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“I’ll be fine. And there will always be another position,” he told her, nodding his thanks as she poured him a cup of the freshly made coffee.
“Abel—” Cela started.
But he didn’t let her finish. “The Order knows who you are, Rabbit. They wouldn’t have been looking for you if they didn’t think you were involved with that mess back in June. But you won’t run, so I’m going to do whatever I can to protect you. I can’t be here every day, but there are things I can do out there, beyond this city. There are men who would love to see the Order brought low—cattlemen and ranchers, businessmen and bankers, who are all tired of New York being the only place that matters. The other Brotherhoods are hungry, Cela. They want a piece of the power that the Order has held for too long.”
Her nerves were already on edge waiting for Jianyu, but now fear and guilt churned in her as well. There was no way she could let him put himself into that kind of danger for her. “What, exactly, do you think you can do about it?” she asked, her voice sharper than she’d intended.
“The people who can afford Pullman berths aren’t your average travelers,” Abel reminded her. “They’re people like the men in the Order. They don’t even bother to hide their secret insignia or conversations from me. I’m just the porter.” He shrugged as he took another forkful of food. “To them, I barely signify. But I hear things. A lot of people wonder just exactly how ready the Order is for the Conclave. They’ve heard whispers about some of the things that have happened—the fire in Khafre Hall, the move to a new set of headquarters—and they wonder if the Order is hiding something. Maybe they don’t need to wonder anymore.”
“They wouldn’t listen to you,” Cela pointed out.
Abel frowned. “Probably not, but they’d listen to one another. All it would take is a telegram or two delivered to the right people.”
“How would you know the right people?” Viola wondered.
“We listen and watch,” Abel said. “Me and Joshua, we know plenty of other porters who would be willing to gather some information. We know people on different lines who could send messages from the right locations. With their help, we can make it believable. If the other Brotherhoods think the Order is weak, they’re more likely to cause trouble. Maybe if we cause enough problems for the Order, they’ll be too busy to think about Cela here and start worrying about their own selves.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Cela argued.
“It’s no more dangerous than you staying here in the city.” He shrugged, taking a careful sip from the steaming cup. “You know how white people are. They talk around the help. Listening isn’t going to do anyone any harm.”
“You’re not talking about just listening, though,” Cela said. “You’re talking about forging telegrams. You’re talking about involving yourself in ways that could get you killed.”
“Rescuing the Order’s castoffs every other week could get you killed, and I can’t seem to stop you,” he pointed out. “It’s bad enough you won’t leave the city. You don’t have to keep risking everything in these midnight rescues.”
Guilt washed over her. “I do, Abel.”
“No, you don’t.” He put his fork down and took the napkin from his lap. “You don’t owe them a thing. Certainly not your life.”
“It’s not because I owe them,” she argued. How was she supposed to explain to him why she went with Viola and Jianyu on those midnight runs? It wasn’t because she didn’t understand the danger. And it was more than the rush of excitement she felt when she put on the trousers and the vest she wore to disguise herself. She’d spent her whole life living in a city where the haves could take whatever they wanted from the have-nots. But on those nights that she rode in the box of the wagon and steered them all to safety, she helped to right that imbalance—if only a little. “I owe it to myself, Abe.”
When he frowned in confusion, she took his hand.
“Could you live with yourself knowing you could have saved a life, but you sat by instead?”
His mouth tightened, but he shook his head.
“Then how do you expect me to?” She gave his hand a squeeze, knowing that he would go through with his plan. Knowing that she would let him. “We’re both cut from the same cloth, Abel Johnson. You and me. We aren’t built to sit by.”
“I’m going to go outside and wait for Jianyu,” Viola said softly, excusing herself from the table. “This is a conversation for family.”
Even once Viola was gone, Abel still didn’t speak.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into this, Abe,” Cela said finally.
He wrapped his other hand around hers. “You didn’t drag me anywhere, Rabbit. I’ve thought this through, you know. It’s going to work, and when it does, we’ll have a whole network in place of people working together. Think of what we can build with that. Not just for your friends but for our people too. The world’s changing, Cela. Pretty soon it’s not going to be this place or that. This Conclave that the Order is throwing is just one example. The country’s coming together, one way or another. We have to be ready too.”
THE INVITATION
The bite of the late-November air was exactly what Viola needed to shake off the mood that Cela and Abel’s bickering had put her in. She had already been on edge, waiting as they were for Jianyu to return from his foolish attempt to convince Werner to join them, but to see the siblings’ love for each other—their mutual respect and concern, so starkly different from her own family—was too much.
It had been a long summer and a longer fall waiting for something to happen, but nothing had. Darrigan and Esta had not yet returned. Nibsy seemed content to let them suffer as they waited for him to make his move. Even the Order seemed more restrained of late—or perhaps they’d just run short of victims.
Meanwhile, Viola had been mostly confined to the small apartment they all shared above the offices of Abel’s friend’s newspaper. Nibsy had the marks and control over much of the Bowery, and John Torrio had the Five Pointers and control over the rest of it. Her mother no longer had a daughter. Even if she could walk the streets freely, even if she hadn’t been worried that one of their enemies might follow her back and harm Cela and Abel, where would she go?
Theo seemed to be keeping his distance as well. It was necessary, she knew. His family still didn’t quite trust him, and he didn’t want to risk leading anyone from the Order to their location. But he was Viola’s only real link to Ruby. Without his steady, sunny presence to remind her of how good he was, it was too easy for Viola to allow herself to imagine a different world, where Ruby might be hers.
Pushing away her maudlin thoughts, Viola wrapped her thin shawl around herself more tightly to ward off the chill. Luckily, the Age building was far enough uptown that it had a small garden in the back, if one could call a plot of dirt patched with scrubby weeds a garden. At least there, she could be under the sky. She could pretend she wasn’t trapped like a rat.
