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Nina’s bottom lip shook.

We should leave , Patrick thought. Before they come back.

But his feet wouldn’t—or couldn’t—move. His head clawed at those crates on their shelves, scratched at the wood in need of answers.

“What does it mean?” Nina whispered over and over, like a fading prayer. The words belting around inside him.

I don’t know what it means.

He couldn’t leave. Not until he could make some meaning.

Patrick placed three crates on the ground and cursed them for rattling. He lifted their lids and cringed at the groan and squeak of the timber. He ran his thumb down the flint wheel of the lighter he’d stolen from his father and held the flame next to his knees.

Two crates of twenty-four vials, all corked, all missing wax seals.

One smaller crate—twelve vials only, all of them lightly coated in thin red wax, as though the administer did not much care if the glass was sealed or not.

Patrick reached for one vial and pulled the wax away easily.

Without its marker, he could not identify the difference between this vial and that of its counterpart. They both glistened with inky dilution.

“They’re marked,” Nina said, her breaths shallow. “They’re marked for Artisans. For the ones… the ones they’ve already picked out.”

Patrick found he could not answer while his blood was so laced with heat.

Pounding in his head was a growing litany.

A cumulative din of every vitriolic word he’d heard since he was small.

Every drunk and sober spray in the direction of the Artisan government.

A flood of it bloomed within him now. It set him on fire.

He was in danger of crushing the vial in his trembling hand.

But while Patrick burned, Nina seemed to extinguish. “I never had a chance, did I?” she asked him. Her voice was so very small. “I never had a chance.”

Nina’s eyes glistened. Her sideways bow slipped another inch.

Without deciding to do it, without really thinking on it at all, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled her to him.

And perhaps she found him dumb and foolish, but she buried her forehead into his chest just the same, gripping the back of his shirt with both hands.

He felt her warm breath permeate his shirt and shivered. He felt inexplicably reluctant to let her go. “We need to leave, Nina.”

“I know.”

“Now.”

“I know.”

But before they slipped back up the ladder and through the hatch, out into the hall, the lane, the courtyard, Patrick plucked four vials of idium from their resting places and shoved them deep into his pockets.

Two with wax seals, and two without.