The Boy Who Was Not Worth Saving

POV: Felix

Father.

The word had been in his mouth for ten minutes. It had been there since the carriages came down the pier, since the footman opened the door and the tall gray figure stepped out into the torchlight, and Felix, crouched in the lee of the oil tank with a fuse in one hand and a match in the other, had felt his whole body turn to water.

He had known. That was the stupid thing. He had known since the roof, since the gold, since Hollis had said someone who keeps their money in your father's bank. He had put it in a drawer in his head and shut the drawer. And now here it was, standing on the planks in a perfectly cut overcoat, forty yards away, with the lamplight on its silver hair.

"Father," whispered Felix.

It came out as a breath. It was not meant for anyone. But the wind was blowing from the tank to the pier, and the pier was very quiet, and on it, a long way off, the tall man with the gold-headed cane lifted his head.

He turned.

It took a very long time. He did it slowly, the way he did everything, with a gentle swing of the shoulders, as if listening to music. The torches threw their glare across his face. It was a face Felix had looked at every morning of his childhood across a breakfast table, and it was exactly as he remembered: long, pale, tidy, a little amused, with the fine lines of an aristocrat and the quiet gray eyes of a banker. It looked at the oil tank. It looked at the shadow beside it.

It found him.

Felix could not breathe. He rose from his crouch. He did not mean to. His body did it of its own accord, the way it had once risen when his father came into a room: straight, with his hands at his sides, and his chin up, as he had been taught. He stood there in the open, in the glare of the torches, a thin boy in a cracked pair of spectacles with a match in his fist.

"Father," he said again, aloud, in a voice he hardly knew.

The Chairman looked at him.

It was the look of a man seeing a coat he'd thrown out, on a stranger's back. No anger. No surprise. A faint, polite, passing recognition, and then a kind of mild disappointment, as at an item on a bill. His eyes rested on Felix's face for exactly as long as it takes to read a line of print.

Then he turned to the captain at his side, a stiff gray officer with a long jaw, and said, in his soft carrying voice, in a tone one might use to request a cup of coffee:

"Kill the boy. He is no longer my concern."

…

He would remember that sentence for the rest of his life.

Not for its cruelty. It was not cruel. It had no heat in it. It was a sentence that Augustus Whitcomb might have addressed to a clerk, over a stack of papers. Kill the boy. He is no longer my concern. It was a thing that was filed. It was a thing that was done.

The captain raised a hand. Rifles rose along the line of the pier. A dozen black muzzles swung toward the tank. And Felix stood quite still, and looked into the barrels, and thought, with a strange detached clarity, Oh. I see. He is not angry. He never was. I was never anything he could be angry at.

I was a line in a ledger.

"FELIX!"

A shape dropped out of the sky.

It fell from the jib of the crane, forty feet, with a rifle in one fist and a coil of rope in the other, and it landed in a crouch on the planks in front of him with a thud that jarred his teeth. It rose. It stood. It stretched out both arms, wide, like a man opening a gate, and turned its back on the muzzles, and shouted, in a voice like a bull's:

"Down!"

"Hollis—"

"Get down, you idiot, get DOWN—"

The volley came.

…

He never remembered the sound. He remembered the shape of it: a ragged rolling crash like a wall falling, and Hollis's hands thrown up in front of his face, and a great invisible weight in the air, a pressure, as though the night itself had leaned forward. He remembered the bullets. He saw them. He saw them in the torchlight, small bright flickering streaks, a hundred, coming across the planks in a dazzling fan; and he saw them bend.

They went round. They swerved, in the air, like swallows. They curved, in long graceful arcs, around his head, around Hollis's shoulders, around the oil tank's round iron flank, and struck the planks behind him in a rattling stitch of splinters. A bullet whined past his ear and cut a lock of his hair. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He thought: He's going to die doing it.

Hollis's face was gray. His mouth was a thin line. Blood was running from his nose. His hands, held up before him, shook like leaves in a gale.

