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By the time Patrick climbed out of his pit high above, Kenton Hill was screaming.

People were scrambling up from below, running to the tunnels. He threw himself down the slope with sickening desperation, passing bawling children and people with babies in slings or on their backs.

The entire way, his heart remained in denial. It thumped a bid of No. It isn’t possible.

It wasn’t possible for the fire to come from within.

There was only one way in. It wasn’t possible.

Unless…

Theodore , his mind concluded. Who else but him? The rich Artisan boy in love with the girl who’d discarded him for a miner.

Patrick clambered over the pickets and wove through familiar alleys. He jumped into the first grate he saw and pulled out a rifle and a box of bullets. He cut his knees on the drain edge as he climbed out, then bolted through the hordes running in the opposite direction to escape the town limits.

It took only minutes to reach the havoc.

The closer he came to the heart of Kenton, the louder the destruction, the more cloying the smoke.

He shot three men in Artisan navy before they could turn to see him streaking past. He threw the full weight of his body into a soldier straddling a woman on the sidewalk, her sleeves ripped free of her shoulders.

He pressed his pistol into his gut and fired.

The town square was somewhere ahead, and it all seemed engulfed from the sight of its rooftops. Just one more alleyway before the fray.

And Patrick would blast every one of them away. He’d have them eat their own fire.

From the dim of a narrow alley, Patrick threw his back against the brick wall and loaded his rifle.

In the square, men lay on their faces. Their bodies, clad in navy or otherwise, were strewn everywhere.

A circle of armed infantrymen stood in the center of the skirmish.

They guarded three figures in long coats, fire in their palms. The Charmers sent streams of it into the town beyond.

Shirts caught fire and men ran, shrieking, only to fall on the bayonets of waiting Artisan soldiers.

Grenades detonated and sent both sides hurtling into the night, their stomachs and limbs and scalps torn from the rest of them.

The Crafters of Kenton Hill were holding the Lords’ infantry in the square, keeping the fire Charmers from spreading their flames to the rest of the town, but they held them at bay by inches.

More soldiers flooded from Margarite’s doors, a seemingly endless reserve, and the Crafters were pushed back, allowing the fire Charmers and their ring of guards to expand outward.

Within moments, they broke through, and jets of fire plumed into the air, alighting the shingles and gutters of every roof they touched. Soon, all of Kenton would be ablaze.

Where was Nina?

Was she safe?

What of his mother? Of Donny and Gunner?

The sound of pounding feet came from behind Patrick, and he turned and raised his rifle, hammer cocked, finger prepped.

“Wait!” said the voice, his face emerging from the shadow.

Theodore Shop stared at Patrick, his eyes wider than they’d ever been, his mouth slackened in shock.

He bore no weapon, just the same dirt-clad clothing he’d worn in the tunnels, his skin gritty with it. “I’m not with them,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “Pat—”

Patrick had the barrel at his forehead within a second, his forearm pinning Theodore to the wall at the throat.

“PATRICK! Wait! I only came back for Nina, I swear. I was worried you might have… that you might have hurt her. Sending you that note was stupid. I was angry—”

Patrick barely saw him through the film of red hazing his vision.

“Think about it, Patrick! Please! Why else would I return? Why would I risk it?”

Somewhere in the red mist, Patrick heard the sense.

“It wasn’t me who let them in, Patrick! It couldn’t have been. Not unless I had a Scribbler.”

Or unless he was a Scribbler.

Which Theodore wasn’t.

But Polly was.

“They’re dying, Pat!”

He knew. He knew.

“The fire Charmers… if they get to the Coal Works, the entire place will blow. Do you hear me? All of Kenton will be gone.”

Patrick’s stomach bottomed. His arm against Theodore’s throat loosened.

“I can help,” Theodore said. “I can help you put them down.”

Patrick’s eyes flickered to Theodore’s hands, then to the fire in his periphery.

“They’ll have the Charmers surrounded by soldiers, Patrick. You can’t take them on without me.”

There was little time for deliberation, and Patrick well knew it.

With an agonized growl, he released Theodore, only to take the scruff of the man’s collar in his grasp.

“Put them out,” he bid Theodore, would have got down on his knees and begged him.

“Put out the Charmers, and I won’t shoot you right here. ”

Theodore nodded vigorously. “You can use the canals,” Patrick told him. “Draw from whatever you can.”

“Just point your gun at something navy,” Theodore told him. “I know what to do.”

Another figure moved into the alley. Patrick lifted his gun.

