Last Descendants

  “Thank you for singing that tune.”

  “You’re welcome.” She crossed the room back to her sofa.

  “Lots of men I fought alongside, they all loved that one.”

  She sat down. “I know.”

  “Many of them … have gone home. The first home of the soul.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  The sun had risen now outside. Tommy got up from the armchair and resumed his vigil at the window. “They’re still marching uptown,” he said, craning to look down the street, toward the park. “God, it’s a mob.”

  “Will you be needed?”

  “I will be,” he said. “But I want to make sure you’re safe first.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll be fine, here. You must do what you need to.”

  He let the curtain fall and strode toward the double doors. “I’m going to go out and have a look around. See what I can learn. Are you sure you don’t mind if I leave you here?”

  “Not at all.”

  “There’s a library upstairs,” he said. “I’ll return as soon as I can.”

  With that, he descended the staircase, and she heard him leave through the front door. From the window, she watched him march down the street until he rounded a corner and was gone.

  Now that she was alone, Natalya felt free to take center stage. For most of the night, she’d deliberately kept herself far from the action playing out, letting it unfold strictly according to the memory’s script. Mostly, she’d wanted to simply watch Adelina being Adelina, a woman very different from her. She was also aware that Tommy was Sean, and Natalya didn’t want there to be any confusion over who was attracted to whom once they left the Animus. But she might have been worrying over nothing. That part of the whole simulation situation was just weird.

  While Adelina waited for Tommy’s return, Natalya decided to have a look around the house, so long as it didn’t threaten to desynchronize her. She enjoyed history in school and she also liked design. Even though she had never really cared much for the style of the Victorian era, it was still interesting to be there, almost like walking through a museum.

  She left the parlor and went into the dining room, which had a gorgeous, long table with silver candelabra, and a large sideboard or buffet that Natalya thought might be Queen Anne style. The dining room had its own pantry and staircase that went down into the kitchen.

  Natalya returned to the main hall and climbed the staircase to the next floor, exploring the library and then the master bedroom, where the vanity contained a slew of beauty products Natalya didn’t recognize. Not that she wore much makeup out in the real world. The next floor held a bedroom that she assumed belonged to Tommy, and down the hall from that, an empty room. Well, not empty. It appeared that someone had begun to prepare it to be a nursery. There was a child’s crib and one of those old-fashioned strollers covered in lace, both shoved into a corner. Half the room had been wallpapered with roses, but it looked as if the project had been abandoned before its completion, and Natalya wondered at the many stories that room told all at once, most of them sad.

  The next floor was mostly attic storage, but there was a small space beneath the eaves that Natalya thought would have made a comfortable bedroom, and a small door that opened onto the roof. The sun was fully up now and already these upper stories were collecting all the rising heat.

  Natalya returned to the parlor and sat at the piano. She laid her fingers on the keys and played a discordant series of notes. Natalya’s mother played the piano. Her grandparents and her parents had wanted her to play the violin, and she’d taken lessons for several years from an expensive Russian teacher named Mr. Krupin. But he had made it quite clear to Natalya and her family that she had little aptitude for music, so she was eventually allowed to quit. She may have inherited Adelina’s memories, but she certainly hadn’t inherited her talent.

  None of the clocks in the house told the correct time or even ticked—Tommy had evidently been neglecting to wind them—but it seemed that an hour or two had passed since he had gone out.

  The street outside was full of sunlight by the time Natalya saw Tommy returning. When she heard the front door open, she rushed backstage and pushed Adelina into the light as heavy footsteps trudged up the staircase.

  “The city is in chaos,” Tommy said as he came into the parlor.

  “Really?” Adelina glanced toward the window and the street that still seemed mostly empty.

  “I connected with a patrolman from another precinct. Those mobs we saw last night and early this morning were massing in a vacant lot up by Central Park. From there, around eight o’clock this morning they marched south. At least ten thousand of them.”

  “Ten—ten thousand?”

  Tommy nodded. “They forced all the factories and foundries and millworks to shut down and took the workers with them under threat. They’ve been cutting telegraph lines and ripping up the railways, to stop communications and movement in the city. They’re tipping over horsebuses.”

  “My God,” Adelina whispered.

  “This isn’t a riot,” Tommy said. “It’s an insurrection. The main mob is attacking the provost marshal’s office where the drafts are taking place. But I don’t expect things will stay contained there for long.”

  “What should we do?”

  “It’s dangerous to be out and about in the streets. We stay indoors for now.”

  “Are you needed?”

  “I’m staying with you,” he said. “I’ll see you safely through this.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine, you—”

  “I’m staying with you,” he said, his tone plated in iron. “Until I’m certain you’ll be safe.”

  Adelina nodded, aware that this was not a point on which she could dissuade him. Tommy took up a position by the windows, and in spite of Adelina’s attempts to engage him in further conversation, he seemed determined to avoid distraction from his watch. She went up to the library and brought down a book of poems to read, but did so silently.

  An hour went by and the day grew hotter. Even had they opened a window, she could see plainly by the tree branches outside that no breeze stirred in them.

