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To the attention of Miss Nina Harrow

of

348 Cobbler and Brum, Row 5, Scurry.

On the 23rd of September, 1892, all children who were born twelve years prior are henceforth summoned to Belavere City and the National Artisan House to enact the 535th Siphoning Ceremony, as per the below articles 2, 3, 6, & 18 of the National Constitution of Belavere Trench.

Long live Belavere.

2. Idium Quantum

To incite the birthright of magics, male children upon the age of twelve years are mandated to consume one ounce of idium dilution. The effects thereafter will constitute the legal status of the individual’s magics, and they shall be irrevocably designated Artisan or Craftsman.

3. Idium Quota

A citizen with official Artisan branding is eligible to an allotment of one ounce of idium dilution twice annually.

6. Education

Every child will be offered approved curriculum. Those deemed Artisan will attend the National Artisan School. Those deemed Craftsman will thereafter seek education at their guardians’ volition.

18. As of the 469th year of siphoning, female children upon the age of twelve years may also rightfully consume one ounce of idium dilution. The effects thereafter will constitute the legal status of the individual’s magics.

CHAPTER 1NINA

In late September, I boarded a train.

The smokestack left plumes in our wake, dirtying the carriage windows, and I wondered if the smoke hadn’t followed us from home. I pressed my nose to the glass and made out the silhouette of Scurry in the distance, then saluted the town with my middle finger and turned away from it forever.

The carriage was filled to the brim with children: twelve years of age, fraying socks, soot on their eyelashes and mush in their heads, I imagined. Lady chaperones in long woolen skirts and slickened faces stumbled down the aisle against inertia. One leaned across the seat and flattened the lace trim collar of my blouse without looking me in the eye.

They yelled ineffectually at those who hung over their seats, at the boys who dared take off their caps, at the girls who bunched their dresses above the knee.Sit proper! Wipe your nose! Roll down your sleeves!The pleas went unnoticed. The children of Scurry bickered and caterwauled. We were teeming and swelling and spilling over with adventure. Something new was upon us. Something vast and frightening and intoxicatingly possible.

Possible.

I clung to that word. I wasn’t swept away by the same vicious thrill as the rest. I sat quiet and still. I gripped a badly bound wad of parchment,its pages filled with profile sketches and plant anatomy. I looked dead ahead and saw the possibilities my brain conjured. It drew me pictures of white marble walls and clean canvas. Of starched white blouses and badly stained aprons, imbued with years of paints and clay and charcoal. A landscape stretched in my mind of never-ending rooftops, where the church steeples and bell towers stretched high enough that one could see all the way to the edge of the continent from their rafters.

Soon, the pictures turned to dreams. The chaos aboard ebbed and flowed. The steam chest coughed. The floor rattled atop the cranks. We were carried farther and farther away from all we’d ever known.

I journeyed all the way to the Artisan capital city without a single thought for home. There were only dreams of brilliant crimson blood that turned inky blue.

CHAPTER 2PATRICK

Farther north, a different train with an asthmatic whistle pulled to a stop at Kenton Hill.

A boy named Patrick Colson boarded with his breath held, wiping sweat from his hands onto the seats. He waved once to his brothers, to his mother, and silently vowed he’d return tomorrow.

The train pulled away with a jolt, and the boy sighed and pressed his back into the wooden bench, swore quietly, curled his nails into his thighs until they bit.

He watched home slip sideways through the window and felt the distance like a slow amputation. A simmer of dread that emerged at breakfast now boiled over.

Beyond the clatter of the tracks, he heard the train’s farewell whistle, and it sounded like the signal of shifts changing in the mines. His dad and older brother always worked the second shift, never the first. When Patrick returned to Kenton Hill tomorrow, he would join them.

Miner’s blood, through and through—black with soot, like his father, and all the fathers that came before. And therein, this journey was redundant for Patrick. He didn’t need the Artisans in their capital city to tell his fortune. What he needed, very badly, was to return to his mother, who waited at the bay windows of a black brick building. He needed to beamong those close walls and low ceilings. Back to the yellow grass hills. To the mills and canals and the great gaping holes in the earth that swallowed men and spat them back out. He needed to be waiting by the whistle in the morning when the night shift ended and ensure his father and brother were spat out with the rest. He needed to be there if (God have mercy) none came back up at all.

At that moment, the worker’s whistle was sounding all over the continent, in dozens of different towns, while dozens of different trains battered across tracks toward the nation’s center.

Much like Nina of Scurry, Patrick ignored the frenzy of children. But the Kenton boy did not sleep. He rubbed his nose subtly to catch tears before they fell over his lip. He stifled the sick in his belly with anger, jutted his chin, stared straight ahead. He dared the bloody Artisans to try and take him away to their fucking school.