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Chapter Text

1887, a tenement room on the edge of Coney Island

Francis was five years and three quarters old, and his mother was beautiful. These were facts fixed in time and space, just like soda bread on Wednesdays and prayers to Saint Cajetan every Sunday. His mother promised that these prayers would bring them good fortune – namely, bring regular work for his father. She would hold him in her lap as the cadence of her voice washed over him, a gentle tide, a blanket.

Sleep, sleep, my love, a stór.

His father kept a daguerreotype of the wedding, taken some twenty-odd years before Francis was old enough to understand. It nestled against their bureau, crisp and dark. The auburn flame of Meggie’s hair was dulled in the picture, coiled neatly against her neck; she stared into the camera, gorgeous and unsmiling. Francis’ father, Rory, wore a battered black suit. His handlebar mustache – the one that Francis loved so much to twist around his tiny fingers – shone out, stark, against the grain of the picture.

Francis didn’t notice when the image of her began to blur. Meggie’s hands and hair were always red, but now they were loudly so. But color was color, and Francis was five. Meggie worked as a launderess for the wealthiest women tourists, and their myriad dresses with miniature buttons coated the Sullivans’ little apartment in a sheet of gloss. Soap days were terrible: lye that stung Francis’ eyes as he stirred the big pot, and his arms shook from the strain. He was glad when Meggie let him release the ladle and curl up on his mattress instead.

But Meggie was tired now, all the time. Rory came home late at night, though his latest job mixing shoe polish only required him to work till evening, and usually he arrived angry. Not violent - he’d sworn off drinking, though, and maybe because, it coursed through his upbringing - but irascible, sharp. Francis eased awake many nights at the sound of voices scraping through the dark, quiet but intense, their inflections jumping polygraph-style and settling again.

“Rory.” She said it hard one night, and the sweetness of her voice made Francis pull his quilt tighter around his shoulders. “You’re never home, are you? Frankie burned his hand today helping me with the soap, and he asked if his da would bring him a sugar bun. Just a sugar bun, Rory. I put it on the list. You promised him. What did you do with the money?”

“Keep your voice down.” Rory’s fists were clenched at his sides, the tarped skin over his knuckles shining white: violence in miniature.

Francis couldn’t stand it. He crossed the room, padded over to them barefoot. Instinctively, he stood behind his mother. He couldn’t discern the frames of their faces in the dark, but he sensed his father’s rage coming off him like greasy tar.

“Go back to bed, Frankie,” his mother warned.

“No, he’s okay. I’m telling you, he didn’t want it anyway.”

“Rory.”

“Tell her, Frankie. You didn’t want it, huh?”

Francis shook his head no. He went back to bed and tried to plunge himself into sleep. The harsh, hushed voices continued far into the night.

The next morning was more soap day; this meant aching arms and tears leaking out of his burning eyes. Steam curled up in tendrils, and he blew gently at it till his mother slapped at his hands. Soap day was a terrific bore, and his mother was angry on top of it all.

He saw that the color flamed brilliant in Meggie’s cheeks that afternoon, and that she paused midway through scrubbing a lacy nightgown to drink a glass of seltzer water. Still, she said nothing.

That night, Rory came home very late with a small white flower in his lapel pocket. He smelled strongly of cheap cologne. Francis, drowning in sleep and blankets, thought he looked rather nice, but his mother was angry. He ducked his head deeper into his pillow, searching for the stars that spun into his eyes before he fell asleep every night, but a sudden slapping sound jolted him awake.

His mother was facing away from him, bracing herself on the countertop, elbows slashing into the oily night. Everything was very quiet. Meggie was making strange little gasping noises, like the only breath she could take was in pinches. When she straightened up she had a hand cupped over the side of her face.

“If you think,” she said, very quietly, “that I will stand here and be complicit–” Her tongue tripped over the spiked syllables – “while you go off and take other women, think again.” She straightened, silver rods lining her back and eyes. Rory opened his mouth, but Meggie held up one hand. “Don’t you deny it.”

Francis clutched his blankets closer around his face, nuzzling into the warmth and softness, trying to stave off the way his pulse leapt. Again, he soothed himself to sleep. Again, his parents fenced each other with their eyes and words.

After school the next day (Wednesday, August fourth), Francis and Meggie went down to the waterfront together. The breezes had not yet begun to cool, and the surf was frothy, salty; it tasted good on Francis’ tongue. The beaches were crowded – no matter. Francis’ world was tiny, no larger than the lacquered pink seashells sprinkled over the sand, no larger than the sand dollar with the five pinpricks inside of it. Meggie’s hair, swept up into a Gibson girl pompadour, had been slightly damp at the temples for the better portion of the day, despite the mild temperature.

“I love you, Frankie.”

Francis was busily engaged in digging a hole in the sand so that the ocean water would come along through the runnel. There! There was a miniature crab, walking sideways. It looked funny. He scooped up sand in his palms and buried the creature.

“Frankie.”

He looked up, disconcerted. His mother’s eyes weren’t soft, like he was used to. Her face was flushed, like Papa’s used to get when he drank from his amber flask and sang happy songs.

“Mama?”

“Listen to me carefully, a stór. I love you and I love your da. And I’m going to go on a little trip, alright? I’m going to visit your aintin, my sister. Just for a short while. ”

Francis turned his hazel eyes imploringly upon his mother, already vaguely sensing her absence. “Why?”

"I will come back for you, cross my heart, but you have to trust me. Do you trust me?”

Francis nodded silently, but his eyes were very big. Meggie reached over and cupped her son’s face in her warm hand, memorizing the liquid hazel of his irises, his thick brown curls, the fullness of his lower lip. “Come here, a stór.”

She held him, then, and they stayed that way till the breezes turned cold. And then they returned home, hand in hand.

That evening, Meggie made soda bread, kneading it into a soft fluffy ball, patting it straight into the stove. Oh, how Francis loved soda bread. The slices were warm, the crust burned his fingers, and Mama let him put a little curl of soft yellow butter on each piece.

She tucked him into bed that night, and his sleep-warmed hands closed on hers.

“I love you,” she whispered, and, then, her eyes were very soft.

The next morning – or, rather, by 11:47 that night, but Francis didn’t know it – she was gone. Not just for a short while, and not to visit her little sister. She’d disappeared into the city as neatly as if she’d never been.

Not until Francis was a teenager would he learn of his father’s infidelity and his mother’s vicious sense of justice. She loved him, he supposed later. Just not enough to make her stay.

She left her wedding ring on the dresser. It collected dust until Francis reached for it merely a few days later. Rory hit him then, a glancing blow off the side of his face. It was the first and only time his father would ever strike him.

From then on, Francis knew two things: one, that he would be motherless – and two, that he was never to touch the one thing of hers left behind.

Chapter Text

Fall 1889, a tenement room on the edge of Coney Island

It had been Frankie and Rory, Rory and Frankie, for two quiet years. Meggie’s wedding ring whispered from the dresser. Frankie hadn’t touched it, nor had he eaten soda bread since the night that she had gone; he desired neither.

Rory took another job, a steadier one, at a rifle factory, greasing and oiling parts. The black stuff got up to his elbows, mucked up his shirtsleeves, stunk up the whole apartment. Every night, Frankie helped him pull the planks off the bathtub in the kitchen – when covered, the tub served as their dining table – and boiled buckets of water, mingled with lye soap, to fend off the oil.

One evening Rory, having skipped his evening bath, went to coax a flame in the fireplace to maturity, but one forearm was still slick from his daily work. Frankie watched as he put the arm out, over the flame, tongs nipping at the coals. A log shifted – sparks steamed – the flame leaped.

Rory extricated his arm in time, but the top layer of his skin was scorched raw. When it was good enough to peel off the consequential bandages, Frankie made him dye his other arm with Scheele’s green and they spoofed old semaphore traffic signals, utilizing Rory’s arms to an insensitive degree. But that was all right, because Rory didn’t really mind.

Frankie, for his part, worked at home after school, making artificial flowers out of colored tissue and wire. The wire cut into his fingertips at first, but he smeared what little blood could be produced onto his forearms and called it war paint. (The Sullivans were not without scarlet forearms for nearly three weeks.)

Over time, his fingertips toughened and hardened, and his motor skills sharpened, and soon he was making about ten cents a night. He was still thin as a rail, but he had dimples and Meggie’s supplicating eyes, and so the ladies loved him right away.

He and his father got along that way just fine, and coins dribbled into the tin-can bank under Rory’s cot, and sometimes (glorious sometimes) there was enough extra for Frankie to buy a piece of penny candy on the way back from school. He liked the hard brown-sugar rock candy the best. He’d try to lick it very slowly to make it last forever, and then when he wanted it so much he couldn’t stand it, he’d put the whole thing in his mouth and crunch down. Frankie lost his first, second, and third baby teeth this way.

He was an utterly average student – a bit of a class clown, racing pet beetles with his deskmate and giggling a little too much for his headmaster’s liking. Only after he’d drawn an excellent chalkboard caricature of his beaknosed teacher, gotten his hands paddled into a raw, painful mess, and come home crying to his da, did his career in classroom disruption come to an end.

Rory listened to Frankie’s tale of woe, privately thinking it had been well deserved, though he hated to see his son cry. He bandaged up Frankie’s hands in soft, clean gauze, convincing him to pretend he was a prizefighter, the macho kind with strong arms and steely eyes. Frankie’s lush imagination took to the idea greedily.

They suffered through Rory’s cold, hard potatoes and tough cuts of beef. Meggie had always been the one to do the cooking. Still, they never went hungry, even if all they had was Rory’s terrible meals.

As the fall turned colder and the shadows stretched like taffy pulls, men began to drop. At first, Rory’s factory overseers thought it was nothing more than mild influenza, but it persisted.

“Frankie,” Rory began one night, striking a match on the strip of the little red matchbook and spurting flame to life. “People are getting sick.”

Frankie dug his fork deeper into his rubbery mashed potatoes. “Yes, Da.”

“The man next to me – he keeled over, right there at his desk. His face was right red, like an apple.” He paused to look his son in the eyes. “Be careful when you go out, will you, kid? Can’t have you takin’ sick on me.”

“Yes, Da.”

The candle sputtered and flickered as they spoke.

“Now be a good lad and get me some of the good stuff. Delicate-like.”

Frankie climbed down from his chair and crossed the kitchen, diving down the hallway. Rory’s stash was under the cot, next to the small tin-can penny bank. His da only asked for his flask when he was especially tired. That, or trying to stave off illness. At least, that’s what Rory told Frankie.

With Meggie gone, Rory had begun to drink again.

Frankie reached under the bed and felt for his father’s flask. Then, carefully, he retrieved the dark amber bottle nearby, uncorked it, and poured the contents into the open flask. Delicate-like. It was pure Irish whiskey, imported expensively and deserving, so Rory insisted, of utmost care.

Rory hadn’t hit him, not since he touched Meggie’s ring those three years before. But he got awful loud, sometimes, when he was drinking. When he had spoken of the man at the factory with the apple-red face, Frankie had thought of his father.

***

Week one, November 26th. Rory came home with a fever. Frankie dipped a cup in their water basin and held it to his father’s mouth as he drank; it was utterly lukewarm, neither fresh nor cold, and Rory could barely stomach it. He went to sleep early, and Frankie followed.

“Spiders.”

The word drew Frankie from sleep early the next morning. Fuzzy with drowsiness, he peered around the dusky room from his place on the floor. His father was tangled in his sheets, scrabbling at the mattress with his arms and legs.

“Spiders. Spiders.”

Frankie scrambled up and joined his father. “Da?”

Rory’s eyes were closed, and his forehead was shiny with sweat. “Everywhere. Gerroff. Gerroff me.” He clawed at his arms, scrunching his eyes tightly closed. “Please, make it stop.”

Panic rose hot in Frankie’s throat, but he quelled it. “Da, it’s me.”

“Frankie…” His father’s voice slurred the syllables. “Kill the… the spiders. For me.”

Frankie yanked back the yellowy sheets, searching for any hidden creature. It was a difficult task, as everything was wound tightly against his father’s body, but from what the morning light allowed him to see, there were no spiders – but there were spots of blood. Rory coughed, and scarlet spurted out of his nose as though it had been waiting only for the pressure. It flecked his lips in crude watercolor, and this time there was no matching Sheele’s green to play with.

Week two. Rory hadn’t gotten up for nine days, and the bedsores spread over his body. Frankie wasn’t going to school anymore, wasn’t laughing anymore. While his father slept, he worked fervently on artificial flowers, creating with a focus much too sharp for his age, and he would venture out of the apartment and onto the street corner to peddle his wares. He drank only small quantities of water, saving most for Rory. He did not know how to call the doctor.

Rory slowly dissolved into delirium as the fever burned ever closer to his brain. He cried out at intervals, twisting on the bed. Frankie used dirty rags – the rags used to dust the furniture – to soak up the sweat and smear away the blood. He bought day-old loaves of bread for a penny from the vendor on the next street. And he prayed.

“Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in the hour of conflict.” It was a schoolroom prayer, one that his class would recite daily. “Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God restrain him, we humbly pray.” He came back Thursday night carrying five unsold flowers and a stale loaf of bread, lips fumbling over the prayer, shoulders electric with tension. “And do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.” Would Rory go to hell? Would God not like the way he got loud when he drank from his flask?

God didn’t know that Rory was good. He saw the big things, like him hitting Meggie and Frankie those two times, and his face getting all red when he’d drunk too much. He didn’t see the way Rory tucked him in so gently at night, and the scratchy way the stubble on his chin felt when he kissed Frankie’s cheek. For being so big, God didn’t know an awful lot of important things, seemed like.

“Amen,” he concluded, a little bitterly.

He unlocked their apartment door, colored tissue and yeasty bread spilling together out of his small arms. Rory was awake on his cot, weak, but lucid.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Da.” Frankie set the food and flowers down on the planked-bathtub table and went to his father. “D’you want something to eat?”

“No, no.” Rory shifted on the bed, coughing; it was loud and rattling. “Been quiet since you been gone.”

“Feeling any better?” Frankie filled another cup with water and nudged his father to drink. Rory drank, but slopped part of it over his chest and shirt; his hands shook as he tried to do it on his own.

“Maybe a little.” Frankie wanted so badly to believe it that he didn’t fight the words. “Say, Frankie. You remember your ma?”

Frankie’s hands stilled, slowed. Of course he remembered her. She was his greatest longing and his secret joy. He sealed her away in the back of his mind, but she lived in the delicacy of his hands and the luminance of his mind. He felt her absence like a toothache. But he could not speak these things, so instead he jerked a nod, just once.

“I want you to know that your mother was everythin’ good and right. I… I dunno why she settled for me. Saw it at last, I guess.” Frankie frowned, trying to understand. “She loved you, y’know, till the last. After that, too, I reckon. Just…” Rory coughed again, hard, and winced. “Just don’t hold it against her.”

Frankie clenched his jaw, fighting back the anger. It was wrong, disloyal, and anyway, the yawning hunger was greater. He wanted more of her. Always, he wanted more of her. But Rory’s mind had moved elsewhere.

“Get me some more of the good stuff, will you?”

Frankie shook off the little pit in his stomach and obeyed his father.

Week three. Rory’s stomach had swollen grossly, and though he kept his complaints to a minimum, the pain glittered behind his eyes like some twisted kind of gilding. His hands were always in motion, constantly picking at the bedclothes, and his fever stayed high.

Frankie prayed all the time, now.

And then the vomiting. Rory demanded his flask more and more, despite being unable to keep anything down. His body shriveled down rapidly, and Frankie, desperate, spent more and more of their savings on different foods, nicer foods, something that his father would be able to stomach. Something that would keep his father alive.

“Meggie!” Rory shouted one night. He was shaking, tears slipping down his face. Fear burned in Frankie’s throat. He hadn’t had so much strength since the first few days of sickness. “Meggie!”

“Da, Da, it’s me, it’s Frankie.”

Rory gripped Frankie’s hands so tightly that Frankie couldn’t feel his fingers. He stared out, beyond and past his son’s eyes. “Meggie, I’m sorry.”

December 17th, 1889. Rory Sullivan died. Typhoid, if Frankie had known, if Frankie had gotten a doctor. If, if, if.

Frankie slept in the same bed with him that night. It was very, very hot, and the sheets smelled of throw-up and alcohol and sweat, and his father’s body was stiffening beside him. Frankie cried for hours, and a canyon opened up wide inside of him, hewn out with a blunt knife. Death was a dribble of urine on the sheets, a final act, a physically engulfing shame.

