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Patrick stood and proffered a hand. “Walk with me.”

I was too thrown to do anything but take it. My ears rang. Blood pounded behind my eyes. I barely registered the ground beneath my feet or Isaiah brushing against my calf.

I stared at the man beside me, part of him now unfamiliar. He waited for me to speak.

“I don’t understand,” I uttered. It was muted and waterlogged, as though I was sinking.

“Yes, you do” was his reply. Somehow, we’d arrived back at the laneways and town houses. Streetlights blinked off his irises. “You’re too clever not to.”

As he said it, there it was, the pieces connecting before me.

I saw Patrick as he had been, thirteen years ago in that dusty courtyard.

Two vials in one hand, and two in the other.

I was gonna be on that train home, one way or another.

I heard it again now. It clanged off the brick walls of the town houses. It chased the run of a copper pipe.

We didn’t speak again until we stepped back inside Colson’s. Isaiah retreated immediately to his bed. Patrick led me through the dim, behind the bar. His hand on the kitchen door seemed enough to unlock it. I heard the mechanism click with no key in sight.

Inside, the lamps were all out. Patrick went round to each one and pulled their strange cords and in increments, the hotel kitchen came aglow. Bottles and bottles of bluff winked from their shelves.

I nodded, to myself or perhaps to the hundreds of doses.

I almost smiled. Almost. “An Alchemist,” I said.

“And an earth Charmer,” he said.

I did smile then, and it was weak and disingenuous, and matched by Patrick, whose shoulders dropped so heavily I thought he might fold in on himself.

“Didn’t think the idium had worked at all, at first. I swallowed it, and it filled me up with all this light.

But then there was nothin’. Seemed like I was unchanged.

Wasn’t until a few months later when my father took me to Dunnitch to meet with Union members.

They had these displays of split terranium ore, the veins of idium already siphoned, and I felt a… a—”

“A frequency,” I finished for him. “A hum.”

He nodded. “I nicked one of the deposits off its shelf. Almost got away with it.”

“But you were caught?” I asked.

“By my dad,” he said. “He realized what I was long before I had a clue.”

I stared around at all those shelves. “You made all this,” I said. If I wasn’t so wrung out, I might have marveled. “How did you learn?”

“Trial and error,” Patrick answered.

“And you make idium for yourself?”

He nodded. “There is very little terranium left to be found. Bluff is more important for now. The brink has always suffered a shortage of it.”

“And your father snuck into Belavere City, not in search of Lord Tanner, but in search of Domelius Becker.”

“With the intention of havin’ him killed,” Patrick added.

I closed my eyes. “Making his son the only person in the Trench who can siphon both idium and bluff.”

“Yes,” Patrick said, and I felt every ounce of weight in it. The multitude of that remit. I wondered how any father could rest it all on their son’s back. “Should’ve tossed that vial out the train window, shouldn’t I?”

I knew that feeling well. “It seems this war has been won for quite some time. Only Tanner doesn’t yet know it.”

“Nor will he ever accept it.”

“You can’t be sure of that, Patrick,” I said, stepping toward him. “Preserving Artisan mediums means everything to these people. Above all else, they’ll want to ensure the continuation of tradition, of art, regardless of who heads the House.”

“That’s what we thought, too,” Patrick said. He paused for a moment, his stare far-off and tormented. “Did you see what the Scribblers wrote in the newspapers, in the days after my father’s alleged failed attack?”

I nodded. “It said they charged the House with dynamite in their trousers. That they were captured before they reached the courtyard.”

“But my father didn’t leave Kenton Hill with any dynamite.

They weren’t lookin’ to blow anything up.

They were to steal in and out quietly, with the Alchemist in tow.

We were planning to kill Domelius Becker, send his branded arm back as a gift to the House, along with a message that I was now the last remaining Alchemist and a list of demands. ”

“But your father didn’t come back,” I said.

He shook his head. “Something went wrong. And then the headlines came, and I knew we’d fucked everything.

Domelius Becker was dead, they had our chairman hostage, and it seemed only a matter of time before the Lords’ Army came barrelin’ over those hills.

A man can only hold out so long beneath the whip.

But they didn’t come. And John Colson was never named in the newsprint.

Nor was I.” They sounded like thoughts that had cycled his mind many times over.

“So, we know my father never gave up his name, nor my abilities, nor Kenton Hill.” He swiped a hand over his face, rubbing his tired eyes.

“They believe Domelius Becker is alive, and it’s the only leverage we have left in this fight, because if they find me, then they have everythin’.

The union, the idium, Kenton Hill—all of it will be theirs.

” He closed his eyes for a moment. “At least Kenton Hill is safe for now.”

Not as safe as you think .

“So, I’m nailed to a corner, Scurry girl,” he said now. “While there’s still bluff floatin’ around the brink, Tanner knows an Alchemist exists, and he thinks it’s Domelius Becker. The second he starts thinking otherwise is the second I’ve lost that one advantage.”

“But if he knew what you were—”

“If he knew what I was, there is nothing he wouldn’t lay waste to in order to get to me,” Patrick said assuredly. “Every week, another town is sacked. You’ve seen it.”

I had. Fire Charmers smoking out buildings of occupants. Rivers contaminated and streams sullied in a perversion of water charming. Men, women, and children lined up on the streets and questioned.

“You’re one of seven people who know the truth,” Patrick said, moving off the counter he leaned on.

“The other six, I’ve had a lifetime with.

I know the insides of their heads better than my own.

I’d bet all the lives of Kenton that they’d never betray me, never breathe a word of it to another. And now I’m tellin’ you.”

I shook my head. “Why?”

“Because I believe you were tellin’ the truth when you said you want to be on this side,” Patrick said. “Am I wrong?”

My legs were beginning to shake again. “No.”

“But you love your mother,” he said. “Enough to sneak out while I slept. Enough to lie to me.”

I breathed once. Twice. Nodded.

He walked five paces, until he had my face in his grip again, staking me with the intensity of his stare. “You won’t ever do that again. Do you understand me?”

And for a moment, I considered revealing it all—the day I was captured in Delfield and dragged back to Belavere City. The ultimatum Tanner had imparted, why I had come here. I wanted to purge it all and be done with it.

“I won’t,” I said.

If there was nothing left with which I was willing to barter peace, the infantry would come. And Kenton Hill would go up in smoke.

I would tell him all of it and hope he loved me enough not to kill me.

There was only one thing that stopped me. I was not the only Artisan in Kenton Hill.

I would warn Polly. Give her the chance to run, if she chose. It might save her life.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

His grip loosened. He wiped the pad of his thumb over my bottom lip, as though he could erase its trembling.

“We’ll find a way to finish the tunnel,” he said. “I’ll get your mother out, I swear it.”

I closed my eyes and felt his fingers sliding into my hair. “And when I come home, I’ve got plans to marry you. Promise me you’ll be waitin’.”

Choked laughter escaped me. “What if I don’t accept your proposal?” I asked. But my voice was hollow, lined in fear.

“You will.” He seemed quite sure of it. “It’ll be far grander than this one.”

He seemed so filled with confidence—for a future still distorted, for his town, his plans. How I wished I could keep him blind to the missile headed for us.

He brushed my hair aside, pressed his mouth to mine. He kissed me so sweetly it was difficult to breathe.

I let myself drown in that moment, knowing it might be the last of its kind.

I pictured yellow hills and black-spotted yarrow and Patrick offering a life with him, and I pretended there was nothing else.

No idium, no lords, no Artisans or Crafters.

I imagined I’d said yes to him as a girl and sat beside him on that train home, the years between then and now made simple and kind.