Chapter Seventeen #2
His gaze found mine, and it was so solemn, my breath hitched. “There’s nuance to it. Variables like proximity, length of exposure, volume of radiance. But to answer your question, yes. Progress is killing people at an alarming rate. Are you wearing undergarments?”
I sputtered. “Julian!”
Julian seemed pleased to have flustered me in turn. “I’d have thought you too cold to blush to that extent.”
“Yes.” I grit the word out. “I am wearing undergarments.”
“Take off as much as you can. I don’t like the way you’re not shivering.”
My trousers and blouse stuck to my body, and the small buttons were torture to my numb, waterlogged fingers. I made a small angry noise and considered setting my clothes on fire so I could die naked but free.
Julian batted my hands away and deftly loosened the buttons down my front.
I expected a moment of tension, for him to blush the way he had when I’d asked him how he’d learned so much about Ezra’s magic.
Instead, he seemed unfazed by the sight of me in my thin, wet undershirt.
Eased by his nonchalance, I helped him pull my boots and my soaked trousers off.
With dismay, I realized I’d lost my tool belt in the river.
The fire’s heat licked at my bare skin where goose bumps made the hair on my legs stand straight up.
“Stay close to him,” he instructed. “I can’t have either of you freezing to death. We’ve got a long way to walk.”
“Where are we walking to?” I asked with a sudden cold-induced yawn.
“Away from here.” Julian stripped Ezra, careful not to jostle him too much. “It’ll take a week if we move quickly. There’s a wagon trail. We can follow it to Cascade. I’ve got business there.”
“You sound like you’ve been planning this for a while,” I said, reeling. One moment he’d been dead, and now he was not only alive but scheming. Heretically.
Without acknowledging me, Julian gathered our wet clothes and shoes. “Stay there. I’ve got to hang these up to dry them properly.”
A small ripple of fear ran through me at the thought of being stranded beside the icy river in my underclothes. I decided to be angry instead, preferring that to being frightened. “Why didn’t you tell me anything? Why aren’t you explaining things now?”
I didn’t want to be left out anymore. And it still stung, despite all that had happened since, that he’d sent me away.
Julian stood like a sapling stretching toward the sun. Somehow, he looked no less haughty in rough clothes. “I didn’t know if I could trust you. Besides, you were meant to be halfway back to the House by now. Give me time to consider my words.”
“That’s cowardly.”
“Perhaps.” The thick brush swallowed him as he went to hang our clothes over branches to dry them with radiance.
I listened for his footsteps rustling and crunching, but the river’s constant rush was too loud.
Beside me, Ezra breathed evenly with no alarming shallowness.
I didn’t know much of healing, but I’d helped nurse other girls at school through fevers and coughs enough times to know when to send for help.
Not that we could send for help. And Ainsley was out there. Did she have more hired killers at her disposal?
Why had Ezra claimed responsibility for Julian’s death?
Why had he helped me get away?
“I wish you were awake,” I whispered.
“I’d rather not be,” Ezra whispered back, startling me.
I nearly punched his arm. Instead, I took his cold hand in both of mine and squeezed it, my relief so profound, it left me woozy. “You need to hold still.”
His lips were pale, but he smiled faintly. “I am holding still.”
“Well … Should you be talking?”
“You’re the one who wished for me to be awake.”
“I didn’t manifest it. Stop being foolish.”
He cracked his eyes open and tilted his head to meet my worried gaze. “I’m all right, I promise. Being out here in the forest, it’ll help. If Ike had punctured any important organs, I’d have bled out long before we ended up here.”
I wanted to ask him more about how the forest helped, how it made him feel—but Ike’s name shattered something in me.
“I killed them.” The words were thick on my tongue. It sounded like a lie to my ears. Like it couldn’t be real.
I was a killer. And I could never take it back.
I’d never be the same.
Ezra closed his eyes and didn’t speak for so long that I wondered if he’d fallen asleep. “You did. But that was my fault. You wouldn’t have been there at all if it weren’t for me.”
“None of that,” Julian said, crashing back out of the brush and shooting an impatient look at both of us. “Can you walk? We should get going.” He threw me my clothes and placed Ezra’s in his hands with somewhat more gentleness, though it appeared to be only on account of the wound at his side.
I hurriedly shimmied back into my clothes, delighted to find that they were dry and warm.
“Thank you,” Ezra said, avoiding his gaze and swiftly tearing long strips from the hem of his shirt. He worked quickly to wrap his middle, wincing as he tightened the knot that held the makeshift bandage fast. “I don’t believe a walk was part of the plan.”
“Fishing you out of the river wasn’t part of the plan either,” Julian said mildly.
Ezra huffed as he finished getting dressed. “You could have let me drown if it was such an inconvenience.”
“Don’t be a child. Would you prefer to languish here waiting to be hunted down and killed?”
“‘Languish’? You know I thrive in nature.”
Unsettled by the easy familiarity between them, I asked, “The plan?”
They both turned their attention to me as I finished lacing my boots and wobbled to stand, sore in places I hadn’t noticed before. Ezra had the decency to look remorseful; Julian did not.
“You were supposed to be on a train,” Julian said, as if this somehow explained or excused an entire plan happening behind my back.
“And it never occurred to either of you—who appear to be colluding—that I might wish to participate in a plan?”
“Why would it occur to me that you’d want to work against the system that created you, that you’re so embedded in, you failed to notice until, it seems, quite recently, that our radiance has devastating impacts?” Julian asked, sounding irritated now.
“Perhaps all my disappointing behavior should have clued you in, Senior,” I spat.
