The ticker tape was falling like confetti at a funeral.

Thomas O'Brien stood at the edge of the trading floor, watching the brokers scream numbers at each other across the mahogany counters. The air smelled of sweat and tobacco and something metallic—fear, maybe, or greed, or both. They were the same thing on this floor, indistinguishable as the Irish and the Italians in the tenements, just different accents on the same hunger.

"Tommy! You seeing this?"

Big Bill Callahan was leaning over the railing above him, his fat face purple with the effort of shouting over the noise. Bill had been trading since before Tommy was born, and he knew the market the way a sailor knows the sea—by the taste of the wind and the color of the waves. Right now, the sea was running red.

"I see it, Bill," Tommy said. "Railway's holding at forty-two."

"Forty-two?" Bill laughed, a sound like gravel in a tin can. "Forty-two is charity, Tommy. We're buying at forty-five. That's what gentlemen pay for a fair fight."

Tommy didn't answer. He was thinking about his sister Molly, who had come to his apartment that morning with a newspaper and a look on her face that said she knew exactly what he was doing and disapproved of every word of it. The newspaper headline read: RAILWAY CONSOLIDATION PLAN DISPLACES THOUSANDS OF WORKERS. Molly had folded the paper and set it on his kitchen table like an accusation.

"You're going to be a rich man, Tommy," she had said. "But you're going to be a lonely one."

He had wanted to argue. He had wanted to tell her that he was doing this for her, that the tenement on Mulberry Street with its leaky ceiling and its neighbors who played cards until three in the morning was not the life she deserved. But Molly had already turned away, and the door had closed behind her with the soft click of a woman who loved her brother but no longer recognized him.

Now, on the trading floor, Tommy watched the railway shares tick upward. Forty-three. Forty-four. Forty-five.

"Buy," he said into the telephone. "Buy everything they're selling."

The order went out like a shot across the floor. Brokers sprinted to their desks. Phones rang. The ticker tape machine chattered like a machine gun. And Tommy O'Brien, twenty-four years old and already feeling the weight of the empire he was building brick by brick with other people's money, stood perfectly still and tried to remember what his father had sounded like.

His father had been a dockworker. He had died when Tommy was nineteen, crushed by a crate of copper wire that had slipped from a crane and fallen onto his chest. The insurance payout had been forty dollars. Forty dollars had paid for the funeral. Forty dollars had paid for the doctor who could have saved him if they had called him sooner. Forty dollars was the total value of a man's life, measured in copper wire and bad crane maintenance.

Tommy had sworn on his father's grave that he would never be forty dollars again.

"Forty-six," someone shouted. "Railway's at forty-six!"

Tommy closed his eyes. He could see his father's hands—calloused, cracked, stained with grease and earth. Hands that had built the railways he was now trying to destroy. The irony was not lost on him. It sat in his stomach like a stone.

"Tommy!" Big Bill was at his elbow again. "We're through with forty-five. We own the floor now. What's the play?"

Tommy opened his eyes. The trading floor was a sea of straw hats and sweating foreheads, and in the center of it all was the railway stock, climbing higher with every passing second. Forty-seven. Forty-eight.

"We hold," Tommy said. "We hold until fifty, then we sell everything and short the market."

Bill stared at him. "Short it? You think the railway's going to crash?"

"I think," Tommy said carefully, "that everything crashes eventually."

He didn't tell Bill about the reports he had been reading at night, in the lamplight of his apartment, after Molly had gone to sleep on the couch with a newspaper over her face. Reports about overextension, about speculation, about railways being built to nowhere, about stocks trading at prices that had nothing to do with value and everything to do with faith. Faith in the market. Faith in the future. Faith in the gentleman's agreement that everyone would keep playing the game even when the game was rigged.

Tommy believed in gentlemen. He had grown up believing in them—the men who shook your hand and meant it, who looked you in the eye and told you the truth even when the truth was ugly. His father had been a gentleman in that sense. A poor man, a dead man, but a gentleman nonetheless.

And Tommy was becoming something else. Something that wore a tailcoat and shouted numbers at men across a trading floor and bought companies he would never operate and sold them to people he would never meet.

"Forty-nine!" someone screamed. "Almost there!"

Tommy felt the phone receiver grow warm in his hand. He was buying. He was always buying. Buying shares, buying influence, buying a place in a world that had no room for dockworkers' sons unless they were willing to climb over everyone else to get it.

"Tommy, we're at fifty. You said fifty."

Tommy looked at the ticker tape. It was still chattering, still feeding him numbers that rose like a fever chart. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. Fifty-three.

"Wait," he said.

"Tommy, we're at fifty-three—"

"Wait!"

He was thinking about Molly. He was thinking about his father. He was thinking about the thousand workers who would lose their jobs if the railway consolidation went through, men who had built the tracks with their hands and now would be told that their hands were no longer needed.

"Tommy, we're at fifty-five!"

"Sell," Tommy said. "Sell everything."

The order went out. The trading floor erupted. Brokers sprinted. Phones rang. The ticker tape machine screamed. And Tommy O'Brien stood at the center of the storm and felt nothing at all.

They sold at fifty-five. They bought back at forty-two. The profit was staggering. Big Bill was hugging people. Someone had opened a bottle of champagne. The floor was dancing.

Tommy walked to the window and looked out at the street below. People were going about their business, unaware that fortunes had been made and lost in the room behind the glass. A street vendor was selling newspapers. A horse-drawn carriage clattered past. A woman in a blue dress was waiting at the corner, checking her watch.

Molly.

She was always waiting. Waiting for him to come home. Waiting for him to remember who he was. Waiting for the brother she had loved to crawl out from under the weight of all the money he had made.

Tommy turned from the window. The celebration was reaching its peak. Bill was standing on a desk, raising a glass. The brokers were singing. Tommy felt the edges of the room blur.

He walked to the door and stepped out into the hallway. The elevator was down. He took the stairs two at a time, his heart pounding in time with his footsteps. Fourth floor. Third floor. Second floor.

He burst onto the street and saw her, still waiting at the corner, still checking her watch, still wearing the blue dress he had bought her for her birthday three years ago.

"Tommy?" She looked surprised to see him. "What are you doing here?"

"I needed to see you," he said.

She studied his face. "Did you make money today?"

"Yes."

"Good." She started walking. "Come on. I made soup."

Tommy followed her through the streets of lower Manhattan, past the tenements and the saloons and the children playing in the gutter. He passed a newspaper stand and saw the headline: RAILWAY STOCK PLUMMETS AFTER O'BRIEN SALE. Forty-two. Back where it had started.

Molly stopped at their building and held the door open. "Soup's getting cold."

Tommy stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The apartment smelled of cabbage and bread and something warm that had nothing to do with money. He sat at the kitchen table and watched his sister ladle soup into bowls, and for the first time all day, he felt something other than nothing.

He felt guilty.

And he knew, with the certainty of a man who had just sold his soul and was trying to remember what it felt like to buy it back, that the guilt was the most valuable thing he owned.