I glanced away with a sharp sigh. Ezra was charming, but he wasn’t a good liar. Tilting my head back, I watched the dappled sunlight that broke through the canopy of trees high above. “I am,” I whispered, adding it to the list of my failings.
When I looked back, Ezra was watching me, his eyes bright. “Josephine. Don’t you wonder why nothing will grow near the radiance lines? The dead trees along the railways. The—”
“That’s enough,” I snapped. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not a little child you can frighten with stories.”
“Don’t do that.” With that same terrible pitying expression, Ezra pushed up on his knees and reached for my wrist.
I flinched away, warning him off with an outstretched hand.
He sank back onto his heels and stared at my palm—and didn’t try to touch me again. In the silence, I could hear the way his breathing coarsened.
“Tell me. Am I hurting you right now?” I steeled myself for the answer.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Discounting when you’re actively trying to fry me like an egg, it only hurts when you’re startled by my magic. I think your wariness … opposes it.” He scrubbed his hand down his face and laughed softly to himself. “Certainly a development worth documenting.”
I wanted to know what he meant by that, but I had a more pressing concern than his cryptic muttering: He’dletme hurt him.
“It causes you pain when you startle me with wild magic,” I said, my voice rising with every word. “So you decided to do a great show of it without warning me? Who’s the fool now?!”
A bird fluttered out of the brush, driven away by my shouting.
He swallowed and didn’t respond for a long time. “To be quite honest, I don’t feel particularly reasonable around you.”
My anger sapped out of me, leaving me weak-kneed and nauseated. The flowers around me were starting to brown and wilt, as if they felt my exhaustion. “That’s comforting, actually.” I tried to catch my breath, but the air felt thin. My thoughts were a buzzing hive of bees.
He looked away, running his hand back through his hair until it stood tall like reeds in the wind. “This wasn’t supposed to go like this,” he muttered.
“Oh? How was it supposed to go?”
When he met my gaze, I hated the frustration I saw in his eyes. He rose to his feet slowly, as if it took great care to move his absurdly tall body. “It doesn’t matter. All I’ve done is upset you.”
“How could it not upset me to hurt you?” My voice broke. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Not when I wasn’t trying to, anyway.
His shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh, and he pushed his messy hair out of his eyes. “Maybe if I learn more about your radiance and the Mission, I can figure out exactly why it hurts me sometimes, and then we can fix it,” he said, something off about his tone.
I didn’t question his reluctance. After all, I’d only caused him pain and frustration since we’d met. If he let me try, I’d find a way to help him and not hurt him. I wanted to do something that would ease the hollowness in his gaze. Even if that meant sharing things that weren’t meant to be shared with anyone—let alone an Animator.
“I’ll show you what I can about Progress,” I promised. I owed him that much for the tension around his eyes, the dullness to his skin that hadn’t been there before he’d made the flowers grow around me. And maybe once he truly understood what we were trying to do, he’d see the good in what I—what the House—was doing. “We’ll figure this out together.”
He turned his face away, his fingers brushing through the grass that formed a soft bed where we sat. “I’d like that,” he said quietly.
It didn’t sound like he meant it.
CHAPTER NINE
We could no longer dally in the woods. The shipment would arrive soon. I followed Ezra in silence back toward the rail yard, and with every step, my feet felt heavier. I’d already grown too attached to Ezra in my attempt to learn self-discipline from his control over wild magic. And now I’d taken our ill-advised partnership a step further by promising to teach him about my radiance in turn.
Ostensibly, it was to help him figure out why my radiance caused him pain. But Gertrude would have taken one look at me and seen the truth under my generous offer.
And she’d have been right. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being disappointed in me. It was selfishness, not altruism, driving me to further distance myself from the regulations of the House. I wanted him to embrace my radiance with the same wonder I felt when he wielded wild magic. I wanted him to believe in Progress. In me.
Gertrude had always examined the mess of me and seen truth in the tangles. More than ever, I longed for her. Surely she’d help meunderstand the feverish way Ezra made me feel. We had never been taught to name the stirrings of our hearts.
Gertrude,I thought, gazing up at the unfeeling trees.I feel drunk.
She used to tug the hair behind my ear until I yelped and focused. I pinched the sensitive skin at the inside of my wrist, but the sting didn’t clear away my turbulent thoughts—or my longing for her. Not looking where I was walking, I stubbed my toe on a knobby stone. The pain enraged me more than it should have, and I cursed and swept the rock off the path with my boot. Ezra turned back to me, brown eyes big and surprised.
