The Broken Lands (43 page)

Mapp handed her his flask. “Go on, take a nip. It's just water. You can finish it if you like.”

Jin drank gratefully and stretched her limbs, willing some feeling to come back to her arms and the weakness to leave her legs. The fanfare fireworks waited in their crate, ready to go. They would take only a few minutes to set up. Now it was time to finish the
dan,
the piece that would turn Jin's display into a cinefaction, and, hopefully, save Brooklyn, New York, and everyone in them from Walker, Bones, and the demonic creature called Jack.

M
AKE THE
fire of blue and red, bitter and sweet, sharp and soft.

Jin took the tin pan from her rucksack and weighted it down against the wind with a chunk of apricot-colored realgar crystal and a lump of the salmon-colored rosin called Greek pitch that she'd taken from Uncle Liao's storage chest. Both caught the final light of sunset in their dull, glassy hearts and seemed to glow.

Next she took two lengths of red silk and Tycho McNulty's little blue-glass jar from the bag. “Mr. Mapp.” The pianist had been prowling a few yards away, looking nervous. “Put this over your face. Be sure to cover your nose and mouth. Then you've got to stay over there. This fire isn't going to smell particularly wholesome.” Burning that much realgar was going to release some fairly noxious fumes. The piny rosin might sweeten the odor, but it wasn't going to make the smoke any less poisonous.

Jin dipped her finger in the jar and smeared the lemony-peppermint-coffee-smelling ointment across her eyelids and over her lips, then tied the second piece of silk around her nose and mouth.

She checked to make sure the few remaining workmen were keeping a safe distance, took out her lighter, and lit the contents of the pan. The fire flared to life: the sulfurous realgar tingeing the flames on one side blue and the Greek pitch coloring the rest a bronze-red. She took the little golden sphere that held the oil from the fountain of fire she'd made in the laboratory and set it carefully at the center of the flames. Then she turned to the crate that held the rockets for the fanfare.

“Can I help with anything?” Mapp offered.

“Not with this fire going. And stay back. With all this wind, I'm not sure if anyplace on this tower is far enough from it to be safe.”

Jin hadn't been sure initially what the
dan
she was compounding would turn out to be. She'd had no idea what kind of firework she should be planning to plug the thing into, but it was clear that it was going to be a component of an explosive. It had to be—if only because Jin was the one making it. She knew how to do one thing well, and this was it.

The second she'd had that thought, she knew what kind of firework she was going to make. Whatever it might've turned into in anyone else's hands, this was Jin's device, which meant it could only take one form: the form she loved best, the same form she had drawn on the yellow paper to give to her friends as a talisman and which they all now wore on their collars.

She had brought along workings to build the most beautiful catherine wheel she'd ever made.
What a shame I can't make it bigger,
Jin thought as she took a much-abused bicycle wheel, a stake, and a collapsible wooden stand from the crate.

She'd lingered over colors when she'd selected the cases for the wheel. Should she use green, like Sam's eyes? Green was one of the hardest tones to do well, but Jin was a master with color. Her own favorites, crimson and gold, the colors that had saved her from the hell of her childhood and had given her her name? Or sugar blue and silvery gray, for the sky above and the river below and the clean new granite that would anchor this great new crossroads?

In the end, she'd chosen them all. She began to wire the cases to the wheel: blue at the outside edge, then the silver of the stone that rose out of the water, then Sam's green, beside the stone in honor of the father it had taken from him. Then Jin's warm gold, and last of all, at the very center, the red of the cinnabar heart Uncle Liao said would never lead her astray.

She kept an eye on the sphere in the fire as she worked, and every now and then she paused to turn it over with a pair of tongs.

At last, the setting sun disappeared. Across the water, a tiny light flickered to life: Constantine's lantern, at the top of the New York tower. Jin turned back toward the deeps of Brooklyn.
Sam, I hope you're okay out there.

When the sun was gone, Jin took the sphere made from the two crucibles out of the fire. Once they were cool enough to handle, she broke the clay seal that held them together and pried the two halves apart with her fingernail. The silver-blue oil inside had turned a deep crimson.

