Chapter Eighteen #2
Four days into our walk, the color returned to Ezra’s lips and he stopped pressing his hand to his bandaged wound protectively. He kept up doggedly. I, on the other hand, frequently needed to pause to catch my breath and tend to my rapidly declining feet.
The hunger was the worst part. Julian hadn’t packed rations for three.
We found some quail eggs, but that hadn’t been enough to fill our bellies.
While Ezra was an expert forager, the wide plain didn’t offer much in the way of greens or mushrooms we could eat.
Every once in a while, we came upon berry bushes and filled our hands and our mouths until our fingertips were stained a deep purple.
At the crest of a hill, the wind whipped high grass into whorls that gleamed in the setting sun.
The path ahead weaved through patchy thickets of scrub leading to a tree line in the distance.
I perched on a rock, massaging my bare feet, while Ezra sprawled flat on his back and napped with the grass curling over him protectively.
“Does he tell the grass to do that?” I asked Julian, who was never far away.
Julian looked up from thumbing through a leather journal. He drew it from his pack often, never seeming to read it so much as assure himself of its existence. “I imagine he’s seeking comfort, whether he means to or not.”
“The grass doesn’t pet me when I seek comfort,” I said grumpily, while I prodded a toenail that didn’t look like it was going to survive the journey. “What’s in your journal?”
“Letters.”
“Letters in a journal?” I craned to look, and he didn’t shy away. I could quickly see why he wasn’t trying to hide it from me. The words were written in a cipher.
“I transcribed them. There are some things … things I wanted to keep.” He closed the journal and carefully tucked it back into his bag.
“Who are they from?”
“My contacts in Cascade. Maggie Taylor, her granddaughter Nikola, and from a friend at the House.” Julian hesitated at first—as if the names would shatter if he spoke them too forcefully.
But the more he went on, the more passionate he sounded.
“Maggie built a laboratory on her farm outside Cascade. Far from the House’s purview.
They’ve been building prototypes, running experiments.
You see, it’s not intelligence that will change the world.
It’s curiosity. And safety breeds curiosity. ”
“I’ve never thought about it that way,” I told him. The House of Industry had felt secure—like a fortress. The kind of place that was only safe if you followed commands and stayed in line. I hadn’t been curious enough because I’d used all my energy trying to follow the rules.
“Maggie’s created a haven for free thought.
Can you imagine?” Julian had become more animated than I’d ever seen him, his elegant hands emphasizing his words.
“No limits, no consequences for being wrong. That’s how we remake the future.
At next year’s Continental Exposition, everyone will see what science can do.
What people can achieve when they’re not afraid to try something different. ”
I could tell by the boyish excitement in his voice that he saw Cascade as not only a home for his science but a home for his heart.
The journal he carried was impractical, but I understood why he held on to a record of correspondence it would have been wiser to destroy.
It made me want to wrap my arms around him, but he didn’t seem like someone who would welcome a sudden embrace.
“I’m glad you have them,” I said, not sure if I meant the letters or the people who gave him hope.
Julian glanced at me warily, as if aware of how much he’d exposed with his sincerity. He abruptly tucked his journal into his bag. “It’s science that matters. Not sentiment.”
I glanced at Ezra pointedly. “I don’t believe you’re incapable of sentiment.”
Following my gaze, Julian drew in an exasperated breath. “Untangling ourselves from the House’s regulations is a process. It’s the same as rewiring a conduction box. There’s much to learn. And it takes … practice.”
“Are you saying you practiced with Ezra?” I asked, unable to hide a smirk. Somehow, I felt much better knowing I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen under his thrall.
“Not intentionally,” Julian said with surprising honesty. “That was a mistake. I’m sure he’d agree.”
I hummed, noncommittal. I hadn’t asked Ezra about their relationship yet.
I wasn’t ready to unravel the knot of pain between us.
With Julian, I felt comfort in knowing we’d been raised the same way.
Ezra was a wild unknown, and he’d hurt me terribly.
The wound of his betrayal and manipulation throbbed no matter how much I tried to ignore it.
“We need to press on to Cascade before we starve,” Julian added, as if he’d heard my stomach growling. He probably had. Or, as was more likely, he wanted to change the subject. “The Taylors will have plenty of food.”
