Before the Devil Breaks You

by Libba Bray

  “Does the poor Scottish shepherd know you took his hat?” Sam said, easing the craft into the water.

  “You should talk. You dress like Trotsky. So where is this mystery ship?” There was nothing in the bay that Evie could see.

  “The Kill Devil? About a mile or so out that way, hidden in that cove over there,” Sam said, pointing to a curved finger of high land jutting into the water on the other side of the Sound. “They’re risking it for sure. There’s a twelve-mile limit. Any boat caught inside that limit can be picked off by the Coast Guard—or pirates. I’m guessing the Kill Devil’s got some secret storage inside her to take that risk.”

  “Are you saying we could be arrested?”

  Sam shrugged. “Or shot.”

  Sam helped Evie into the boat. It wobbled precariously as he hopped on board and took a seat himself.

  “If this kills me, I’ll never forgive you,” Evie groused.

  Sam leaned over with a pair of binoculars. “The list of things you’ll never forgive me for is long, Sheba. Just keep your peepers peeled for the Coast Guard. Ow!”

  “What?”

  Sam rubbed his left eye. “Your funny hat just got me in the peeper.”

  “Well, you insulted it,” Evie said, raising the binoculars and looking out at the open water for signs of trouble. “The Scots are not a forgiving people. Neither are their hats.”

  Sam leaned over the stern and looped the string around the outboard motor, pulling until it sputtered into noisy motion. Evie shivered as Sam steered them across the calm water, watching the darkened houses of Long Island growing smaller. From where she sat, they seemed content, tucked into the cove like sleeping children. She wanted to ask Sam if he ever felt frightened about the danger they’d face if Will and Miss Walker were right about the coming storm. She wanted to tell him how she still had awful nightmares about James. But it didn’t seem like the sort of conversation to have while shouting over the hammering of a motorboat.

  When they’d put enough sea behind them, Sam rounded the cove, and Evie saw the Kill Devil. It wasn’t a schooner, low and fast like most rum runners. The Kill Devil was a yacht, easily more than one hundred feet long, and there was a party taking place on board. Two smaller boats were speeding away, their bellies presumably filled with crates of booze smuggled in from Canada. Sam cut the motor as they pulled up alongside the ship. Two crewmen peered down from the deck. They did not look friendly to Evie. Sam stood and waved his arms, rocking the boat as he called out, “Ahoy! Permission to board? Eloise sent me,” Sam said, using the password he’d been given. “Said I should talk to Captain Moony himself.”

  A rope ladder tumbled down and thumped against the boat’s flank.

  Evie eyed the swaying ladder. “Every time I go somewhere with you, Sam, I’m sure it’ll be the end of me. And my shoes,” she sighed as she climbed.

  On deck, a few gangsters and their molls laughed it up. A balding man played a banjo while two flappers in beaded dresses and furs, stockings rolled down to show off rouged knees, danced the Charleston, stopping to swig from unmarked brown bottles—the good stuff that hadn’t been cut with water and cheap grain liquor yet. As she and Sam passed by, Evie raised her hands in the air like a holy roller. “Beware the dangers of demon rum! That way lies eeeevillll!” she thundered in her best Sarah Snow impression, making Sam laugh full out, and just like that, her mood lifted, and she was glad she’d come.

  “Say, you folks don’t know where a fella could find the lavatory, do you?” a drunken passenger asked.

  “Sure. It’s this way.” Sam stuck out his arm and narrowed his eyes, concentrating. “Don’t see me.”

  The man went slack. Sam reached into his pocket and took out a chunk of cash.

  “Sam!” Evie said, looking over her shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  “We might need extra money for information.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “Yeah? Say, when did you develop a conscience?”

  “About the time I started reading people’s secrets for a living,” Evie said, but she was laughing. “And I hate having a conscience. Very inconvenient.”

  Sam unfolded the man’s money, lifted a twenty, and put the rest back in the man’s pocket. “Happy now, Sheba?”

  Evie pursed her lips and looked toward the ship’s ceiling. “That depends. Are you sore about it, Sam?”

  “Yes.”

