Page 51

We continued up the lane at a languid pace.

In the nimbus of lanterns, pairs sipped bottles and laughed.

Polly Prescott sat on the steps to the tea shop and pressed her shoulder to Otto’s.

I wondered if she felt freedom in sitting without her legs crossed at the ankles, without a kerchief beneath her arse or wires in her undergarments.

She tipped her head back and laughed at something Otto said.

I wondered if she thought of Belavere City at all.

“What about you?” I slipped my hand in the crook of Patrick’s arm, the fever of the night making me brave. “Did you ever play coppers and thieves?”

“Darlin’, I’m playing it every day.”

I sniffed a laugh. “I suppose you are.”

“Haven’t lost yet,” he said, kicking a stone from his course.

But along the way that game had become life, it seemed. He’d somehow grown into a man responsible for the running of an entire town, a political revolution. I wondered when the game had lost its fantasy. “Would you explain it all to me, if I asked you?”

“I can’t yet read your mind, Nina, much as I’d like to. Explain what?”

“How the Union formed,” I said. “How it all started.”

He hesitated, but only for a moment. There and then gone. “It started with me.”

This I knew already. He’d blown the whistle. “You told your father about the idium we found.”

“I did,” he said. “But even before that, my father was already having meetings in the pub every week, talkin’ about change.

Talkin’ about the police. We’ve only got three left now, but there used to be an entire outfit of coppers.

Bigger brutes I’ve never seen. They killed a miner in the street when I was a kid for spitting on an officer’s shoes.

Beat him with their batons until his skull caved in, right outside the pub.

People were angry after that, of course, but none more so than my father.

He wanted every one of them dead.” Patrick stared up at those plucked, strung-up stars.

His usual tiredness returned. “It was like he’d already determined what would happen.

Had everything mapped out, just needed a reason.

Something big enough to make even the most mild-natured man pick up a gun. ”

I stared, wide-eyed. “And then you got off the train.”

He nodded slowly. “And then I got off the fuckin’ train. My father had Kenton’s miners corralled around the jailhouse by the end of the week, and they set it ablaze. My mother hardly spoke to my dad again after that, because he made me and Gunner come along, and we saw it all.”

I could almost smell the burning ash on the air, hear the pounding fists on the inside of the glass as two boys in the street watched monsters take the shape of men.

Patrick looked over his shoulder. “Whatever is alive and well in those kids back there, I reckon it was snuffed out in Gunner and me that very night.”

We had walked beyond the streetlights and claimed the middle of the lane. There was absolutely no one to stop us. I had the strange urge to spread my arms and try to balance on the cobbles. Instead, I asked, “What happened next?”

“The coppers that remained were kept scared enough that they didn’t report what happened, and in return, they got to keep the pay the government continued to send to the dead ones.

My dad and the others built a tunnel to the nearest port, and they began making their deals, hoarding weapons.

He started traveling, using false names and talking in more pubs about the idium.

He said it was like a contagion spreading.

Hundreds quickly pledged to the Miners Union, which meant more tunnels, more guns.

They communicated through coded telegrams back then, sending messages underground—we couldn’t trust the Scribbler we had at the time.

The strikes were effective, and Dad said it wouldn’t be long till the whole government buckled.

Eventually, he started talking about blowing up the school.

” Here, Patrick paused, and his voice resembled fraying thread.

“And I begged him to target anything else.”

I swallowed shakily, the smell of sulfur and smoke collecting in my nose. “Why did he do it?” I managed.

He’d walked ahead of me, letting my arm fall. I suspected it was to offer me distance. But he had the decency to look me in the eye when he said, “Because that school was the epicenter of the Artisans’ universe, and we had a message to send.”

That was war, wasn’t it? Look at the buildings we can crumble. Look at how many we can kill.

I nodded weakly, a tear escaping over the curve of my cheekbone. “He was right,” I murmured. “It was the center of everything.”

He stepped toward me, then thought better of it. He buried his hands in his pockets. “My father was— is a good man. I might not be painting a pretty picture, but he’s not evil. He sent warnings. We thought the city would be evacuated.”

“The House of Lords didn’t take the idea of a rebellion so seriously back then,” I said, wiping my fingers beneath my eyes.

Patrick’s voice turned wry. “Or perhaps they knew we would attack, and they wanted the Nation to see what barbarians we are.”

And didn’t that sound right? All those caricatures in the newspapers of blood-smeared Crafters—men willing to bury an entire generation of Artisans under rubble.

I wished I could stem the tears. “How did he do it?” I asked. “How did he get into the school?”

But Patrick shook his head, and for a moment, I thought he swayed where he stood, or perhaps it was me.

“No, Nina,” he said. “Not him. Me.”

Of course.

