IT’S QUIET UPTOWN
1902—New York
There were too many men around, taking up the air in the place, Cela thought as she watched her brother and Jianyu eye each other from across the room. At the rate they were going, someone was going to draw first blood before morning. If the boys kept up their preening and posturing, it was going to be her.
“Would you two quit it already?” she said as she handed Abel a cup of the strong coffee she’d just brewed.
“I’m not doing anything,” her brother said, still giving Jianyu an appraising glance.
“You’re trying to lay him low with nothing but a look,” she told him, her heart easing a bit at the very idea that he could give such a look. Abel is alive. “I should know, since you’ve tried to do it to me often enough.”
“I just want to make sure we haven’t made a mistake by bringing them here,” her brother told her, gesturing to Jianyu and the boy they’d taken from Evelyn’s apartment. “I didn’t exactly ask Mr. Fortune’s permission to have any more.”
Abel had brought them to the house he’d been staying at ever since the fire, a nondescript building on 112th Street, in a part of town called Harlem. The building belonged to one of the publishers of the New York Freeman, the most important newspaper for the black community in the city. They’d apparently taken a recent interest in the labor issues that Abel had gotten wrapped up in.
“Jianyu is fine,” Cela told him. “I told you already, he’s a friend.”
“Maybe he is, but what about that other one?” Abe asked, nodding to the white boy. He’d still been unconscious when they’d arrived uptown and was lying on his side, dead to the world.
“He’s my responsibility,” Jianyu said. He’d been quiet and watchful ever since they’d arrived at the building, cramped full of too many people. “I am in your debt for all that you have done for me tonight, and I will not impose on that generosity any further. I will take the boy and go.”
“That’s fine,” Abe said, but Cela was shaking her head.
She knew what it was like to walk into Wallack’s every day, the only brown face in a sea of white. It didn’t matter that they wanted her there for her talent and skill. She was always separate from the rest, from the basement workroom they gave her to the way the performers acted around her. She wondered if Jianyu felt that way as well when he walked through the streets of this city that would always see him as an outsider, and whether he felt that way now, in a too-tight room filled with people he didn’t know. But her brother’s friends were all huddled together, turned away from the newcomers and talking among themselves.
“No,” she told them. “You don’t need to leave. Tell him, Abe. Tell him he’s welcome to stay.”
Her brother hesitated, and her irritation spiked.
“Tell him,” she demanded. “You left me alone for nearly a week, Abel Johnson. I was at Uncle Desmond’s most of that time, and you never once came for me, but Jianyu did. He got me out of that theater where that harpy actress had locked me up, so I’d say we’re about equal in owing debts, wouldn’t you?”
Abel frowned. “This isn’t our fight, Cela,” he said softly. “We have our own worries right now, our own battles to wage.”
“Maybe it’s not,” she told him, “but have you ever considered why it’s not?”
“Because we have enough problems without worrying about Mageus, too.”
“That’s what they want us to do, isn’t it, though?” She was pacing now. “You don’t see what Tammany is doing, offering black saloons their protection so long as we vote their way? They’re not helping us. They’re using us, same as politicians have ever done. You’re fighting for better wages, aren’t you? But who are you fighting? Who owns the railroads?” she asked, but she didn’t give him time to answer. “I’ll tell you who—they’re all in the Order.”
Her brother was considering her words, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at Jianyu like he was trying to make up his mind.
“You don’t think that there are Mageus who look like us?” she asked. “Don’t you remember the stories Daddy used to tell us? There were Africans who could fly, Abel.”
“Those were just tales.”
“Were they?” she asked softly. “Because he told those tales like they were the truth.”
“Cela—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head before he could use that condescending older-brother tone with her. “When I thought you were dead, when I was alone this last week, it changed me. I can’t go back now. Maybe this isn’t your fight, but Jianyu’s my friend, so it’s become my fight.”
Jianyu was watching them, his expression unreadable. “You do not have to take on my fight,” he told her. “You never should have been brought into this. Darrigan never should have involved you.”
“But he did,” she told him. Then she looked back at Abe. “If he goes, I go with him. I can’t just hide forever, Abel. Not when I know that Evelyn has the stone, and not when I know how powerful it is. If the wrong people get that ring, who do you think they’ll come after next? We won’t be safe just because we don’t have any magic.”
Abel looked like he wanted to argue, but he was just silent for a long, heavy minute. When she saw his mouth hitch upward, she knew she’d won.
“You’re worse than Mama, you know that?”
She smiled full-on then, her eyes damp with tears that she’d been holding back. “Why, Abel Johnson, that may be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Rabbit.” Then her brother’s expression faltered. “What do we do with the other one?”
Cela glanced over to where the white boy had been lying. Her stomach sank. “Well, we’d have to find him before we can do anything with him,” she said. Because the white boy was gone.