INTO THE FIRE
1902—New York
The moment Jianyu Lee told Cela that Harte Darrigan had sent him, she’d had a feeling that he would be trouble. Watching him try to keep himself upright as they made their escape from the building, she knew she’d been right.
She never should have followed him. Once she was freed from her workroom, she should have turned north and gone straight to her family, but curiosity had gotten the better of her when she’d watched him walking away from the theater late the night before, his long braid swinging down his back.
She hadn’t known that Darrigan was friends with any Chinese men. She didn’t know anyone who even knew any of the Chinese people, who mostly kept to themselves as they held on to their strange dress and stranger customs. So she couldn’t help but wonder if Darrigan really had sent the man to help her, and if he had, why? Did he know who was responsible for her brother’s murder?
If he knew anything about what had happened to Abe, it seemed worth the risk, so she’d followed him, keeping herself back a ways as he headed first to a Chinese laundry on Twenty-Fourth Street, at the southern edge of the area some called the Tenderloin and others called Satan’s Circus. She probably should have left him there, but she’d felt almost safe hiding in the quiet side alley near the laundry. She’d only meant to rest for a little while, but she’d fallen asleep without meaning to and only woke when she heard the door of the laundry close sometime around dawn. Rousing herself, she’d followed him as he walked south, toward the Bowery.
She had seen the boys following before he did—stupid, rangy things who barely had hair sprouting on their pale, pimpled chins, and mean as rats. There wasn’t even time to warn him before they had him cornered and on the ground, and she wasn’t big enough or strong enough—or stupid enough—to jump into a fight she couldn’t win. She’d thought to wait until they’d left to help him, but then that other one came.
Mock Duck, they called him, and everyone in the city had read about what he was capable of. The papers had been covering the war between the tongs on Mott Street and Pell Street the same way they covered the gossip of the people who lived in the mansions on Fifth Avenue—like it was some kind of sport. But while the people in the fancy mansions wore the wrong hats or went out dancing with people who might not be their own wives, the violence stirred up by Mock Duck and his highbinders killed innocent people.
Cela had almost left then, because she’d figured the guy she’d been following must’ve been one of Mock Duck’s highbinders himself. They’d take care of their own, even if they wouldn’t be able to put his hair back onto his head. But it was clear soon enough that Mock Duck wasn’t saving him so much as taking him prisoner.
A smarter woman would have called it quits right then and there, maybe. A woman with some brains in her head wouldn’t have followed them deeper into the Bowery. But she was a woman without much more to lose. Jianyu Lee had claimed that Darrigan had sent him to protect her. Her brother had already died doing that—just as her father had—and she would carry that knowledge with her all her days. She wasn’t about to add another life to her load.
Out of the frying pan, she thought as she pulled the scrap of fabric she’d taken up over her head. She kept her distance as she followed them to some saloon on the Bowery. And then, when she needed a distraction to get Jianyu on his own, she made one.
She was in the fire now—literally, if they didn’t get out of there, and fast. But from the way Jianyu was moving, it didn’t seem like fast was an option.
They were nearly to the ground floor, nearly free, when they heard voices—angry voices—coming their way.
She looked back up at Jianyu, who was standing on the step above her, to see if he’d heard them. From the expression on his face, it was clear that he had. Maybe they could go back up. . . . But if the fire was still burning—she didn’t think it would be, but if it was—she wasn’t ready to die quite yet.
The boy didn’t look half as concerned as Cela felt. With a smooth, practiced motion, he withdrew two dark disks from the inside pocket of his tunic.
“Step up here and hold on to me,” he told her.
“Hold on to you?” she repeated, sure she must have misheard him.
“You’re right. It would be better if you climbed onto my back.” He maneuvered past her and then stooped slightly, waiting.
“I’m not climbing up onto you. I don’t know you from Adam,” she said, thinking that maybe she should take her chances with the fire. “You can barely walk as it is.”
“I’m fine,” he said, clipping out the words through clenched teeth.
She saw the way he was masking the hurt with the fire in his eyes. She’d done the same thing many times herself.
