The Broken Lands (18 page)

Christophel shook his head. “It might take you an hour, but you can go to the docks right here in Red Hook and hire someone to ferry you across to New York. Tammany headquarters has restaurants and entertainment open every day till midnight. You have time.”

Bones slapped Walker on the shoulder, leaving a yellow-dust handprint on the gambler's suit. “Let's be off.”

Walker twisted his head to look at the print, sighed, and brushed at it in annoyance. “No rest for the wicked.”

 

Jin stopped at the wagon long enough to throw some things in her rucksack and hand a bicycle wheel and a metal stake out to Sam. Then she led him back down to the beach and eastward, beyond the two iron piers to an open stretch of sand mostly out of reach of the lights of the hotel.

Beside a huge piece of driftwood, she unslung her bag from her shoulder and began pulling what Sam assumed were explosives from it. “Go sit,” she said over her shoulder. “This will take me a minute to set up.”

Sam lowered himself onto the wood. He was just about to kick off his shoes when he spotted the lantern bobbing its way up the beach toward them.

“Who's there?” called a voice.

Sam could just make out the dark shape of a man in the dim glow. “Who's that?” he called back.

The man with the lantern stopped a few paces away. Now Sam could see that he was wearing one of the Broken Land's red and silver uniforms. “Hotel staff,” he retorted, glaring from Sam to Jin and back. “And you? This is private property.”

Jin waved. “We're with Fata Morgana, your fireworks purveyors. Just testing some things for tomorrow's display.”

The uniformed man did not look impressed. “How do I know that? I warn you, this hotel does not tolerate trespassers.”

“I'm not a trespasser,” Jin said calmly. “And this is how you know I am who I say I am.” She reached into her bag, took out two small leather pouches, and poured a bit of powder from each onto her palm. Then she set the pouches aside and rubbed her palms together in fast circles. Golden-green sparks flew from between her hands.

Now he looked a little impressed. “That's something,” the uniformed man said admiringly. “Doesn't it burn?”

“Only a little,” Jin said, brushing off the remaining powder. “I'm sorry, we didn't mean to startle you. I just needed some open space to practice.”

“That's all right. I won't chase you off.” He gave Sam a big wink and went on his way.

Jin rolled her eyes at his back. “What's he think he's winking at?” she grumbled as she turned back to her bag and continued unpacking her gear.

“That didn't really burn, did it?” Sam asked, forcing himself not to reach for her hands to look for himself. It had seemed pretty convincing.

“Only a little, just like I said,” she replied, not looking up. “You get used to it. It's not so bad.”

She buried the stake in the sand and secured the bicycle wheel to the end that pointed skyward, then she took a length of fuse and a handful of little cylindrical explosive cases from her bag. With short, sure knots she ran the fuse around the rim and placed the rockets at precise intervals.

“How can you see to do that?” Sam asked. She made it look like instinct, even in the near-complete dark between the piers.

“I can do this with my eyes shut,” she said. “This is my favorite kind of firework.” A few more moments, and she stood back to examine her handiwork. “Ready?”

“Sure.”

She took from her pocket the same contraption she'd used that afternoon to light the fireball in Culver Plaza, flicked it to life, and touched its flame to the end of the fuse. The glowing end raced around the rim, touching off the fuses of each of the individual explosives one by one, and the wheel began to rotate, driven by the flaming rockets. It picked up speed until the rockets blended into a single hoop of golden flame.

“This is a simple one,” Jin said, backing away and lowering herself onto the log beside Sam. “I can do fancier versions.”

“It's beautiful. What is it?”

“It's a catherine wheel.”

“Who's Catherine?”

“Saint Catherine,” Jin said. “She was martyred. Broken on the wheel.” Sam looked at her blankly. “You don't know what that means? Not a very good Catholic, are you? Aren't most Italians Catholic?”

“I never said
I
was.”

Jin watched the wheel spark as it turned. When she spoke again her voice was flat. “They strapped you to a wheel and hit you with cudgels. Beat you to death. It doesn't sound like much, I guess, but it was bad enough that sometimes people were strangled out of mercy after the first two hits.”

