The Broken Lands (32 page)

As the next volley of rockets sailed up to paint the heavens, Sam reached for the hand that sat clenched on her knee. Jin stopped breathing for a moment, but all he did was trace the burn patterns and scars with his fingers as he turned his face up to watch the starbursts overhead.

When she had made sure, by peeking out of the corner of her eye, that he was still looking up rather than at her, Jin eased herself back against the driftwood, letting her shoulder and arm line up next to his so that they were just touching. Then she turned her face up, too.

 

After the fireworks ended, they sat in the dark for a long moment, her hand still clasped in his, both studiously staring skyward as if there was something more to see than the dissipating smoke of Liao's finale.

Jin had spent the entire hour of the display, which she had thought would make her feel better, in a state of stomach-twisting confusion. She wanted so badly to curl herself under Sam's arm and tuck her head onto his shoulder the way she had when they'd danced on the beach. Except that in a matter of days she would be gone—and that was assuming they both survived tomorrow. Except that it had been six years since anyone had kissed her, and those memories needed to stay buried because not a single one of them was good. Except that she kept on finding herself in situations normal girls simply didn't get into, and if just once Sam misunderstood why she was there and thought that, because they were alone on this deserted stretch of beach and she had let down her guard—

“Why did you go rigid all of a sudden?” he asked. Instinctively she tried to pull her hand away, but he tightened his grip. “Jin, wait. Just sit here with me.”

“Why are you here?” she whispered. “Why am I here?”

“I don't know why you're here,” he admitted. “But I'm glad you are. The best I can figure is, I think maybe we're friends, and maybe we don't have to worry about the rest.”

“Friends don't hold hands.”

“Well, not all of them, certainly. I do have friends I absolutely will not hold hands with.”

Against her will, Jin laughed.

“I don't know what to tell you,” Sam said at last. “I don't know what's bothering you, exactly . . . but it's late, and we have a long day tomorrow. Come on.” He stood and pulled her up after him, and it was then, just the second she was on her feet, that he kissed her. She burst into tears, shoved him away, and scrambled over the driftwood and up the beach toward the piers and the Broken Land, her feet slipping awkwardly in the sand.

He followed as she sprinted toward the hotel, and caught up with her just as she reached the edge of the gravel outside the stables. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop. “You know you can't go back there now.”

She shook off his grip and stumbled across to the wagon. Just before she reached the door, however, two things happened, one right after the other: Uncle Liao stepped out onto the top stair, and a voice spoke up from the dark on the other side of the gravel.

“Well, isn't this perfect.” Jin turned to find a red-haired man in a white suit stalking toward her. “And here I thought if we wanted to talk with somebody from Fata Morgana, we'd have to hunt you down.”

 

Sam skidded to a halt as the man strode toward the wagon. He scanned the darkness around them, but the bald man in the long felt coat was nowhere to be seen.

Liao took Jin by the arm and pulled her into the wagon behind him. Then he folded his arms and regarded the newcomer. “We have not been introduced.”

The red-haired man gave a sarcastic little bow. “I go by Walker. Once I was called Redgore. I'm in the market for some conflagration services.”

“Let my niece and the boy go, and then we will discuss this business.”

Walker grinned, baring what looked to Sam like two full rows of teeth. “No, I don't think so.”

Liao grinned back. “You're a fox, Mr. Walker, prowling through the jungle before a tiger and thinking the creatures that flee are running from you and not the bigger menace at your back. I am not to be ordered around by foxes.”

Walker stiffened. Liao grinned a little wider, as if he were baring fangs rather than perfect white teeth. “Or by tigers, either,” Liao added, “but that is none of
your
concern.”

“Old man,” Walker said coldly, “this is not a fight you want to start.”

Sam's heart burst into a drumroll. Something bad was about to happen. If Walker was the killer who had torn the two Coney Island bodies to pieces, no matter how good a game Liao could talk, he couldn't possibly stand a chance against him.

He looked past the old man at Jin, hoping he was wrong, hoping she knew something he didn't. His racing heart sank. Jin's eyes were wild with terror.

“Uncle,” she said, her voice so weak it was nearly inaudible, “please.”

Liao ignored her, and his next words made Sam feel faint. “Stand aside for the children to leave, and I will do you the courtesy of listening to your request before I laugh and blast you from my doorstep.”

Across the red-haired man's cheeks a spattering of freckles began to darken. “Are you sure you really want to be threatening me?” All in a moment, red slashes radiated from the dark marks into a webwork of angry welts across his face.

Liao shrugged and folded his hands into his sleeves. “I would prefer not to threaten you. I would prefer we speak as gentlemen. But even the sage knows one may occasionally be forced to use arms in the name of good. I will hurt you if I must.”

“Now you're just boring me,” Walker growled. And then he launched himself at Liao.

Before Sam could even begin to think how to react, the old man flung his arms out of his sleeves, and with a concussion of blinding light and deafening sound, did exactly what he'd threatened to do and—there was no other way to describe it—
blasted
Walker backwards and across the gravel.

“Go now,” Liao snapped. Sam looked up at him and did a double take. It might just have been a trick of his eyes, the lingering result of the cold blue light of the flare, but the old man appeared to actually be
glowing
.

Jin sprinted out of the wagon and past Liao to Sam. From the opposite direction, Walker, his impeccable white suit blackened and smoking and his whip-marked face charred, stalked toward them. Liao's blast must have thrown him nearly all the way across to the back wall of the hotel, Sam realized—but that wasn't even the most shocking thing.

