It was too slow.
Neva was sprinting by that point, vaulting the low wall girding the Wheel. After dashing to its base, she hopped atop the outer rim, gripped the ridge with bone-bent strength, and scrambled up.
She only made it ten feet before her arms felt like they were going to give out.
Last summer, the ascent would have been challenging but not overly taxing. Now, though, in her fatigued and famished state, the climb was exhausting. But whenever quitting became too tempting, she forced herself to relive an instance Augie had discouraged her. Or misled her. Or mocked her.
“If you are caught,” he’d said when they were teenagers, “even for something small—bending in a way you shouldn’t while you hang the wash; marking yourself with freakish scars—what do you think they’ll do to you?”
“You’re stronger than you know,” he’d said at the circus.
“Eventually,” he’d said, just a little while ago, “I know their capabilities better than their original owners did.”
Fuck him.
It was enough. Barely.
By the time she reached the second car, she’d stopped walking her feet up the rim and started squeezing them tight against its sides, scooting skywards in clumsy, diminishing bursts. They brought her to Augie’s level, but only just—thank God he’d chosen the fifth car and not the sixth. She doubted she could have managed another inch.
The last hindrance was the door. Augie had left it open, yet there was no landing for her to swing to: Ferris hadn’t designed his carriages with the idea that passengers would board in midair. With her body strained and failing, the only viable route was to curl around the Wheel’s rim and lunge for the doorframe.
Twisting into position proved relatively easy. Leaping, less so—she missed.
Augie caught her.
He hadn’t left the carriage; Neva had been worried he’d clamber higher as soon as he saw her attempting to reach him. But he’d stayed put, perhaps resigned to the coming confrontation.
Good thing—had he gone elsewhere, Derek and Brin would be peeling her off the ground right now.
Augie didn’t pull her inside the carriage right away, however. For a long moment, he held her by her forearms, letting her dangle above the Midway as he stared at her face—her whitened, blue-eyed face. “I see you finally understand your true abilities.”
“No thanks to you.” Neva had enjoyed her stint as part of the highwire act at Barnum & Bailey’s, so she wasn’t too nervous about being suspended in space. But this was a different kind of height. “Help me in, Augie.”
He studied her for another beat, then raised her up and into the carriage with absurd ease—he must have collected immense strength from someone along the way.
Enough to rip off a man’s leg.
Resisting the impulse to take and expel a deep breath, Neva looked everywhere but at Augie. The carriage seemed to be in good condition—aside from a few tears in the chairs’ upholstery and the odd spot of rust on the frame. But she couldn’t help wondering if it was the same car Wherrit had lost his mind on the year before ... Below them, Pinkertons, soldiers, and policemen clashed with strikers, rioters, and refugees. In the distance, a hundred other flashpoints stitched Chicago into a quilt of conflict.
Closing her eyes, she focused on reverting the changes she’d wrought in her flesh. As before, the transition hurt—badly—but it was slightly more bearable, and she managed it without touching the cowry.
Opening her eyes, she found Augie in his original guise as well, watching her intently, his face a whirlpool of emotion.
“I told you not to look for me,” he said. Was that a hint of hope in his voice?
“You didn’t make yourself all that hard to find.” Neva glanced at the base of the Ferris Wheel. Brin and Derek had moved into the ticketing booth, and the Irishwoman had her rifle trained on Augie.
One shot. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
“I have five more questions for you.”
Augie winced—looking very like Derek for a second—but signaled for Neva to continue.
“One.” She raised her left thumb. “The man who raped me at the circus: did you acquire him?”
“No. I didn’t want his form, not after what he’d done to you. Just his life, and I already had that.”
She nodded. She wasn’t sure why that mattered to her, but it did. Especially given that the rapist’s seed had been inside her, which probably meant his guise was as well ...
No. She wouldn’t think about that now. Maybe not ever. “Two.” She raised her index finger. “Are you Jack the Ripper?”
