Chapter Sixty-Five Nina
The shop across the way had once been a confectionary. The lady who owned it would spare me a butterscotch toffee every so often, if I looked forlorn enough.
Now the windows were barred and the lettering read FULTON brOKERS. A kid slept beneath it, back pressed against the coal bin, which had no doubt gone cold in the night.
I crossed to her.
She was maybe twelve. A twelve-year-old who wouldn’t board a train to the city and attend her siphoning ceremony. What did the boys and girls of the brink hope for now, if not the scratch of a Scribbler’s letter? If not the prospect of magic?
The girl slept with her ruddy face half hidden in blanket. I took off my coat and laid it over her.
Scurry was waking around me. Doors opening, reluctant feet dragging. I backed away from the girl and stumbled over the pile of newspapers, still bound in twine at the stoop of the brokers.
“Shit,” I mumbled, righting myself before I fell. I looked down at them.
The headline blared back at me.
NEW TERRANIUM FOUND IN THE brINK
And there was something about the energy in the air. Some change in Scurry. The doors that opened snapped back on their hinges. Voices called loudly down the lane. Feet ran, bolted.
A siren wailed.
“RAID!” called a far away voice. “RAID!”
My stomach fell away. No, I thought.
And I could picture that train rattling down its tracks, thundering into the station, the platform teeming with soldiers, just as the square in Kenton Hill had.
“Raid!” more screamed, bashing their fists on doors. “Raid!”
And I ran. I ran and collided with bodies, everyone scrambling in the opposite direction, some half dressed, still in housecoats, feet bare. When the sirens blared here, all of Scurry ran for the river.
I ran for the alley, for where I’d last seen Patrick, tearing through the stream of people, but as its mouth reared up, another body met with mine, this one shoving me sideways.
I fell, my head hitting the icy ground.
“Got her, Kicker!” A shout. Something heavy pressing into my back, pinning me down. “She’s here, Kicker!”
All the air squeezed from my lungs. I tried to cry out and couldn’t.
The siren heightened, growing louder, more insistent.
The lane was full of pounding feet, none of them stopping for me. I tried to free myself, my fingernails digging into the dirt.
Then the weight was gone, replaced by a hand on the scruff of my neck, a vise on my hair and collar, pulling me off the ground. I cried out, and it was drowned in the chaos.
Harland stood before me, his face so close I could see the flecks of color in his irises.
Smell the fury on him. “Now, where’re you goin’?
” he growled, teeth bared. Years of drinking showed in the veins of his cheeks, rivers of them.
He looked rabid. “Fuckin’ worthless swank!
” He struck me. I didn’t see from which direction it came, only felt the slosh of my brain collide with my skull, saw the light burst in my vision, felt the pain moments later.
“Where’s Colson?” Harland yelled. “Eh? Where the fuck is he?”
My lips sealed themselves shut. I wouldn’t give him another fucking thing. I pulled at his arm uselessly, but he held me too close. I reached outward, visualized dirt rising up and funneling into his eyes and nose and mouth. But he struck me again, and I lost my hold on it.
“Little birdie John Colson told us you sent a little scribble to the House. Bringin’ the fuckin’ army into my parish!
” he said, spit flying over my mouth, into my eyes.
He pulled a blade from his pocket and held it against my neck.
“Told us you were plannin’ to cut us out.
But I’m thinkin’ the House will make some nice concessions in exchange for their earth Charmer. You ain’t cuttin’ me out, Harrow!”
He turned his head to someone out of sight. “Find John Colson,” he growled. “He’ll have Patrick in hand by now.”
There were hands at my legs picking me up, men on my arms, taking me away. Away from the alley and Patrick.
They dragged me down the middle of the lane one foot at a time as I struggled to remain awake. I fought against the rising black tide threatening to swallow me.
My hair was yanked back wrenching my neck painfully. A blow hit my side. I blinked, panted.
Residents came to their doors to peer at the commotion.
“Please,” I called weakly. “Help me.”
But there had never been any help in Scurry. They locked their jaws and averted their eyes the moment they saw Kicker. The sirens churned on.
And I was ten years old again, knocking at each house and begging for scraps.
I was eleven and fishing through their garbage bins.
My own uncle dragged me on limp legs as my doped father faded away in the same house my mother had left me in, and there was no help in this world.
You didn’t get what you deserved, you got whatever was handed down by those more powerful.
You lost what you weren’t willing to take.
They carried me all the way to the church, the only statue in Scurry standing before it, encrusted and blackened with mold and soot. Impossible to tell who the statue depicted. Desecrated now and left to erode, just like everything else here in Scurry.
But there was enough of it left that they could tie me to it. They could wrap rope around my ankles and stomach and bind my hands at the back of it. I heaved and screamed and felt the blackness encroach, waiting for me to fall into it, my fingers clinging to the ledge of consciousness.
Harland drew monstrous breaths from the air, possessed by something I couldn’t hope to fight. “Those fuckers can try,” he declared, foaming with rage, “but they can’t run us out of our own fuckin’ town!”
Idium was suddenly there in my veins, awakening while the rest of me went under.
“And I’m bettin’ they can’t lose the key to their fuckin’ vault, can they?”
Me. I was the key.
Then something sharp sliced through, something horribly familiar: the feeling that I had been stripped away to raw materials, that I was a tool. A piece of machinery. A weapon.
In another lifetime, hundreds of years ago, a woman not so different from me stood here, tied as I was, when this place was still full of wildflowers. And she let the ground devour the men who came to take her.
The church loomed. The same one my mother dragged me to every week to pray to Idia, to beg her for something more.
We’re meant for bigger things, Ma whispered.
“Fuckin’ witch!” my uncle spat.
Hide, hide the witches…
Then, one last voice. Patrick’s.
Bury them all.
There was no part of me that hadn’t been stripped and cut and picked to the bone.
Wet lips at my ear now, panting into it. “I’ll set you on fuckin’ fire if I’ve got to.”
I laughed. “Then let me be fire.”
I closed my eyes.
At first, it started as it always did. A tremble in the earth that might have passed as a figment of imagination. But it grew.
It grew until my mind expanded beyond its bounds, frequencies ringing to holy hell. My blood screaming, rejoicing.
It grew until my captors’ voices became distant, the rot of their breath dissipating.
I heard the screams rise, and it intertwined with the ringing. A symphony.
The earth shook and feet pounded as though we were all the contents of a jar, picked up and rattled, and in my mind, or perhaps in reality, I saw them run from me, looking over their shoulders as the first cracks split the earth beneath that cursed church, then through the lane.
The fissure spread down the street, dividing the houses, then branched off in new directions, weaving through the town like tributaries of a giant river.
The sound was monstrous, cataclysmic, the tearing of the town so violent even the buildings screamed. The church toppled in on itself like it was made of paper.
Then, silence.
The ground stilled, Scurry now cleaved in two.
And I let out a scream that had long been trapped in my lungs, gave flight to it. I looked down at the crevasse in the earth before my feet. And I thought of how cruel it was that I couldn’t simply step into it and let the ground swallow me, no matter how hard I pulled at my bindings.
But then came the only voice that might bring me back from the edge.
“Nina!” it called.
And finally, finally, I crumbled.