The vibration in my teeth wouldn't stop, a jarring, bone-deep rattle that made my vision blur. We were stalled in the center of a village that didn't have a name, just a cluster of mud-brick hovels drowning in the slush of a failed spring. Alaric stood on the wagon's edge, his hand tight on his pistol as the first stone shattered the remaining glass of our windshield.
"They're coming for the grain, Alaric," I rasped, my voice barely audible over the hissing steam.
"Let them try," he growled, but I saw the way his eyes darted to the narrow, mud-choked exit of the main square.
The road had collapsed two miles back—not just a crack, but a total structural failure. My calculations for the weight-bearing basalt had been off, or maybe the Scavengers had sabotaged the mix, but the result was the same: a caravan of food meant for the Iron Peaks was currently sinking into a ravine, and the villagers who were supposed to be fed by it were standing in our way with pitchforks and hollow eyes.
"You! The girl with the drawings!" a man screamed, his face a skeletal mask of desperation. "Where is the flour? You promised the road would bring the flour!"
"It's coming," I lied, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. "The secondary wagons are—"
"The secondary wagons are at the bottom of the gorge, Elowen," Alaric cut in, his voice loud enough for the crowd to hear. "Tell them the truth. The road failed."
He's throwing me to them. He's letting them know I'm the one who failed the math.
"I screwed up the grade," I whispered, the nausea rising in a cold, bitter wave. "The rain... I didn't account for the saturation levels."
"We don't care about your saturation!" a woman shrieked, throwing a handful of frozen mud that hit me square in the chest. "My children haven't eaten in three days! You built a road for machines, not for us!"
The crowd surged. The sound of their boots in the muck was a wet, heavy rhythmic thud that signaled the end of talking. Alaric didn't wait. He fired his pistol into the air, the crack echoing off the hovels. The villagers flinched, but they didn't scatter. Hunger had burned away their fear of lead.
"Get in the seat," Alaric commanded, grabbing me by the waist and shoving me toward the controls.
"We can't just drive through them! They're starving!"
"If we stay, they'll tear this boiler apart for the scrap, and then we'll all starve." He jumped onto the bench next to me, his face a terrifying mask of military indifference. "Open the vents. Now."
If I open the vents, the steam will scald whoever is standing in front of the wheels. If I don't, we're dead cargo.
"I can't!"
"Do it, or I'll do it for you." He grabbed my hand, his fingers crushing mine against the brass lever.
I looked at the skeletal man in front of the wagon. He wasn't a rebel; he was a father. But then I looked at Alaric—the man who had kept me from the Inquisition, the man who was currently the only barrier between me and a lynch mob.
I chose the monster I knew.
I pulled the lever.
The wagon let out a high-pressure shriek, a wall of white-hot steam erupting from the side vents. The crowd screamed, scattering as the heat hit them. I didn't look. I couldn't. I slammed the gear into forward, the wheels spinning in the mud before catching on a patch of stone.
The wagon lurched. We hit something—a cart, a fence, I didn't know—and then we were moving, tearing through the village square.
"Faster!" Alaric yelled, looking back. "They're throwing torches!"
A flare of orange light erupted in the back of the wagon. One of the grain sacks—the only one we had left—was on fire. The smell of burning flour was sickening, a sweet, toasted scent that felt like a funeral.
"The grain! Alaric, the fire!"
"Forget the grain! Keep the pressure up!"
We hurtled out of the village, the mud spraying up in massive, filthy fans. I kept my eyes on the pressure gauge, watching the needle dance in the red. We were pushing the engine too hard on a road that didn't exist anymore. The suspension groaned, a metallic scream of overtaxed steel.
Five miles out, the engine finally gave up. A loud crack echoed through the chassis—the main axle snapping like a dry twig.
The wagon tilted violently to the left, skidding across the frozen mud before slamming into a stand of dead pines. I was thrown against the boiler, the heat searing through my cloak.
Silence.
The steam hissed out in a dying whistle. I sat in the dirt, my hair matted with mud and soot, watching the smoke rise from our ruined escape.
Alaric climbed out of the wreckage. He wasn't bleeding, but he looked broken in a way I hadn't seen before. He walked to the back of the wagon and looked at the charred remains of the grain.
"The road is gone," he said, his voice flat. "The supply line is severed. Harrington doesn't even need to catch us now. The winter will finish the job."
"It was the basalt mix," I whispered, my ears ringing. "I should have known the salt in the soil would corrode the binding agent."
"It doesn't matter now." Alaric walked over to me. He didn't offer a hand. He just looked down at me, his eyes cold and distant. "You realized it, didn't you? Back in the village?"
"Realized what?"
"That you're not building a future, Elowen. You're just building faster ways to kill people."
The status had shifted. I wasn't the savior of the north anymore. I was the architect of its famine.
Alaric reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, crumpled piece of paper—a dispatch he must have intercepted in the village. He tossed it into my lap.
"The King has put a price on your head," he said. "Not for treason. For 'negligent destruction of Crown resources.' They're blaming the road failure on your sabotage."
"Sabotage? I tried to save it!"
"It doesn't matter what you tried. It matters what they can prove. And right now, you're the easiest person to blame for a starving province."
He looked toward the horizon, where the first signs of a blizzard were beginning to swirl.
"We're not going to the Iron Peaks," Alaric said. "We're going to the coast. We're leaving the kingdom."
"We can't! My father's work is still—"
"Your father's work is a graveyard!" Alaric roared, turning on me. He grabbed my shoulders, his grip so tight I felt the bone groan. "Look around you! This is what 'progress' looks like! It's fire, mud, and hungry children! I'm taking you to the ships, and you're never touching a drawing board again."
I looked at him, the man I had chosen, and saw the truth. He didn't want my genius. He wanted my silence. He wanted the girl he could control, not the woman who could change the world.
"I hate you," I breathed, my heart breaking in a way that felt permanent.
"Good," he said, pulling me up and throwing me over his shoulder like a sack of coal. "Hate keeps you warm."
He started walking into the snow, leaving the ruined engine and the broken road behind.
But as he moved, a small, cold realization hit me. I still had the firing pin in my pocket.
And Alaric Veyron hadn't noticed that the dispatch he'd given me wasn't from the King.
It was from my sister.