Pt. 3
Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is finer still to defy
arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used—not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf
of others more helpless.
—Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
The riot broke at the Gorgon Factory at five in the morning on Thursday. Maka slept through it. She couldn't help it—Gorgon's was five miles from Hampton Street. She probably would have slept through it even if Gorgon's had been right outside her front door, because she'd spent the whole day washing, drying, and airing out curtains, and the living room curtains, when wet, were half again as heavy as she was. As it was, she slept right through until nearly seven o'clock, when Blair, eyes wide, hair tangled, shook her awake to say that someone was knocking on the door for her.
It was Tsubaki. She was wringing her hands and shivering in her threadbare shawl, but when Maka invited her in, she shook her head. "No," she said. She was panting, cheeks and collarbone flushed red. Maka wondered if she'd run all the way here. "I don't have much time. And I'm sorry to ask this, but we need bandages, and I ran out of cloth, and I remembered you saying that there were some old sheets that you were going to remake and I really hope you haven't used them yet—"
Blair was off to get the sheets before Maka even had to say anything. She reached out, tentatively, setting her hands on Tsubaki's shoulders. She was shaking, and when she looked up again, Maka realized there was a smear of blood across her cheek. "Tsubaki, what happened?"
"It's falling apart," she said, and then her face crumpled, and she closed her eyes and took several huge breaths, as though keeping herself from flying into a million pieces. "Mifune lost control of the strikers. One of them led a riot this morning. It's ruined. They're never going to take us seriously now, not that people have stooped to violence. Black Star's furious; he went storming off somewhere to find who did it, but even Mifune isn't sure. And there are so many people who were hurt and we ran out of bandages and you're closer than the nearest depot and I don't think any doctor would give us bandages anyway because we're striking—"
She continued to talk, random strings of words and meanings, and Maka rubbed her arms to get some warmth back into them, not sure what to say, or do, or think. When Blair came back with the sheets, Maka drew Tsubaki in the house, and set her to wait the ten minutes it would take her to change, and Tsubaki started taking deep breaths again.
"It's bad, Maka," she said, but that was all she would offer on the subject. "You won't like it."
"I don't like a lot of things around here," said Maka. "Doesn't mean I can't help." And she went upstairs to change.
Seeing Gorgon's made her think of Madame Gorgon, all coiled ice and fire. The factory was more aesthetic, less functional than Hale's, but the fact remained that Gorgon's had more clients and thus a heavier workload than the place belonging to Soul Evans, Esq. The logo was all sharp lines and triangles. The gates stood open, and when she looked inside, she could see scuffs in the dirt and blood on the walls. A single handprint stood out on the gate. She looked at Tsubaki, and Tsubaki tightened her lips and kept walking.
The working neighborhoods for Gorgon's were only a few blocks away from the factory, and they'd been transformed into a makeshift hospital. There wasn't much anyone could do, not in these circumstances, but at least they could try to set broken bones from police rods and bind up cuts, even as they watched men with internal bleeding fade away and die with their faces twisted into painful mockeries of smiles.
She had never met Mifune before that morning. He was like a fairy tale hero, she thought, a tall and stoic blonde with a little girl who clung desperately to his heels. A daughter of one of the men who'd started the riot, someone told her. Now he was on the run, and Mifune was looking after the kid until he returned for justice. Still: the relationship between the two of them seemed closer than two people who had been thrown together only a few hours ago, and Tsubaki drew her aside later to explain that Angela's father had been a blind wretched drunk who beat all his children, and Mifune had been keeping an eye on Angela and her brothers and sisters since before Angela had even been born. "That rat bastard," said Tsubaki, and Maka's eyes had widened, because she'd never heard Tsubaki swear before. "I don't even know why he started telling everyone to revolt. He had some stupid excuse."
"He said his sister was starving," Mifune said from behind Tsubaki, his voice soft and furious. "Which I wouldn't have let happen. I swore I wouldn't let it happen, before witnesses. They always had food on the table." He scratched the back of his neck. "The man was itching for a fight since we started organizing. He just wanted to see blood."
Maka looked down at her hands, which were streaked with blood and dust, and hate coiled like a viper in her belly.
