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The Artisan Fellowship Ball was an annual event inviting future graduates to dine and dance in the splendor of the National Artisan House, where a stowed-away ballroom was dusted off and dipped in gold.

On the outskirts of the dancefloor, I felt Theo’s fingers slip out of mine. He held his hand out to a girl with an exuberant headdress, then left me in the corner alone.

I watched as he spun her among the sea of other couples, an inexplicable hollowness carved from my middle.

“Is that Theodore I see with Jane Winter?” said a voice from my side. Polly was resplendent in white silk, her dark hair coiffed high on her head.

“You don’t wish to dance?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Me neither. I’ve never felt more out of place.”

I bumped my shoulder against hers. “We’ve worked as hard as any of them, haven’t we?”

Polly grimaced. “Harder, probably.”

But I felt what she felt, the undeniable sense that we were imposters. The worm and the squid.

For a while, we simply watched the party pass us by.

To me, it looked like theater: costumes and gleaming teeth and false smiles.

Around the government ministers, all manner of near-graduates swarmed—Cutters and Scribblers and Masons and Smiths all vying to have their name remembered, collecting insurance they wouldn’t be sent somewhere unseemly beyond graduation.

As for me, I imagined a foothill hidden in the colossal shadow of a snowcapped mountain, an easel with fresh canvas, a board wet with paint, someone who loved me. It was, really, all I wanted.

Theo offered his hand to yet another of our classmates.

“What plans do you have after graduation?” I asked Polly.

She grimaced. “I’ve been posted in Hesson.”

A brink town. It seemed all the new Scribblers were sent to the ends of the Trench. Polly took a sip of champagne and said, “It seems foolish, doesn’t it? To send Artisans so far from the capital on the precipice of a war?”

It was uttered with such bluntness that my lungs stuttered. The party continued to ebb and surge before us in great mocking contrast. We weren’t to talk of such things—to spread panic. “The union members are being disbanded,” I argued quietly. “It was in the papers.”

“The papers lie all the time. Just last week, a train cart was blown to pieces on its way to the city.”

I swallowed, trying not to look too surprised, lest someone around us notice.

After a considerable silence, Polly said, “Do you ever imagine that perhaps the idium got it all wrong?”

A few nearby wallflowers were staring now, their ears pricked. Several paces away, Theodore’s father, Lord Shop, caught my eye.

He turned his cane in our direction.

“Shh,” I warned, snatching Polly’s hand. I ushered her sideways. “Outside. Come on.”

We wove through the throng and escaped through the open doors, our heads ducked and faces turned away.

Gardens stretched out before us, neatly hedged and haloed in golden light from hundreds of torches speared into the flower beds.

The music of the party settled into gentle waves, and Polly and I were alone, save the few couples stealing private moments behind peony bushes.

I pulled Polly into a dark corner, not too close to the exit. “They’re lying to us,” she continued, as though a wall inside her had been knocked down and she couldn’t stem the river. “I don’t think they have control over any of it.”

“I’m sure it’s—”

“War is coming , Nina. They know it, and they won’t tell anyone.” Polly was trembling. Her fingernails bit into my palms. “My father says that half the policemen have abandoned their posts already. Half! They’re all Craftsmen. How are we to win a war if our own army is made of the enemy?”

The word enemy struck me. Her parents were Crafters. She’d once belonged to the brink.

“They’ll think nothing of killing people like us, Nina. Nothing . They’re stronger than us. Crueler.”

I went quiet. There had been a boy in my Scurry schoolroom who’d routinely held me against a brick wall in the yard and forced black beetles past my lips. I still remembered the way they’d tasted. I wanted to argue with Polly but found I couldn’t.

Instead, I embraced her. “Even if what you believe comes to pass,” I said, “we’ll still have the greatest minds working to keep all of us safe.

” And as I said it, I realized it was true.

What would bullets and dynamite matter next to an army of thousands who could turn the land against them, crack the earth beneath their feet, and bury them whole?

“They’re lying to us, Nina,” she said into the tender flesh of my neck.

“Nina?” came a voice. “Polly?”

I felt her disentangle from me immediately. She wiped her eyes and smiled at the newcomer. “Theo.”

“Pardon the interruption,” he said, eyes darting between us.

I was quick to take his arm and guide him away from Polly before she could say something she regretted.

“Is she unwell?” he asked me, looking back at her.

“Just feeling sentimental,” I said. “Too much champagne.” I leaned my head against his shoulder to hide my face.

“What did the two of you talk about?” he asked, his suspicion plain. I wondered if Polly’s voice had traveled too far in the ballroom.

I considered lying, but panic climbed my throat, and there was no one I trusted more than him. So instead, I asked him the question on the tip of my tongue. The question we had, each one of us, wordlessly agreed not to utter. “Theo, what will you do if this war comes to pass?”

He rolled his eyes. It seemed so often recently that his eyes rolled when I spoke. “Don’t be dramatic. There’s nothing to fear.”

“You and I have everything to fear. Do you truly believe that we won’t be put on the front lines?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Nina, stop. Enough with this.”

My voice was small. “Enough with what?”

“With this… naivete ! We aren’t children anymore.”

I breathed, once. Twice. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Good God, Nina. It means we have responsibilities to uphold. Did you really think we could just hold hands forever and ignore what we are ?”

A knife incised my chest, twisting inward toward my heart. “Are you prepared to follow any order then?” I asked. “Whatever it might be?”

Theo shook his head at me, exasperated. “Nina,” he pleaded. “What other choice is there?”

There was another, looming there in the dark. “We could refuse,” I said. “You and I. We could refuse to be their weapons.”

I watched a shutter fall over his eyes. The knife sunk deeper. “What?”

“We could do it, Theo,” I said, taking him by the wrists. “We have minds of our own. Why should we let them take that from us?”

“Shh,” he hissed, looking over his shoulder, disentangling his wrists from me and raising his hands as though to fend off an animal. “Lower your voice. We’re surrounded by every lord of the nation.”

“Theo.” And now, it was me who pleaded. “Please. Think about it.” Beneath my collar was the emerald he’d gifted me a year previous, when the future had seemed very, very distant.

I reached to grip it through the fabric, a habit I’d developed.

“The only thing that I want… is you.” I was painfully aware of how pitiful I was.

His head dropped on a sigh. He shook it, and when it rose again, he looked tired. Sad. “Nina,” he said. “Once we’ve graduated, I’m leaving for Thornton. I—I’ll take my ordainment there.”

In plunged the knife, to the depths of my pulsing heart.

I tried to identify Theo in the person who stood before me and failed. He seemed a stranger. “What?” A gasp escaped, I was afraid my lungs were caving in. Theo looked away.

“When?” I managed.

“The day after the ceremony.”

“And you’ve already decided?”

“I have,” he said. His chin shook, but his eyes—they were steel. “I have to, Nina. I have to go.”

“For… for how long?”

“Two years.”

It seemed an uncrossable amount of time. “Does—did your father—?”

“My father suggested it, yes,” he answered. “If a revolution breaks, he thinks they would need a force there to man the docks. This is my duty, Nina.”

I reeled. “And what of us? Of me?”

Theo met my eyes, and for a second his facade broke. “Tanner wants you here.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

His chest rose, swelling with that final missile. I wondered how long he’d kept it loaded and aimed. “Nina, we’re only eighteen. I think it best we part ways.”

There was more. More about the nature of change, and how it creeps up on a person. He apologized and apologized until I was riddled with his reasons. I stared at the earth beneath his feet as he spoke and wondered why I could so easily move it, but I couldn’t move him .