Chapter Nine
We could no longer dally in the woods. The shipment would arrive soon.
I followed Ezra in silence back toward the rail yard, and with every step, my feet felt heavier.
I’d already grown too attached to Ezra in my attempt to learn self-discipline from his control over wild magic.
And now I’d taken our ill-advised partnership a step further by promising to teach him about my radiance in turn.
Ostensibly, it was to help him figure out why my radiance caused him pain. But Gertrude would have taken one look at me and seen the truth under my generous offer.
And she’d have been right. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being disappointed in me.
It was selfishness, not altruism, driving me to further distance myself from the regulations of the House.
I wanted him to embrace my radiance with the same wonder I felt when he wielded wild magic.
I wanted him to believe in Progress. In me.
Gertrude had always examined the mess of me and seen truth in the tangles. More than ever, I longed for her. Surely she’d help me understand the feverish way Ezra made me feel. We had never been taught to name the stirrings of our hearts.
Gertrude, I thought, gazing up at the unfeeling trees. I feel drunk.
She used to tug the hair behind my ear until I yelped and focused.
I pinched the sensitive skin at the inside of my wrist, but the sting didn’t clear away my turbulent thoughts—or my longing for her.
Not looking where I was walking, I stubbed my toe on a knobby stone.
The pain enraged me more than it should have, and I cursed and swept the rock off the path with my boot.
Ezra turned back to me, brown eyes big and surprised.
“What?” I shouted viciously. Gertrude had looked at me like that when I’d struck her with radiance and promised I wouldn’t do it again. When I’d shown her how weak and mean I truly was. It was only a matter of time before Ezra understood the same thing she did—that I was hopeless.
Anger felt good. Felt much better than missing her and wanting him.
Ezra took a step back and eyed me warily. “Are you always this moody?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I muttered, trembling. I closed my hands into tight fists and tried to understand why tripping over a stone had enraged me. Why did I feel so much?
“That’s what I’m worried about.” He sank into a crouch, and for a heartbeat, I thought he might spring at me like a wild animal. Then I realized that he was only responding to the skittering light around my body. He was slipping into a defensive stance. He was frightened.
Radiance danced on my skin, thready veins of white-hot light. I tried to will it away.
“I’m not troubled by the way you feel,” he gritted out, as if it pained him to speak. “It’s this.” He gestured carefully. “You’re not as disciplined as you think you are. What if you kill someone? What if you do something you can’t take back?”
My breath sucked in with a sharp hiss, and I jammed my hands into my pockets. My trousers would do nothing to curb the flow of radiance, but hiding my hands helped me restrain myself. I wanted to tell him that losing control was exactly what I was afraid of.
But I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t make it that real.
“Something’s wrong with me?” I asked instead, because it was easier to blame him for seeing it. It took everything I had to keep from setting my own pockets on fire. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. Something’s wrong with radiance. Fundamentally. And you know it.” He scrubbed his hands over his face and ran them back through his sweaty hair until he looked like he wore a twiggy bird’s nest on his head. “You know it in your heart. Isn’t that why you’re angry?”
He was wrong. Something was fundamentally wrong with my control. Not my radiance. “Don’t presume to know what I feel.”
“Anyone could see that you’re close to boiling over.” His voice broke, the wrecked sound of it startling me. “But you’d have killed someone by now if you weren’t a good person. You’re good.”
He sounded regretful.
“You are confusing,” I whispered, wanting to sink to the dirt and curl up in the thick clover alongside the path. I reached for something biting to say and found nothing but hollowness around my lungs.
Ezra straightened, no longer crouched like a cornered animal. Still, something shadowed his gaze as he studied me.
You’re good. The echo of it lingered on my skin. Why had he sounded disappointed? Did he expect something terrible of me?
I didn’t want to know. Not right now when my mind was already overly full.
“I know I’m not a ruthless killer,” I said, trying to make the words light. “I grew up with the most irritating people in the world. They survived, didn’t they?”
He didn’t smile. “What would happen if you had a good reason to take a life?”
“Then I’d do it,” I snapped. “Wouldn’t you?”
Ezra’s lips parted. The woods were quiet enough for me to hear how sharply he inhaled. And then he sighed. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to. I wouldn’t want to.”