Augie smiled, but it was about the saddest curving of a mouth she’d ever seen. “I’m worse.”
Neva stopped herself from nodding again. It was probably a true statement, but signaling her agreement wouldn’t accomplish anything. “Three.” She raised her middle finger. “Why did you stay you all these years? Playing with props, and wigs, and fake noses—as what, a joke? Was that just you being ironic? You could have been anyone, gone anywhere.” Her sister’s image flitted across her vision, followed by a glimpse of Mr. DeBell. “Hell, you could have been white. You could have had privilege. Why stay Augie the servant? Augie the circus Negro? Why not choose an easier life?”
“I wanted to be there for you.”
“So why not tell me?” She raised her ring finger, then used it to wipe the tears from her eyes. “Why keep it to yourself? What you could do ... What I could do. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He looked away, his gaze passing disinterestedly over Brin and settling on the Turkish Village, where a striker grappled with a gangly Pinkerton. “If I’d told you—told you all of it—you wouldn’t have let me be there for you.”
Neva shook her head. This was probably a true statement as well, but that didn’t make it good enough, not by half. Yet what else had she expected him to say? “Five.” She raised her pinkie. She’d come to the hardest question to ask, the one that would hurt her as much as it did him. Taking that deep breath now, she exhaled it ... and took another. “When you were Wiley,” she began at last, but didn’t finish.
She didn’t need to—Augie had already buried his face in his hands. He remembered.
Remembered what had happened when he’d stumbled to Machinery in Wiley’s guise, knowing nothing but that he was a Boer guardsman who fancied Neva. And when she’d kissed him and indicated her willingness to do more, he’d acted as any man would have.
Any man who wasn’t her brother.
Yet he hadn’t known the full extent of that sin. Not until later. Months later, when—just an hour or two ago—he’d woken in his true form and begun recalling everything that happened during his rotating prison of false aspects. And now ...
Now he remembered.
But it was worse than he knew. “Look at me,” Neva whispered.
When Augie uncovered his face, she accepted the pain in her stomach and allowed it to expand, to bulge until it distended far enough to protrude several inches beyond her breasts and strain her dress almost to bursting.
“I lowered my ribcage to keep from showing,” she said when he didn’t react—didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. “To keep it in. But I could feel it ... changing. Adapting inside me; it didn’t need much space. I thought that was because it was a skinchanger’s get. I guess I was righter than I knew.” She chuckled, but there was no mirth in it. Just guilt. And hate. And shame.
A flake of ash fluttered into the carriage. “I never knew you were so good at lying,” Augie said. “But you certainly have a knack for it.”
“Why would I lie about this, Augie? Do you think I want it to be real?” Her stomach twitched as if something inside were stretching its legs, bending its little skinchanger bones to take advantage of the additional room. “Did you see that? It’s kicking.”
Her brother’s smile was so sickly now that Neva felt ill herself. “This is desperate, sister. Even given what I confessed to you earlier, this i
s ...”
She bared her swollen belly, and on cue, the right side pulsed.
Augie recoiled, but Neva gestured for him to come closer, to put his hand on her abdomen and feel the truth.
He hesitated, then flinched when her belly beat again. “This isn’t a trick?”
“This isn’t a trick.” She held out her hand.
He took it and let her guide his fingers to her stomach. It jerked once at his touch, and the tiny impact rippled through Augie in a lengthy shudder. “God help us,” he murmured. “What a family we are.”
Neva extended her other hand. “Come down with me.”
He studied it. “Why?”
“Just come down with me.”
He looked at her face, then her stomach, then her face again. Finally, he nodded.
And whistled.
Chapter Thirty-Six
BENEATH THE CARRIAGE—IN front of the Algerian and Tunisian Village, the Street in Cairo, and all the other nearby exhibits of the Midway—men in the middle of murdering each other paused to listen. For most, Augie’s tune was too faint to have full effect. But everyone seemed to at least slow, and some of the combatants lost their balance and fell over.
