Chapter Three
“Apprentice Haven,” someone asked in a worried voice. Clammy hands patted my cheeks.
I woke with a growl, unused to being touched. Fire circled my throat, and even before I worked my gummy eyes open, I knew I wanted whoever was close by to get away from me.
A girl hovered at my side, her eyes dark brown and shining in the lamplight like jewels. She held a wet compress tentatively. “I—I’m sorry. Can I apply this to your neck? It’ll help with the swelling.”
We were in the train’s cramped infirmary, recognizable by shelves of bottles and boxes strapped down with canvas.
The girl wore the striped uniform of an apprentice healer.
Her eager, gentle expression warmed me, and I regretted growling at her.
We were alike in our status—both in a position to prove ourselves or be deemed unworthy.
“Yes, please,” I said, shocked at the hoarse, broken sound of my voice.
“You’re lucky we found you. You could have tumbled between the cars when the train started.”
The train was running again, the rumbling sway comforting. “Are we nearly to Frostbrook?”
“We’ll arrive any moment.”
“Did they find the people who robbed the train?”
The young healer frowned while she folded the cold muslin over my throat. “No. They got away with supplies for the new Mission. But the engineer credits you with driving them off. How did you start a fire like that?”
Silence stretched. In the moment, I hadn’t hesitated to fight with my radiance, but now that I didn’t have rage beating through my veins, it was much clearer that I’d broken House rules before even arriving at my post. “My head feels terribly foggy. I’m afraid I can’t recall,” I lied, feeling foolish.
“Of course, Apprentice. You were nearly killed! You rest your voice. The steward will bring your bag to the platform.”
I wasn’t entirely lying. My head did feel like I’d removed my brain and replaced it with mud.
I closed my eyes against the lamplight and let the cold cloth soothe the pain in my throat.
Sleep did not come back to me, despite the healer’s quiet humming and the calming motion of the train.
Instead, I saw the shadows again, thieves taking what was rightfully mine.
Or at least adjacent to being mine. If construction didn’t finish on time, it would be years before I got a chance to do anything but work on old mills and waterwheels.
Not only would that fail to qualify me to finish my apprenticeship, it would be dreadfully boring.
In Sterling City, I’d already attached radiance lines to factories, scaling scaffoldings while onlookers placed bets on whether I’d tumble to my death.
I’d worked alongside a Senior who engineered a grid system to channel radiance throughout a textile mill and power everything from its cooling system to the belt that carried bolts of fabric across a clever bridge from one building to the next.
I could wire—and even power—industrial machinery in my sleep.
“Your head must hurt terribly,” the healer murmured, placing another wet cloth across my brow.
I was scowling. Professor Dunn had once told me it was my default expression, a wry grin on her weathered face.
But smiling had gotten me nothing. Not for six years in the foundling home, when people scooped up fat infants and ignored skinny redheads covered in bruises.
I’d stopped smiling at the couples who toured twice a month.
And when Master Hayes approached my pallet bed, I lifted my chin in a challenge, daring him to give me false hope.
“That’s good.” He laughed. I didn’t like the sound. “Anger suits you.”
Of course, at the time I only understood that an adult was laughing at me the way the other children did, those who called me a witch for the bloodred color of my hair.
I balled up my fists, ready to strike the old man the way I struck the children who laughed too close to me.
His strong wrinkled fingers circled my wrist and pulled me to stand, and before I knew it, I was in a carriage as black and as sleek as a crow’s feathers.
Up until then, my only time traveling had been at three, when someone had pulled me from my mother’s rotting arms and placed me in the back of a wagon full of children holding crying babes, then driven the lot of us to the foundling home.
I had only enough sense to tell them my first name.
They assigned me a last name indicating that I’d been discovered in the township of Haven.
On my journey from the foundling home to Sterling City, Master Hayes wordlessly opened a book and began scrawling numbers in it.
I knew I’d go mad if I didn’t fill the silence in the carriage.
So, instead of speaking to him, I spoke to the woman beside him, who had introduced herself and told me that she’d be my teacher when I was older.