  She looped her arm through his. “Then I’m happy.”

  Sam burst into laughter. “Okay, Lamb Chop. You win.”

  That was the thing about being with Evie—she was a high-wire act, exciting and dangerous and exhilarating. When Sam had run away from home to find his mother, he’d joined up with Barnes & Bellwether’s Traveling Circus Pandemonium. They’d given him passage, and in return, he’d worked for them, first as a roustabout, then as a clown, and then, when it was discovered that he was quick on his feet, as a tumbler and acrobat. His most vivid memory was hanging by his knees from the trapeze bar, arms out, ready to catch the flier, his stomach somersaulting with high-stakes expectation. As they stole belowdeck in search of Moony Runyon, Sam felt that same fluttering excitement. Some of it was the hope that he would finally get some answers about Project Buffalo and the whereabouts of his missing mother. The other part was pure Evie, the two of them, an adventurous team, up for anything. Sure, Evie was selfish sometimes. She liked being the star. But she would do anything for her friends, Sam included. That was what he couldn’t tell her—that the end of their fake romance was really about saving himself. He’d gone goofy for her, and if she broke his heart, that would be the end of the best friendship he’d ever had. He couldn’t risk that.

  “You think there are pirates on board?” Evie whispered, her eyes alight with puckish mischief.

  “We can always hope,” Sam said, feeling alive.

  At the very back of the boat, they came to a door with a sign reading, CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS. KEEP OUT. YES, THAT MEANS YOU.

  “Very welcoming,” Evie said, and opened the door without knocking. The modest cabin was mostly dark, the only light coming from a desk lamp. A potbellied man glared at her from behind that desk. His hands were wrapped around a mug. A half-empty bottle of whiskey sat nearby. “What’s the big idea? Can’t you read?” he growled.

  “Oh, I’m afraid not. Tragic accident in the convent. I stared too long at the rays of the sun coming through the stained-glass windows. The nuns are still praying for my recovery,” Evie said breezily, taking in the whole of the close quarters, whose every inch of wall space was occupied by bleached sea creature bones. “My. What a lot of dead things you have in here. I can only imagine what your nursery was like.”

  “Moony Runyon?” Sam asked before the man could get up and throw them out.

  “Who wants to know?” It was more command than question.

  “A fella interested in knowing what happened to Ben Arnold,” Sam answered.

  Moony Runyon settled back against his chair. “Oh. It’s you. Wasn’t sure if you were coming. You have the money?”

  Sam offered the fifty dollars he’d made lifting wallets in Central Park plus the twenty he’d just taken from the drunken party guest. Captain Moony gestured for them to sit. Sam dragged over two skinny chairs—one for himself and one for Evie—from a narrow table against the wall.

  Captain Moony counted the money while he talked. “Heard old Ben ended up dead on an ash heap. He never was too careful. Me? I’m careful.” He slapped a knife on the table and stuffed the money into his pocket. “So. What was it you wanted to know?”

  “We’re looking for the machine that reads these.” Sam handed over one of the coded punch cards. “Know where we could find it?”

  Moony examined it briefly before handing it back. “I smuggle booze. Not government documents.”

  Sam smirked. “Yeah? How’d you know it was a government document?”

  “I seen one of those before. With Ben. Department of Paranormal, United States gov
ernment. Project Buffalo.”

  Sam sat as still as he could. But inside, he was buzzing. For two years, he’d been doing nothing but hunting down leads on the secret government project that had taken his mother from him. He’d never been this close. Next to him, he could feel Evie holding her breath, too.

  “You go first. Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in,” Moony said.

  “We know it had to do with the government’s Department of Paranormal,” Evie said. “And with Diviners. Testing them.”

  Moony poured whiskey into his mug and swallowed a third of it. “Testing them? Sure. That came later.”

  Evie started to ask another question, but Sam pressed his knee against hers in private warning: Don’t say more.

  “Project Buffalo was so top secret there was even a private outfit within the Bureau assigned to look after it,” Moony continued. “The Shadow Men. Ben was one of ’em once. He told me the agents all had code names. Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Adams. Mr. Jackson. You get the idea. They were a rogue agency—they could work outside the law. Word was, the whole project got private money from the Founders Club.”

