Iron Cast(39)

Ada had seen the loss like a shadow on her mother’s features, one that had faded over the years but never dissipated completely.

“Mama, please. What did you tell them?” Ada tried to keep her voice reasonable, but she couldn’t fight the rising panic.

“Nothing.” She banged open a drawer and pulled out a spatula, then seemed to change her mind and threw it back. “I told them I know nothing.”

“Did they threaten you?”

Nyah shook her head. Her frown deepened. “They asked about Corinne. They did not know her name, but they described her.”

Ada’s heart stuttered. “Did you tell them her name?”

Nyah shook her head again.

“I told them that you had left Boston, but they only laughed at me.” Her mother swiped a damp rag across the counter in fretful strokes, then flung it into the sink. “The short one—he had a serpent smile—said that they knew exactly where to find you. Then the tall one said they were patient. That they wanted the . . . the whole set.”

“They mean Corinne,” Ada said. And who else? Johnny? Saint? The rest of Johnny’s crew?

Her mother’s hands were hovering at waist level, as if she were torn between pulling out more cookware and pulling Ada into an embrace.

“I should not have let you go to that club,” she said softly. Her eyes were fixed on a distant point over Ada’s head. “Now it is too late. Now your life is ruined.”

“Cor and I will find a way to fix this.” Ada rounded the counter, reaching for her mother’s hands. “We always do.”

Nyah’s expression hardened. “So your father and I must always be afraid for you? We must pretend we don’t know what you are doing at that club? António is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, while our daughter uses her talent to be a criminal. We tried to raise you to give more than you take. I see now that we failed.”

Ada recoiled and dropped her hands. Her mother began to furiously scrub the pan she had just retrieved, even though it was already clean.

“I’m trying to help you.” Ada’s voice, when she finally found it, was feeble and wavering. “I’ve done all this for you.”

But she wasn’t sure that was true.

“It is not your place to protect us,” her mother said. “We should have been protecting you—from that club, and from Johnny Dervish.”

“Johnny saved us, Mama.” Unexpected heat chased her words. “When they took Papa away, Johnny was the only reason we didn’t starve.”

“You do not think I could have provided for us?”

“I didn’t say—”

“I am lonely, and I miss my husband, but I am not weak,” said her mother, throwing down the dishrag. “Sina hofu.”

Ada didn’t recognize the words in her mother’s native tongue. She was quiet, waiting, but Nyah didn’t translate for her. Ada wondered if her mother was tired of translating for a child who never learned, for a daughter who listened to stories and sang lullabies in Swahili but knew nothing else about the world her mother had given up. For the first time, she wondered if she missed more than just her husband.

Nyah turned her head to look at Ada, her palms planted firmly on the edge of the sink, her shoulders hunched like she was a lioness preparing to leap.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you so much, but this is not how things were meant to be.”

Ada wasn’t an idiot. She knew that the tale of the queen from the beautiful, wild lands of northern Mozambique and the foreign prince who fell in love with her was a romanticized version of the truth, removed from the context of four hundred years of colonization, but her mother had taken such care in preserving the tale that Ada couldn’t bring herself to imagine anything different. And this wasn’t how that story was supposed to end.

“I’m sorry,” Ada said.

“Go back to the Cast Iron,” Nyah said, waving her hand. She was not looking at Ada now. “Maybe you are safer there, and that is where you want to be.”

The words were blows that only her mother was capable of delivering. Ada closed her eyes briefly. She knew she should stay, apologize more, make things right somehow. But she was hurt and angry and the apartment suddenly felt very small.

She gave her mother a hug and left without another word.

The walk back to the Cast Iron was bitingly cold, and Ada concentrated on her icy nose to avoid dwelling on anything that had just happened. She didn’t think she was being followed, but it was hard to know for sure.

It should never have gone this far. She and Corinne had lived and worked for years in peace, pulling the occasional con when business was slow without the regs being any wiser. But the Harvard Bridge had tipped the scales. Councilman Turner’s proposed bill for banning hemopathic activity had suddenly gained unprecedented support, and it had passed two months to the day after the Bengali banker job. Corinne insisted that the law would have passed anyway, but Ada knew it was their fault. They had reached too high and brought a storm down on the hemopaths of Boston. There would be no peace for them anymore.

Ada cupped her hands over her mouth and nose and blew into them. Her mind still turned in queasy circles as she opened the alley door and stepped into the relative warmth of the Cast Iron’s storage room. When she saw Charlie there, leaning against the wall and chatting with Gordon like it was any old day, her mind went blank.