I told Professor Dunn everything I knew about the foundling home—which children were terribly mean, which knew well enough to ignore me, how the other children were sick more often than not, which cooks could be trusted to sneak you extra bread if you helped them scour pots, and how the boiler room was my sanctuary.
Her demeanor changed, then. At her barest encouragement, I explained how I’d been chastised for lying after I’d told the groundskeeper that the dumbwaiter didn’t need steam from the boiler to power it.
That I could make it move all on my own.
“Does anyone know you were telling the truth?” she asked, leaning across the small space between us as I recoiled, too startled to mask my surprise.
“I’m only telling a story,” I tried to lie, tripping on the words.
She laughed again, her voice big and musical. Even Master Hayes, his milky eyes bright beneath his wrinkles, let out a huff of amusement. For the first time in my life, I knew they weren’t laughing at me, but at everyone who didn’t know our secret.
They took me directly to the House of Industry, where the servants cut my tangled hair and stripped me down and scrubbed me clean.
Dressed in a simple black shift, I stood before a man who introduced himself only as the Indicator.
I’d never seen anyone so old. He made me open my mouth, and he prodded my belly, and then he took my hands and squeezed them until my bones ached and I screamed.
He’d wheezed out an amused sound before saying, “She’ll do.”
My first glimpse of Frostbrook was a rough-hewn shack and a raised platform constructed with knotty, unfinished pine. “This is the station?” I asked, unable to mask my distress.
The steward only laughed as he tossed my bag at my feet.
For a few minutes, I stood there, my skin prickling with embarrassment. I’d expected to be greeted by my Senior. Maybe escorted by a small crowd of admirers. That’s how they’d welcome Gertrude in Copper City. They’d probably weave flowers into her pretty hair.
Thinking about her made my eyes hot.
As I scrubbed my face, pretending it was only sweat I was wiping away, a little boy appeared at my elbow, startling me.
He gave me a grubby bow. I wondered if he noticed that my skirts were wrinkled, or that my hair had risen into a red halo of unruly curls from the wet cloth.
Maybe it was best that no one else had come for me.
At the other end of the platform, a group of workers in coveralls unloaded large pallets of machinery and huge spools of cable. A woman with a clipboard noted each item, frowning. Surely documenting what was missing from the robbery.
A winch groaned with the load, heavy timber straining against the weight.
I stared for a moment, taking in the complicated loops and pulleys that allowed only three of them to maneuver a massive pallet.
My bones hummed with a warm thrill at the mechanics of it.
I felt like one of the little children who chased trains through the dank belly of the city, dancing in the rain of soot.
But I forced myself to stay where I was.
The station wasn’t my post, and the train wasn’t my playground.
The workers ignored my childish grin. As far as I could tell, I was the only passenger who’d disembarked at Frostbrook beyond those who had come to resupply and relieve the others who toiled at the unfinished Mission.
My grin faltered as I watched two young women help a middle-aged worker up onto the train.
He’d sweated through his shirt and walked hunched over and trembling.
Though he had a muscular build, he looked as if it strained him to take shuffling, slow steps.
I didn’t see an obvious injury, but it seemed as if he’d somehow hurt himself working on the Mission.
“Um?” A small voice interrupted.
I turned my attention back to the boy. His golden-brown skin reminded me of Tabitha’s, and a pang of longing for the House of Industry made itself known like a puncture.
“Hello,” I managed, noticing that the boy was missing both his front teeth. “You don’t look like you weigh an ounce more than my bag.”
He muscled the bag up anyway. “I’m Henry, and I’m stronger than I look.”
I smiled at his determined grimace and let him get as far as the dirt road before I slipped the bag out of his hands. “I’ve got it. You lead the way. I’m in need of a guide.”
Now unfettered, he skipped ahead of me, gesturing at the wide river in the distance.
My steps halted as I took in the view. The rippling water sparkled like crystals in the sun, all shimmering bursts of sunlight and deep blue.
At home in the city, every canal leading to the Sterling River was the color of laundry water.
I’d never seen anything like this wild ribbon.
I was so besotted by it that it took several more clumsy paces for me to notice the small houses dotting the banks and the machinery where mules tugged the ferry raft back and forth.