God was punishing him, he decided. God saw hime every time he had gotten his father a drink, and this was his reward. Meggie had always called his drinking a sin. Please don’t let him go to hell, God. Please.

When he woke up, Rory’s body was cold.

The next day, rent was due. Frankie had just enough to pay the landlord, but when he opened the door, the man’s face contorted.

“Jesus, kid. What’s that smell?”

Frankie clung to the door, because the canyon inside of him was gaping and bloody and he felt every damn bit of it. “My… my da…” He shut his mouth, because his voice had gone strangled and he would not, he would not, cry in front of this man.

The landlord looked past him, and his eyes widened. Instinctively, he crossed himself, a sign of protection, a too-late petition. “Oh, kid.”

Frankie just looked at him, and his eyes were tired.

“Listen.” The landlord reached for the right words, stumbling over his thoughts. “I’ll… I’ll cover the burial. Just a mass grave, mind you, I can’t give more than that. But I don’t figure you got that kind of money.”

Frankie shook his head.

“I’ll ring the undertaker as soon as I get back.” The man looked over his shoulder, then back at the body in the room. “Your father was a good man. I’m sorry.”

He left.

Frankie moved numbly around the room, packing things in his school rucksack. Leave the books, you won’t need them. The last of the bread, some soft potatoes, the few pennies remaining in the tin can. A knife, socks, the rest of the matches, a coat. He took his parents’ daguerreotype out of its frame and packed it tenderly beside the knife.

Meggie and Rory Sullivan were gone. Frankie was eight years old and utterly alone.

His father’s flask lay discarded on the floor.

Chapter Text

December 1889, Coney Island

His first night outside, Frankie slept on the fire escape of their tenement building, just outside his old apartment. A family of five had already moved in – the flow of the poor was relentless, and kind as the landlord had been, he went no further than burying Rory and arranging for the apartment to be scrubbed. The place stank of carbolic soap, but it was clean. And Rory had never really lived at all.

Frankie, lying on his belly just under view of the window sill, watched jealously through the slit in the closed curtains. The new family was in there, washing clothes, sipping soup. He thought about his other neighbors: old Mrs. Hammond, with the loud, angry adult son, and the Levin family, who was so poor that their children wore clothes made of flour sacks.

The stove inside flamed with light, and Frankie’s body yearned for the warmth. It was cold, savagely cold, and the night was clear. He drew his coat tightly around himself, tucked his shaking hands under his armpits, and tried to sleep.

Six-thirty in the morning. His breath made plumes before him, and he couldn’t feel his hands or feet. Ice had formed in little diamond clusters on the rails. He was wet, and so hungry, and alive.

Frankie eased himself up, trembling. His exhales came out in starts and fits, shimmying up his hacked throat and nasal passages. Quietly, he gathered his things together – all the clothes he had, he wore in layers, and his rucksack had kept everything he needed. He sensed that movement was critical, and so he got out a heel of the bread he’d packed and clutched it in one hand as he began to descend the fire escape.

The ice ensured slow travel – not that Frankie knew where he was going anyway. He followed the coastline, hardly caring about his final destination. His movements were much more primal: keep the blood flowing within his body, warm his muscles, stop him from freezing. And he also felt that wherever he ended up, he could not stay here, in Coney Island, in the neighborhood where his father greased rifle parts and his mother baked him soda bread.

The coastline pointed north, in a meandering sort of way. By midday, Frankie had walked miles, and his tongue had begun to swell and stick, cottony, to the inside of his mouth. His throat felt gritty, like it was filled with sand.

“Please,” he asked a lady pushing a pram. “Where can I get water?”

“There’s a town not a twenty-minute walk from here.” She peered curiously at him. “Are you all alone?”

“Yes’m. I’m - I’m going to visit my uncle.”

She hesitated. “If you stay here, little boy, I can call an officer. He could find you a place to stay.”

Fear, of an aching variety, rose in Frankie’s dry throat. Urban legend had taught him that police officers would take solitary children to one of two places: prison or the orphan train. Each had its own monsters.

“N-no, no thank you’m.” He ducked below her outstretched arm and ran, ran despite his weary legs, ran till he found the pump in the town square and doused himself with it: hands, hair, face.

He drank from it greedily, and Rory’s glassy eyes stared at him from the misty, rainbowed arc.

Rory, whose mustache was shot through with silver.
Rory, who overcooked his potatoes and bathed with lye.
Rory, whose body cooled around Frankie’s terrified frame.

He forced himself to drink, now, though the cold water tasted like bile. He forced himself to keep walking.

That night, he slept in an alley, burrowed under sheets of old newspaper. He dreamt of cotton fields and red trains so long it took minutes to burn past his eyes.

***

Two days later, Frankie had a nickel in his pocket, nothing in his stomach, and he had – miraculously – reached Brooklyn. But his body felt old and wrong, all shivery and achy; when he thought of apple turnovers and crispy pork belly, his tongue became thick and dry. The previous day, he’d begged a soup bone from a butcher, just to split it open and suck the marrow out, but it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Lord, how he missed his father’s cooking.

He didn’t remember stumbling and then dropping at the mouth of another alley. There were claws in the cavity of his stomach, and he’d shut his eyes against them.

“Hey. Hey.”

Frankie opened his eyes. The voice was adolescent, male, and distinctly sharp.

Frankie’s breath hitched, and blindly, he groped backwards, hoping to find a rock, a spray of gravel, anything.

“Easy, bud, it’s alright.”

It was an older boy, thirteen or fourteen years old, wearing a tweed derby. His inflection was softer now.

“Please don’t hurt me.” Frankie’s voice came out in a whisper, and his soft hands were clenched.

“I’m not gonna hurt you. D’you know you’re in Camorra territory?”

Camorra?

Frankie knew the name. He tested the syllables, and they tasted violent in his mouth; he shook his head.

The older boy pushed the brim of his cap back. “Well, you are, and I wouldn’t stay there if I liked my nose in working order.” He smiled at Frankie. “Supposin’ you do, of course. I ain’t one to presume.”

Frankie watched him tensely. The boy stuck out his hand, but Frankie got up on his own. The boy’s smile faded when the light fell cleanly across Frankie’s face and body. His clothes hung loose off his frame, and the shadows under his eyes were more than just dirt.

“Jesus, kid.”

Frankie leaned against the doorway of the apartment and the landlord looked back at him with parlor-room sympathy in his eyes. He blinked. The landlord was gone.

“Down on your luck, or what?”

Frankie narrowed his eyes. He knew he hadn’t had a bath in a long time. That didn’t mean the boy had to be so mean about it. And Meggie had taught him it was rude to stare.

“Leave me alone.” He tried to push past the boy, who turned and matched him step for step.

“My name’s Sarge. Figured we might get to know each other and all, seeing as I’m gonna take you across the river.”

Frankie stopped. “What?”

“You think you’re gonna stay out here by yourself?” The boy – Sarge – looked genuinely surprised. “Hell, I don’t think you’d last the night. That, or you’ll get picked up by a cop. It’s a miracle you haven’t yet. I’ll take you back with me.”

“But-”

“You got a better plan?”

Back where? Frankie thought. But he was so tired. And Sarge’s smile was so nice.

“Eat this.” Sarge pushed a paper bag of peanuts at him; dumbfounded, Frankie took it. They began to walk together.

“So what’s the story? Run away from home? No, don’t tell me. You’re a prince, but it’s under wraps.”

Frankie almost smiled, but the memories flooded his senses. Distended stomach, putrid rigor mortis. His nose and mouth were full of decay.

Sarge nudged him with his elbow, and Frankie flinched. The older boy saw this and quieted. They walked in silence, ever northward, for several more minutes.

“My ma left. My da died,” Frankie said finally.

“Oh.” Sarge’s boots went crunch-crunch along the gravel path. “ ‘M sorry.”

Frankie figured he meant it. They walked that way, the tall boy and the little one, silhouetted against the afternoon sun, kicking rocks as they went.

***

Sarge said he was a newsboy.

They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and blocks of buildings trickled by. And when Frankie grew so tired he could no longer walk, Sarge carried him on his back.

After eternity and an age, they reached Lower Manhattan. Newsboys’ Lodging House, read the sign on the dilapidated brick building. Frankie slipped off Sarge’s back; something inside him wanted him to enter on his feet.

The inside was a vortex of color and sound. Fifty, sixty boys populated the hallways and various rooms. Fifty, sixty derby caps littered the place. The mess hall, Sarge pointed out, and the bunkrooms. There was a room designated for washing, with a tub and basins along the wall. Razors, soap and brushes rested around the edges of the basins.

A short, freckled boy stepped into Sarge’s path. “How’d the meet go? With the Brooklyn boys?”

“Good, I’ll tell you later. Listen, tell Kloppman we’re gonna need to reserve another bed.” He turned suddenly to Frankie, as though realizing. “That good, yeah?” He placed a hand on Frankie’s head. “Whaddya say?”

“Thank you,” Frankie managed.

“No,” Sarge laughed. “I meant, d’you think you wanna do this? Be a newsie?” He ruffled Frankie's hair. "It's a tough gig, no one'll lie about that," he said. "But you make something, it's a steady job, and - hey - you'll be fit as a fiddle come summertime."

Frankie considered this. He didn’t know any of these loud, confident boys. He didn’t even really know what this job would entail, but he had a hazy vision of waving stacks of neat newspapers at nice passersby. But the alternative? Starving on the street. Also, he liked Sarge.

He nodded mutely, and Sarge laughed and ruffled his hair.

“Attaboy.”

Sarge paid his rent for the room, and Frankie had his very own cot that night. Wrapped in snowy bedsheets, Frankie curled onto his side. The bed was so big. He missed his da. He liked Sarge an awful lot.

Sarge heard him crying that night, but didn’t go to him. He already cared about the kid – the other boys called him a big softie, a weak link – but he wanted Frankie to settle life on his own terms. And oh, Frankie would; he had a strong feeling about that.

Chapter Text

January 1890, Lower Manhattan

Hawking newspapers was no walk in the park. (Parks were Brooklyn territory anyway.)

Sarge accompanied Frankie his first week on the job, buying him his newspapers and showing him the layout of the borough. The other boys made fun of Frankie, calling him a baby and a kiss-up, but that was all right, because Sarge’s eyes flashed warning lights every time this happened. Frankie liked seeing the way those boys’ mouths jumped to attention.

By the end of the first week, Frankie had his very own derby cap, a paperbag, and aching shoulders. He’d waved papers all around New York City. Maybe he’d get strong and it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

Drippy ice still stuck, like frozen candle wax, to the cold street. Frankie had begun to sell alone, checking in with Sarge at designated points every day, but wandering through streets by himself, hawking papers and yelling himself raw. This alone was difficult enough, not to mention that he didn’t much like talking, not anymore. He searched for Rory everywhere, and he saw him, sometimes, in the flashes of a grin or the scent of a soap, but the whole world was vacant.

On a Tuesday morning, before the local schools were beginning, Frankie found himself face to face with two well-to-do schoolboys. They wore clean knickers and jaunty little porkpie hats, and their faces had the lobsterlike freshness of vigorous scrubbing. They both had size and a few years on Frankie.

These kids had boredom and class, two ingredients in an explosive cocktail of danger. It would take Frankie some time to identify these flavors in the atmosphere, and this was one of those times.

“Isn’t he cute,” one of them said.

“Trying to charm us out of our money.”

“I don’t think he knows he don’t belong on our streets.”

Frankie sensed it, then, too late. He tried to run, but they had longer legs. Within moments, he was on the ground, cobblestones chewing up one side of his face, arms thrown up over his head.

The next few moments were a lesson in pristine violence. Their shining black shoes – his stomach – a spray of white fireworks in his eyes. He curled up tighter, but the pain was blooming like wildflowers all around his core and mouth. Salt and scarlet mingled on his tongue. The inability to breathe was an animal whining in his chest. Nothing, nothing, had ever felt like this.

Dimly, he watched them shred his remaining newspapers with soft, sticky hands. They danced in the tatters of his survival like small children playing in a rain puddle.

In the distance, a school bell rang. The two little gentlemen clapped their hands to their porkpies and took off. Frankie trembled on the ground, repulsed by the pain.

When his breath came easier, not in great narrow snatches, he pushed himself up. His palms and lip were bleeding – he’d bitten the latter all on his own – and his gut ached, but he could walk. He slunk back to the lodging house, frightened and a little nauseous.

Sarge’s face lit with anger when he saw Frankie’s face, and Frankie shrank from it.

“No, no, kid, it’s –” The older boy bit at his thumb, and Frankie saw that his other hand was clenched in a fist. “Damn it. It’s okay. Lemme help you.”

Slowly, Frankie followed him to the bath room, and Sarge dipped a rag in a basin of cold water and sponged away the blood on his face. Frankie stayed very still under his touch. Phantom fists plunged into his stomach.

“Wanna tell me what happened?”

“These two…” The words buckled in his throat. “Dunno.”

“You know,” Sarge said, “there’s a secret weapon we use in street fightin’?” Frankie shook his head. “You just hit them where it hurts. Like this.” He swung his knee up, past a right angle, and Frankie tried to copy him. Sarge chuckled. “Yeah, like that. Just do it real quick so they don’t see it comin’ and they’ll be down before you know it.”

***

A month had done wonders for being a newsie. Frankie’s muscles had toughened, permanent exhaustion had settled like a fog over every crevice of his mind, and he could make up a white lie about something as dull as dockwork.

But when he saw the kid on the ground, the fear curled like a dead thing in his stomach all over again.

The guy standing over him, pinning him to the alley wall, was somewhere in his mid-teens. He had one hand around the kid’s throat and the other in a fist; the kid was choking and kicking, blond curls falling over his eyes.

“You learned yet, ya gump? I don’t think you’ve learned yet.” The blond kid’s feet lashed out against the wall.

“Hey!” Frankie’s head and hands burned with adrenaline. He dropped his paperbag and ran towards the two of them.

The older guy looked around, surprised, and the blond kid wiggled free. The older boy whirled back and caught his arm, keeping him from fleeing. Frankie grabbed the younger kid, too, before realizing that this might hurt the kid even more – instead, he tried to throw punches, the strength tiny in his arms.

You just hit ‘em where it hurts, Sarge’s voice said in Frankie’s head. Frankie moved instinctively, bringing his knee up sharply like they’d practiced. His aim was perfect. The guy went down hard.

Hardly believing his luck, Frankie grabbed the blond kid’s arm again, and – without checking to see if the kid was all right – dragged him with him. They ran together, not looking behind, adrenaline pulsing in their lungs.

Blocks whirled by, and as they ran, the blond kid tipped his head back and began to laugh. Frankie slowed, halted, too stunned to continue. Red fingerprints ringed the kid’s throat, and the miniature Adam’s apple bobbed there.

“Thanks for the help,” he said, a broad grin smudged all over his mouth.

“You okay?” Frankie asked. The kid nodded, and his blue eyes were bright with amusement.

“Can’t believe we got out of that.” He gulped down air like a fish out of water. “Owed that fella. I bet at the horse races. But I run so fast they ain’t never caught me yet. Not till today. They call me Racer.” He said all of this very quickly and without drawing a breath.

Frankie didn’t think this was a very profitable job. They walked in silence together for a few more minutes.

“I know somewhere you can get a job,” Frankie said.

He’d need to get two more paperbags now.

***

“Frankie your real name, kid?” Sarge asked one day, as they tromped through the streets.

“Francis.”

A well-dressed lady approached, and Sarge turned his smile on. “Extra, extra! Whole family found dead in their beds, mystery unsolved!” A penny and paper exchanged hands. “Gee, thanks, miss.”

Frankie knew enough to see that Sarge was lying about the story. Either said story was a tiny three-sentence aside, or it didn’t exist at all. Ain’t lying till they read it or don’t, Sarge had told him their first day selling.

“So what’s your real name?” Frankie asked, curiosity piqued.

They turned their steps back towards the lodging house, and Sarge lifted his cap slightly, combing fingers through his hair before setting the cap back down, one hand at the back of his head. “My ma called me Samuel. Sam, really.”

Frankie didn’t reply.

“My real name would’a been Samuel Kelly, I s’pose. But the boys called me Sarge on account’a I bossed them all around.”

Frankie noticed they weren’t heading to the entrance of the lodging house; Sarge was, very confidently, approaching the wraparound fire escape of the building.