She worked all day. She wasn't sure when Blair came out to join her, maybe noon, maybe later, but the riot had been huge, and there were more victims than there were cots. People were lined up back and forth along the main street, lying on blankets or sitting propped against the houses, and she went from man to woman to man to woman, doing the best she could. She was sure that every bone she'd straightened would heal crooked, every cut she'd stitched or covered would turn into a bad scar, but each time she went to stand and move on to someone else, those with sense left in their heads would look up at her and smile and tell her thank you, like she'd done something worth the thanks.
The troop of doctors—three of them, Dr. Stein and two others she'd never met before in her life—showed up about an hour after Blair. Fury had been swirling in her for hours, and finally there were targets to be had, even if Stein honestly scared her. She went to meet them. "You're damn well late," she snapped, and wiped her bloody hands on her skirt. "These people have been lying here since just past dawn. Where the hell have you been when people have been doing, taking your sweet time like this?"
One of the doctors she didn't know had the grace to look at the dirt. The second one stared off into space. Stein just looked at her, smoking like a chimney like always. "Gorgon made us work on the guards first," he said, and suddenly she couldn't be furious anymore. "Where are the worst of them?"
She brought them over to those who were not yet dead, and went on setting fingers.
Soul Evans showed up less than an hour after Stein, and she didn't even notice until he crouched next to her and helped her set a broken arm of a boy who had been working as a napalm carrier. She hadn't even noticed it was him helping her until the job was done, and she swiped hair out of her face with the back of her hand and realized the man squatting next to her had red eyes. She stared at him. "What are you doing here?" she blurted, and then realized that she'd probably just smeared blood all over her face, and swore under her breath. Mr. Evans stood, and put down a hand to help her up, but Maka stood on her own.
"I came because this has gone on long enough," he said. His eyes were hard. "I want to talk to Black Star."
"He's not the one who started the riots," she said. "There was another man who picked a fight, convinced people to get bloody for him. It's not the strikers' fault."
"I didn't say I thought it was, Miss Albarn," he said. "I want to talk to Black Star. That's all."
People around them had started to notice that a master was standing among the wounded. She could hear the whispers. Maka let out a breath. "He's out looking for the man who started all of this," she said. "I don't know where he is or when he'll be back. You could wait, I suppose, but you might not want to do that considering how people here feel about masters."
Mr. Evans considered her for a moment, eyes searching her face. Then a hint of a smile quirked his lips, and he rolled up his sleeves. "So tell me, Miss Albarn," he said, and Maka was most certainly not looking at his hands. Or arms. Even if they were clean this time. Even if he had nice hands. "Who's the next one that needs tending?"
She stared at him for a moment. Then she shook her head—because she really didn't understand anyone here, not masters, not workers, not anyone—and moved on down the line. When she cast half a look over her shoulder, Soul Evans was right on her heels.
The home guard came by a while later, and Maka sent them away with a flea in their ears. It was only after that that Black Star came back, empty-handed, his knuckles and lip split, fury curling off him in waves. She let Tsubaki handle him—she doubted he would want anything to do with anyone who could be called a master at this point—and glanced at Mr. Evans. She'd been stealing little looks at him for the whole of it, all three hours he'd been helping her so far, and she wasn't sure if she was going to stop. If she was really able to stop. Because frankly, Soul Evans didn't make sense.
He'd spent the past twenty minutes trying to get her to call him Soul, and not Mr. Evans—"because," he said, baring teeth, "it wasn't my choice to name the factory after me"—but propriety and embarrassment kept her from agreeing. It was one thing to use first names among the workers, but quite another to call a man she'd met in—well, not civilized society, because she'd always severely questioned why upper-class society was the only "civilized" sort, but at a social event, anyway—by his first name. She'd had enough drama and humiliation with that sort of thing through living with her father.
She shoved that thought right out of her head.
There were only three reasons she could think of for why Mr. Evans wanted her to call him by his first name. The first: he really did hate hearing his last name, and he didn't want to hear it from anyone, even someone who he very strongly disliked. (She couldn't think why he kept sniping at her if he didn't at least dislike her.) The second: he was playing a trick of some kind, maybe planning a way he could embarrass her in public. After all, if she called him Soul, and he looked at her and said, very pointedly, Miss Albarn, she could get into so much trouble in Society. Or the third: he wanted to seduce her.
