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I caught a laugh between my teeth before it could escape. “What would your mother say?”

“Wouldn’t say much of anything I’d imagine. She’s dead.”

My stomach lurched. I stopped in the street. “Theo, I’m… I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Clarke,” he said, flicking ash to the pavement. “Everyone’s lost someone, haven’t they?”

Yes, everyone had lost someone. “How did she—?”

“Influenza,” he said, and his hand surreptitiously slipped around mine, pulling me onward. “Right after the laboratories in the South were raided. The reports said the Craftsmen had taken all the terranium meant for bluff. We couldn’t find any in a twenty-mile radius. The fever took her a week later.”

My conversation with Patrick came to mind immediately.

How did you get that terranium?

By doing bad things.

“I’m sorry, Theo,” I said. And I didn’t pull my hand away, not until we reached the marketplace. People thronged near the doors, and children, abandoning their parents for the evening, chased one another in circles.

“If you find yourself wanting to leave,” said Theo, “just say the word, and we’ll go back.”

“Why should I want to leave?”

He grimaced. “It can become… rowdy.”

I must have looked to him like I was still eighteen years old, a debutante. Not a girl from Scurry, or a woman seven years in the shadows.

“Do you remember the night of the Fellowship Ball?” I asked him, letting him guide me into the giant barn, cleared of its vendors’ tables and wares. The crowd was gathering before a low wooden stage in the back corner, and we followed suit.

Theo nodded, his neck now mottled red. “What of it?” he asked warily.

“You danced half the night with every girl we knew.” On the stage,Scottie set down a podium, and I kept my eyes on him instead of Theo. “As many as you could. And I stayed by the wall.”

Theo sighed, his eyes closing briefly. “Yes. I thought it might be better to try and… slowly separate myself, I suppose. I think I was trying to ease the blow. It was idiotic of me.” His regret sounded genuine.

I nodded. “It bothered me for a long time.”

Theodore shifted nervously, and I envisioned him again, walking past me in the halls and pretending the two of us had never been. Pretending he couldn’t see me breaking. Crumbling.

“You left me as well,” he muttered. Patrick climbed onto the stage. “Left me in the dust.”

“You left me behind well before,” I answered, and a millstone inside me disintegrated.

Patrick was doused in shadow, but I saw that he’d changed his clothes, bathed, perhaps even shaved. His hair remained as wavy as it had been when he was a boy. He was hundreds of heads and shoulders away, but I still saw those small pieces of him.

What seemed like the entire town chanted the Miners Union creed:From each what they can give, to each what they need. By dusk our work is done—at dawn we fight!

Scottie brought a small gramophone onto the stage, a long coil of wire, and what was possibly a reconstituted trumpet. Castoffs that did not belong together, but when Patrick raised the horn to his lips, the gramophone crackled, and his voice was magnified louder than ought to be possible.

I laughed in surprise.

“Good people of Kenton Hill,” he said, and the crowd cheered. Every one of them settled, their faces turned to the stage and the man presiding it. “Yesterday, our brothers in combat successfully raided the docks of Dorser and took two shipping containers of artillery out of the hands of the Lords’ Army.”

An uproarious response. Women clapped, men raised their hats in the air.

“With control of the Dorser docks, and the ones in Morland and Baymouth, we will take over imports and exports, and that which has been withheld from us by our own government will be sought offshore instead!”

More cheers, louder now. It struck me that Patrick had an aptitude for this—a politician’s vigor, whether he would admit it or not. He was utterly compelling.