“It’s nothing personal. I just—”
“Unless you would like to explain to the men coming up the steps who you are and what you’re doing here, you would be wise to do as I say and climb onto my back.”
The voices were getting closer.
“Fine,” she said, hoping with every bit of her being that her mother wasn’t watching from the hereafter as she used his shoulders to pull herself up and wrapped her legs around him.
The first thing she thought, and it was maybe the least sensible thing she could have picked to think, was that the guy beneath her was all muscle. He looked half-dead from the beating he’d gotten, but with her legs secure around his midsection and her arms around his neck, she could feel the strength beneath his loose clothes.
The second thing she thought, once she got over the idiotic first thought, was that the papers were wrong. But then, she should have known that the papers would be wrong. Weren’t they usually when it came to anyone who wasn’t white? She’d read all sorts of things about the Chinese men who made their home in the city—about their strange habits and the filthy conditions in which they lived, refusing to become good, solid Americans like everyone else. But this boy smelled like the earth, like something green and pleasant.
She was still thinking the second thought when Jianyu made a subtle movement of his hands, and she felt the world tilt.
“Hold on,” he said, and started down the steps.
When they reached the landing below, he paused, listening. She could feel his labored breathing. “Stay still and be quiet,” he commanded, as though he had some right to command her when she was the one who was doing the rescuing. But seeing how she was the one who’d climbed up onto him, however unwillingly, maybe he wasn’t too far off the mark.
Men were coming up the steps—the same swarthy-skinned Italians who’d been standing around at the saloon. They were dressed in dark pants and coats and there was a meanness to the air around them, but the guy carrying her didn’t do more than pull back against the wall.
And just like that, those men walked past them like they weren’t even standing there. Like she wasn’t nothing but a haint walking in the world.
The men were still too close and Cela was too unnerved to ask what had happened. She decided instead to take the blessings as they came and to hope that their luck held.
As the men continued up, Jianyu began to descend again, and a moment later they were out the back of the building and into the busy traffic of Elizabeth Street.
“Don’t let go,” he told her just as she started to release his neck.
She probably shouldn’t have listened, but there was something about the way he said it—more desperate than commanding—that made her comply.
“They can’t see us,” he whispered, answering her unspoken question.
“None of them?”
“Not as long as you stay where you are,” he said, hitching her up higher on his back and walking away from the building she’d rescued him from.
She understood then. “You’re one of them,” she said. But though his jaw went tight, he didn’t answer.
He didn’t put her down until they were two blocks away. In the distance, she could hear the clanging of a fire brigade’s wagons as he released her. His face was turned, solemn and serious, toward the direction of the sound.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Dolph built the Strega from nothing. To see it burn . . .” His voice fell away.
“The bar, you mean? It won’t burn,” she assured him. “I only set a small fire in a waste can—one that would make a lot of smoke and look worse than it is. Besides,” she said, pausing to listen to the approaching sirens, “it sounds like someone there has friends in high places if the brigades are already coming.”
He turned to her. “Thank you for rescuing me, Miss Johnson.” His straight, dark hair was hanging lank and uneven around his face from where it had been so unceremoniously chopped. It should have looked a mess, but instead it served to accent the sharp angles of him—his razor-blade cheekbones and sharp chin, the wide, strong nose, and the finely knit brows over too-knowing eyes.
“You might as well call me Cela. Everyone else does.”
“Cela,” he repeated, swaying a bit on his feet.
“Whoa, there,” she said, catching him up under the arm before he toppled over. “They messed you up good, didn’t they?”
“I’m fine,” Jianyu said, grimacing even as he said it.
“Sure you are.” She helped him over to a shuttered doorway, where he could lean and rest.
“Come,” he said. “We’re still too close.”
He led the way to a streetcar stop another block over, and he didn’t speak again until they were heading uptown and away from the Bowery. “Is there somewhere you can go?” he asked her, still clutching his stomach as the car rattled along, like he was trying to hold it in. “Somewhere you would feel safe?”
“Safe?” Cela wanted to laugh from the sheer absurdity of the idea. “I’m not sure what safe even is anymore.”