As he approached,
Walker got taller
.

He towered over them. He towered over the
wagon
. He was, suddenly, a giant.

And then Liao stepped back into the wagon's doorway. In the space of a blink Walker launched himself at the old man. The world warped—the giant figure somehow never seemed to diminish, yet as he closed in on Liao the two men looked to be the same size again.

Liao blasted him back once more, and this time Sam caught the brief glint of a glass vessel that burst against the red-haired man's chest and exploded into flame.

Walker, his impeccable white suit blackened and smoking and his whip-marked face charred, stalked toward them.
 

Lights were coming on in the hotel. Faces appeared against the glass of dozens of windows. From the direction of the beach, there were voices, lots of them, as people who'd been watching the fireworks drifted toward this new commotion.

“Go,” Liao shouted again, and as Walker picked himself up off the gravel once more, Sam took Jin by the arm and hauled her away.

She fought him for a few steps, shouting her uncle's name, but by the time they got around the corner and had to push against the tide of gawkers rushing to see what all the flashes and bangs were, she was stumbling along with him, silent tears pouring down her face.

A sky-rending crack sounded from behind the hotel just as they reached the tradesman's entrance. Sam tightened his grip on Jin's arm. “He's going to be fine,” he whispered.

He didn't really believe it, though. Mere explosives couldn't possibly hold a monster like Walker at bay.

“It's not going to work,” Jin said dully as she allowed herself to be pulled into the elevator. “It's not going to work, none of it. How could it? How could anything work against that . . . that—”

“It
is
going to work.” Never mind that he'd been thinking exactly the same thing.

“It's not. Even if I can do it, all it can possibly accomplish is to stall the inevitable. That
thing
back there—”

“It's the plan we have.”

Jin stared at him. “And then what?”

I have no idea.
“And then . . . well, and then we have to hope Tom and Mapp and the rest of them come up with something.”

On the fifth floor, Susannah Asher barely managed to get the door open before Jin was shoving past her and through the suite to the window. Sam mumbled apologies and followed. Outside and below, the Fata Morgana encampment had gone still and dark.

Susannah came to stand behind them. Her expression reflected in the window was concerned. “I saw the explosions,” she said softly. “Everything all right?”

“No,” Jin murmured. “Not really.” She searched the shadows outside, looking for any sign of the battle they had just fled, any indication of how it had ended. There was nothing, nothing but furrows in the gravel and drifting smoke.

“I figured it out.”

Jin turned to Susannah. “Figured what out?”

“How new . . . vacancies are filled among us.” She rubbed her eyes as if there was a headache pounding behind them. “The memories—they're there, but they're hard to call forth without something to bring them to mind. But Mike loaned me this.” She held up a pair of spectacles on a golden chain.

“They were Jim Hawks's.” For the first time Jin noticed Mike sitting on the sofa, arms folded tightly. “I took them after—you know.”

She swallowed. “Yes, I know.” In all the confusion, in all her worry about Uncle Liao and Mr. Burns and what it meant if she was a conflagrationeer, she'd managed to forget entirely that Mike had lost his—his what? His boss, his mentor, maybe even his friend? “I'm sorry, Mike,” she said carefully, hoping it wasn't too little, too late. “I should have said so earlier.”

He shrugged, face closed, and nodded for Susannah to continue. “Anyway.”

“Anyway. The spectacles helped me remember how Hawks came to be one of us.” Susannah handed the glasses back to Mike. “The role was offered to him by the previous keeper of sanctuary, when that man knew he was near the end of his life. And that man was offered it by another steward, after the sanctuary keeper of the generation before died without finding a successor. So I think,” she concluded, “I think that I can offer stewardships to fill the empty places. And I think I can offer four of them. Overcaste forfeited his place when he betrayed the city. I just have to decide on the right four.”

 

Bones stood on the darkened beach with arms folded and watched a battered and charred Walker limp toward him. “Looks like that's another suit done for,” he observed dryly.

Walker held up one warning forefinger and dropped to the sand. He sat for a moment, then fell over backwards, breathing hard.

“I take it your meeting with Liao didn't go as well as you anticipated.”

Walker said nothing, but this time he made another, ruder gesture.

“So we begin our final day with no conflagrationeer.”

Still lying in the sand, Walker sighed and took out his cigarette case. He lit one of the cheroots and smoked in silence.

Bones turned toward the hotel to watch another figure as it approached from the lawn. Overcaste came to stand next to him and peered hesitantly down at Walker. “Is . . . everything—”

“Tell me,” the bald man cut him off.

“They went inside, both of them, through the tradesman's entrance,” Overcaste said, still looking at Walker's smoke- and ash-stained form. “There were too many people in the way; I couldn't see what floor they went to. The boy left. The girl's still in there, I think.”

“Burns?”

“Didn't see any sign of him.”

Finally, Walker spoke up. “I am really, really getting tired of this place.”

 

On Mrs. Ponzi's rooftop, Sam and Constantine and Ilana sat outside their window listening to the Saturday night noises of carousing from the wilder streets of West Brighton. “So what do you think?” Sam asked, watching Constantine deal a hand of poker. “Could it work?”

“After everything you just told me, the letters on the cable part sounds perfectly logical.” Con set down the remaining cards and swept up his hand. “I mean, compared to the rest of it. Yeah. No reason it couldn't work. The bit about stringing letters and lighting 'em up, I mean. The rest of it sounds utterly insane.”

“Is it . . . is it true?” Ilana picked up her cards one by one and arranged them in her hand.