Chapter Sixty-Four Patrick
At the worker’s whistle, Nina and Patrick left the town house, Tess red-eyed and gripping a mug of tea as though the plate of the town was tipping and she would go sliding off with it.
After they buried the Seam they had just yesterday etched from the belly of the earth, Patrick would take his mother home to Kenton Hill.
They entered a quiet lane, most of Scurry not yet waking to the cold, gray light.
Newsprint was left in bundled stacks on the stoops of flats, slowly soaking in the frost. The only ones awake were the night soil man returning from his shift, a skin and bones goat tied to an iron gate, the paperboy and his satchel, pinning a new bulletin to the board in the distance.
Patrick couldn’t make the headline out from here.
Nina pulled her collar more tightly around her neck and nodded to him.
He took her freezing hand in his, buried them both in his coat pocket.
Back down into the black they’d go. Undo all they’d done.
“Pat?” said a voice.
It was John. He stood at the edge of an alley, cigarette glowing red between his lips. He pulled his hat from his head as though he were stepping into a church. Instead, he only stepped into the street.
Patrick looked away from him and kept walking.
“You ought to be halfway to the tracks,” he said.
Something wretched swelled in him again.
Something he’d hoped to keep buried until he was home and he had a room he recognized surrounding him, so he could bring war to the walls and windows and bellow all of it out.
“Train don’t leave for another hour,” he said. “I wanted to give my apology now, before I left, Pat. Please.”
Patrick came to a slow, reluctant stop, his breath fogging as his head tipped back.
“Let’s keep going, Patrick,” Nina murmured quietly from his side. “Come on.”
“You gonna make me beg, son?” John said. “A moment, and then I’m gone.”
And Patrick realized how desperate he was to hear some remorse from the man he’d followed into every dark corner of the world. A single redeemable thing. He could spare a minute.
Patrick looked down at Nina. “I won’t be long,” he said.
She looked like she might argue, but the night had been fraught enough. “Come back soon.”
“Always do.”
He left Nina at the corner, chickens pecking at her feet, an empty milk crate overturned and stacked high with broken flowerpots. She leaned against the wall there and watched him go. Hems of light fought through the gutters to find her.
Patrick looked back at her once more before he followed his father down the alley. They didn’t trail far—just around the corner and out of sight, where John lit another cigarette and passed it to Patrick.
Patrick relented. He dragged smoke into his lungs, felt the irresistible burn of it. “Lord,” he muttered, closing his eyes. It felt rapturous.
John lit his own. “I didn’t mean for any of this to take the turn it has,” he started.
“I don’t much care for what you meant,” Patrick replied. “Only what you did.”
John looked to the blanket sky. Swallows flying south. Even the birds shied away from Scurry. “I’m hopin’ that one day, you’ll understand. You’ll see that I’d do anythin’ for you boys. For your ma. I always promised you that, didn’t I? That one day we’d have everythin’.”
“You promised more than just us. You promised the Union. You promised every Crafter man and woman.”
His father said nothing to that, only flicked the ash of his cigarette to the ground. “The thing is though, Patty. All those people? They ain’t my kin. A man takes care of his own lot first.”
“Gunner nearly died in that fight in the square,” Patrick said coldly.
“Should have seen them all, Dad. Hundreds of navy blue dogs, all of ’em armed.
Fire Charmers and Smiths. So many of our own throwin’ themselves on the blades to stop them from breaking out into the lanes.
” Patrick closed his eyes on the memory.
“If he’d died. It would have been your doin’. ”
John grimaced and hung his head, finally contrite. “Walk with me,” he said.
They rounded chicken coops and garden stakes and overflowing tomato bushels. The grass here crunched underfoot, the frost setting in but not holding. The very last wilted stems of widow’s lace lay flat to the ground, red petals still somehow attached.
“That girl of yours,” John said, his breath puffing out in small clouds. “She truly is somethin’ else.”
Patrick did not show any outward reaction. He watched John pull on his cigarette.
“Will you marry her?”
“Don’t know if there’s much choice in it.”
John nodded. “Well, marriage ain’t for the faint of heart, let me tell you. Your ma? She got under my skin early on, when we were hardly grown, and she never left, you know? Not a thing I could do about it. When that fever took her—”
“That fever took her while you were venturin’ around the countryside, rallyin’ troops in a war you insisted upon,” Patrick said in a deadened way. “You should have been there.”
