Page 32

We walked slowly back alongside the canal, keeping a careful distance between us. The men fishing at its edge barely paid us any mind as we passed them.

“Is there no river for them to fish in?” I asked Patrick. Ahead, the tall brick walls came closer, riddled in lichen and soot, slowly blacking out the sky.

Patrick shook his head. “No water outside the canals,” he said. “We’re too far from the mountains, and too high. If I was a godly man, I’d say Idia chose this place to build her canals because we needed them most.”

I peered at him. “You don’t believe there’s a God?”

Patrick chuckled, low and bitter. “Oh, I believe there’s a God,” he said. “But I’d spit in his hand before I shook it.”

I got the sense that I should ask no more questions about that, though I desperately wanted to. I thought of what I’d seen in all those towns and wanted to tell him that I felt the same.

“I’ve never seen a canal so clean,” I said instead. “How did you manage it?”

“We have experts.”

“Experts in drawing pollution from the water?”

“Something like that.”

“And if there’s no other water, then why choke it off?” I wondered. “Your farms must be suffering.”

“We don’t have farms, Nina. The land here’s no good for farming. No good for much but coal.”

I looked at him incredulously. “But how are you feeding all these people, if you’ve blocked all method of import?”

“Now, I never said there were no imports, did I?”

Oh, of course , I thought. The tunnels.

He grinned. “Always hungerin’ for all the things you don’t know.” He shook his head. “Have you forgotten all those union members outside this town? We ain’t the only ones fighting the fight. There are plenty who are willing to trade.”

We reached a skinny path between the canal and the brick facade, and he gestured for me to go ahead of him. His breath whispered against my neck from behind, and I shivered. “So you make your deals with them, and they pass along their goods?”

“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 take your side,” 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.

“Why?” I asked. I didn’t like the way my skin pricked at his touch. I imagined sinking into the folds of his coat. Being swallowed by his shadow. It was both unnerving and… tantalizing.

No, not tantalizing. Just unnerving.

“Because you’re quite recognizable, Nina. And there are a few around here that don’t take too kindly to Artisans.”

An image of those wanted posters floated to mind, and I shuddered. “You receive the bulletins here?”

“Of course,” Patrick said. “Our Scribbler gets the same bulletins as any other province.”

My head turned sharply. “Aren’t you worried they’ll alert the House of—?”

“There’s only one,” Patrick interjected. “And she’s loyal to us.”

A noise of exasperation escaped me. My eyes began darting to the streetlamps and shopwindows, expecting to find my own face staring back at me.

“I don’t allow Artisan propaganda to make its way onto the street,” he reassured, watching my face closely. “You needn’t worry.”

“But if—”