Iron Cast(59)

At Corinne’s insistence, they took the long way to the apartment, staying off the more trafficked streets. Ada didn’t argue, but she thought the measure was unnecessary. All the white-slick roads were empty this morning. The snow was falling faster now, sticking to her eyelashes and blurring her vision.

Corinne was hugging herself and skipping to avoid the denser patches of snow. She had always been better suited for sunshine and springtime. Ada kept her hands buried in her pockets. Melting snow was thick on her wool coat; and despite her hat, she was beginning to feel the dampness on her scalp. An umbrella probably would have been a useful thing to bring along.

“I haven’t seen your mother in ages,” Corinne said. “You think there will be any of that bread waiting? I can’t ever remember what it’s called—pan?”

“P?o.” Ada hunched her shoulders, trying in vain to protect her neck from the chill. She had forgotten a scarf. “Cor, my mom’s pretty angry at me. She might be mad at you too—I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“We had another fight. About Johnny and the Cast Iron. About what we do for a living.”

Corinne’s lips were a grim line. Her hair was stringy with the melting snow, and thin rivulets ran down the contours of her face.

“We’re just doing the best we can,” Corinne said. “You’ve done all this for her.”

“That doesn’t make any of it right.” Ada’s voice was so soft that the fluttering snow drowned it out.

Shawmut Avenue emptied onto her mother’s street, and she could see the apartment building a block down on the right. Corinne started to cross the street, but an unfamiliar shape caught Ada’s eye and she grabbed her arm. The black, hulking car was parked across the road from the apartments. There was a man leaning against the driver’s side door, puffing on a cigarette. Ada didn’t see his face, but the hairs on her neck prickled. Corinne saw him too and cursed. She backed up and threw open the door of the nearest shop. Ada ducked in behind her.

The shop had wall-to-floor windows, mostly obscured by artfully displayed bolts of cloth. Ada and Corinne huddled behind a violently magenta drapery and peered through the window. Once the man had finished his cigarette, he stayed where he was. He did open the car door at one point, but he only stuck his head in for a moment, then straightened back up.

“It’s one of the agents from the club,” Corinne whispered. “His partner must be in the car.”

They were definitely waiting for someone, Ada realized. She could see it in the casual sweeps of his gaze up and down the street. They were waiting for her. If she had come by her usual route from the Cast Iron, she would have turned the corner and walked right into them.

“What are you doing in here?”

Ada and Corinne turned to face the clerk, a pale woman with a pinched face. Her hands were balled into tight fists at her sides.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Corinne said, with all the genteel manners her aborted boarding-school education afforded her. “We were just—”

“You’re not welcome in here,” the clerk said, but she was looking directly at Ada. “Get out.”

Ada’s cheeks burned. It was a shame that never really got easier, burred as it was with anger and sorrow. The shop clerk’s hostility was the least of her worries, though. If she went back onto the sidewalk, the agents might see her.

“Please,” Ada began.

“Go on, before I call the cops.”

Ada thought about the Haversham Asylum, about the basement, about the screaming inmate who had never returned. She wasn’t going back there.

She glanced at Corinne, who nodded once.

Ada started to hum, gently at first so that the melody wrapped around the woman and held her fast before she even realized what was happening. The clerk trembled, trying to fight it, but her face was already slackening. Ada eased smoothly into a song, a lullaby her mother used to sing. The words didn’t matter as much as the melody and the way her voice shaped and sharpened it.

The disdain was gone from the woman’s eyes, replaced with a doleful weariness. Ada’s song guided her to the corner, where she sank to the floor and rested her head against the wall, half concealed by a cabinet of gaudy buttons and spools of thread. She looked for all the world like a child, curled up for a nap in the midst of a trying day.

“Let’s go,” Corinne said once the clerk had started to snore.

Ada followed her through the door behind the counter. The corridor in the back had only three doors. The first was a closet, the second was locked, and the third let out into an alley. The cold air tasted heavenly. They ran down the alley in the direction they had come, slipping and sliding on the accumulating ice. Corinne was laughing breathlessly.

“That was the fastest you’ve ever managed it,” she cried. “Soon you’ll only need a few bars before they’re out like a light.”

Ada didn’t reply. The woman’s hate, the fright from their narrow escape, and her own guilt roiled in her chest. Every time she used her talent on an unsuspecting reg, she told herself that she didn’t have a choice. Or that they deserved it. But it never seemed enough, somehow. She couldn’t get her mother’s words out of her head.

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

Ada had always thought it was the justice system’s fault, for taking her father away from them. But what if Ada had been the one to ruin everything? What if the day she shook hands with Johnny Dervish was the day that the lives they wanted had been irrevocably lost?