Sam looked at the fiery wheel as it went on sputtering golden sparks. “Sounds dreadful.”

“It used to be a torture device, and now it's a beautiful flower of light.” She smiled a little. “A very religious woman once told me that it was wrong to name something so frivolous after the wheel Catherine was martyred on. That it was disrespectful to the memory of the saint. But I think that's unfair to the wheel. It didn't choose to be an instrument of pain. I think all things, if they could choose, would decide to be instruments of joy. But people put them to terrible uses, and then it's a part of them forever.”

Sam watched the sparks flying from Jin's beautiful flower of light, wondering how the heck he was supposed to respond. “Are you really looking at that and thinking of torture?” he asked quietly. “Why?”

“Because it's part of the wheel,” Jin said. “Part of the past of every catherine wheel.” She turned and Sam felt her eyes pin him. “Because it's been years since I saw a dead body, and today I saw two.”

The reflection of the golden sparks made her eyes look as if they were full of fire and pain at the same time. She held his gaze for a long time, and then she turned away.

“Sometimes it's hard to forget those things, even in the face of beauty,” she said quietly. “I never do. Uncle Liao says that's why I'm so good at fireworks. I know they grew out of violence and war. The first pyrotechnicians—many of them, anyway—were gunners. Believe it or not, that's where Liao learned about explosives—aboard a ship. All fireworks, even ones like these . . . they are flowers grown on a battlefield. That's where we got our slogan.”

“Arte et marte,”
Sam murmured, remembering the phrase at the bottom of the handbill.

“Art and war.” Jin nodded fiercely. “And I want to do everything I can to help my works overcome the destruction in their past. Some people, like that woman I mentioned before, cannot see beyond the evils. But I want to make them so beautiful even someone like that can forget what they have done.”

She looked back at him, and her eyes were full of night and flame and the brightness of what he thought might've been tears. There was wariness there also, threatening to drop between them; that same wariness that he had seen her pull on like armor whenever there was any mention of her past.

To his shock, he knew exactly what he wanted to say to her, and he knew how he wanted to say it. “There is nothing that your past could have in it that would make you anything but lovely to me.” The words were awkward coming out, but for some reason that didn't seem like a bad thing.

“You don't know that,” Jin said savagely. Her gaze was utterly, inhumanly beautiful. Never before had he wanted to kiss a girl so badly. Of course, this had to be the worst time in the world to have those kinds of thoughts.

Now that he'd said the hardest words, the rest were easier. “You don't ever have to tell me. I promise not to ask, Jin, but whatever it is, I promise you I wouldn't care.”

Jin laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “Forgive me if I don't sound impressed by your gentlemanly spirit. Anyone can curb their curiosity for a weekend, Sam. After that you'll never see me again.”

“
You
don't know that,” Sam retorted. “And I'm not a gentleman, I'm a card sharp. I'm not some sport who makes a habit of saying nice things to girls. In fact, this might be the longest conversation I've had with a girl who wasn't a relative or a landlady, ever.”

Another moment of silence. A few yards away, the catherine wheel sputtered to stillness and left them in the dark.

Jin swiveled and reached for him. Sam's chest clenched and he pulled her close without a second thought. It was then, as he felt her freeze in his arms, that he realized she'd only been reaching for the bag of explosives tucked behind the driftwood log they were sitting on.

“Cavolo,”
Sam muttered, dropping his arms. “Sorry.”

“Fine.” Jin was already on her feet with the bag in her hands. She pulled on a pair of gloves, stilled the spinning bicycle wheel, and began stripping away the shredded remnants of the rockets with a pocketknife.

Sam watched her reset more explosives, stringing the fuse first, then selecting new rockets and attaching them to the rim. He decided this was a good sign. If he'd really fouled things up beyond repair, she certainly wouldn't have wanted to stick around to set up another wheel.

It took longer this time. It was impossible to say whether she wanted to do something fancier or if she was avoiding returning to his side, but finally her blue-flamed lighter flared and fired the fuse.