“So, rather than defend yourself, you’d give up and die?” I asked, my voice too thin.
We regarded each other in silence until the train whistle sounded shrilly, making me jump.
“The shipment,” I said, groaning. “I’m going to be late to work. I’ve got to go.”
“Of course,” he said with another small sigh. He gestured for me to lead the way on the path, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d just admitted that I’d kill someone if given cause. He’d called me good, but he’d said it as if the word were a splinter. Maybe I’d do him a favor and prove him wrong.
It would be easier for both of us if he hated me.
As I jogged toward the train yard, birdsong and our heavy footsteps gave way to the grunts and shouts of people working, and the heavy thuds of machinery.
At the tree line, I stopped short to smooth my blouse and the front of my trousers, then adjust my tool belt.
A few stray flower petals fell from my hair when I ran my fingers back through my close-cropped curls.
I wasn’t naive enough to ignore the conclusions others would jump to if they saw me rushing from the woods with a boy, mussed and covered in bits of plants.
Ezra plucked a blossom from the scarf at my throat. His fingers brushed my skin. “There,” he said softly.
A shiver ran up my legs. I resisted the urge to startle away—or surge toward him. The impulse was as hot as my anger had been. As impossible to ignore. But I only trembled.
What would it be like to live a simpler life? To steal away for the afternoon with a beautiful boy and kiss him on a bed of clover until our clothes became rumpled? My cheeks felt like I’d gotten too close to a fire, and I patted my hands at them, willing the flush to die down before anyone saw me.
Despite the urgency, I lingered a moment longer. It was a strange sensation—feeling rooted in place. Rooted to him.
Saplings hid us from view. Ezra asked, shockingly close to my ear, “Are you all right?”
“I’ve got a lot on my mind. Don’t you?”
“More than you might think.” His low, amused voice sent another shiver through me. “Go tend to your duties. I’ll find you later.”
“You’re a nuisance.” I exhaled, batting him away, eager to reclaim my dignity from the traitorous grasp of my heart.
The train hulked like a grimy beast, stinking of coal and grease and the iron smell of unfathomable heat. Running, grateful for my trousers, I passed the huge engine, wary of the massive wheels but drawn to the mechanisms that made it fly across the landscape faster than any horse.
When I reached the crowd of people unloading goods from a cargo car, everyone quieted and stared at me. No one smiled. Julian emerged, his sleeves rolled up, exposing his light-brown skin to the afternoon sun. He didn’t look particularly pleased.
“Made your way here at last?” he asked. “Ideally you’d have arrived before the train.”
Others glared or laughed, all of them dressed for hard labor and already sweating in the growing heat. Guilt rushed through me. I’d been too wrapped up in my hurt and Ezra’s. All the while, others had been toiling to finish the Mission. That’s what we were here for. What all of us were here for.
“I’m sorry,” I said, bowing my head and panting from sprinting along the tracks. “Truly.”
“You ought to be,” muttered a man with a thick white beard. His blue eyes were cloudy with age. “We’ve done all we could, but they say we can’t unload the new cables without a child lending a hand.”
A child. He meant me. My cheeks heated.
Julian’s disappointed expression softened. He took me by the elbow and led me to a wooden platform attached to a fairly rudimentary winch. “Gather yourself,” he said with a nod. “Now go on.”
I climbed the ladder to the top of the platform.
Below me, in the train car’s hold, dozens of delicate wire coils were packed tightly in wooden pallets.
The gleaming metal had made its way across the continent.
Mined on a distant coast and forged in a massive factory.
A thousand hands had probably touched it before it traveled to Frostbrook to be handled by more workers.
More people I didn’t know, and might never know.
Would they ever benefit from Progress?
A hollow ache formed in my belly. I didn’t have a word for it.
Dozens of people watched me expectantly.
When the forewoman, Alice, marched up to the group, I realized how odd I must look doing nothing but staring at the crates.
I sifted through my buzzing thoughts to recall the safety protocols for handling conduction wire.
It was critical not to drop the spindles and bend the wire, or it wouldn’t unspool properly.
“I thought you said she could do this,” Alice said to Julian. She crossed her strong arms and gave me a dubious look that made me want to shrink to the size of a dormouse.