“Just follow me,” Sarge said, seeing Frankie’s confusion. They climbed the lacy, spindling steps out onto the flat-bricked roof.

The whole world flooded out before their eyes, one bright carpet, unrolled. Shafts of fading sunlight pierced Frankie’s vision.

There was a thin mattress up here, covered sloppily with a canvas sheet. Frankie frowned.

“Kloppman lets me sleep up here sometimes. Bad dreams.”

Frankie wrapped his arms around himself. “Me too,” he whispered.

Sarge nodded, acknowledged, let it go. He plopped down on the mattress, all lithe body and gangly limbs, and motioned for Frankie to make himself comfortable.

“Ever think about your newsie name?”

Frankie hugged his knees. His shins were still a little curved, the wire barely visible, from the prolonged starving time. His knickers should’ve fit, and would fit, soon enough. Sarge had promised.

“You don’t gotta have one, not if you don’t want it. But the boys all do it. Pointer, Fox, Young Waffles – it’s like our stage names.”

“Jack.” Sarge looked up when Frankie spoke, because his voice was a breath against the sunset. “My ma wanted to name me Jack.”

Sarge’s mouth tilted, lopsided. “Okay, then, Jack.”

Impulsively – but it was not an impulse, but a hunger – Frankie leaned into Sarge on the mattress. The older boy’s weight was solid, his body warm. Frankie wanted to cry from the happiness of it all.

Sarge slotted his weight right back against Frankie, and it was good. It was very good. It had been months since Frankie – Jack – had touched someone else for comfort. His skin yearned for it, and the contact sizzled electric into his fingertips. Touching Sarge felt like taking a deep breath.

Sarge, for once, had gone quiet. Slowly, he lifted a hand and carded his fingers through Jack’s hair. Jack closed his eyes. He was warm, and his belly was full, and he was safe.

“Jack Kelly,” he said softly.

In the endless horizon, the sun died fighting, and the stars emerged one by one.

Chapter Text

April 1893, Lower Manhattan / Randall’s Island

Three years had passed since Jack had changed his name. He’d grown a little taller, tanner, with strong legs and a good smile. His hair, now that it was regularly clean, was a slightly lighter shade of brown, and still curly. He’d begun to speak more, slowly, at first, and then holding conversations here and there. But his real charm lay with the selling. Sarge still showed him, sold with him weekly, but Jack’s level of adaptability and ability to improvise were soaring.

Racer had become a fixture at the lodging house. His cap, ever tilted the wrong way on his head, hung over wickedly dancing blue eyes and an everpresent grin. He wasn’t too good at inventing stories, so he begged for pennies on the bad days, and he begged cheerfully. People were fascinated and disconcerted with him by turns.

At night, the lodging house came alive with whispers and life. Nobody slept much, not really; the chatter was quiet, but it ran through the bunkrooms like an electric current.

First, Jack heard the horror stories.

Boys would line up on their mattresses at night and talk of things, all murmured voices and milky moonlight. Jack watched as they stripped off their shirts, showing off their mazes of scars – burns, slices, nasty jagged marks – littered across hard-muscled torsos.

Some of these scars came from street fights, turf wars, kitchen duty gone wrong. But the ones that the boys lingered on, bragged about, terrified the littles with? These came from one place: a jail for children sequestered on Randall’s Island.

The Refuge.

This burn? one of them whispered, the edges of a grin seeping out in spittle. They held me to the wall, and one of ‘em had a lit cigar. Ain’t no one around to hear me scream.

They chain your wrists to the bedframe if you’re bad. That way, they can do anything they like to you. Jack did not know what this meant, but the idea of being chained to his bed with vague horrors swirling in the fog sounded unsettling.

Kids get so hungry they eat candle wax. I saw one boy catch a rat, and get a rock, and – the boy made a wet splat sound with his mouth. Took a big bite. Blood all over his kisser.

Jack, drowning in the fear, curled in on himself. He’d look at Racer, comforted only by the mirrored distress he’d find in his friend’s face. These older boys, children themselves, took an almost guilty pleasure in recounting explicit abuse just to see the wide eyes and refrigerated shudders from their young audience.

Watch your back, they’d say. Or the Spider’ll catch you.

The Spider? Jack had asked, the very first time.

The warden. Carries a billy club as thick as my leg. You ain’t careful, he’ll snap you up.

Just around this juncture, Jack would tremble, and Sarge would say something like, “We don’t go to bed, Kloppman’ll kick us out. You wanna be on the streets again, Beanpole? You wanna get shipped to Randall’s Island?”

(There would be a long silence from whichever boy was telling the story.)

“No? Then shut your piehole.”

Jack would lie in the cot that he shared with Race, eyes open. Race fell asleep quicker. Sometimes, in his sleep, Race would throw his arms around Jack’s waist, and then everything was okay, because Jack was safe.

Jack hadn’t ever thought to ask if Sarge had been to the Refuge.

***

It was twilight when they took him.

Scary stories were all well and good in the darkness of the lodging house, but out here in the open under the blue sky? Stories of orange-tipped cigars and bloody rats evaporated in the balmy April air.

Jack had been up since five in the morning, per his usual schedule, and his feet were numb. He’d sold all of his papers – thirty of them – and, paperbag limp, he was counting his earnings in the palm of his hand.

Thirty papers, thirty cents. Not terrible. He folded the coins into his pocket.

“Hey, kid, hold it.”

Pure instinct shouted through Jack’s body. His head snapped up and he bolted. He didn't know who was chasing him or what he’d done, but he knew that if he didn’t run he would pay, and pay dearly.

A whistle split the air in one clean line. It was a cop.

God, please, please, pl–

He hit the ground hard, his balance wiped out, shock and sparks beating a tattoo in his chest and across his face. The cop had tackled him and he had a knee across his back, and Jack couldn’t breathe, and there were little pieces of gravel embedded in his cheek.

“All right.” The handcuffs were on, tight, and they hurt. They hurt bad. The pressure slid off his back. “Get up.”

Jack couldn't, not without using his hands. He twisted, kicked, maneuvered himself onto his back so he could see his captor: a tall, thin police officer with a weak chin and dark hair.

To his shame, Jack found that he was crying.

“Please, sir.” His cheek hurt, and his wrists hurt, and he was breathing funny. “Please. I didn’t do nothin’. You can take my money. I earned it all, honest I did.”

The officer squatted in front of him and reached to touch Jack’s scraped-up cheek. Jack flinched away, but the man’s hand was gentle.

“How old are you, kid?” he asked softly.

“Ten, sir.”

The slap came like thunder: crisp and brutal. Jack’s air supply was vacuumed out of his shallow lungs. The world was a ringing shade of white.

“Old enough to know you were loitering, disturbing the peace, a useless vagrant,” came the pronouncement from above. “Now get up. I won’t ask again. You’re coming with me.”

Jack sat silently on the ferry ride to Randall’s Island, head down, heart walloping his eardrums. His boots were cracked and badly needed a shine. His wrists hurt something fierce. Loitering? Vagrancy? Those sounded like crimes. He’d just been standing there, counting honest-earned money.

Rats. Chains. Blood. Flames. The nightmare carousel spun round and round in Jack’s mind.

The building – the Refuge – was concrete, cold and solid. Three stories? Four? Jack was too fixated on his numb hands to notice.

The officer took him into a little room, uncuffed him, and ordered him to strip naked. Shaking, Jack did so, hands covering himself, narrow chest textured with gooseflesh.

“Hands at your sides.”

Jack scrunched his eyes shut, shame roaring to life, and obeyed.

Hands prodded at him, large, cold. He felt the officer examine every inch of his body, looking, touching. In his hair, on his skin, in his mouth.

“Get these on.” Jack opened his eyes just in time to catch the state-issued pants and shirt.

Breathe in, breathe out.

They made him hold the placard while they took his picture. They shaved his head, all his curls a puddle of death on the floor. They confiscated all the possessions he’d been carrying, as well as his shoes, and shunted him into an overpopulated cell, locking the door.

The boys stared at him dully from their spots on the bunks, daring him to try and get a bed.

Jack slept on the floor that night and woke to find his legs, from the shins down, covered in rat bites. He woke to find himself stiff, aching. God, he wanted Sarge, wanted Race. He woke to find himself alive.

***

He spent three weeks there, mute, quick to obey any order from the guards. He listened well, and he stayed out of trouble. Jack wondered if God had heard his prayer in the alley. His arresting officer had been savage, but since then, no one had laid a hand on him. He scarfed his food in the mess hall, did his assigned schoolwork and menial work diligently, and slept a lot.

Jack, in the North division, worked with wires, twisting and bending them to form sieves and rat-traps. He didn’t know the consequences of an unfinished quota, but he’d heard whispers of severe beatings. The wire cut his fingers, and he was eight years old again, drowning in a nightmare.

Sundays were for colorless religious edification. The chaplain and head teacher would stand together in the schoolroom, in front of the lines of restless boys, and one would read a long King James text in a voice as dead and dry as the beetle Jack had found in the corner of his cell. Jack knew two Gods: Meggie’s God who had kept the mens’ hands off him since his arrest, and the angry one in the schoolroom with the big white beard. They were not the same.

Yes, rats covered the place. But boys seemed to get plenty of food. One of Jack’s cellmates disappeared one day, but maybe he’d just been released early. (By the time he returned, nose grossly out of shape and dried blood smeared all around his mouth, Jack had been released.) It was not so bad, then, not counting the handcuffs and cut fingertips and great big loneliness. It was not so bad, then, not counting the crying nights.

They let Jack go with very little ceremony. They returned his clothes to him, sans the money. What was this racket about scars and hell? If this was the Refuge, Jack Kelly could take it.

“What’d it look like?” Race wanted to know the night Jack got back.

“Boxy. Lotsa cells. Lotsa rats. But not too bad.”

“Did you get any cool scars? Like Fox an’ Beanpole and them?”

Jack shifted to face Race on the bed. “Nah. The copper that arrested me, he hit me good. An’... made me take off my clothes.” Race wrinkled his nose. “So I got scared. But after that, they didn’t hurt me no more.”

“So no cool scars?”

“Sorry.”

Race sighed and said nothing. Jack sensed that he’d disappointed him in some way. He flipped over again, his back to Race, but spoke over his shoulder. “‘M glad I’m back.”

Race grunted in response, but Jack thought he might have been smiling.

“Your hair don’t look good all short, y’know.”

“An’ yours ain’t never looked good. Your point?” Jack mumbled.

“Shaddup.”

Jack rolled his eyes and went to sleep. In his nightmares, the purple rings on his wrists never went away. Razors burned his scalp. Guards whistled melancholy tunes while strolling lonely corridors.

Chapter Text

September 1894, Lower Manhattan

“You ever think ‘bout what you wanna do? After this?”

Sarge leaned against the fine railing on the roof, the breeze leafing through his hair. Jack, on his belly, doodled on an old newspaper using a nubby pencil.

“After what?”

“This, kid. Bein’ a newsie. Kloppman ain’t gonna look the other way for me too much longer.” It was true; boys weren’t allowed in the lodging house after eighteen. Though the manager had been known to give the boys several months, give or take, to get their lives in order and plans set in motion, there was only so long they could avoid the inevitable.

Jack looked up, watched him. Sarge’s suntanned hands flexed on the railing, strong, deft. He’d just passed his eighteenth birthday, or so he’d told Jack. Out of decorum, the boys celebrated unknown birthdays on the first of the month with a bite of babka from Jacobi’s.

In the quiet, Sarge whirled to face Jack. His jaw was set.

“I don’t wanna be here no more, Jackie. I wanna see the world. I wanna breathe, maybe.” The words came out like a plea. Jack set his pencil down.

This was not the first time Sarge had spoken of leaving, but this low fervor was new. Jack thought there was a little fear, too.

“Where you wanna go?” The words crept out of Jack’s mouth.

“Anywhere. India. San Francisco.” Sarge rubbed at his eyebrow with a frenetic thumb. “I wanna set sail, get right clear of this city.”

Jack said nothing, just let his fingers trace the sketch on the newsprint. The oil from his hands blurred the lines. An unidentifiable ache thrummed in his belly.

Sarge slid down to sit on the roof, forearms leaning haphazardly off his knees. “Jackie, I’m gonna start as a sailor. I’ll swab the decks, hoist the rigging, do all the stuff no one wants to do. And I’m gonna wait, and I’ll travel everywhere. And then I’ll get older, maybe find me an island girl, marry her.” Sarge’s eyes flashed, dark in the afternoon sun. “I’m gonna get my own ship and be captain someday.”

Jack could see it, torn from the comics they sold in the five and dime store. White beaches, salt-spray surf, the freedom to go and do and be. The ache in him pulsed, widened. He stared up at the sky until the brightness swallowed him up.

“Jackie?” Sarge’s arms were neatly at his sides now. “Everything good?”

Jack tore his gaze from the sun and looked in what he hoped was Sarge’s direction. He nodded faintly, smiling.

***

Friday nights were usually busy. Weekend headlines would come fresh, the boys knew, but they stayed out well past sundown anyway, trying to sell the rest of their papers before the coming morning rendered them obsolete. Lodging house shuttered at ten o’clock, though, and the boys piled in this hot June evening. Race hadn’t come home, and Kloppman locked up without him. Jack’s skin felt crawly with anxiety.

He slept with the window ajar.

1:37 A.M. A volley of gravel bit into Jack’s face, grit chunky in his eyes, and he shook himself awake. Race was at the window, kneeling on the fire escape.

“Lemme in,” he whispered. Jack sat up and squinted into the darkness.

“Racer, what the hell?” He unlatched the window and Race tumbled in.

Up close, Race wasn’t a pretty sight. Someone had bashed his face up good – given him a split lip, gashed cheek, and the cherry beginnings of a black eye.

“What happened to you?”

“Worse under the shirt,” Race replied grimly. “Spot me for a bandage?”

Jack tore a strip of fabric from the hem of his shirt and handed it over; Race wrapped it tourniquet-tight around his ribs, and Jack glimpsed flashes of watercolor bruising.

“Who did it?”

“Some big guys at the races.” Jack’s mouth popped open, and Race held up a finger. “I know, I know, but it’s a good gig.” He fiddled with the bandage for a moment longer before thrusting his hand into the pocket of his knickers and producing a thick cigar. “Hey, look what I found on the grounds. Fella only used up a bit. Smoke it with me tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Jack mumbled, or maybe thought, because he was so tired. He lay back down, pressing his face into his arm. For a guy who’d just taken a nasty beating, Race’s spirits sure weren’t dampened.

“I’m gonna be the youngest guy to fix a race ever,” Jack heard him say, dimly, above his head. “G’night, Jack.”

“G’night.”

***

“Hey, greeners.” The voice came from inside the wire-thatched distribution booth. Jack glanced at the three scrawny kids who flinched in response: their newest recruits, Albert, Henry, and a tawny-haired one who simply called himself Finch.

“They ain’t got guts enough to scare a cat,” a second voice said, audibly. There were two boys in that booth, and both wore porkpie hats. Jack’s head swiveled once, twice. It had been a year, and the caps were larger, but he remembered the taste of the ground and the laughter threaded through their savagery.

Henry, the littlest, looked no older than seven, and his eyes were bright with tears. He folded his arms around himself, making himself tinier.

Jack shouldered his way to the front of the line, hooked his fingers into the wire mesh, and rattled it hard.

“Scared to say it to their face ‘less you’re safe back here?”

The newsboys around him went quiet. The two boys in the booth mumbled to one another. Jack rattled the mesh again.

“Come out. I double-dog dare you.”

More mumbling. Then the back gate opened and the taller boy stepped out.

Jack had, perhaps, marginally underestimated the boy’s height. He was probably a full head shorter than this kid. Fear trickled down the back of his neck. He drew himself up and puffed out his chest.

“Pansy,” the boy snarled.

“Soc,” Jack replied, calmly.

Without warning, the boy lashed out and struck Jack in the face. Jack reeled, stumbled backwards, drunk on the pain. A collective groan rose from the crowd of boys, but as if stayed by invisible ropes, none of them lifted a finger.

Instinct and anger dug fangs into Jack’s mouth, where he’d been hit. The next blow he anticipated, dodged, sank his fist into the boy’s soft solar plexus.

The world tunneled, and Jack bruised his knuckles on the boy’s body, and when the haze cleared he found he was straddling the kid with a fist drawn back in the air. Blood spurted from the boy’s nose, and his eyes were narrowed not in fear, but in rage. Jack felt suddenly ill. Wordlessly, he climbed off the boy and shoved his way back through the whispering crowd, hardly noticing the starry-eyed way the three newcomers looked at him.