“Watch,” she whispered as she backed toward the driftwood bench again. The glow raced around the wheel and sent it into motion. This time, the rockets erupted into blue and silver, and as the spinning accelerated, the sparks of four more fuses raced inward and a delicate filigree of sparkles burst to life at the center.

“I came to America, to San Francisco, when I was just a baby.” Jin stared at the wheel as she spoke. “I don't know how it happened. I have no memory of it. I was maybe two years old.”

San Francisco.
Of course. Sam's heart sank. Why hadn't he realized it before? That was why she had gone so strange and defensive when Ambrose had called her
the girl from San Francisco
. To be a Chinese girl growing up there . . . whatever she was about to tell him, it wasn't going to be good.

It wasn't going to be easy for her to say, either.

“You don't have to—”

“I know.” Jin's gloved fingers flexed by her side, and she continued. “I was raised in a house owned by one of the tongs. The tongs run San Francisco, at least as far as the Chinese are concerned.”

“It's the same here,” Sam said quietly, but that wasn't quite true. The tongs in New York were nowhere near as powerful as they were out West.

“And there aren't many Chinese women in America.” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “You know that, too?”

Sam nodded without speaking. It was the way things often went with immigrants; fathers, sons, and brothers went first. His own grandfather had come to New York alone, then he had brought Sam's grandmother over later, when he had saved up enough for the passage.

“Most of the Chinese women who make it here are smuggled in,” Jin said flatly, as if she was reciting something she didn't want to have to think about. “They don't always make it to their families, if there are families waiting for them at all. There are ways to make money off a cargo of people, especially girls, especially in a community where there are tens of thousands of males and only a few score of females. You understand what I mean?”

Sam looked down at his knees and nodded again. The tongs did this kind of business in New York, too.

“When I was eight,” Jin continued quietly, “they brought a woman to the house to bind my feet. The pain was . . .” She stopped talking for a moment and took a deep breath. “I had always planned to try and escape, but after that, I couldn't do it by running or climbing.”

“I don't really know what that means, actually.”

She glanced at his bare feet. “Curl your toes under, but not the big one.” He did. “Curl them further. Put some weight on the knuckles if you have to. The knuckles should be all the way out of sight.”

It was basically impossible for Sam to do as she asked, but he tried. “How's that?”

“Dreadful, but I see you get the idea. You can relax your foot. What you just did can't even approximate what binding is like. The foot is broken at the arch and pretty much folded in half. The idea is to get the length of the foot down to three inches from the toe to the heel.” She held up her forefinger and thumb a short distance apart. “That big.”

Sam stared. “How is that even possible?”

Jin shrugged. “Break the toes, break the arch, fold them where you want them, wrap them in wet cloth, tie them up. Then you have to stand up and walk around, because body weight helps the compression. When the cloth dries, it tightens. You rewrap the feet every few days or so. Or rather, someone else rewraps them, someone who isn't bothered by screaming. The woman who first bound mine bragged that back in China she had been much sought after because she was basically deaf and there was no amount of screaming a girl could do that would make her show mercy.”

He swallowed. “I'm so sorry.”

Jin shrugged again. “It's what's done. It's what has been done for centuries. It's a mark of status, really, although it's also . . . well, some men find it attractive. This is why it was done in the house where I lived. Someone got the idea that a few of us—the ones who weren't as pretty as the others—would fetch higher prices with bound feet. And we wouldn't be able to run away. So they made me a small-foot girl, along with a few others, even though I was eight then, which is older than usual and so it was . . .” She swallowed. “It was very bad. The pain, I mean.”

Another long silence stretched. Finally Jin spoke again. “I think perhaps if I had been a normal girl, if I could have run to my mother's arms afterward and she could have told me all the reasons it was important, all the tradition and meaning, whatever had made her decide to put me through that pain . . . it might've been different. But it wasn't like that, not in the house in San Francisco. It was done because someone thought the men who visited the house would like to see a girl tottering around on tiny lotus feet, and I didn't have a mother to run to, and I couldn't run anymore, anyhow.”