The King of Crows

by Libba Bray

  “Am I… are we… alive?” She’d said that out loud. She had a mouth.

  “Yeah. I think so. My ribs hurt something fierce.” Memphis.

  Evie blinked. Sam? Ahead of her, the landscape took shape. The side of the crater. Death Valley. They’d made it back. Evie pushed herself onto her hands and knees. The upended helmet lay next to her, its wires mangled.

  “Theta? Memphis?” she called.

  So much smoke all around. It was hard to see, but she could make out the splintered debris of the Eye scattered all around a wide ring of scorched earth. A few remaining pieces still smoldered. Henry emerged from the haze. He was shuffling toward her, a dazed expression on his face.

  “Henry! Over here,” Evie said, staggering to her feet.

  “A little help?” Ling. She was sprawled near the ruins of a chair. “Has anyone seen my crutches?”

  Henry and Evie helped Ling up and shouldered her weight.

  Evie looked up. The sky was no longer bothered by angry clouds. There was no trace of the breach, not even a scar to mark the spot. The day was beginning, a purplish pink hinting at blue.

  Theta came out of the fog hoisting one of Ling’s crutches. It was a bit bent, but still functional. “Sorry. I only found one,” she said, handing it over. Evie moved and let Ling balance. “Anybody seen Memphis?” Theta asked.

  Evie shook her head. It made her a little dizzy. “Anybody seen Sam?”

  “Theta!”

  “Memphis!”

  Memphis ran to Theta, and they wrapped their arms around each other, holding tightly.

  Evie felt a tiny surge of panic. “Sam? Sam Lloyd? Please, please, please answer me—”

  “I’m here, Lamb Chop.”

  Tears sprang to Evie’s eyes. “Sam?”

  And then, there he was, just as he’d said he would be. He was smudged and his hair stood up in funny cowlicks, but he was there, and he was limping toward her. “Didn’t I promise you I’d be here?”

  Evie ran the best she could, and it seemed to her that their kiss would be the kiss she would remember for the rest of her days.

  Evie wiped her eyes but it didn’t seem to matter. “I was afraid I’d lose you.”

  Sam brushed his lips softly across her forehead and nuzzled her neck. “You’d never let me die when I owed you twenty bucks.”

  “Sam?”

  “Let me guess—shut up?”

  “No. No, talk to me. Keep talking to me.”

  “There’ll be time,” he said and kissed her again.

  “We did it,” Evie whispered.

  “Little Fox!” Miriam called. She limped toward Sam. Freed from the Eye, she held her son tightly for the first time in nearly a decade. Evie stepped back, but Miriam pulled her close. “So you are the one my Sergei loves?” she said.

  “Ma,” Sam said, embarrassed.

  The military men were already talking about what they’d witnessed. “Did you see? The energy was unlike any I’d ever seen before. Bright white light, and then that cloud came up from the ground like… like a giant mushroom! Mr. Marlowe—did you see that? Mr. Marlowe? Mr. Marlowe!”

  Jake Marlowe lay on his back beside the ruins of his golden machine. His eyes were open, unseeing. In his hand was the shattered heart of the Eye. It was empty. Miriam Lubovitch looked down into Jake’s lifeless eyes. She spat in his face.

  “Jericho?” Evie said suddenly. She waited, hoping for an answer. The smoke was clearing, blown away by a morning breeze that reached down into the crater.

  Jericho’s chair remained.

  He was no longer there.

  Evie brushed her fingers across the chair’s battered arms.

  Two tears streamed down her face. “Oh, Jericho, Jericho.”

  “Memphis?”

  Memphis thought he’d heard his name, but he couldn’t be sure. Exhausted, half-delirious, grief-stricken, he was no longer sure of anything. But then he thought he heard it a second time. “Memphis? Where are you?”

  He looked around wildly. “Isaiah? Isaiah?”

  “Memphis! Memphis!”

  The sound carried down into the crater and bounced off the sides, echoing, overlapping until it sounded like the call of seagulls. Memphis ran to the steep incline. “Isaiah?”

  Memphis reached the top. Isaiah stood on the dusty road, blinking against the first rays of sun. He’d returned. He was alive and standing in the middle of the desert like hope.

