“Don’t.”
He tilts his head. “That’s not a compliment. He’s weak.”
I scoff.
“When his mark appeared,” my grandfather adds casually, “he threw a temper tantrum too.”
I bark a laugh. “My father has one?”
“Of course.”
He rolls back the sleeve of his shirt. I see the same mark on his bicep. Faded, but unmistakable. “We all do.”
“So you’re saying,” I say slowly, the pieces clicking into place with a sickening lurch, “you can see at night too?”
He frowns slightly, a genuine flicker of confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t play me,” I take a step toward his desk. “The red eyes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I believe him, the confusion on his face is real. My pulse ticks hard in my throat. I have a thousand questions and no idea where to start. So I start at the beginning. “What is the tar?” I say. “The truth. Don’t fucking lie to me or I swear I’ll throw you out that window myself.”
“Perhaps,” he says calmly, “you are more like me than I gave you credit for.”
“I’m nothing like you.”
“Well,” he says lightly, “time will tell.”
He folds his hands behind his back and walks toward the wall of maps. “What the tar is,” he continues, “nobody really knows. It doesn’t matter.”
He taps the glass. “What matters is what it wants.”
I don’t move.
“It began with a contract,” he says. “Like everything that built this city.” He gestures toward the photographs. “There was land, and there were men who knew how to read rock. They knew there was coal under the soil. Iron in the bedrock. Something worth digging for. Investors followed,” he continues. “Among them—Augustus St. Clair.”
I cross my arms.
“Do you not remember the stories I used to tell you?” he asks, a strange, almost gentle look on his face. “Well, of course not. You were still too busy trying to see how many rocks you could fit in your pockets before your pants fell down.” He gives me a thin smile. “You must be what now? Almost 30?”
The memory comes back to me—him telling me about the dark that lived under the city, my father grabbing my arm later and hissing that I wasn’t to listen to a word my grandfather said about the tar. I shake it off.
“Get to the point,” I snap.
“Where were we? Oh, yes, back then our name meant nothing,” he continues smoothly, “Simply ownership lines on maps.”
He points to the diagram behind the glass. “You see this? Tunnels,” he says. “First they drilled straight down. Then outward. Timber beams holding ceilings that groaned under pressure. Men hauling carts through passages thick with dust and gas.” His voice stays calm. “The deeper they went, the hotter it got. Water seeped in. Methane pockets hissed.” He glances at me. “There are always collapses in mines. But then,” he says quietly, “they hit something else.”
“What?”
“A pocket.”
“The tar?”
“Pressurized,” he says. “When the drill cracked through, the earth answered.”
I don’t like the way he says that.
