Water pooled on the stone floor and spread down the hall and under the doorways. It surrounded my boots, but it wasn’t deep yet. Julian didn’t acknowledge it when it reached his knees and shins and wet his trousers. My attention caught briefly on the blisters on his feet. Blisters he’d never acknowledged on our long walk together. They were raw and healing poorly.
Watching how slowly the water crept in, I changed my mind about the mercy of drowning.
“Ezra,” I called out softly. “Are you flooding the catacombs? I can make it quicker for them. Just tell me.” My voice cracked with grief. “It won’t take me long to kill us all.”
“No one is drowning!” Ezra said with a roar of exertion. “I’ve almost got it.”
A loud, teeth-rattling groan sounded, and the cables bent toward us, their protective covering cracking and making the water and the radiance sizzle and steam.
“Careful!” I shouted at Ezra in a panic. “Liquid conducts radiance. You’re standing in the water.”
“I’ve almost got it,” Ezra said stubbornly. He was soaked head to toe from the flow raining from the ceiling.
After dashing to the corner of Julian’s room, I hooked my hands under the edge of a wooden cot and dragged it, levering it out the door as quickly as I could, dizzy with nauseating dread. I had mere seconds. The knowledge that Ezra was about to stop his own heart with radiance gave me more strength than should have been left in my weary body. “Here!” I screamed, pushing it close enough for him to leap onto it.
Without sparing me a look, Ezra took two long strides and jumped onto the cot just as the cables snapped completely and crashed onto the wet floor. Radiance glowed like spiderwebs, spreading eagerly through the pooled water, bouncing around as if gleeful to have been freed. It stung me through my boots with a current so strong, it would have instantly killed Ezra.
“I got it,” Ezra said belatedly, carefully keeping his balance as he eyed the rapidly fading flow of radiance on the floor all around the cot. His gaze jerked up at a cry from within Julian’s cell.
I turned in time to see Julian patting the sphere in distress, his radiance snapping as it ricocheted back against his palms. He shook his head in distraught disbelief and moaned.
I approached him. “Julian.”
He looked up at the sound of my voice, his expression betrayed—and painfully wary.
“It’ll be all right,” I said weakly.
“Can I get down now?” Ezra asked, raising his voice over the water splashing from the ceiling in steady rivulets.
The puddle at my feet wasn’t stinging me anymore. I crouched and touched it, ensuring that no current of radiance remained. “You’re safe now,” I told him, hearing the immediate slosh of his footsteps as he came up behind me.
Julian shied back when he saw Ezra. He glanced between us and the sphere, his body tense and his eyes wide and scared.
“This conduction surface is broken,” I told him slowly. “I will take you to one that’s not broken. And that will feel better.” Lying felt horrendous, but being seen as a threat felt worse. I extended my hand. “It’s all wet down here, too. Let’s go get dry.”
As Julian stared at my hand, we heard footsteps and door hinges creaking. Pushing Ezra behind me, I cautiously glanced back out into the hallway. All the doors were open, and one by one, Generators stepped out into the puddles, each barefoot and dressed in dirty clothes that must have been white at one point. They varied in age from people who appeared to be in their thirties all the way down to two children who didn’t seem any older than six or seven. Shuffling through the water, the Generators looked haunted, lost. No one appeared relieved to have been freed of their duties.
All of them had scars on their foreheads matching Julian’s.
A little boy—the smallest of them all—approached me first, his palms outstretched and his face streaked with tears and dirt. I recognized the hunger on his gaunt face from the foundling home, but I knew he wasn’t hungering for food. He wanted to return to his work.
“They’ve done something to make themneedto release their radiance,” I said under my breath to Ezra. To the boy, I said, “We’re going to go somewhere else together. You can generate there, and it won’t be cold or wet.”
I expected a child to warm to the prospect of getting dry and comfortable, but the boy only thrust his palms toward me demandingly. Hoping dearly that they understood me, somehow, I called out to all of them, “Did you hear me? We are moving to a different facility. You can generate there.”
Turning back to ask Ezra for help, I saw that he’d managed to get Julian to his feet. He was holding him carefully by the elbow, and it reminded me of the older couple I’d seen on my train trip to Frostbrook. The woman had guided her wife so tenderly. Though there’d never been doubt in my mind that Ezra still loved Julian, it was clearer now than ever.
“That’s good,” Ezra was saying in a low, soothing tone. “You’re doing so well. Let’s get everyone dry. It’s too wet down here to work, see?”
I couldn’t consider whether the effects of the Indicator’s procedure were permanent. I couldn’t let my mind go there. Instead, I put my hand on the little boy’s shoulder and directed him toward the stairs at the far end of the hall. Both dead men lay on the floor, and I hoped the Generators didn’t register them as anything but sleeping … very deeply.
“You’ll be the leader,” I said, recalling the way we’d marched to the dining hall together as little girls. “Everyone is going to follow you. I’ll help you up the stairs. That’s a good boy. Yes! One foot after the other.”
Jogging ahead, I grabbed Master Hayes by the ankle and tried to drag him out of the way. He was surprisingly slight, but much heavier than I was, and I groaned, digging my heels in. It was right then, as I was tugging him with all my might, that two little girls poured down the stairs like a waterfall, took one look at me, and started screaming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“He’s asleep,” I said hurriedly. “He’s only asleep.” Saying it twice didn’t make it any more convincing. It was pretty clear I was trying to cover up a murder. Or at least make the murder less of an obstacle.