Race ran to follow him.

“What was that?”

“I dunno.”

“D’you know who those guys were?”

“Who cares?”

Race grabbed Jack’s arm, forcing him to stop and turn. His eyes were alight with glee.

“That was Oscar Delancey you went and did up. An’ his brother Morris. You know Weasel?” Sure, Jack knew him. Mr. Wiesel, Santa Claus for the orphan kids. Fat, mean as dirt, sold the boys their papers every day.

“What about him?”

“He’s their uncle, nitwit. They started with him today.”

Uh-oh.

Jack looked back. Oscar had reentered the booth, head tilted back, one hand pinching his nose shut. Some of the newsboys were audibly jeering.

Despite the slow inpouring of dread, a fierce, drowsy feeling of satisfaction permeated Jack’s chest.

“Are you even listening?” Race’s tone made Jack startle.

“Uh-huh.”

“I said,” Race repeated imperiously, “you got a damn good right hook. But next time you fly off the handle, make sure it ain’t anyone important.”

True to Race’s warning, Jack did indeed face the consequences for his guff. Wiesel refused to sell to him for a full week, and he was forced to visit distribution booths further away, cutting into his selling time and quantity. Hunger returned again, not enough to threaten, but enough to scrape at his insides like some many-clawed thing. It was all right. Jack had made friends with the wild animal in his stomach.

Whenever he remembered that morning, he remembered the all-consuming focus and acidic joy. He tried not to think of it, but it came back, a canker sore unexplored. The blood, he told himself, trying to conjure up the whining nausea. But all that returned to him was the warm fizzle and Oscar’s eyes, dark with suppressed rage and the promise of retribution.

Chapter Text

December 1894
Lower Manhattan

Early December, Sarge found a job as a sailor aboard the James W. Baldwin, and the fever happiness was eating him alive. Jack watched, drowning in the shadow.

The night before he left, he drew Jack aside.

“Got you somethin’.”

The something was presented in due course, with little ceremony and no wrapping. It was a sketchbook, bound with gilt trim, and the paper was thick, creamy. Jack’s breath caught in his throat. Surely something so luxurious had cost a fortune.

“Like it?” Sarge was beaming. Dumbfounded, Jack cracked open the book so he wouldn’t have to look Sarge in the eyes.

“I – gosh–” He didn’t know how to draw, not really. Where had Sarge gotten it into his head that he did?

“Listen, kid. We’re gonna write, yeah? Once a week. You’re gonna draw me all the stuff that goes on here, like Tommy Boy an’ Beanpole, an’ Race sharpin’ cards. And every time you take down a Delancey–” he tapped the paper – “right here. Got it?”

Jack nodded, unable to speak.

“Be a big man for me, huh? I gotta know someone is able to watch ‘em all. And just between you and me? Beanpole ain’t it, he ain’t got the sense God gave a pigeon.”

Jack offered a watery smile. Sarge’s hand came down solid, warm, on his shoulder.

“You’re a good kid, Jackie,” was the last thing he said before going to bed.

The next morning, Sarge’s cot was empty and his things were gone. Aptly, it was raining, so no customers could see the tear tracks on Jack’s face.

He’d never been much for goodbyes.

***

June 1895
Randall’s Island

It was Racer’s bright idea, of course. And it was simple, too: lift the bare essentials from local shops, cross the water, get in, get out. No one need know they’d ever been.

Stealing food and clothes was easy enough. Race, it seemed, had been born with sticky fingers, and Jack had known his fair share of desperation. Deftly, they trundled hand pies and mittens alike into empty newspaper bags.

The ferry was another question. There was one located at the Little Hell Gate channel, through which Jack had been taken, but this would arouse suspicion. Besides, no one was operating them in the dead of night.

Instead, they borrowed a skiff from Jojo’s father’s boss, who ran a tackle shop. (“Borrow” being a strong word, but they were going to give it back. Eventually. When they could.)

The morning of the fateful day, Race woke with a fever and sore throat. Jack took one look at his red face and bright eyes and ordered him back to bed.

Jack went alone that night.

Randall’s Island was further than he’d thought. The muscles in his arms burned as he rowed ever further out into the glossy, dark water. The night was still. Jack’s pulse tattooed his throat.

Take care of ‘em, Sarge said, voice grave and gentle all at once.

Jack anchored the skiff on the shore and went to find the Refuge.

Half an hour later, he’d crawled up the fire escape, bags bulky on his frame. It was cold out here, and his knees were bruising on the steel. But the boys were there, startled up from sleep, flocking to their cell windows.

“Shh, I brought this, share ‘em – share ‘em–” Jack whispered, passing the food and clothing through the bars. The hands that rose to intercept were fragile, birdlike; the boys scarfed the pastries, eyes wide, cheeks like those of chipmunks. The mittens were hidden away inside pillowcases.

Thank you, they whispered to him, eyes liquid.

One little boy grabbed his hand when he tried to pass a muff through.

“Please don’t go.”

Jack stared at him – every terrified angle of his face, the curls, the tininess. He watched Rory die again and himself alone, starving. He hesitated too long.

“My, my.”

Jack flung himself against the bars, heart galloping. Behind him, in the cell, the boys threw themselves back on their beds, tunneled under the sheets.

The man Jack recognized as Snyder was on the stairs, arms folded, smiling.

“Jack Kelly, a common thief, as I live and breathe.”

He could make it, he could run. Jack bolted down the other side of the fire escape and promptly into the arms of a night guard. They’d been waiting for him.

Hands closed on his arms, slid down his chest, down his stomach. Jack squeezed his eyes shut, body wound tight. “Please.” Soft laughter trickled into the night. Snyder strolled beside them, tapping two fingers on his gold timepiece. A pulse. A bomb, throbbing.

From the third and fourth floors, the boys watched through the bars as the guards forced Jack through the iron-scrolled gate and into the depths of the prison.

They’d put handcuffs on him, his arms in front of him, and these cuffs had a chain attached that one of the guards held. The man walking beside Jack had a handlebar mustache, and the one who had Jack on a leash was fat and chuffed a cigar. Snyder brought up the rear of the little procession.

“Do tell us,” Handlebar started, “why you chose to grace us with your presence tonight.”

“You’re starvin’ them.” Jack’s voice came out faint but fiery. Smoke yanked on the chain, and Jack lurched forward.

“And so you chose to traffic stolen goods and clothing?”

Jack didn’t respond immediately; another yank, another stumble. “Yes, sir.”

They’d reached an officelike room with a desk, a single lightbulb, and a hook in the ceiling. Jack wasn’t at all sure they weren’t below ground – the walls seeped moisture, and he heard dripping water somewhere.

He tried, very hard, not to stare at the rusty-looking drain on the floor.

Snyder steepled his fingers and smiled unpleasantly at Jack. “You, Mr. Kelly,” he said, “are about to learn where a life of thievery leads. Mr. Evans, why don’t we show our guest how we deal with those who resist careful guidance?”

Jack swallowed.

Briefly, Smoke removed his handcuffs, only to strip off Jack’s shirt. The cold wrapped around him suddenly, viciously; he shivered like a rabbit. The soft laughter began again.

The cuffs went back on, and suddenly, the panic jolted into Jack’s limbs. He thrashed out with his bound hands, all streetfighting elegance lost, and both Smoke and Handlebar threw their weight into wrangling his arms up, over his head, looping the chains up to the hook in the ceiling.

It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream.

His shoulders flexed, stiffened, the full weight of his body suspended. The tips of his boots brushed the floor, and the swoosh in his stomach echoed the emptiness around his ankles. Nausea from the swinging infused the crevices of his mind, and he scrunched his eyes shut yet again, breathing hard through his nose.

“My, don’t you look pretty.” One of the men ran a finger along the line of Jack’s bare shoulder, chuckling as Jack thrashed and bucked.

“Quit fooling, Evans,” came Snyder’s voice.

Jack heard someone rummaging through a drawer, heard the lightning crack through the air. He flinched, hard, arms trembling. Lightning-crack again.

“Quit fooling, Evans,” Snyder repeated, sharper this time.

If God had ever listened to his prayers, Jack figured He’d stopped a long time ago. So, instead, he prayed to Mary. His lips worked feverishly over the words, weight heavy in his shoulders, body a lesson in exquisite anatomy.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

“Twenty for the brat.” Jack opened his eyes just in time to see Evans roll up his sleeves, cigar still dangling from his lips. In his hand rested a slender five-tailed whip.

Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

The first lash sizzled across Jack’s exposed back. He shut his eyes against the vicious pain, the muscles cording, knotting. A second followed, criss-crossing in lines of fire. It was getting so much harder to breathe.

Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Five. Eight. Eleven. He whimpered, at first, sweat coating his forehead. Thirteen. Fourteen. The cries were torn from his mouth now, and blood dribbled down his back. Sixteen. Seventeen. Twenty.

For the first time in years, he wanted Meggie. He couldn’t remember a life without the burning stripes on his back. Please, God, please. He wanted Meggie.

It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream.

They let him down, allowed him to crumple onto the ground, bloody, twitching. Above him, Snyder grunted his disgust.

“What do you want us to do with him?” Handlebar asked.

“Leave him be. He’ll live.”

Jack gritted his teeth and curled in on himself, on the biting animal entrenched in his flesh. He would live, he thought grimly. He always did.

Heavy boots thundered on the floor, and his shirt fluttered down beside him. The door clicked shut, and keys jangled in the lock. Footsteps receded.

Jack let himself sob, then, quietly, muffling the sound in his shirt. He was alone. He was alive.

Amen.

Chapter Text

July 1895
Randall’s Island

Building wire traps, it turned out, wasn’t the only thing Jack was good for. He’d gotten strong, strong for a fourteen-year-old. His voice had deepened, his shoulders broadened. They put him on hard labor.

Ever since the cold summer night when he stained the concrete floor, he’d become watchful, cautious. He didn’t run his mouth – the lashes on his back stung too long for that. Comply, and he’d be out within three months.

So when Snyder called him into his office about a month into his sentence, Jack didn’t understand. He’d kept his head down, tilled the damn soil until his muscles turned to stone, never looked the guards in the eyes. So what could have possibly earned him a summons to Snyder’s office?

“Kelly. Enjoying your stay?” Snyder asked.

Jack looked up, startled. The guard at his side slapped the back of his head, and he quickly returned his gaze to the floor, if only the floor would quit sliding around. He wasn’t getting as much food now, or maybe it was that he just needed more what with digging in the dirt all day, but it was all right, really it was.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. How are the accommodations? Food to your liking?”

Jack couldn’t tell if he was being sardonic, but the morning’s rations had consisted of watery gruel and a leather-tough hunk of bread. The kid a row down had yelled something about a maggot.

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. Now, business. I suppose you’re wondering why I called you in?”

“Yes, sir,” Jack repeated, refusing to fall for any planned trap, any trick to get him to confess preemptively. Surely Snyder didn’t know how he’d slipped his gruel-softened piece of bread to a skinny, freckly kid that morning. It had to be something else.

“I’m starting a new venture. So many of you boys are fine, strong lads with so much energy. You can work like a dog and it only makes you prettier.” He flashed very white teeth at Jack. “So I’m giving you a proposition, and I’d like you to consider carefully. It comes with its rewards, you know.”

He rose, his paunchy frame rattling the desk. “You fight, twice a week, with one of the other ragamuffins. My colleagues come for the view. It’ll turn a good amount, and if you do as I say – maybe you’ll get a nice place to stay. Steak. Flowers with your morning coffee.”

Jack raised his head and stared hard at him, trying to divorce the facetious from the true even as his stomach flip-flopped.

They wanted him to fight. Other kids. Like a dog. Like a prizefighter.

“Do I even get the choice, Mr. Snyder?”

Jack’s guard backhanded him, hard, and his head snapped to the side. He’d been sort of expecting it. Snyder strolled out from behind his desk and over to Jack, his gait leisurely, gold watch fob glittering out of his pocket.

“Oh, Kelly. Mr. Kelly. You pretty little brat.” Snyder was entirely too close, and Jack instinctively tried to step back, but the guard held him firm. Snyder’s index finger traced his jawline, the corner of his mouth, slipped up into his curls. “That you should be so honored.” His hand tightened in Jack’s hair and pulled his head back, painfully. Jack gritted his teeth, chin tilted up, staring coldly back at Snyder.

“First match is on Friday,” Snyder breathed, fingernails digging into Jack’s scalp. Abruptly, he released him, rubbing his hands on his waistcoat. He returned to his desk and nodded to Jack’s guard before adding, “And you’re going to win.”

***

Friday night came far too quickly. The lobby was wholly transformed, wooden benches dragged in from the mess hall, crystal shot glasses on trays, a white circle rendered in heavy chalk on the ground. Jack knew because he, and the other older boys, were made to prepare it.

At six o’clock, Snyder’s guests came filing in. Portly, thin, taffy-tall, miniature – all wore crisply ironed suits and dark porkpies. The common denominator? Gold pocketwatches and flammable eyes.

Jack was told to get changed, upon which he was given a pair of linen shorts and nothing else. It was July, and the roiling anxiety masked any residual cold, but he felt vulnerable standing there, all bare torso and coltish legs. The whip marks on his back had scabbed over nicely, but that didn’t mean he wanted strange eyes on them.

At seven, he was handcuffed, brought barefoot, trembling, into the ring. The men whispered behind their hands, and he caught their words only in snatches.

So young.
Not much meat on his bones.
Wonder if they’re loaning him out for… personal use.

Their smiles gleamed electric under the bright lights. Jack breathed quickly, shallowly, as his opponent was brought out: a brawny specimen of about sixteen.

Glasses clinked, amber liquid sloshing inside. Bills crept from hand to furtive hand. And the bell chimed for blood.

Quickly, Jack learned that his opponent was all size and no skill. He sidestepped easily, flirting with danger, dodging and feinting and lashing out with the force born of regularly crushing Delanceys into the ground. The world tunneled into measured breath and quick reflexes and fire spurting across his knuckles.

One final uppercut knocked to the older boy to the floor, and he didn’t get up.

Dazed, Jack stood over his inert body, swaying slightly, chest rising and falling. There was a roar in his ears, and he wasn’t sure if the thunder was the crowd of men or the swirling of his own heartbeat. Something warm and sticky tickled his upper lip, and his knuckles had a starry numbness about them.

Snyder climbed into the ring and grabbed Jack’s wrist, throwing it high into the air. The men were the roaring ones, now. Jack’s hand was held high above his head like it had been that dark summer night, and he looked at the boy’s body the whole while, feeling only revulsion.

He shut out the next few moments – the moments when Snyder put the handcuffs back on and dragged him out so the men could see him, touch him, slide silky hands over his skin. Here, he wasn’t Jack Kelly or Frankie Sullivan, he was their pet fighter. All the while, Snyder pocketed bill after bill.

Shot glasses sloppy with liquor were thrust into Jack’s face, and a sickness filled his stomach. He ran, eight years old, to fill his father’s flask. Be a good boy, Frankie. And then the decay, and the prayers, and the too-late promises. No, Jack had killed his father, fed him the poison from his own soft hands.

He held up a hand now, declining, nauseous.

Snyder’s nails dug into Jack’s arm, and his warm breath curled around his ear. “Drink it, boy.”

Jack’s eyes fluttered closed, then open, and he slowly took the crystal glass. The man watched him as he raised it to his lips, gulped it down.

He didn’t know what kind of alcohol it was, but it burned his throat violently and left a trail of warmth all the way down to his stomach. The man clapped him on the back, and he coughed; Snyder jerked him away, away from the crowd, back down the lonely corridors and into his office.

“Good job, Kelly.”

Jack stared at him blankly. His hands were aflame now, and he wanted his clothes, and his skin was still crawling with the phantom touch. Oh, and he was definitely, definitely going to hell now for drinking the communion of his father’s death.

“You’ll receive double rations and a private cell. Your performance tonight was satisfactory.”

Solitary and an extra serving of maggoty bread. God. Anger fizzled in Jack’s lungs, but he was tired, so tired. “Please, Mr. Snyder.” He sucked in a breath. “Please don’t make me drink no more.”

Snyder’s eyes narrowed. “You’ll drink, boy, and you’ll like it.” He studied Jack for a long moment. “Next round is in four days, and this time, you’re going to lose.”

