Chapter Thirty-Five Theo
When Theo had first arrived in Kenton Hill, a man had aimed a shotgun at his stomach outside the Coal Works. Called him a swank. Told him to go back to the city or be sent back in a box.
Theo had wondered then, with a sort of detached curiosity, what it would feel like to have a bullet sink into his skin. Whether he would feel anything at first, or if the pain would seep in slower, like melting ice.
He’d been wrong on both counts.
Agony splintered through his gut, made worse by the jostle of movement as Patrick and John leveraged him on their shoulders. His feet dragged over snow, then soil, then the metal slats of a mine shaft. He heard the groan of the pulley, the music of chains, the rhythmic plink of dripping blood.
“Theo?” Nina’s voice. Ice-cold hands on his cheeks. “Theo! Don’t close your eyes.”
“It’s gone all the way through,” Patrick was saying. “A graze, I think.”
Fuck off, Colson, he wanted to tell him. But his mind was turning to swill. He couldn’t find his eyes to open them. Something heavy pressed into his stomach, and he bucked with a new onslaught of pain.
“Easy,” Patrick said to him. “Nina, keep pressure on it.”
When Theo opened his eyes he saw nothing. Just encroaching darkness. Fingers insistent at his neck. “Why did you do that?” she asked him.
But he was being swallowed. Into the earth, into some black reprieve, and he couldn’t force the words beyond that heavy barrier.
In his mind, he saw Nina’s face in Dumley’s office levitating soil, in the shadows of an Artisan theater, in the rubble of the first attack, and in his dreams every damned night.
Because I love you, he thought. He hadn’t found a way, just yet, to make it stop.
In his disorientation, Theo awoke with the surety he was in Kenton Hill, deep underground.
He felt the damp earth beneath him, heard that suffocating quiet, and tried to organize the tangle of his thoughts.
Where was Scottie, or Briggs? Where was Gunner, shouting at him for daring to rest?
Why was he here, seated? Had he fainted again? As he had on his first descent?
But pain lanced him, spiking up his side and into his lungs, stealing his breath. “Fuck,” he groaned, and cupped his hand over his waist just above the hip bone, where a coat covered him.
“It’s all right” came not Nina’s voice, but Polly’s. Theo blinked, and her face pieced together. “Don’t sit up,” she said. “The bleeding will start again.”
He realized then that her hand was gently pressing a wadded rag over his wound.
He frowned, his eyes wanting to close again. Fuck, but it stung. “You’re not planning to sleep?”
She shook her head. “Truth be told, I’m terrified of the tunnels.”
He nodded. He was, too. He looked farther down the tunnel, to where John and Patrick were also awake, their back pressed to the walls and a lit gas lamp between them. Nina was curled onto her side, asleep.
Theo nodded in the direction of their party. “You didn’t want to be closer to the light?”
She grimaced. “It’s a little crowded down there.”
“I’ll say.”
She smiled at him wanly, then looked into her lap, shame spilling across her expression.
Theo exhaled, then winced. “You don’t need to fear them, Polly. They can hardly be rid of you, can they?”
She looked at him dubiously. “And how long does that last?” she murmured. “My usefulness runs out the moment they find Idia’s Seam or give up on the endeavor entirely.”
He scoffed. “Men like Patrick and John—my father, too—they don’t give up on things like this.”
Polly’s stare was distant. “Do you remember that drunk back in Kenton?”
“You’ll have to be a lot more specific.”
“The one who cursed at Mrs. Colson and kicked Isaiah?”
A man from Dorser came to mind. He’d been granted amnesty at Colson & Sons, just like Polly and Theo.
He’d said he was a businessman, though Theo suspected he was just a criminal to whom they owed a favor.
He’d gotten carried away one evening and turned cantankerous, knocking over a table, throwing his brandy onto an unsuspecting woman, screaming at Tess when she came to clear him out, then gave Patrick’s dog a firm kick in the ribs as he left.
He’d been a novice to Kenton Hill. He’d yet to understand the codes of the Colson empire, and the rest of those in the pub had watched on in quiet anticipation.
It surprised no one when Patrick downed the rest of his drink and stood, or when Gunner adjusted his belt and opened a switchblade, both of them following the Dorser man calmly out to the road.
The man ended up on his back in the middle of Main Street, his cheek slashed open and his shoulder bleeding from the puncture wound beneath.
“Deal’s off,” Patrick had said around the length of a cigarette. “Take the long way home. Just watch the hills now, they tick.”
