The Game of Love and Death(16)

At last, she found the one she had been looking for. He lay beneath a stone from a building that had once held hand-blown drinking glasses. Shards of their remains, some as small as stardust, surrounded him.

There was life left in him, but not much.

She knelt beside him, her hand on a stone too heavy for him to remove, for any human to lift alone. His face was sweaty, caked with dust and the dried blood from a cut on his forehead. He shivered.

“I told you to run,” Death said as she put her hand on his brow. His skin was hot, his eyes delirious.

“I —”

If she removed the stone, it was likely he would die. If she didn’t remove the stone, his death was a certainty.

“I —”

His eyes focused on her face and she remembered the flower tucked into a pocket of her now filthy dress. Its crumpled petals were still as soft as an infant’s skin. Soft, scarred, ruined.

“I was looking,” he said. “Looking … for you.”

“Here I am.” She pinched the stem in her cold fingers.

His lashes fluttered. Death saw something in his eyes: recognition. And something else: desire.

“What do you have to live for?” She weighed his soul in her hands, wondering why humans wanted to live so when in the end, everything would be lost.

She could feel him trying to wrap his mind around her words, trying to shape an answer with his dry lips. Water. She wished she had some. Footsteps echoed off of broken buildings, and rescuers called out for survivors to hear. There wasn’t much time.

She moved the stone and touched his cheek, and as she did, the images in the man’s mind splashed over her. A field of blooming flowers. The shape of a woman, a woman whose face he could not yet see, but one whom the man wished to marry when he found her at last. Then the man himself silhouetted against the setting sun on a pleasant spring evening to come, the man and his someday child walking hand in hand through the field.

“This,” he said at last. “This.”

Death laid the broken flower where her hand had been. The man gasped.

“Hay uno por allí,” a rescuer called out. There’s one over there.

There was a scuffle of running feet, the gust of an anxious breeze heaving the smoke aside. Death disappeared behind the broken stone skeleton of a church before they found the man and put their quick hands all over him, probing him for injuries, brushing away gravel and bits of glass, putting a tin cup of water to his lips, lifting him into the long shadows of early evening.

She walked the cobbled streets one last time and reimagined herself a dress, a new style, cut close to her frame, unadorned, and also free of blood and dust and smoke, as if none of it had ever happened. The light of the setting sun turned its black edges red. She stood until the pain quieted itself within her and the color of her clothes was at last the same black as a starless sky. Then she brought herself to New York, where she had someone to observe.





MR. Thorne sat behind his desk, sucking his pipe and reading a stack of newspapers from cities across the continent. He looked up when Ethan and Henry walked into the room in their shirtsleeves and trousers, their hair still wet from washing, their chins glowing pink from the razor. Henry suppressed a yawn as he watched Ethan’s gaze travel over Mr. Thorne’s collection of untouchable tin windup toys from his childhood: cars, clapping monkeys, a painted minstrel, and even a small automaton.

“Fine job on the Staggerwing story, Ethan,” Mr. Thorne said. “You look like hell, Henry. You get any sleep?”

“Plenty, sir.” He hoped his lie wasn’t obvious. His was an exhaustion built of late nights listening to jazz music and dreaming of Flora. He’d been every night for weeks. He still hadn’t worked up the nerve to speak to her again. Even so, sitting at his usual table near the stage, he’d watched her, memorizing every inch of her. And he’d felt her stealing glances at him, always looking away whenever he’d try to catch her gaze. It had almost begun to feel like a game.

“Eat some meat, why don’t you. You look low on iron.” Mr. Thorne set his pipe in a stand and snapped open a newspaper from Washington, DC. He cleared his throat and pointed to a grainy photograph on page A2. “See this?”

Henry and Ethan leaned in, but it was obvious neither knew what Mr. Thorne’s point was.

“Hooverville. Below the 59th Street Bridge in New York City,” he said. “It’s nothing compared to ours. We have eight encampments. Our largest is ten times the size, easily. But because it’s out west, these newspapers think it doesn’t exist.” He slapped the paper closed.

Mr. Thorne clamped his pipe between his molars. “You’re going to write a story about Seattle’s Hooverville, Ethan. The big one by the water. It’s a human-interest story, at least. Especially on this new fellow” — he consulted a typewritten sheet of paper on his desk — “a Mr. James Booth, age twenty, who arrived out of nowhere a few weeks back and claims to be their de facto mayor. But here’s the thing. I hear tell they’re brewing liquor in those shacks of theirs. No doubt this Booth character is behind it, trying to build himself a quick fortune. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has connections to the mob. If that’s the case, and if the buyers aren’t paying liquor taxes, then it’s more than a human-interest story. It’s a scandal. And it’s something to show those East Coast clowns that news doesn’t drown when it hits the Mississippi.”