Chapter Twenty-Seven #3
I was frightened. Too frightened to ask for details. Whatever state Julian was in, Ezra had not felt equipped to help him—even as an apprentice healer. If he couldn’t help, what could I possibly do?
What were we going to do?
A drop of water fell on me from the condensation on the conduction cables that ran along the ceiling. I brushed it off my cheek and ran ahead of Ezra to the only open door down the long hallway. Skidding through the doorway, I rushed inside—then froze as if I’d run up against a pane of glass.
Julian sat on the floor, barefoot and dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing at the Continental Exposition.
His waistcoat was gone, and his shirt was torn and half unbuttoned.
He had his hands on what looked like a spherical conduction pad.
Radiance flowed from his palms into the rounded surface, and he watched it with a dreamy expression. He looked … relaxed.
There were three strange oozing marks on his forehead. Perfect circles, evenly spaced.
“Julian?” I asked, sinking to crouch on the other side of the metal sphere. “Can you hear me?”
Julian glanced up, the radiance pouring from his hands unwavering. As if disinterested, he returned his attention to conducting. Generating.
“He doesn’t know us,” Ezra said behind me. Anguish made his voice hoarse and tired. “He doesn’t know who we are.”
“It must be temporary,” I said, desperate to be correct. “It’s the shock of whatever they’ve done. The Indicator mentioned a procedure.” And then, recklessly, I’d killed him before I could interrogate him and find out how to undo the damage.
“We need to get him out of here.” Ezra lowered himself kneel at Julian’s side. He touched Julian’s arm, and Julian elbowed him away as if shooing a horsefly. “Julian. You can’t stay here. You’re cold. Let’s go somewhere warmer,” he went on gently, as if speaking to one of the children upstairs.
“We don’t have time to convince him,” I said shakily. What I’d done was catching up to me. I’d killed the master of the House of Industry. “We have to figure out how to release all of them. Quickly.”
“It’s not that simple!” Ezra snapped, making me flinch. Julian seemed oblivious, his attention on his hands. Cringing apologetically, Ezra lowered his voice. “Forcing him could make this worse.”
“Not worse than the alternative.” I swallowed. “Soon, every Transistor in the House will be upon us. They’ll kill us, and Julian will be alone down here until he dies. Do you understand?”
With a grimace of acknowledgment, Ezra put his arms around Julian from behind and tried to pull him away from the sphere.
As soon as Julian’s radiance thinned and broke contact, he flailed, reaching frantically for it and trying to shrug out of Ezra’s hold.
Julian wasn’t speaking—not with words—but he whined a miserable, anxious sound that made my chest throb terribly.
“Fuck,” Ezra said, letting go of Julian and falling back heavily. He was panting and ran his hands through his hair with a gravelly frustrated cry.
Julian scrambled forward and put his hands back on the sphere. He made a wordless sound of relief and huddled closer to it, as if warming himself over flames.
I could see that Ezra was unraveling, his hand trembling as he wiped the sweat off his forehead. “What are we going to do?” he asked, staring at Julian’s back. “What did they do to him?”
“Ezra,” I said urgently, “Stay with me. Let’s think.”
Mind racing, I covered Julian’s hands with my own, not pulling him away from the conduction sphere, but instead letting him feel my touch.
His breath hitched, but he didn’t otherwise move.
I could feel the thrum of his radiance through his skin.
He’d always done such precise work. I’d never realized how much raw power he had within.
He must have narrowly avoided being made a Generator as a child.
The sphere was connected to a conduction cable bolted to the stone floor and covered in a thick protective material. I traced its path with my eyes, following it to the wall, where it crept up and out a small opening to the hallway.
“This thing is connected to those cables on the ceiling,” I said. “We have to disconnect it from the rest of the House. With nothing to channel radiance into, the metal will only heat up. It’ll hurt to do what he’s doing now.”
“The solution is hurting him?” Ezra asked, following my gaze.
“He’s not going to fight to get his hands back on the conduction surface if it burns him. I don’t like it either. But there’s no other way to get him—to get all of them—to stop generating.”
I let go of Julian and walked a few steps into the hall, studying the cables.
There were at least twenty at the thickest point, each branching off into one of the cells.
They were too well protected for me to use radiance to melt them.
And if I tried, I might cause a disruption in the flow of radiance that could damage Julian or one of the other Generators.
“We have to break the connection.” Ezra had followed me out, and I gestured, showing him the point where all the cables met and entered a narrow duct leading up to the House’s main floors. “Here.”
Another drop of water fell on me, and I brushed it away with a shudder. It felt like the Sterling River was slowly trying to reclaim this space that had been carved out so close to its bank.
Making a thoughtful sound, Ezra touched the wet spot on my cheek. Then he looked up. “There’s moisture on every wall. It’s collecting on the backside of those cables and dripping through. Stand back a little. I’m going to try something.”
With a flutter of nerves, I backed into Julian’s cell and watched Ezra from the doorway, recognizing the faraway look in his eyes as he surveyed the cables. His mouth moved silently, and I wondered what he was asking the water to do. What it was taking to convince it to listen to him.
“It’s more difficult down here,” he murmured, hunching over as if winded from running. “There’s radiance in everything. Traces of it in the water. Makes me feel muzzled.”
“What can I do?” I asked helplessly, glancing back at Julian. Oblivious, he watched his hands with a serene expression that made me want to scream until my throat bled.
“Nothing,” Ezra responded tightly. Condensation gathered into thicker beads until it abruptly poured like a drizzling rain from the cables.
“Watch your head. I don’t think this is going to be especially precise.
” Giving me no further warning, he took a step back, gesturing as if pulling an invisible rope with two hands.