  Slowly, he smiled. “Hi, Memphis.”

  THE DEAD

  The dead do not rest. Not really.

  They hum in the air above the empty seat at the table.

  They perch at the window, drawn to the light.

  They make their peace with regret and wish that it, too, could be buried deep in the earth.

  They walk across the battlefields of Antietam, Gettysburg, Fort McHenry, Wounded Knee. They watch as the people struggle to form a more perfect union and secure the blessings of liberty.

  Sometimes their sins stretch like a shadow over those they have wronged.

  Sometimes the kindnesses they planted bloom in the next generation.

  And so on.

  And so on.

  And so…

  We go on.

  We are remembered, for a time.

  All is ephemeral.

  All is eternal.

  The dead come to us however they can.

  They are with us. Always.

  Hear what they have to say:

  You are the stories.

  Make a better history.

  EPILOGUE / PROLOGUE

  The parade carried the great aviator up Fifth Avenue under a fusillade of paper streamers and ticker tape so thick it looked like snow in summer. American flags had been hung from high windows and balconies; they fluttered against the sides of buildings, a patriotic drapery. And why not? The aviator, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, was the nation’s new favorite golden boy, a certified American hero. He’d done something remarkable, and for a moment, the people forgot all that had come before. Forgetting was a pastime as popular as baseball.

  Through the windows of Goldberg’s Delicatessen, over plates of the world’s best pastrami-on-rye, Sam and Evie watched over the heads of the shouting, streamer-throwing crowd. They were hopeful they could catch at least a glimpse of the motorcade.

  Evie grabbed for the binoculars on the table and took a look.

  “Anything yet?” Sam asked. He seized the opportunity to steal three bites of her unattended coleslaw.

  “No, just a lot of police on horses and old men in top hats,” Evie said. She put the binoculars down and frowned. “Didn’t I have more coleslaw than that?”

  “Was I telling the truth about that sandwich?” Sam asked, wiggling his eyebrows.

  “You were pos-i-tutely on the money. I could eat this every day for a week,” Evie said and tucked into another generous bite.

  The diner wasn’t very crowded. Most people were outside on the streets, eager to cheer on the aviator, to feel like they were part of his triumph. Mrs. Goldberg fiddled with the radio on the diner’s sparkling countertop so that the regulars who were there could hear the announcer’s play-by-play of the parade.

  “I used to be big on the radio, you know,” Evie said to Sam nonchalantly.

  “You don’t say! Let me guess: the farm reports.” Sam grinned and winked, and Evie burst into giggles.

  “You should hear me read in cow,” she said.

  “You might not want to say that in front of the pastrami,” Sam whispered.

  A smiling Mrs. Goldberg stopped by their table. She was a soft, round woman with large brown eyes. “More coffee?” Her English still carried a faintly German accent. Sam had told Evie that Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg had emigrated to New York from Berlin. The rest of their family—aunts and uncles, parents, sisters and brothers—still lived in Germany, but, as Mrs. Goldberg had said, “New York is for me.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Goldberg,” Sam said.

  “Maxie!” Mrs. Gold
berg called across the cafe. “We have fresh coffee?”

  “In a minute, in a minute, Fanny,” Mr. Goldberg called back.

  Mrs. Goldberg shook her head. “That man. We have been married twenty-five years last Tuesday. So. When is the big day?”

  “As soon as she’ll let me,” Sam said and kissed Evie’s hand, and it made Evie so happy she was afraid her happiness was a bird that might fly away.

  “You’ll come to see me after, right?” Mrs. Goldberg said.

  “Yes. You can make us special wedding pastrami,” Sam said.

  “With extra coleslaw,” Mrs. Goldberg said with a wink as she walked away.

  Mrs. Sam Lloyd, Evie thought. And then, Evie Lloyd. And then, Mrs. Evie O’Neill-Lloyd, like British royalty. It would look very dignified on her calling cards. She’d mail a bunch of them back to the girls in Zenith. The pettiness of this warmed her.

  “What are you smiling about?” Sam asked.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Now I’m worried.”

