One of the professors at the House had insisted that giving oneself a confident lecture had a positive impact on the brain. The workings of my brain made little sense to me, but I’d given it a try now and then ever since. She’d always carried herself with a quiet serenity, as if untouched by anger. Even when we’d deserved a raised voice or a strike across the knuckles.
The room seemed to darken as I recalled the day resistors had shot her in the street. My class was in the dining hall when they carried the victims in—some dead and some dying, all bloodied and broken from rifle ammunition. Why they thought killing six of us would make a difference was beyond me. The Children of Industry were five hundred strong, with more of us identified each day. All the attack had done was raise sympathy for the Conductors who carried Progress to the masses in their calloused hands.
I studied my own hands. Short nails. Scars from blisters. Shiny rough places. A scrape on one knuckle. Could I have killed the resistors before they’d shot me down? I’d have wanted to. I’d have tried.
Abruptly wanting to confess to Gertrude that I was once again fantasizing about being a Transistor, I found myself scraping tears from my lashes. The room was too quiet, devoid of sparkling laughter and cutting gossip and the whisper of fabric as we all tossed and turned in our beds. We’d never been entirely alone.
It was a long while until sundown, and Julian hadn’t given me any directions beyond supplying him with meals, so I freshened my face and dampened the back of my neck in the washroom. I removed the unnecessary layer of petticoats under my skirt and set off to explore more of Frostbrook without my bag weighing me down or a small child shadowing me.
I wasn’t indulging in curiosity. I was doing my due diligence. If I was meant to serve this little community, I had to become familiar with it.
In the busy courtyard, the Mission’s pack mule tossed its head restlessly, watching the bustle of activity. Men worked with their shirts tied ’round their waists, and the women—fewer in number—had their sleeves rolled up past the elbows. I’d heard that here in the country, women could take on tasks that were considered too harsh by older generations. Hopefully that meant I wouldn’t get as many sidelong looks as the female Conductors did in the city, where old ways lingered despite the roaring engine of Progress. While the Elders of the House of Industry were all men, they’d given opportunities to female professors and girls like me, who had a chance to eventually run Missions.
Though, now that I considered it, the boys in my class had been assigned to more of the larger Missions in the bigger cities than the girls had. I willed back a gnawing twinge of concern. There was no sense in questioning the Elders now. I couldn’t be farther away from them.
No one spared me a glance as they formed a human chain to haul bricks. It wasn’t my place to help, but I felt useless and lazy simply watching and hurried away to the riverbank, where several rafts were tied to a massive dock that extended to the deeper water. Here, the mechanisms of an old ox-crank crossing remained next to the new construction. Eventually, this would all be radiance powered and would make it easy to cross the river year-round—on rafts in the summer and sledges in the winter. All without requiring man or beast.
I strolled out onto the dock. Swooping pine boughs cast shadows that cooled the breeze. Obscured from the workers on the other side of the Mission, I crouched and removed my shoes and stockings and tiedmy skirt into a thick knot at my knee. Then I sat on the edge of the dock and dipped my ankles into the frigid water.
“Starlight,” I swore, hissing. I’d expected a chill, but this was a different kind of freezing. The kind that could numb your limbs and your mind before you remembered how to swim. I swirled my feet in the water with a grimace and tried not to think about how it would feel to be submerged in the painful cold.
“There’s a hot spring a few miles upstream,” someone with a laughing voice said, startling me. “You might prefer it.”
Yanking my bare feet out of the water and tucking them under my skirt, I whirled around to find a tall boy pushing a raft up to the dock with a pole twice his height. Water curled around the raft, kicking up through the slats as he angled the wobbly pole against the rocky bottom to maneuver. He was lanky but strong. When a swift eddy caught the raft, submerging the upriver edge of it, he widened his stance and shifted the long pole. The river seemed to swell beneath the raft, righting it.
He wore linen trousers cuffed at his knees and a threadbare blue shirt the color of the sky at noon. Sweat ringed his collar, made the thin fabric stick to his skin.
I caught myself staring at his arms and looked away long enough to mutter, “You’d have me boil myself?”
“You won’t boil. It mixes with snowmelt, so it’s more like a pleasant bath.”
I had the sneaking suspicion heactuallyused it as a bath, which sent my imagination spinning before I could stop myself from picturing him swimming naked like an unruly otter. A blush betrayed me.
“You don’t need to hide your feet,” he went on, working as he spoke. He hopped off the raft and tied it to a wooden cleat neatly with soft hemp rope. The raft creaked as it settled against the wood and the rag-covered bumpers on the edge of the dock. He gave it an affectionate sort of pat, as if greeting a horse, and pushed his brown curls out of his eyes.
His suntanned white skin spoke of a life spent outside. As I studied him, his full mouth hooked in a crooked smile.
“I’m not hiding my feet,” I lied, not wanting to tell him that I wasn’t used to being barefoot outside. I had no idea if toes were indecent or not. “I’m warming them up.”
“Don’t blame you.” He crouched on the dock. Close enough for me to touch his knee if I wanted to. “Would you like me to show you the hot spring?”
My eyes widened at the audacity of his invitation. “Excuse me? I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Ezra. My name is Ezra. Would you like me to show you the hot spring?”
“You don’t even knowmyname!”
“I know who you are. It’s apprentice … Conductor …” His hand extended as if asking for a favor.
I finished his sentence with an air of exasperation. “Josephine Haven.”
He echoed my name, hand still extended. “Would you like me to show you the hot spring?”
I sprang to my feet without his help and hurriedly untied the knot at my knees to release my skirt to my ankles. My hands shot to my hips, my body responding with anger before I could reason my way through a response. “Why?”
“Because you ought to know all the good places if you’re living here.”
Be careful,Ainsley had said.