This was the most unbelievable; she couldn't recall meeting a single male in her life who might have wanted to seduce her, except maybe Justin, and the whole of her interaction with Justin, from awkward start to even more awkward finish, had been a disaster of international proportions. So she had settled on two, and had quite stubbornly refused to call him Soul, even when he had just as stubbornly refused to respond to Mr. Evans. So she'd just started not using names at all, which was cheating, and kind of rude, but it was working out more easily than she'd anticipated.
"Medusa was planning on bringing in new staff," Mr. Evans said suddenly, his eyes tracking Black Star across the street. Maka blinked, and looked at him from where she'd leaned up against a hitching post, swiping dust off her skirt. "I only heard about it last night. Maybe that's why the riot started. Maybe the man Black Star went to find heard something, saw something."
"Or maybe he's just bloodthirsty," she said, and leaned her head back, staring at the sky. She'd had her hair pinned into pigtails for sleep, and she hadn't bothered to undo them in her rush out the door. Her hands went to her hair, undoing the ties. "The one you're watching is Black Star, by the way," she said, "if you do really want to talk to him."
"If," said Mr. Evans. He glanced at her just as she stole another look at him, and Maka looked quickly away. "You have yourself to thank for this, Miss Albarn."
She blinked. "I do?"
"You're the one who advocated discussion instead of force, as I recall."
Maka blinked again. Yes, she had said something very like that, a week and a half ago at the party they'd both attended. She hadn't thought he'd really been listening. "…oh."
He smiled again, an actual smile this time, and said nothing. He folded his hands behind his head. Across the street, Tsubaki herded Black Star into a chair, and said something to him that made him stay there. Black Star looked up at her, hands closing around Tsubaki's wrists, pulling her closer, and he rested his head against Tsubaki's stomach, hands bracing the small of her back. It was suddenly, starkly intimate, and Maka hastily looked away. Of course, looking away meant looking at Soul Evans, so she stared at the hitching post instead.
It wasn't like she hadn't known that Tsubaki and Black Star were close. Not married, but close. And Black Star might be one of the most confusing and aggravating men she'd ever met in her life (present company included) but she couldn't imagine him ever turning away from Tsubaki, in any sense of the phrase. At the same time, seeing proof of that closeness made something in her chest twist and ache like a sprained muscle.
When she looked up again, Tsubaki and Black Star had parted, and Mr. Evans was watching her. She pursed her lips. "…what?"
"I was only wondering," he said, "what makes an established woman of society like yourself come running out at dawn to tend to wounded factory workers."
She offered him a poisonous smile. "Compassion," she said. "Honor. Friendship. Oh, and a well-developed sense of basic human decency."
He laughed. Actually laughed, like she'd said something funny. Maka scowled. "It wasn't meant to be a joke, Mr. Evans."
"I didn't take it as one." His eyes were still creased, though, like he was laughing inside. "You startle me, is all, Miss Albarn."
"Do you have to say my name like that?" she said, unable to help herself. "Like it's a stain."
"I don't say it like it's a stain. I say it the way you seem to want me to."
"I'm not calling you by your first name, sir. That doesn't mean you have to be tetchy about it." When he just looked at her, she scoffed under her breath. "I startle you, you say. Why?"
"Mm." He stuck a hand in his pocket, pulled it out. There was a bullet, used, battered, lying on his palm. He rolled it with his finger, back and forth, thoughtfully, staring at it. "I suppose," he said, when the silence had stretched on long enough for her to think he wasn't going to answer at all, "because you don't act like I expected."
She didn't quite know what to say to that. Mr. Evans closed his hand over the mangled bullet, and stared across the way, ignoring the whispers as the wounded who could walk passed. "In my letters with your father, when he requested help in finding a place, he mentioned you a great deal. He had a…lot to say about you, Miss Albarn. But he didn't really describe you, not really."
Maka didn't quite know how to respond to that. She looked down at her feet.
"He never mentioned that you were kind," said Mr. Evans, and before she could respond, he'd bowed to her, curtly, and gone off to talk to Black Star. She saw Tsubaki blanch, saw Black Star redden, at Mr. Evans' approach, but after a few short words, they retreated, along with Mifune, into the office.
Maka gathered her skirts in her hands, and began the long walk home.
The strike had broken, thanks to the riot. Everyone went back to work. Maka spent her afternoons talking with Tsubaki, Masamune, Black Star, and occasionally the Thompson sisters. Liz Thompson didn't speak to her, but Patti did. A strange girl, she thought. Odd. But kind.
