When they got back to the inn, he and Coulton removed their shoes and took the offered slippers and went quietly upstairs, the dark polished wood floors gleaming, their bodies drenched with sweat. There was a smell of blossoms in the air, cut flowers in a bowl in the hallway. After a few minutes they heard a muffled greeting, and the innkeeper’s wife appeared, a warm bottle of sake wrapped in a towel. She kneeled, opened the paper screen, entered, kneeled, and closed it behind her. Then she lit the lanterns, never once looking in their faces. There was such an unhurried grace in this country, Jacob marveled. So much beauty in the smallest of gestures.
When they were alone again, he said, just as if they hadn’t stopped speaking of it, just as if he was continuing his thought: “She has my talent, Frank. The dust.”
Coulton made a little movement of his head, said nothing. He was taking off his wet greatcoat.
“You saw what I saw.”
“Aye,” said Coulton reluctantly. “And I seen her sister too. That ain’t your talent, lad.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s the dust that’s done it.”
“You never done nothing like that.”
“I’ve never tried.”
“Aye.” Coulton grinned, pouring out a knuckle of sake. “Is that envy I see in you, lad?”
Jacob frowned, irritated. The man was teasing but, in truth, some part of him was fascinated by the possibility. He had never been able to find the limits of dustwork; who could say what it was capable of? But he said none of this out loud. Instead he said, “Easiest way to get her to come with us would be to promise to help the sister. That’s her weak point. Tell her we could cure her at Cairndale.”
“We can’t cure what that girl is.”
Jacob raised his face and saw Coulton watching him with hooded eyes and then he said it out loud, the thing they’d been avoiding naming: “Because she’s a litch. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? The little sister’s a litch.”
“Aye. And the poor lass thinks her sister’s just sick.”
“She knows the truth,” said Jacob softly. “Even if she won’t let herself believe it.”
Coulton crossed to the window. The wooden shutters were held up by a stick. “I just don’t see how it were done. Making a litch, that takes a process, don’t it? It don’t just happen.”
“According to Berghast,” Jacob pointed out.
“Aye. According to Dr. Berghast.”
“But what does he know? Has he ever even seen a litch, in life? Maybe it could work like this, too. Maybe there’s something in dustwork that makes it possible—”
He faltered, didn’t finish the thought. He was thinking of the woman in his dream but he hadn’t realized he was until he’d spoken and now, blushing, he didn’t finish. But Coulton was peering, troubled, out at the torches moving through the cobbled streets, and seemed not to have noticed. He lifted his shirt, wiped at his face. The locals were carting the choleric dead out of the city.
“Right. So this girl,” he said, “this Komako. We’re saying she made her sister a litch? And she don’t even know she done it?”
“I guess we are.”
Coulton turned. The anguish in his face made Jacob flinch. “And that would mean the wee girl, what’s her name, Teshi—”
“—is already dead. Yes.”
He heard Coulton sigh in the darkness.
“Fuck,” he said quietly.
* * *
Jacob’s earliest memory was of the dust.
He was four years old. It was a summer night, that grim children’s home in Vienna. He was crouched sweating under a moth-eaten blanket, his brother beside him, both of them straining to hear the night nun’s footsteps recede through the echoing halls. They were twins but not identical. His brother didn’t have Jacob’s gift, his talent, couldn’t do what he could do. The light of a streetlamp from the open window was dimly visible through the blanket. He was working his little hands over the dust he’d scooped up from the corners of the room, making it swirl and shift and spiral, when one of the older boys tore the blanket from their cot. Jacob never knew what the boy saw, if he glimpsed his talent at work, if he even believed his eyes. His brother, Bertolt, was on his feet in an instant. Hurling himself at the bigger boy, tearing at his nightshirt and face in the dark dormitory, pummeling him with his fists, and though the other was older and bigger, Bertolt ripped at him with such a fury that it was the boy who cried for help and Bertolt who was hauled off by the throat, Bertolt who was beaten savagely, Bertolt who the nuns said had the devil in him.
The nuns never did forget that. But nor did the other boys, and after that, Jacob and his brother were left mostly alone.
Their days were spent picking oakum or sewing pieces of cloth and when they got a little older the nuns rented them out to factories on account of their size. They’d clamber between the machines, slide themselves into the gaps where the great whirring gears were punching away, in order to unsnare a loop of leather, or bang loose a jammed bolt. Bertolt never let Jacob go into the machines but went himself, even when he was getting too big for it. There were boys without fingers, boys without hands. A few years after, one Sunday afternoon, Bertolt took Jacob’s hand and walked right out the open front doors of the factory, into the grime of the Unterstrass, to live as sweeps in the crews of kids working the chimneys of the great houses in Vienna’s high streets. Bertolt was just like that, he’d walk into his own future and take Jacob with him, and Jacob loved him, admired him, wanted to be like him.
They became sweeps. Soot was different from ordinary dust, not as easy for Jacob to manipulate or draw into his hands, sticky and clumpy as it was, smearing over everything, and so the work was hard. He’d scrub and clamber and slide greasily along the shafts, gasping for breath, twisting as he went, a small boy in outsized clothes, the whites of his eyes showing. But he never cared much. Bertolt was the thing, the only thing that mattered, and they figured sweep work was safer than climbing inside the machines. They’d always had each other’s backs. When he’d been sick with scarlet fever in the orphanage it was Bertolt, four years old, who mopped his brow and changed his sheets, not the nuns. It was Bertolt who brought him food scraps when he was punished with no dinner. It was Bertolt who gave him a reason not to give up. They had no recollection of their parents, had nothing to remember them by, and if there’d ever been a daguerreotype, or necklace, or memento, the nuns had not seen fit to preserve it. It was only the two of them, just the two of them, in all the world.
“Bertolt, what’ll we do?” Jacob asked him one winter. They were freezing by then, starting to get too big for the sweep work, their knees and backs bruised and bleeding.
“We’ll find something,” said his brother. “There’s always a way.”
“What? What’ll we find?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll find it.”
Then two weeks later his brother suffocated in a chimney when he got stuck and the sweep boss left his little body unclaimed in a dirty alley and Jacob understood the only thing kids like them ever found was suffering and pain and death. And Jacob, in a rage he’d never felt before, had stalked the boss to a card table in a club in the dark hours of the morning and strangled him with the dust, strangled him until his eyes nearly burst from their sockets. He was ten years old.