Page 24

The dog led the way into town, his brown tail swinging side to side and nose to the ground. He turned every so often to spy Patrick, who paid him no mind. Patrick only watched the ground as he walked, kicking stones away from his boots, hands in pockets. He did not slow his pace for me.

For days after the bombing of the Artisan School, I’d been shell-shocked, my skeleton rattling inside me long after the fact. On occasion, my head still swam, my vision blurred unexpectedly.

I felt that way now, like I’d been thrown in opposite directions.

I wanted to hurl something vitriolic at him. Accuse him of killing my friends, my aunt. But in truth, there’d never been many friends, and my aunt wasn’t truly my aunt. So instead, I said, “You murdered children in that school, you know.”

He didn’t turn. “Did we? Or did our Right Honorable Lord ignore the dozens of messages we sent in warnin’, directin’ him to evacuate the city?”

“But he didn’t,” I said. “And you blew it up anyway.”

He spun on his heel. He didn’t seem as self-important as before, only intimidating. “All right, then we’re villains,” he said darkly, eyes piercing. “And we burned down your castle, if that’s what you need to believe. But if we’re villains, then Lord Tanner is the fuckin’ devil.”

I ignored the tremble in my core. I looked him up and down. “Patrick Colson,” I said in a voice I hoped was derisive. “Leader of the Miners Union.”

The House of Lords should have accounted for an angry boy who might one day stumble onto a crate of fake idium, might board a train back to the brink and divulge.

Might one day lead an army of revolutionaries.

Patrick clicked his tongue. “Son of the chairman.”

I peered at him, saw again that boyish glint beneath the veneer of a man. “Your father?”

His jaw ticked. “My father is—”

“Detained.” The pieces fell together. I saw the light in his eyes deaden and continued anyway.

“In a clink somewhere in the city, I’d imagine.

” The papers had been vague in their headlines.

They never published a single name. Not the leader’s, not the town whence he’d come. Perhaps the writers didn’t know.

Two years since his father’s arrest was made.

“John Colson,” Patrick said. I felt that overwhelming heaviness return. His voice was shadows. “When he returns, he’ll resume his seat, and my brothers and I will do as sons do.”

I scoffed. “What their fathers tell them?”

“What their fathers taught ’em,” he corrected. “If they were fortunate enough to be taught.”

We entered what I assumed was the main street, and I halted. Whatever quip I’d prepared abruptly fled.

From afar, Kenton Hill had seemed not so far removed from Scurry.

Hillier, smaller, but the same—lines of chimneys that coughed smoke and the rhythmic clinking of the mills; blackened roof tiles atop clay-brick town houses.

Row after row, curving to its middle like a snail shell.

A mining parish. A town in the brink, identical to the next.

And unrecognizable in its middle.

I turned in every direction, scanning the street from road to rooftop, from doorway to doorway as far as I could see, my mouth agape.

I’d drawn a picture as a child in a Scurry schoolroom—something of fantasy that didn’t exist outside my mind and I’d known so even then, at the age of six.

A crooked street with building facades decorated in an assortment of instruments.

Bells and horns and birdcages hanging from shingles.

Perhaps it hadn’t been my imagination at all.

Perhaps I’d glimpsed the future and seen Kenton Hill.

It was a normal main street of brick facades, except that it was not normal at all.

It was decorated and embellished. Mismatched and absurd.

The walls were crawling in bizarre networks of pipes.

The copper glinting beneath… lanterns? A thousand of them, hanging from lines that spanned the eaves along the street, as though someone had reached into the sky and pulled the galaxy closer.

Meanwhile, the light posts had no lanterns.

They were topped in large steel bowls. I couldn’t fathom their purpose.

Nor the purpose of the large basins that teetered on the edges of shingles, the grates lining either side of the street, the steel tracks that ran straight down its center.

Surely they weren’t for a train? The question was answered when a shrill whistle sounded and a machine the likes of which I’d never seen trundled up the lane.

It was a mutation of several recognizable things.

A steam train smokebox without its stack, six wheels that resembled that of a coach and a black carriage to match.

But the inside was elongated, hollow. It held only standing passengers, and all ten of them grasped belts that hung from the ceiling and leaned out the sides.

