“Well, the way I told it, there was a lot of skillful tongue work.”
I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t contain a chuckle.
“Now, Gunner don’t look like he gossips, but trust me, he’s worse than a widow in a tea shop. He told Donny, and Donny told our Ma, and the first thing she did was cuff me about the head and tell me that a man never kisses a girl so soon into courtship. I had to confess my lyin’ so she wouldn’t think her son was a tail-chasin’ scoundrel.”
A genuine laugh slipped free. I could picture him cowering beneath Tess Colson’s scorn.
“She told me the next girl I kissed better ask for it first, or she’d find out and flog me.” He twisted my skirt up in his hand.
I grinned. “And did you honor her?”
“I waited for you to ask me in Kenton Hill,” he said. “Nearly killed me, but I waited.”
I looked up at him, his hair more overgrown than I’d ever seen it, a thickening scruff of beard shadowing his jaw. But still the same boy underneath it. Still the man I loved, even if he tried to smother it.
“You’re impossible to ignore, Nina Harrow,” he told me. “You’re cunning, and powerful. Grown men have to hide their fear around you.” He said it softly, seriously. “Whatever lies in wait here, you’ve faced worse. Remember that. You’re stronger now.”
I nodded once, a tight soldier’s nod, the kind that hid the quaking and cracking of one’s chest.
We reached the summit of Scurry and ventured inward, and imbued as I was by Patrick’s warmth, a chill slunk over my shoulders. Scurry was unchanged. Identical slate roofing conjoining one flat to the next. A sea of brick chimneys, soot-encrusted and coughing.
Scurry was twice the size of Kenton Hill, with triple the population stuffed inside its flats and all their waste dumped in the alleys. There were no hanging lanterns, no gleaming pipeworks, trolleys, canals, drains. No cobblestones or flower boxes. Just the flat exteriors of homes, and then, farther inward, the shop fronts, the trading post, the church, and the school in the westernmost part of Scurry.
We passed a bulletin board, its notices peeling away from the cork in reproach. Upon it, over and over again, was my face.
Did the House expect I’d return here after I’d disappeared seven years ago? I supposed most people’s first thought in times of trouble was home.
And I had to admit, there had been those awful nights where I’d lain awake, suffocating in fear, and I’d thought of this town. Dreary as it was, there was comfort in the familiar. Still, I’d never returned.
“Never did get this far out, did we, Pat?” John said casually. “Ground’s too fuckin’ unstable for tunnels.”
“Too many coppers, besides,” Patrick replied. “Crawlin’ with ’em. Always was. Too much terranium lyin’ about for it to go unguarded, or at least there used to be.”
“Reckon all those hats ain’t got much to do nowadays,” John muttered.
And indeed, the town did seem to have an air of complacency about it. There was an eerie silence. A hum of activity now missing, the miners short of terranium and the coppers short of remit.
A man passed on horseback, and a woman with three baskets stacked one on top of the other overtook them. A group of grubby-looking men stood clustered on a stoop, lighting three cigarettes with one match. They kept their noses down, their eyes never wandering, not even to the young boy who sat a few feet from them up against the bricks with his hat out for coins, his feet bare and his gloves bitten through. A skinny dog lay at his side, one stray warming himself against another.
“Poor bloody kid,” John muttered too loudly, patting his pockets for coins he didn’t have. “Ain’t they got hearts in Scurry?”
Bleeding hearts bleed out, my father used to say, and he wasn’t often right,but about this he might have been. There were too many hungry mouths in Scurry to feed. “We’ll pass a dozen more yet,” I muttered.
A few paces later, there were two more, then a whole family. “Bloody hell,” John cursed, shaking his head. “Can’t imagine a place that don’t take care of their own.”
I wanted to tell him that the people here were so troubled by their own poverty that it was dangerous to take on the burden of another’s. The drowning often drowned their rescuers. But in truth, there wasn’t much to be said in defense of Scurry. I had once knocked on doors that refused to open, pleaded with strangers who ignored me.
“We headed to a hotel?” he asked. “A pub?”
I shook my head. “They’ll be full of police.”
“Where then?” John insisted, rubbing his chapped hands together. “Wouldn’t mind a nip.”
I sighed, turning a corner I hadn’t believed I’d ever take again. Past Mrs. Penhaligon’s and my childhood neighbor’s.
“Where are we headed?” Patrick asked warily, though I was sure he already knew. There was never another place to hide when I was a kid. Stood to reason it would be no different now.
“To call on my father,” I said. “If he isn’t yet dead.”