"The tank!" he gasped. "Felix, the tank, do it now, I can't hold them, do it now—"

Felix looked at the match.

It was a small thing. A sliver of pine, with a head of red phosphorus. He had made a hundred like it. He had struck them in his attic every night of the last two years. He knew the moment of ignition as he knew the shape of his own hand: the flare, the hiss, the sweet sharp smell of sulfur.

He knew what was in the tank.

Kerosene. Four thousand gallons. A fuse of cotton wick soaked in saltpeter. A charge of my own devising, no bigger than a plum. It will not explode. It will burn. It will make a wall of fire and a cloud of smoke, and the Lamp Order will not cross it.

No one near it. No one inside.

Rule three.

"I'm sorry," said Felix, to nobody, and struck the match.

…

The world turned orange.

The fuse took with a sound like a sigh. A thin bright worm of flame ran along the cotton, quick and silent, into the black mouth of the tank, and for a second nothing happened. Then something went whump deep in the iron, like a giant clearing his throat, and a pillar of fire rose out of the manhole into the night.

It was enormous. It was a living thing. It went up fifty feet in a single roaring column, and spread, and curled, and rolled out across the pier in a sheet of heat that struck his face like a hand. The planks began to blister. The air shimmered. Smoke poured from the burning tank in thick black billows, rolling toward the carriages, and the soldiers on the pier, who had been running toward him, stopped and flung up their arms.

"Back!" shouted the captain. "Back! Fire!"

It was working. It was working perfectly. He had calculated the draft, the angle, the spread. The wall of flame lay between the Lamp Order and the tank like a curtain, and the wind was blowing the smoke into their faces, and in the red roaring glare he could see them stumbling, coughing, clawing at their eyes. He had done it. He had done it exactly as he'd planned.

And then he saw the man on fire.

…

He was one of the soldiers. He had been at the head of the file, a young one, with a round soft face, and he had run too close. A tongue of burning kerosene, thrown by the blast, had caught his sleeve. It ran up his arm like a living thing. He stood a moment in the middle of the pier, in the glare, with a puzzled, almost thoughtful expression, looking at the flame that was eating his coat. Then it reached his throat.

He screamed.

It was not a loud scream. That was the worst of it. It was high and thin and astonished, like the cry of a child who has been burned by a stove. He beat at his arm. He beat at his chest. He turned in a slow circle with his mouth wide open and his hair alight, and then he fell to his knees on the planks and rolled, and rolled, and a comrade ran to him with a coat, and the screaming went on and on and on.

Felix stood and watched.

He couldn't move. His hands hung at his sides. He was aware of the heat on his face, and the roar of the fire, and the smell, a thick sweet greasy smell that he knew from the attic and had never in his life smelled on a person. He was aware that someone was shouting his name. He was aware of nothing else.

I did that.

I lit the match.

"Felix!"

It was only supposed to be smoke.

"Felix! Come on, we've got to move—"

He was twenty. He was twenty years old. He had a face like a boy from the Academy. He had a mother, somewhere, who made his bed.

A hand closed on his collar.

…

They went off the end of the dock into the harbor.

He didn't remember jumping. He remembered the planks going out from under him and the air going past, and the long black glittering fall, and then the cold. It was a cold beyond cold. It hit him like a wall of iron. The water closed over his head and filled his mouth and his nose and his ears, and the world went silent, and dark, and green. He kicked. He thrashed. A strong arm locked round his chest, and hauled, and he came up spluttering into the night.

"Breathe!" shouted Hollis. "Breathe, damn you, kick, KICK—"

He kicked.

They swam. He couldn't have said for how long. The harbor was wide and black and heaving, with the flames of Pier Nine standing up behind them like the gates of hell, and the cold bit at his bones, and the salt burned in his eyes. He swam badly. He had never learned. Hollis swam beside him with one arm hooked under his shoulders, towing, grunting, swearing in a low continuous undertone, in a language that was mostly consonants.

