And then I did.
When I woke, I was fairly certain only a little bit of time had passed. I was still in the bed with Julian, though Ezra was nowhere to be found.
Julian, now sitting up, stared down at me. I hadn’t noticed before that he was wearing a nightgown and looked very silly in it. “What did you do?” he asked impatiently.
He sounded so gloriously like himself. Whatever I’d meant to say dissolved into a choked sob of relief.
“Oh no,” Julian said, waving his hands in the air around my face. “Oh. Stop.”
“You’re back,” I managed to say, hiccuping.
Cringing, he nodded. “I am. Though I feel quite rearranged.” Swallowing, he asked rather accusingly, “Were you rummaging around in my mind?”
“I wasn’t rummaging as much as … repairing,” I said. “They did something terrible to you in the catacombs.”
“Stop—” Julian shuddered, his breath catching. He shook his head, and it looked frighteningly similar to the way he’d shied away from us in the cell where they’d left him alone, broken. “Not yet.”
I clasped his forearm, silently promising to tread more carefully. “Of course,” I whispered.
He didn’t shake off my grip. “And what happened here?” he asked, gesturing at my thigh, where blood was seeping through the bandage and staining my clothes.
“The Elders didn’t have radiance. They were impostors all along. And one of them shot me. And nearly killed Ezra, but you …” I searched his expression for signs of distress.
“Go on,” he urged.
“You saved him.”
“Are you saying I killed an Elder of the House of Industry?” Julian asked, clearly amazed.
I couldn’t help grinning. “There is no House of Industry.”
His eyes widened, but before he could ask another question, Nikola slammed the door open and threw herself onto Julian. Ezra followed her in and narrowed his eyes when he spotted my reopened wound.
I surrendered to the resulting chaos, to a sensation I’d never known until now:
Joy.
In the weeks following Julian’s reawakening, we fell into a rhythm of quiet domesticity.
Julian worked day and night in Nikola’s laboratory, sleeping only when he tired himself out. He didn’t want to talk about what hadhappened to him in the catacombs, so we waited, giving him space to heal in the sorts of ways that no amount of magic could hasten.
Sometimes he woke up screaming, and in the hazy aftermath of his nightmares, he’d whisper things that were far worse than what I’d imagined. The man who’d tortured him had died too fast. I told him that.
“You think you have an unlimited capacity for violence,” he’d said in return, exhausted and curled up between me and Ezra in the dark. “But you do not. I am glad for you that it was quick.”
I resolved not to tell him what Master Hayes’s death had been like. But in my bruised soul, I knew he was right.
While Nikola and Julian worked on the very beginnings of widespread infrastructure for electricity, Ezra and I took on the arduous task of healing the Generators. It was much more difficult than it had been to fumble my way through repairing Julian’s mind. I’d had the benefit of knowing Julian, whether he’d wanted to be known or not. Sifting through a stranger’s shattered mind was like walking blindfolded through a room full of glass sculptures. But once Ezra became more familiar with the process, he took on more of the strange labor of it, and I stopped passing out every time we succeeded.
The children were the easiest to heal. Their young minds were malleable in a way that felt more like strolling through tender shoots of grass than navigating a twisting, fathomless maze.
After our first successful attempt with one of the adults, we’d learned that all of them had been subjected to the procedure at such an early age that they were more or less children in a world that had gone on without them. Ezra developed a routine for each reawakening, careful not to overwhelm them. He’d spend days warming them up to new people and new sensations—to the very notion that they were free, with free will.
By the fourth awakening, I could see the toll it was taking on him.
I decided to enlist help.
Calling on Gertrude was easy, considering she’d taken up residence in the Far Bank only a few blocks away from Nikola. Several boarding houses had offered rooms to refugees from the House. Tabitha and Grace, having returned to Sterling City in the aftermath of the House’s fall, were sharing a modest room with her.
