“A boy learning midwifery?” I blurted. It was my turn to laugh.
He whirled around, his cheeks flushed and bright. I nearly walked right into him and grabbed on to a sapling to keep my balance before I toppled both of us over. He opened his mouth as if to shout at me, then clamped it shut. I could hear his breath, and the intimacy of our closeness sent an unruly shiver down my back.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly, properly ashamed. “It’s only that I’ve never heard of a boy bringing babes into the world.”
“There’s more to it than that. It’s about nurturing a new life, balancing what that life needs and what the mother needs.” He spoke with sudden fervor, like he’d already forgotten I’d crossed him. He stared at the small stretch of chestnut-brown needles between our feet. “It’s about knowing which herbs are safe and which aren’t, and then how to care for infants and small children. They’re hardy in their own ways, but not the way adults are. A fever can take a child’s life in the night, when it might have only brought you or me down for a day.”
“I believe you.” I forced myself not to touch his shoulder to reassure him that I did believe him, that it was impossible not to believe that thismeant everything to him. “People need to know the things you know. I’m glad you know them.”
He lifted his gaze. “I want to make people better. Death comes early for too many.”
The breeze seemed to grow cold for a moment. Goose bumps rose along my forearms. “I know. It came for my parents,” I offered, an admission that felt like a peace treaty. I rarely spoke of them, though at the House of Industry, no one had needed to explain that their parents were long dead.
Ezra looked away as if he had something to say but decided against it. With all he’d said so far, it was difficult to imagine him withholding a single thought that crossed his mind.
Still, I didn’t press. Not when the air had become thin and cool. “Should we continue?”
He nodded and set off, his pace slower now, more measured. I found myself watching the patch of suntanned skin at the back of his neck where sweat pulled the shaggy ends of his hair into loose curls.
“When I was a young child, I wanted to be a shepherd,” I said. “I thought that napping with lambs and bumblebees sounded lovely.”
“How does being a Conductor compare?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been a shepherd. And I’ve never even met a lamb. Maybe they bite.”
When he let out a soft, breathy sound of amusement, I found myself wanting to make him do it again. “They don’t bite hard,” he said. “But you ought not grow too fond. They’re delicious.”
I echoed his laugh, testing out the sound. It eased the knot of strange tension in my chest. I’d only just met this boy, but I didn’t want him to be sad or cross with me. I knew better than to give him that power over me, but it didn’t stop the feeling from surfacing and attempting to rule my mind.
He asked nothing from me but to follow him to a good place, so what harm could it do? It wasn’t like a single walk would make us friends, would make me attached to him.
Right?
“We’re almost there,” he said.
I stumbled briefly, guilt snagging my gait as we broke free from the canopy of trees to a clearing that sloped down to a gentle riverbank. Small boulders had clearly been moved by people to form a sort of pool with shallow places to lounge and deeper places to soak. My thoughts scattered. All I could consider was the beauty of this place. The way it smelled and sounded. The scrape of pebbles beneath my boots and the way my breathing changed when my body heated with exertion.
Ezra picked his way down the sloping path, stripping his shirt off as he walked and tossing his boots and the blue cloth into a patch of fluffy grass. “As long as the river is high enough, it mixes with the hot water and tempers it. When the river is low, avoid the hot spring. It’s scalded a few who didn’t know better.”
I swallowed against a dry throat, tearing my eyes away from the angles of his back. “I don’t have bathing clothes.”
“I didn’t invite you to bathe; I invited you to see where the hot spring is.” Ezra looked back over his freckled shoulder at me. “Now that you know how to get here, you can come alone and preserve your modesty.”
“Of course.” I was appalled to feel a brief twinge of disappointment. “Yes, of course.”
Ezra entered the water in his trousers, letting out an indelicate moan as he sank to his armpits and rested his head back on a dry rock. I found a little spot on the opposite side of the pool and unlaced my boots. He had his eyes closed and his face to the late-afternoon sun, so I paid him no mind as I rolled my skirt to my thighs and sank my legs to the knee in the water.
It was hot, but not painfully so. Precisely the kind of bone-deep heat that soothed muscles. “I can heat water, but it takes a lot of concentration,” I told him. “I like this better.”
My words sounded clumsy. I clamped my mouth shut to keep from telling him that this would do as a place to soak away the tension of working with delicate machines. That I’d prefer it to the small bath in the lonely Mission.
Despite my resolve to remain silent, a question rose, bubbling out of my chest. “Did you know the Senior Conductor who passed away?”
The water around him splashed gently as he sat up, his gaze almost disoriented for a long moment before it settled on my legs, then—quickly—on a patch of dry rock to my side. “I saw her around town. Everyone saw her. She kept to herself when she wasn’t making her rounds and overseeing the work on the radiance lines and the Mission. No one really …knewher.”
“Do you know Julian?” I asked, hoping he’d have some choice words about him. Surely a boy like Ezra would dislike someone as stuck-up and fastidious as Julian Gray.
Ezra fiddled with a dry leaf floating in circles on the surface of the water. “Who?” he finally asked.
