Chapter Eighteen Nina #3
My mother’s face swam in and out of my vision.
I looked back at Theo. “It’s real?”
He sighed. Nodded.
“It’s written in Verian Script,” Patrick added, and my gaze swerved to his. He was watching me carefully now, blue eyes sparking. “That’s why we’re here. There’s some Scribbler who works in the archives who can translate. A descendant of the Stewards, or so says Shop.”
I closed my eyes briefly, the first tremors of a headache beating about my skull. “You’re going to look for the Seam.”
Of course they were.
“If we don’t,” Patrick said slowly, “then they will, Nina. Only they don’t have a way to find it. They don’t have the book.”
“It’d mean the end of the war,” John inserted, spinning the little book in his palm like the needle of a compass. “With a Charmer to dig up the terranium and an Alchemist to siphon it?” he whistled. “The swanks might as well kneel now.”
So this was why Patrick had yet to turn me away.
“Is that what you want?” I asked Patrick, ignoring his father. “The entire nation on its knees? Do you want to lead all of Belavere Trench?”
Patrick’s eyes iced over. It sent a shiver down my spine. “I want to drag the ministers from their nice beds, their nice houses, and have them watch as I burn it all to the ground.”
I saw then what he saw: Lord Shop and his fucking cane, the ministers lining the courtyard to watch my mother swing from the noose. The tidy streets of Belavere City, every brick mined by Crafters. Kenton Hill ablaze, Gunner bleeding. Tanner in a drawing room, proclaiming me his weapon, his knife.
A deep cold slithered through me. “Is this why you saved me?” I asked him. “Because you needed someone to dig up your seam?”
I already knew it was. I hated the way my voice shook.
Patrick didn’t answer. I looked away.
“It’s just business between us now, then?”
He sighed, flicked ash onto Tamir’s carpet. “Yes.”
I nodded, trying desperately to hold on to whatever pieces in my chest remained intact. It was no more than I’d expected, but twice as painful.
“You don’t have to say yes to this,” Patrick said slowly, as though it were only us two now. He stepped away from the window toward me but halted in his tracks. Lord, his face was handsome—salt in the wound. “You’ve got choices. If you don’t want a part in it, you can leave.”
“Leave?” John stood abruptly from the bed. “Wait a minute, miss. ’Fraid we can’t let you do tha—”
“She’ll go where she pleases,” Patrick said with a threatening finality. “And you’ll not be doin’ a fuckin’ thing to stop her.”
Something passed between the two men. “Tell me, Patty,” John said, his voice turning low, dangerous. “Who’s the chairman of the Union now? Did you usurp me in my absence, son?”
Patrick’s expression flattened, and I thought of all the times he’d refused the title of chairman, as though he’d been forced to the summit of his father’s venture and found he disliked the height.
He’d been willing to do many things, hadn’t he? To get his father back.
“You’ve been gone too long, Dad,” Patrick said. “Too fuckin’ long. And now things have changed.”
I swallowed.
John inhaled and jutted his jaw as Gunner had. “We need her, son.”
“Only if she wants to help,” Patrick repeated. “But, she’s free to leave. I’ll insist upon it.”
“Will you now?” John said, chuckling mirthlessly. “Lord, boy. How deep are you?”
Patrick didn’t answer. His expression was unreadable, John’s veneered in dark amusement.
Patrick returned his attention to me. “What is it you want, then?”
What did I want?
I wanted to turn back the hand of the clock.
To be a simple person with simple troubles, who had taken only bluff and left the National House with Patrick that day when we were twelve.
I wanted to see Kenton Hill restored and revive the dead.
I wanted to rip the ache from within me.
Tanner, Shop, the House, their soldiers with their bayonets—they’d taken everything.
This itch for idium was never quiet, never satisfied.
In truth, though, it wasn’t idium that I cared for.
How often had my medium become a gun to my head?
Perhaps I should want to run. I felt the coil in my muscles now, willing me to seek safety in solitude.
Loving someone was dangerous, and it would hurt to stay, to see Patrick every day and know he’d loved me once.
I could escape back into the folds of Belavere and learn to live with an empty chest.
But I didn’t want that.
I didn’t want to take on a new name and new lies and let the idium ebb until I was none of the things I’d ever been.
I wanted someone to hurt.
I felt it burgeoning in me: a yearning for blood. Shop’s perhaps, or the man who’d pulled the lever on my mother, or the coppers at the docks. I wanted to feel as I had when the earth clogged Tanner’s ears and mouth and jammed his airways—like no one could touch me.
And here was Patrick, offering me a way. Generations of idium, he’d said. A fair fight. If I was a knife, then I could rip and slash and gouge until the aching ebbed. It wasn’t idium I wanted. It was revenge.
“If we succeed,” I said, “I want to bury those lords myself.”
A shadow rippled across Patrick’s face. He nodded and stepped away.
“Then we’ll find ourselves that Scribbler,” he said. “We begin tomorrow.”