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REBELS RUMORED TO HAVE CAPTURED THE LAST ALCHEMIST

Following an attempt to seize the National Artisan House last week, a group of Crafter rebels have been taken into custody, including a man rumored to be the leader of the Miners Union, sparking citizens to wonder if this could be the end of the conflict. The Right Honorable Lord himself reassured the press that the incident had been contained, and the terrorists apprehended. And yet, other whispers suggest that perhaps the rebels’ ploy had not been entirely fruitless.

Despite the placation of Lord Tanner, sources close to the House report that the last living Alchemist, Domelius Becker, is now missing, and rumored to be in the possession of the union.

While the nation awaits good news from the House that the union leader has, indeed, been arrested, Belavere suffers resounding silence. It seems that still, five years into this enduring conflict, the House of Lords has no names and no pins on the map. The Miners Union remains as mysterious as it has always been, and the Lords’ Army fight a masked adversary.

This reporter can only assume the silence purports an adversary still very much at large. And if the rumors of the missing Alchemist are true,then surely the House of Lords ought to proclaim this day the darkest in Belavere history.

I discarded the newspaper with the others. This issue was two years old, and the street was littered with copies of it. The print factory I walked by had timber nailed over its windows. I imagined this had beenThe Trench Tribune’s last before the factory was choked off by strikes, and still the headline lingered, crawling up my spine.

I shivered. I thought of those shadows the Lords’ Army was fighting, scratching for a center they couldn’t find. In my opinion, it was not so difficult to remain elusive in a country split apart. After all, I’d managed it for seven years.

It was easy to take up a different name while so many died and left theirs behind. Simple enough to burn away the brand on my arm until it was just an old wound. There were a thousand different towns to lose yourself in, to move on to when the fighting started, and it always did.

Hiding, I’d learned, was simple. Gunfire made for good distraction. Running on foot was far from out of place. Stealing was expected. Desperation was normal. Women were often alone. On the outside, I certainly didn’t look like the world’s only earth Charmer. I looked like the thousands of other women fleeing a conflict in which we were collateral.

At first, I’d run to Aunt Francis’s home. My toes were bloody before I’d arrived. I’d waited there for a short while, hoping Aunt Francis would walk through the door and tell me what to do, pluck a new identity from the air as she had when I was a girl then send me to bed.

Before anyone could come to look for me, I’d slipped my broken arm into one of Aunt Francis’s cloaks, slipped out the back door, and fled.

I wouldn’t belong to the House, couldn’t belong to the Union. Nothing to do but hide in the middle.

I’d tried for Sommerland first, boarding a train that was derailed by dynamite halfway along. The second explosion in the span of two days. I believed then that the world was on fire.

I soon discovered that there were worse things than bombs and guns.

Sommerland was filled with police. So were Baymouth and Trent and Lavnonshire. Infantries of Craftsmen sworn to obey the command of the National Artisan House, with steep rewards for loyalty and even steeper punishments if they fled. They turned their eyes on me when I walked by, scanning my features and wondering if I was her: the missing Nina Clarke. I imagined whoever found me alive would be showered in riches and promotion.

It did not take long for sketches to appear on shopwindows:WANTED, they said,BY ORDER OF THE NATIONAL ARTISAN HOUSE. The likeness was, unfortunately, precise. I wondered which Scribbler had drawn it. Perhaps one of my own classmates.

I wasn’t the only face plastered on windows across the country. There were other Artisans who had abandoned their posts when the revolution began, refusing to side with either party, or else sympathizing with the Crafters in their war against the capital.Deserters, the National House declared them.Terrorists.

The lampposts and bulletin boards became so saturated in wanted posters that people walked right by and paid them little mind. My face was lost in the slew.

I worked as a Crafter when I could. I sewed uniforms in a Dorser factory for the Artisan command, sorted parcels in Dunnitch before the factory walkout, painted china in a small shop in Hesson. When waves of Artisan infantrymen rolled in off their trains, I disappeared. By the time a finger pointed in my direction, I was already gone. I became proficient in watching, in listening, in spotting a glint of recognition in one’s eye. I did not stay long enough for whispers to catch me.

And yet, catch me they did.

It must have been near my birthday. This was what distracted me as I walked down a dark street in Gilmore, a large industrial wasteland of a town just outside Belavere City, now mostly abandoned.

I grimaced at the muck wetting my shoes with each step and imaginedcharming it away. But it had been years since my last dose of idium. Years since I’d melted away the brand needed to enter a dispensary. And now I couldn’t charm a speck of it. Before I graduated, I’d been proficient, even talented. I’d easily dammed rivers, dug trenches a mile long within moments. Now I shook mud off the bottom of my shoes.

I pulled my coat around me. I did not know the precise date, but I thought it must be September. The air was growing colder. In the days to come or perhaps in the days already past, I would be twenty-five.

I felt both older and younger.

Too young to have seen so many terrible and grand things—tree branches artfully bent to shelter a courtyard; a horseless carriage trundling down the lane; a cannery on fire with its workers trapped inside; a flying sparrow made of glass; a man with a grenade, its pin pulled; a woman dragging her screaming children onto a boat; centuries-old architecture; a thousand soulless, sunken faces, queueing to board a train.

But I felt old, too. Much older than I ought to. I was tired. So tired that I stopped in the middle of the street beneath a flickering lamp and I found myself praying to God that I would not meet the age of twenty-six.

And then, as though my prayer were answered, the night disappeared.

Something was thrust over my head. Arms constricted around my stomach. My feet left the ground, and instinctually, I kicked and thrashed.

A sharp crack, and then sickening, liquid pain seeped through my head. I thought it a kind mercy for one such as me, too much of a coward to do anything but hide and pray.

Seven years I’d eluded them all. Now one side or the other had me.