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A Smith.”

“Why would you want to be a Smith and not a Mason? Or a Charmer?”

“One fuckin’ word, Nina Harrow,” Patrick said, arms stretched wide. “Gold.”

Nina flattened her lips in that way girls did when they thought you stupid. “I think you’ll find that diamond is more valuable than gold.”

“Is not.”

“Sure it is.”

“Oh yeah?” he remarked, flicking a pebble at her. She barely flinched. “How would you know, Scurry girl?”

“Because I read ,” she said simply, and she had him there. Patrick could barely read more than the newspaper headlines. The schoolroom bored him.

She was smart, that much was clear. Not smarter than Patrick, he was sure. But a different kind. A blistering kind. “What do you want to be, then, since you have all the answers?”

“Somethin’ that matters,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chest.

He raised one eyebrow. “You mean terranium?”

Her flat expression told him he was right.

She surprised him once more. It was true that many of their peers probably hoped to be a famed terranium Alchemist. After all, what could be more vital to the continent then the careful extraction of idium—a job only a medium of terranium could do.

And rumor had it the number of terranium Alchemists was dwindling quickly—few knew how many were left.

But still, Nina didn’t seem to Patrick like a person vying for fame or glory.

She seemed like a person who was running away.

“Hmm,” Patrick murmured. “I thought you might say a Scribbler.”

She gave him a look of disbelief. “The lowliest of Artisans?”

He shrugged. “Seems more excitin’ than drawin’ blood from a stone.

Scribblers travel all over.” It was true.

There was a Scribbler in every town and parish of the Trench, sending and receiving missives from the capital and collecting payment from anyone who could afford to send notes to a distant loved one.

Nina shook her head. “If I’m gonna be an Artisan, I don’t want to sit around all day sendin’ notes with my mind. I want to do something more important.”

“And you want terranium to be your medium?”

“I want anythin’ but pen and paper to be my medium.”

“And yet, you’ve got a bindin’ of parchment shoved down the waist of your trousers,” he grinned. “Saw it when you dropped your skirt.”

Her cheeks pinkened, a small victory. He chucked his chin at the place near her hip. “Can I see what you wrote?”

“No,” she said immediately. Patrick thought of animals with their legs caught in traps and decided it was best not to press her. He rolled his eyes and didn’t ask again.

Around them, conversations of similar nature were happening simultaneously. Boys and girls sitting or standing and waiting as the crowds thinned. Waiting for the name of their birthplace to be called through the crackling microphone. In the meantime, they debated the hierarchy of the Artisans.

Mediums known as the lesser arts: painting, drawing, writing, composing, were the pastimes of swanks. Most Artisans excelled at doing one or more of these. Some showed aptitude in all. And then there were the more highly ranked classifications…

A Scribbler’s medium was, quite simply, ink. They could make it appear from half a world away.

Cutters specialized in precious stones: diamond, quartz, amethyst, and the like. They were the pretty decorators, the designers of finer things. Cutters could mold gems into any shape a rich mistress pleased. Patrick thought them rather useless.

Smiths molded copper, iron, nickel, gold, and silver. Patrick admitted the intricacies of their work could be admired.

Masons were a higher order of Artisan. Wood and stone were vital resources in a world made from little else.

Alchemy was most important, of course. Only an Alchemist could crack open a lump of terranium. Without them, there was no idium. No siphoning ceremonies. No Artisans. There was only one other order that might match the class of an Alchemist.

“What if you were a Charmer?” Patrick asked her now, this girl who wasn’t going home.

Her answer was instant, as were all her answers, as though she’d already thought of every question the world might demand and banked her thoughts on the matter. “Earth,” she said.

“Why not fire or water?” Patrick liked quizzing her. Liked hearing the sureness in her voice.

“Not hard to guess why.”

“I suppose it’s the glory?” he guessed. “You’d be the only earth Charmer in a hundred years or more.”

She frowned, reproaching him. “More earth Charmers means fewer mine collapses,” she explained, rather like she were teaching a bug to count. “Imagine if each mine had a Charmer to keep the tunnels from folding in.”

He didn’t care to imagine it. To imagine it was to think of his dad and brother back in Kenton Hill, readying themselves for passage down the shaft. He didn’t want to think of tunnels that closed in like card houses.

Instead, Patrick peered at her, trying to pick off the peculiarities one by one.

There were scratches on her throat. Her fingers kept finding their way back there, worrying absently at nothing.

He’d never seen a person itch for something so much it found its way onto their skin. But Nina itched. Lord, did she.

She pointed to the spired roofs of the buildings over the courtyard ramparts and named each one of them as though they were well acquainted.

She crossed and uncrossed her legs in different directions, sometimes remembering to be proper, and sometimes reverting back to a kid from a town like Scurry who sat like sitting was meant for comfort.

She had blond curls spiraling in every direction, flushed skin, a thousand freckles, and widely spaced teeth.

She had dancing fingers and dark brows that rose and fell with each word.

Her hazel eyes seemed to see everything.

Nina pointed to the clock tower and told him it was crafted by a blind Artisan named Jeffrey Waltzer. This made him smile widely.

“Me brother Donny don’t see too well,” he told her. “Bet he’d like that story.”

“It chimes a different tone at every hour,” Nina continued, “so that one needn’t look to tell the time. They can hear it.”