  “The Founders Club? What’s that, some sort of rich folks’ summer camp?” Sam asked.

  “Not too far off. It’s a social club, one of those eugenics things, made up of the richest men in America, the kind who want to stay rich. They pulled the strings on a lotta things. And they were bully on Diviners. Wanted to know everything about them: What could they do? Were there ways to make their gifts even stronger? Could you use Diviners to make America the greatest, most unstoppable country on earth?”

  Nothing was making sense in Sam’s head. “How were they gonna do that?”

  “You still don’t get it, do ya?” Moony Runyon leaned forward and put his fists on the desk. The dim lamp cast shadows across his unshaven face. “Project Buffalo wasn’t just about testing and recruiting Diviners. It was about making them.”

  The cabin suddenly felt very small to Sam. It was all he could do not to run up to the deck and breathe in clean night air. “Making them?”

  “Yes, indeed. Super Americans, engineered in the womb. Pump ’em up with some concoction Jake Marlowe and that woman, Miss Walker, made. They’d work with those kids over the years, run ’em through tests to strengthen their gifts. And then they’d recruit those same Diviner kids as secret weapons. Imagine it: a private army of gifted Americans who could use their powers to predict an attack by the enemy or crack secret codes. They could read the minds of kings and rulers signing treaties. They’d know if those leaders were on the level. They’d know at a glance if a fella was telling the truth or not. If he was loyal or a traitor or an anarchist.” Moony Runyon swigged the last of his whiskey and examined the empty mug as if it might hold answers to questions he wasn’t sharing. “But from what I heard, the experiment didn’t take for most of the kids. It even made some kids come out wrong.”

  “Wrong how?” Evie asked.

  Moony shrugged. “But then the war broke out and something happened along the way. Ben would never tell me. And after that, they shut it all down—the program and the department, everything.”

  “’Cept I heard they didn’t,” Sam said.

  “Yeah? Who told you that?”

  “Ben Arnold.”

  “And now he’s dead.”

  “You think one of those Shadow Men murdered Ben Arnold?”

  “I’d bet my bottom dollar on it.”

  “Why?”

  Moony Runyon shrugged. “Ben talked too much. To fellas like you, for instance. That’s what a gambling habit will do to a fella. Maybe I shouldn’t even be talking to you. Go on. Get off my boat. Let me drink in peace.”

  Moony handed back the punch card and swigged straight from the bottle. At the cabin door, Evie turned back. “Just one more question, please, Mr. Runyon? The machine that reads these cards—we’re desperate to find it, but we don’t even know where to look. Please, can you help us?”

  “If there’s a machine to read it somewhere, the person who’d know would be Jake Marlowe. After all, he probably built it.” Moony snickered. “But good luck trying to get into any of Marlowe’s strongholds. You might as well try to get into Fort Knox.”

  Evie took the wheel on the way back to the city. She watched the rutted road appear like a surprise in the headlamps’ glare. Everything looked sideways to her now. The car bounced as it hit a bump, and Sam grabbed hold of the door handle. “Holy moly! You always drive this fast?”

  Evie hadn’t realized how fast she was going. “Slow is for chumps.”

  “Well, I’d like to be a live chump. Take it easy, will ya?”

  Evie eased her foot off the accelerator and the car settled into a healthy purr. “Sam, could all of that be true? Do you think we’re… test subjects?”

  “Pretty sure I am,” Sam said. “That would explain why Rotke Wasserman kept coming around to see me.”

  “But that could have to do with your mother, too. Didn’t you say she was a Diviner? They probably wanted to know if you’d inherited her talents.”

  “Maybe. Except that I can’t remember any of that stuff. When you read my mother’s photograph, that was the first time I knew of it.”

  Evie thought about what she’d seen then: A beautiful room full of paintings, books, and fancy chandeliers, like a museum or a palace. Will’s fiancée, Rotke, asking Sam if he could read cards. But Sam couldn’t. He didn’t seem to have any powers. And then there were all those children on the front lawn crying about the sinking of the Lusitania seconds before it was known. What if those children had been part of Project Buffalo? If so, where were they now?

