My legs were hurrying me to class but my head was a-swirl with confusion, shame and, unmistakably...envy. Not just shame at the envy, which was familiar in the way a toothache is familiar, but also shame at having been actually, actually seen committing the envy. I was reeling with the peculiar sense of having been recognized. My depths measured and plumbed and somehow known. It was terrifying. My heart was smashing frantically around like a bird trapped behind glass.

I turned down a rarely used servant’s passage, leaned against the wall and slumped down to sitting. I heaved a deep breath. I was over-reacting. There was no way that girl could actually know anything about me, right? I was fairly sure there hadn’t been any spellcraft involved. She had just looked at me.

I shook my head, bemused. Why had she looked at me? Nobody else did. People’s attention slipped off me like oil slipped off of water and I liked it that way. It was safe.

My heart was slowing down. There was no way she could have known what I was thinking when I saw her. I had never spoken my secret to another soul other than Kisma, never written it down. I knew the consequences of my yearning, even as a quiet child among the older, rougher kids of Stuhkrad.

The adults of the town hadn’t liked to talk about the small, moss-covered statues scattered in the forests and ravines around the milltown, but the older kids couldn’t gossip enough about their mingled, hybrid bodies. The town children called them kuffa. Most of them had been smashed and buried by the Imperial settlers when they’d driven out the native forest people a generation ago.

But once, exploring in the woods beyond the clear-cuts with my brother Carame and his friends, we’d found a narrow cave and slipped inside. I would have faltered, but Carame was fearless and his courage was like a drug to me. One of the boys had swiped a chemical light-stick from the Foundry. He broke it with a hiss and a sizzle of reagents mixing and the darkness flooded with brassy, white light.

I remembered the rich, earthy reds and browns and yellows of the little shrine. I remembered the little pots of unguents, the glittering quartz, the figurines and the swell of their breasts and their cocks. I remembered the older boys shouting with glee as they smashed everything and urinated on it. I remembered Carame pausing in the frenzy to turn and look at where I stood frozen against the wall, his face deep in shadow, unreadable.

I took a sharp breath and staggered to my feet, pushing down the razor-edged feeling in my throat. I was late to alchemy class.

I slipped into Advanced Principles while professor Yvell was still lecturing, my face numb and dry. I tried to concentrate but everything seemed very distant and hard to understand.

Memories continued to flood my head. The rattle of stones against brickwork around me as I ran from a gang of bullies, my whole back stinging, lungs burning. Every day, running after school. Hiding in the Foundry, a sprawling complex of workshops and labs that also contained the town’s singular, tiny, non-private library. The Foundry was Gresha’s domain, and I liked Gresha. She was a tall, stooped, squint-eyed and white-haired and gruffly kind. She gave off the smell of burnt leather and quenched iron.

Gresha was busy, because the Foundry fed the mill and the loggers with a constant supply of carefully machined new gears and cleats and plates and wheels to replace broken parts as well as chemical lights and waxes and lubricants and a hundred other things. All the same, Gresha let me read by the wood stove while she mixed powders or grumbled around in the next room, the whine of the lathe cutting on and off.

She had other staff doing piecework and delivering finished orders. Fenn had a big, calm face and limitless patience and I liked to watch his clever hands as he worked. He was mute, but he pointed carefully at each tool he used and re-positioned the light so I could see what he was doing with them. I watched him fix the boiler so many times that soon I began doing it in his stead, so he could finish his orders sooner and maybe have more time to bake a tasty treat for everyone.

Heather was a brisk, no-nonsense, ruddy-cheeked woman, Gresha’s lifelong ‘companion’, who had a sharp tongue for Gresha but a soft spot for me. She liked to rouse me from my reading nest of burlap bags by the stove to sweep or to chop onions, but always made sure I had a full belly.

The accredited town alchemist lived very handsomely in a whitestone house at the top of the hill and charged customers dearly. Gresha wasn’t officially an alchemist, had certainly never trained at a university, but she had a keen, methodical mind and she was brilliant at seeing what a thing might be able to do.

She casually nudged me towards certain books and when I came to her for more, she hmph-ed and her eyebrows, which were always growing back from being burnt off, climbed in the way they did when she tried something and it worked to her satisfaction. She asked me questions about the books—did the long-winded descriptions of how to render materials down to their basic underlying principles bore me? What about the chapter on crystalline liquids had I liked best? I found that I liked to impress her with my responses and quickly learned to see past the ways she tried to hide it.

Soon, she started dictating her notes while she was elbows deep in a project and had me scribe for her. She would look over my shoulder and poke at the page with a blunt finger and show me how, no, this is the abbreviation for sulfuric acid and that’s not how to copy a cipher correctly, try this, see? She began to check less and less often for mistakes, and I ate up the tiny signs of her satisfaction with glowing pride.

Carame had begun working in the mill and came home more and more hollow-eyed every night, ate, then slept and left again in the pre-dawn darkness. Without him to protect me, the everyday torture of school intensified and I got thrashed in the street and pelted with stones even more often. To give my bullies the slip, I began to spend more and more time at the Foundry and made fewer trips at odder hours to the shouting, crowded graybrick tenement that my older brothers and sisters and mother occupied.

My sister Kisma had started working nights at a bakery. I still risked visits to see her before her shift started and we slipped away to the roof among the flapping lines of laundry to smoke her halfpenny tobacco and giggle and watch sunset bands of pink and orange melt into the dark blue dusk. She told me about sneaking leftover dough out of work with her friends one night and stuffing it in the mouths of the vainglorious statues that lined the town square, so that all the pigeons came and ate it all and covered their strong chins and proud barrel chests with runny white streaks, so it looked, she laugh-snorted, “like they’d all been eating bird ass!”

