Medda Larkson, the Swedish meadowlark, never revealed what had made her an omega. And, politely enough, no one asked. Medda was gaiety and light; she had spring in her laugh. Even her prominent canines and the strange way she could prick up her ears made her seem less like an animal danger and more like a mountain nymph, albeit a mountain nymph on the Bowery. Unlike the other local beauties, there was something appealingly natural to Medda.
She hadn't really known Joseph Sullivan. Only seen him sometimes when Joe was working at McGuirk's Suicide Hall. Well, like the Suicide Hall Joe was no good, so they took him to the Tombs and then up to his permanent residence, out on a bare and barred little island in the middle of the river. But Francis stayed. He was six or so. Medda knew him and liked him. He'd been working for years and only occasionally materialized, dirty and small with bright eyes, reading something lewd (he peddled papers and could read; Joe was sometimes proud, sometimes scornful about it) or something Western, on his father's knee in the Suicide Hall. But only when the stars aligned. Only then did one see Francis. Joe had to remember he existed, and then Joe had to be able to track him down. This was a rare combination.
So the only people who knew about Francis were McGuirk and Medda and Edie Ruskin, Joe's most enduring fling, the belle of Canal. And maybe Tom Powers, Joe's old drinking buddy. And then McGuirk was killed in his own suicide hall, and Edie Ruskin bled out in the abortionist backroom, and Tom inevitably got twenty years for something. So only Medda knew about Francis after that.
Francis was in the Refuge for the better part of a year, and in that time Medda scraped together enough to buy her hall. In the day and evening, she sang to crowds of enraptured men come down from Astor Place. And at night she slept easy - often alone now, except when she needed an alpha - in the back rooms above the stage, where the noise from the bums couldn't penetrate. But one night she heard another noise instead. And when she crept downstairs with her pistol there he was, eating her licorice whips like he was famished, which he probably was. Dirty and tall now, like against all odds a growth spurt had hit in the Refuge. He was beginning haltingly to fill out, though it looked like it would still take him three or four more years to look like a man. But he was getting there. Already he looked an awful lot like Joe.
And there was something else. Something she had smelled all the way upstairs, that hadn't exactly seemed dangerous. Medda inhaled again. .
She gathered up her skirts and put the pistol down, approached him cautiously. She knew he could smell her too. He turned. She looked down at him kindly. "You're-" she began.
"Jack," said Francis Sullivan. "Jack Kelly."
He smiled. In the light of her lamp she could make out a whole new person. Not only did he smell different, but there was a wildness to him now. Something feral, not yet tamed, something that – against all odds - appealed.
"Alright, Jack," Medda said.
Denton wondered if Jack Kelly really was an alpha.
It was near-impossible for a normal human to tell. Betas just didn't have the nose for it. If you were observant and knew what to look for, you could tell something was off. But even then an alpha was much like an omega, and anyway outside the slums of New York (where one might see as many as three differentiated a week), any person with prominent canines and an odd otherness to them was just that: odd. In the poorer areas of the South maybe you would find enough alphas or omegas to become practiced at spotting them. Or maybe in the hardy farmsteads and bitter winters of the midwest.
But probably not. Only in New York were there so many starving, miserable people that enough survived differentiation, so that they became a common part of the landscape. In Sioux Falls and Savannah and Santa Fe, people probably wouldn't be able to pick out a real differentiated from a normal human. In fact it was considered a credit to this great nation that, barring some cases at Valley Forge and during the Civil War and among slaves and Indians years ago, Americans were mostly fortunate enough not to differentiate. Not like the old starving masses of Europe.
The immigrant problem, according to the men at the office. When those masses came over and differentiated they inevitably became immigrant Bowery omega madams, or illiterate Irish alpha drunks. There was a popular myth that real Americans would naturally become god-fearing prairie omegas, raising children in the harsh conditions out West, like in Ms. Wilder's books. Or even better: tough, unstoppable alpha cowboys, like the Virginian. Or best yet: wouldn't differentiate at all.
"Just get it right," said cowboy Kelly. "Kelly. Jack Kelly."
He smiled. He wanted no pictures, but there at the table he looked like a front page piece. Him, David, Les. Two normal enough children, plainly human and regular and easy to sympathize with.