She tucked a packet of gunpowder and a fuse between the two hemispheres, closed the halves again with the last of the red clay mud, and the
dan
in its crucibles became an explosive mortar. Jin wired it at the center of the bicycle wheel. It looked oddly out of place, a mud-and-clay grenade surrounded by her perfectly rolled paper explosive cases.

“Done,” she said into the wind. Cold sweat prickled on her forehead; she wiped it away and felt a momentary burn. Glancing at her fingers, she saw that they were tipped with red from the crimson oil.

She rubbed them clean on the stone beneath her feet, stood, and went to sit with Walter Mapp next to the footpath. Nothing to do now but wait for full dark, and Sam, and Jack's infernal coal.

 

By the time they reached the turn onto Front Street, the carriage behind them was close enough for Sam to see Overcaste in the driver's seat. Mike reined the horses just enough to make the turn, nearly running down a pair of men staggering out of a saloon, and whipped them into a frenzy for the last sprint to the anchorage, the place where the bridge met the road in Brooklyn.

“Get ready to jump out,” Mike called back. “I'll keep on and if we're lucky they'll follow me.”

“Right.” But they weren't going to be lucky. Sam already knew that. He was just going to have to be faster than his pursuers.

The granite bulk of the anchorage came into view, a big stone box topped with bony structures like skeletal limbs: cranes and ladders and the great spinning engines for the massive suspension cables. Sam, having made sure the tinderbox was safely buttoned into his pocket, crouched on the running board of the coach until he spotted the scaffolding that held the ladders up to the top.

He leaped to the pavement, sprawled, righted himself, and sprang for the lowermost ladder. Behind him he could hear the sounds of shouting, of hooves striking stone. Walker and Bones were coming.

 

Jin was beginning to feel a little strange.

vergreen-sap scent of the pitch and the cinnamon aroma of the burning salts she used for her bonfire and by McNulty's wonderful ointment, and though she'd left the red mask in place over her nose and mouth, she knew she was breathing far too much of it.

It had to be the realgar, but Jin had begun to see things.

It started as soon as the sun was gone and the stars began to show in the pale oncoming dark. The last of the workmen and sightseers had finally gone, leaving Jin and Mapp alone on the tower. She had been setting the fireworks for the opening fanfare, the long burst of explosions that were meant to call the attention of the people of New York and Brooklyn to the bridge towers so that they could read the message she had written so painstakingly across the central span:
STAND WITH THE PILLARS OF THE CITY AGAINST JACK HELLCOAL.
She'd set some of the fanfare rockets facing north and some facing south, but she wanted them as vertical as possible.

She'd paused in her work, straightened, and stretched, arching her back and turning her face skyward. And the sky ... the sky was
spinning
.

She spoke to Walter Mapp without taking her eyes away from it. “Do you see that?”

Hundreds,
thousands
of pale arcs of light shot from east to west and then froze, bright points trailed by tapering tails. A hundred thousand comets caught in the night like insects in amber—only they weren't comets.

With difficulty, Jin found the streaked shape of the constellation her uncle called the Northern Bushel and Mr. Burns called the Big Dipper. The points of its handle looked like smeared spots of ink. There were other familiar shapes up there, constellations she knew from long nights in the great open spaces of the middle country. It was as if the stars had leaped into place before her very eyes, and she could somehow make out the traces of their flight.

Jin realized Mapp hadn't answered, and glanced at the pianist. He sat staring northward up the river, his hat tilted over his forehead, as if he hadn't heard a word she'd said.

She rubbed her eyes. The wind gusted. Slowly the streaks faded, rubbed from her tired vision or swept clean by the wind, leaving the star-spattered sky in its proper place.

The gusts spun around her, glittering. Lights sparked and died at the corners of her sight. She had rubbed her eyes so hard she was now seeing flashes. Or the wind had knocked over a jar of something—sugar, salt, oyster shells, she wasn't sure—and the particles were blowing about and catching the light of the fire. Or there really
was
stardust up there, and now it was blowing around her like a tornado.

