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Fire. Karigan racked her brain, trying to remember something about fire. Floating in it. The images were dreamlike, vague. Perhaps they really were from a dream.
“The Inspectors became very distracted and most left,” Mirriam said. “I used that distraction to escape.”
“Escape?”
“To a safe place, naturally. And this is where your story, and Mr. Harlowe’s, and the professor’s, come in.” Mirriam appeared to know that part of it from Cade, who had found Karigan already unconscious on the mill floor just after the professor had drugged her. “They’d begun to argue,” Mirriam said. “Argue about you and what the professor had done, but they were interrupted by another team of Inspectors trying to break in to the mill.”
She described how the professor had led Cade to a secret escape route out through the tailrace tunnel. “Mr. Harlowe carried you all the way.”
The heat stoked to furnace proportions in Karigan. He’d carried her? All the way? She remembered something of tunnels but nothing of being carried.
“There was a boat stashed at the outlet,” Mirriam continued, explaining how they’d been washed into the river when the mill exploded.
“The mill exploded?” Karigan said. “How?”
“The professor, the fool of a man, must have decided his artifacts were too precious to come into the hands of the emperor, so he chose to destroy them first. He lit the mill on fire, and black powder finished it off.”
Karigan gaped at Mirriam, unable to believe the professor would do such a thing to the old objects he so loved. “Where is he? The professor? Do the Inspectors have him?” If they did, it would be only a matter of time before they forced him to spill his secrets.
“Oh, dear girl.” Mirriam reached for Karigan’s hands. “The old fool died in the fire.”
“Gods.” Karigan reeled, and it wasn’t just the result of what the morphia had done to her. Her hands shook, and Mirriam squeezed them.
“Yes, it is a shock.”
Of course the professor died in the fire, Karigan thought. He would not have burned his artifacts and then gone on himself. They’d given him meaning, a touchstone to the past. He’d been their guardian, and he had failed.
“Gods,” she murmured again.
“He never understood,” Mirriam mused, “that we did not need the past for us to create a new, better future. He got lost in the history, I think.”
Karigan saw him clearly in her mind, the professor with his wolfish features, wearing his dapper tweed. She remembered him showing her his artifacts, the pride with which he regarded them. She remembered him inundating her with questions about what various objects were for, what they did. He had not really been her uncle, and he’d betrayed her in the end, but she’d grown very fond of him almost as if he really were her uncle. A sometimes distant, mercurial uncle, but he’d protected, sheltered her, even trusted her with many of his secrets. It was hard to balance that with the man who had tried to force her to stay in Mill City against her will. Except . . .
He had redeemed himself, really, by allowing Cade to carry her out so she might survive and try to reach her home. The professor must have known she would try.
But by then, it was, by his own measure, all over.
She tried not to think of what might have become of her if the Inspectors had not come for him, if there’d been no fire. Would she still be his captive? She did not wish to remember him that way.
“Miss Goodgrave?” Mirriam asked in a surprisingly gentle voice.
Karigan sniffed and rubbed away tears. The morphia hadn’t cut the pain of his loss.
“Do not grieve overmuch,” Mirriam said. “He chose his path, and he took several Inspectors and Enforcers with him in the conflagration. They will not be so easy to replace.”
Karigan only half heard, through the combined haze of grief and morphia, Mirriam finish the tale of how Cade had brought her down the river in a rowboat and finally to Jax’s place. Her thinking grew ever more cloudy, and when she started to slide away into blissful nothingness, Mirriam shook her.
“Not now. We must ready you for Mr. Harlowe’s return.”
“Where is he?”
“Preparing to do what the professor never could.”
MILL NUMBER FIVE
Cade and Jax entered the silent mill lugging tool boxes, both of them disguised in nondescript work clothes. It was, at least, a disguise for Cade, if not so much for Jax, who was a carpenter. It was odd seeing the two hundred looms still and silent, the metallic exoskeletons of machines in their perfect rows, all threaded, with finished cloth wound around the rollers. No belts and pulleys whirred in endless cycles, no turbine churned in the depths beneath the mill, no slaves tended the machines.
At the far end of the mill floor, however, an argument between two men erupted in the silence. One man, the mill owner, wore a fine-tailored suit, the other, Inspector red. Cade and Jax did not approach, but kept a respectful distance. There was no need to get any closer to an Inspector than was necessary.
“I will not release the rest of my slaves to that excavation,” Mr. Greeling, the mill owner shouted. “Three of the mills in this one complex alone are shut down due to Silk’s project, and the Water Power Authority is threatening to cut me off altogether if I’m not at full capacity. This is costing hundreds of thousands in losses, do you understand?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Greeling, but you must release the slaves to us tomorrow, by imperial order.” With that, the Inspector turned on his heel and left the mill owner fuming.