  Through the diner’s windows, Evie watched the parade and daydreamed about a wedding at City Hall downtown, with Theta and Ling by her side. She thought of Mabel and felt the twinge in her heart. I’m getting married, Mabesie, she thought, and she wished that she could share the day with her best friend. She thought of James and Will, Woody, Bill, and Jericho. She could do nothing but face the future. She would live every day fully. She was not the same girl she’d been nearly a year ago. She would never see things so blithely again. Even now, as Evie watched the parade and the people alight with pride and joy, she knew how easily that same crowd could become angry. The things that divided them. The things that brought them together, too. They couldn’t afford to become complacent.

  Sam swiped the pickle from Evie’s plate and took a big bite.

  “I saw that!”

  He offered her the bitten end. “You want I should give it back?”

  Evie waved it away. “Go ahead. I don’t want to smell like pickle juice anyway.”

  “Me? I’ve always liked your perfume, Baby Vamp. Well, look what the cat dragged in!” Sam got up to welcome Henry and Ling. Theta, Memphis, and Isaiah were right behind them. They made room at the table, and then room again, until everybody had a place and nobody was too squished.

  “Mrs. Goldberg! I think we’re gonna need more pastrami!” Sam called.

  “Coming right up!”

  It had been a few weeks since they’d been together in Death Valley. In that time, Woody’s stories had been found, mysteriously, by a cleaning woman in Union Station in D.C. and printed in the Daily News. The whole ugly business of Project Buffalo and the Shadow Men had come to light. Sister Walker had been exonerated. So had the Diviners. A full pardon from President Coolidge himself. For some Americans, the late Jake Marlowe’s reputation had been tarnished beyond repair. Others still clung to him as an icon. Nothing had happened to the wealthy men of the Founders Club. Their names stayed out of the press. They had enough money to make sure of it. There were even some people who were discrediting eugenics. People had begun fighting to have racial hygiene laws overturned.

  There were still people who didn’t trust the Diviners. It would always be that way, they knew. Debates had sprung up at town halls and school auditoriums across the country about what made somebody an American. Was it simply being born here? Was it an allegiance to a flag? Or was it something deeper and more fluid—finding common purpose, a commitment to democratic principles that said all were created equal, that great shared story?

  “So. Are we going to be bridesmaids?” Theta asked.

  “Of course! I couldn’t get married without you and Ling by my side,” Evie said.

  “I’ve never been a bridesmaid,” Ling said, and she seemed genuinely happy.

  “I believe the phrase is ‘always a bridesmaid, never a bride,’” Henry quipped.

  Ling scowled. “What does that mean?”

  “Ling, when does Alma get home?” Sam asked and sipped his coffee.

  Ling smiled. “Day after tomorrow. She said she brought me a souvenir. I’m afraid it will be something with mayonnaise.”

  “Did… she talk to Lupe?” Evie asked gently.

  Ling nodded, and for a moment everyone fell silent.

  “I’m moving up to Harlem,” Theta said, breaking the tension. She smiled at Memphis and Isaiah. “And I’m going to open a dance studio with Alma.”

  “That is pos-i-tutely the cat’s meow!” Evie cheered.

  “So long to the Bennington,” Henry said.

  “Hen. Tell ’em,” Theta prompted.

  “Paul Whiteman’s orchestra wants to record one of my songs,” Henry said.

  “Why, Hen, that’s wonderful!” Evie said.

  “Apparently, he heard me playing at a little club on Fifty-second Street and he liked what he heard. David and I have already penned three more! Before long, we’ll have our own catalog. Take that, Tin Pan Alley!”

  “My parents are letting me enroll at Hunter College,” Ling said. “I’ll still work at the restaurant. But I’ll be in college.”

  “Ling Chan, coed,” Henry said.

  “Professor Ling Chan,” Ling said a little dreamily. “One day. One day. Oh, Henry, my mother wants to know when you’re coming to our house for dinner,” Ling said. “If I tell her you’ve got a song to be recorded, she’ll be marrying us off.”

  “If it means your father’s dumplings, I accept,” Henry said.

  They rejoiced in one another’s good news.

  They would be there for the bad as well.

  “Memphis?” Evie asked. “What about you?”