Ezra ducked his head and failed to hide a smile.
“There’s more at stake than your hurt feelings,” Julian muttered.
The breath left my body as if he’d punched me. “Do you think I don’t understand that? I just killed two men! I’m trying to catch up. Let me catch up. Let me help.” My voice broke, despite my desperate wish not to cry in front of them. “Please.”
“Don’t bully her, Julian,” Ezra said.
Julian whirled on him. “Me? You can’t be serious.”
Frustration consumed me, but for once it was easy to clench my fist and keep my radiance tucked inside.
I wasn’t ready to use it violently again.
Not yet. “Tell me what you’re doing so I can decide if I’m going to help or forget I ever met either of you insufferable, arrogant, rude, awful boys! ” I yelled.
Ezra looked like he wanted to say something, but his gaze flicked to my fist, and he closed his mouth tightly. He was wise to fear me. He’d seen what I’d done. How easily I’d done it.
It took Julian several long moments to stop looking surprised that I’d shouted at him.
He smoothed down his clothes as if he wore an impeccably tailored waistcoat.
“I’m traveling to Cascade,” he finally said quietly, sounding like his head ached.
“I have contacts who live on a farm on the outskirts of town. Others who believe there’s a peaceful way to stop the march of Progress.
To reform our understanding of Progress itself. ”
His words slowly settled into my bones. “You’re a resistor, too,” I said with a heavy exhale.
Julian rolled his eyes. “Resistors are not an organized entity, despite what the House would have people think. And trust me, there’s no consensus on approach either.”
“I will die on the spot if I have to listen to Julian’s treatise on ethical approaches to the rise of Industry,” Ezra said.
I ignored Ezra. “You’re saying you have allies? People who would help us if we wanted to stop the House from hurting people?”
“You put it rather simply, but yes,” Julian said, with a pained expression that indicated it was not remotely simple.
I recalled the letter on his desk, the unfamiliar name on it. It must have been to one of his allies. “So you don’t have a secret sweetheart,” I reasoned aloud.
Ezra and Julian said absolutely nothing, both fixing gazes on me that made them look like startled alley cats.
“The letters,” I explained. “Nikola isn’t your sweetheart.”
A choking laugh escaped Ezra.
Julian’s skin took on a slightly reddened tone. “Correct. Nikola is not my sweetheart.”
I weighed what I knew, which was next to nothing.
Julian and Ezra had planned something together.
Julian was secretly a resistor working against the House, but not with Ainsley.
There were people who wanted to stop radiance from hurting people, and they didn’t want to do it by causing more violence.
That felt—it felt impossible to me, but like something I should want.
Even though I wasn’t sure I knew how to resolve any of this without violence.
The House of Industry had power far beyond the radiance at our fingertips. The Elders were ministers of state, of transportation, even of war. We were only children in the woods.
But I wanted a place in all this anyway. Now, more than ever, I needed to feel rooted to something. I had so much squandered time to make up for, so many mistakes to atone for. I needed to find a way to help undo the damage I’d caused by being so thoughtlessly obedient. So small-minded.
And, a tiny voice admitted in my heart, I didn’t want to be alone.
“I want to go with you,” I said firmly. If Frostbrook wasn’t meant to be my home, I’d go somewhere else. “You know I can fight if we need to. And I’m as strong as either of you.”
“No one’s debating that,” Julian said under his breath, continuing to look flustered.
“Let her go with you,” Ezra prompted, his voice strangely gentle.
“You’re coming, too,” Julian snapped at the exact same time that I asked, “What about you?”
Ezra used a smooth stick to stand and leaned against it. “The two of you can go anywhere you please. I never agreed to go on a long, boring walk.”
An uncomfortable pang of unhappiness gripped me. “You won’t come with us?”
Here I was again, longing for Ezra’s company. I hated them both in that moment—for being all I had, for being people I wanted to know better, know completely, despite everything.
“Ainsley will kill you if you return to Frostbrook,” Julian said. “You showed her your hand. You’re a liability to her now.”
“What’s to keep her from chasing after me? Not all of us can fake our own deaths,” Ezra said crossly. I remembered how he’d boasted that he’d killed Julian. How he’d staged the blood in his room. Now I had a feeling it had all been to protect Julian—to give him a way out.
“You know she’s not going to chase you. Not when Henry’s waiting on her to return to him,” Julian said impatiently.
“You don’t have to be dead. You can disappear,” I told Ezra. “We can disappear together.”
Ezra stared at me. “But I …”
Julian abruptly pushed him toward a sloping incline, ignoring his stumbling and swearing.
“Enough dithering. Didn’t you tell me to be more decisive?
Well, I’ve decided. Start walking. Appren—Josephine, you may as well come along.
It’s not like you’d survive if you didn’t.
” He grabbed a bag from the ground and slung it over his shoulder.
Ezra glanced back, and I saw a silent plea in his eyes that nearly made me laugh hysterically. He might as well have mouthed, Don’t leave me alone with him.
Swallowing the impulse to dig my heels in the dirt and watch them walk out of my life, I kicked sand onto the fire until it dampened to a wisp of smoke.
I was too exhausted and sore to lie to myself.
This wasn’t a last resort. It was what I wanted.
I wanted to walk beside the two most infuriating boys I’d ever met.
Struck by an impulse, I untied the blue scarf I’d fastened back on out of habit. I held it out over the water and opened my fingers, letting it flutter away. The swift current stole it and carried it out of sight.
Without another word, I followed their silent stumbling path alongside the relentless rush of the river.