Hoskins was crying now, tears running down his weathered face. I begged her to end it. Told her I couldn't live with what I'd seen. But she said death was too easy. She said I had to live with the knowledge.
Had to carry it every day. Had to let it change me or let it destroy me. Those were my choices. "And the people in your warehouse? "Gone when I woke the next morning.
Every chain unlocked, every door open. They vanished like they'd never existed. And I never traded in human flesh again. I couldn't. Every time I even thought about it, I'd see those visions.
Feel that weight. I moved here, started over, tried to live a life that wasn't built on suffering. Crawford asked the question that had been haunting him. "The young man with violet eyes. Was he with her?
Hoskins nodded slowly. He appeared twice. Once in South Carolina when she freed a group of slaves from a holding facility. Once in Georgia when a trader named Morton had an accident that left him paralyzed. Different ages in each sighting.
Like he was growing up across these years, but the same presence, the same purpose. "Which is what? What's their purpose? "Justice," Hoskins said simply. "Not revenge, not random violence.
Justice. They target the infrastructure of slavery, the traders, the auction houses, the financial systems that profit from human bondage. They're dismantling it piece by piece. And they're using truth as their weapon, making people see what they've been part of, what they've supported, what they've ignored. Crawford left Petersburg with more questions than answers.
If what Hoskins described was accurate, then Josiah and the woman in gray represented something unprecedented, a force moving through the South, specifically targeting slavery's mechanisms. But why Richmond? Why the elaborate auction? Why allow himself to be sold to Harrison Whitmore, only to kill the man days later? The answer came to Crawford in a flash of understanding.
Richmond wasn't the target. The auction wasn't about Josiah being sold. It was about gathering Richmond's elite in one room, about making them compete for him, about getting them to reveal the depths of their depravity through their bidding. The auction was a trap designed to expose who would pay the most to own another human being, and everyone who participated had been marked. Crawford began tracking the other bidders.
Mrs. Ashford, the widow who had bid $9,000. She'd suffered a house fire that destroyed half her mansion but killed no one. The fire had started in her study where she kept documentation of illegal slave purchases dating back decades. All of it consumed, her wealth largely destroyed, but she survived. Williams, the cotton factor who'd seen Josiah as an investment opportunity.
He'd been ruined by a series of mysterious business failures. Ships sinking, warehouses flooding, contracts cancelling for no apparent reason. Within two weeks of the auction, he'd gone from wealthy to bankrupt, And the quiet man, Graves, whom Crawford now knew had been speaking the truth at the auction, had warned them of death and misery. Graves had been warning them, had understood what they were too blind to see. Crawford needed to find Josiah, not to capture him, but to understand the full scope of what was happening.
Because if this pattern continued, if every person complicit in slavery became a target for these impossible reckonings, then the entire South was about to experience a crisis that would make political tensions look trivial by comparison. He found Josiah in the last place he expected, at the African church on Broad Street, sitting in a back pew during evening services. Crawford slipped into the pew beside him, and Josiah turned to him with those unsettling violet eyes. "Mr. Crawford, I wondered when you'd find me. "I need to understand what's happening here, what you are, what your purpose is.
"I'm a catalyst, an instrument of truth. The woman you've been investigating, she's been working for years to undermine slavery from within, freeing individuals, destroying traders. But she understood that individual actions weren't enough. The system is too vast, too entrenched. So she needed something bigger.
A demonstration that would shake the foundations of slaveholder society. "The auction. "The auction. Bring together the wealthiest, most powerful men in Richmond. Make them compete to own someone.
Let them reveal their true nature through their bids and then show them what they really are. Hold a mirror up to their souls and force them to see the monsters reflected back. Some like Harrison Whitmore can't survive that revelation. Others, like Daniel Preston, might find redemption, but all of them are changed. And change ripples outward.
"You're trying to end slavery through individual conversions. Josiah shook his head. "I'm trying to plant seeds of doubt to crack the certainty that lets good people participate in evil systems. Slavery won't end because of what I do. It will end because of economic forces and political movements and eventually war.
But when those forces arrive, will this region be ready? Will the people here be capable of imagining a different world? That depends on whether enough of them have been forced to see the truth of what they've been part of. Crawford was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "People are going to come looking for you.
Dangerous people. People who understand you're a threat to their entire way of life. "Let them come. The more they react, the more they reveal. Every act of violence against me proves my point about the system they're defending.
Every attempt to recapture me demonstrates the cruelty they're willing to employ. I'm not afraid of them, Mr. Crawford. They should be afraid of the truth. That night, five of Richmond's leading citizens met in secret at the home of Charles Pembroke, a judge who'd presided over numerous cases enforcing fugitive slave laws. They'd all heard about Harrison Whitmore's death.
All understood that something unprecedented was happening and all recognized that Josiah represented an existential threat to their social order. "We need to eliminate him," Pembroke said bluntly. "I don't care how we do it, but that slave cannot remain at large. He's destabilizing everything. "He's not a normal runaway," another man replied.
Samuel Torrance, owner of Richmond's largest slave auction house, continued, "He's organized somehow, connected to something bigger. The woman in gray that people keep mentioning. There's a network here, an abolitionist conspiracy operating right under our noses. Then we root it out. We use every resource at our disposal.