If her afternoons belonged to the factory workers, then her nights belonged, for the most part, to the masters. Mr. Evans was in her house most nights, talking with her father or not, depending on their moods and how late she was. She wasn't quite certain what to make of him, now that she'd seen him on his hands and knees, setting bones and wrapping bandages. Not now that she'd seen him go and shake Black Star's hand and speak to him as an equal, because he had. Tsubaki had told her so. She couldn't simply write him off as another master with no sympathy anymore. He had layers. Layers with white hair and eyes that were beauty and danger all at once.
It was bothering her more than she wanted to admit.
If they had all been back east, this question would have never occurred to her. She might have wanted to go help the factory workers, to aid them, but she wouldn't have. Not with so many whispers about her father and her mother and her own heritage, not with the hisses behind her back and the way women would flutter their fans at Spirit Albarn and give him secret smiles. Not even Justin and his oddities had broken her resolve: everything she observed about the whole male sex just kept confirming it. No man was trustworthy, not really. They all had flaws that could break your heart.
It wasn't that she hadn't seen flaws in Soul Evans. Rather, she'd seen a great many. Too many, almost, she thought, turning the page in her book without really seeing the words. It was like he was showing them off, and the honesty puzzled her. He'd never gone out of his way to hide any of them: not his grouching, or his laziness, or the way he refused to admit she was right, even when he was most certainly wrong. It bothered her. Didn't the man have any shame? Or pride? Or, well, anything, really.
It bothered her because it confused her, and the fact that he kept persisting in trying to get her to call him Soul made it worse. Even when he was on his absolute best behavior in front of her father, he could always get her riled when he gave her a sideways look and said "Miss Albarn," like he was weighing her and finding her wanting.
She kind of wanted to whack him with something large and conveniently heavy.
(Also, riled was her new favorite word. She'd heard it from Tsubaki. It seemed to mean a combination between irritated and agitated, and that suited the feeling she had when he sent her that odd, wide, sharky smile.)
Despite the fact that Soul Evans seemed determined to needle her every time he came into the house, her father (who, during the Justin debacle, had turned into a raging hypocrite the instant his daughter seemed in danger of being deflowered, or…whatever it was people were calling it nowadays) actually seemed to like the manufacturer. She was certain if her mother was still with them, then Soul Evans wouldn't have been coming to dinner nearly so often, but as it was, he was here almost every night now. Once she asked him (only with half a mind to needle him back) if he didn't have a family of his own to go to every night, and he just looked at her with his eyes glinting in the candlelight and said that his whole family was over a hundred miles away.
She'd known he'd set the party up on his own, but it hadn't really connected (even in her brain) that not having anyone to assist him with planning that party meant not having anybody in his house but him. Maka felt guilty after that. Not enough to stop being irritated with him, but enough to start thinking all over again about the sort of factory owner who would get on his hands and knees to set the broken bones of people who didn't even work for him.
Maka turned another page, and drew her knees up against her chest. She would have been paying more attention to the proprieties if Mr. Evans and her father were even in the room anymore; they'd gone off somewhere talking about Corporal Kidman and his designs for the new fort. Besides, it was still freezing, even in the sitting room, with all its blankets and covered windows. Her toes were almost numb, even practically sitting in the fire as she was.
They'd come to some kind of compromise, so far as she knew. Higher wages weren't coming soon, but they were coming, and Mr. Evans had even managed to contact one of his barrage of lawyers (she thought the man's name was Ox Ford, but she wasn't entirely sure) to get documents signed that would legally require him to raise those wages once a certain quota was met. There was another company dinner coming up soon, one that her father (and thus herself) had been invited to, and Maka dearly wished to know what Madame Medusa and the Asura man thought of this new negotiation. Considering what she'd heard from Mifune, nothing much had changed at Gorgon's, and who knew about Asura's. She wasn't even rightly sure where the latter factory was, though she thought it was out closer to the mines someplace.
New Bly. Death City. Maka tugged on her earlobe as she read, scanning words she already knew by heart. There were four months left before she turned twenty-one, four months before she could leave and go wherever she wished—even all the way back east if she wanted, though that would take days to do—but instead of the anticipation she'd been expecting, it felt as though something small and deviously sharp was carving pieces out of her every day that passed. Four months, she told herself, and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the side of the chair. Four months and all of this will be over.
