“You can’t send me home,” I whispered. Was the House of Industry even my home anymore?
Sterling City already felt like a place I’d lived a lifetime ago. I wanted to stay here. I wanted to live here. I wanted to make Frostbrook my home.
“You left me no choice. It’s one thing to bend the rules, but you crossed a line entirely. Josephine. Are you listening?”
“I’ll be disgraced.” My voice was a pitiful croak. I’d be more than disgraced. I’d be nothing. Two apprentices had returned almost immediately in my four years of upper school. They’d repeated classes with the fourth years, and not a single person had talked to them for fear of their spectacularly bad fortune being contagious.
Even worse, they weren’t assigned out again after that and had eventually become servants at the House. They’d become prisoners.
I swallowed the bitter taste of bile and breathed through a surge of radiance that wanted to rage out of me.
“You will not be disgraced,” Julian said, looking pained. He softened his voice. “I am not—I am not cruel. I’ll send you home with a letter stating that you would benefit from working at a more established Mission, with more peers at your level. This is only a setback. An opportunity, really. Were you really content here?”
He sounded like he was trying to convince himself that I was better off leaving. I didn’t care how he felt. I was already searching for a way to fix this.
My hands felt like bricks of ice. I shook them out, hating the prickly numbness. “You don’t have to do this, Senior. I’m a good Conductor. You know I am. And I can work machinery better than anyone I graduated with. Everyone knows that! I can be obedient.”
“And Ezra?” Julian asked, raising his voice. He pushed his hair out of his eyes in a way that looked familiar to me. “Would you be able to stay away from him?”
“It was a mistake,” I whispered, my voice breaking with a low, ragged sob.
He couldn’t send me away. I’d be alone.
No one in Sterling City would make me feel like a person. Like I was worth anything more than the light and rage inside me.
Ezra would be left alone.
Again.
Julian sucked in a shaky breath, as if sending me home somehow upset him. What did he have to lose? He’d get a new, better apprentice. Someone who didn’t ask questions. “Apprentice Haven, I did not expect you to fight me on this. We both know you’ll benefit from reconnecting with your instructors. The shock of moving from the city to this wilderness has clearly upset your sensibilities. When you’re home, you’ll regain your footing. And your propriety.”
I wanted to tell him exactly what he could do with propriety. A month ago, the following thought never would have crossed my mind: What if I simply ran away?
I could learn how to survive. Where to eat, where to sleep. I could find work like Ezra’s mother had. I could learn what was beyond the front range of mountains and where the winding river led.
I couldn’t go back.
Julian watched me, his eyes narrowing as if he could read the shifting of my expression from devastation to reckless defiance. “There’s a train this afternoon. You’ll be departing on it.” This was clearly not a request. “I won’t be able to get word to the House before you, so send a message when you arrive at the train station in Sterling City. They’ll come to collect you.”
It would do me no good to argue with him. I knew this. But it was painful to agree. “Yes, Senior.” My voice broke as my fingers curled into tight fists. “I’ll go pack my things.”
“You may bring your new tool belt back to the House of Industry with you,” Julian said, not unkindly. His gaze had softened to something like regret.
I looked away, loath to find pity in his jewel-like eyes.
In that moment, I resolved to end up anywhere but the train station back in Sterling City. I sucked in a breath and tried to sound defeated and not at all like someone seriously contemplating running off into the wilderness. “What good will the tools do me when I’m made a servant?”
Julian looked pained before he straightened and crossed his arms. “Take them or don’t take them. Prepare to leave in a few hours and gather your wits about you enough not to make a scene in front of all of Frostbrook on the way there.”
He’d been right that this place had changed me. But the wilderness hadn’t upset my sensibilities. It had awakened them.
How could he expect me to put my mind back to sleep?
Julian followed me around the Mission like an uptight shadow, knocking on the door when I took too long to pack, as if I’d developed the ability to turn myself into a bird and fly out the narrow, high window.
Hysterically, I found myself wondering if Ezra could turn into a bird and fly.
Probably not. He would have told me.
