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CHAPTER 27NINAEIGHT YEARS PREVIOUS

In the sleeping quarters of the National Artisan School, students were not permitted to enter one another’s dorms beyond the stroke of nine. So, naturally, the corridors were full of quick-moving shadows by a quarter past the hour.

At almost midnight, long after I’d fallen asleep at my desk, the door to my room inched open.

I startled at the sound, disoriented. My cheek ripped away from the porous page of a book.

“Did you doze off again?” Theo murmured, closing the door quietly behind him. He entered with an air of casualness. This meeting had long since become a habit of ours, though we’d made no plans to meet tonight.

I scrubbed a hand over my face, sleep clinging. The wax from the candle had dripped over its holder and into the saucer beneath, flame barely sputtering.

Theo seemed amused. “Should I go?”

“No,” I mumbled. “No. It’s all right.”

He walked to my chair and turned my face to one side. “You’ve gotPholinger’s Interpretation of Modern Aestheticson your cheek.”

“It wasn’t very enlightening.”

“I’d gathered,” Theo said, smirking. Whenever his lips quirked like that, charged particles raced through my core and ruptured like tiny supernovas.

Infatuation, Aunt Francis had called it.Not to be confused with love.

Theo took my hand, led me to my bed. Without a word exchanged we lay on our backs, my head cradled in the crook of his arm. We stared at the ceiling. I felt his lips descend into my hair.

I’d read poetry that had described romance as being a descent into madness. A kind of precursor to pain. That wasn’t how being with Theo felt. Being with Theo was levitation. I was weightless here, when usually I felt encumbered. It sometimes took great effort to drag myself from place to place.

Sometimes I thought of him as the water he charmed. I was buoyant with him. Helpless to the current. I went where he took me and rather liked the lack of responsibility.

Theo drew a box from his pocket and held it in the air above us. It was emerald green, made of leather. No bigger than the canyon of his palm.

“Had one of the fourth year Smiths make it,” he said, removing the box’s lid. “And a Cutter as well.” He pulled a green jewel from its depths. Swinging from it was a gleaming silver chain, thin as spun sugar. He lowered it gently onto the bridge of my nose, then left a kiss beneath my ear.

I grinned, pinched the necklace between my forefinger and thumb and inspected it closely. It was small and precisely cut and the color of poison. Pricks of some inscrutable emotion lanced my throat. I’d never owned something quite so beautiful. “What’s this for?”

“For you,” he said simply. “It’s been a year since we stepped out.”

A year and two days, actually. “I—I don’t have anything to give back to you,” I said feebly. So often, it seemed, I sounded less than I was.

Theo turned my chin to see the expression I tried to hide. Damn that grin. “Don’t fret, Clarke. I’ve got no need for presents.”

I relented, a wavering smile stretching across my face. “Thank you,” I told him. “I’ve never owned jewelry.”

“Never?” he frowned. “Did your parents never gift you any? An heirloom, even?”

My stomach tightened painfully. Close—so dangerously close to the lie. To the truth. “Everything was left behind when they passed,” I invented. I was rather proficient in storytelling, so said the scribbling teachers. “I was quite young. Not old enough for necklaces.”

I could see him taking those tidbits and adding them to some invisible inventory. I wondered what the collection would look like if it was laid out on the bed: dead Artisan mother and Crafter father, born in Sommerland—the source of my strangely blended accent. What killed them? Influenza, so common near the brink. Who raised me? Aunt Francis, a spinster. Now I was here. End of story.

At some point in our acquaintance, the scant offerings of my history had failed to satiate Theo. These days, he asked questions frequently. I suspected it was why Aunt Francis had not endorsed our relationship from the beginning.

“Do you miss them?” Theo asked me, tracing my bottom lip with his thumb. There I went again, floating up to the ceiling.

“Sometimes,” I said, though it was my own mother and father I thought of.

I closed my eyes, momentarily drugged by his soft caresses. Sometimes my body reacted to touch as though it’d been starved of it. I supposed it had been.

“What were they like?”