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The stage lamps popped and erupted.

Aunt Francis was before me, scrambling amid a sea of the flailing. Swarms of crabs scuttling over one another’s backs.

“Nina!” she shouted, her face bloody.

She was sideways, or I was. She reached me on hands and knees and bid me to stand. Dust rained down in a cloud above her. “Hurry!” she said. “Hurry!”

An alarm was sounding, distant and sleepy. It whirred in one long drone, barely discernible above the screams.

I clambered over fallen rafters with Aunt Francis, tripped on blasted pieces of furbished timber. I fell across the body of a man with part of his head caved in.

Smoke was thick on the air. It joined the dust and made it impossible to see ahead. A Mason tried to persuade fallen bricks from an exit, but she was already out of breath and the stone moved slowly, sluggishly. Others joined her, lifting their hands before them and grunting until the stone gave. They tumbled away, clearing a path.

A flood of Artisans barreled through. The earth continued to quake. Boom after boom shook the walls, cracked the ceilings. Great plates of plaster detached and fell from above. The entrance hall was littered with it. Marble tiles lifted and danced in place. Walls buckled, the entire frame of the school growling its last before it gave in.

And I ran.

It never once occurred to me that I might try to stop the earth from breaking apart. There was only fear.

I was young.

I was not the weapon they thought me.

I gripped Aunt Francis’s hand. I propelled myself headfirst down the entrance hall toward the open doors. A gentleman groaned against a wall, his calf bent at a sickening angle, his eyes wide with shock. I grabbed his elbow, but Aunt Francis wrenched my arm away and screamed in my ear.

I heard nothing above the titanic groan that rose and rose as the wallsfell. I spilled down the front steps, Aunt Francis’s hands at my back pushing me forward.

I felt it when her arms fell away, turned in time to see a splay of her limbs, a whip of her black hair as the rubble crashed atop her, and I screamed.

And then I was swallowed, too, buried in the marble and sandstone.

CHAPTER 14NINA

Sound was muted there, beneath the debris of the Artisan school.

A five-hundred-year-old institute, now imprisoning its students beneath its weight, crushing air from our lungs.

There were burdens upon my arm and leg, too. Timber. Stone. Things I could not hope to shift. My head was bent awkwardly so that I looked sideways, up the steps to a building that once housed me but was now a crumpled burning ruin.

I was trapped. In a moment of desperation, I put my mind to the ground beneath me and bid it to concave, but the rubble only sank and took me with it.

I do not know how long I lay there, in a bowl of the earth, blanketed in wreckage, but it was time enough to believe I would die. To consider who exactly had killed me.

Rebels. Crafters. The Miners Union. All one amorphous entity.

What could they accomplish against those of our ability?When I’d first heard the words, they had sounded like derision. Now they sounded like a terrible realization.

Whatcouldthey accomplish?

What damage could be rendered?

My ears were so clogged I did not hear the grating stone, but I felt thecrushing weights on my limbs lift free, followed by a sudden onslaught of pain. I cried out.

“Nina!” A voice graveled, choked by dust. “ThankGod. Thank God.”

Theo—his arms winding behind my shoulders and knees. He pulled me against his chest and I screamed. I pulled my damaged arm into the cradle of my body.

I was surprised to look up and see that the sky still existed, still bogged in fat gray clouds. Cries not my own rent the air; they intensified when I pulled my ear away from Theo’s shoulder.