Read Chapter 11: Fires in the Night

The night air smelled of coal smoke and rain, but beneath both there was something else—oil, and the sharp, acrid bite of burning canvas. Jack smelled it before he saw it, a thin ribbon of gray curling from the direction of the survey office like a finger pointing at heaven.

He was already running before his mind caught up with his legs.

The survey office sat at the edge of the Grand Union yard, a squat brick building where Crenshaw kept the tender documents under lock and key. Jack had spent the last three days inside it, learning every corner while pretending to study the locomotive schematics. He knew the desk where the maps were stored. He knew the iron safe that held the final drawings. He knew the window that did not latch properly, the one that faced the marsh.

The window was open now. And the door hung off its hinges, blackened at the edges.

"Fire!" Jack shouted, though the yard was empty at this hour. "Fire! Everyone up!"

He crashed through the doorway into a wall of heat. The flames had taken hold of the drafting table first—he could see the skeleton of it, a black ribcage of charred wood collapsing inward. The far wall was already burning, and the ceiling groaned above him like a dying animal.

The safe. The tender documents were in the safe.

Jack pulled his coat over his mouth and pushed deeper into the smoke. His eyes streamed. The heat pressed against him like a solid thing, and for a moment he was back in the Foundry, the night the boiler had burst and taken his brother's name with it. But he pushed the memory down. There was no time for ghosts.

The safe stood against the back wall, its iron door still closed. Thank God for small mercies. The flames hadn't reached it yet. Jack grabbed the handle and pulled—locked, of course. Crenshaw kept the key on a chain around his neck, and Crenshaw was in the main office, half a mile away.

But Jack had noticed something in his three days of studying the room. The safe was old, and its locking mechanism had a weakness. The screw securing the backplate had worked itself loose, and a man with the right tool could—

His hand went to his belt. His knife. Not the right tool, but close enough.

The heat was building. The wall beside the safe was beginning to blacken, small tongues of flame licking at the plaster. Jack dropped to his knees and went to work on the backplate, his fingers finding the loose screw and turning it with the edge of his blade. The metal was hot. He could feel it blistering the skin of his thumb, but he did not stop.

*Come on. Come on.*

The screw gave. The plate came away in his hand, and behind it, the mechanism lay exposed—a simple lever, a spring, a bolt. Jack reached in and pushed. The bolt slid back with a click that sounded like a blessing.

He pulled the door open and grabbed the bundle inside: the tender documents, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. The maps. The survey reports. The cost estimates. Everything Grand Union needed to win the Stoketon valley line.

Something fell from the bundle and clattered at his feet. A small brass plate, no bigger than his palm. Jack snatched it up without looking at it and shoved it into his pocket.

The ceiling chose that moment to give way.

A beam came down in a shower of sparks and embers, cutting him off from the door. Jack rolled away from it, clutching the documents to his chest, and found himself pinned against the wall as the fire closed in from three sides. The smoke was thick now, and his lungs burned with every breath.

*This is how it ends,* he thought. *Burned for a set of maps in a town that doesn't know my name.*

Then the window—the broken window with the faulty latch—was only six feet away. Jack scrambled toward it, threw the documents through the opening, and dove after them.

He landed hard on the gravel outside, the breath knocked out of him, and for a moment he could only lie there, gasping, as the fire roared behind him. The documents lay beside him in the dirt, intact. He had saved them.

He had saved them, but his left arm screamed with pain. He looked down. A long gash ran from his elbow to his wrist, the skin blackened at the edges, blood welling up dark and slow. A piece of the beam must have caught him on the way out.

"Jack!"

Eleanor's voice. She was running toward him across the yard, her hair loose and wild, a blanket clutched in her hands. She dropped to her knees beside him.

"You fool," she said. "You absolute fool."

"Nice to see you too." He tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. "The documents. Are they—"

"They're fine. You're bleeding like a stuck pig, but the documents are fine." She tore a strip from the blanket and began wrapping his arm. "What happened?"

