She had to get to her brother. But she could not move.
The papers had been filled with news of the patrols that were combing the city, ransacking private homes and burning them to the ground. The fires had been contained in the immigrant quarters close to the Bowery. The blocks west of Greenwich Village, where her father had bought the building they lived in, had been safe. But Cela knew enough about how quickly things could change that she understood last week’s safety didn’t mean anything today.
There were men in her house.
She could hear their voices, could feel their footfalls vibrating through her as they spread out like they were searching the rooms above. Robbing us? Looking for something?
Abe.
Cela didn’t particularly care. She only needed to make sure Abel was okay. She needed to be upstairs, but her will no longer seemed to be her own.
Without knowing why she did it or what drove her, she turned from the steps that led up into the house her parents had bought ten years before with their hard-earned money and went to the white lady, now clearly lifeless. With the pads of her fingers, Cela closed the newly dead woman’s eyes, saying a short prayer for both of their souls, and then she was climbing the short ramp to the coal chute.
Cela pushed open the doors and climbed out into the cool freshness of the night. Her feet were moving before she could make herself stop, before she could think Abe or No or any of the things that she should have been thinking. She couldn’t have stopped herself from running if she tried, so she was already around the corner and out of sight when the flames started to lick from the windows of the only home she had ever known.
THE BOWERY AFIRE
1902—New York
By the time Jianyu Lee made it from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Bowery, his mind had turned to murder. Ironic that he was set on killing to avenge the man who had once saved him from a life of violence. Jianyu supposed that Dolph Saunders would have been amused by the turn of events. But Dolph was dead. The leader of the Devil’s Own and the one sāi yàn who had never looked at Jianyu with the suspicion that shimmered in the eyes of so many others had been shot in the back by one of his own—by someone he had trusted. Someone they all had trusted.
Nibsy Lorcan.
For Jianyu, it did not matter whether Esta and Harte made it through the Brink, as they planned. If their wild scheme to get through its devastating power worked, he doubted they would ever return. Why should they, if they found freedom on the other side? If he were able to escape from this trap of a city, he would certainly never look back. He would find the first ship heading to the East, to the home he never should have left.
He would see the land that had borne him once again.
He would breathe the clean air of the village where his family lived in Sānnìng and forget his ambitions.
Once he had been so young. So innocent in his headstrong confidence. After his parents had died, his older brother, Siu-Kao, had raised him. Siu-Kao was nearly a decade older and had a wife who, though beautiful, was cunning as a fox. She had married his brother as much for the magic that ran in their family as for the benefit of the family’s farmlands. But when their first child seemed not to have any affinity at all, she began to make clear that Jianyu was no longer welcome in her house. By the time he started to sprout hair beneath his arms, he was so angry at his place in his older brother’s home, so desperate to strike out on his own, that he had decided to leave.
He saw now that his youth had blinded him and his magic had made him reckless. Drawn into one of the packs of roving bandits that were so common in the more impoverished villages throughout Gwóng-dūng, he had lived freely for a time, repudiating his older brother’s control and choosing his own path. But then, he had lingered too long in one town, a tiny hamlet close to the banks of the Zyū Gōng, and had forgotten that magic was not a panacea for stupidity. He had been barely thirteen years of age when he was caught breaking into a local merchant’s home.
Then, he could not have gone back to face his brother. He refused.
Then, he had believed that leaving his homeland and starting anew was his only recourse.
He had not realized that there were places in the world where magic was caged. Now, he knew too well. There was a safety in fealty that he had failed to understand and freedom in the constraints of family duty that he had not appreciated as a boy.
Once, he had thought that, given the chance, he would repent and live the life that had been demanded of him, a life he had once run from. He would not make the same mistakes again.
Why else would he have given his loyalty to Dolph Saunders if not for the promise that one day the Brink would be brought down? Why else would he have kept the queue so many others had already discarded, if not for the hope that one day he would find a way to return to his homeland? Certainly, it would have been easier to cut the long braid that drew curious glances and wary stares—many of his countrymen already had. But cutting his hair would mean a final admission that he would never return.
From what Esta had told him, though, going back to Sānnìng would be pointless if the danger she foresaw ever came to pass. If Nibsy Lorcan managed to obtain the Ars Arcana, the Book that contained the very source of magic, or if he retrieved the Order’s five artifacts—ancient stones that the Order had used to create the Brink and maintain their power—the boy would be unstoppable. No land, no people—Mageus or Sundren—would be safe from the power Nibsy would wield. He would subjugate the Sundren, and he would use his control over Mageus to do so.
Jianyu saw it as his duty now to make sure that future could never be realized. If he could not return to his homeland, he would protect it from Nibsy Lorcan and his like.
Darrigan had left him with very specific instructions: Jianyu must protect the first of the Order’s artifacts—and the woman who carried it. But he did not have much time. Soon the boy Esta had warned them about would arrive—a boy with the power to find lost objects and with knowledge of the future to come. A boy who was loyal to Nibsy. That boy could not be allowed to reach Nibsy, especially not so long as somewhere in the city, one of the Order’s stones lay waiting to be found.
Jianyu would rather risk dying on foreign shores, his bones far from his ancestors, than allow Nibsy Lorcan to win. He would find the artifact and stop this “Logan.” And then Jianyu would kill Nibsy and avenge his murdered friend. Or he would die trying.
As Jianyu made his way through the Bowery, toward his destination in the Village, the scent of ash and soot was heavy in the air. For the last week—ever since Dolph Saunders’ team had robbed the Order of its most powerful artifacts and Khafre Hall had burned to the ground—much of the Lower East Side had been shrouded with smoke. In retaliation for the theft, one fire after another had erupted through the most impoverished neighborhoods of the city. The Order, after all, had a point to make.
Where Hester Street met the wide boulevard that was the Bowery, Jianyu passed the burned-out remains of a tenement. The sidewalk was heaped with the detritus of destroyed lives. The building had once housed Mageus, people who had lived under Dolph’s care. Jianyu wondered where they had gone and who they would depend upon now that Dolph was dead.
As Jianyu walked, he noticed a clutch of dark shadows lurking just beyond the circle of lamplight across from the remains of the building. Paul Kelly’s men. Sundren, all of them, the Five Pointers had nothing to fear from the Order.