she even realized she was crying, then she swiped her sleeve over her eyes and stumbled toward the alley where Tycho McNulty kept shop.

The green door was at the far end, where the ocean scent almost broke through the smell of alcohol and rotting things and where Jin thought she might actually be able to hear the occasional wave crash on the unseen beach. The plaque was tarnished, but the engraving was even and all the words were spelled right:
T. MCNULTY, PHARMACIST
.

She squared her shoulders, lifted the bronze door knocker, and let it fall. After a moment, the peephole under the plaque darkened. Jin waited until the eye behind it disappeared. She knew there were other eyes in the street watching, wondering what she was up to. She could feel them.

She knocked again, harder. This time, when the eye appeared behind the peephole, she held up her carefully lettered shopping list.

The door opened and the man who stood on the threshold looked her over and folded his arms across his chest. The pharmacist wasn't much taller than she was, and although he obviously wasn't a young man, Jin got the sense that his gray hair, like Mr. Burns's, had come a little on the early side. A pair of old rimless spectacles perched on his nose, and the look he gave her through them was shrewd but curious. “I want it to be very clear that the only reason I'm considering serving you is that I can't stand not knowing what you plan to do with all that. Come on in, and give me that list.”