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The symptoms of craftsmanship were accurate enough, but what most Artisans ignored was the cause. Crafters were born to parents without means. Often, those parents died young. The children worked at an early age for little pay, subject to occupational hazards an Artisan would never face. They medicated themselves against the trauma, the injuries, the knowledge that the next day would bring them nothing better, and if they survived to the right age, they eventually raised their own hungry children. It was a cascading line of falling bricks that built the brink.

I scrunched the newspaper into a ball and threw it aside, though it did little to quell my trembling. The headlines still appeared before me when I blinked.

MINERS UNION TAKES STRIKE INTO SIXTH WEEK

TERRANIUM FAMINE FEARED

CLAIMS OF IDIUM CORRUPTION NOW RAMPANT

FAMED ALCHEMIST MIRANDA MILANY TAKEN BY INFLUENZA

THE LAST ALCHEMIST, DOMELIUS BECKER, MOVES INTO HIDING, SAYS SOURCES

But no mentions of any specific names or places. Just vague references to the Northeast or the brink towns, or miners in general.

I swallowed thickly. Clenched my hands.

In a few hours, I would graduate from the National Artisan School, and just as I had on the fated day of my siphoning ceremony, I felt a shiverof catastrophe travel up my spine. I was suddenly twelve years old again, awash in terror as Aunt Francis gripped my arm.

She would be in the audience today as I read my fellowship oath and received a scroll from a tower of identical scrolls that prescribed my status as a Charmer, my medium of earth, and my academic ranking of high order.

And then I would officially be an Artisan. Someone who existed outside these walls. Perhaps this was the source of all my terror.

I wondered, and not for the first time, whether I still would have slipped that vial from my pocket six years ago had I known then what I did now.

Had I known that the stories of corruption would leak down the rivers and canals into towns spilling over with Crafters; had I known the country was on the knife-edge of revolution. If I’d known then that my reserved part in a likely civil war was to be its artillery, perhaps I would have unstoppered my given Crafter’s vial after all, for that little din that Lord Tanner once spoke of was now a roar, even if he pretended to be obtuse about it.

I tied the ceremony cape at my throat—it perfectly matched the blue of my skirt, my stockings, the fake idium in the bottom of my trunk. It billowed out just past my elbows and no lower, leaving the Artisan brand uncovered on my forearm—a stark, blister-red Idia with her fanning hair.

The accumulation of my life was packed inside the bulging case next to me. A meager sum of clothing, shoes, journals, sketches. It would be packed into a coach and taken to an undisclosed location. A location I would soon be transported to, just as soon as I’d received my fellowship assignment.

The safe house will only be for a short while, Lord Tanner had told me in Dumley’s drawing room.An earth Charmer is quite a valuable thing, Miss Clarke. One that many would covet. We wouldn’t want these rebels getting their hands on you, now, would we? Best to err on the side of caution and wait for all the dust to settle.

I wondered if Domelius Becker, the last surviving Alchemist in the trench, would be waiting in this “safe house” with me, both of us now the only one of our medium. How long would it take for the “dust to settle”? It seemed to me that dust was a growing storm.

The city was riddled with the effects of the strikes. The refectory meals had grown sparser as farmers left fields untended and didn’t return. Deliveries weren’t made. The coal supply was being rationed carefully. Even bluff was hard to come by, with only a single Alchemist left to siphon it.

It was rumored that the next siphoning ceremony would be postponed—that there wasn’t enough idium left in reserve.

To me, it seemed even the exterior of the city was showing its first cracks before its inevitable fall, and yet the Lords went about their business as though its foundation weren’t quaking.

Just a precaution. These dark times will come to an end soon enough, Professor Dumley had assured me just yesterday.And with you assisting in the House of Lords—an earth Charmer!—why, the Miners Union might as well lay down their banners now.

I thought of those Lords with their polished tabletops and fine china cups, and wondered if they truly needed my assistance.

I thought of those miners, so desperate to escape the life I had narrowly escaped.

I thought of this school, which I’d come to love, each corner of it intricately beautiful.

I thought of collapsing mines and children left to scour the streets for food.

I thought of a boy from Kenton Hill with blue eyes, and I wondered if he’d survived these past years or suffered the same fate as most men born in the brink.

I thought of disappearing. I dreamed of it almost every night, in fact.

I deliberated until the voices and faces and headlines pendulumed, and cracks spread on either side of my skull, and then I pushed a pin throughmy hat and left my room behind, biting the inside of my cheek until it bled.

The theater was full to bursting, and I was saddened by the idea of leaving it for good. The stucco-plastered ceiling was carefully embellished in cherubs, rose gardens, the gates of paradise. I’d heard the finest opera singers cast their voices into the ether here, seen ballerinas thrown through space and land on the tips of their toes. I’d heard compositions and poetry and the cries of a boy in a costume simulating grief.