John looked at him with more remorse than Patrick thought him capable of.
“The thing is, Pat, I ain’t all powerful.
And I made the mistake of thinkin’ I was.
Of thinkin’ I could fix anythin’, so long as I was willin’ to do what other men wouldn’t, to accept what other men would never, never accept.
So long as I was willin’ to cross the line as many times as I had to. ”
“Now you’ve crossed so many, you can’t see straight,” Patrick said.
“Wouldn’t you do the same?” John said. “Ask yourself, what wouldn’t you do for someone you loved?”
Patrick didn’t answer. In truth, he wasn’t sure he could. He’d already done things, crossed so many of his own lines. But none of that mattered against the promises he’d made to Nina, to his mother. Promises to take care of them. What sort of man was he, if he couldn’t keep his word?
“That girl,” John was shaking his head now.
“I couldn’t have foreseen it. When you arrived at the House with Nina, you and her undid everythin’,” John wouldn’t meet Patrick’s eye now.
“You and the Charmer, boy. Neither of you were willin’ to let sense prevail when it came to her.
So, you see? You and I have made the same mistakes, son. ”
Patrick felt his blood heat, but he said nothing. He only waited. He sensed his father hanging over a cliff.
“That fuckin’ Charmer boy,” John said again. “He went and broke us out. Stole that damned book. And I knew I wouldn’t talk you out of rescuin’ her. You were too far gone already. You would’ve burned down any bridge I tried to build. It wasn’t meant to go like this, Pat.”
“What are you talkin’ about?” Patrick said, dread bubbling up in his chest. His father wouldn’t look at him.
“Two years I spent holed up in that city,” John spat bitterly.
“Two years of buildin’ somethin’ more than we’d ever dreamed of, and we only needed the key.
We needed Nina. But you’d gone and fallen in love with her.
Squandered it all for the sake of a girl.
” He shook his head. “But there’s still time to right it all, Patty.
The army were always gonna march in. They were always goin’ to take control of the Seam.
But they don’t have an Alchemist, son. They don’t have you. ”
Patrick pulled his gun from his pocket and pointed it at his father’s head. He was shaking. “What did you do?”
“I’ve salvaged us a victory,” John spat, looking maddened, like the years in captivity had finally caught up to him. “And it was my call to make, son. You ain’t the chairman. You ain’t the head of this family.”
Patrick cocked the gun. “Tell me,” he said. “Or I shoot you here, where you stand. That’ll be the line I cross.”
John rocked on his feet, the capillaries in his eyes straining. He looked once more to the sky. “You won’t, Patty. I know you won’t. Your bullets are spent. And I can’t let you bury that Seam,” he said. “One way or another, that terranium is comin’ up.”
“And you plan on forcin’ Nina’s hand?” Patrick said. “You think I’d let you?”
John shook his head manically. “I’m sorry, son. I had to do it, you understand? They need her, and we’re the ones who can deliver her to them.” Tears now, streaking into his beard.
The gun shook in Patrick’s hand. “No,” he whispered desperately.
John looked at his son as though he was seeing his own reckoning. “It’s too late, Pat,” he said. “They’re already on their way. One day, you’ll thank me.”
“You fuckin’ bastard.” Patrick lowered the gun. He meant to turn, to run back the way he’d come, back to Nina.
But John grabbed his collar in both hands, the action pleading, manic, rather than confrontational. He clapped a hand around the back of Patrick’s neck, and Patrick fought against him. “You know the funny thing, Pat?”
“Get off me!”
“No, listen! The funny thing is, your ma… she ain’t perfect, neither. She’s crossed her own lines, Patty. And I’ve looked the other way. She—”
But there was the click of a gun hammer pulling back, a shadow emerging from an alley. A figure Patrick knew like the back of his hand.
“Ma,” he muttered.
But the sound of a gunshot rent the air. Smoke blew from the muzzle of the rifle she held.
And John toppled to the ground, blood seeping from a hole in his neck. A terrible sound expelled from him. He blinked slowly, once, twice, then went completely still but for the blood gurgling out.
Somewhere overhead, birds took flight.
A siren, wrenched from the depths of Patrick’s nightmares, permeating muscle and sinew. Shaking his rib cage.
The siren wailed and wailed.
His father bled.
Tess Colson, shotgun still in her hand, looked upon her husband and did not utter a sound.