"Someone torched the office." Jack's mind was already working, even through the pain. "The door was kicked in. That's not an accident."

"It's the night before the tender." Eleanor's voice was flat. "Someone doesn't want Grand Union to deliver."

"Someone." Jack turned the word over in his mouth. Nunes had been too quiet these past three days. Since the bribe, Jack had seen him twice, always with a smile and a nod, never pressing for results. The man had been patient. Too patient.

A man who was patient was a man who had a plan.

Jack struggled to his feet, cradling his injured arm. The fire had spread to the roof of the survey office now, and in the distance he could hear the approach of shouts, running feet, the bell of the town's fire wagon. Crenshaw would be here soon.

"Help me," Jack said.

"You need a doctor."

"No. Help me look respectable." He pulled his coat straight with his good hand. "Crenshaw needs to see me standing over these documents like a guard dog, not bleeding in the dirt."

Eleanor understood. She always did.

By the time Crenshaw arrived, red-faced and panting from his run across the yard, Jack was leaning against the water trough, the oilcloth bundle clutched to his chest. His sleeve was dark with blood, but he had arranged himself so that the injury was not immediately visible.

Crenshaw's eyes went from the burning building to Jack, to the bundle in his arms. His face cycled through a dozen emotions in the space of a second—horror, rage, relief—before settling on something Jack could not quite name.

"The documents," Crenshaw said.

"Safe." Jack held out the bundle. "The safe was old. I got it open."

Crenshaw took the bundle with trembling hands, opened the oilcloth, and riffled through the contents. When he looked up again, there was something new in his eyes. Something close to respect.

"You saved the tender." Crenshaw's voice was hoarse. "You saved everything."

"Didn't save the model." Jack gestured toward the burning building. Somewhere in that inferno was the scale engine Crenshaw had spent months building, a thing of brass and copper and painstaking care. "I'm sorry. I couldn't get to it."

Crenshaw's jaw tightened. For a moment, Jack thought he would shout—had been bracing for it, the way you brace for a blow. But instead, Crenshaw shook his head.

"A thing can be replaced. A man cannot." He gripped Jack's shoulder. "You did well, Mullins. Better than well. When this is done, we'll talk about your future with this company."

Jack felt the weight of those words settle over him. It was what he wanted. It was the whole point of this dance, to make himself indispensable, to climb high enough on Crenshaw's regard that when the truth came out, the truth would not matter.

But he also felt the weight of the brass plate in his pocket.

Later, when the fire was out and the yard had quieted, Jack sat in the lamp room of the locomotive shed, his arm freshly bandaged, and turned the plate over in his fingers. It was small, rectangular, with a hole drilled in one corner as if for mounting. The face was engraved with a design—a stylized bird, its wings spread wide, talons extended.

A hawk. A hawk with arrows in its grip.

Jack had seen that symbol before. It had been in the corner of the stolen survey maps, faded and unobtrusive, a mark he had assumed was a surveyor's private stamp. He had seen it again on the wax seal of Nunes's bribe note, pressed into the red wax like a signature.

Now he found it here, in the burned ruins of Grand Union's survey office, on a plate that could only have come from the model engine Crenshaw had loved.

His blood went cold.

The fire had not been about destroying the documents. If it had been, whoever set it would have targeted the safe first. The fire had been about destroying the model—or, more precisely, about destroying anything that might reveal the symbol it carried.

What was on that model that someone did not want Crenshaw to see?

Jack pocketed the plate and stood. Tomorrow, the tender would be delivered. Tomorrow, Grand Union would almost certainly win the Stoketon valley line. And tomorrow, Nunes would expect the sabotage he had paid for.

But Jack had a new question now, and it burned brighter than the fire that had nearly taken his life: why would Ashworth's network want to hide a brass plate that Jack's father had once marked his survey maps with?

The answer, he suspected, was somewhere in the valley. And he was going to find it.