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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 got Pholinger’s Interpretation of Modern Aesthetics on 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?”

“My father was worn,” I said. “My mother was sad.”

His voice lowered to a whisper. The candle on the desk finally sputtered out. “Were they kind to you?” he asked tentatively, and the tenderness with which he said it did not make it feel like so big an invasion.

“Sometimes,” I murmured. “Sometimes they were too wrapped up in their troubles to remember me at all.”

He became so quiet that I opened my eyes, missing the sound of his voice. I couldn’t see him well in the dark, just the familiar outline of him. The movement of his eyelids. “But you were young,” he reminded me. “Very young when they died.”

I tried not to tense. “Yes. I was young.”

“And it must have been a difficult life for them. There aren’t many who would endorse a marriage between an Artisan and a Crafter.”

I said nothing. I didn’t need to widen the divide between him and me. Between myself and everyone.

“Sommerland just declared intentions for their first strike, actually,” Theo continued. His hand had stopped its hypnotic ministrations. “The sheep farmers and wool millers are all walking out at the blow of the whistle in two days. Bloody Miners Union.” I saw his head shake in the dark.

My lips pressed tightly together. “You think them fools.” It wasn’t a question.

“My father says you can’t strong-arm a governing house to increase wages by simply walking out.

After all, we have Tailors! We have Smiths and Masons.

If the Crafters won’t pick up their tools, the Artisans will use their mediums. The millers and farmers of Sommerland will soon see how irrelevant they are. ”

“Irrelevant,” I repeated. It rolled off my tongue like a tidal wave. “Do you believe Crafters irrelevant?”

“Of course not,” he laughed. “Nor does my father, or the House of Lords, by the way. I only mean to point out how easily the Crafters will be persuaded, by merely giving them the illusion that they can be easily replaced.”

“There’s only one Artisan for every ten Craftsmen,” I reminded him. “Surely, they won’t be so easily duped.”

“I think Tanner knows how persuasive hunger will be when the wages stop altogether. Sommerland has a lot of children who will go without food for as long as the strike holds.”

“And the House of Lords will be in their stately homes, with their cooks bringing five courses each evening.”

Tension coalesced in the air, as it tended to where Theo’s father was concerned.

Lord Shop was determined for Theo to follow in his political footsteps, and yet Theo often seemed to me as though he wanted to resist. He would never say so aloud.

It was only ever evident in the tightening of his lips, or the way his eyes hardened at his father’s mention.

And his father was mentioned quite a bit.

It was a large part of Theo’s popularity among our peers.

“Speaking of dinner, father asked if you would join us this weekend?”

I grimaced. I’d already declined the last two invitations. Recently, the lord had taken a keen interest in me. I wondered, and not for the first time, what Theo’s father would do if he knew where I truly came from.

“For what it’s worth, I would like to have you there this weekend at dinner. It’ll be much less insufferable with you in the room.”

I peered up at him, but it was too dark to see if he meant it. He pulled me tighter to his chest, and I was floating again, lighter than oxygen. His hands grazed the curve of my spine.

“Come with me,” he said, then pressed his mouth to mine.

We stayed that way for a while, his lips taking hostage of my cheeks and throat. Eventually my nightdress was swarmed above my hips and the ribbon at my bust had come undone, and I was pieces of airborne dust, not really of any substance at all.