Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

Sacha could have laughed out loud. Ten minutes of doing squats? To a boy who’d grown up on Hester Street pushing foot-powered sewing machines and dragging slopping buckets of water up tenement house stairs, ten minutes of deep knee bends didn’t even qualify as effort. His father was right, after all, he decided; Jews were the only people on the planet who knew what real work was.

He shrugged and settled in to practice. But as he straightened his legs to begin his second squat, Joe stopped him. “You call that ten minutes? that’s more like ten seconds!”

Several other orphans had drifted over to watch, and now they were laughing and elbowing one another in the ribs.

“The dabizi don’t get it!” someone laughed. “They think they’re doing jumping jacks!”

That was when Sacha realized that they weren’t supposed to be practicing the move over and over again for ten minutes. They were supposed to crouch down once — and stay there.

At first it didn’t seem so hard. But after about a minute, it began to seem somewhat uncomfortable. In another minute, Sacha’s legs started to burn. Then his knees started to shake. Then his whole leg started to spasm with the sheer effort of staying there.

Then he looked at the clock and realized that he still had seven minutes to go.

His only consolation was that Lily looked at least as bad as he felt. Good thing too, he told himself. At least he could avoid total humiliation as long as he held out longer than she did. The alternative — being beaten by a girl — was unthinkable.

The other students had also realized it was a contest, and they seemed determined to make the most of it. Their laughter began to be sprinkled with bets on who would collapse first. Most wagered on Sacha to win, but Lily had her fans — especially among the girls in the crowd.

As the minutes dragged on, Sacha felt his face redden with exertion. Lily, on the other hand, had turned white as fish bellies. With every breath, Sacha told himself he only had to hold out a second longer because Lily was about to crack. But then the next breath would come and go, and Lily would still be there.

She was in deadly earnest, he realized. She might be a girl, but she wanted to beat him just as badly as any boy would have. He would have shaken his head in admiration of her chutzpah —if he hadn’t been worried that he’d fall over.

Sacha never got a chance to find out which one of them could hold out longer. Just as he was certain he was about to collapse, Shen reappeared. “That’s enough for today,” she said, despite the students’ boisterous protests that she was ruining their betting. “Well done, both of you!”

Sacha and Lily hit the floor before the words were even out of her mouth. They lay there gasping for breath while Shen herded the others back to their practice mats. Finally Sacha recovered enough to sit up and ask Lily how she felt.

“Sick to my stomach!”

“Me too.”

“I guess now you’re going to tell me that you would have won if Shen hadn’t come along,” she said with a challenging toss of her head.

“Actually, I doubt I would have lasted another five seconds.”

Lily gave him a surprised look. then she grinned. “Me neither! that was awful! ”

Sacha grinned back at her — and then felt his grin fade as he came to an astounding realization. He actually liked Lily. Really liked her. It was too bad she was an Astral. And rich. And blond. And … well, he had to admit Paddy Doyle was right; she really was pretty. What a shame. If Lily were any ordinary girl, he really thought they could have been friends.

NEXT SUNDAY, in a cold, driving October rain, Sacha went house hunting.

He was looking for a house that was nice but not too nice, a house that he could pretend was his when Lily’s chauffeur drove him home every afternoon. He’d been making excuses every day since the fateful tea with Mrs. Astral, but he could tell Lily was starting to get suspicious. And Lily being Lily, he wouldn’t put it above her to follow him home out of sheer cussedness.

He started his search near Gramercy Park. But one look at the luxurious row houses and the shady green park cloistered behind its wrought-iron railings convinced him that Lily would never believe he lived in such a place. So he circled around in search of more modest lodgings. The tenderloin was no good — what respectable people would live there? Lower Fifth Avenue was out too — all those fancy apartment buildings with snooty doormen who would run him off before the Astrals’ car was out of sight. In theory at least, Astral place would work, but no amount of cold and rain would have made Sacha desperate enough to tell Lily he lived on a street named after her own great-grandfather.

As he hurried through the flooding streets, Sacha noticed ads for Edison’s etherograph going up all over the city. On building after building, workmen were taking down ads for headache remedies, patent medicines, corsets, and cigarillos, and putting up the now-familiar image of the heroic Inquisitor and cringing Kabbalist. It looked like Morgaunt and Edison were expecting the upcoming Houdini-Edison showdown to spark off a big boom in the witch-detection sector — and Sacha found this prospect even bleaker than the foul weather.

He had just turned onto a sedate block of respectable row houses when he noticed a ghostlike figure slipping along behind him. His blood chilled at the thought that it might be the dybbuk. But no, it was a grownup. A small grownup, true. But that was only because he was Chinese.

Sacha hurried on, pretending not to have seen the man, and trying to play for time while he decided what to do about him. When he reached the end of the block, he had a plan in mind. He looked back toward his pursuer, glaring fiercely as if to demand what the fellow thought he was up to, following him like that. When the man turned away, Sacha bolted around the corner and ran like hell.

Except that instead of running away, he ducked into the mews behind the comfortable residential block and jumped the gate of the first stable yard he passed in order to cut through the alley and come back around behind the man.

Or at least that’s what he’d intended to do. But when he skidded back out onto the street, there was no Chinese man there at all.

There was only Shen, standing with her hands in her trouser pockets and laughing at him.

He could have kicked himself.

“You really didn’t know it was me, did you?” she asked when her laughter had finally subsided into intermittent chuckles. “What are you doing, anyway? You’ve been wandering around all afternoon like a lost dog.”

“Just getting some exercise.”

“Isn’t it a bit wet for that?”

“I, uh, well…”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were casing out houses to rob.”

“Shen!”

“You don’t have to take my word for it. Look down at the end of the block.”

Sacha peered around Shen — and was alarmed to see a burly patrolman loitering at the corner, making no secret of the fact that he was keeping an eye on the two suspicious characters who had ventured onto his beat.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on,” Shen suggested. “After all, wouldn’t you rather tell me than him?”

Haltingly, Sacha told her about going to tea at Lily’s house, and Lily’s mother, and the situation with the Astral chauffeur. “So,” he concluded, “I need a house.”

“I don’t quite follow. Don’t you have a house?”

“Yes, but…”

“But you’re ashamed of it.”

He glared at her, but his angry answer died in his throat when he saw the gentle, understanding way she was looking at him.