The sun rises high enough to crest the wall, and in a rush last night’s shadows retreat and the windows flash and the canals brighten into many diamond points. The sun, the cruel orange eye that cooks the sweat from their skin and the water from the ground and the clouds from the sky. The temperature in the Sanctuary immediately spikes fifteen degrees. The space beneath the gates, though, remains a pocket of shadow, and it is here that the riders gather.
The bone whistle sounds, the gates groan open, and the rangers ride out two horses abreast. They all wear hats to battle the sun and neckerchiefs to battle the dust. At their lead is Reed, the chief of the sentinels. Even from here she can see the long black braid twisting down his back like a shorn noose. She wills him to turn in his saddle and look for her, but he does not. She imagines she can feel his disappointment radiating off him. Earlier, when she stumbled out of her quarters and reported to the stables, he took her face in his hands and shook his head and told her to climb the wall. She was in no shape to ride, still drunk from the night before.
A great wing of dust rises behind them—and the wind carries it toward her, the grit pattering her clothes, biting her face when she watches them depart. It will be another week, she’s guessing, before he allows her to rotate back from sentry to ranger. He disapproves of her drinking not only because of the hazard to her body, the interference with her duties, but because he cannot risk her speaking loosely to others. The risk is too great—given their plans. She doesn’t know when they will leave, where they will go, or how they will get there, but she will not die here. She will escape.
She understands why Reed punishes her, but she hates him for it. Because she hates the wall. She prefers to move, to escape. Ride at a gallop with the reins wrapped around her fist and the wind knocking her hair. Fire a whistling arrow into a buck’s breast. Collect jackrabbits and coyotes from her many traps. Fill satchels with juniper berries for the distilleries. Salvage steel and copper from buildings as dark as tombs. Kick through the skeletons that lie everywhere and rip the drawers out of dressers, pull open cabinets, upend toolboxes, dig through closets. By comparison the wall is stillness…the wall is control…the wall is imprisonment—that she finds maddening.
There is much she finds maddening. As a child she bit her grandfather when he wouldn’t give her another one of the salted nuts they ate for dessert. After being teased and tripped by a group of boys, she picked up a fist-sized stone and knocked the teeth from one of them. She kicked the leg of a table and sent supper crashing to the floor. She dropped a beetle in her baby brother York’s mouth when, as an infant, he wouldn’t stop crying. Not much has changed. Her whole life she has been told this is her greatest weakness, her inability to control herself. She tries. But whenever she is provoked, like a bees’ nest disturbed, something swarms out of her, something out of her control, making her capable of anything. Of escaping this place.
An hour later she remains so deadened by her hangover, so caught up in her thoughts, she does not notice the panicked voices or the smoke billowing from a torchlit brazier until it has risen so high that it occludes the sun.
*
People wear hoods or hats with squared tops and crisp round rims, but Lewis has never paid any attention to what might be fashionable. His keeps the sun out of his eyes—that’s all that matters. Its rim is floppy and its peak high and its color a speckled gray. He wears a long duster of the same color. Its many pockets hold many things. It billows around him and makes him appear like a wraith.
People make way for him and turn to watch him in his passing. He knows their nicknames for him: the gray man, the freak, the magician. He hears them whispering now, just as he hears them whispering in the museum. They say he once turned a crying baby into a croaking toad. They say his heart is made of cogs and wheels and his veins run black with oil, the same as his mechanical owl. They say he creeps around the Sanctuary at night, crawling through windows and approaching bedsides and experimenting on people when they are sleeping, dosing them up with potions, cutting them open and sewing them back up with invisible thread. Sometimes parents say, to naughty children, you better be good or the gray man will steal you away and stuff you full of sawdust and make you into an exhibit in his museum.
He walks among them now, and they startle away from his figure. “Look,” they say. “There he is.” Horses snort. Carts rattle. Men shout. Forges glow. Swallows twitter. Meat sizzles over cooking stoves. Dust flurries like snow. He shades his eyes with his hand and looks up only briefly at the smoke rising from the wall. A black cloud of it roils, as threatening as a thunderhead, backlit by the sun.
Then he pulls his hat brim low, his gaze once again downcast as he approaches a narrow concrete building tucked into a street of narrow concrete buildings. The sign over the door reads YIN’S DRY CLEANING, but it has been splashed with black paint and a hand-carved wooden sign next to it reads APOTHECARY.