Before I left, Jagger called, “Tell Roumelade I want this room cleaned. And . . . Mari . . . tell Griff to hurry along.”
Hours later, long after Griff had flown from Hell Gate’s roof, I curled on my side, staring dry-eyed into the dark. Justice’s room was just like mine. Bare walls. Hard bed. No decorations. The only difference was that his sheets smelled like him, and his pillow had an imprint from where he’d laid his head.
I pulled my knees to my chest and breathed in his scent. How long would it take to fade? How long would it take him to fade?
“Justice,” I whispered. And then, silently, so the walls couldn’t hear, “I’m sorry.”
I fell asleep knowing that when I woke up, days, weeks, or months would’ve passed for him, and the Justice I knew would be long gone.
There was nothing I could do to save him.
33
There were a million places to hide in a city, and the wind had strolled through a million and one. This was, it acknowledged, hyperbole, since the wind did not count, nor did it care to count—but there wasn’t a crevice, a crack, or a crawlspace in the city the wind had not misted through at one time or another.
Even in a city where new buildings sprouted overnight, tunnels zigzagged beneath the streets as if dug by frenetic ants, and the rubble of bombed cities built its foundation—even then, the wind had been everywhere.
At least, that was what it liked to tell itself.
What was the point in being the wind if it couldn’t rub its underbelly along the construction of a city and dive through its tunneled mysteries?
It sniffed along the East River’s black edge, trailing through one of the city’s mysteries now. There, it found it—the forgotten memory and lingering scent of England’s western shore.
Long ago for humans, and a short time ago for the wind, ships full of stone, brick, and concrete had sailed into New York Harbor. The wind had sailed with them, sifting through the ballast.
It had spent the autumn with the man, soaring over England, blowing toward the continent. It was another human war, spurred by illusion. The wind had always found it interesting that stupid humans were most easily fooled by others, but smart humans were most easily fooled by themselves. That war had spawned millions of humans fooling themselves. It only took careful prodding, a few lies, and minor illusions, and then the smart humans twisted their own minds to believe exactly what they wanted.
That was the way it always was. Only an intelligent being could so thoroughly convince themselves killing an innocent was right and good.
One winter night, the wind had skated on air-raid sirens blasting over Bristol. The man had fled after shoving a thick mist over the city, but the wind had remained. It spun over airplane propellers and floated on dropped flares that lit the city with an eerie red glow. Then it spent the night diving and screaming as bombs crowded the sky like snowflakes in a blizzard. The city broke apart and became a roaring, monstrous ocean of stone and glass. It filled with fire.
Humans ran like ants from their hill, boiling water poured in the dirt. The explosions were deafening, the heat searing, the scent bitter and evil. The wind had wailed. In one night, a city of churches had become a city of ruins.
And then, shortly after, the rubble of churches, homes, hospitals, and schools was loaded as ballast into ships and sent to New York, where it was used to reclaim the East River. A road and a new neighborhood were built on top of it.
The wind sniffed along the edge of the water, tasting the ballast, the stone, and the brick.
Did the humans know they were sleeping, eating, living on top of a bombed and ruined English city? Did they know the foundation of New York was the rubble of old England?
Perhaps.
The trickster knew. The wind was certain of it.
It hadn’t meant to trail the trickster, but instead of finding the solange-eyed man in the city’s darkness, the wind had stumbled onto the trickster’s path.
The wind followed him as he walked along the water’s edge. The street was deserted, the footbridge empty. Streetlights gently poured over him, a milky bath that distorted his features so he looked nothing like himself. As he walked, he shifted one feature at a time. It was so incremental that no one would notice. But from the beginning of the block to the end, the trickster became someone entirely new.
A woman. Tall. Short black hair. Youngish. A face that looked like a thousand others.
The wind huffed and decided to stay with the trickster a little longer.
Maybe he was meeting the solange-eyed one. They were friends, weren’t they?
But then the trickster stopped and paused in front of a plaque. He folded his hands behind his back and stared at the written words.
The wind trailed over the trickster’s jaw and pressed against the beat of his pulse. It was slow and steady—until the click of high heels sounded behind him, and then the trickster’s pulse sped into a frenzy.
The wind swirled around, blowing dust in a whirlwind.
