Page 49

When Theo collected me at dusk, as he promised he would, he did not hold out his hand.

His eyes widened at the dress I wore. A dress that, I feared, had been purloined from some sorry wife’s wardrobe.

It hugged my waist in romantic red and lined my spine in buttons.

At first glance in the wardrobe mirror, I thought I looked striking.

On second glance, I was scandalized by the way my breasts threatened the sanctity of the bustline.

I had to wrap a shawl around my shoulders to look properly decent.

Theodore cleared his throat, keeping his eyes dutifully ahead.

We walked by Sam down the treacherous stairs, out through the pub, out to a blanket of stars close enough to touch. In dim light, the town’s lanterns looked like magic.

The trolley rattled past, brimming with passengers—a train’s carcass trundling down Main Street, following a gentle curve out of sight. Steam rose from the pavement, starlings swarmed above, and a chorus of pounding feet passed us by, everyone headed in the same direction.

Theodore drew a cigarette from his pocket and lit it, and I raised an eyebrow.

He shrugged in response. “At first, I couldn’t stand them. Now I can’t stop.”

I caught a laugh between my teeth before it could escape. “What would your mother say?”

“Wouldn’t say much of anything I’d imagine. She’s dead.”

My stomach lurched. I stopped in the street. “Theo, I’m… I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Clarke,” he said, flicking ash to the pavement. “Everyone’s lost someone, haven’t they?”

Yes, everyone had lost someone. “How did she—?”

“Influenza,” he said, and his hand surreptitiously slipped around mine, pulling me onward.

“Right after the laboratories in the South were raided. The reports said the Craftsmen had taken all the terranium meant for bluff. We couldn’t find any in a twenty-mile radius. The fever took her a week later.”

My conversation with Patrick came to mind immediately.

How did you get that terranium?

By doing bad things.

“I’m sorry, Theo,” I said. And I didn’t pull my hand away, not until we reached the marketplace. People thronged near the doors, and children, abandoning their parents for the evening, chased one another in circles.

“If you find yourself wanting to leave,” said Theo, “just say the word, and we’ll go back.”

“Why should I want to leave?”

He grimaced. “It can become… rowdy.”

I must have looked to him like I was still eighteen years old, a debutante. Not a girl from Scurry, or a woman seven years in the shadows.

“Do you remember the night of the Fellowship Ball?” I asked him, letting him guide me into the giant barn, cleared of its vendors’ tables and wares. The crowd was gathering before a low wooden stage in the back corner, and we followed suit.

Theo nodded, his neck now mottled red. “What of it?” he asked warily.

“You danced half the night with every girl we knew.” On the stage, Scottie set down a podium, and I kept my eyes on him instead of Theo. “As many as you could. And I stayed by the wall.”

Theo sighed, his eyes closing briefly. “Yes. I thought it might be better to try and… slowly separate myself, I suppose. I think I was trying to ease the blow. It was idiotic of me.” His regret sounded genuine.

I nodded. “It bothered me for a long time.”

Theodore shifted nervously, and I envisioned him again, walking past me in the halls and pretending the two of us had never been. Pretending he couldn’t see me breaking. Crumbling.

“You left me as well,” he muttered. Patrick climbed onto the stage. “Left me in the dust.”

“You left me behind well before,” I answered, and a millstone inside me disintegrated.

Patrick was doused in shadow, but I saw that he’d changed his clothes, bathed, perhaps even shaved. His hair remained as wavy as it had been when he was a boy. He was hundreds of heads and shoulders away, but I still saw those small pieces of him.

What seemed like the entire town chanted the Miners Union creed: From each what they can give, to each what they need. By dusk our work is done—at dawn we fight!

Scottie brought a small gramophone onto the stage, a long coil of wire, and what was possibly a reconstituted trumpet. Castoffs that did not belong together, but when Patrick raised the horn to his lips, the gramophone crackled, and his voice was magnified louder than ought to be possible.

I laughed in surprise.

“Good people of Kenton Hill,” he said, and the crowd cheered.

Every one of them settled, their faces turned to the stage and the man presiding it.

“Yesterday, our brothers in combat successfully raided the docks of Dorser and took two shipping containers of artillery out of the hands of the Lords’ Army. ”

An uproarious response. Women clapped, men raised their hats in the air.