Chapter Text

July 1895
Randall’s Island

Despite Snyder’s promise, Jack suffered.

The extra rations lasted all of two days, stale bread that Jack gagged down, rinsing his throat out with cold water. His cell was quiet, lonely, dark. And then the real work began.

With just two days to go until his next fight, he found himself assigned to the most fatiguing manual labor. He shoveled dirt till his hands wept – blisters ballooning and rupturing over his palms – strained his legs and back by lifting slabs of concrete, collapsed under the lashes of the vicious foreman. He worked dawn to dusk, stumbling back into his silent cell each night, gulping down the dry bread and desperately slopping gruel into his mouth.

Snyder didn’t pay him any visits, but his parting words echoed around the groaning emptiness in Jack’s head: This time, you’re going to lose.

But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. The lashes on his back stung all over again, burning strips of fire, and he knew this: he wouldn’t lose.

He didn’t lose.

He felled the boy pitted against him with heavy blows. His knuckles split, hurt like hell, and his body was slower – it took longer to react, to move, his legs weighed down as though they were tied with sandbags – but he fought hard, savagely, laid that boy out at his feet.

He looked straight at Snyder when he did it, and that night, he paid for it.

“I told you to lose, boy,” Snyder said, the confines of his office inhaling and devouring Jack, inch by inch. Jack’s breath came loose and shapeless; he stood there, wrists chained together, guard standing at his side. He was ready to face whatever Snyder wanted of him. “Why didn’t you obey?”

This was a good question, and one to which Jack didn’t really know the answer. Why? He didn’t want to be that broken body on the floor, stepped upon, bloody hatches on his face. Why? He wasn’t a dog. Why? He wanted to taste the bitter tang of victory again.

“Answer me, boy.” Snyder’s lips slipped up at the corner to reveal his terrifically bright teeth.

“I dunno, Mr. Snyder. Sir.”

Snyder approached him slowly, paused before him, contemplating. “This won’t happen again, will it, Kelly?”

Jack gritted his teeth. Think. “I – I can’t rightly say. Sir.”

Darkness, something soft and imperceptible, crossed Snyder’s eyes. Annoyance, like a cow slapping flicked-tail at a nibbling fly. And then it was gone. “That’s quite all right.” He stepped closer, again, one hand blooming open on Jack’s chest. “We’ll make sure you lose next time.”

His breath, Jack thought dimly, smelled like crushed mint.

“No rations, and you won’t be permitted to sleep, not until you show me you’ve earned it.” Snyder’s mouth touched the curl of Jack’s ear. Jack swallowed. “Rest is a privilege, Mr. Kelly. I don’t think you understand that.” He nodded to the guard. “Take him back to his cell.”

Whatever happened to complying? Jack thought ruefully.

They stationed guards to swap shifts within his cell, directing him to kneel on the concrete, motionless. About two hours in, he dozed off, and the slap to his face was instant, brutal. His knees bruised, bit into the ground, began to swell. He knelt there all night, praying that the guards would stay put, wouldn’t touch him.

They slapped him awake more times than he could count on his fingers. His cheek purpled. He wouldn’t cry. He didn’t cry.

In the morning, when they told him to stand, he couldn’t get up. They had to drag him to his feet, ignoring the way he cried out, legs buckling like deadweight underneath him. And in the evening, he took the punishment on his face and body, crumpling in the center of the ring after just one round, laid out like a moth-eaten floorcloth. Another boy had his arm raised in victory, pink circles around his wrists where handcuffs had been just a moment ago.

At least the ground chilled the wounds on Jack’s face. At least the liquor dulled the pain.

They permitted him to spend a whole day sleeping off the hangover, locked in his cell. He received very little food, but he didn’t notice; the sickness and stupor fogged over his consciousness.

On the next day, keys jangled in the lock and a guard entered the cell. “Wakey, wakey, Kelly.” His nightstick swung casually by his side. Jack moaned and pulled his thin blanket over his head; a hand gripped the blanket, yanked it back down. Light flooded into Jack’s miserable world.

“Gotta get up. Snyder wants you for tonight’s fight.”

Jack closed his eyes, exhaustion funneling through his core. “I can’t. Sir. I can’t,” he mumbled. The light hurt his head. “I can’t.”

The guard chuckled. “Bash your brains up too? He don’t want you to fight. He just wants you on cleanup crew.” No response from Jack. The guard banged his nightstick on Jack’s cot; Jack flinched. “Get up, now.”

Jack spent the afternoon on his bruised, swollen knees, scrubbing the concrete with frothy soap and a horsehair brush, trying desperately to rid it of the dark stains. He re-chalked the circle, arranged the opulent crystal glasses on their trays, roped off sections of seating with velvet stanchions. His whole body shrilled with pain. It was all he could do to keep his mouth shut.

Seven o’clock approached, and Jack was brushed behind the ring with a few other cleanup boys, directed to stand and wait at attention for further instruction. He shifted in his work clothes, the crude homespun rough on his sore back.

The first boy was brought out, a man, though only just; Jack wagered he was about eighteen, and lithe. Not that Jack cared what he looked like, but if they let him get back in fighting shape again, they might pit them together, and he might as well size him up and look for tells while he stayed out of the ring.

The second boy emerged, and Jack’s breath caught in his throat. He was tiny, freckled, with cowlicked blond hair; he couldn’t have been older than twelve. His eyes were overlarge in his head. From the way he was shaking, he was obviously terrified.

Before Jack, the men spread like glittering ants, light reflecting in the cut crystal, suits tailored, hands manicured. Their murmurs were chiffon in the sodden air; cigar smoke curled and stank. And then the bell chimed, and the dogs were let loose to play.

The littler boy was good at dodging, Jack gave him that. He was quick on his feet, ducking under the bigger one’s vicious swings, but it was all desperate footwork, no offense. He tired quickly, responses growing slower and slower. The bigger boy caught him on the chin with a swinging fist, and he went down. The bigger boy hesitated, looked out at the swarm of men, consulting about how much punishment to dole out.

They screamed for blood.

Oh – Jack threw a hand over his own mouth. The littler boy had staggered to his feet, thrown a small fist in the direction of the bigger one’s solar plexus. The older one turned and caught his fist, stopping the trajectory with ease. Jack’s heart sank.

A guard, already drunk, tossed one of Snyder’s metal interrogation chairs into the ring. Where he got it, Jack wasn’t sure. The bigger boy, one hand wrapped around the little one’s throat, saw it, paused. He looked at Snyder for silent help. The men shouted in one overlapping cacophony.

Snyder shifted his waistcoat to reveal his glittering watch fob, and, in the pocket, the edges of a fat stack of bills.

The bigger boy threw the little one to the ground, grabbed the chair, and – Jack opened his mouth to scream – brought it down hard, loud. One of the metal legs pierced the little boy’s calf straight through. The kid cried out, a long, wailing sound. Jack retched. But the victory light was ferocious in the bigger boy’s eyes – oh, Jack recognized it miserably – and he wasn’t done. The chair was his salvation.

The world was suddenly silent as he beat the little boy with the chair, slamming into the kid’s stomach and back. Finally, the little boy stopped moving. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

Seeing red, Jack leapt over the stanchions, dashed into the ring. He had no plan, no clear thoughts, nothing in his head but molten fury, fury so concentrated it was nausea. He threw himself at the older boy, adrenaline shutting off the pain in his body, raining blows down on him hard, harder than he’d ever hit anyone in his whole life.

The guards were yelling, the men were yelling, Snyder was yelling. Hands pulled him off the stumbling, crimson-flecked boy. Above him, the stars spun sugary and bright. The whole world was drunk.

***

Jack woke in the night. Every nerve ending in his body felt aflame – his knuckles, his knees, his grotesquely bloodied face. Someone had dressed him in his issued uniform again, and in doing so, had removed his shorts and oh, God, changed his underthings. Instinctually, he knew it had been Snyder, though he could not remember the touch. Had they sedated him?

He twisted onto his stomach and was sick on the floor.

When his throat stopped burning from the acid, he peered through the darkness. Someone shifted on the ground a few feet away. Some vindictive guard had taken their cots.

“Hey.” Jack’s whisper scraped into the quiet. He was greeted by a sniffle. “Hey, kid.”

It was the little boy who’d fought and fallen in the ring. He was curled awkwardly on the ground, hugging the floor. He moaned softly.

Jack pushed himself up on his hands, crawled the few feet over by dragging himself on his elbows. His whole body was a lit torch. “Hey, kiddo.”

“Please,” the little boy begged, breath coming in shallow gulps. “Please help me.” He twisted on the ground, and Jack watched him reach for his bloodied leg in the darkness. “I can’t feel my leg.” His breath hitched, a watery hiccup, ever closer to hysteria. “I can’t feel my leg.”

Fear settled in Jack’s stomach. “Shh. Shh.” He pulled the little boy into his lap, making sure he was comfortable, running fingers through his damp hair. “You’re gonna be okay.”

The boy buried his face in Jack’s shirt, crying weakly. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.”

Jack held him tighter, wondering just what the hell to do. What would Sarge do? Did Sarge ever land in a cell with a kid who couldn’t feel his damn leg? Great loneliness spilled over the surf, closing over Jack’s head. He surfaced, breathing, fighting.

“You got a name, kid?”

The boy hiccuped again.

“Charlie.”

“Well, Charlie.” Jack held him in the dark, carding fingers through his hair, the weight resting in his arms. “My guys call me Jack. I’m a newsie. You know what a newsie is?”

He felt Charlie nod against his chest.

“I hawk all the papes, morning to night. Ain’t so bad – you get the sky and the stars so it don’t get so lonely. But someday, I’m gonna move out West. Maybe I’ll be a cowboy. With them lassoes and horses and things.”

Jack had only ever seen a picture of the Wild West once, in a poster on the side of a brothel. Beautiful Painted Ladies, the poster read, with a stylized picture of a buxom barmaid, cacti and desert stretching out behind her. He hadn’t given it much thought. But now, holding this bleeding little boy, he figured he needed to talk, talk of good things, big things. Little kids didn’t know you were fibbing. Little kids didn't care. Jack spoke slowly, hypnotically.

“And just as soon as we get outta here, Charlie, you’re comin’ back with me. I’ll show you all the good sellin’ spots. Race’ll take a shine to you, he likes anyone who don’t try to whoop him. And –”

Charlie’s body had become very heavy in his arms, and his breathing was slower, softer. He’d left a trail of dark blood where Jack had picked him up. The pain shrilled around Jack again, and he bowed his head, cradling the other boy closer, succumbing to uneasy sleep.

Chapter Text

September 1895
Lower Manhattan

When Jack crossed through the lodging house, Charlie slung on his back, he couldn’t see that Charlie’s eyes were buttoned tight against the color and sound. And it was just as well, because Jack kept up an endless stream of chatter about Race and how he got himself gently banned from the Central Park Casino in just half an hour.

Charlie’s leg hadn’t gotten infected, thanks to Jack’s meticulous bandaging and dressing. Jack had taken over Charlie’s work detail as well, wearing himself down, muscles practically pellucid, so the littler boy wouldn’t die from exhaustion. The wound in his calf closed and healed, and he was ambulatory in about two weeks, on the mend except for one thing: he couldn’t feel anything in his leg from the hip down.

Crips were good newsies, not good prisoners.

The guards quickly discovered Charlie’s condition. They’d take his food at mealtimes, hold it up over his head. Jump, boy. Jump for your dinner. And the most pathetic thing, Jack thought, was that Charlie tried. He was just a kid, after all. Jack spent the rest of his sentence slipping Charlie half his own portions of food at mealtimes.
Now, in the lodging house, the boys flocked to him, looking, grinning, touching. Jack summoned an easy smile, adjusted the seams so it slouched on his face, but their fingerprints were vicious soft hands and peppermint breath and being stripped naked under amber lightbulbs.

Charlie clung to him, mute, soft.

“Fellas, fellas.” Jack held up a free hand, trying to force oxygen into his body, trying to shoulder back to his old bunk. In the crowd, he saw familiar faces – Albert, Fox, mouthy old Beanpole – and a smattering of new ones. Young ones. Kids who didn’t know that the fat cats played dirty.

Dirty. Dirty. Dirty.

He couldn’t look at any of his boys, couldn’t see their giddiness unpolluted. He dropped Charlie off on his own bed, rapidly recruited Henry to watch and befriend him, and ducked past the outstretched hands, open mouths, begging eyes.

“Kelly–”

“Jack!”

“Good to have you back!”

“Jackie–”

He ran.

The fire escape groaned under his weight. He took the steps two at a time, bounding up, forever up, dragging gravity with him. The looping scrolls of iron were suspiciously brittle under his hands. The sky broke into his open lungs.

Jack blinked rapidly, though no tears came. How had he gotten here? He tasted his chapped lips. Now all the boys would know something was wrong. He rocked back and forth on his heels, vaguely remembering Charlie on his bed. He shouldn’t have left. He needed to leave.

He got up to go back down, but his body stayed right where it was. Fine by him. He could live up here. He needed to leave.

Slowly, Jack slid down onto the roof, hugging his knees. Salty breeze came in from the docks. He thought he could smell the fish, hear the seagulls cry. Never mind he was twenty minutes away from the coast, because he was there, he was, he was. He closed his eyes; tears seeped out from under his eyelids, and he smudged them fiercely away.

He stayed like that, body turned to silt and stone, for God knew how long, praying to nothing at all.

Behind him, the fire escape creaked. He stiffened, muscles taut in his jaw and throat. They knew not to come up here. They knew.

“The little kid you dumped here is just dandy, thanks for askin’,” came Race’s voice. “Cried like a baby, then Fox gave him an orange and he calmed right down. What’s with the gimp leg?”

Jack turned to look at him and didn’t reply. Race held a bucket half full with sudsy water, having sloshed half of it on himself on the way up, from the looks of things. He set the bucket down and joined Jack.

“C’mon, can’t have both’a you mute. That ain’t fair.”

Jack stared at him.

“C’mon, then, shirt off.”

“What?” Jack blurted, then clamped his mouth shut. Race’s eyes lit up.

“He speaks!” He sobered, softened, dipping a hand into the water and then shaking it out. “I know you ain’t good. You were walkin’ funny the second you came in here. So,” he repeated calmly, “shirt off.”

Silently, Jack obeyed. He unbuttoned his waistcoat, slipped out of his thin flannel undershirt, pulling the fabric over his head, over the nastiest of the scarring and bruises.

He knew Race tried to keep quiet when he saw. He also knew Race had sucked in the oxygen sharp between his teeth, the way he’d done the time he and Jack saw the decaying tomcat in the alleyway.

There it is. Feast your eyes. Ain’t nothin’ you ain’t seen before.

“Did it hurt?” Race asked softly. Jack raised his head off his knees and forgot his vow of silence.

“You blitherin’ idiot, of course it hurt.”

Race biffed him on his injured shoulder, and he flinched. Water dripped back into the bucket as Race wrung something out over it.

“Okay, cowboy, this is gonna sting. Hold still.”

Cowboy?

The world turned white, as though someone had flashed a camera straight into his eyes. His back seared, leaping into flame.

“God, Race, what’re you–”

“Cleaning. So it don’t get worse. Shut up.”

Prepared this time, Jack felt the wet rag touching his lattice of wounds, sponging away the dried blood, the soap creeping into the open and tender places. He gritted his teeth.

“Kid you drug in said you’re fixin’ to be a cowboy.” The rag pressed harder, and Jack planted both hands on the ground to steady the whirling world. “That so?”

No. Jack didn’t reply.

“I just think you oughta let a fella know if you’re fixin’ to light out, y’know? Or is it just somethin’ with you Irish?”

Anger bubbled up, a hot spring in Jack’s gut, but the water in the bucket was warm. How much had Race paid for warm water?

“I ain’t fixin’ to go.”

“But the kid said–”

“Never mind what the kid said. You don’t know what it’s like in there.” He shrugged off the rag. He could feel Race’s hurt lasering into the back of his head. “You don’t.”

“Because I was a coward, that it? I was too much of a pansy to go with you?”

“I ain’t said that. All I said was you don’t know. So shut up about the kid.”

The silence was loud on the rooftop. Race picked up the rag again and continued washing his back, gentler this time. Guilt was shrapnel on Jack’s soft belly.

“I ain’t never leavin’ you, awright?” he said gruffly.

Not like Sarge.

Race rested his cheek on a non-shredded portion of Jack’s back, tossing the rag back into the bucket with a splash. He didn’t say anything.

