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“In exchange for coal,” he said, “and safe passage.” The words crept over my shoulder, slipped beneath my collar.

“Safe passage to where?” I asked, stopping halfway down the alley. I turned and looked at him.

He was staring ahead at the busy street where people hurried on foot and horse and newer modes of transport back and forth in an endless parade. One seemed to be operating a one-wheeled apparatus with his feet alone. Patrick turned wary, forehead creased. “To wherever the tunnels can take them,” he said. “Any town in the northwest, really, so long as it’s this side of the Gyser River.”

“That’s how you manage it?” I asked. “All of it? The weapons, the communications. It’s all underground.”

He tsked, and his jaw flexed distractingly. It drew my eyes downward. “I thought you’d have figured that much out by now.”

I thought of the miles upon miles of tunnels that would need to exist between towns, the impossibility of such a complex network, all buried beneath Lord Tanner’s feet.

“The tunnels have saved people,” he said, taking a small step back, reestablishing the distance. “Entire villages. When the Lords’ Army comes in, the rebel towns have a way out. They can escape or hide until the gunfire stops. Have you ever seen a town razed, Nina? Have you seen what their police do to them?”

I had. I’d watched it unfold around me, just barely avoiding the raining missiles and exploding cement. Girls carried away by their ankles, boys shouting over the punctured chests of fathers. Lines of rebels with their knees sinking in mud, gun barrels to their heads. Screams bursting the walls of your middle ear.

Patrick nodded. “So you’ve seen,” he said. “And it’s why you couldn’t take their side.”

I didn’t like the way he said it; like he knew me. Like he’d already unraveled all my secrets, there for the taking. “You haven’t mentioned why I can’t takeyourside,” I told him, stepping intentionally across the boundary he’d created. I wanted his insides to flinch in my presence as mine did in his, and I got my wish. His nostrils flared; a fire lit behind his eyes. He suddenly looked starved.

“You speak like your union hasn’t done anything as terrible,” I said cuttingly. It was true that I’d seen towns wiped from the Trench by the Lords’ infantrymen. I’d seen all the blood and the bullets spraying. But there was a time before all this, when the cords of my soul hadn’t yet been severed, when I didn’t know what death looked like, and the first to show me was the Miners Union on the day of the first attack. “If you have any misconceptions that I sympathize with you, I should dispel them. I’ve seen both sides of this fight. You both bleed the same. Both scream the same. Both leave women without husbands and children without parents. You’re two sides to the same coin.”

Patrick looked at my finger now prodding his chest, pushing the first button of his waistcoat against the bone of his sternum. When he looked back up at me, his eyes had softened somewhat, the fire tempered. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

I wanted to punch him. He held up his hands to placate me, clearly reading the violence in my expression.

“I only meant that I don’t believe you’re without sympathy. You likely have too much of it. I can see it in your fists,” he looked down to where I’d bunched them. “In your throat,” he said, and I couldn’t help but swallow as his eyes touched it. I was burning, burning. “You’re a miner’s daughter,” he reminded me. “Ain’t never met one not filled with all the soot their daddies brought home with them.”

Suddenly I was a child again, and my father sat staring at the stove with a slack jaw and wet eyelashes.

Patrick nodded knowingly. “I bet you remember what it was like when he came home—filthy, the soles of his shoes separating from the damp. And you’d listen to him cough and wonder if he’d drown in it this time. And then he’d start swallowing anything wet. He’d sink himself in booze and bad bluff, and you’d be happy for him to do it, because it quieted the rattling in his chest, didn’t it? It made it so he’d sleep, eh?”

Twelve years of evenings just like it. Each night the same as the last. My father growing steadily thinner and less present. I pressed my lips together to stop their shaking.

“You know exactly why we started this fight,” Patrick said now. “You’re just too scared to join it.”

I swung at him, throwing my fist around in a wide, wild arc. Instead of hearing it connect with his jaw, I found myself wrapped up, my back to his front, his hands clamping over my wrists, his lips by my ear.

And every muscle of his chest and stomach pressed against me. We were both burning, our skin flaming beneath the fabric.

“Get off me!” I heaved. “Crafter scum.”

“Crafter scum, eh?” He snickered, though there was anger there, too. It broiled between us, mixed with a hundred other things too tangled to examine. I struggled to escape his hold.

“Easy,” he said, as though I were a skittish horse. “God, woman. Did your daddy never teach you to punch a man?”

I wanted to tear his eyes out. “Let go of me, Patrick.Now.”

“I intend to, Scurry girl,” he said. “And we’ll speak of other things if your sensibilities can take no more, but know this—” And here he pulled me closer, so that I could feel all the hot points of his thighs and hips and the solid wall of his chest. “I’m making it my mission to change your mind about us Crafter scum, and about the union as well. Because I know you, Nina Harrow,” he said. “Better than you think I do. And I know you’ll pick the side worth fightin’ for.”

Slowly, my muscles slackened.

He let me go then, gently loosening the cuffs of his fingers and letting me slide my wrists free.

But his hands lingered near my waist a moment longer, and I felt the current of his pounding blood through my clothes. And for a fleeting moment, I imagined his hands sliding beneath them, running up my sides, around to my stomach. My breath sounded like a gasp. “I thought I’d already picked a side,” I said. My voice was someone else’s.

There was a moment of hesitance, and then his hands abruptly fell away. A careful distance resumed. “Perhaps out of necessity.” It sounded strained. Guttural. “But soon, you’ll be enlisting for the cause. I’ll make sure of it.”

As soon as our feet found the cobbles, I felt Patrick’s hand at my forearm. Without breaking stride he fitted my arm into the crook of his. “Don’t get ideas,” he said quietly, watching the people that passed, people who looked at him and tipped their caps. “If you walk these streets, you walk them on my arm.” Isaiah trotted along beside Patrick, one eye on his owner. Everyone watched him, it seemed.