The same refrain ran through my head every night. Every morning. Every time my radiance wanted to lash out without precision.They didn’t want me.When the time had come to enter secondary school, I’d begged to train as a Transistor, to learn how to fight and defend the House of Industry as a powerful, elite guard. I hoped down to my bones that it was my destiny, because I couldn’t understand why else I felt so hopelessly angry, so in need of release.
What I hoped for didn’t matter. They’d denied my request, and instead the House had called on me to serve as a Conductor. There wereno adjustments to the decisions the Elders made. It didn’t matter that I was certain they’d only disqualified me from serving in the Transistor guard on account of my being small for my age. It didn’t matter that I was certain I had the ability to use my radiance as a weapon.
It didn’t matter that my emotions made me feel violent.
Maybe they’d looked into my heart and seen how much I hated the part of myself that enjoyed hurting people.
With my face searing hot, I left the dormitory for the washroom, where I’d spend hours scouring chamber pots until my hands were raw with lye.
Transistors, perhaps even more so than Conductors, had to demonstrate extreme control in addition to the ability to cast radiance from their bodies like lightning. Professor Dunn had explained this on numerous occasions in the rare joint classes we had with the Transistors. Every time, I’d felt her eyes on me. It was a reminder that a penchant for occasionally attacking classmates wasn’t enough for an elite role in the House’s guard. Transistors protected the House of Industry and its interests. They didn’t use radiance at will to get revenge on bratty girls with overly perceptive eyes and soft mouths.
Tears wet my cheeks in the chilly washroom as I scrubbed each porcelain pot mercilessly, wishing there were a way to wash off the fear that my temper and my lack of certainty made me inadequate to even function as a Conductor—let alone advance enough to run my own Mission. If I didn’t perform to expectations as an apprentice, I’d be sent home to the House of Industry. I’d join the servants who became nameless over the years, blessed with radiance but unworthy of representing the House as Conductors or Transistors. House servants turned on the lights, heated the hearths, ran the lifts. Tasks any small child with radiance could complete.
A birthright unrealized.
I could not allow that to happen. I had to stop lashing out. I had to stop examining the place in me that felt like a loose tooth. And I had tostop caring about what the other girls thought of me or what I thought of them.
Once I ran my own Mission, an entire community would rely on me. Everyone would know exactly who I was and why I existed. I’d gladly do what was expected of me.
Scraping my tears away with the inside of my arms, I rinsed another chamber pot. Just because I wanted to throw it across the room didn’t mean I would, didn’t mean my impulses were anything but that—fleeting weaknesses.
Iwascapable. I’d passed my exams and practicals. And tomorrow, I’d leave the House of Industry and work alongside someone who never needed to know that I’d set a few sleeves on fire and burned a few nightgowns and knocked out one particularly mouthy classmate who had entirely deserved it.
“Gertrude Faircove,” Master Hayes intoned, reading from a scroll at the podium, “shall apprentice at the Copper Hills Mission.”
A series of cheers erupted from the girls around me and the boys across the aisle in the great hall. I sat straight as an iron rod, every muscle in my body clenched so tight, I trembled. She was sitting right beside me, close enough that the black fabric of our skirts pooled together. I watched her fingers twist into the folds at her lap. Her breath made a soft whistling sound.
“It’s what you wanted,” I muttered under my breath.
Gertude spoke in a hissing whisper. “I realize that.”
“Then what are you scared of?”
“I am not scared,” she bit out.
I rolled my eyes and took her small hand in my own too quickly for her to yank it away. Copper Hills was as big as Sterling City, but it was deep inland and far north. Farther than either of us had everbeen. I held her cold hand for only a moment, long enough to feel a prickle of discomfort. Long enough for my eyes to sting. “You’ll be fine,” I managed to say before letting go.
She made a show of drying her hand on her skirt. “Says the girl sweating through her dress.”
“It’s hot in here.”
It was actually cold and drafty—early-spring air seeping through the open windows above the stained glass that illuminated the room in shades of cobalt and sky blue. Incense curled from two braziers on each side of the master, lending the air a hazy quality, like the edges of a dream. Intricate chandeliers lit with radiance flickered beneath the polished rafters, a signal of the staggering wealth the House of Industry had amassed by developing Missions in every major city. Access to Progress came at a price, but it added considerable value to people’s lives: automating tasks that used to take sweat and hard labor; lighting the night and extending the time people could work. We were changing the world one Mission at a time.
And now I was about to find out exactly where I’d fit into the march of Progress. My empty stomach curled in on itself. I was so busy trying not to vomit with nerves that the sound of my own name startled a small squeak out of me.
“Josephine Haven,” the master was saying, “shall apprentice at the Frostbrook Mission.”
Silence followed his announcement. I blinked senselessly, trying to understand the words he’d spoken. The room tilted as I finally recognized the name.
Gertrude whispered my realization aloud. “But that Mission isn’t even close to operational.”
Someone laughed in the row behind us. I swallowed a sour taste at the back of my throat and squeezed my eyes shut briefly to quell the dizziness. Frostbrook was the farthest Mission from Sterling City—little more than an experiment in rural development. So remote that it tooknearly a week by train to get materials out to the workers constructing it. So rural that it would only serve a mill and a winch and a few scattered buildings until the trade outpost finally began to thrive.
This wasn’t an apprenticeship. It was a punishment. The culmination of too many disappointments.
This was what I’d earned for myself.
I refused to cry.
