I’d been worried we’d stand out for our clothes, the grime of travel. I had only the clothes in which I’d left the Iron Wood, and they were dirty and travel-stained, worn and torn in places during my struggle with the shadow family. Oren was in a far worse state, his multicolored patched pants dirty and full of holes, his once-white shirt grey with age and grime, his hands a full shade darker than the rest of him with ingrained dirt.
But men and women of every shade, shape, and attire walked the paths. Some were dressed far more richly than anyone I’d seen—wealth, in my city, was for the architects alone. Here, people wearing heavy, embroidered fabrics and elaborate hairstyles walked side by side with others wearing whatever they could cobble together. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no hierarchy or division apparent between the classes.
We headed into the thick of it, listening for anything helpful in the snatches of conversation we could hear. My ears strained for the sound of Tansy’s name, for news of captives, for any reference to a Renewable. But the noise and tumult of the crowd was too baffling, too chaotic, to get any sense of a pattern. Never had I so longed for the quiet calm of my own city, everyone doing exactly as instructed, living their lives by the quiet rhythm of the sun disc slipping second by meticulous second across the dome of the Wall.
There were machines here, too, far more than existed in my city or in the Iron Wood. Nix had overcome its misgivings and was now darting around my head as we walked, zipping here and there to investigate other machines but always returning to touch down on my shoulder, briefly, regrouping for its next foray. Oren stayed half a step behind me, tense. I imagined that descending into this chaos was like being surrounded by iron for me—in the noise and jumble he was as blind and deaf as I had been.
The muggy air was smothering, and I could feel sweat rolling down the small of my back even after I took off my coat and tied it around my waist. I knew we were going to need a place to rest—sleep was a distant memory for me, and neither of us were used to such an overwhelming riot of color and movement. We needed to pause, to regroup. None of this was what we’d expected.
We turned onto a bridge made of ropes and planks, the whole thing creaking damply under our feet. My hands shook as I moved along the bridge, gripping the handrails. Our steps were far too slow—we hadn’t gotten halfway across before someone behind us cleared his throat loudly.
It was a short, stocky man with thinning hair and a brilliant blue waistcoat covered in some kind of iridescent green-brown eye pattern. He stared at me for a moment, eyes meeting mine and narrowing. But before I could react, he raised his alarmingly bushy eyebrows at us, and I realized he was waiting for us to keep moving. There was only room on the bridge for people to proceed single file. Oren and I hurried across, trying to ignore the swaying of the bridge, and got out of the man’s way.
He brushed past us without another glance, vanishing into the crowd. I could feel Oren bristling, annoyance at the man’s behavior combining with his general unease at being underground, and I took his arm. My arm tingled, but I kept hold of him, ready to march him past the group before he could do anything rash. Something about the man’s gaze had unsettled me, and I wanted to find some alley or corner to wedge ourselves into and find our bearings.
I spotted a gap in the crowd, but before I could change course, a voice rang over the tumult.
“Stop! By order of Prometheus, on suspicion of Renewable activity, you are commanded to surrender.”
I froze. Oren’s arm went rigid under my hand, and I could imagine his already overwhelmed senses jangling. There were too many people between us and the alleyway I’d spotted, and even if we could make it there, I had no way of knowing where it led, or if it was a dead end.
I turned slowly, expecting to see the looming face of one of the guards who’d captured us. Instead, I realized that the crowd had formed a circle around someone some distance away.
A woman’s voice split the air in a desperate cry. Through the press of bodies, I could only tell that some sort of scuffle was taking place. I hesitated, then let go of Oren’s arm. “Stay here,” I whispered. Dragging him into the thick of the crowd would not have been particularly wise.
I carefully wormed my way through the crowd, mumbling apologies here and curses there when appropriate, until I could see what was going on. A pair of men stood there wearing matching charcoal-and-red uniforms. Copper badges emblazoned with some kind of bird of prey adorned their chests. Though they looked nothing like the Regulators in my home city, I recognized them nonetheless. Cops. They were standing over the prone body of a woman, holding weapons—curved, wicked machines I couldn’t identify, but clearly aimed with menace.
“You’re wrong,” the woman sobbed, curled around something. “He’s no Renewable—he’s not, he’s not.” Something moved in the circle of her arms, and a white face appeared over her shoulder. She was shielding someone, a child.
“Resisting an Eagle’s order is a punishable offense,” one of the two guards said, voice harsh. “Harboring a Renewable is another. You’ll get banished for that one. Turn him over, ma’am, before we’re forced to take action.”
But the woman kept repeating, over and over, that the boy was no Renewable. With a sick kind of certainty, I knew that there was no way out of the standoff that didn’t involve the weapons.
Then a commotion on the other side of the circle drew my attention, and after a moment someone else entered the circle, pushing through the onlookers. It was the man in the blue-and-green coat.
“The hell is going on here?” he snapped. “It’s my day off, don’t make me get involved.” Though he wore no uniform, the two guards—Eagles, one of them had called himself— snapped to attention.
“We’ve had reports that the boy’s a Renewable, sir.”
The man in the coat glanced down at the huddled woman, gaze dismissive. “So? Take him down to Central Processing.”
The Eagle shifted uncomfortably. “His mother won’t give him up.”
The man in the coat gave a long-suffering sigh. “So shoot her,” he retorted with exasperation. “You’ve got talons, use them.” But before either Eagle could act, he crouched down at the woman’s side.
“Ma’am,” he said gently. “Ma’am, you’re going to have to let them take your son in.”
“He’s not a Renewable,” she whimpered. It was as if being a Renewable was the worst possible crime. The way they spoke the word, they might as well have been saying “murderer.”
“If he’s not, then he’ll be back before the end of the day.” The man in the coat reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “You have my word.”
As he continued to murmur to her, I scanned the faces of the onlookers. They were silent now, pale. Afraid. When the woman straightened a little, I could see that the boy in question was no more than eleven or twelve. But when he lifted his head, at least half the spectators drew back, a murmur running through the crowd.
These people were terrified by the mere thought that he could be a Renewable.
I felt a dull anger flicker through me. I’d been that kid before. The dud, the strange one. Any excuse to make someone different, to keep them from fitting in. Even here, a hundred miles away from the city where I was born. Even if they let him go, he’d never be the same again.
The man in the coat was slowly easing the woman away from her child. “We can’t take the chance that it’s true, Marsa—you did say Marsa, right? Marsa, it was Renewables that caused the cataclysm, forced us to live down here like this. We can’t let that happen again—where would we run to now?”