  Just after another hour had passed, Tommy stood up straighter. “Some of the mob is coming this way. From Third Avenue.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Looting,” he said.

  Adelina hurried to the window and looked out. Up the street, several houses down, a tide of men had surged forward, pausing at each residence to hurl brickbats and paving stones. Several women and children had been turned out of their homes into the street, forced to watch as the looters invaded and stole away their lives, tossing furniture and paintings and dishware out through the windows into the street.

  “Where are the police?” Adelina asked.

  “Putting down larger mobs than this,” Tommy said.

  “They’ll be here soon,” Adelina said. “I think we should go. But first, you need to get out of that uniform. If they see you in it, I think they’ll forget all about looting.”

  He reluctantly agreed and went up to a room to change while Adelina kept watch at the window. The mob was only three doors down now. An older woman knelt in the street sobbing, a man with white, wispy hair stood over her, clutching his head where it was bleeding a little from having been struck. Adelina was surprised to see the mob had more women than men, clothed in filthy dresses and skirts, hair wild, unkempt, and stuck to their faces by sweat.

  “I’m ready,” Tommy said from the parlor doorway.

  Adelina turned to look at him.

  He wore plaid wool trousers with suspenders, and a white, collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up high. She found she liked this version of Tommy better than the patrolman.

  “That’ll do,” she said.

  “We can go out the back way,” he said.

  They hurried down the staircase to the main entry hall and had just turned toward the kitchen when a huge p
aving stone came through the window near the door, sending a shower of broken glass skimming across the floor.

  “Go!” Tommy said.

  Adelina raced into the kitchen, but didn’t see a back door.

  “Down the stairs to the cellar,” Tommy said behind her.

  Adelina spotted the metal, spiral staircase in the corner, and dove down it into darkness, her footsteps clanking and echoing back at her. She reached the bottom, and didn’t know where to go, her eyes not having adjusted to the light.

  “This way,” Tommy whispered, sliding around her. “I think they’re in the house, so we must go quietly.”

  He moved away into the shadows and Adelina heard him fiddling with a lock. Then a wedge of light opened wide, silhouetting him against a view of the house’s back lawn. She stepped toward him and together they left the brownstone in the hands of the looters.

  Eliza made her way west from the Hole-in-the-Wall toward the Astor House. That Irish woman, Gallus Mag, had told her that Cudgel had taken her father with him. Eliza didn’t know what that man could want with her father. But she knew of no better way to find her father than to find Cudgel, and the message she had read in Mr. Tweed’s library mentioned the Astor House as the site of Cudgel’s orders. It also meant that her father had delivered the letter she had gone out to stop.

  She took Frankfort over to Park Row from Pearl, hoping that Tammany Hall’s presence on the corner might lessen some of the danger. The activity in the streets confirmed to her what Mr. Tweed had warned her about. The rioters were planning and massing, mostly ruffians from the slums and docks.

  One group took note of her as she passed, staring with open hatred and disgust. “Where you going?” one of them asked as he stepped toward her, nearly into her path.

  “I am running an errand for Mr. Tweed. I am his maid.” She hoped that would deter him.

  It stopped his advance, but he didn’t retreat. “That so?”

  “It is,” she said, chin up, as she walked by him.

  “What if you’re lying?” he called after her.

  She turned around and looked directly into his eyes. “Are you a gambling man?”

  His jutting Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

  “It seems not,” she said, and continued on her way in the calmest manner she could manage, even though she wanted to run.

  After that, she kept mostly to the shadows along the sides of the roads, or blended in with a group of passersby if they didn’t seem threatening. She had always been good at hiding, which was why her father had affectionately called her his “little sneak thief” as a girl.

  When she reached Park Row and crossed the railway into the park that surrounded City Hall, she found it even easier to hide among the trees. She glided southwest, down past the Croton Fountain to the tip of the park, and she stood there in the shadows studying the Astor House hotel across Broadway from her.

  She hadn’t been there long when she glimpsed a figure down among the tombstones in the churchyard of the chapel of St. Paul. Shortly after that, she spotted a second figure emerging from a fifth-story window on the south side of the hotel. The one in the churchyard shot something at the one in the window, too quiet to be a gun, and the figure in the window disappeared.

  Then the man in the churchyard appeared to fly up the tree and over the fence into the street. In a flash he scaled the bare hotel wall as if someone had hung a ladder for him from the window. Eliza had never seen such a feat.

  She crouched down deeper into the shadows and waited to see what would happen next. Several moments went by and then the second figure climbed out the window and up onto the hotel roof, followed by the man from the churchyard. After another few moments, one of the men fell from the roof, but in fits, as he seemed to snatch at the wall and slow his descent. Eliza thought for certain he would break his neck, but he landed hard on the ground and then labored to his feet.

  From there, he staggered across Broadway and down nearby Ann Street. Shortly after that, the man from the churchyard climbed down the side of the hotel as easily as he’d surmounted it and stalked in the direction his quarry had fled. Then he paused and pulled a curious telescope from his coat, which he used to survey the streets.