I told her about when Gresha had set me to mixing up some bio-phosphate to dope an set of passive light emitters for the hanging walkways at the mill, I’d had some left over, and mixed the extra into the bowl of slop that Heather left at the Foundry door each night for the town’s stray cats. For a night, all the street cats of Stuhkrad had run around glowing neon blue and meowing their exasperation. Heather had such a fright she’d scolded me about it for a week.

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“What! Eli! That was you?” Kisma sounded simultaneously amused and reproachful. “You’re lucky nobody started a witch-hunt. And how did you know the cats would be alright?!” She shook her head. “Maybe leave the pranks to your big sister, kid.”

My feet were hanging over the edge of the building. I kicked them, pouting. Truthfully, I wasn’t usually so daring and had only done the deed so I could impress my older sister, for once.

“I knew the cats would be alright! I did the factoring myself,” I mumbled sulkily. I knew Kisma didn’t really understand the stuff I was learning at the Foundry. But it still stung a bit, that she assumed I hadn’t known.

She raised her eyebrows at me. “You’re really smart, Eli. But you can also be really, really, really dumb, you know that?” She sighed. “Oh, I just worry about you sometimes.”

Truthfully, I was somewhat worried, too. All of my brothers were heading to the mill, or to be bargemen and cart drivers, and when I tried to imagine following them, of living that life, there was only a yawning, all-devouring blankness. I thought Gresha was training me to take her place, and at least that didn’t seem so bad. When she sat me down and told me in her gravelly voice that she was going to aim me at the Imperial merit exams, I spluttered and gaped, but in my belly a tiny circle of light opened. I could leave. I could get out.

I fed and grew that tiny light with long winter nights of obsessive reading and ciphering and memorizing tables and properties and principles until I closed my eyes to sleep and saw numbers dancing on my closed eyelids. I bent all my waking hours towards alchemy, which needed no inherited talent or gift of sorcery. I cut school and rarely went home and spent nearly all my time at the Foundry, working in the shop or studying. Lots of kids my age had already dropped out of the town school to work at the mill or on the steep slopes of the logging clear-cuts. It began to get safer for me to walk the narrow, cobbled streets without risking a beating.

Some nights, rubbing my booksore eyes, I thought guiltily of my sister Kisma sitting alone on the roof, again. But there was so, so much to do. I had seen her last week, hadn’t I? Or was that last fortnight?

And last spring, after four years of study, when the guarded wagons came to Stukrad with the merit tests locked inside, I watched them roll through the cobbled streets and up the hill biting the inside of my cheek so hard that my mouth filled with warm, metal-salty blood.

Two days later, I floated out of the testing hall, my shoulders tense and taut as lashed mill cables, my lip half-chewed through, my stomach a wreck, my eyes bloodshot, my hair a snarled bird’s nest, knowing I had demolished the test. I slept for two days on Gresha’s spare cot in one of the backrooms, waking only to piss and to drink the cold broth she’d left by my head. And cry. I hadn’t been able to cry since I was ten, but some blockage had crumbled, some rusty switch had finally slid into place inside me, and I bit Gresha’s pillow and shuddered with waves and waves of sobs that seemed to rise ceaselessly from someplace deep inside me.

Results from the exams took months to come back. In the meantime, I occupied my hands working for Gresha in the Foundry. I visited Kisma, who was getting married, and brought her a small blue dropper bottle of contraceptive—which I was ridiculously proud of, not least of all because any control by women over the reproductive power of the Democracy was frowned on by Imperial social hygienists. By teaching me how to make it, Gresha had clearly staked her trust in me. I found Carame, who was getting roaring drunk at the tavern with his mates, and brought him similar bottle but with a hangover cure in it instead. I didn’t visit Carame again.

When the results came, Heather insisted all four of us cluster around the scarred table in the kitchen before she even brought out the envelope. I tore it open, scanned it, then gasped and stumbled backwards and tripped over a chair. Heather grabbed the letter, squinted, whooped, and yanked me up and sank my head into her bosom. Gresha grunted, brought out a bottle of peach brandy and conferred upon me (when I had extracted myself from Heather) a sagacious nod. Fenn hefted a steaming, gold-crusted pie as large as wagon wheel out of the oven. I looked around at the three of them and tried to fix their faces in my memory. This is what I wanted to remember, when I thought of home. This good, glowing evening, surrounded by people who cared about me.

~ ~ ~

In the back of the lecture hall, I swallowed my emotions. My throat ached. I missed Heather, and Gresha and Fenn. Starting out at the University had been very lonely. I felt so out of place here. But hadn’t I felt so out of place in Stuhkrad, too? I woke up so many mornings full of relief that I wasn’t back there anymore, and that couldn’t be faked, right? I didn’t think that I would ever willingly return, even though that probably made me a horrible person. I felt guilty about it, because it was ungrateful and disloyal to Gresha and Heather, Kisma and Fenn, and even Carame, wasn’t it? But when I thought of going back there, even to work with Gresha in the Foundry, I felt such a crushing suffocation. But why?

I had unpleasant memories, but so did everyone. Why did the thought of a life there, with the few and only people in the world who cared about me, fill me with a heavy and endless dread? Why did that life feel like it would be a living death?

My attention was yanked back to the lecture hall as Master Yvell finished a long, droning speech and the assembled students burst into enthusiastic applause. What was going on? Nobody applauded Yvell. Then I saw the sweep of his arm as he looked offstage and realized that he had been introducing someone.

She walked onto the lecture stage and I could only stare.