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“No,” he said flatly. “I only drink.”

We reached Colson’s much quicker than seemed possible, given our slow amble. At the door he disentangled my arm from his, but he did not immediately drop my fingers. His were hot. Burning. For a moment, the pad of his thumb skated across my knuckles.

Once more, I counted the stolen seconds before he let me go.Three, four, five, six.

He blinked rapidly, relinquished my hand.

“Are you not heading inside?” I asked.

He shook his head and put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll see you at the rally.”

“I have nothing appropriate to wear,” I told him, my fingers itching once again, though not for their medium this time.

“I’ll have somethin’ sent up,” he said. “Mrs. Colson will bring you supper.”

“Please thank her for me.”

“Nah,” he said, smirking at some joke I’d missed. “Better if I don’t.” Then he nodded once, eyes flickering to mine in a way that made my heart stutter, then stepped back into the lane, dusty coat billowing out behind him.

I stood there a whole minute, waiting for my blood to cool before turning to go inside.

CHAPTER 33NINASEVEN YEARS AGO

The Artisan Fellowship Ball was an annual event inviting future graduates to dine and dance in the splendor of the National Artisan House, where a stowed-away ballroom was dusted off and dipped in gold.

On the outskirts of the dancefloor, I felt Theo’s fingers slip out of mine. He held his hand out to a girl with an exuberant headdress, then left me in the corner alone.

I watched as he spun her among the sea of other couples, an inexplicable hollowness carved from my middle.

“Is that Theodore I see with Jane Winter?” said a voice from my side. Polly was resplendent in white silk, her dark hair coiffed high on her head.

“You don’t wish to dance?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Me neither. I’ve never felt more out of place.”

I bumped my shoulder against hers. “We’ve worked as hard as any of them, haven’t we?”

Polly grimaced. “Harder, probably.”

But I felt what she felt, the undeniable sense that we were imposters. The worm and the squid.

For a while, we simply watched the party pass us by. To me, it lookedlike theater: costumes and gleaming teeth and false smiles. Around the government ministers, all manner of near-graduates swarmed—Cutters and Scribblers and Masons and Smiths all vying to have their name remembered, collecting insurance they wouldn’t be sent somewhere unseemly beyond graduation.

As for me, I imagined a foothill hidden in the colossal shadow of a snowcapped mountain, an easel with fresh canvas, a board wet with paint, someone who loved me. It was, really, all I wanted.

Theo offered his hand to yet another of our classmates.

“What plans do you have after graduation?” I asked Polly.

She grimaced. “I’ve been posted in Hesson.”

A brink town. It seemed all the new Scribblers were sent to the ends of the Trench. Polly took a sip of champagne and said, “It seems foolish, doesn’t it? To send Artisans so far from the capital on the precipice of a war?”

It was uttered with such bluntness that my lungs stuttered. The party continued to ebb and surge before us in great mocking contrast. We weren’t to talk of such things—to spread panic. “The union members are being disbanded,” I argued quietly. “It was in the papers.”

“The papers lie all the time. Just last week, a train cart was blown to pieces on its way to the city.”