“We dug a tunnel from the outskirts of the city to the center, all of us. Scottie, Briggs, Gunner, Donny, Otto. Two miles long, right underneath the building. But it was me who set the explosives and the wires. It was me who detonated it. My father was miles and miles away, celebrating in Colson’s. ”

I remembered the sensation of the floor rising and sinking, the walls and ceiling splitting, lights exploding. All those beautiful things, covered in plaster dust. I thought of Patrick, belowground, wiring the boxes that would pitch it all into a crater.

“I swear to you, Nina,” he said now, eyes hard. “We didn’t know you were all waiting above it. If I had…”

I exhaled, then eventually, finished the sentence for him. “If you had known, you would have pushed on the plunger anyway, because you believed it was right.”

His jaw rolled. “I like to believe I wouldn’t have. I need to believe that.”

I didn’t much care to pick apart whether he was lying. I was running through cracking halls, Aunt Francis pulling on my hand.

Then, back in Kenton Hill, Patrick’s arms went around me, and I was swallowed in warm darkness. I buried my face in it and waited for the shaking to stop.

“Just breathe,” he told me. “It’ll pass.”

Slowly, achingly so, it did. And he pressed his cheek to mine, as though he was trying to steal the tears slicking my skin. “I’m sorry, Scurry girl,” he said, and it felt years old, heavy with burden. His face came away as wet as mine, full of ghosts.

We walked the remaining journey without exchanging a word. Just my hand in his, all the way down Main Street and through the pub and up the stairwell. All the way to number fifteen.

And he bid me goodnight before I thought he would, and turned to retreat, and it was me who stopped him. I clasped his hand when he tried to reclaim it, and without saying a word I asked him if he would kiss me again.

He shook his head, slowly, painfully. “The night’s grown too sad for it, Nina.”

But there had been joy, too, hadn’t there? There’d been laughter and flushed cheeks and racing hearts. And he wanted to. It was written all over him.

“Men turn into boys when it comes to girls,” I reminded him, though I had no right. “Perhaps we can let it just be about that.”

He looked at me, tormented, a card house quickly folding. And I couldn’t say why I pushed him, or why I felt suddenly starved. In truth, I wasn’t thinking at all. I only felt, and whatever it was, I was sure he felt it, too.

So when he crowded me against the door I was already expecting it, and I hardly moved, hardly breathed.

His hands slipped over my waist and around my back, and his voice ghosted over my lips.

“I’ll wake up tomorrow, and you’ll have been somethin’ I imagined, I’m sure of it.

” And then his lips pressed to mine. Briefly, softly, and so heart-wrenchingly gentle.

And then they lifted, and I felt deserted.

“Sleep well,” he told me, hands disappearing from my body. “I’ll send Sam up.” He was descending the steps long before I could muster any sensical response.

I touched my fingers to my lips. Vaguely noticed that they trembled. Then, I smiled so widely that I thought they might crack.

It was a while before I moved, before my heart slowed and my muscles uncoiled. I turned to number fifteen and went inside, listening for the snick of the doorjamb as it shut, and still, all I could see was his face. I leaned my forehead against the wood.

“Enjoy your evening?” said a voice, and I jumped.

There was movement in the shadows. A figure sitting on the end of my bed. It lifted something to its mouth, and I heard the glug of liquid, the subsequent exhale.

“Theo?” I asked, stomach turning. “What are you doing in my room?”

“Waiting,” he said. Then he stood, and the light slinking in from the street threw him into relief. He saluted me with an amber bottle. “Having a drink.”

The words were elongated and slurred. A warning bolted across my skin. “I’m tired,” I told him carefully. “Perhaps we can talk in the morning.”

“What are you doing, Clarke?” he asked. “Pardon, that’s not your name, is it? Not anymore.”

I eyed the door handle. “Theo, you shouldn’t—”

“He’s a dangerous man.” He stalked forward, and in the dark, he seemed taller, more daunting. “You haven’t been here long enough to see that, but I have.”

“Theo. I don’t know what you’re talk—”

“I watched you,” he said, stepping closer, into another prism of light thrown through the window. “I watched you dance with him.” His face had changed. Liquor had dragged out the circles beneath his eyes and twisted his lips, turning him cruel. “I watched you kiss him.”

Fear slid down my throat and into my belly, dousing the fire and leaving only ice. I swallowed. “It isn’t what you think.”

“What do I think?”

“I knew Patrick before , Theo. Before all of this. When we were young.”

He nodded at the ceiling. “Ah. A romance rekindled, then.”

“No—”

“And what will happen to this… romance when he finds out why you’re really here, Nina?” he asked. “When Patrick finds out who sent you?”

My fingers clenched. “Theo, please… someone might hear—”

“Or worse,” Theo continued, “what will happen to you , when Tanner learns you’ve been seduced by the man you were sent to bury?”