The fog rolled off the Thames like a living thing, thick and yellow and smelling of coal smoke and river rot. Arthur Blackwood pulled his coat tighter and walked faster, his boots splashing through puddles that reflected the gas lamps in fractured amber circles. The notebook in his inner pocket weighed more than it should have -- three hundred pages of ledgers, shipping manifests, death counts. His father's empire, reduced to ink and paper.

He had been running for eleven months.

The garret was on the fourth floor of a building on Dorset Street that leaned slightly to the left, as if tired of standing. The landlord, a Welshman with a missing ear and a heart that had softened just enough to accept Arthur's final coin, had given him the room on credit. The credit had run out three weeks ago.

Arthur lit the candle on the windowsill and sat on the mattress that had been a mattress once, before it became something else. He opened the notebook to the last page he had written on -- a list of names. Thirty-seven names of men who had died in the Blackwood copper mines on Saint Lucia. Thirty-seven names with ages beside them. Twelve were under sixteen.

He had tried London. God, he had tried London. He had taken his evidence to three members of Parliament, all of whom had listened politely and then asked him very gently whether he understood his family's position. He had gone to the abolitionist societies, and they had looked at the documents and then looked at him with expressions he could only describe as professional pity. One man had said, "Young Mr. Blackwood, your father sits on the Trade Committee. He knows how these things work."

How these things work. The phrase played in Arthur's mind like a record stuck on one note.

The candle guttered. Outside, a woman was singing something in Irish, her voice thin and reedy, carried on the fog like a prayer that nobody was answering.

Arthur remembered the plantation. Not the house -- the house was too grand, too full of marble and oil paintings and the laughter of people who had never known hunger. He remembered the fields. The way the copper ore looked when it was first pulled from the earth: dull and brown and unremarkable. The way it looked after it was smelted: bright and red and alive, like blood.

He had been eleven the first time he visited. His father had put a whip in his hand and told him to swing it at the slave who had dropped a basket. The slave was a woman, maybe thirty, maybe forty, her skin the color of the earth she worked, her eyes fixed on the ground. Arthur had swung the whip and missed. His father had laughed. The woman had not looked up.

That night, Arthur had dreamed of blood. Not his blood. The woman's blood, on the red ore, on the green leaves, on the white sheets of his bed at home in Blackiron. He had woken screaming. His mother had come in, lit the lamp, and held him while he shook. She had not asked what he had dreamed. She had known.

The dream had not stopped.

Arthur closed the notebook. He could not sleep. He never slept anymore. The insomnia had started the night he left -- the night he stole the notebook while his father slept, the night he walked out of the Blackwood mansion with nothing but the clothes on his back and the three pounds in his pocket. He had walked through the gates of Blackiron for the last time at 3 AM. The sentry had not stopped him. Nobody had stopped him. His father had let him go.

That was the worst part. His father had known. He had known and he had let him go.

Why?

Arthur did not know. He had spent eleven months turning the question over in his mind like a coin, looking for edges, looking for something to bite. There was nothing. His father was a man who understood power, and power did not require explanation.

The candle burned lower. Arthur's fingers were cold. He could feel the damp in the walls, the way the plaster crumbled when he touched it, the way the floorboards groaned under his weight. This was not a place for a young gentleman. This was not a place for anyone, really. But it was a place, and a place was all he had.

He thought of Saint Lucia. The heat. The way the sky turned that particular shade of purple at dusk, the color of a bruise. The way the birds sang in the morning, loud and careless and full of life, as if the earth were not covered in chains.

He had written one letter to his mother. She had not answered. Or perhaps she had answered and the letter had been intercepted. It did not matter. The silence was its own answer.

Arthur stood up and walked to the window. The fog had thickened. He could see maybe twenty feet in any direction. Beyond that, London was gone, swallowed by the white and the dark. He pressed his hand against the glass. It was cold.

He thought of the woman in the fields. The one he had missed with the whip. He did not know her name. He had never asked. He would never know her name.

The candle went out.

Arthur sat in the dark and listened to the city breathe. Somewhere below him, a dog was barking. Somewhere further away, a church bell was striking midnight. He counted the strikes. Twelve. Then nothing.

He did not know if he would live to see morning. The cough had started two weeks ago, deep in his chest, the kind of cough that rattled and shook and left him gasping. The doctor at the free clinic had looked at him with tired eyes and said, "It's the damp, Mr. Blackwood. You need better air."

Better air. The phrase played in his mind like a record stuck on one note.

Arthur pulled the blanket over his shoulders and closed his eyes. He did not pray. He had stopped praying six months ago, the night he realized that God, if He existed, was either indifferent or complicit. There was no third option.

In the morning, the landlord would come looking for the rent. He would find Arthur on the floor, the notebook open beside him, the last page stained with something that might have been tears or might have been blood. He would take the notebook. He would not read it. He would take it to the police, or to the newspapers, or to his mother, or to the devil himself. It did not matter.

The fog would still be there. The city would still be breathing. The machine would still be turning.

Somewhere, a pigeon flew over the rooftops. Its owner, an old man in a room on the other side of the city, had made its whistle from a cow bone. The whistle sounded like a question.

Nobody answered.