“Just seems odd we’re not reaching out to them is all.”
“We can’t,” Sister Walker said. “Our files were destroyed when the department was shut down. We have no way of reaching them. I’m afraid it’s down to the six of you.”
“Any runner in Harlem would tell you those aren’t great odds,” Memphis said.
“Why did they shut you down?” Ling asked. “If you were doing important work.”
“The war ended us.” Will spoke as if each word cost him dearly. “The war and its horrors. It was no longer an age for mystery and miracles. It was an age of industry and weapons and the industry of weapons.”
“So,” Theta said after a moment of uncomfortable silence, “in all this investigating you two did, you ever meet a bad Diviner?”
Sister Walker warmed her hands against her china cup. “There is always the capacity to abuse power,” she said evenly.
“Must be pretty rotten if you won’t even talk about it.” Theta’s palms prickled.
Sister Walker sipped her tea, then set her cup down. “There was a Diviner once who could pull the life out of things.”
“Holy smokes!” Sam said on a gasp.
“He could kill people?” Isaiah blurted.
“That’s some power—”
“Who’d he kill? How many?”
“He didn’t kill anyone that I know of,” Sister Walker said. “But he could ease an animal’s passing or wilt a rose in a vase.”
“Can we meet him?” Isaiah asked. “Or do they keep him in a special jail somewhere?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Sister Walker said with a note of sadness. “He left us one day. We never saw him again.”
A hush fell over the table. The wind thundered across the roof like a ghostly herd, drawing everyone’s eyes for a moment to the painted expanse of ceiling—bewigged Founding Fathers surrounded by spirits and magic and mysteries.
“Kinda funny when you think about it,” Sam said around a mouthful of cookie.
“What’s that?” Will asked. He’d abandoned his cookie in favor of a cigarette.
“Me and Isaiah. Evie. Memphis. Ling. Henry. And—” Sam quickly stopped himself from saying Theta. “Us. We got a Jew, two Negroes, a half-Chinese-half-Irish girl. Coupla Catholics. Sounds like the start of some really awful joke the stuffed shirts would tell behind closed doors.”
“What’s your point?” Ling said.
“Well, people like to say we’re not true Americans, whatever that means. But we’re the ones with these powers.” Sam shrugged. “It’s just kinda funny is all.”
He caught Sister Walker throwing a meaningful glance Will’s way. It was quick but noticeable. But then Sister Walker was putting aside her tea and standing to her full height, smoothing down the front of her dress as if to announce that no wrinkle, no flaw could find purchase in her. “Time to get back to work. Sam, Henry, and Ling, let’s see what you can do together.”
Henry slurped down the rest of his milky tea and wiped his mouth. He winked at Evie. “We who are about to die salute you.”
Evie put a hand over her heart. “I’ll remember you fondly on your birthday,” she said with mock-solemnity. She was suddenly aware of Jericho beside her.
“Meet me in the collections room,” he whispered in her ear, making the skin along her neck buzz. And just like that, everything about him that she’d tried to put away came flooding back.
Evie waited until a new test was under way, and then she slipped out of the library. Her stomach had begun to flutter. Don’t you dare, she scolded, but her stomach wouldn’t listen.
“Hi,” Jericho said with a shy smile as Evie entered the collections room.
“Hi,” she said back. Steady, she thought.
“You, ah, looked like you might need a rescue.”
“Thanks.” Evie laughed, relieved that she didn’t have to pretend otherwise. It was one of the things she liked about Jericho. Around him, she didn’t feel the need to pretend. There was a certain loneliness in Jericho that she recognized, a twin to her own. The way he looked at her from time to time, like a searchlight that had found what it sought, made her go a little dizzy.
Evie hopped up on the sideboard. “Gee, I love what you’ve done with the place. How smart you are to put the spectral barometer beside the… um”—Evie gestured vaguely to a group of shriveled potato-like cuttings on a table beside Jericho—“dead vegetables.”
Jericho smiled and lifted one eyebrow. “It’s a mandrake root.”
“So it is! I’m certainly rooting for it.”
“Evie, I need to tell you something. You’re the only person I can tell, actually,” he added.
“All right,” she said. It made her feel special that he trusted her.
From his pocket, Jericho brought out a leather pouch. He unrolled it and took out a stoppered glass vial with a small portion of blue liquid inside. “It’s all I’ve got left. Marlowe gave me an ultimatum: Be part of his Future of America Exhibition, let him test me, parade me onstage as his shining victory—or he’ll cut me off for good.”
Evie knew that Marlowe’s serum was lifesaving. It kept the tubes and wires inside Jericho working. “He wouldn’t really do that, would he? Why, that’s blackmail!”
“No. It’s Marlowe,” Jericho said. He hopped up beside her on the sideboard. “If I agree, I’d need to live with Marlowe upstate until the exhibition. I’d have to leave the museum and Will and you just when you need me most.”
“Oh,” Evie said, deflating a bit at the thought of Jericho being gone. “We’ll manage. Don’t worry about us.”
“I do worry, though. Feels like something big is happening. I don’t want you to get hurt.” Jericho reached out and tucked one of Evie’s loose curls behind her ear, and she caught her breath. “As terrible as it was, that night with John Hobbes made me start to come alive again. I saw that I had just been existing before. I want more than that. You made me see that, Evie. I’m forever grateful to your uncle. But I don’t want to shelve books for the rest of my life. I want to make my mark.” He took hold of her hand. “It never would’ve worked for Mabel and me, you know.”
“I see that now. But does Mabel?”
“I think so. What about you and Sam?”
What about Sam? It was probably for the best that he had ended things. They were combustible together—perfection one minute and at each other’s throats the next. Still, it hurt her pride to be the “jilted woman,” with the papers reporting on all of Sam’s flings. And she’d be lying if she said she didn’t still carry a torch for him. Was it normal to have a crush on two boys at the same time?
Jericho was looking right at her. His eyes were the blue of a summer sky.
“Just a publicity stunt,” she said, hoping it didn’t sound bitter.