At last there was a piling. A great slimed black post, hung with weed, and a rusty iron ladder bolted to the side. Hollis hauled him to it. He clung. He felt for a rung and found one and dragged himself up, with his teeth chattering, until he sat on a ledge of stone under the wharf, in the dark, with the water lapping at his boots.

He leaned over the edge and was sick.

It went on a long time. When he had finished he stayed there, hanging, with his forehead on the cold wet stone and the taste of salt and bile in his mouth, shaking from head to foot. He heard the water slap. He heard the distant crackle of the fire. And he heard, very close, a low rough ragged breathing, and a hand on his back.

"I burned him," said Felix.

"I know."

"I burned a man. I, I set him on fire."

"He was shooting at you."

"He was twenty." His voice cracked. "He had a round face. He didn't, he wasn't, he was only doing what he was told, Hollis, he was only a boy, he was only, he's somebody's, he's somebody's son—"

"Felix."

"Do you know what it smells like?"

Hollis said nothing.

"It's not the way I thought. I thought, I had it all worked out. It was a controlled reaction. It was thermodynamics. It was a, a wall. I never, I never thought about the, the skin—" He stopped. He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth. "I'm a chemist. I'm supposed to know what things do."

"You didn't know."

"I should have."

"You did what you had to." Hollis's voice was ragged. "If you hadn't lit it, they'd have shot us both. They'd have shot all of us. You saved Roz and the Captain. You saved me."

"I didn't save anyone. I hurt someone."

"Both can be true."

"Can they?"

"Aye," said Hollis, very quietly. "They can. God help us."

…

He put his arms around him.

It was clumsy. The ledge was narrow, and both of them were soaked to the skin, and Hollis's hands, those numb gray hands, shook as they gripped the back of Felix's coat. But he held on. He drew Felix against his chest, hard, one arm round his shoulders and one round his waist, and pressed his cheek against Felix's wet hair. He did not say anything. He rocked him, a little, back and forth. Felix felt, through the cold, the heat of his body. He felt the thud of his heart.

He wept.

He wept as he had not wept at his mother's funeral, or in the hall with the broken window, or in the attic with the notice in the Courier. He wept with his whole body, in great gasping silent heaves, with his face in Hollis's shirt. And Hollis held him, and let him, and said nothing at all.

At some point the shaking stopped. Felix lay against him, spent, and listened to the water. Far off, over the harbor, a bell was ringing, a thin frantic clangor, and a fire-engine's whistle, and shouting. A long way away.

He put his hand in his pocket.

He didn't know why. His fingers moved of their own accord. They closed on something cold and heavy and sodden, and drew it out into the dark.

It was the ingot.

He turned it over. Water ran off it. In the gleam of the distant fire he could just see the two sharp letters on its face.

MT.

Father's money.

It had paid for the flasks. It had paid for the kiln, for the retort stand with the ring, for the cello case, and the vials, and the green solvent that had melted the first seal. It had paid for the oil that had burned on Pier Nine. It had been handed to him in an attic, by a thin boy with a cane, who had said, quite solemnly, You've agreed to. That's what a retainer is.

He thought of the ledger in Dex's hand. He thought of the ink-stained fingers, and the gray calm eyes, and the cellar. He thought of a voice saying, The client is anonymous.

Who is paying us?

The one who pays.

And all at once, as the water lapped and the fire flickered and Hollis breathed against his hair, the pieces fell together in his mind with a small neat click, like a lock turning in a well-oiled door. It was so simple. It was so obvious. It had been staring him in the face for weeks.

He closed his fist around the gold.

"It was him," he whispered.

"What?"

"The client. The one who hired us. The patron. It was him. It was Father." His voice was quite calm. "He's been paying for this from the beginning. He hired Dex. He paid for the bombs. He paid for me. He sent me the gold. And I, I laughed."

Hollis went very still.

"And Dex knew," said Felix. "Dex knew the whole time."