“Never.”

Jack was clean, and the water was warm. That was all.

“Plot revenge with me,” Race murmured against Jack.

“For what?”

Race raised his head. “Oscar.”

“Huh?”

Race sat up, body wired and at attention. Even his curls stood on end. “You don’t know? Jack!” He hesitated, then forged on. “Oscar found out about your – our – plan. That night at the Refuge. He tipped off the bulls.”

Oh.

Jack inhaled, realizing, remembering. Every lash, every cry, every night of barefoot and abject terror on the white-chalked ring, was because of Oscar Delancey. That was why they were waiting for him that night on the fire escape. Jack’s hands and feet were suddenly cold.

“I’m gonna kill him,” he whispered. Race smiled, then, in the fading sunlight; he stood up, helping Jack to his feet.

“Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Race helped him dress, gentle on the tender wounds. And they headed back into the lodging house together, Jack pensive, Race triumphant.

Chapter Text

November 1895
Lower Manhattan

Charlie was, as it turned out, a born natural at hawking papes. He hobbled on a makeshift walking stick at first, learning to balance on his good foot, smile intensifying the bigger his fight for equilibrium.

“You could kill someone with that puss,” Race told him one day.

Jack made the mistake of trying to carry his papers for him, just once, the very first day.

“Don’t,” he said, and his eyes were sunless. “Don’t you dare treat me no different from the other guys. I ain’t pitiful that way.” He struggled with the heavy paperbag for a moment longer before finding a comfortable place for it to rest on his body.

Jack let him be.

He needed very little coaching; his freckles and cockeyed foot were bait enough for the droves of cooing, clucking women. Jack realized, after a week, why Charlie had been so firm with him. This treatment was unavoidable, but it would become intolerable if the other boys did it, too. Jack let Charlie struggle. Somehow, he thought, the littler boy needed the fight. He needed to prove he could beat himself and win.

That wasn’t to say he let Charlie’s life stay all hard. Two months into Charlie’s induction, when Jack had just passed his fifteenth birthday, he took scrap wood, sponge, and clean rags, busying himself beaverlike with his new project. Jack answered no questions, only pointing his whittling knife here and there (whether demanding departure, requesting food, or threatening violence, none of the boys were really sure.)

At the end of a fiery three days, in which Jack had eaten approximately eleven apples, gashed his thumb twice, called Henry a communist, and taken a short hiatus to crush Oscar Delancey’s face into the pavement, he was done. The finished product: a small, solid crutch, bound with rags, sanded to softness, and tailored to fit snugly under Charlie’s arm.

He thought, after, that Charlie’s smile could’ve lit a candle, a whole dozen of them. He’d forgotten that the burn in his stomach could be good. Warm.

He was with Charlie every day that week, racing him, selling together, easing him out of the thoughtful, shellacked exterior he adopted when the other boys were around. By the end of the week, Jack’s lying mouth and Charlie’s bona fide gam leg had landed them just over four whole dollars. Race had accrued that much in debt at the same time, but that was all right, because he stole hearts and cufflinks indiscriminately.

But Race caught Jack one evening on the rooftop, bouncing a used cigar on his lips, hands fluttering to and fro like a pale butterfly.

“Didja know Beanpole’s leavin’?”

Jack looked up from his money tin, where he stashed the few pennies he saved. “No. Where’s he-”

“Didja know Dutchy’s first grown-up tooth came in?” Race asked blithely, cutting him off. Jack frowned, still thinking about Beanpole.

“No, I-”

“Didja know Al can’t fit his boots no more?”

Jack stared at him. Race turned his cigar over in meditative fingers, watching the lit end like it was the only thing in the world worth seeing.

“Racer.” Jack raised his hands up, placatingly, then set them down again. “Racer, what’s this about?”

“What’s this about?” Race’s left hand flew tangled into his hair, the other gripping the cigar until rivers of pink rippled on his knuckles. “Jackie, you ain’t even seen, ‘cause you ain’t ever here. Your kid don’t need no babysitter, stop kiddin’ yourself.”

Jack blinked. “My kid can’t even walk on his own. And his name is Charlie.”

“Didja even know Mush's birthday was yesterday? Turned eight. We sang to him. Kloppman even dusted off a stick of eatin’ chocolate as old as God. Where were you?”

Oh.

Henry was one of the few who knew his birthday, insisted it was October the twenty-fifth, always a Sunday, though that couldn’t possibly be right. How could Jack have forgotten?

“You weren’t here, Jack. And Charlie don’t need you, and you know it.”

“You don’t know what Charlie needs.” The anger flared up again, the familiar soft burn that Race so graciously eased out of Jack’s bones. And the silence stretched, unspooled.

“Say somethin’,” Race demanded. “Don’t clam up on me now.”

“Ain’t got nothin’ to say to you.” Jack started, faltered, started again. “Except you wouldn’t’ve had none of this without me goin’ and savin’ your a–”

“Oh, there it is.” Race cut him off. “There it is. You just wanna save us all, huh? Gotta go and be the hero?” Jack opened his mouth, but Race was having none of it. “And just when you got ‘em back, nice and clean, you get bored, and you go find somethin’ new.”

Jack stared at him, dumbfounded. No. He wasn’t going to do this, not today, not with Race, of all people. He should’ve just left him pinned to that wall till his face turned purple.

He shouldered past Race, making sure to bang into him, hard, on his way out.

Vaguely, he thought he’d go to the docks, fill his hair with salt and brine. He took all the wrong turns to get there, weaving and looping through alleys, broken open under the wide sky. Weren't the pavements running with his blood? At least, didn't people see he was drunk on the hard knocks? Drunk on life, that was him, but not the good parts, never the good parts. And he'd worked so hard on Charlie's crutch, thought he was making progress with all of them, treating them right, and Race had hated him all along.

He tasted blood. He'd bitten through his lip and there was copper on his tongue.

And then the voice behind him stuck the cobblestone to the soles of his shoes.

“Kelly, cool it, I wanna talk.”

Jack put his head down, hurrying ever faster.

“Get lost, Morris.”

“No. Stop.”

Jack turned around, seething. He didn’t want to split his knuckles on someone’s puss today, especially not someone like Morris Delancey, but God help him, he would if he had to.

Morris slipped off his bowler, and Jack stared.

His hair was short, covered in little curls. Just short enough that the haircut had to have been imposed upon him. Jack knew, because his were that way, too.

“Why’d you help me? In there?”

What? Jack opened his mouth, but for once, nothing came out.

Morris had been in? At all? And Jack had helped him?

“Oscar been givin’ you those fancy cigars? The smoke’s gettin’ to your brain,” he said roughly.

“You gave me food.” Morris’s eyes were flinty. “When I ain’t got none.”

Jack had given food to many boys, all with shaved heads, wearing prison clothes. But Morris? Morris Delancey?

He remembered one skinny kid who’d gulped down Jack’s proffered rations like he was dying. Come to think of it, he probably was. But the face… the face was hopelessly blurred in Jack’s mind’s eye, fuzzy, soft.

“Last year?” Jack blinked, trying to understand. “You?”

Morris nodded, slowly. The baby fat still clung to his cheeks.

“Os tipped off the police about’cha, y’know,” he said conversationally. Jack nodded, surprised that he felt no instinctive bristle of anger. He’d never really spoken with Morris before; Oscar was the brains and mouth of the whole Delancey operation. Morris just existed, softly, quietly, glaringly.

“Yeah, I know.”

“I been in there for a while. Os got worried. Sent me a letter sayin’ he’d make sure someone looked after me.” Morris smiled then, a slow, sunlit grin. “An’ it was you. Don’t’cha remember?”

What?

Jack shook his head. “No. I don’t remember.”

“Oh. S’okay,” Morris said, like he was forgiving Jack for something. He scuffed one shoe on the sidewalk and slid his hat back on over his head, movements chunky, almost lumbering. Jack turned to go.

“Os says you sleep on the roof ‘cause you’re scared.” Morris tipped up his chin, peering at Jack. “That true?”

Jack swallowed. Ever since his return, he’d slept up under the stars because his fists had begun to wander, to itch, to crave the sultry bloodspurt and carbonated adrenaline. The first night, he’d imagined how quickly he could knock Race out in a fight.

He’d terrified himself.

And it definitely didn’t have anything to do with his dreams.

“Shut your piehole, Morris,” he mumbled and started away.

“Truce? For Thanksgivin’?” Morris yelled after him.

Jack rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if you shut up,” he called back. Shaking his head, he kept walking, the thought of Race pulsing through his mind. He wasn’t mad at Race, not anymore. He would be happy if Jack got him something, though, something like the pair of new socks he’d been eyeing in the frosted shop window. God, Race was such a baby.

He chose not to think about Oscar, Oscar and Morris, and he made himself whistle on the way to the department store.

Chapter Text

December 1896
Lower Manhattan

They’d grown, all of them. Beanpole had left the previous winter, striking out as a sandhog, clapping Jack pompously on the shoulder and loudly recommending a sturdy birch rod for the “morally ambivalent”.

“I’ll give him a sturdy birch rod,” Race had mumbled darkly after his retreating figure.

Charlie had gotten taller, developed ever more freckles, discovered that his hair was a little wavy now that it was regularly clean. His voice was in that squeaky adolescent stage, brittle rubber, and the boys ribbed him for it constantly. He slept up with Jack, under the stars, and on the bad nights they slotted their bodies against each other, cradling warmth, blocking out the world.

Race had begun keeping a slender flask of Jack Daniels under his mattress with his favorite Coronas. It was an open secret, but old Kloppman never got wise – Race had dazzling teeth and baby-blue eyes and leveraged them to his advantage on occasions such as these. Jack routinely refused the proffered flask, eyes merry, hands very still.

“Virgin,” Race would quip.

“Glutton,” Jack would retort, and then it would be all right.

For his part, Jack was getting old. Fifteen, tall, terrifically sun-bronzed – the girls came in droves. He liked to look, of course, look at the dolls’ wrists and shiny hair and gigantic beribboned fripperies – but then Race would be chatting at his elbow, or Henry would break his arm, or Fox would need his knickers sewn, and Jack would stop looking.

They’d gotten Jojo that fall – he’d recited his full name in the dining hall, in front of God and everyone, and by the time he’d finished Jack couldn’t remember how it began. So Jojo it was. Another tick on the roster for Kloppman, another comedian-in-arms for Race, another hungry little brother for Jack.

Fall blended into winter; the weather sharpened, whittling itself into blades. The lucky little ones who had mothers at home, who didn’t live in the lodging house, began to wear thick woolen scarves wrapped tightly around their throats. The rest of the boys sank into the necklines of their jackets, lips chapped, noses red.

“Lookit Miss Priss over there,” Race said, jabbing at Jack with a particularly sharp elbow. The boy in question was very little, wearing a very big scarlet scarf. “One gust of wind and he won’t be so high an’ mighty, huh?”

“That’s Elmer, and he just turned six,” Jack replied wearily. “Wouldn’t fit your fat head nohow.”

He dodged Race’s retributive smack.

“Hey, Jackie.” Charlie swung over to Jack in the dining hall one evening. “Gonna be making a little more money from now on. Don’t ‘spect me back for dinner, okay?”

Jack jammed a sewing needle under his fingernail, swore something fierce about Fox’s damn pants, and nodded absentmindedly. “Sure. Be back before Klopp locks up.”

He didn't find out the true nature of Charlie’s newest business venture until about a week later. The weather had softened, albeit only marginally, and the ice on the pavement was worn wet and slick from the traffic. Jack himself had a sore elbow and patchwork of bruising on his rear end from the evil combination of weather and gravity. He’d uttered a few unholy things on the way down, but ever after, he treated the ice with the greatest reverence and lovingkindness.

“Tricks, mister!” The nasal cry cut through the teeming street. “Step right up, test your wit. Guaranteed to read your mind.”

As Race had not suddenly developed psychic powers since Jack had last spoken with him, this was a curious string of phrases. Jack shouldered through the crowd to find Race fanning out a deck of cards with his lockpick fingers. Charlie held up a flipped-over top hat, eyes big and artless.

As Jack watched, a man holding the hand of a little boy approached them. Race chatted animatedly, Charlie beamed, and the man selected a card. Race shuffled the deck, and after some fuss, Charlie produced the card from the top hat. Only – as the man leaned in to see, Race’s fingers slipped around his watchband, deftly unfastening it, and talking all the while.

Jack’s mouth filled with cotton. “Race!”

Race froze and looked up. The watch slipped from his fingers, hurtled to the ground, smashed on the cobblestone.

Oh. Oh, no. No, no, no.

The man stared at the shattered watch, then at Race. Then:

“Constable!” He filled his lungs again. “Constable!”

Jack ran to intercept Race and Charlie just as the cop arrived. Race’s face was milk-white against his freckles, and Charlie breathed like a wounded animal.

“What do we have here, boys?” the officer asked, feeling for his handcuffs.

“Tryin’ to steal my watch!” the man snapped. “Lock ‘em up. Lock ‘em all up, the damn lot–” His little boy was whimpering now, tugging at his arm.

Jack looked from Race to Charlie. He could only save one. Before his eyes, Charlie’s leg was dark with blood, staining the concrete, and he cried. God, I’m so sorry.

“Please,” Jack blurted, “please, sir. I put Charlie up to it.”

“Who?” The officer looked at Jack for the first time, utterly uninterested.

Jack gestured. “Him. I told him to, and he didn’t wanna, but-”

“Jack?” Charlie’s eyes were wide. “What are you doing?”

“-but I made him, sir, take me, please, take me-”

“Jack-”

“Please!” Desperation was curling up Jack’s body in hot tendrils, his chest, his hands, coming out of his eyes.

“Very well. Come with me. And you, too, wise guy,” the officer intoned - this to Race. Satisfied, the man gripped his watch and child (in that order) and shouldered past Charlie, knocking him off balance on his way out.

Jack didn’t look at Charlie as the officer handcuffed him. Would Fox scrape up the wits to sew his own pants? Jack thought dimly.

Behind him, he heard Charlie crying, begging the officer. Please – don’t take him – he’s all I got… Not once, though, did Jack hear him own up to it or offer himself in Jack’s stead. Not that he wanted to hear it.

The prison ride was long, punctuated with Race’s quiet sobbing.

***
December 1896
Randall's Island

They landed in front of the judge, a fat, balding fellow of fifty-odd years.

“Three months,” came the verdict. Fraud, intent to deceive, false representation – mighty big words rolling off the man’s big lips. The boys didn’t know jack about the definitions – only that they’d be in the hellhole for three months. For Race, it was the first time.

Jack slipped into the darkness of the place easily, like putting on an old jacket. Race had gone mute, blue eyes overlarge. They spent the first few days in silence, anonymity, working side by side at their tables, cutting their fingers on the wire, sucking their thumbs. And then.

Then it was a lazy, dust-mote Sunday, sabbath from work. The older boys, in charge of their bodies and willing their minds to shut off, slept for long stretches of time. The littles stayed awake, alert with hunger. Race showed them how to make animal shapes with their fingers, rocked them, sang bawdy songs overlaid with lullaby cadence – Jack was too tired even to object – but even he couldn’t stop the tears.

Jack couldn’t stand the tears.

They cried from hunger, from boredom, from the fear stitched into the makeup of their muscles. And if they didn’t shut up quick, they’d be punished for it, too. Snyder hadn't ever discriminated because they were children.

So Jack called them over that afternoon, let them circle around him.

“Guess what I’m drawing,” he murmured, rubbing at the dust on the floor, dragging his index finger in spirals and whorls. The tears dried salty on the little ones’ faces. He drew, satirizing, pulling the guards’ limbs like taffy and fattening Snyder’s bloat. The kids watched, mesmerized, fingers in mouths, smiles creeping out.

Jack had been stupid; he’d lost himself. The warmth of their small bodies, piled around him like so many puppies, the spell of his own artwork, the weak afternoon sun filtering slanted, spilling on the ground – it was lovely, it was good, it was enough.

The laughter started quietly, from a few brave boys, and then it metastasized, gushing and blooming until the whole cell was ringing with the peals of it. And then, when Jack thought his heart couldn’t be more swollen with pride, the cell door opened, and Jack’s instincts failed him.

Rather than rubbing out the drawings, he flinched, and flinched away from the work. And it was Snyder, Snyder trailed by two guards – wholly unnecessary, Jack thought numbly, a show of force? – and the three of them looked curiously menacing in the weak sunlight.

