What would it be like to live a simpler life? To steal away for the afternoon with a beautiful boy and kiss him on a bed of clover until our clothes became rumpled? My cheeks felt like I’d gotten too close to afire, and I patted my hands at them, willing the flush to die down before anyone saw me.
Despite the urgency, I lingered a moment longer. It was a strange sensation—feeling rooted in place. Rooted to him.
Saplings hid us from view. Ezra asked, shockingly close to my ear, “Are you all right?”
“I’ve got a lot on my mind. Don’t you?”
“More than you might think.” His low, amused voice sent another shiver through me. “Go tend to your duties. I’ll find you later.”
“You’re a nuisance.” I exhaled, batting him away, eager to reclaim my dignity from the traitorous grasp of my heart.
The train hulked like a grimy beast, stinking of coal and grease and the iron smell of unfathomable heat. Running, grateful for my trousers, I passed the huge engine, wary of the massive wheels but drawn to the mechanisms that made it fly across the landscape faster than any horse.
When I reached the crowd of people unloading goods from a cargo car, everyone quieted and stared at me. No one smiled. Julian emerged, his sleeves rolled up, exposing his light-brown skin to the afternoon sun. He didn’t look particularly pleased.
“Made your way here at last?” he asked. “Ideally you’d have arrivedbeforethe train.”
Others glared or laughed, all of them dressed for hard labor and already sweating in the growing heat. Guilt rushed through me. I’d been too wrapped up in my hurt and Ezra’s. All the while, others had been toiling to finish the Mission. That’s what we were here for. What all of us were here for.
“I’m sorry,” I said, bowing my head and panting from sprinting along the tracks. “Truly.”
“You ought to be,” muttered a man with a thick white beard. His blue eyes were cloudy with age. “We’ve done all we could, but they say we can’t unload the new cables without a child lending a hand.”
A child.He meant me. My cheeks heated.
Julian’s disappointed expression softened. He took me by the elbow and led me to a wooden platform attached to a fairly rudimentary winch. “Gather yourself,” he said with a nod. “Now go on.”
I climbed the ladder to the top of the platform. Below me, in the train car’s hold, dozens of delicate wire coils were packed tightly in wooden pallets. The gleaming metal had made its way across the continent. Mined on a distant coast and forged in a massive factory. A thousand hands had probably touched it before it traveled to Frostbrook to be handled by more workers. More people I didn’t know, and might never know.
Would they ever benefit from Progress?
A hollow ache formed in my belly. I didn’t have a word for it.
Dozens of people watched me expectantly. When the forewoman, Alice, marched up to the group, I realized how odd I must look doing nothing but staring at the crates. I sifted through my buzzing thoughts to recall the safety protocols for handling conduction wire. It was critical not to drop the spindles and bend the wire, or it wouldn’t unspool properly.
“I thought you said she could do this,” Alice said to Julian. She crossed her strong arms and gave me a dubious look that made me want to shrink to the size of a dormouse.
“She can. Are you ready?” Julian called up to me. Our eyes met, and his were steady and calm. There were dozens of people watching me, but he was the only one I needed to impress. He looked curious, but not doubtful. Like me, he’d learned how to control simple gears by the age of ten. This was child’s play.
Swallowing my nerves, I positioned myself at the gearbox that controlled the winch used to load and unload cargo. Julian—or hispredecessor—had configured it to run on radiance once a lever was pulled to override the manual power of a team of mules. I hefted the lever and placed my hand on the cool metal conduction pad. Though Conductors didn’t have the raw, unfiltered power of Generators, we could easily power isolated machinery. And once the radiance line was complete, the greater power source would be connected to the winch, and anyone with a mind for machinery could control it.
No one would have to wait for a child to stop playing in the woods in order to finish their work.
The faces of those watching me were wary but curious. Their expressions made me think of Ezra, of the way he looked at me so keenly, and my fingers trembled. I felt the platform creak under my feet, and then Julian was beside me.
“They haven’t seen me run the winch yet.” He reached out, and I was unreasonably terrified he’d touch my hand. Instead, he flicked a dead leaf off the conduction pad so it wouldn’t catch fire. “It’s the only reason you’re a bit of a spectacle. Get ahold of your nerves.”
“I’ve got it.” I exhaled.
The leaf had fallen from the anemic trees on either side of the track. I thought of Alice telling me how many had already died working on the Mission. And then I wasn’t nervous over an audience but nervousforthem in a way I could not wrap words around.
My misplaced worry didn’t matter. I had to fulfill the duty I’d been sent here to do.
Steadying myself with a slow breath, I let my attention turn inward, to the ever-present call of radiance. As if it had been jealous of Ezra’s show of magic earlier, radiance leaped from me, and the winch hummed. “All right,” I said, my eyes half closed, my focus on keeping the flow even. Too much power and it would snap the gears. Too little and it wouldn’t have the torque required to lift the heavy load.
The silence around me made my skin prickle. For a moment, it was like everyone was holding their breath.
Were they waiting for me to make a mistake?