Neva wasn’t the slightest bit affected.
She’d maintained her bone earplugs throughout the conversation with Augie, reading his lips and body language. There would be no puppeteering for him his time—not with her.
He realized it almost immediately; perhaps she should have feigned compliance. But when she didn’t react to the first few bars of his whistling, he stopped, shrugged, and shoved her.
The push, delivered with a casual hand to either shoulder, shouldn’t have sent her back more than a step or two—Augie didn’t lean into the motion or thrust his arms at all forcefully. Yet as if she weighed no more than a feather, his freakish strength launched her into the air, hurtling her over the carriage’s rear seats and out the door. It happened so fast she didn’t have a chance to scream, much less resist.
But once Neva was in open space, she seemed to have all the time in the world.
Below, she could see Brin and Derek doing the screaming for her. Elsewhere, the forces of labor and capital resumed their struggle amidst the expanding fire—the only combatant consistently gaining ground, ravenous despite having consumed the Court of Honor: Manufactures was more smoke than structure now, and a garden of flames grew atop the roof of each great building save Agriculture ...
Hanging above the Fair, Neva could view it all. She even took a moment to scan for Dob and his cousins. Then her arc passed its apex, and she began to drop.
Slowly.
So slowly she seemed to float.
Neva looked up: a gossamer web unfurled above her, finely woven and cupped over an invisible pocket of air. The webs’ threads emanated from her shoulders, wrapping under her armpits before billowing out to form her silky parachute.
Augie pressed his face to one of the carriage’s windows and watched her descend a few feet, his expression implacable. He must have fastened the web when he’d shoved her. Fastened a web ... What couldn’t he do with the talents he’d collected?
She turned away. Augie couldn’t control himself. Or face up to what he’d done—he had no limits now.
And that was why he couldn’t remain in the world.
“Neva?” asked Derek as he steadied her landing in front of the Moorish Palace.
A soldier looked at her in awe, but the distraction earned him a brick to the head from a stone-faced striker.
“Are you all right?” called Brin, still training her rifle on Augie, but casting glances at Neva’s prominent stomach.
“Later,” she said. “Do it.”
The Irishwoman didn’t seek further confirmation. She just sighted down the barrel, breathed out, and squeezed the trigger. Her aim was true: the bullet shattered the carriage window Augie stood behind, striking at chest-height—a heart shot.
But the bullet shattered too, breaking against his flesh and flying into a thousand pieces that mingled with the glass shards raining down from the Wheel, a glittering shower that reflected the light of the rising sun and the fires eating the Fair.
“Did he get that from you?” Neva asked Brin when the gleaming bits had ceased falling.
“Perhaps, but I can’t mold metal that fast—not to stop a bullet. Bugger learns quick.”
Derek pointed at Augie’s carriage. “What do we do?”
Neva tugged the gossamer threads circling her shoulders. Now that the web no longer had to suspend her, the tension had slackened, and it took only a moment to slip the loops off her arms. That done, she studied Augie.
He was back in his original seat, feet up and arms crossed behind his head, an impassive expression on his face as he watched the Fair’s final transformation into a pyre—much of the Midway was burning now too. Nothing this far west was alight, but it wouldn’t be long. Flames from the Javanese Settlement were already licking at the German Village.
Augie would have to be dealt with swiftly.
Neva had tried talking to him; there was nothing more to be said. And guns had proven of little use. That left only one thing she could think of, mad though it was. “We have to emancipate the Wheel,” she said to Brin.
The Irishwoman squinted as if she’d misread Neva’s lips, or read them correctly and assumed she hadn’t.
“Your stick babies,” Neva elaborated, overenunciating each syllable. “They’re still in the supports? You didn’t move them?”
Brin’s eyes widened. “They’re still there. Might not be good, though—rain probably got through the air holes I left for the fuse.”
“Can you check?”