“With control of the Dorser docks, and the ones in Morland and Baymouth, we will take over imports and exports, and that which has been withheld from us by our own government will be sought offshore instead!”

More cheers, louder now. It struck me that Patrick had an aptitude for this—a politician’s vigor, whether he would admit it or not. He was utterly compelling.

“Every success, every inch gained, has been gained with nothing more than the grit of laboring Craftsmen!”

“And what are we?” Theodore said quietly, beneath the applause. “Showpieces?”

“We will take back the land we have worked for generations. And God help those so unfortunate as to stand against us!”

Around me, people exploded in a frenzy, cheering, whistling, shouting slurs and curses and devotions simultaneously. Patrick returned his strange microphone to Scottie, pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and left the stage. He descended into a sea of back claps and vanished.

Music started, a man with a fiddle on a far wall played a quickening melody.

He was joined by another, a man with a harmonica, another with a cello.

A small grand piano with two wooden legs and two steel substitutes was unveiled beneath a dustsheet, and a woman took the stool before it.

The song shook the starlings from the rafters, and soon, pairs stumbled and laughed along to a country dance I’d not seen since childhood.

A small smile crept across my lips. I clapped along with the other spectators.

Theo left my side momentarily and returned seconds later with a tin cup of wine. “It’s bitter,” he said. “But not so bad once you get used to it.”

I downed the entire cup before the first song ended, the piano notes still warbling among applause.

Overhead, those endless twinkling manufactured lights hung.

Kenton Hill’s very own galaxy. A young woman was asked to dance by a timid young man.

Little girls twirled amid a group of cheering adults.

A harried contingent served spit pork and potatoes at the door, and the fiddler played notes at such dizzying speed I could hardly make sense of his fingers.

I had the sudden image of my old music composition class, where dozens of students hovered over the shoulder of a professor, trying to untangle the majesty of his quick play.

I felt, and not for the first time since arriving, that I was in someone else’s misshapen dream.

Without preamble, Theo turned to me. He hesitated before speaking. “I was an idiot back then,” he said, clearing his throat. “I should have danced with you all night.”

He likely didn’t remember that I had begged him for reprieve. I had never wanted to dance in that room, before all those watchful eyes.

“Let me make amends.” He held out his hand. “Please, Clarke.”

It seemed too joyous a moment to say no, and I thought it might be nice to dance with him again, the man I’d loved as an adolescent. He led me out into the fray.

The next dance was a folk number, and Theo turned me until my back met his chest and held my hands out wide in the starting position. Had it really been years since we’d practiced these steps in the Artisan dance hall, laughing and falling over each other’s feet?

We followed the flow of dancers in a circle.

Theo led me with expertise. Feet pounded the plywood and reverberated in my bones.

My borrowed red dress arced when I spun, and I didn’t try to stem the gaiety, the freedom of it.

My shawl slipped from my shoulders and puddled around my elbows.

As always, the tendrils around the frame of my face sprung free, and when I finally looked back at Theo, he was smiling at me—not, it seemed, at the simple happiness of barn dancing.

And it made me sad that I no longer saw him in the same way I used to.

The song ended abruptly, with both of Theo’s hands around my waist in a way our old instructor would have deemed improper. The crowd clapped politely. Theo’s chest pounded beneath my hand. His dark eyes hooded. He bore down on me.

“No—”

“Pardon, Teddy,” came a merciful voice, and I disengaged from Theo’s embrace while I still could.

Patrick stood close by with a strange expression; his jaw fastened, eyes flashing.

Theo’s smile fell. He looked between me and Patrick, and something fraught brewed in the space between the two men.

But Patrick spoke genially enough. “I’ll need to steal her for this one.” And he held his hand out to me.

If we’d still stood in the Artisan School, where Theo’s status had counted for something, he might have laughed in Patrick’s face and spun me away. Then again, he wouldn’t have been challenged in the first place.

But this was Kenton Hill. Theo’s expression darkened. “If Nina wishes.”

I swallowed.

Patrick’s gaze softened considerably when he looked at me, but his hand waited.

I thought I saw him grin when I placed my fingers in his palm. He nodded to Theo. “Enjoy your evenin’,” he said, and turned his back.