Lord Shop did not balk, but I thought I saw his lips thin. “So, then, it’s an impasse, Mr. Colson, because you see, we both have too much to lose.”
There was a scuffle from behind them, and two more men came into view. One was a fire Charmer, by the glowing red of his hands. The other was John, the side of his face badly burned. A rope of fire wrapped around his neck, not yet touching his skin, but slowly burning it. John’s face was mottled red and suffused in sweat. It dripped into his eyes and stained his shirtfront. He sucked breath through his teeth. “Teddy,” he heaved, lengthening his neck to keep his chin from the fire. “Don’t suppose you got any water handy?”
The barrel of Patrick’s gun swung instead to this new fire Charmer, an older man, his hand held lazily in front of him with the arrogance of skill and decades of practice. He did not flinch at the revolver pointed at him.
“Let him go,” Patrick said evenly.
“In just a moment,” Lord Shop said.
John panted, moaned in pain. The skin on his neck glowed.
“You’ll be on your way,” Lord Shop said. “The Scribbler and her books come with me. And I’m sure”—here he looked toward Polly and her ruined hands—“that she’ll be amenable in rewriting the translations.”
“You have no use for me,” Theodore said, pulling uselessly at his arms. The officers tightened their grip. “And I won’t go back.”
“You’re right, in one regard at least,” Shop said. “I’d rather have the Alchemist instead, but I doubt Nina would make the trade.” He was inquiring me now, his brow lifted. Waiting.
A trade?Patrick for Theo? My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I said nothing.
John groaned. Polly wept.
Shop nodded knowingly. “I thought as much. I daresay, Theodore, that you’ve rather outstayed your welcome.”
Theo looked at me for a moment, and something in my expression must have solidified this, because he stopped struggling. He looked down at the marble floor.
I felt suddenly subsumed by guilt. The walls distended.
John cursed loudly. “Patty!” he begged.
“Let him go,” Patrick said. “And we’ll be on our way.”
Lord Shop nodded to the fire Charmer, who curled his fingers inward, and the rope of flames around John’s neck vanished.
“I suspect we’ll see each other again soon,” Shop told Patrick, the ghost of a smile touching the corners of his mouth. “When the time is right.”
Patrick pulled me back, and I resisted, my eyes latched on to the book and the cypher. “You won’t reach the Seam,” I said, teeth gritted. Idium undulated within me—thin but ravenous, stretching veins and expanding my mind. “Not without me.”
“Perhaps,” Lord Shop said, nodding, as though this were a meeting and he was examining the facts. “But I believe in innovation. In progress. Where one door refuses to open, another can be carved.” He stepped around his officers, close enough to stand inches from Patrick’s gun, as though he knew the chamber held no bullet. “In the meantime, I suggest you dig yourself a hole deep enough that even the worms cannot find you, or summon the courage to put his gun in your mouth and fire. Because there are plenty of ways to break ground, girl, and the day you outlive your usefulness to me will be the end of this war.”
He looked faceless in that moment. He could have been a Crafter or Artisan, the devil himself. Futility descended, spirals of it circling my entire being until my fingers curled in and my rib cage folded.
He must have been stark raving mad if he thought I’d blow myself away and not bring him with me.
“Nina, we have to go.”
In the square, the clock tolled, the hole in me widened, everything toppling into it.
Patrick had hooked his arm around my chest and was hauling me away. No matter how hard I fought, I couldn’t seem to break free. Theo and Polly, the cypher and the translations, they were becoming further from reach.
“Don’t do it, Nina,”Patrick begged.
Shop had the audacity to smile from a distance. “Get my son out of here,” he ordered his Charmers.
But not soon enough. In my veins, the idium exalted, and I felt the earth beneath all that marble awaken. The ground heaved. Marble cracking. A titanic groan shook my middle ear, and the great labyrinth of shelves teetered.
The first seemed to wobble and overcorrect, and Patrick froze in his bid to drag me out. They each stilled and watched in horror as the shelves swayed back and forth, and then, finally, they fell, crashing into the next row. Hundreds of books rained down.
“RUN!” John bellowed.
