I recalled the food Ainsley had tried to give me at the train station. “You saved my life,” I murmured.
“I’ve never wanted to do you harm,” he said stiffly.
“Don’t you think sending me back to the House was doing me harm?” I asked with my mouth full. Bread and cheese had never tastedso good. Grateful, I took the canteen he offered and drew a careful sip to wash the small meal down.
Julian was watching Ezra sleep. His normally pinched expression had softened, as if it relieved him to see Ezra at rest. “A lesser harm than allowing Ainsley to kill you. A lesser harm than chasing you off into the wilderness to die alone.”
I recalled what he’d told me when I’d asked him if we were killing people. My stomach turned. “We’ve been doing harm all along,” I said bitterly.
Twisting the cap back onto the canteen, Julian stared at his hands. “Great harm,” he said on an exhale.
“The wasting. It’s really because of us?” I asked, struggling to speak the words aloud.
Julian nodded solemnly. “Our radiance is toxic to living things. The way we’re using it, anyway. This relentless march of Progress,” he said bitterly. “The excess. The House’s insatiable greed.”
I swallowed hard, fighting nausea. “Do the Elders know?”
He looked at me closely, approval in his gaze. I hated how much I still wanted him to find me competent. “That’s a good question to ask,” he said. “I’m certain they must. They spend far too much time maligning the resistor movement not to know.”
“To distract people,” I realized aloud.
“It’s convenient for them to turn everyone’s focus onto a common enemy.”
The confirmation of what I hadn’t wanted to believe settled in my body, heavy as a stone. I didn’t want to dwell on the thought of our parents in their graves. I’d unravel. I chose, instead, to be angry at Julian. “You didn’t consider telling me any of this when I arrived in Frostbrook?”
“You would have thought me a heretic.” Julian’s voice held no judgement for once. It was a simple fact.
And he was right. I would have. I would have found a way to get a message back to the House of Industry that the brilliant young Senior atFrostbrook’s Mission was promoting a dangerous, reckless agenda that went against our very existence. I would have taken the opportunity to finally distinguish myself from my peers. Josephine Haven, the bright mind who’d exposed Julian Gray as a resistor—a wolf among the flock.
The person I’d been less than two weeks ago felt like a stranger now. Would she have wept over Julian’s murder?
“I thought you were dead.” I hiccuped, overcome with the memory of what I’d thought was his lifeblood smeared across his room. “I came back to warn you and you were dead and it was my fault. I let him in, and it was my fault.” My breath shuddered with the effort not to sob.
Looking distraught, Julian glanced from me to Ezra’s sleeping form, as if Ezra could somehow save him from perceiving my emotions. “I’m not dead,” he pointed out.
“I shouldn’t have cared because you were someanto me,” I said shakily, no longer caring how childish I sounded. He’d been cruel, and he deserved to feel at least a little terrible about it.
“You cared because you are good,” Julian murmured.
“Or did I care becauseyouare better than you seem?”
Julian huffed a little breeze of a laugh. “Perhaps this remains to be seen.”
A heavy sigh escaped me. The plain that stretched before us, and the world that stretched beyond that, was so impossibly large. And we were nothing but two children who no longer had the House to call a home. “Julian. What are we going to do now?”
“‘We’?” he asked. The dim light of the growing dawn illuminated his small, shy smile.
I slapped his arm, and he stared at me with such shock that I couldn’t help laughing. “Whatever you’re doing, I’m doing it, too. I want to make things right. I want to protect people. Even if—Julian, even if it means risking our lives.”
“No one is asking you to die,” he said gruffly, rubbing his arm. “I think you’ll find my plan is far more practical than that. I believethere’s an ethical way to bring Progress to the world. Nikola and I are pioneering a synthetic form of radiance.”
“It’s safe?” I asked hopefully.
“Yes,” he said with quiet conviction. “When used with proper precautions, it will be safe. Clean. We can stop the wasting if this alternative to the House’s radiance is adopted.”
“It sounds so simple when you say it that way.” My head spun. It was more than the weight of his words, I realized. Every part of my body throbbed from barely surviving the night.
“I wish it were simple. Turn your face this way,” Julian said, pulling a tin of salve out of his pack. I recognized the comforting green scent as he dabbed it onto a cut on my brow.
