Chapter Eighteen
Whatever toiling I thought I’d done in the past paled in comparison to the effort it took to make my legs keep moving when all I wanted was to crumple to the ground.
The only thing that kept me upright was my rage.
I could feel it like a living thing pulsing alongside my heart.
With every shuffling step, I nurtured it, despite being unsure exactly who or what I wanted to unleash that rage upon.
Julian, a surprisingly skilled way finder, led us to a wagon trail that we followed through the damp, thick forest until the trees gave way to an empty rolling plain. It wasn’t quite dawn, but the birds in the tall grass were beginning to trill and flutter, as if anticipating the light.
Shuffling out from under the canopy leaves, I stared up at a sky so vast, it made me dizzy.
There were no tufts of clouds above, only the shimmering lights of innumerable stars and the glossy swirls of the galaxies that cradled them.
The radiance in me responded to the echo of countless suns, all pulsing with the same power that lived within me.
I felt warm and sheltered, uniquely aware that while my body was far from celestial, it was the temporary home to something much greater than I’d ever truly understand.
Placing his hand on my shoulder, Julian spoke softly. “It’s your first time seeing the sky like this?”
“How can you tell?”
He chuckled quietly. “Because you haven’t been looking where you’re walking. Listen—I’m not teasing you,” he said, responding to my bristling. “I cried the first time I saw the stars that bright.”
For a long moment, we stood side by side, and I wondered if we were not Children of Industry but children of stars. Stars that could not and should not be harnessed.
“City folk,” Ezra muttered, shoving past us and stumbling off the path into what looked like a soft patch of grass. He turned in a circle like a restless cat before sinking to the ground and closing his eyes.
I glanced at Julian, expecting him to be frustrated. Instead, he wore a fond expression that made me feel weightless for a moment. I was fairly certain I’d looked at Ezra the exact same way more than once. Strangely, that made me feel closer to Julian.
“I’d like to go farther, but he needs to rest,” he murmured. “We can sleep through the morning and set off again at midday.”
Privately relieved, I found my own little spot where I could keep an eye on Ezra. He hadn’t said a word as we’d walked through the night, as if it had taken all he had to stay on his feet.
Julian sat beside me. It felt strange. More intimate than walking side by side. Before I could complain, he opened his pack and handed me a piece of hard cheese and a scrap of grainy bread. “This isn’t poisoned, if you’re concerned.”
I recalled the food Ainsley had tried to give me at the train station. “You saved my life,” I murmured.
“I’ve never wanted to do you harm,” he said stiffly.
“Don’t you think sending me back to the House was doing me harm?” I asked with my mouth full. Bread and cheese had never tasted so good. Grateful, I took the canteen he offered and drew a careful sip to wash the small meal down.
Julian was watching Ezra sleep. His normally pinched expression had softened, as if it relieved him to see Ezra at rest. “A lesser harm than allowing Ainsley to kill you. A lesser harm than chasing you off into the wilderness to die alone.”
I recalled what he’d told me when I’d asked him if we were killing people. My stomach turned. “We’ve been doing harm all along,” I said bitterly.
Twisting the cap back onto the canteen, Julian stared at his hands. “Great harm,” he said on an exhale.
“The wasting. It’s really because of us?” I asked, struggling to speak the words aloud.
Julian nodded solemnly. “Our radiance is toxic to living things. The way we’re using it, anyway. This relentless march of Progress,” he said bitterly. “The excess. The House’s insatiable greed.”
I swallowed hard, fighting nausea. “Do the Elders know?”
He looked at me closely, approval in his gaze. I hated how much I still wanted him to find me competent. “That’s a good question to ask,” he said. “I’m certain they must. They spend far too much time maligning the resistor movement not to know.”
“To distract people,” I realized aloud.
“It’s convenient for them to turn everyone’s focus onto a common enemy.”
The confirmation of what I hadn’t wanted to believe settled in my body, heavy as a stone. I didn’t want to dwell on the thought of our parents in their graves. I’d unravel. I chose, instead, to be angry at Julian. “You didn’t consider telling me any of this when I arrived in Frostbrook?”
“You would have thought me a heretic.” Julian’s voice held no judgement for once. It was a simple fact.
And he was right. I would have. I would have found a way to get a message back to the House of Industry that the brilliant young Senior at Frostbrook’s Mission was promoting a dangerous, reckless agenda that went against our very existence.
