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Patrick stood. He didn’t want to reenact the many rows that had split the seams of this kitchen when his father had been here and Tess still believed he could be persuaded from his course. Patrick and his brothers had heard them from that one bedroom upstairs, one ear pressed to the mattress and the other blocked by a pillow as the roar downstairs seemed to grow and grow.

“Four weeks,” Tess murmured. “It ain’t enough time to change a person’s mind. Lord knows a decade weren’t enough to change your father’s, and now he’s—”

“Captured,” Patrick cut in.

“Dead,” Tess said forcefully, white knuckles clutching the back of a chair. “There ain’t a hope you’ll find him still alive, Pat. You need to stop pretendin’—”

“You’re able to abandon him so easily.” Patrick’s fists shook with the urge to be buried in a wall. But he spoke evenly. “Not me.”

No, not Patrick. He felt his father knocking at the insides of his skull. Other people had a tendency to forget what Patrick couldn’t when it came to John Colson: the cast-off parts turned into toy trains, the easy jokes, and a hand wide enough to span two of his. In the mornings, his father would submerge his head in a bucket of water to rinse dust from his eyes, and they’d come away bloodshot. He’d sit at the table, draw a sketch of some strange imagining: a lantern, a filter, a kettle, a trolley. Tess would shake her head in wonder and ask him how he came to such ideas, and John would pull Donny onto his knee and tell her that he was going to fix up the whole world. A place crafted by hand, out of spit and steam, all before the whistle for second shift blew.No son of mine, he’d said.No son of mine in a pit.

And he’d found a way. It would only take a war.

He was too stubborn to die, Patrick knew.

Tess shook her head again, and from one breath to the next, Patrick thought she grew older. “This idea you have in your head of victory? It’s a delusion. We already have all the victory we’re gonna get. A safe home, fairgain, less men belowground.” Her eyes welled. “Everyone gets what they need, Pat. God bites the hand of those who try ’n’ take more.” Suddenly, she coughed into her hand, bending almost double, and Patrick rounded the table to her side, held her shoulders until the spluttering slowed.

He sighed. “Your God turned his head from this place a long time ago, Ma. We’re the only gods here.”

She sat at the table with Patrick’s guidance, leaning her head on her steepled hands, eyes closing. “You sound so much like him, Pat. That’s what’s hardest.” She said it so softly he could barely hear it. “You’re some of him and some of me, and we don’t get to pick which parts we give to our children. You’re a mess of the two of us—his head and my heart. Both’ll get you killed.”

“I have to finish it, Ma. I promised him.”

“Aye,” she said. “And there’s not a day I don’t hate him for it.”

Patrick left. No time to sleep, no time to lament. Just a knocking in his brain, a tingling on his mouth, a looming clock in the periphery winding down the seconds.

“Don’t wait on her, Patrick,” his mother called after him as he walked out into the night.

CHAPTER 37NINA

What will happen to you, when Tanner learns you’ve been seduced by the man you were sent to bury?”

Theo came closer.

He reeked of whiskey. Whiskey made good men angry and angry men violent. I hid my shaking hands, lifted my eyes. “You assume it’s me who’s been seduced?”

It was enough to give him pause.

“Do you give me no credit at all, Theo?”

He rose onto his toes and back onto his heels, the neck of the bottle dangling precariously in his grip. “You planned it?” He sounded mollified, at least in part.

I shrugged in a way I hoped seemed offhand. “Is seduction not the quickest way to ruin a man?”

He blinked twice. Then he slowly raised the bottle to his lips and swigged, contemplating. “You looked at him a long, long time, Clarke. Same way you used to look at me.”

Perhaps jealousy was the quickest path to ruin. I barely recognized him in those shadows, menacing and brash. The drink propelled his voice, made me flinch inwardly, but I hid it. “We were sent here to find the Alchemist, Theo, and in two years, you’ve been unable to. Patrick’scareful. It’ll take more than trust before he reveals where they’re keeping him. It’ll take—”

“Love,” Theo finished. “Is that your plan, Clarke? Are you to make him fall in love with you?”

I wanted to tear my own heart from my chest. “Yes.”

“A tall order to achieve in a few short weeks,” he muttered, his expression no less severe. It seemed at any moment he might slip over the knife’s edge. “That’s when they’re planning to raze the National House, you realize? Four short weeks.”

“I need more time,” I muttered, and this, at least, was true.

“Then you’d better dig slower.” It ricocheted across my skin. “You know as well as I do, if they reach the city, the game is up.”