“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He sat erect in his chair, and the expression that had crept across his face vanished, replaced by his usual genial smile.
“I’ll have your cut for you in a couple of hours.”
He turned his attention back to the money, and Ada realized she had been dismissed. She left and shut the door quietly behind her. The anger was still there, a tiny, persistent flame, but Ada was too tired to fan it right now. Corinne would make sure Saint kept his distance, but there wasn’t much else to be done. Whatever his reasons, Johnny had made his decision.
Saint had broken the number one rule of the Cast Iron: trust. But Ada knew better than to break the second, which was to never cross Johnny Dervish.
That evening, Ada took advantage of the empty common room to tend to her violin. The instrument had been a gift from Johnny a couple of months after she’d first found her way to the Cast Iron. A sympathetic doctor had whispered Johnny Dervish’s name to Ada’s parents, who were wretched with worry when their daughter suddenly fell ill, racked with pain from the inside out. Hemopath manifestation was a gruesome process, usually lasting at least a week, and Ada’s blood had turned when she was relatively young—only ten. She had blocked out most of that horrific time and remembered only how sweet the iron-free relief of the Cast Iron was. Johnny had offered to let her stay there as long as she needed, and her parents had relented, because they didn’t know what else to do. Young hemopaths needed years to adjust to the city’s plethora of iron sources, and the ones who couldn’t find or make an iron-free refuge either fled to the countryside, committed themselves at Haversham, or turned to more grisly, permanent means of escape.
Ada had always intended to move back home, once she could cope with the ever-present ache of the outside world, but somehow it had never happened. The closest she’d ever come was when Corinne had first moved in—Ada had decided she would rather live in an iron box than deal with the petulant, demanding, blue-blooded twit Johnny was making her share a room with. Sometimes she thought about how different her life would have been if she had followed through with the decision, but in four years she had never once wished she had.
Ada slid the hair of her violin bow across a block of rosin, coating it to the right density. Then she systematically tuned her violin, tweaking the pegs until every note sang with perfect pitch. Once she was satisfied, she sat on the edge of the couch and sailed through the first few measures of “Amazing Grace.” It was one of the songs her father had taught her. When she was small, he’d bought her a cheap violin from a pawn shop. It had a seam down the back and a bridge that never seemed to stay in place, but none of that had mattered to Ada. She practiced every spare moment she had. Her father called her a natural, but that was generously ignoring the late nights she spent drilling herself over and over again, no doubt driving every resident of their run-down tenement insane.
The violin Johnny had given her was seamless, with superior sound and strings that were exquisitely responsive to her touch. Even away from her father’s tutelage, she had excelled, improving her technique and learning new ones from the violinists Johnny paid for shows. The first time she had played an emotion, it had been an accident. Johnny had explained the nature of hemopathy to her, of course, and she knew that somewhere inside her lurked the ability to make people feel anything she wanted them to feel. But it had still come as a surprise when a sonata she was playing made Danny start to cry, right in the middle of pouring a drink.
She’d started practicing emotions with the same vigor as she had practiced her father’s lessons, and soon Johnny was letting her play with the house band. The shows had been bigger back then, before the law. There were usually several bands in one night and performances four or five times a week. Ada had loved the unbridled thrill of it, the knowledge that she was giving people exactly what they wanted, what they paid for. Back then it had all been so simple.
Ada had played through nearly to the end of “Amazing Grace” without thinking about it when Corinne bounded down the stairs.
“There you are,” she said. She collapsed on the couch beside Ada in exaggerated relief. “Danny just made me help him mop the club, and it was terrible. Why don’t you ever have to help?”
“I help Danny all the time,” Ada said, lowering her violin. “You’re the one who’s always conveniently absent. Serves you right.”
Corinne rolled her eyes at her. “I can’t help that I’m better at being unproductive than you.” She twisted to face Ada, crossing her legs on the couch.
“Let’s play a few rounds. We haven’t in ages.”
“You may have forgotten, but I’ve been indisposed for the past couple of weeks.”
Corinne poked her on the knee. “That means you’re rusty. You need the practice.”