“What have we here, Kelly?” Snyder asked carelessly, approaching them. “Inciting another riot, this time from the inside?” He chuckled at his own joke.

“He was making some drawings!” one of the little boys blurted, and Jack winced.

“Whatever of?”

This time the boys were quiet. Snyder leaned down, peered at the artwork, recognized his own pince-nez, his own fat stomach.

“Well. Well, then.”

He straightened up; the guards were crisply ironed, paper figures against the bars of the cell. It all happened so quickly. Snyder tilted his chin at Jack, just a tiny jerk, and the guards’ hands closed on him, fixed on his arms, yanked. Snapped.

Fire spurted down his right shoulder, and he heard someone cry out – he had, he realized later – and the floor was horribly hard against his face. The world was a blinding shade of white, and he couldn’t breathe, and someone, Race, was on the floor, shaking him, and rougher hands pulled him up, and he couldn’t stand because he couldn’t see –

They got him to his feet, knees and ankles bent at disjointed angles, head lolling back onto his good shoulder, and just at that juncture, he blacked out.

***

It was dark when he came to. Race was bent over him, carding a hand through his curls, wiping the sweat away from his temples.

“How d’you feel?” he whispered.

Jack shifted, and the fire spurted down his arm again; he stifled the gasp, and it came out as a strangled moan. Race’s jaw set firm, fierce, and his hand stilled.

“Bastards.”

Jack squeezed his eyes shut, trying to magnify Race’s touch in his own mind until it was the only thing worth thinking about. The pain didn’t matter. He could get over the pain. He could. He could.

He tilted his head back, grinding his skull further into the ground, trying to force the whimper down in his throat.

“Hey. Stop that.” Race caught his head, and his voice wasn’t quite as gentle. He shifted Jack’s head into his lap. “Don’t you dare hurt yourself.”

Jack clamped his teeth together, breathing hard through his nose for a few moments. The pain dulled to a horrible ache.

“Virgin,” he whispered, eyes still closed. Race laughed softly.

“Glutton.”

And then everything was all right, even if Jack didn’t sleep that night, even if his shoulder was broken. The boys were safe. Race was safe. It was all right.

Chapter Text

January 1897
Randall’s Island

“Kelly, aren’t you a sight.”

Jack paused, sweat trickling down his temples, and prayed for death.

Weak winter sunlight washed the sky clean, and for some cruel reason, Jack had been assigned to outdoor work detail – broken shoulder and all. So there he was, shirtless, a chain looping between his ankles, and his fractured bones grinding the world into a seething whiteness.

Snyder’s hands prodded serenely at Jack’s chest, then his injured shoulder. Jack swallowed his gasp, but not his flinch; callous triumph flicked across the man’s eyes.

“I suppose you’re tired.”

Jack stared at him. Three hours of shoveling soil and not a single reason for it except the word edification. Snyder studied his clean, smooth fingernails. Jack looked down at his own hands, raw and pink and caked with dirt. “Hungry, too,” Snyder continued.

Jack worked his jaw back and forth, back and forth. It didn’t help that it felt like there was a serrated chasm in his belly.

“Would you care to join me for a bit of lunch in my office?”

Oh, Jack thought he knew what this was about. He wasn’t going to rat out any of the other guys, even if Race had procured contraband cigars, even if Splasher had been bribing the guards into giving him bigger rations. No way would he turn traitor on them.

God, his shoulder hurt.

“No.”

“No?” Snyder did little to conceal his surprise.

“No. Thank you. Mr. Snyder.”

“Very well, boy.” Snyder stuck his hands back into his pockets. “Enjoy your work.”

He walked off, leaving Jack.

Jack labored for another hour and seventeen minutes before the pain in his shoulder ground into sickening fire. He dropped to his knees in the slush and mud. Nobody saw. He must’ve wrenched the fracture.

He threw up a moment later, and his ears rang with his own frailty. Hunger and his screaming shoulder intensified.

The other boys found him soon after, half naked, face down in his own sick. His shoulder was swollen and purple. There was a clean little pleat between his eyebrows, like he’d been stumped on a problem he just couldn’t solve.

Jack woke in the sick ward, shoulder ablaze with heat. Everything was dark, and for a moment, he thought he was still dreaming, unmoored from reality. His wrists were tied down on either side of his body, ankles pinned likewise, and he couldn’t see for anything. Panic leapt into his chest cavity, and he thrashed against the cot.

This, of course, wrenched his shoulder yet again, and he gasped, stilling instantly.

“Lemme out!” he yelled, yanking on his bindings with his good hand. Out of the dark, out of this squeaky cot, out of this room that smelled sweetly of antiseptic and puke. “Lemme out!”

“Hey, cool it, buster,” came an unfamiliar boy’s voice close to him. “Whadja do to get yourself a blindfold, huh?”

Jack lay back, panting, dazed with pain. “A what?”

The kid chuckled. “They got you good. Carried you in squealin’ like a stuck pig, poked you full of sleeping juice. I could’a took you for an embro’dry square.”

Jack did not remember this, which did nothing to help his feelings about the whole situation.

Then: echoing footsteps, and the boy’s jaw snapped shut – Jack heard the click of his teeth – and a door creaked open.

“Kelly.”

Jack squeezed his eyes shut behind the blindfold at the sound of Snyder’s voice. He fought whatever it was that kept him tied to the bed, but to no avail; he lay there, belly-up like a dead fish. Vulnerable.

“Have you given any more thought to our office chat?”

The peppermint smell of Snyder’s breath barely brushed Jack’s face.

“Yes, sir.”

“And?”

“No. Sir.”

There was a rustling sound, and the peppermint smell was suddenly much stronger.

“I suggest,” Snyder whispered, and his voice tiptoed into Jack’s ear, “that you reconsider. Or…” He left the sentence toppling, unfinished.

Jack never had known to keep his mouth shut. It was some obnoxiously stubborn trait that he’d been born with, the need to piss off grown men as badly and as frequently as he could. Some kind of up-yours to the fat guys feeding on the young.

“Or what? Sir?”

There was a silence.

And then, very suddenly, something warm and soft filled Jack’s ear, something insistent and intimate and stinking of peppermint. And, God help him, Jack whimpered, tugging at his restraints.

Snyder stopped, breathing heavily. “Or,” he murmured, and Jack heard him wipe his face, “you and I will have another sort of chat.” Another rustle, and now his voice came from farther away. “Do consider carefully.”

And with that, he left the sick ward, and fear curdled in Jack’s stomach. Cold saliva dribbled down his cheek.

***

Jack was in Snyder’s office as soon as his shoulder quit threatening to make him black out. The familiar cuffs cinched his wrists together, but this time there was no accompanying guard; Snyder had requested complete privacy.

Soft afternoon sun angled through the small northwest window, puddling golden on the lacquered floor. By all accounts, it was a fine January day, but no one was deceived – the cold still ran bone-deep. A dish of shepherd's pie sat conspicuously on the sill, infusing the room with a torturous aroma.

Snyder wasn’t even facing the door when Jack’s escort shunted him in. The light bounced back off Snyder’s black satin waistcoat and hit him right in the goddam eyes, and Jack figured that was what it must feel like to look at God, if God smelled like peppermint and licked a guy in the ear.

“What are you afraid of, Kelly?”

Jack rolled his slowly-healing shoulder. “I - I dunno. Sir.”

“Do you know, I can’t figure you out. Some days I think you actually like the pain.” He turned slightly, and his profile caught fire in the gentle light. He was smiling, Jack saw that now. “Do you? Like it?”

Jack licked his lips. Careful, Kelly. “Not so’s you’d notice. Sir.”

“But you attract trouble all the same. I say it’s a natural-born gift.”

“Yes, I s’pose so, sir.”

“You’re also the biggest fool I ever met. That stunt smuggling contraband to my other boys? Making a mockery of our staff, encouraging the smaller boys to follow in your sordid footsteps? What am I to do with you, Kelly? How will you learn?”

Jack took a slow breath in, forcing it – if only it – under his control. Snyder’s voice was soft, buttery, hypnotizing. “I suppose that’s up to you, sir.”

Snyder turned, fully, at last. His gaze was level with Jack’s, though he was only a little taller; Jack felt tiny, dirty. He lifted his chin.

“Yes,” Snyder mused, “I suppose it is.” He removed his pince-nez, folded them carefully, slipped them into his silk-lined pocket. Jack tracked his every move.

“Someone has been pilfering from the kitchen supply,” Snyder continued, watching him carefully. “Now, you’re dumber than a box of rocks, but I don’t think even you would be so bold, so soon after correction. But I will ask: Do you know who is behind this?”

“No, sir,” Jack said, struggling to understand. Someone was swiping food? And he was supposed to know who? “I ain’t never seen no one.”

“Very well.” Snyder clapped his fat hands together like a child. “You will find out the culprit and report back to me. I’ll see justice done, and you –” the barest hint of a smile glittered on the edges of his mouth – “will get a more comfortable position here.”

Jack’s hands twitched behind his back. “Like the gig I got doing that - that fight club?” Because that sure as hell wasn’t anything he was raring to reprise.

“No. Not like that.” Snyder slotted his hands neatly into his pockets. “But if that’s what you prefer, we can make that happen.”

“No.” Jack said it too fast, he knew that right away. He cleared his throat, praying Snyder hadn’t noticed. “I mean, no, sir.”

Snyder lifted one eyebrow, slow, like he knew it made Jack’s skin go all crawly. “Or we can arrange something else.” He approached Jack, whose feet had grown roots into the floor. “Something that might feel better than getting yourself beat to hell every night.”

Jack trembled. Snyder slapped a hand on his shoulder, laughing when he flinched. “Find me the culprit, then, and you won’t have to worry your pretty, pretty head.” He turned to the sill, as though remembering suddenly. "Supper?"

Jack swallowed and nodded.

***

Race’s restless body was warm against Jack’s that night. But he didn’t feel like Charlie – too many sharp angles, too much compressed energy, and Lord, would he ever stop moving? Jack shoved his face into the worn pillow, wondering how long he’d have to hold his breath before he went to sleep or died or something.

“Jack.” (Jack lay very still.) “Jackie.” Sharp elbow to the ribs.

“Race, what the hell do you want?” Jack crushed a fist into his pillow and turned on his side to face him.

“You haven’t told me what the Spider wanted.”

“Damned ‘f I know.” Jack scrubbed a hand over the bridge of his nose, dreaming of rest. “Someone’s pinchin’ from the pantry and he wants me to catch ‘em.”

Race went very still.

Aw, no. No, no, no.

“Racer.” Jack sat up, stomach churning. “Racer, what did you do?”

“I – Jack, I –” Race’s skin glowed milky through the dark. Jack grabbed his wrists much harder than he probably should have, twisting the fabric under frenetic fingertips.

“Tell me you ain’t the one. Come on.”

“Don’t you see how they cry every night?” Race’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “Jackie, tell me you ain’t seen the way they look. Ain’t that why you broke in?”

“And it got me whipped halfway to Sunday!” Jack forced his voice to stay a whisper, but oh, God, did he ever want to scream. “They know. How could you – Racer – I thought you was smarter than that–”

“I just wanted to be like you, Jackie.” Race shoved the heels of his hands into his eyes, sniffing hard. “You can turn me in to Snyder.”

“Don’t you see I can’t?” Jack stared at him. “Ain’t neither of us getting outta this all right.”

The night was quiet, too many boys in too few bunks, hot and dank with body odor and sweat. Jack realized he was still gripping Race’s wrists, and he softened, rubbing his shirtsleeves with a gentle thumb. “‘S okay. ‘S okay.” He lay back down, staring at the ceiling, willing the moon to break through the concrete and swallow everything up. “We’ll figure somethin’ out. Go to sleep.”

Race did not, in fact, go to sleep quickly, which prompted Jack’s own share of elbowing and shut up-ing. Jack, for his part, lay awake for a long time, eyes open in the darkness, wondering just how to get them both out of this one.

Chapter Text

February 1897
Randall’s Island

Teddy Roosevelt was coming.

He’d returned from Cuba, a war hero, lauded by the newspapers and the businessmen alike. For some reason, he’d decided to run for governor, or so the older boys whispered. The guards had a crisp, cool edge to their demeanors and pant legs. Warden Snyder himself was sharper, and that was saying something.

Boys were on bruised knees for weeks, scrubbing and dusting and cleaning till their hands bled on the polished floor. Mice starved in their hidey-holes. After a few days, Jack had breathed in entirely too much turpentine; his nose ran and his throat burned.

Head up, back to work, the guards nudged, accentuating with a leather boot in Jack’s ribs. He was going to die cleaning this floor, Jack thought, and Roosevelt would have a nice time looking at his body.

He’d invented a new excuse every time Snyder asked him about their office talk, but the warden’s patience was wearing thin as a blade. Race had stopped stealing from the pantry, sneaking part of his own food instead to the little boys. He was learning, albeit slowly, to sit down and shut up.

“If I hear one word from any of you during the visit,” Snyder had announced in chapel, hands methodically behind his back, eyes boring into their souls, “I will personally make sure you cannot do so ever again.” He terrified a row of eight-year-olds with the purity of his malevolence. “One complaint, one accusation, one — heaven forbid – ill-gotten bid for freedom –” here, he stared at Jack, and the corner of his mouth quirked up. “You will not succeed, and you will make atonement.”

Electricity flickered in Jack’s fingers, but this time it was not fear.

***

“Race.” Rain spattered on the world outside, and the cold filtered through the leaky windows. Jack curled himself tighter in his sheets, closer to Race. “Hey.”

“Hmm?”

“Didja hear what Spider said?”

“He says a lot and I ain’t a mind reader.”

“ ‘Bout escaping. He thinks we’re gonna make a run for it.”

“Why would he think that?”

Jack didn’t respond.

“Jack?”

“Just listen.” Race groaned softly. “No, I’m dead serious, listen…”

***

Roosevelt arrived, and there was such a fuss that the whole place thrummed with dark electricity. Nobody noticed the way Jack’s hands cracked and bled, the bruises peeking from the knees of his knickers. Nobody noticed the way Race swayed on his feet, high on the stench of lye and carbolic.

They stood up straight, the pair of them, and stared at their feet as Snyder and the gubernatorial candidate swept by. Hats off heads, hands tucked behind backs, chins touching chests. Properly penitent.

Snyder didn’t even give Jack a second look.

Race did. It was time to go.

They’d been working on the window grate in their cell constantly, tugging and coaxing the bolts. When Jack’s hands hurt too badly to work on the window, the other boys would join in, though Jack knew full well they didn’t plan on running.

“Why?” Jack finally asked. “Why’re you helping?”

“Here goes nothin’, Cowboy,” an older boy replied, grinning. Jack looked to Race.

“I told them about’cha,” the younger boy replied.

They were scheduled to reconvene in the cell, late afternoon; Roosevelt would be finishing up his rounds. The boys removed the window grates, heads swiveling like weathervanes to check for stray guards. Jack removed his shoes and tied them around his neck, heart thumping all the while. He moved to peer out the gaping window.

Three flights, rusty cobblestone, a sharp drop. Jesus. He shrank from the window, dwarfed by the sickness. The other boys watched him silently.

“Don’t scrape me off the pavement too hard, y’hear?” he tried to joke, but it came out feeble. “Ready?” he asked Race.

But Race shook his head.

“I ain’t goin’.”

“Whaddya mean you ain’t goin’?”

“Jack-” Race’s eyes were frantic, time draining out of them like wet sand. “You know Snyder’s got it out for you, it won’t be as bad for me, and there ain’t no way we’re the both of us gettin’ outta here alive, and it ain’t too much longer for me anyway-”

Jack stared at him. “But he knows you stole.”

“It don’t matter.”

“Don’t be a nincompoop.”

“Wheredja learn that one…”

“Racer!”

“I ain’t goin’.” Race lifted his chin, met Jack’s eyes, held them in place.

Lacquered footsteps clicked in the hall. “Someone’s coming!” hissed one of the boys.

Jack dove out the window. The boys clicked the grate back into place.

***

There was a fire escape on this side of the building, but it only went as high as the second story. Jack clung to the window sill with his fingers, bracing himself against the gutter pipe, willing it to stay firm under his weight. Fingers burning, arms trembling, he worked himself down to the second story and dropped flat on his stomach. The lacework fire escape bit into his fingers.

You sure you wanna make a run for it, a kid had asked him last night. You seen what happened to the last guy who tried?