I would have taken the opportunity to finally distinguish myself from my peers.
Josephine Haven, the bright mind who’d exposed Julian Gray as a resistor—a wolf among the flock.
The person I’d been less than two weeks ago felt like a stranger now. Would she have wept over Julian’s murder?
“I thought you were dead.” I hiccuped, overcome with the memory of what I’d thought was his lifeblood smeared across his room. “I came back to warn you and you were dead and it was my fault. I let him in, and it was my fault.” My breath shuddered with the effort not to sob.
Looking distraught, Julian glanced from me to Ezra’s sleeping form, as if Ezra could somehow save him from perceiving my emotions. “I’m not dead,” he pointed out.
“I shouldn’t have cared because you were so mean to me,” I said shakily, no longer caring how childish I sounded. He’d been cruel, and he deserved to feel at least a little terrible about it.
“You cared because you are good,” Julian murmured.
“Or did I care because you are better than you seem?”
Julian huffed a little breeze of a laugh. “Perhaps this remains to be seen.”
A heavy sigh escaped me. The plain that stretched before us, and the world that stretched beyond that, was so impossibly large. And we were nothing but two children who no longer had the House to call a home. “Julian. What are we going to do now?”
“‘We’?” he asked. The dim light of the growing dawn illuminated his small, shy smile.
I slapped his arm, and he stared at me with such shock that I couldn’t help laughing. “Whatever you’re doing, I’m doing it, too. I want to make things right. I want to protect people. Even if—Julian, even if it means risking our lives.”
“No one is asking you to die,” he said gruffly, rubbing his arm. “I think you’ll find my plan is far more practical than that. I believe there’s an ethical way to bring Progress to the world. Nikola and I are pioneering a synthetic form of radiance.”
“It’s safe?” I asked hopefully.
“Yes,” he said with quiet conviction. “When used with proper precautions, it will be safe. Clean. We can stop the wasting if this alternative to the House’s radiance is adopted.”
“It sounds so simple when you say it that way.” My head spun. It was more than the weight of his words, I realized. Every part of my body throbbed from barely surviving the night.
“I wish it were simple. Turn your face this way,” Julian said, pulling a tin of salve out of his pack. I recognized the comforting green scent as he dabbed it onto a cut on my brow.
Narrowing my eyes, I held still and allowed his surprisingly gentle touch to soothe me. “Ezra made that, didn’t he?”
“Before you call me a liar, it’s not as if I could have told you that before,” he said, sounding flustered.
Perhaps because I was overtired, I allowed myself to ask a question I never would have dreamed of asking my Senior Conductor the day before. “You didn’t simply know each other. You were lovers, weren’t you? You and Ezra?”
His hand trembled slightly as he dabbed the cool salve at a few more smaller scrapes on my forehead and my hands. “Yes,” he said simply. The solitary word held both regret and, I was startled to realize, longing.
Unsure what I was searching for, I studied his eyes. For the first time, I saw the boy he truly was—unsure, stubborn … and lonely. “How did you meet?”
“Ah. Frostbrook is a small town, as you know. We orbited each other for a while. And …” He shifted where he sat, visibly uncomfortable in a way I found hopelessly endearing. “Well. Sometimes it’s simply about needs being met. I don’t think either of us anticipated becoming … entangled. He’s …”
I caught his hand, and he froze, staring at me. “You don’t have say more,” I said. “I know.”
He looked down at our hands with a rueful smile. “I suppose you do.”
Releasing him, I murmured, “Thank you. For the salve. My head was aching.”
Julian took the sort of breath that precedes a proclamation, and I braced myself for whatever he had to say.
“I don’t—” he started, uncommonly clumsy with his words.
“I don’t feel a … connection … with girls the same way Ezra does.
He’s … his heart is more generous, I suppose.
But I … I do care for you, Appren—Josephine.
You are bold. And inquisitive. And clever. I would like to earn your trust.”
I found myself laughing giddily, my heart giving a strange thrill at the notion of finding a friend here on this empty plain, where the House could no longer tell us to guard ourselves from others. If Julian could remake Progress, surely we could also make what we wanted of our hearts.
“All right,” I said. “Start by telling me about this plan you have.”
Julian’s eyes lit up in a way I’d never seen before. It made him look younger and far less armored. “How much do you know about the Continental Exposition?” he asked.