“Don’t say ‘food,’” I whined, pressing my hand to my belly. “It’ll start getting ideas.”
Julian let out a tired chuckle and began to pack up the rest of his things.
“Hey.” I walked over to Ezra and nudged him with my boot. “Julian says we have to keep going.”
Watching him wake, I felt a coil of heat under my ribs. He took several seconds to orient himself, his expression warm and sleepy in a way that stole my breath. Then he shifted and winced, his hand flying to his bandages. He let out a disappointed moan. “We’re not there yet?”
“We’ll never be there if you continue sleeping every time we stop,” I said.
“I won’t get better without plenty of naps.” The amused glint in his eyes told me he’d have napped whether he needed to commune with the grass or not.
As we began to travel again, Julian led the way, pack snug against his back and his gait long and sure. I was in the middle, with Ezra trailing me like a shadow. I never allowed him to slip too far behind in case he got any ideas about resting without telling us first.
“How does it work?” I asked, tired of the silence of our endless march.
Ezra answered quickly. “How does what work?”
“You. The grass. The forest. Getting better.”
“I wish I knew.”
Julian’s head gave a curious sort of tilt, but he said nothing.
“My mother told me some things,” Ezra went on, hesitant now, as if sifting through ashes to find the words.
“Stories that had snatches of truth in them. She didn’t call us Animators, you know.
She called us witches. She’d tell me about witches letting saplings rock their babies to sleep, putting their bare feet in the dirt to feel the breath of the world. ”
I’d never been told anything nice about witches or Animators.
At the House of Industry, they were the villains, mad with the wildness of dark forests and cold winter winds.
They stole babies, buried people alive in the dirt.
They were characterized as too emotional to be properly in control of their power. Just like me.
It was one more way I’d been shaped and shamed into an unthinking tool.
I liked Ezra’s mother’s stories better.
“If she told you stories about witches, maybe she knew there were others like you out there,” I suggested softly. “Other survivors.”
“Maybe. It’s difficult for me to remember all the things she told me.
I didn’t want to listen.” His voice grew so quiet, I worried he’d stopped walking, but when I glanced back, he was nearly beside me, his gaze fixed on the weedy wheel ruts at our feet as he shuffled along.
“I think I was more powerful than her. Otherwise, she could have stopped me.”
“If you know how to make water move, why couldn’t you do it when we were on the raft?”
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out how I did that.” Ezra’s laugh was tired, void of amusement. “I can’t call to the water with the ease I can with plants. I suppose some things happen only because you don’t mean for them to happen.”
His words held a thread of significance I couldn’t grasp. “So you can’t control water?”
“I can’t control anything. I can only ask. Water is stubborn and strong. Like you. Plants are friendly.”
“Plants are friendly,” I repeated, dubious, and pointedly ignoring being called stubborn.
“They are. You’d think so if you could feel it. Sometimes it’s not like asking—it’s like being called.”
“Is that what healing is like, too?” I asked, thinking of the life he’d walked away from. His apprenticeship, the gentleness of that work.
“A little. It’s connected, right?”
“It’s likely more connected than you realize,” Julian said. “You’ve got an affinity for herbal healing and an intuition about the body. You should explore it further.”
A little pang of envy made itself known in my belly. Julian spoke as if he shared a language with Ezra. As if he had no trouble following the meandering path of Ezra’s thoughts.
Ezra let out a tired chuckle. “Yes, well, I haven’t had the benefit of instruction the way you both did.”
“We weren’t instructed,” Julian said. He’d paused, allowing us to catch up.
Impatience tightened his jaw, but I understood.
He wasn’t frustrated with me and Ezra, only at the necessity of our pace.
“We were indoctrinated. We were made to be something, not given the opportunity to step into what we were meant to be. Everything meaningful I know I had to teach myself. I had to seek the information, the same as Josephine must, now that her eyes have been opened.”
“By all means,” Ezra said, brittle, as if Julian’s irritation had infected him, “direct me to where I can seek information about Animators. Find me documentation without bias. Show me the contacts I can correspond with. I’d be happy to learn.”
“Ezra,” I said, not quite admonishing—but not hiding my surprise either. I’d only heard him speak with such venom once before, when Julian had chastised me at the Mission. I was still discovering the thorny parts of him.