He was slumped in the mud, his shirt painted to his chest with blood. Slow-blinking, arms limp, his teeth chattered with cold. Worse still, the blue in his eyes, not yet deadened by the dark. Still hoping.
A soldier kicked the sole of Patrick’s boot and shouted at him to stand. He barely seemed to notice.
His eyes were drowning me.
Behind us, his town and his people were patching up bullet holes and stitching gashes. The dead were awaiting their graves. The runaways were likely rising from the tunnels and being greeted by the barrels of more guns, more soldiers. The Artisans had taken everything they needed from Kenton Hill. They had the last Alchemist. They had the earth Charmer.
And Patrick had no one but me.
I held him as though he were a sinking raft. I gritted my teeth. “I can’t.”
Blue turned to ice—his one remaining hope, snuffed out. He pivoted sharply out of my grasp.
But not before I saw the agony.
“Then get away from me.”
And a tether between me and him snapped. Perhaps the final one. I felt the ricochet down to my core.
Someone grasped my shoulders and pulled me back, and in the mess of my breaking heart I flung wildly, turning to push them away, to fight and scratch and claw. To me, every one of these navy blue uniforms was Lord Tanner, the leader of the House himself. All this was his doing.Hisfault.
But the person who handled me spoke softly. He gripped my wrists to keep me from tearing out his eyes. “Shhh, Nina! Stop!Stop!” Theo’s face hovered in the gloom, one eye swollen shut, the other pleading. “They’ll knock you out, Nina. Please.” His eyes flittered to the soldiers standing on every side, grappling for sense in the dark.
“Tie her up!” one shouted. “She’s rabid. Get me some fucking rope!”
Theo gripped the sides of my face harder than he ever had. He pierced me with a stare so forceful that I had no choice but to focus on the edges of him, expanding and retracting in the glow. He spoke clearly, an anchor in his voice. “We’ll figure it all out,” he told me. “I promise you, we’ll find a way.”
And then we were wrenched apart again, and a sack was pulled over my face, my hands were tied, and several shouts echoed. Shoving. Grunting. The toes of boots glancing my heels.
The walls groaned their reproach. My fingers itched with the urge to pull them inward, to bury all of us.
But especially me.
Yes. Especially me.
The tunnel ended somewhere under Gilmore.
The infantry had dug themselves a crude hole all the way down to reach it, rope ladders dangling freely on every side, and I was permitted my sight to climb to the surface.
“Go on,” said a soldier with an overflowing neck. He smacked my arse before my foot could find the first rung. “Up you go.”
I spat at his boots, and he jumped back in disgust.
I was sure I would slip and fall at every rung. My limbs felt too feeble for climbing. Each time I blinked upward, the surface seemed impossibly far away.
I was dragged out by more unwanted hands, my front hauled over pebble and dirt, and I stumbled to my feet, immediately looking around for Patrick or Theo before someone thought to blindfold me again.
I saw neither among all the navy. Two soldiers gripped either arm, the heavy-necked one and another, and I was frog-marched into the sea of soldiers, some of them trading canisters, others finding damp cigarettes in their pockets and trying to light them in vain.
“She’s a pretty one,” said the toad. I feared from his position he could see down my blouse. “Ain’t she?”
“Shut up, Luderman,” said his comrade, repositioning his grip on my arm. “She’s the earth Charmer. It don’t matter what else she is.”
And yet, the toad’s eyes remained on the split buttons below my neck.
We climbed knolls of no discerning marks until a steam train loomed ahead, on tracks bracketed by hills. The swarm of navy blue cascaded down the slopes toward it.
I was loaded into a carriage with no seats, no benches. Just rotting wooden walls and floors, a bucket in the corner that smelled strongly of urine. Theo and Patrick were loaded in after me, the latter dragged, the three of us made to sit at different corners of the carriage, our hands tied by rope and looped through cattle rings.
