Narrowing my eyes, I held still and allowed his surprisingly gentle touch to soothe me. “Ezra made that, didn’t he?”
“Before you call me a liar, it’s not as if I could have told you that before,” he said, sounding flustered.
Perhaps because I was overtired, I allowed myself to ask a question I never would have dreamed of asking my Senior Conductor the day before. “You didn’t simply know each other. You were lovers, weren’t you? You and Ezra?”
His hand trembled slightly as he dabbed the cool salve at a few more smaller scrapes on my forehead and my hands. “Yes,” he said simply. The solitary word held both regret and, I was startled to realize, longing.
Unsure what I was searching for, I studied his eyes. For the first time, I saw the boy he truly was—unsure, stubborn … and lonely. “How did you meet?”
“Ah. Frostbrook is a small town, as you know. We orbited each other for a while. And …” He shifted where he sat, visibly uncomfortable in a way I found hopelessly endearing. “Well. Sometimes it’s simply about needs being met. I don’t think either of us anticipated becoming … entangled. He’s …”
I caught his hand, and he froze, staring at me. “You don’t have say more,” I said. “I know.”
He looked down at our hands with a rueful smile. “I suppose you do.”
Releasing him, I murmured, “Thank you. For the salve. My head was aching.”
Julian took the sort of breath that precedes a proclamation, and I braced myself for whatever he had to say. “I don’t—” he started, uncommonly clumsy with his words. “I don’t feel a … connection … with girls the same way Ezra does. He’s … his heart is more generous, I suppose. But I … I do care for you, Appren—Josephine. You are bold. And inquisitive. And clever. I would like to earn your trust.”
I found myself laughing giddily, my heart giving a strange thrill at the notion of finding a friend here on this empty plain, where the House could no longer tell us to guard ourselves from others. If Julian could remake Progress, surely we could also make what we wanted of our hearts.
“All right,” I said. “Start by telling me about this plan you have.”
Julian’s eyes lit up in a way I’d never seen before. It made him look younger and far less armored. “How much do you know about the Continental Exposition?” he asked.
Four days into our walk, the color returned to Ezra’s lips and he stopped pressing his hand to his bandaged wound protectively. He kept up doggedly. I, on the other hand, frequently needed to pause to catch my breath and tend to my rapidly declining feet.
The hunger was the worst part. Julian hadn’t packed rations for three. We found some quail eggs, but that hadn’t been enough to fill our bellies. While Ezra was an expert forager, the wide plain didn’t offer much in the way of greens or mushrooms we could eat. Every once in a while, we came upon berry bushes and filled our hands and our mouths until our fingertips were stained a deep purple.
At the crest of a hill, the wind whipped high grass into whorls that gleamed in the setting sun. The path ahead weaved through patchy thickets of scrub leading to a tree line in the distance. I perched on a rock, massaging my bare feet, while Ezra sprawled flat on his back and napped with the grass curling over him protectively.
“Does he tell the grass to do that?” I asked Julian, who was never far away.
Julian looked up from thumbing through a leather journal. He drew it from his pack often, never seeming to read it so much as assure himself of its existence. “I imagine he’s seeking comfort, whether he means to or not.”
“The grass doesn’t pet me when I seek comfort,” I said grumpily, while I prodded a toenail that didn’t look like it was going to survive the journey. “What’s in your journal?”
“Letters.”
“Letters in a journal?” I craned to look, and he didn’t shy away. I could quickly see why he wasn’t trying to hide it from me. The words were written in a cipher.
“I transcribed them. There are some things … things I wanted to keep.” He closed the journal and carefully tucked it back into his bag.
“Who are they from?”
“My contacts in Cascade. Maggie Taylor, her granddaughter Nikola, and from a friend at the House.” Julian hesitated at first—as if the names would shatter if he spoke them too forcefully. But the more he went on, the more passionate he sounded. “Maggie built a laboratory on her farm outside Cascade. Far from the House’s purview. They’ve been building prototypes, running experiments. You see, it’s not intelligence that will change the world. It’s curiosity. And safety breeds curiosity.”
“I’ve never thought about it that way,” I told him. The House of Industry had felt secure—like a fortress. The kind of place that was only safe if you followed commands and stayed in line. I hadn’t been curious enough because I’d used all my energy trying to follow the rules.
“Maggie’s created a haven for free thought. Can you imagine?” Julian had become more animated than I’d ever seen him, his elegant hands emphasizing his words. “No limits, no consequences for being wrong. That’s how we remake the future. At next year’s Continental Exposition, everyone will see what science can do. What people can achieve when they’re not afraid to try something different.”
I could tell by the boyish excitement in his voice that he saw Cascade as not only a home for his science but a home for his heart. The journal he carried was impractical, but I understood why he held on to a record of correspondence it would have been wiser to destroy. It made me want to wrap my arms around him, but he didn’t seem like someone who would welcome a sudden embrace.
“I’m glad you have them,” I said, not sure if I meant the letters or the people who gave him hope.
Julian glanced at me warily, as if aware of how much he’d exposed with his sincerity. He abruptly tucked his journal into his bag. “It’s science that matters. Not sentiment.”
I glanced at Ezra pointedly. “I don’t believe you’re incapable of sentiment.”
