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They had everything in the world already.

They couldn’t have him.

CHAPTER 3NINA

The chaperones herded us on foot into the heart of Belavere Trench, and I became suddenly, brutally aware that I was a speck on an ever-expanding map.

Scurry had always seemed half collapsed. Even as a younger girl, when the world was supposed to seem made of giants, it had never been big enough for me. Ma used to say that my mind was big and it made the outside small. “Girls like us,” she’d say. “We’re made for bigger places, you hear me?”

I’d heard her.

I’d heard everything.

Heard all the parts she didn’t say, too. Heard the door shut when she’d left. Heard Dad crying in the night. Heard all the neighbors and their snide speculations of where she’d run off to.

I thought she was likely in a place like this—somewhere big. If she wasn’t, then she was in hell, and I didn’t care much to visit her in either place.

Belavere City—a place for dreamers and innovators. For artists. For creation. This city wastheseat of creation—the very center of it, and I now stood in its heart.

I’d stolen my uncle’sAnthology of Belavereand studied every mural and fresco and blueprint and diagram. I had bothered my father with incessant questions since I’d had a mind to ask them.Are the boilers Artisan-made,or Crafter? What about the shaft pulleys? The conveyors? Surely the conveyors were invented by the Artisans?It seemed that everything of value, everything worth something, was conceived here.

The towns out in the brink were only the clogged arteries that led to the heart.

I had never seen buildings so tall, so clustered. Their red-tiled roofs and off-white facades matched perfectly with their neighbors’. The doorways were framed in arches, alcoves, steep steps to tiled landings. A girl ahead of me pointed and exclaimed at the domed roof in the distance, its fine sculpted stone decorated with gold. A man stood precariously on its top, and before him, the gold filigree morphed and changed, creating new patterns.

Flowering vines spilled from windows and off balconies. Fat-chested pigeons preened on the gutters. Wagons of coal trundled by with no one behind to push them. The women wore wide-hooped skirts, and the men wore neckties and long coats. They looked up and smiled knowingly as we children passed through. Smaller kids pulled on their mothers’ hands and pointed, lamenting the long wait until they too came of age. A man blew into his closed fist, and light appeared. It burst through the cracks between fingers. When his hand unfurled, the light flew from his palm like a dozen released doves and was captured by the lanterns that lined the street.

“Fire Charmer,” we whispered.

Here, clean water flowed streetside in tiny trenches no wider than a bucket. The residents need only step beyond their stoop to access it. I wondered at the team of water Charmers it must take to move so much water through the city.

There were Craftsmen here, too, and they were easy to spot, for their wagons and carts did not move for them unless pushed. Their clothes were hardly so fine, their brows already beaded in sweat. I supposed even a city that thrived from the minds of the most brilliant Artisans must still require manual labor, and Crafters were gifted with what the Artisans were not—superior vigor, strength, endurance.

On and on we walked, and I looked in every direction, seeking out thefine details. Every Belaverian book and sketch and testament I’d ever swallowed was spilling from me, unfolding into perfect replicas. Everything glistened. No precariously hung shutters, no puddles in the alleys. The exactness of it all, the cleanliness, was all painfully beautiful.

The National Artisan House was ahead. Its marble columns reminded me of ancient ruins. I knew from my readings that the sculptor had had them in mind when he’d crafted the building’s facade.

The crowds of children funneled through the narrow cobblestone pathways and bloomed again into an expansive courtyard behind the building. Here, things were not quite as opulent, and I frowned despite myself. The stone walls were stained with limescale; the ground was not bricked or cobbled, but compacted with dirt. The tall perimeter walls were not lined in the same neatly trimmed hedges at the building’s front.

But the air smelled like a million known and unknown things—coffee, kerosene, pastry, tobacco, horse shit. I heard bells and carts and voices upon voices—the cogs of a city perfectly churning, and my excitement returned.

Possibility.The sounds and smells and gleam of it.

It was, despite my father’s beliefs, possible that I would become a student of the Artisan School. Didn’t the teachers in Scurry say I had a remarkable capacity for the arts? “Natural aptitude,” one had called it.

If it wasn’t the Artisan School for me, then I would find a way to live among these tightly packed buildings and winding roads. If I couldn’t imbue magic, then I would ensure I was surrounded by it. It was still preferable to Scurry.

I would not be boarding another train.

Shoulders bumped into mine. Children continued pouring into the courtyard until we were pushed to its very edges. When it seemed the square surely could not fit one more body, another surge of entrants arrived, hustled in by the calls of chaperones.

We pressed together like cattle in an abattoir, shifting nervously. The smell of so many bodies soon became intolerable.

Finally, someone in navy blue lapels stepped out from the National Artisan House and onto the steps. He held a shiny brass microphone in front of his mouth. It screeched as he pressed its receiving button, and the sea of twelve-year-olds fell silent.

“Good morning,” the man said. He had small teeth and thin lips, a bulbous nose, large jowls, sparse hairs plastered over his forehead. There were posters of this man in all the taverns of Scurry. The first-shift miners threw darts at it in the evening.

“Welcome to the National Artisan House, children,” said Lord Tanner, the Head of House. A small smattering of awkward applause. Another of my pictures unfolding into reality.