Maka closed her eyes. She thought of her mother, of the suitcase and the fading scent of her perfume, and the way Maka used to crawl into her mother's old closet when she'd been young and close the doors and fall asleep in there, because every other link to Kami had already long since vanished. Kami had taken it all with her. The book felt heavy in her hands. She closed it, keeping her finger trapped between the pages to keep her place. The fire crackled. She'd been up all night again, sewing, reading, thinking, and her exhaustion weighed heavy on her shoulders, like a beast she couldn't shake off.
She didn't realize she'd fallen asleep until she opened her eyes again, and saw that Soul Evans was sitting in the chair opposite, watching her. Her father wasn't there. Maka didn't jump; she just blinked, slowly, and said, "I didn't hear you come in."
He shrugged a little. "What comes of sleeping, I suppose."
Maka blinked again. Something was chewing away at the bottom of her heart, at the locks she'd set up so carefully. "Where's Papa?" she said, and set her feet on the floor again, ignoring the wrinkles to her skirt. Soul Evans glanced at the fire.
"He's upstairs. He fell asleep, too. Do you both run around all day, or just long enough to think chairs are beds?"
"I went to see Tsubaki today," said Maka and ran her hands over her face. "One of the women who lost a husband in the riots was kicked out of her house. They were building her a new one."
He considered that. "You helped build a house?"
"I helped build a room," she corrected, and set the book on the table. Maka stretched her arms up over her head. She was too tired, she decided, to care what Soul Evans thought of her. She drew her shawl tighter over her shoulders, and watched him for a moment. He never dressed like a gentleman, not really; he might start off wearing the coat, but it would come off within ten minutes of getting to work, she was sure, and his sleeves were rolled up so often that she thought he might actually commission them that way. He was staring at the fire, shadows flickering over his face, and she tilted her head a little. "Why did you do it?"
"What?" He glanced back at her, lips quirking. "Why? Why did I do what?"
"Come talk to Black Star," she said. Something clenched inside her when he turned, his eyes fixed on her face. "I know you said that it had gone on long enough, and it had, but I don't think…" she drew a breath. "I don't think you're the sort of person who would come and speak to workers like they were equals just to get your factory running again."
He considered that for a long while. Soul Evans rubbed his chin with one hand, not looking away from her, and for some reason, Maka felt the back of her neck, the tips of her ears, go warm and uncomfortable. Then he glanced away. "You ask funny questions."
"You never answer any."
He grinned. Then it faded, like mist, and he turned back to watch the fire again. "I live on the factory grounds," he said. "I'm used to hearing the people, the machines. It's like a heartbeat, like arteries firing. The bellows are its lungs, the gunshots its nerves. Every bit of me is made of oil and smoke, and having the factory closed stung like a son of a bitch." She blinked at his crassness, but didn't call him on it, because he still seemed to have more to say. "But the people in the workers' district, they were suffering too; they didn't eat, didn't have anywhere to go. The other factories in this town are draining New Bly of its life. I…I suppose I went to speak to Black Star to see if I can turn the tide."
"Of Gorgon's and Asura's?"
"Of stillness," he said, and she crinkled her nose.
"Stillness doesn't have a tide."
"It does if you're standing still," he told her. "Being still can be like being caught in rapids or a hurricane. It tugs at you. You've never been still in your life, Miss Albarn, so I don't believe you would know."
She frowned. Something tugged at the back of her mind. A debate—an argument, really. She licked her lips, and wondered why she was nervous. "So," she said, "you don't want to be still."
"Not anymore."
There was something in his eyes that made her uncomfortable. Maka broke the gaze, and went to put her book back. She could feel his gaze following her around the room as she dimmed the lamps, fixed the bookshelf, and turned at the door. "I see," she said. "Good night, then, Mr. Evans."
"Maka," he said, and there was something suddenly raw in his voice, something powerful. She froze, her hand on the doorknob, and turned to look at him. Soul Evans was watching her, on his feet, hands clenched against his sides, and his eyes were glowing in the dim light. "I did it for you, too. Because you were right." He took a breath. "I did it for me, and for all of them, but I also did it for you."
Her heart was shaking in her chest. Maka drew a breath, let it out, and fled back up the stairs.
