Until then, hiding had to be enough for people like him—a quiet life, a quiet death.
It had never really been enough. And sometimes death wasn’t quiet or easy.
It had not been enough for his father, who’d withered away because of it. He’d done his best to raise North after his mother had run off, but by the time he died in the Chicago slaughterhouses where he worked, he’d become a small man, tired and far older than his years. The day North buried his father, he didn’t have enough money even for the plainest of tombstones, and there was less than a week left before his landlord would knock on the door, demanding the rent. He could have gone to the same plant where his father had worked and died, and they would have taken him on, tall and strong as he was even then. But he’d decided to go west instead, hoping that in the wide-open spaces of the country, he could find some kind of life for himself.
He’d traveled to the endless sweeping plains and realized that no matter how far he went, no matter how big the sky above him, there wasn’t really any way to live free. Not for someone like him.
The first time he’d heard of the Devil’s Thief, North was working at a stockyard in Kansas. He’d looked at the picture of the girl staring up from a crumpled piece of newsprint and had felt a spark of hope that had set him off to search for others who were also tired of never having enough. He’d ended up in St. Louis before he finally found the Antistasi, and once he saw Maggie, that was about it for him.
If he’d been a little younger, he probably would have done something just as stupid as those kids. Had his daddy not been around to keep him in line for so long, he probably would have done something that stupid even without hearing about the Thief.
He wondered for a second if those kids had fathers who would tan their hides for getting caught up by the Guard, or if they were on their own, like so many kids were these days. North supposed he’d have to take care of them later—get them out of the holding cell the Guard were bound to put them in and either get them back to their parents or find them a safe place to go. But before he worried about those kids, he needed to get to Maggie.
Her building was a monstrosity of a thing, flanked by two enormous towers. Inside, a row of some mechanical contraptions helped to keep tiny infants alive. Ruth hadn’t wanted Maggie to bother with working at the fair. They had plenty of people to do reconnaissance, and Ruth thought she would have been better served to keep working on the serum. But small and delicate as Maggie might look, his girl had a spine of steel when she wanted something. In the end, Maggie had won . . . mostly. North still escorted her to and from work, but she tended to the children and watched for any with an affinity all the while.
North moved along with the crowds until he came to the railing and could catch her attention. She looked up from her work and frowned when she saw him. They didn’t need words. From just a look, he understood her point, and he maneuvered his way through the crowd of mostly women to the side hall. A moment later, Maggie was there.
“What is it?” she asked, clearly irritated that he’d interrupted her.
“We might have a problem.” He told her about what he’d seen, about the Thief and the other guys she was with. “There’s only one thing they could want in there.”
“The necklace,” she agreed.
North remembered the first time he’d gone through the Cairo exhibit and had seen the necklace. He’d thought the five artifacts were nothing but myth, just as he’d doubted the Thief’s existence before he saw her, but there one was, real as anything else. He’d known it wasn’t a fake because he’d felt its power. Like the watch he had tucked in his pocket, there was an energy around it—an energy that was eminently compelling. But unlike his watch, the necklace had felt like so much more. He figured that every Sundren in that room felt it, even if they didn’t know why they were all enthralled by the display.
There was no way the Society or any of the Brotherhoods could be allowed to have power like that. Ruth had planned to take the necklace in the confusion of the deed, but maybe that couldn’t wait. “Everything depends upon us having that necklace when the smoke clears,” North said. Without it, there would be little chance of uniting the Antistasi and leading them. Without the necklace and the power it could impart, the deed wouldn’t change who was in control—the members of the Brotherhoods were all rich men, living in a country where money could buy anything at all, especially power. No, the Antistasi needed the necklace so they could stand above the rest with power of their own. “We can’t let her get it first.”
“No . . .” But Maggie was still frowning, her gaze distant like she was thinking through all the implications of this most recent development. Then she blinked and looked up at him. “Or maybe we just can’t let her keep it.”
INVISIBLE ENERGY ALL AROUND
1904—St. Louis
The heat of the day had waned some by the time Jack Grew finally pulled himself out of bed, popped two more morphine cubes into his mouth, and made his way to the Exposition. St. Louis was a dump compared to the grandeur of New York, no matter how glorious the Society believed their little fair was. They’d never reach the status of the Order, now that he had transformed it, and their city would always be a backwater town wishing it were something more.
Still, begrudgingly, he had to admit that the lights were something to behold. They covered every surface of the fair, reflecting in the enormous lagoon and shining brightly, late into the night. The crowds had started to dwindle, and the Streets of Cairo were nearly empty. They were also nothing more than a second-rate attempt at resurrecting the splendor of a long-lost civilization. It was nothing compared to what Khafre Hall had been, or what the Order’s new headquarters would be when they were complete. They didn’t even have an authentic obelisk, he thought with some disdain, not like Manhattan, where one was planted in Central Park for everyone to see.
But none of that stopped Corwin Spenser and David Francis from preening about their Society’s offering at the fair—a singular stone set into an exquisite collar of platinum and polished so that it seemed to gleam from within.
An artifact that had once belonged in the Order’s vaults.
Do they know what they have? Jack wondered as he stared at the necklace in the velvet-lined case before him. Could these two men—and the rest of their ridiculous Society—know that the stone was one of the treasures taken from Khafre Hall? Were they gloating because they thought he cared about the Order’s power? Or did they truly believe they’d discovered some new object of power? He couldn’t be sure.
He didn’t actually care. The Order and its business only interested Jack insomuch as he could use them. He had already proven how easily the Inner Circle’s leadership could be made inconsequential back at the Conclave nearly two years ago. Impotent old men, all of them.
What Spenser and Francis didn’t realize while they boasted about the Society’s power was that the Order was simply a means to an end, a convenient tool for gaining Jack access to the right people and the right places. Places like this chamber, which had been closed for the night to the public but which Jack now had free access to, without the worry of being watched.
“Where did you say you found this piece?” he asked, keeping his voice casual and easy.