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There were others who watched us leave—many in fact, but I paid them no mind.

The open lane brought fresh air. Children ran screaming, as was mandated by childhood. I’d spent many nights just the same, bolting down the street in some game while the grown-ups drank in the warmth of the pub. There were differences though, between my youth and the one tearing through Kenton Hill. These boys and girls weren’t without shoes.They wore knitted jumpers. Some squeezed bits of cooked pork in their hands, the juices slipping over their knuckles.

I’d stopped walking, and Patrick with me. He followed my line of sight to the children, then looked at me quizzically. “Thinking of stealin’ one?”

“I don’t think I was ever that free,” I said. It seemed to come from a vault I’d left unlocked. Even I was surprised to hear it aloud.

Patrick frowned. “You never played coppers and thieves?”

“I did. But I don’t think I looked like them.” I could explain it no further. I just knew that my cheeks had never shone that brightly. I’d never bellowed with such abandon. Always, always, I knew that the game’s end would come long before Fletcher Harrow emerged from whatever hole he was drinking in. And when he did, it was a fickle bet he’d be able to make the walk home.

“No,” Patrick said. “Reckon I didn’t, either.”

There was a saying in Scurry, that the anger of the parent leaves traces in the blood. Babies got their eyes from their mother and their bloodlust from their father. Their mum’s bitterness, their grandfather’s right hook. All of us born with hereditary rot in our bellies. It seemed these children had been spared it.

But Patrick and I, we were sure carriers.

“They’ve never heard the whistles, Nina. That’s what it is.”

I thought he might be right. Sometimes I heard them in my nightmares. Whistles, canaries, and earth caving in.

We continued up the lane at a languid pace. In the nimbus of lanterns, pairs sipped bottles and laughed. Polly Prescott sat on the steps to the tea shop and pressed her shoulder to Otto’s. I wondered if she felt freedom in sitting without her legs crossed at the ankles, without a kerchief beneath her arse or wires in her undergarments. She tipped her head back and laughed at something Otto said. I wondered if she thought of Belavere City at all.

“What about you?” I slipped my hand in the crook of Patrick’s arm, the fever of the night making me brave. “Did you ever play coppers and thieves?”

“Darlin’, I’m playing it every day.”

I sniffed a laugh. “I suppose you are.”

“Haven’t lost yet,” he said, kicking a stone from his course.

But along the way that game had become life, it seemed. He’d somehow grown into a man responsible for the running of an entire town, a political revolution. I wondered when the game had lost its fantasy. “Would you explain it all to me, if I asked you?”

“I can’t yet read your mind, Nina, much as I’d like to. Explain what?”

“How the Union formed,” I said. “How it all started.”

He hesitated, but only for a moment. There and then gone. “It started with me.”

This I knew already. He’d blown the whistle. “You told your father about the idium we found.”

“I did,” he said. “But even before that, my father was already having meetings in the pub every week, talkin’ about change. Talkin’ about the police. We’ve only got three left now, but there used to be an entire outfit of coppers. Bigger brutes I’ve never seen. They killed a miner in the street when I was a kid for spitting on an officer’s shoes. Beat him with their batons until his skull caved in, right outside the pub. People were angry after that, of course, but none more so than my father. He wanted every one of them dead.” Patrick stared up at those plucked, strung-up stars. His usual tiredness returned. “It was like he’d already determined what would happen. Had everything mapped out, just needed a reason. Something big enough to make even the most mild-natured man pick up a gun.”

I stared, wide-eyed. “And then you got off the train.”

He nodded slowly. “And then I got off the fuckin’ train. My father had Kenton’s miners corralled around the jailhouse by the end of the week, and they set it ablaze. My mother hardly spoke to my dad again after that, because he made me and Gunner come along, and we saw it all.”

I could almost smell the burning ash on the air, hear the pounding fists on the inside of the glass as two boys in the street watched monsters take the shape of men.

Patrick looked over his shoulder. “Whatever is alive and well in those kids back there, I reckon it was snuffed out in Gunner and me that very night.”

We had walked beyond the streetlights and claimed the middle of the lane. There was absolutely no one to stop us. I had the strange urge to spread my arms and try to balance on the cobbles. Instead, I asked, “What happened next?”

“The coppers that remained were kept scared enough that they didn’t report what happened, and in return, they got to keep the pay the government continued to send to the dead ones. My dad and the others built a tunnel to the nearest port, and they began making their deals, hoarding weapons. He started traveling, using false names and talking in more pubs about the idium. He said it was like a contagion spreading. Hundreds quickly pledged to the Miners Union, which meant more tunnels, more guns. They communicated through coded telegrams back then, sending messages underground—we couldn’t trust the Scribbler we had at the time. The strikes were effective, and Dad said it wouldn’t be long till the whole government buckled. Eventually, he started talking about blowing up the school.” Here, Patrick paused, and his voice resembled fraying thread. “And I begged him to target anything else.”

I swallowed shakily, the smell of sulfur and smoke collecting in my nose. “Why did he do it?” I managed.

He’d walked ahead of me, letting my arm fall. I suspected it was to offer me distance. But he had the decency to look me in the eye when he said, “Because that school was the epicenter of the Artisans’ universe, and we had a message to send.”