“Why wouldn’t they stop the flames?” Ruby asked, frowning at her.
“The Order has a point to make,” Viola said with a shrug. She hadn’t wanted to touch the offered food, because she didn’t need them to buy her a thing, but Ruby still had a dusting of sugar at the corner of her mouth and Viola had to do something to distract herself. So she took the tazza of espresso sitting on the table in front of her and downed it in a single swallow, letting the hot bitterness of it steel her against her own stupidity.
“I don’t understand,” Theo said.
“Tammany controls most of the police and fire departments in this part of town,” Viola explained. “The Order has been using Tammany’s influence in the Bowery for revenge against what they lost for almost two weeks now.”
“They’re looking for the artifacts?” Ruby asked.
“And sending a message.” Viola frowned as she listened to the man’s voice rise in volume.
“Now what’s he saying?” Ruby asked, leaning forward.
Viola wanted to reach across the table and brush the sugar from the corner of the other girl’s mouth, but she wrapped her fingers in her skirts and held herself back instead. “It seems that things are turning,” Viola said. Ruby was watching her again with those eyes the color of the ocean. They would pull her under if she wasn’t careful.
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t need to tell them any more. They didn’t have to know. But there was something about the way Ruby was looking at her, so earnestly—as though maybe she saw Viola as a friend, as an equal—and Viola spoke before she could stop herself. “According to those men, water isn’t even touching the fire,” she told them. “The flames are being fed by magic.”
THE NEWLY WOKEN
1904—St. Louis
North didn’t really care what Maggie said about giving the new guy a chance, and he didn’t care that the Thief had managed to deliver the device like she was supposed to. He’d found them too late to hear much of what they’d been talking about. But he still didn’t trust either one of them, even if Ruth was starting to. Which was why he found himself sitting next to the one who called himself Ben as they drove the brewery’s wagon toward the hospital to collect their new brothers-in-arms before the Guard could get to them. After the rounding up of the Mageus over in Dutchtown, Mother Ruth wasn’t taking any chances. Considering that Ben looked like a born liar, North wasn’t taking any chances either.
The hospital was on the north end of town, far from the excitement of the Exposition. It was still the dead of night, so they didn’t pass more than one or two other travelers on the road. Rescuing the newly awoken should be an easy enough job, considering that they had one of their own on the inside working as a night charge.
He gave the horses another gentle flick of the reins to urge them on. Easy or not, the faster it was over with, the better. Next to him, Ben was silent, but North could feel the weight of his stare as he drove. After a couple of miles, he’d had about enough.
“You have a problem?” he asked, glaring at Ben. “Something you want to say?”
At first North didn’t think he would answer, but then he spoke.
“Your tattoo . . . ,” Ben said, and there was something funny about his voice.
North had heard enough about the mark he chose to wear on his arm in the years since he’d gotten it, which was why he usually kept the tattoo covered. But he hadn’t bothered to button the sleeves of the shirt he’d tossed on when he’d been woken about the kids, and as he’d driven the horses, his sleeves had fallen back to reveal the dark circle that ringed his left wrist.
“What about it?” North asked, lifting his chin and daring him to say something.
“I knew someone who had a tattoo something like that,” Ben said.
“I doubt that.” He rotated his wrist to reveal the bracelet of ink formed by a skeletal snake eating its own tail. “Not unless he was Antistasi.”
“It was something like that,” Ben said, frowning down at it. “Is that what the symbol is—the mark of the Antistasi?”
“This symbol?” North said. “It’s an ouroboros, which goes back way before the Antistasi. But, yeah, the Antistasi adopted it, probably sometime during the Disenchantment. They used it as a sign so they could identify each other,” he said, pulling his sleeve back down. This time he fastened the cuff to hide the mark from view.
“You had to accept it, then, to be part of Ruth’s organization?” Ben asked. North could tell he was trying to keep his tone light, but he was failing miserably.
“I didn’t have to do anything,” North said. He’d had the tattoo since he was sixteen, a promise to himself and to the father he’d lost. It was sheer luck that he’d run into Mother Ruth and her people not long after that, and even better luck that she’d taken him in. “Nobody is forced to take the sign. It’s not the Middle Ages anymore.”
“But you did take it.”
“Because I liked what it stood for,” North explained, answering the implied question. “The snake eating its own tail is an ancient symbol for eternity. Infinity.” Rebirth. He’d been a different person before, and the serpent on his wrist reminded him he’d be a different person yet again someday.
“The serpent separates the world from the chaos and disorder it was formed from,” Ben said, as if he knew something about it. “Life and death, two sides to the same coin, as my friend used to say. You can’t have one without the other.”
North frowned, not sure what to make of Ben’s statement. He’d never thought of it like that, and he wasn’t sure he cared to. “The Antistasi use it because it represents magic itself. Because everything in the world—the sun and the stars and even time itself—it all begins and ends with magic.”
“And if magic ends,” Ben said, his voice low and solemn, “so does the world.”
North huffed out his disagreement. “Magic can’t end,” he said. “That’s what the symbol shows. Magic has no beginning and no end. Since the Disenchantment, they’ve tried to snuff us out and kill us off, but they haven’t been able to. We learn and bend, and then we change.”
“You believe that?” Ben asked, looking at North with curious eyes.
“You don’t?” North tossed back.
But Ben didn’t answer, and it was too late anyway, because they’d arrived.
North pulled the wagon around back, just like they’d agreed to, and gave the signal—a couple of sharp whistles that were returned in kind. A few minutes later the back gates of the hospital opened and their work started in truth.
There were about a dozen people to move. One had his hands wrapped in gauze, and they all had a sleepy, docile quality to them.
“What’s wrong with them?” Ben asked. “Did the serum do this?”
North shook his head. “This isn’t the serum. The hospital doped them up to make sure they can’t do anything. Morphine, probably.” He understood why the nurses had drugged them. The newly made Mageus had caused too many problems because they didn’t know how to control their powers.