He inched forwards on his belly, holding his breath, crawling down the first flight of steps, completely exposed from the outside. On the ground, Roosevelt emerged, headed for the scrolled front gates.

No, Jack had responded, morbidly curious. What happened? Well, didn’t come out of solitary for ‘bout two weeks, for starters. Couldn’t walk real good. Slowed up the line for breakfast, limpin’ the morning after he came back. So the guard on duty, he gets fed up. Yanks down this kid’s pants in front of everyone.

One more story. Jack’s hands sweat profusely, leaving trails of moisture on the metal. His knees were bruised to hell and beyond. He crawled on all fours, an animal escaping the circus. The ground was warm under his bare feet.

There were guards milling about, but they weren’t stationed directly at the gate. Roosevelt and Snyder had said their goodbyes; Snyder was heading back towards the building, Roosevelt nearing the dock.

Jack was going to run.

There’s all this dried blood and scarring everywhere. His back, his ass, his thighs. My money’s on the Spider’s cane.

Jack ran. He sprinted from the mouth of the building across the courtyard, shooting for the flayed-open iron gates, acutely aware of the fire in the guards’ voices. He was fast, even barefoot. He gained ground. He flew through the gate.

“Stop the ferry!” someone screamed behind him, but he knew Roosevelt’s escorts were too far away to hear – and anyway, there was only one ferry. Jack dove headlong off the dock and into the water before he had a chance to draw breath. The iciness shocked his entire body, and he forced himself to kick, to lash out in the freezing water.

The ferry was only a couple hundred feet out, but his limbs felt dumb, slow. Jack kicked fiercely in the freezing water, hair dripping in his eyes. His hand made contact with the stern of the ferry. His breath hitched, and he wrapped his arms around it, relaxing his body as much as he could, floating, letting the ferry carry him. The water came up to his chin, and he couldn’t quite remember the mechanics of breathing, let alone breathing silently. He couldn’t hear the men’s shouting anymore.

He’d left Race.

He’d left Race.

If his feet fell off from hypothermia, it would only be just. After all the blood and warmth of Snyder’s tongue and rat-infested horror stories he’d lived, he’d left Race back there. Race was the point of it all. And shamefully, he knew he didn’t regret it. Freedom was so close that his skin prickled with the warmth of it.

Water seeped into the marrow of his bones, and he slid lower, deeper into it, terrified someone would see him hanging on.

They didn’t. Never had.

He stayed perfectly still for that half hour, muscles sprung tight and yet not working a smidge. His fingers were blue and he couldn’t feel his feet. The ferry docked at the Little Hell Gate channel, and he let go, dunked his head underwater, tried to be quiet when his lungs felt like they were going to pop.

Where was Race now? Still in that cell? Or trapped in Snyder’s tiny, hot office? Dark curls of dread lanced into Jack’s empty stomach. He’d left Race.

He slunk out of the water once the coast was clear, sodden, hands and feet pruny, sure that he looked a sight with his flagging clothes and the bruise-bloom on his cheekbone. So pretty, Snyder whispered. He shivered.

People stared, high society come to rubberneck at the boy with wet-plaster curls and a scarecrow’s body. Gutter rat without the sense to drown himself properly.

“Hey, kid, ya fell in?” a rosy-cheeked man called. Jack jerked a nod, wrapping his arms tightly around himself. What if people wondered? What if they called the cops? Dull fear undercut his footsteps, but he couldn’t run. Not now. Not while he was wet and barefoot and so tired he couldn’t quite see straight.

There was some kind of theater hall at the end of the block. He’d go around back on the stoop and sit down and catch his breath for just a moment. No one would see him.

He scrunched himself up, hands under his armpits, rocking back and forth. His clothes turned to ice in the silver twilight. Numbness dulled the burn in his fingers and toes.

***

Irving Hall, Lower Manhattan

“Hey, buster, beat it!”

Jack startled awake, nerves jangling, fingers clawing at the concrete. Man. It was a man’s voice. Oh, God. The first streaks of sunrise colored the sky.

“Adam, he’s just a boy.”

Woman. Jack scrambled up, and the ground tilted beneath him. His stomach churned, and his brain felt fuzzed over with sleep – or the desperate longing for it. Vaguely, he sensed a deep ache in his arms and a pinching sensation in his right shoulder.

“I’m sorry, sir, ma’am,” he mumbled, lips slow to form words, a nauseous heat alight just under his navel. “P-please-” he licked his chapped lips - “please don’t call the cops. I’m going. Right now. Right now.”

“Honey, it’s all right.” The lady approached, burnished skin warm in the glow from the street lamps, and Jack stumbled back, away from her touch.

“Get over here, kid.” The man seized his right arm and yanked him forward; pain shot through his shoulder and Jack gasped before he could stop himself.

“Adam, he’s hurt!” The lady brushed her fingers over his shoulder, and he flinched. “See how he’s holding his arm?” She looked him full in the face, like she was reading his soul. It didn’t feel half as bad as a guy would’ve thought.

“Where’d you come from, kid? Who hurt you like that?”

Jack stared at her, mute. He knew she could see the dark bruise on his face, could probably smell his damp greasy hair. Cop or warden or city slicker, didn’t matter who hurt him. The outcome would be the same till the end of time.

“Come on, kid, come inside.”

“Miss Larkin-” the man blurted. The woman fixed him with a steely look, and he fell silent. But Jack shook his head.

“Baby, I could carry you in, I bet you’re that light. Save yourself the trouble. No one’s callin’ the cops.”

Jack hesitated.

“It’s warm inside.”

Head down, trembling with fear and exhaustion, Jack followed her inside.

***

She made him goddam chicken soup.

Well, made was a strong word, but it was hot and hearty and had real pieces of chicken floating in it. He tried not to wolf it down, eating with his left hand, or drool into it.

She’d also made him a nest of paint-spattered dropcloths in an old empty room that smelled vaguely of cedar and turpentine. She watched him eat the soup. Jack wondered if she meant to give him one good meal before sending him back.

“I gotta get ready to open the theater,” she said at length. “Think you can bed down here awhile?”

Jack watched her for signs of lying. Her eyes were so pretty – honey and cinnamon and fringed with thick dark lashes. He bet she’d get some money for turning him in. He realized she was waiting for a response.

“Uh. You don’t gotta do all that. I can-” he pushed himself up with one hand- “I can go.”

“Baby.” She said it so softly. “Just rest.”

Jack’s throat ached and his nose felt funny. She was going to wait and then call the cops so that he was easier to catch and drag out of there. But hand to God, he wanted her to call him baby just once more before she did.

He sank back down into the dropcloths. Her lips curved in a smile.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he whispered. She looked at him and did not touch him.

“Call me Miss Medda,” she said simply, and then she was gone.

Jack didn’t close his eyes for a very long time, skin alight with nerves, certain the door would crash open at any moment. But the cloths were warm, and he could feel his toes again, and his belly was full. Sure, his shoulder hurt, but that was okay. It was so nice and quiet. No crying, no threats, no chains jangling. A guy could lie down here and spend his last few moments of freedom in relative contentment. Even if he was going to have to go back.

He forgot Race, forgot the cops, forgot Medda, forgot himself, and went to sleep.

Chapter Text

January 1902, a tenement on Hester Street

Dawn broke bitterly across the sky, unfurling into dark cirrus clouds. Jack woke, drowning in blankets and the soft lull of sleep; he knew that snow lay just outside the thin walls of their tenement, was probably still melting off his boots in the entryway, puddling and spoiling the floor. Katie wouldn’t like that at all. He almost smiled at the thought of her hyperbolic anger.

It was time to get up, he knew, but the puddle of his muscles, mixed with her soft limbs, was ridiculously satisfying. He nuzzled into the back of her neck, nosing at the fine curls frizzing up around the nape. Katie's sleep-warmed murmur of contentment met him in response.

“Mornin’, a stór.” He slipped his hands around her waist, pulling her closer, feeling the slight curve of her belly underneath his palms. She was so delicate, a lacy doll lying in her white nightgown. On mornings like this, it was almost easy to pretend this was the life he had chosen. If he squinted, angled his imagination just so, he could see the willowy, clear-eyed girl she had been before he’d marked grime and rot all over her future.

Nineteen, Race loved to remind him. Nineteen and a family man, the old ball and chain dragging him into the undertow, dead man walking. It wasn’t a one-off mistake – Jack attributed it all, really, to the heat of summer, the need for love and the dryness of the rubber.

The first few times were miserable, done compulsorily, reminiscent of bloody chain links and a warden’s peppermint breath. It had eased before he ever got to Katherine. Then, she was just another gorgeous factory girl, hair done up in soft coils with the wisps coming down to frame her face, chocolate eyelashes dark and heavy. He’d won her easily, just like all the others. And just like all the others, the chase was the only exhilarating thing about it.

She was a sweet girl, he supposed. But she deserved some nice fellow, one with clean hands and an unmarked back and long nights of peaceful sleep. He felt sorry for her.

It didn’t matter anymore, of course. Strange, that, how nothing mattered when the girl’s belly slowly began to swell, time-bomb, fit to pop. Just like that, Kate traded in shirtsleeves for suspenders and an overcoat, the lifelong struggle for a steady job now the looming spectre of necessity. He could go days without eating, he’d done it his whole life. But he’d be damned if he dragged his wife and kid through hell with him.

He’d spent his twentieth birthday making cowboy coffee, pouring the grounds into the boiling pot of water and pushing it around with a ladle. Katie had slept late that day; Jack wondered when she’d begin to show, when the whole world would talk of his clumsiness and desire.

Now, his hands had grown accustomed to the swell of her body, snug in his palms. He’d even begun to show affection, mapping his lips across the small globe of skin – far from those early days, when he couldn’t bear to look at her, and when she would cry from the loneliness of it all.


Today, the cold had serrated teeth, and Lord, if they didn’t pierce into his very soul. The washbasin was four years away. Dull pain bracketed his head, pushing into the cesspit of his desires. Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in the hour of conflict.

Water slid over his skin, the iciness shocking, cutting to the pit of his stomach. The sound of it, though, was swallows in the spring. His reflection dripped in the little glass hanging off the wall and above the basin, haphazard; his skin was clear and baby-smooth, revealing no signs of stress, and he needed a haircut badly. Maybe Katie could do it for him in the evening. He scrubbed his face dry with the washing cloth and pulled on his work clothes.

“Jack?” Kate's hands had reached empty space on the bedsheets and the morning disorientation had crept up to her brain. Jack went back to her, face still wet from the washing.

“Right here.” He perched on the edge of the bed and rubbed his five o’clock shadow, coarse and unshaven, up against her cheek like a cat. Kate smiled.

“Did you sleep well?” She reached for him, lazy and content.

“Mhmm.” His fingers were beginning to tremble. He jammed them under his legs.

“I had a dream,” she murmured, “that you were hurt.”

Jack looked at her – her soft sunkissed hair, the sleep in her eyes, the little pout on her cupid’s bow. She was so tiny. “Don’ think about that,” he replied, a little roughly. “Y’know I’m safe.”

“Yes. I know. ” She smiled and her eyes fluttered closed again, twitching under the paper-thin skin of her eyelids. Jack could count every blood-filled vein underneath the surface. A thousand cells working together, a world of light and sound he knew nothing of. But he knew her eyes, now hidden, were so blank, so artless.

*

“Race, you gotta help me, man.” Jack ran his hands through his hair, catching on tangles, yanking through. Moonlight spangled the wet cobblestones; his breath came shaky, acidic. “I don’t know how to leave. I can’t leave. I can’t stay.”

“What’s goin’ on? I thought you were okay last night.”

“No, I- I was, but –” Jack shook his head, a dog shaking off water droplets, a drowning man. “I got no idea how to be a dad, Race, I can’t have a kid, and Kate –”

“You like her okay, don’t you? Ain’t that what got you into all this?” Race’s mouth quirked up in the corner, always sly, and Jack wanted to slug him. The bitter night air closed around him like a fist.

“You don’t get it. Kate… she’s simple. She likes her flowers, her gossip, her dresses. ‘S like there’s a bubble around. I can’t talk to her about nothin’, she just don’t get it, she smiles and nods and asks me when I want dinner ready, my God –”

“She good to you?”

Jack stuffed his knuckles into his eyes, little-boy weary, stars popping in zig-zags and swirls. “So goddamn good.”

Race’s hand came down gentle on his shoulder, warm and unfamiliar. They’d finally stumbled out of callow boyhood.

“You go home and stay there and build what you want outta it.” Jack couldn’t meet his eyes, but he knew well enough that they were steady, dead serious. “Ain’t got no other choice. You know well ‘s I do you ain’t gonna leave.”

Jack sniffed, ran his wrist under his nose.

“Yeah.”

*

On the bed, he stroked her hair; it spilled out on the pillow like water. “Gotta go, Katie. Gotta beat the other guys.”

“Mmkay.” No questions about the lack of coins in his pockets each night, just the endless darning and patching, because, of course, money was a man’s domain.

“Wake up soon, yeah?”

She murmured something in response; God alone knew the content and, meanwhile, Jack took it as assent.

Sure enough, it was freezing outside, but the open space felt so good in his lungs. He beat the snow off the awning, shivered with the plummet, felt inside his jacket for the flask. A rush of padded heartbeat filled the gaps in his body, hot blood engulfing his Adam’s apple and filling up his lungs. The liquid knocked politely at his lips, asking to enter, brushing the guilt away. His father twisted in the bedsheets – head thrown back – mouth sloppy with liquor – dying – a man climaxing. Brandy trailed fire down Jack's throat as the men with silk suits jammed the glass rim into his mouth, colliding with his lower teeth, one strong hand on the back of his neck – the victor, the spoils.

It all burned the same.

Meggie’s figure of Jesus displayed himself on the wooden cross, bloody arms stretched, sweat-drops rolling off his naked body, leaking out of his pores. The sin, leaching, the gnawing bite of hell, of hunger, of being so damn tired all the time. Of the paralysis of fear, of not loving his wife enough, of the shame and blackened bruises and aching muscles.

The warmth uncurled across his chest and settled into his belly, purring. Jack's muscles relaxed and softened just a little, and the relief mingled strangely with the guilt. He could move now.

Hester Street teemed with life, rolling, the nausea before the purge. Jack shouldered through the bodies, warm to the snow crunching under his boots. The walk was twenty minutes to Pier 35, slower in the chill. His nose and mouth reddened, dried. Probably Katie slept still, heavy with their child and lulled by the promise of rest.

The docks were filled, as always, all lean muscled bodies with thin voices to match. There was jostling and clamoring, flap-soled work boots and raggedy Levis, cigarettes and chewing tobacco jammed in the back pockets and pennies in the front; the miscellany spilled from the shape on the shore. Head down, cap slotted low on his forehead, Jack slipped into their ranks. He stayed there, quiet, for minutes, feeling the alcohol sear into the lining of his stomach. Looser, clumsier.

“Hey! Hey!” One of the men alerted all the others.

The foremen approached, sizing up, wearing long clean coats and chuffing fat, expensive cigars. So it had already begun. As one, the crowd surged, fighting each other off, shoving, violence draped over starving bodies. Jack ducked, pushed, brushed up against the already-sweaty clothes of the men around him, flinched away. The desperate lower class lined up for the slaughter. In a dusty office on Randall’s Island, he stood at the end of Snyder's rigid line with his eyes on the floor, trying not to think of the cane that would, of course, land savagely on his knuckles. On the frostbitten New York streets, he waved a newspaper over his head and screamed himself hoarse, begging, burning.

One of the foremen squeezed his bicep, and Jack steadied his footing, willing himself not to stumble. Fear suddenly curled into his empty stomach, and he wondered if the man could smell the liquor on him. He needed this job. Please, please, please. He swallowed and closed his eyes, feeling Snyder's hands prod at his chest, his shoulders.

“He’ll do.”

Sickness and relief tangled together in Jack's body, wound tight, time-bomb. Automatically, his hand went to touch the back of his cap, adjust it, sense the familiar grit of the fabric under his fingertips. He rolled his bad shoulder back, sniffed, squared his jaw. Another day; he’d get through it and he wouldn’t drink again, not till forever, not till tomorrow morning, at least. Katie would be well fed. God help him, the baby born out of the dog days of summer wouldn’t be the infant too dehydrated to cry, the malnourished toddler with wire shins, the child with sunken eyes. The baby born of his animal need for touch would not be left to pick up the shatters of his ugly life. And Kate would be happy.

He’d do.