The locomotive moved along the steel tracks slowly, without pistons or steam.

There was no driver, just an incessant, low clanking that I realized came from cables above.

Isaiah ran along beside the vehicle, barking merrily.

The passengers onboard did not wait for the machine to stop before alighting; they jumped from the rear of the carriage when they pleased.

“It’s called a trolley,” Patrick said suddenly, and I jumped.

He stood a distance from me, looking where I looked.

I laughed despite myself. A few of its passengers tipped their caps to me, or perhaps to Patrick. “Where is it going?”

“Only from one end of town to the other. It will head back in a moment.”

“But…” I teemed with questions, none of them forming a sensible line.

Patrick looked about with indifference, as though we weren’t standing on a jerry-built jumble of thought. A patchwork paper town. “We’ve made some… modifications these past years.”

“How…” Again, words alluded me. I’d seen many towns in the past seven years, walked through their main streets, and most were littered by remnants of conflict—walls buckling, orphans sitting among the bricks, shop owners patching their windows and carrying on.

Business as usual. The stench of despondency thicker than smoke.

Those other towns were depictions of Scurry, or how I remembered it, untouched and unchanged. The Crafters worked and worked with the turning of the earth and transported their goods out of town. There was time for little else.

The only other places in the Trench that had made me marvel were the mountains, the ruins, the seaside, and of course, Belavere City, where the Artisans were the machines that turned the cogs.

Kenton Hill matched none of this.

“How?” I uttered. “How is this possible?”

Patrick walked ahead, his coat billowing out behind him. “It’s amazin’ how much time and resources can be made available when you no longer work for Belavere City.”

I followed hurriedly, trying to keep pace to hear him.

It had been a long time since the first strikes at the mines, at the mills, the factories, the docks, but some labor had resumed under the pressure of the Artisan government.

Only where there wasn’t a choice. Towns already impoverished could not afford to go without the capital’s support for long. “You held your strike?”

“We did,” Patrick said easily. “Been a long time since we turned over a single dime to Tanner. We’re completely independent.”

I skirted puddles at the last moment, sputtering, “But how? How have you—”

“Survived?” Patrick offered. “Without the House of Lords blowin’ us to pieces, you mean.”

I pressed my lips together. It was exactly what I meant.

He sniffed knowingly. “You won’t speak ill of ’em,” he noted. “Suppose I wouldn’t, either, if they’d fed me from their silver cutlery and dressed me in silk.”

I ignored the gibe. “How?”

“Oh, just some luck,” he said, drawing a pocket watch from his coat. He glanced at it and said no more.

A few residents still remained on the streets.

They seemed familiar with Patrick, nodding or making way for him as he passed.

Those who looked at me averted their eyes quickly.

I imagined I resembled a beggar of sorts, but I cared very little.

I had forgotten the dirty clothes sticking to my skin, the ache of my legs.

My neck craned as I tried to discern more of the buildings and their strange facades. “What do the pipes carry?”

“Gas,” he said. “Water.”

I shook my head in wonder. “Simple Crafters, you said.”

He only nodded.

“What of your police?” I asked, for every town had government-instated police. “Or the Scribblers?”

“We’re a small town, miss. We’ve only ever had the one Scribbler. A handful of police.”

“And you aren’t worried someone will recognize me? That they might turn me in to authorities? There’s a price on my head, Mr. Colson.”

“Patrick,” he corrected. “And no, I’m not worried.”

“No.” I grimaced. “Because you run this town.”

A huff of mirth escaped his lips. He clicked his tongue as he looked over at me with those unnaturally clear crystal-blue eyes. “No one runs us. You don’t listen much, do you?”

He crossed the street then, whistling to Isaiah.

He walked purposefully toward a tall, teetering building, its many windows alight.

The sign hanging above the door read COLSON & SONS .

Patrons spilled out onto the street, wobbling as they walked.

A cat slipped through the swinging door and disappeared inside.

Above, floors of windows wavered higher than the other town houses.

I panted as I reached Patrick’s side again. Lord, but my head pounded. “Surely you’re not an innkeeper as well as a gangster?”

He caught the door as it swung open once more, two women holding fast to each other stumbling out. He waited for them to pass, then said to me, “In you get.”