  “What if they had a way of erasing my memories?” Sam said from the passenger seat, bringing Evie back. “Say, do you remember anything about your childhood, anybody testing you?”

  “No. Never,” Evie said. But just because she couldn’t remember it, did that mean it had never happened? Unnatural. Created. The thought of it made Evie’s skin crawl. And something else had been nagging at Evie for the entire drive back. “Sam, what Moony said, about strengthening Diviners’ powers. What if…”

  “What if Sister Walker and Will aren’t on the level about this ‘coming storm’ business? What if they’re using us for something else? Yeah. I thought about that, too. I think until we know more, we gotta keep pretending that everything’s jake.”

  They’d reached the city’s shiny edge, smears of neon sharpening into tall window blocks of light.

  “What does any of this have to do with all these ghosts showing up?” Evie said.

  “I don’t know. My head feels like it’s been twirled on a merry-go-round.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “First things first: We gotta find this card reader if we want answers. Doesn’t Jake Marlowe have some kinda house upstate?”

  “Yes. An estate. I heard Will say it belonged to his family.”

  “Seems like a good place to start.” Sam let out a long, hard sigh. “Aww, how we gonna get into Marlowe’s house anyhow?”

  “I know somebody who could.” She turned the car toward the Bennington.

  “Coast is clear. The professor’s room is empty,” Sam said, letting Evie into the apartment.

  Jericho stepped out of the bathroom, startling them all into shrieks. He was shirtless, with a towel wrapped around his waist. Evie pretended to be interested in Jericho’s painted battle figurines on the kitchen table while stealing sideways glances at the impressive muscles of his broad back.

  “I didn’t know we had company,” Jericho growled at Sam as he ducked back into the bathroom. A moment later, he emerged in trousers and an undershirt.

  “I’m mostly decent,” Jericho said. “What’s got you both so excited?”

  They sat at the table while Evie and Sam told Jericho all about their meeting with Moony Runyon.

  “The samples,” Jericho said when they’d finished their tale. “In all of Will’s letters to Cornelius, Will mentioned collecting samples from
the Diviners they were testing. Wait just a minute.” Jericho disappeared into his room and returned with a cache of bound letters.

  Sam snorted. “You kept those and I’m the bad guy?”

  “Sam, you steal from people all the time.”

  “Just like Robin Hood.”

  “He gave to the poor.”

  “So…I’m poor.”

  “I’m not going to entertain this argument,” Jericho said. “I’d meant to ask Will about it at some point. And they were a little damaged, so I kept them out of the damp basement.”

  Watching Jericho untie the string and sift through the letters made Evie antsy. She wanted to know what was in them and didn’t at the same time.

  “Here’s one. ‘Today we visited with Miss Maudie Lemieux, a Diviner in Poughkeepsie with the ability to commune with the spirit world through séance.’ Et cetera, et cetera…”

  “Et cetera, et cetera?” Sam said, incredulous. “You’re skipping over the best parts, Freddy.”

  “You know how to read, don’t you, Sam? You can go through them to your heart’s content,” Jericho said, exchanging a brief smile with Evie before returning his attention to the letter. “Here it is: ‘She consented to allow Margaret the liberty of a sample or two.’”

  “Diviner blood,” Evie mused.

  “The question is, what did they do with it?” Jericho asked.

  “I got a feeling whatever it was, we’re the end result,” Sam said.

  Evie examined the letter. She squinted at the return address, feeling a tingle. “‘Hopeful Harbor, New York,’” she read aloud. “Where’s that?”

  “That’s the name of Marlowe’s family home upstate,” Jericho said. “Why?”

  “Sam, remember when I read your mother’s photograph, I heard Will asking her to come to the Harbor? I thought it was an actual harbor somewhere. But what if he meant Hopeful Harbor? What if that’s where all the Project Buffalo testing happened?”

  “Doll, I think you were right that all of these things are connected. And don’t say anything about Nietzsche and the eternal recurrence, Freddy.”