And Jack. Whatever he was, there was something appealing about him.
Spot Conlon had been normal enough, a dockside boy, harmless, pretty eyed like his mother, never squirming at the language, the roughness, the nakedness of the sailors. He was often down at the pier where all the big ships were and there were too many merchant bodyguards for there to be serious fights. His friends were boys like Fingers Donnelly, who despite his name never stole a thing, and Albert Higgins, who could have gone to school he was so smart.
They used to sit on the pier and drum up business for their mothers, shoot marbles. Albert knew Italian since his mother was from Naples; he could reel in all kinds with that ability, and Fingers could make them laugh, and Spot was sweet, people thought. But not too sweet. Once he'd looked out across the water and seen two boys toss in a struggling alley cat with rocks tied to its legs.
"Bet you it'll be drowned in ten," he said to Albert, although Albert's mother didn't like him taking bets (but Spot knew Bert was crazy for it. He would bet on anything. Spot thought it was funny to indulge him.)
"Less," Bert said uncomfortably. "It's struggling, so it's gonna drown faster. But I don't wanna take that bet." (The first and last time he would ever say this.)
And Spot let it go. He was mostly a good kid then.
When he was made an alpha he was no good anymore. His brothers and sisters, starving and hollow-cheeked and runty as he was, had all had the good grace to die. They didn't make it past the fever. But he did. And his mother conferred with the other working girls, and with Mr. Wallach, the department store owner who'd seen her and promised her so much if only he didn't have a wife and she didn't have all those children. And before the week was out Mrs. Wallach had been sent to upstate indefinitely. And feral little Spot had been drugged with department store cocoa and tossed into the canal with weighted shoes.
Like a street cat.
His mother didn't do it. A gang out of Red Hook did the job, and thought nothing more of it. The kid, as far as they knew, couldn't swim.
But he was a fast learner. Very fast. This was his first lesson. Survival at all costs. Cutting loose anything that might hold him back. He knew not to struggle too much underwater, his new senses helped keep him calm, and his new hormones beat back the effects of the drug. And his sight was so good now that even as he sank deeper into the Gowanus, with the light of Brooklyn dwindling above him, he could still make out the knotted laces on the fancy white boots his mother's lover had given him.
He undid the laces. And only then did he struggle, like a graceless frog, to the surface, his body beating back the water instinctively. When he got free he pulled himself up next to the Union Street bridge and coughed up dirty water, then lay there hidden behind the carcass of a dead draft horse, thinking. He was disgusted. He'd liked those new white leather boots. He was like his mother; he liked nice things.
The leader of the Red Hook gang had been packed off to a children's refuge in Manhattan, which was what happened to suckers and weaklings, Spot thought. So the gang needed a leader. Good. Spot had what they needed. The rest of them didn't have what Spot had - not just better eyes, a powerful nose, strange bursts of strength. But smarts. Spot didn't kill them all. The ones who were scared enough to be loyal, fierce enough to be useful; these, he forgave. The rest washed up in the Canal within a week. When the leader came back, he did, too. He was eighteen. Spot was twelve.
Wallach's department store burned down, and two people died. Before they burned it Spot went through and picked out anything he wanted: new shoes, caps for his lieutenants, the key to the register, the money, a woman's ribbon from the apartment upstairs, a gold-topped cane.
No one was quite like Spot. Some of the Brooklyn boys quietly moved away because this scared them - Bert, now Racetrack, among them. Others, like Fingers, were taken out. Whenever Spot heard about a new alpha involved with the gangs, or even an upstart beta, terrible things started to happen. Because Spot wasn't stupid, and he didn't like competition. No kid in Brooklyn was like him. He wanted to keep it that way.
Which was why it was such a mystery that he never once made a play to take out Jack Kelly. Not even when Jack did stupid things like cross into his territory.
"Jacky's alright," he would say, with a gleam in his eye like he knew a secret. "Me and Jack, we have an understanding."
But he wasn't going to help Jack right away. He'd done a lot to help Jack already. Jack was really in his debt. He'd come looking for Punsly Schultz, former leader of the old Red Hook gang. He'd found Spot instead; that was better. Puns had never differentiated. He'd never quite had what Jack needed.