Brin grinned and dashed to the closest of the Wheel’s supports, casting frequent glances at Augie. But he seemed indifferent to her movements. Or oblivious. Either way, he didn’t stir as she made a rapid inspection.
Derek and Neva ducked into the Parisian Store to avoid a three-way scuffle. One of the men involved was a soldier, but she couldn’t tell whose side the other two were on.
“Did you say, ‘stick babies?’” asked Derek.
“Dynamite. In the Wheel.”
He squinted at her, just as Brin had moments earlier.
“Anarchists,” Neva added, hoping that would be enough for now. “Do you have any matches?”
Derek patted his pockets, then shook his head.
Brin darted into the store and shut the door. “Most of the sticks are bad. A few might light if we’re lucky. But the fuse is a ruin. Wasn’t tarred as well as I’d hoped; it’s a sodden mess.”
Neva grimaced. She hated to ask more of Derek, but ... “Can you manage one more current?” she said, turning to him.
He didn’t look like it. His face was wan, and he still couldn’t stand well on his own—at present, he was bracing himself against an empty display case. He said yes anyway.
“You’re sure?” asked Brin as he moved to a broken window, using the case and then a bookshelf to stabilize himself. “You don’t want to wait for the fire to spread to the Wheel?”
“Not if the fuse is bad,” Neva said. She offered Derek the last cowry shell. “See if this helps.”
He closed his hand on it, and she closed her hand on his. Derek didn’t try to pull free. He seemed to understand that she needed to be a part of this, needed to help ...
Kill their brother.
Because that’s what they were doing: they were going to kill Augie. Dear God.
How had it come to this? What was wrong with the world that they had to administer justice to their last remaining family member? And that he deserved it? But what else could they do?
Brin waved her arms in front of them. “Shouldn’t we get clear? If this works, and the Wheel falls this way—it won’t be easy to run if we’re inside a wee building.”
“Have to be close,” Derek replied, his skin flushed with the shell’s energy and the resurging fever. “Doubt I’ll be able to run anyway.”
; Neva gestured from Brin to the door. “You go. We’ll finish this.”
She snorted. “Already said no to that. Just target the far support—there.” The Irishwoman pointed through the window.
Derek nodded and aimed the hand Neva still held. “If that’s real,” he said, glancing at her belly, “you should let go.”
She didn’t move. “I’ll keep you steady.”
He hesitated.
She swore and folded her stomach back in. “I’m fine. Take the shot!”
Shrugging, Derek loosed a current several times smaller than the one he’d launched at Kam, but much longer. It took only an instant to reach the spot Brin had recommended. Yet each inch of the bolt’s advance seemed to send another round of charge searing through Neva’s body, racing round and round as if she were a human coil. Then Derek somehow made his electricity hotter, less blue and more red, fiery and fast and ...
Explosive.
Neva didn’t hear the dynamite detonate—her bone plugs remained firmly in place—but she felt the shockwave as the first stick went off. Followed by another, and another, until the Wheel’s northern support became a chain of fireworks that crumpled the leg and caused the entire structure to list.
But even as a less spectacular series of explosions wracked the other support, and her muscles quivered from the current’s aftereffects, she had eyes only for Augie. The first blast had startled him, but the subsequent concussions knocked his mouth into a ... smile. An expression of acceptance—and relief. Staying balanced despite the Wheel’s growing tilt, he stood in his carriage, walked to the window Brin’s shot had shattered, and stepped out.
Augie fell in a slow tumble, no web parachute extending from his shoulders as he completed a partial rotation before ...
He hit the low wall encircling the teetering attraction’s base.
His spine snapped.
The falling Wheel buried him.
Epilogue
ON BRIN’S THIRD CALL to push, Neva did so with everything she had left, and her baby emerged into the Irishwoman’s waiting hands.
“It’s a boy,” Brin murmured, gently wiping the squalling little thing off and tending to the umbilical cord.
Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1) Page 29