“ Hear time,” Patrick scoffed. “Artisan bullshit.”

Nina sighed. Her shoulders fell dramatically, and Patrick suddenly became worried that she’d had enough of him. “It is clever, though,” he added hastily.

“Liar.”

He grinned. “I just don’t understand it, is all.”

“Don’t understand what?”

He fumbled for an answer that didn’t sound like an insult. “All that artsy stuff… hearin’ time and feelin’ colors and whatever else. Artisans talk like the wind blows just for them. But wind is just wind. There’s no meanin’ to it.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, not angry, but animated, sparkling eyes big as planets.

“There’s meanin’ in everythin’ if you look hard enough.

There’s joy in it, too. That’s the problem with Crafters,” she sniffed, drawing her knees up to her chest. “Too worn out to feel anythin’ other than angry. Do you know what my dad hates most?”

Patrick shrugged warily.

“Music,” she said. “Dancin’, too. Says it turns people into clowns. Imagine being so… so…”

“Constipated?”

She smiled reluctantly. “Miserable. Every one of them’s the same. Miserable and tired. Too uptight to dance.”

Her lips had thinned as she spoke, sourness curling them inward. Every one of them’s the same.

“Maybe in Scurry.” Patrick frowned. “But not everywhere. Not in Kenton Hill.”

Nina rolled her eyes.

“We dance.” A strange desire to impress her had come over him. “ I am an excellent dancer. Just ’cause we ain’t Artisan, don’t mean we’re no fun.”

She laughed once, then turned her head away, dismissive.

Lord, but she was annoying. Huffy. Edgy. He thought it was likely time she had someone show her up, take her off that high horse. For a Crafter’s daughter, she sure had the opinions of an Artisan.

Patrick stood abruptly, towering over her. When she looked back, confused, he flattened his expression into one of severe concentration.

Then Patrick danced. Nothing too ambitious, just a folk jig. His feet kicked up the dust and a group of nearby girls giggled and backed away. When Nina’s cheeks flamed, he spun on the spot, lifted his arms, jumped. He heard others clapping in time, hooting insults.

Then he was yanked back down to the dirt, Nina’s hand gripping his belt.

“Bloody hell ,” Nina cursed, only releasing Patrick once his arse had firmly hit the ground. She looked about her with rising embarrassment. “You got gas in your head?”

He sniggered. “Got music in me feet, Nina Harrow, or whatever Artisan bullshit you’d prefer.”

A smile broke free, then a burst of laughter. Then he was laughing, too.

Both of them falling about in fits.

He wanted to ask her a thousand other questions. He was acutely aware of the time ticking by, though he’d forgotten all about the train he was so desperate to return to.

“If you don’t get into the school,” he asked cautiously, “Where will you go?”

She shrugged like it didn’t much matter. “I’ll find a place.”

“In the city? You gonna work in a factory? That’s all the Crafters do here, you know. My dad says it’s worse than prison.”

“Won’t matter much when I become an Artisan, will it?” She stared pointedly back at him, daring him to contradict her, and he wanted to. If it wasn’t for the knowledge that she might stab him with that pin in her skirt, Patrick would’ve called her daft.

“What makes you so sure?” He was leaning closer, not wanting to miss the answer. He stared at her lips, just in case.

It took a moment. She rolled those lips around like she needed to chew the words first. She looked over Patrick’s head to the endless rows of red rooftops, and her hands danced in her lap.

Finally, she looked back at him, grinned, and said, “Just feel it. In here.” And she didn’t point to her head, where the Artisans believed creativity lived.

She pointed to her chest, and Patrick knew that if she could show him directly beneath the skin and sinew and bone, there would lie her beating heart.

He wanted quite desperately to know what it was back in Scurry that would make her so eager to live on unfamiliar streets. He wanted to know what made her itch.

Whatever drove her, it was sprinting through her mind as they sat there, a foot apart, in fancier clothes than they ought to be in. It ran wild in her blood, chasing her away. For one horrifying moment, her eyes went glassy and she gulped in a fragile way. Patrick had the urge to touch her cheek.

In the end, he didn’t.

“If the idium doesn’t work, you could come back to Kenton Hill with me instead,” Patrick heard himself say. Didn’t know why he’d said it, except that his chest was surging and Nina hadn’t blinked.

She didn’t answer. She only dried her eyes on her sleeve and looked to the woman waiting by the microphone. “How long do you think we’ll wait?”

“A while yet,” Patrick said, relieved. “They’re not past Dorser and Dunnitch.”

She deflated. Her stomach grumbled and Patrick’s responded in kind. Neither of them had eaten since their respective train rides, and the food carts on board had only offered bread with vinegar or biscuits that turned to dust in your hand.

Patrick chewed his lip and glanced around the courtyard.

At the side of the National Artisan House, servants used a side door to enter and exit with crate upon crate of goods.

A man with a bald head bellowed at the wagons that trundled to a stop before him.

Capped drivers with sweaty faces alighted from their seats and unloaded their wares.

Normally, Patrick wasn’t one for stealing.

His older brother Gunner had almost had his hand cut off over a ten-ounce bag of sugared orange—one of their more foolish conquests.

But when Patrick looked at Nina, saw the loosened bow in her hair, the scratches on her throat, the eyes that saw everything, he felt the feverish urge to do something foolish.

So he snatched up her hand. “Come on, Scurry girl.”