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“Uh, hi,” I say. “You must be Daneca’s brother.”
“Screw you,” the kid says, and walks back up the stairs.
“In here,” Daneca’s mom calls, and I head in that direction. Daneca’s waiting for me near a half-open door to a room filled to its high ceilings with books. Mrs. Wasserman sits on a small sofa near a desk.
“Get lost?” Daneca asks me.
“It’s a big house,” I say.
“Well, bring him in,” Mrs. Wasserman says, and Daneca ushers me inside. She flops down onto her mother’s wooden desk chair and spins it a little with her foot.
I am left to perch on the edge of a brown leather ottoman.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I say.
“Really?” Mrs. Wasserman has a whole mess of light brown curly hair that she doesn’t seem interested in corralling. Her bare feet are tucked up under a soft-looking oatmeal throw. “I’m glad. I heard that you were a little bit wary of us.”
“I don’t want to disappoint you, but I’m not a worker,” I tell her. “I thought maybe there was some misunderstanding.”
“Do you know where the term ‘worker’ comes from?” she asks, leaning forward, ignoring my floundering.
“Working magic?” I ask.
“It’s much more modern than that,” she says. “Long, long ago, we were called theurgists. But from about the seventeenth century until the 1930s, we were called dab hands. The term ‘worker’ comes from the work camps. When the ban was passed, no one knew how to actually enforce it, so people waited for prosecution in labor camps. It took the government a long time to figure out how to conduct a trial. Some people waited years. That’s where the crime families started—in those camps. They started recruiting. The ban created organized crime as we know it.
“In Australia, for instance, where working has never been illegal, there is no real syndicate with the kind of power our crime families have. And in Europe the families are so entrenched that they are practically a second royalty.”
“Some people think workers are royalty,” I say, thinking of my mother. “And Australia never made curse work illegal because it was founded by curse workers—or dab hands or whatever—who’d been sent to a penal colony.”
“You do know your history, but I want you to look at something.” Mrs. Wasserman places a stack of large black-and-white photos in front of me. Men and women with their hands cut off, balancing bowls on their heads. “This is what used to happen to workers all over the world—and still does in some places. People talk about how workers abused their power, about how they were the real power behind thrones, kingmakers, but you have to understand that most workers were in small villages. Many still are. And violence against them isn’t taken seriously.”
She’s right about that. Hard to take violence seriously when workers are the ones with all the advantages. I look at the pictures again. My eyes keep stopping on the brutal, jagged flesh, healed dark and probably burned.
She sees me staring.
“The surprising thing,” she says, “is that some of them have learned to work with their feet.”
“Really?” I look up at her.
She smiles. “If more people knew that, I don’t know if gloves would be as popular. Wearing gloves goes back as far as the Byzantine Empire. Back then people wore them to protect themselves from what they called the touch. They believed that demons walked among people and their touch brought chaos and terror. Back then workers were thought to be demons who could be bargained with for great rewards. If you had a worker baby, it was because a demon had gotten inside of it. Justinian the first—the emperor—took all those babies and raised them in an enormous tower to be an unstoppable demon army.”
“Why are you telling me this? I know workers have been thought of lots of different idiotic ways.”
“Because Zacharov and those other heads of crime families are doing the same thing. Their people hang around bus stations in the big cities waiting for the runaways. They give them a place to stay and a few little jobs, and before they know it, they’re like the Byzantine child-demons, in so much debt that they might as well be prisoners or prostitutes.”
“We have a boy staying with us,” Daneca says. “Chris. His parents threw him out.”
I think of the blond boy on the stairs.
Mrs. Wasserman gives Daneca a stern look. “That’s Chris’s story to tell.”
“I have to get going,” I say, standing. I’m uncomfortable; I feel like my skin is too tight. I have to get out of this conversation.
“I want you to know that when you’re ready, I can help you,” she says. “You could save a lot of boys from towers.”
“I’m not who you think I am,” I say. “I’m not a worker.”
“You don’t have to be,” Mrs. Wasserman says. “You know things, Cassel. Things that could help people like Chris.”