Mapp sat with his back to her, still as a statue.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, Jin thought she saw a face in the shimmer. She turned her head. It disappeared. Then she caught another shape on the other side. It, too, vanished when she looked.

The wind kicked up harder, and this time, Jin heard it whisper a word.

“What?” The sound of her own voice startled her. She hadn't realized she'd spoken out loud.

The rushing of the wind continued to rise, and the word came again. She heard it, and then she heard its echo, a metallic vibration from the giant cables that stretched away toward the banks of the East River.

Fangshi
.

And then it was gone, and the air was still and the great cables silent. Jin stood alone, surrounded by rockets. She looked down at her feet, bent to touch the residue of gray glitter on the stone, rubbed it between her fingers.

Oyster shell, ground fine as flour. She looked over her shoulder just in time to see the empty jar roll into a groove between two granite blocks.

“Mr. Mapp?”

He turned immediately. “Yes?”

I am going out of my mind.

That, or she was experiencing the first stages of arsenic poisoning from the realgar. In either case, there was nothing to do about it now.

Make the bellows deep and smooth.
“Never mind.”

“Do you need something?” Walter Mapp got creakily to his feet. “Is there something I can do?”

“No.” Jin shook her head and turned back to the rockets, and her deep breathing and the comforting familiarity of the task began to make her feel better. Time to bring the city to attention and paint the sky.

She grinned to herself. Time to blow things up.

 

First came the whistle, the hissing of the rocket as it speared heavenward. Then came the blossom of blinding brightness in the sky, the sudden gorgeous explosion of fire, and the downpour of sizzling color. Last of all, the bang—sound is slow to travel, a tortoise to the hare that is light.

Jin's fanfare poured out into the night, two seconds of whistle and hiss and trailing smoke before the wild frenzy of light began. The whistles could be heard for another few seconds, then the bangs started. And all the while, an insanity of color overhead like flowers, like falling water, like the world made incendiary, like the end of time.

And then it was over. Across the span, on the New York tower, Constantine's lantern blinked four times. Jin lit a lantern and waved it back. Then, more than a thousand feet apart, the two of them lit their fuses.

 

Sam paused on the footpath as the fireworks burst overhead. They brought immediately to mind a bouquet of flowers that had stood in Mrs. Ponzi's parlor for a while, a massive bewilderment of blossoms so dense it threatened to overflow its vase. Then, as the confusion of fizzing fountains of sparks continued, he realized it didn't look like flowers at all. It looked . . .
martial
somehow. Warlike. As if it were the opening salvo from otherworldly cannons, laying siege to the sky.

Then it was over, and before he even thought about it, Sam gave a triumphant yell, waving both fists over his head. “Yeah, yeah,
yeah!
”

He heard other shouts from the city behind him, carrying through the sudden quiet in the wake of the explosions. Brooklyn was coming to its windows. On the other side of the river, New York, no doubt, was doing the same.

It took everything in him not to sprint, but the gaps between the wooden slats in the footpath were too wide. One toe caught, and Sam was pretty sure he'd be sprawled out and falling over the side before he knew what was happening.

He'd just reached the midpoint of the slope up to the Brooklyn tower when he heard the noises. From ahead, the long snap and pop of the lances catching fire as Jin's message came to life:

STAND WITH THE PILLARS OF THE CITY AGAINST JACK HELLCOAL

Then he heard the second sound, from somewhere at his back: a snarl of fury that was only barely distinguishable as words.

“You. Can. Stop.
Right. There.
”

Sam turned. Two figures stood at the entrance to the footpath on the anchorage: two man-sized figures, one in a long, flapping coat and one that seemed, before Sam's very eyes, to grow somehow too large for the path. He was too far away to be seen in any kind of detail, but the memory of his two rows of teeth, of his face, whip-marked by the scarlet welts, and of his red-rimmed black eyes was fresh in Sam's mind.

Walker. And Bones, right behind him.

He backed away instinctively, and his heel caught between two boards. He stumbled, felt his body go numb with the sensation of falling, grabbed at the rope handrails, and caught his balance. Then he forced himself to turn his back on the horrible thing stalking up behind him and got moving again.