  Eliza wanted to duck even lower, but he never pointed the glass directly at her. When it seemed to be pointing in the direction of Ann Street, he put the telescope away, unslung a rifle from his shoulder, loaded it, and fired it with a muffled pop. Then he strolled out of view down the street in the direction he’d just shot.

  Eliza felt certain one of these men was Cudgel, but she didn’t know which one. Mr. Tweed’s letter had mentioned another man named Varius. From what she had witnessed, both men seemed equally dangerous, and capable of incredible deeds like climbing walls and surviving what should have been lethal falls.

  When the man from the churchyard emerged from Ann Street, Eliza had a choice. She could follow him and try to confront him, hoping he was Cudgel, but it was also possible that Cudgel was the other man down Ann Street, possibly dying or dead at that moment.

  Before she could make up her mind, the man from the churchyard scaled the wall of the nearest building to its roof and disappeared, eliminating any chance of her following him. So she took the only option that remained available to her and left the park, hurrying down Broadway to Ann Street.

  She didn’t see the man right away. She had to walk up and down the street twice before she noticed him in the shadows of an alleyway. At first glance, she thought he was dead, and within the corner of her own mind, Grace recognized Owen’s ancestor. But her panic quickly faded as she got near to him and saw the rise and fall of his chest. He was merely unconscious, poisoned in some way.

  Eliza tried slapping him awake, but that failed to rouse him. Grace decided to take the risk of desynchronization and banished Eliza to the corner room in her mind. Then she whispered, “Monroe?”

  Nothing.

  She wondered if he could hear her. “Monroe?” she said more loudly.

  Yeah, he said in her ear. I’m here. Sorry, busy trying to keep tabs on everyone.

  “Is Owen okay?”

  He’s fine, just in limbo right now.

  “So what do I do?”

  Same thing he’s doing. You wait. As long as Eliza waits anyway.

  “But Owen’s not Cudgel, is he?”

  No, he’s not. But Eliza doesn’t know that.

  “How is David?”

  He’s fine, too.

  “Where is he?”

  He’s looking for you, actually. I think he might even be heading to the Hole-in-the-Wall. But again, Eliza doesn’t know that. If you take off, you’ll—

  “I know,” Grace said. “I’ll desynchronize.”

  Right. So sit tight, and let Eliza run the show as much as you can. Okay? We’re getting close. Javier has the Piece of Eden right now. We just have to ride this wave all the way in.

  “Okay,” Grace said, even though it was hard to let anyone else run the show, apparently even the person whose memory she was experiencing. But she forced herself to let Eliza back out, and gave the girl free access to the real estate of her mind.

  Eliza thought about calling for a doctor, but decided against it. That might involve the police or other authorities, who might then interfere with her finding her father. So instead, she settled down in the alley next to him, this stranger, and kept watch over him, making sure he was breathing and that no one found them.

  An hour passed this way, and then another, and then the first light of dawn reached down to touch the street with a warmth that promised a sweltering day.

  The stranger stirred.

  “Hey,” Eliza said. “Hey, wake up.”

  His eyelids fluttered and he groaned.

  “Can you hear me?” Eliza asked.

  His eyes opened, a little too widely, and she could tell they weren’t yet focusing right. He had the look of a drunkard waking from a hard night.

  “Who—who’re you?” he asked.


  “Eliza,” she said. “Please tell me you’re Cudgel.”

  He shook his head. “I’d like to kill him, though.”

  So Cudgel had been the other one, the one Eliza couldn’t have followed up to the rooftops, anyway. That meant she also knew who this fellow was.

  “You’re Varius,” she said.

  A startled look took over for his bewilderment. “Yes. Who did you say you were?”

  “Eliza,” she said. “Cudgel took my father somewhere.”

  “Where is Cudgel?” Varius asked.

  Eliza flicked her eyes upward. “Long gone. He climbed up the walls. Like you did.”

  “You see a lot, Miss Eliza.” Varius rubbed his head. “Why would Cudgel want your father?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, not yet trusting this man. “Why would Cudgel want to shoot you?”

  He paused. “Let’s just say … we’re very old enemies.”

  Neither Cudgel nor this man seemed very old. “Do you know how to find him?”

  “I’m going to try,” Varius said. “Meanwhile, why don’t you tell me how you know my name.”

  Eliza still wasn’t willing or ready to trust him and didn’t answer.

  Varius closed his eyes. “Look, Miss Eliza. We both want the same thing. But Cudgel is a very dangerous man—”

  “Aren’t you a dangerous man?”

  “I am dangerous, too,” he said. “That’s true. But if you help me, I swear I’ll help you, and I won’t harm you. You could have harmed me while I was unconscious, but you didn’t.”

  “Only because I didn’t know who you were.”

  “And now you do. So how do you know my name?”

  Eliza narrowed her eyes, considering him. She thought back to the contents of the letter, and what they suggested. Mr. Tweed and Cudgel were out to destroy the city and the nation, and this man lying on the ground was their enemy, which might make him her friend. But beyond that, Eliza’s vision, the same sight that had allowed her to read the letter in the first place, gave her a glimpse of this man’s intent. She knew with certainty he meant her no harm and he would keep his word.

  “I read it,” she said. “That’s how I learned your name.”