“Wax?” Steris asked softly. “Do you wish you’d gone with Marasi and Wayne?”
“They’ll be fine,” he said. “They don’t need me.”
“That isn’t what I asked, love,” she said softly.
He thought for a moment. Then shook his head. “I don’t, Steris. I genuinely don’t. I realized it the other day. I’m … past that stage of my life. I really feel like I’m done.”
Except for one thing. The fact that his sister was involved. Still out there. Dangerous.
Most families had skeletons in the closet. And most of those were sensible enough to stay dead. His might be threatening the entire Basin.
Ash falling again …
But he did feel done. Ready to move on. So, he showed Steris an account of a series of broken windows in the city of Demoux. It seemed to be the result of a small twister — a smaller cousin to the more terrifying ones that struck the Roughs. But maybe it was an indication of a sharp pressure change, like an explosion?
They put it in the “unlikely” pile. Unfortunately, after an hour of this, they neared the end of the stacks with no solid leads. Just a lot of very unlikely possibilities.
Steris watched him as she moved another broadsheet to the unlikely pile. He knew what she was thinking, but she didn’t prod him.
“There is one thing,” he admitted to her. “My sister. I should be the one to deal with her. But I have important work to do here in Elendel. Besides, I’m not that man anymore.”
“Do you have to be that man or this man?” she asked.
“I have to make choices. Everyone does.”
“And what about when you initially came back to Elendel?” she asked. “When you decided to hang up your guns the first time?”
“This is different,” he explained. “Back then I was running from myself. I stopped running six years ago, in the mountains, Steris. This is what I want. This is who I want to be. I’m happy here.”
She leaned into him, a steady warmth at his side. “So long as you know,” she whispered, “that you don’t have to be one or the other. You don’t have to see yourself as two men, Wax, with two different lives. Those men are the same person. And he’s the one I love.”
He thought on that, considering those days when he’d come back to Elendel — determined to put his past in the Roughs behind him. Because it was what he thought he should do. And … well, because a part of him had been broken. A gouge that had eventually been ripped back open by Lessie’s return.
Lying near death on a frozen mountaintop to the south had changed his perspective. When he’d returned to Elendel, he’d been able to live again. Growing, changing. And yet … did that mean the past him was no longer him? Were the inner rings in a tree less a part of it just because they were no longer exposed to the air?
“I’m worried about them,” he admitted to Steris. “And … I’m worried about the safety of the Basin. I don’t want to act like I don’t trust Marasi and Wayne. But…” He reached into his pocket and took out the envelope with the earring. Which he still hadn’t used. “Last year, when VenDell offered me a mission, it didn’t have the same urgency. The same disquiet about it. I’m afraid that whatever is happening now has grown too big to ignore. Too dangerous to be stopped by detective work or police intervention, no matter how competent.”
“Another god,” Steris whispered.
He took out a second envelope. “I had this made,” he said, shaking something out of it. Another earring. With a red tinge to the metal. It was nothing more than a stud, with the only trellium portion the bar in the middle, as the metal couldn’t be melted to be forged.
“When I gave the trellium spike to the university for study,” he explained, “I asked them to fabricate this for me. Because Harmony suggested I’d need it.”
“Do you believe what Marasi said? About another ashfall? The return of those … dark days?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But VenDell says Harmony is afraid. And that has me terrified.”
Steris tapped her finger on the stack of broadsheets in her lap. “Let’s identify our worst-case scenario. Consider: What’s the worst thing you can imagine, in regards to our current hunt?”
“My worst fear?” he said, thinking. “It’s that we’re years behind. That the Set has known about this interaction between harmonium and trellium for a great deal longer than we assume — maybe since that first Malwish airship crashed here. My fear is that the Set is not beginning a plan. My fear is that we’re in the end stages of said plan.”
“Is there anything we could search for to prove this?” Steris asked.
Wax stood up, surveying the room full of broadsheets, each stack from a different city. “Rusts,” he said. “We shouldn’t be searching for accidental explosions. We should be searching for proof of intentional ones. And we’re looking at too recent a batch of papers — if it happened, it could be five or six years old by now.” He paused. “They’d want to test. It wouldn’t be one explosion long ago. It would be a series of them … hidden somehow … because if they have this weapon, they’ll want to develop it. Improve it.”
“How?” Steris asked. “Should we search for records of harmonium busts?”
“I doubt that would show up in the broadsheets,” Wax said, turning around the room. “The Set is good at hiding its resource movement, especially of contraband. Marasi’s investigation proves that.”
So what? Was there any way to find what he wanted? Evidence of tests … of explosions they’d keep hidden …
“Earthquakes,” Wax whispered.
“What was that?”
“Earthquakes,” he said, kneeling beside Steris. “They would test explosions underground, in the caverns. Where they’d be contained and hidden. But they can’t fool the seismographs.”
They dug into the headlines again — but this time with a different set of criteria. And admittedly, Wax broke format a little, peeking at the contents of the stories rather than just looking for headlines. Steris poked him in the side if he spent too long doing this, but he was curious. And excited.
The answers had to be in here somewhere.
The search took a solid three hours of work. But as midnight passed, Wax found it. A series of articles from an Elendel broadsheet about something happening in Bilming.
“A subway?” Steris asked, frowning.
“Reports,” Wax explained, “of odd earthquakes in the city, starting years ago. Officials quickly explained that Bilming had decided to build a subterranean rail line like Elendel.”
“That could be valid,” Steris said, reading another broadsheet expanding on the story. “We used explosives to blast away rock and build the subway.”
“But why would Bilming need a subway? They have that elevated rail they’re so proud of. They love showing it off. Plus, these explosions have been going for four and a half years — and they don’t have a single subway line up and running.”
“Suspicious,” Steris said, scanning the next article. “Very suspicious. A new initiative started seven months ago … Reports of buildings being rattled by large-scale detonations … They were detected all the way here in Elendel.”
“They’re calling it a financial scandal, with construction companies leeching away funds. But it’s obviously more.”
Steris nodded vigorously. The broadsheet that had uncovered this wasn’t the most reputable source — it was the latest one to carry that fool Jak’s outlandish stories — but there was something here, as confirmed by several other broadsheets, now that they knew what they were looking for.