An hour or so later, there had been a distant blast to the South. A landmine tripped. And Kenton barely stuttered at the sound.
Theo nodded. “I remember.”
“Well, that man kicked their dog,” she said. “What do you think they imagine doing to me?”
Theo grimaced. “You were doing what you believed was right.”
Polly shook her head sadly. “The word right didn’t factor much into it.”
“You were backed into a corner.”
“I was,” she said on a whisper. “And so was Nina. So were you. But I was the one to give Tanner the tunnel. I kicked the dog.” She turned to look at Theo then. “And I don’t deserve your compassion. I’m exactly the coward they believe I am.”
Theo considered her for a moment. “Do you remember when I arrived in Kenton Hill? The mining boys started in on me straight away. Trying to rile me up, I think. Test my mettle. I’d never met men like them before, throwing their weight around, beating their chests like apes.
I thought them moronic. Only Scottie didn’t take too well to that observation. ”
“Well, you called him a witless degenerate, and I don’t think he knew what either of those words meant.”
“And he and Otto took my chair out from underneath me, and I was lying there on the floor thinking they might beat my head in. Then you rose up like a guardian angel and scolded them both like they were toddlers. Told them to sit down before you knocked their heads together.”
She smiled, just slightly. “Scottie’s harmless. He only looks like a troll.”
“And Otto was butter in your palm from the very beginning.”
Her expression splintered at the sound of his name, and she turned away, eyes back on the Stewards’ book in her hands. “Are we just reminiscing? Or does this story have a point?”
“You’re not a coward, Polly. Not truly. You survived the Artisan school, and then countless towns after it, most of which were far from welcoming.
You’ve seen far more than I would care to see, I’m sure of it.
Whatever it is you are, you are not a coward.
You simply want to survive. I can’t reproach you that. ”
She turned in on herself, her spine curving. When she next spoke, her voice was reedy. “What kind of person forsakes an entire town just to save their own hide?”
Theo sighed heavily and looked out into the gloom. “Funny how things shook out in the end,” he said quietly. “I hated that damned parish, yet I stayed to help salvage it. You liked Kenton, and yet…”
“Yet I sent in the bloody infantry.” She sounded like she could hardly believe it herself. “Knowing full well that it might kill the man I—”
Theo watched the word stick in her throat, her eyes rimming with tears. “Loved?” he supplied. “Was it love? With Otto?”
The hollowing of her throat told Theo enough.
He did the gentlemanly thing of changing the subject. “What will you do after this? Without scribbling?”
She shrugged lamely. “If I’m being truthful, I don’t care, so long as I’m not shot dead somewhere along the way.”
“For what’s it worth,” Theo said. “I won’t let the Colsons kill you.”
“And if Nina were the one holding the gun?” she asked now, turning her head to watch his reaction. “Would you stop her?”
Theo frowned. “I wouldn’t have to. She’d never do that.”
“Wouldn’t she?”
Theo thought he saw something flash across Polly’s irises. Perhaps she was remembering the night they had found her in Rickers, Nina’s knuckles blanching around the butt of a pistol. “However angry she might feel, she isn’t capable of something like that, Polly. She isn’t one of them.”
Polly tilted her head as though she pitied him his naivete. “That’s exactly who she is, Theo. However much you might wish it otherwise.”
He bit his tongue to stave off a retort. She didn’t know Nina as he did.
“Do you think we’ll ever move on?” Polly asked now, shivering. The cold was closing in.
“I hope not,” he said in earnest. “Then it was all for nothing.” Theo had been too long with that ache in his throat, grown used to it.
She looked at him sadly, as though she couldn’t imagine a worse fate.
“I think I’d be more content to, though, if I knew there was some part of her that was… changed by me,” Theo allowed. “To know that I’d altered her half as much as she altered me.”
“She loved you once,” Polly said simply. “You carved your way into her heart back then. It stands to reason the marks would still be there.”
Theo took a tremulous breath. His stomach seemed to seize. After a moment, his muscles relaxed back against the wall of the tunnel, his head tilted to the ceiling. From the void of his chest, words rose unbidden. “I do worry, you know, that we aren’t the ones who find their happy ending.”
“No,” Polly murmured. “No, I don’t think we do.”
When the others rose from their rest, Polly helped Theo to stand. They traveled on, Theo clawing dying embers of memory and Polly rubbing her right arm with her left hand, as though warming that one small part of herself.