  Memphis was thoughtful. What had happened inside the rift and in the days before had dismantled him utterly. The Memphis who left the land of the dead was a different Memphis, the atoms Ling spoke of so often with reverence rearranged. They had not settled. He was vibrating at a new frequency. His Diviner power as he’d known it had left him after he’d healed the rift. But it was not gone so much as it had changed. He felt it now when he laid his hands upon the page. A healing of words and ideas. Every day, he went to the 135th Street Library to write until Mrs. Andrews teased that she might have to give him a job there. Memphis felt life all around him now. From the secretaries hurrying to their jobs in the big office buildings, humming with busyness, to the old men buying their cigars on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street. The street sweepers and the beat cops, the shoeshine boys and the chorus girls. The cheerful drunks searching for god in the gutters, the little girls playing dress-up in newspapers but seeing them as silk gowns. The searchers. The strivers. The lost. The lonely. The hurting. The hopeful. He felt them all. And every dreamer who stepped outside to look up past the neon haze into the souls of stars watching them below. They were with him. They were all with him. Connected. On the way to see his friends, as the bus jostled its way downtown, Memphis had noticed a small sign propped against the window of a building on the West Side. Hand-painted, it read, simply: I BELIEVE IN THE VOICE OF TOMORROW.

  “Memphis?” Evie prompted again, breaking his reverie.

  “I don’t know,” Memphis said. He was no longer so easily defined. He was possibility. He was becoming. He smiled. “I don’t know… yet.”

  “Yet,” Evie echoed in sympathy.

  “I’m gonna play baseball!” Isaiah said, nudging the conversation toward a kind of loose joy, a shifting of atoms again.

  “So, uh, how are your powers?” Sam whispered.

  Memphis shook his head slowly. “Just a little left. Enough to fix your bruise, maybe.”

  “I said Don’t see me to a fella the other day and he looked right at me and said, ‘What do you mean, don’t see you?’ I guess my pickpocketing days are truly behind me,” Sam said.

  “I picked up this saltshaker, and do you know what it told me?” Evie said.

  Ling swallowed a bite of sandwich. “What?”

  Evie put the shaker back down. “Pos-i-tutely nothing.”

&nb
sp; No more dream walking. No bursting into flames. No more ghosts.

  “I don’t see so much anymore. Just little things here and there,” Isaiah said with a shrug.

  That was about all the future anybody should probably see, Evie thought.

  The powers that Project Buffalo had forced on them were fading away. What remained was all they had been through together. They could still feel one another, still sense one another’s moods and hurts. What remained was friendship. What remained was love. It was, they knew, their greatest power.

  Mrs. Goldberg fiddled with the radio until a flood of German poured out.

  “Whatcha listening to, Mrs. G?” Sam asked.

  “A political rally in Nuremberg,” she answered tightly.

  It was astonishing that a wire was picking up this sound in Germany and carrying it via a transatlantic cable all the way to this deli in New York City, as if the world were so easily connected, all one big ball. It didn’t hurt that Sam and Evie had used some of the last dregs of their Diviner power to soup up the Goldbergs’ radio so they could listen to news and music from back home.

  The man on the radio was shouting. He sounded very angry. When he paused, the crowd responded with chants. Mr. Goldberg had stepped out from the kitchen. He was listening to the angry, shouting man. Listening to the people clamoring for him. He came to Mrs. Goldberg’s side. Evie watched as the couple clasped hands. They did this without a word, almost without thought, she could see. It was instinctual, animal. They were frightened, and they each sought comfort from the other.

  “Do you know what he’s saying?” Evie asked her friends.

  “Beats me. I don’t speak German,” Theta said.

  Behind the counter, the Goldbergs stood perfectly still. Outside, there were ripples of excitement. The noise began to swell. The aviator was approaching. The Diviners kept their eyes on the Goldbergs, who, in turn, watched the radio as if it needed watching, as if it might become a monster they could not stop. Evie listened closely to the German chants coming through the radio speakers. That crowd was getting louder, too. And though she didn’t know German, it made her uneasy all the same. She sensed the fury underneath it. Seeds of evil. Growing. Metastasizing. The chant repeated several times, and she began to pick out the words being shouted over and over again: “Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler.”