Next year he’d give it a shot, or he wouldn’t. Next year he’d start seeing ghosts again, or they’d leave him alone. Next year, maybe he’d have a better idea of what he wanted, or where he wanted to be, and what he wanted to do.

But for now …

Epilogue

Epilogue

Mercy Lynch adjusted the electric lantern, propping it atop a stack of weathered, damp-swollen books. The light burned brightly across the desk in her office, in her clinic, in her city; it spilled across her hands, and it cast weird shadows across the woman who stood behind her, overseeing her progress.

Mercy frowned at the paper and tapped her pen’s nib into the inkwell. “Miss Angeline, how do you spell your name? I’ve got the first part, but I don’t know about your daddy’s.”

“You could just spell it ‘Seattle’ if you want to.”

“I’d rather do it right.”

Angeline smiled, and patted the younger woman’s shoulder. “You don’t have the letters for it, not in English. But when I write it down for white folks, I do it like this…” she said, taking a pencil nub and scratching Sealth on the nearest scrap of unused paper. “And that’s close enough.”

“Thank you, ma’am. That’ll work just fine. And thank you for keeping an eye on that redheaded boy.”

“Somebody had to do it.”

“I’m glad it was you. You’re a good reporter, and now that we’ve got all these notes between us, I’m getting a picture of what sap withdrawal looks like. After a fashion.”

“You really didn’t think the boy would make it, did you?”

Mercy shook her head and reached for a large envelope she’d stitched together out of canvas and twine. “No, I didn’t. I’ve never seen anybody that far gone come this far back. Rector’s shown us the outer limits of what can be survived. Of what can be saved. He’s young, and that worked in his favor; but he wasn’t so healthy at the start, and that worked against him. All in all, I think he’s been a real good test case.”

“Poor fellow never had much of a chance. The children they pulled from the city, especially the ones as little as he was … not all of them lived long enough to grow up at all. And them that did didn’t always grow up right.” Angeline stood up straight and stretched her shoulders. She walked to the edge of the sickbed and sat down on it.

Mercy paused, then gathered her stack of papers and began to stuff them inside the makeshift envelope. When the package was full, she turned her seat around to face Angeline. “Are there any figures on that? Any numbers, about the things that went wrong with the little ones?”

“None to my knowledge, unless maybe the orphanage kept track.”