“Cutters do the same thing as joiners.”

“Except cutters decide how to put the story together. I’d still rather be a cameraman.”

“I’ll say something to Mr. Carrera.”

“He won’t listen to a girl.”

“He’ll listen to me,” Glory retorted.

She slid her arm from Pin’s and adjusted her Panama hat. Pin kicked at the gravel underfoot. “Well, thanks,” she said.

Another, louder rumble of thunder sounded. Glory looked at the sky in alarm. “My dress!”

Pin pointed to a large wooden building. “That’s the Comique. C’mon—” They began to run as the first fat drops spattered against the ground.

Chapter 69

Chapter 69

HE NEVER NOTICED when the busy thoroughfare fell away and he entered a street of tenements. Overhead, ash-colored clouds filled the sky, seamed with heat lightning. Earlier he’d seen a distant twister form before it fragmented into grey ribbons. He paused beneath a tree, opened the first bottle of cordial, and proceeded until he’d dosed all three tins of lemon drops. He finished what remained of the cordial and replaced the tins in his pocket, kicked the empty bottles into the underbrush, sucking his fingers to remove the sticky residue, and ducked out from under the tree.

The road here wasn’t much more than a path, deeply rutted and coated with brick dust and soot. The cordial made him feel not languid but anxious, his earlier desperation sharpened. The world around him seemed harshly lit, as if battalions of electrical lights had replaced the sun. He cast no shadow on the cracked earth at his feet; when he knuckled his eyes, strange sparks flew out. His eyes itched, and his arms. His tongue. An image of the doll came to him, her glass eyes threaded with tiny black cracks and her mouth parted to show a black slit. No teeth, no tongue. He thrust the image from his mind, but another took its place: the girl struggling in the theater as he covered her mouth and her teeth sank into the ball of his thumb. She had died but still escaped him. The next one wouldn’t; he shoved his hands into his pockets, finding a twist of soft fabric in one and shredding it between his fingers. No, she wouldn’t get away, not her, not ever.

“Hey, Mister!”

A shrill voice disturbed him: he looked up, startled to see he wasn’t alone. On either side, people stood or squatted on the stoops of ramshackle buildings, the women’s hair hidden beneath dark kerchiefs, men’s faces shaded by wide-brimmed hats as they puffed their cheroots. Huns or Czechs or refugees from some country he’d never heard of before the war in Europe.

“Hey, Mister, Mister, you lost?”