I was supposed to be happy about that.
But all I felt was sick.
CHAPTER TWO
At the sprawling Sterling City train station, everything happened too quickly. Professor Dunn and two other chaperones from the House distributed tickets and hustled us off to our assigned railway platforms. Tabitha was sent away swiftly, having time only to look back over her shoulder to call out a wide-eyed goodbye. With my throat tight, I waved and watched her disappear into a sea of colorful clothes. We stood out in severe black, the only color on each of us the vivid blue scarves at our throats that marked us as apprentice Conductors.
Overwhelmed by the mass of people around us, I looked around helplessly. The tightly packed crowd abruptly parted for a parade of healers dressed in dark red. They were ushering limping, coughing passengers onto a train car marked with the sigil of the Healer’s Guild. Though healers insisted that the wasting could not be passed through spittle, people shied away from the group, snatching up their children and covering their faces with their hands. My hand rose to my chest involuntarily, as if I were struggling to catch my breath. But I wasn’t the one with the wasting.
“Look,” Gertrude said quietly, elbowing me until I looked away from the solemn procession of the ill and dying. She pointed subtly. One of the boys from our class had run up to Grace.
I gasped as Franklin leaned in and kissed Grace’s cheek, his hands clasping hers tightly. It was too late, I supposed, for anyone to discipline them for it. I’d never figured Grace for someone bold enough to kiss a boy in plain sight of chaperones from the House. Plenty of students had stolen kisses in the dormitories and in the dark stairwells as we’d grown up together, but those had been silly games. That’s all it had meant when Gertrude had approached me with a cold dare in her eyes, all it had been when we’d pressed our mouths together in the hazy hours before dawn.
What Grace and Franklin were doing looked likemore.Looked real in a way I wasn’t sure how to describe. “Is he weeping?” I asked, somewhat horrified at the bald display of sentiment.
Gertrude choked on a laugh. “I believe so.”
We lost sight of them as the crowd thickened, a chaotic jumble of businesspeople and families and carts full of sweets and trinkets. It was more bustle and life than I’d ever seen all in one place. And it would be the last I’d see for longer than I cared to imagine. It was entirely too much and thoroughly not enough.
“You’re on platform six,” Professor Dunn told me, pressing a paper ticket into my gloved hands. She looked me up and down and sighed. “You ought to have had your trousers tailored when you were given the option.”
My face darkened with a frown. I enjoyed the sensation of fabric swishing against my legs. “If someone had given me more than a few hours’ warning that I’d be banished to a desolate wilderness, I would have made a more practical decision,” I said, emboldened by the fact that it was too late to send me off to scour chamber pots. The train at platform six was already puffing great billows of steam.
“You’re hardly banished,” Professor Dunn said. Her eyes shone. She patted my face briefly, something between a soft slap and nervousreassurance, and I went still, unaccustomed to being touched. “Be safe, you silly girl. You’re going to encounter more than you could imagine. And all of it may be more difficult than you expect. But I know that you can do this. Be—be yourself.”
My voice was hoarse when I responded, “Yes, Professor.”
“Honor the radiance within you,” she said to me solemnly, catching both my hands.
“Pulse of the stars, steady my heart,” I choked out.
Professor Dunn didn’t finish the blessing. The train shrieked. Gertrude was staring at me, looking smaller without her entourage. She’d chosen skirts like mine, and they caught in the smoky wind, flaring like spilled ink. She’d braided her blond hair back severely. I missed her curls. I wanted her to say something cruel so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to embrace her.
Then one of the chaperones was pulling her away, and Professor Dunn was pushing me toward platform six, and that was it.
That was it.
Dazed, I let a porter take my bag and offer me a hand onto the train.
It was already moving, inching forward like a great iron worm. Taking me away from my home. I choked on a sob that no one acknowledged and stumbled dizzily into my tiny cabin.
The steward hurried through his demonstration of my fold-down bed and small copper sink. As I bit back breathy, hysterical sounds, he tripped over his own feet in his rush out the door. In an act of mercy for both of us, I slid the door shut behind him and closed the curtain over the metal latticework.
Through a foggy windowpane, I watched the crowded train station give way to a slow crawl of brick and iron. Sterling City unfurled, a tangle of steamy alleys and cobblestone streets. The tracks followed the silver ribbon of the Sterling River, its filthy waters dotted with brown and gray barges and swirling eddies of refuse. I’d never seen the House from this vantage point. In the distance, it rose from beside the riverlike a massive arched gravestone, taller and newer than the other buildings. Its many small windows glittered for a moment, caught in a beam of sunlight breaking through the overcast sky.
My thoughts drifted to the rest of my class, each of the twenty-four of us sent in a different direction. I covered my mouth tightly, trying to cram my unruly grief back inside where it belonged, caged by my ribs, a wild and terrible thing. But it would not be contained. Soon, I was crying too hard to see. My cries became low wails, more unseemly than Gertrude’s insufferable playacting. Clumsily, I pulled down the bed and climbed upon it and tucked the thin, scratchy pillow over my head.
This ugly show of emotion, I knew, was why we’d been cautioned all our lives against attachment. This, I understood, was one more way I’d already failed.
The journey droned on. Hour after hour of staring at dead trees along the train tracks. Occasionally, a rolling hill or rushing river broke the monotony, but for the most part, it was a wall of brown bark and a few straggling green leaves and weeds outside my window.
I took my meals alone, my clothing marking me an apprentice Conductor to passengers who shifted nervously around me. I’d been told that some people were unaccustomed to meeting Children of Industry, but the level of jitteriness still surprised me. By their sidelong looks, you’d have thought I was a violent resistor determined to break down the beautiful things built by the House of Industry. Though, truth be told, I wasn’t sure how one would identify a resistor. Anyone could be harboring a secret violent agenda.I should be the frightened one,I wanted to tell the other passengers. I was the one a resistor would kill if given the opportunity.
But there was no sense in trying to explain myself. It didn’t matter what they thought of me. All that mattered were the duties that lay before me in Frostbrook.
If we ever got there.
On the third day, the train stopped at a station in a narrow valley, and the passengers were given an hour to stretch our legs. Anxious to do anything but ruminate on my boredom, I followed a well-worn footpath up a hill behind the station. My thighs burned as I climbed, quickly becoming aware that my body was unaccustomed to inclines. When I looked around, the expanse of countryside disoriented me. In Sterling City, you could never see too far at once unless you had the privilege of getting to a high rooftop. Even the House of Industry had been only ten stories tall. Not tall enough to see as far as I could now, from a grassy hill in the middle of nowhere.
