“I’m not,” he said. His voice was little more than a whisper.
All at once her leg erupted in a fire of pain. She cried out, holding her knee. Her voice banged off the walls, the echo dying away into the darkness.
“Is he coming after us?” Marlowe asked.
She said nothing, just looked quickly around.
The park was small, really just a square of grass around the statue, a solitary streetlight burning on the corner. There were buildings on three sides, rear walls, windowless, judging by the dark looming forms. An occasional cab clattered by in the street behind them. If the man found them, there would be nowhere to run.
She must have passed out. When she opened her eyes Marlowe had changed positions, was sitting cross-legged close to her, and he had folded his coat and slipped it under her head for a pillow. In the darkness she could just make out his pale face.
She tried to sit up, fell back.
“Is it your leg?” he whispered.
“My knee. How long was I out?”
“You just kind of fell over.”
She wanted to make some joke about the creature at the hotel but couldn’t think of anything to say and after a moment she closed her eyes.
“Alice?” said the boy.
“Yes?”
“My name’s not really Stephen Halliday, is it?”
She opened one eye, in pain. “Why—why would you ask me that?”
“I can tell. I know.”
“No,” she said reluctantly. “It isn’t.”
“Who am I, then?”
“Do we need to talk about this now?” She gritted her teeth, saw his face. “Listen, I don’t know who you are. Who do you want to be?”
“Marlowe.”
“All right, then.” Her head sank back.
“Alice? Why did you say I was Stephen Halliday if I’m not?”
Her knee was aching again. The wet grass had seeped through her clothes and she was very cold. It’d be a hell of a thing, getting to the passenger liner in the morning. She grimaced. “I guess because the people I work for told me to. And I guess I thought it was the best way to get you to come with me. The way that would … hurt people the least.”
“You mean Brynt?”
“Brynt, yes. And you.”
Marlowe in the darkness was quiet. She could see him chewing at the cuff of his sleeve. “So where are you taking me, then?”
“London. Then to a place in Scotland. It’s called the Cairndale Institute, you’ll be safe there. There’re other kids there, just like you. Kids who can … do things.”
“Will you go with me?”
She winced. “Some of the way. Usually I just … find the kids.”
He nodded. “You shouldn’t have lied to me.”
He got up then and he walked out into the darkness. She started to ask what he was doing but he came back, shoes squeaking in the wet grass, having walked carefully around the perimeter, and now he kneeled next to her and said, quietly: “I know why they want me. Why the people you work for want me.”
It was such a strange thing for an eight-year-old kid to say. So eerie and composed. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. “What do you mean?” she asked.
But he didn’t answer. He did something instead, something she wasn’t expecting. He reached out his fingers; he touched her wrist. “What happened?”
“This?” She shook her head in surprise. “It’s nothing. A sprain.”
Remembering it as she did so. How she’d slapped the man’s hand from her waist at the bar in White Rapids and how his friends had laughed. He was a cattle drover with pay, he’d told her with a grin, and he’d been alone with men for four months. Coulton was scowling from their table as if the attention were her own doing and that had made her angriest of all. When the drover reached for her hips again she had set her feet as Allan Pinkerton had taught her to do and had leaned her muscled shoulders in and punched the bastard hard in the face and felt something give under the force of it and then the drover’s legs collapsed out from under him and he was down. The bar went quiet, men looked away, the bar started up again. Coulton had done nothing.
The boy sat with his knuckles interlaced, his hands crushed in his lap. Then he held both palms up in front of her, as if he wished to show her something.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
Very slowly he began to untie her boot, slip it off, roll up the leg of her trousers. She let him do this. When her injured knee was visible he looked at her with a question in his eyes and then he pressed both palms against it. He did so with gentleness. She felt a heat in his hands and it felt good. The warmth traveled the length of her thigh, aching. Then the heat got worse. Her knee got hotter and hotter and she looked at the boy. His eyes were closed. He was shining.
It was that same bright blue shining, his skin sigiling with veins of light. She stared. She could see through to the veins, the shadowy bones in his skull and hands. The wet grass and the outlines of the statue were blue in the glow. And then the heat in her knee grew very intense, and the pain sharpened, and she could not help herself, and she cried out and pulled away. The burning faded. The light in the boy went out.
“Marlowe,” she gasped. “Marlowe—?”
But something was different. She felt it at once. The shine was still fading from the edges of her vision. She peered down at her leg and shifted her knee and turned it side to side. It had healed.
She stared in amazement. Her heart was beating very fast.
“Don’t be mad,” he whispered.
He looked pale. He was cradling his wrists gingerly now against his little chest and she saw how swollen they looked.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. His little face was clouded with pain. “I took your hurt away. I have it now. It goes away fast when I have it.”
She was trying to understand what the boy had told her but she could not. She thought of Coulton, she thought of Charlie Ovid with the blade hidden in his smooth flesh. “It isn’t possible,” she said. Getting gingerly to her feet as she spoke, testing her leg, staring at him.
“She said you wouldn’t believe me,” the boy whispered.
“Who said?”
He didn’t answer, he didn’t need to. Of course Alice did believe. Her knee was proof enough. She thought of her mother, unbidden, the green fire in her eyes when her faith used to take over in her, that madness, and she thought of what her mother would believe, glimpsing the miracle of it all, and she closed her eyes in sudden grief. Her mom.
Within the hour he held out his arms and rotated his wrists and showed her. The swelling was gone. It was already beginning to get light. The city felt emptied, still.
“It doesn’t take long,” he said. “Little hurts like this.”
She felt something then, a kind of disgust, which surprised her and shamed her. She didn’t want to touch him. He’d trusted her with something important and helped her and her disgust felt like a kind of betrayal. She lowered her voice when she said, “Have you done this a lot, Marlowe?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“How did it start?”
He shrugged, uncomfortable. “I can’t always control it. I didn’t used to be able to.”
“They’ll help you with that. At Cairndale.” She moved then and got stiffly to her feet and stamped the warmth back into her legs and then she said, “Your friend, Brynt. She knew?”
He was putting back on his coat and he didn’t look up. “We didn’t talk about it.”
She nodded. She looked around at the empty square, the graying silhouettes of the buildings against the sky. Somewhere out there was a man, a creature, made out of smoke, a thing that was following them. It was madness and yet she knew the truth of it. She’d seen it herself.
“We should find you something to eat,” she said. “We’ll get down to the docks.”
She picked up the little traveling cases and blew out her cheeks. Marlowe was peering up at her.
“Alice?”
“Mm?”
“Is it all right if I’m scared?”
“Everyone gets scared,” she said. “I get scared.”
“Like at the hotel?”
She nodded. “And other times too. Scared is just your head telling your heart to be careful. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what you do with it that matters.”