“Patty?” came Donny’s voice. “I can help.”

Patrick cursed. “No, Don. Not this time.”

“I’m a much better shot,” Donny said. “Hurry up. We ain’t got time for chitchat.”

Patrick looked out onto the square, at all his men, and with a deep ache, he turned his back on them. “We’ll cut off the fire Charmers at the pass,” he told Theodore. “Stay close. Some of the infantry found their way out of the square.”

Patrick led them away, back into the maze of town houses.

He cut over a canal, then another. Under a bridge and through the dusty courtyard of his old schoolteacher.

This is how he’d once passed through Kenton Hill—on tumbling legs with a chest filled with fire, cutting corners and jumping pickets quicker than his feet could muster.

Donny hardly slowed them. Patrick called warnings to him, but Donny had better ears than a hunting dog, and he’d run through these streets just as often as Patrick.

They only encountered two soldiers. They were sacking the narrow boats docked in the canals.

“Wait!” Theodore whispered, fear on his breath.

But there was no time to wait. No time to mute their approach.

Patrick kept on running. The first one to turn in Patrick’s direction found a bullet between his eyes.

“Dead ahead,” Patrick called, and the next got two of Donny’s in the chest. They toppled into the water.

Patrick ignored the fear that he’d be shot at any moment, that he’d topple just the same. “Hurry up!” he shouted to Theodore, whose breathing had grown ragged. Patrick thought he heard the man praying between inhales.

The Coal Works was ahead. In the distance, fire danced across tiles and disappeared down chimney flumes, trickling ever closer. Patrick broke into a sprint. Past the brewery, the metal scrap. Over the last canal crossing.

And there, at the end of the lane, came a flurry of movement, fire dancing in their midst. It leapt from roof to roof. The outlines of cloaked figures and armed soldiers became visible.

But the fire jumped ahead of them, bid by something faster than its own nature.

Patrick pictured those great copper drums waiting within the Coal Works. All that gas in the bellies of a hundred boilers. How big would the blast’s radius be if it were all to combust?

Patrick became seized by something far greater than bravery, or any sense of responsibility.

He was gripped by fear. By the thought of losing his home completely. Every scrap of it blasted into oblivion.

“STOP!” he shouted madly, foolishly. They were three men on a road facing a group of twenty, thirty, and Patrick forgot himself, raised his gun.

Patrick heard the clack of many rifles lifted onto shoulders. Heard the blast of a barrel before he felt the bullet.

Pain shattered his left shoulder as he was thrown backward. The back of his head hit the cobbles, gun clattering beside him. Donny was suddenly over him, eyes ahead. His gun raised to defend them both.

But Theodore advanced. “Wait!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot! I’m not Union!”

Patrick blinked up at him, tried to see and hear around the bursts of agony pulsing along his collarbone. He could see the underside of Theo’s face, see the terror in his eyes.

“I’m an Artisan!” Theodore was saying now, shouting it. His hands were raised in surrender, the mark of Idia on his arm visible. “I’m an Artisan!”

“Theodore?” came a distant reply, a woman’s voice. “Theodore Shop?”

Patrick rolled onto his side, a hiss of pain escaping him at the pull from his shoulder, but he squinted his eyes to see the brigade of fire Charmers and soldiers approaching them. Now a mere twenty feet away. At its head was a woman with tawny hair. “Is that you?”

“Tell me when to shoot, Pat,” Donny murmured.

Another Charmer scoffed. This one was young, reedy. He cocked his chin with an air of importance. “Lord Shop’s boy?” he said. “The disgraced son? Spare me.”

“No, it’s him, I’m quite sure,” said the woman. “A water Charmer.”

Theodore’s eyes bounced between them, between all those guns. “I can prove it.”

“And what would a water Charmer be doing all the way out here?” said the third fire Charmer, an older man. “Defected, have you?”

“No,” said the woman. “Tanner sent him.”

Something in Patrick fractured.

“An informant?” asked the young fire Charmer.

“One of them,” said the woman, and that hole in Patrick ripped deeper. “Where is the earth Charmer, Mr. Shop? I was told explicitly to find her. That she would be here alongside you on this assignment.”

Patrick turned his head in time to see Theodore’s face. He waited for a frown, some display of confusion.

But Theodore nodded. His eyes flickered to Patrick for only a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Though the earth Charmer is long gone. You won’t find her.”

Patrick didn’t comprehend it. Refused to.

And yet there was that yawning abyss inside him, threatening to swallow him whole.