He growled, and the cables creaked, bending toward him. Water flowed down in earnest.
If Ezra did something too imprecise, would he flood the catacombs with raging water from the Sterling River?
I found myself willing to accept that possibility. It would be reasonably quick for all of us. A shock of cold, a brief panic, and then an end to this torture. Mercy delivered by nature’s unfeeling might.
Water pooled on the stone floor and spread down the hall and under the doorways.
It surrounded my boots, but it wasn’t deep yet.
Julian didn’t acknowledge it when it reached his knees and shins and wet his trousers.
My attention caught briefly on the blisters on his feet.
Blisters he’d never acknowledged on our long walk together. They were raw and healing poorly.
Watching how slowly the water crept in, I changed my mind about the mercy of drowning.
“Ezra,” I called out softly. “Are you flooding the catacombs? I can make it quicker for them. Just tell me.” My voice cracked with grief. “It won’t take me long to kill us all.”
“No one is drowning!” Ezra said with a roar of exertion. “I’ve almost got it.”
A loud, teeth-rattling groan sounded, and the cables bent toward us, their protective covering cracking and making the water and the radiance sizzle and steam.
“Careful!” I shouted at Ezra in a panic. “Liquid conducts radiance. You’re standing in the water.”
“I’ve almost got it,” Ezra said stubbornly. He was soaked head to toe from the flow raining from the ceiling.
After dashing to the corner of Julian’s room, I hooked my hands under the edge of a wooden cot and dragged it, levering it out the door as quickly as I could, dizzy with nauseating dread.
I had mere seconds. The knowledge that Ezra was about to stop his own heart with radiance gave me more strength than should have been left in my weary body.
“Here!” I screamed, pushing it close enough for him to leap onto it.
Without sparing me a look, Ezra took two long strides and jumped onto the cot just as the cables snapped completely and crashed onto the wet floor.
Radiance glowed like spiderwebs, spreading eagerly through the pooled water, bouncing around as if gleeful to have been freed.
It stung me through my boots with a current so strong, it would have instantly killed Ezra.
“I got it,” Ezra said belatedly, carefully keeping his balance as he eyed the rapidly fading flow of radiance on the floor all around the cot. His gaze jerked up at a cry from within Julian’s cell.
I turned in time to see Julian patting the sphere in distress, his radiance snapping as it ricocheted back against his palms. He shook his head in distraught disbelief and moaned.
I approached him. “Julian.”
He looked up at the sound of my voice, his expression betrayed—and painfully wary.
“It’ll be all right,” I said weakly.
“Can I get down now?” Ezra asked, raising his voice over the water splashing from the ceiling in steady rivulets.
The puddle at my feet wasn’t stinging me anymore. I crouched and touched it, ensuring that no current of radiance remained. “You’re safe now,” I told him, hearing the immediate slosh of his footsteps as he came up behind me.
Julian shied back when he saw Ezra. He glanced between us and the sphere, his body tense and his eyes wide and scared.
“This conduction surface is broken,” I told him slowly. “I will take you to one that’s not broken. And that will feel better.” Lying felt horrendous, but being seen as a threat felt worse. I extended my hand. “It’s all wet down here, too. Let’s go get dry.”
As Julian stared at my hand, we heard footsteps and door hinges creaking.
Pushing Ezra behind me, I cautiously glanced back out into the hallway.
All the doors were open, and one by one, Generators stepped out into the puddles, each barefoot and dressed in dirty clothes that must have been white at one point.
They varied in age from people who appeared to be in their thirties all the way down to two children who didn’t seem any older than six or seven.
Shuffling through the water, the Generators looked haunted, lost. No one appeared relieved to have been freed of their duties.
All of them had scars on their foreheads matching Julian’s.
A little boy—the smallest of them all—approached me first, his palms outstretched and his face streaked with tears and dirt. I recognized the hunger on his gaunt face from the foundling home, but I knew he wasn’t hungering for food. He wanted to return to his work.
“They’ve done something to make them need to release their radiance,” I said under my breath to Ezra. To the boy, I said, “We’re going to go somewhere else together. You can generate there, and it won’t be cold or wet.”
I expected a child to warm to the prospect of getting dry and comfortable, but the boy only thrust his palms toward me demandingly. Hoping dearly that they understood me, somehow, I called out to all of them, “Did you hear me? We are moving to a different facility. You can generate there.”
Turning back to ask Ezra for help, I saw that he’d managed to get Julian to his feet.
He was holding him carefully by the elbow, and it reminded me of the older couple I’d seen on my train trip to Frostbrook.
The woman had guided her wife so tenderly.
Though there’d never been doubt in my mind that Ezra still loved Julian, it was clearer now than ever.
“That’s good,” Ezra was saying in a low, soothing tone. “You’re doing so well. Let’s get everyone dry. It’s too wet down here to work, see?”
I couldn’t consider whether the effects of the Indicator’s procedure were permanent.
I couldn’t let my mind go there. Instead, I put my hand on the little boy’s shoulder and directed him toward the stairs at the far end of the hall.
Both dead men lay on the floor, and I hoped the Generators didn’t register them as anything but sleeping … very deeply.
“You’ll be the leader,” I said, recalling the way we’d marched to the dining hall together as little girls. “Everyone is going to follow you. I’ll help you up the stairs. That’s a good boy. Yes! One foot after the other.”
Jogging ahead, I grabbed Master Hayes by the ankle and tried to drag him out of the way.
He was surprisingly slight, but much heavier than I was, and I groaned, digging my heels in.
It was right then, as I was tugging him with all my might, that two little girls poured down the stairs like a waterfall, took one look at me, and started screaming.