ensconced in porcelain. His companion helped him light the lamp from the torch, and it blazed with a bright white light. He affixed the belt to his head, and the lamplight cut a swath of light through the dank blackness of the tunnel.
“I was wondering how you worked there, in the darkness,” Mattie said and retracted her eyes back into her face, narrowing the aperture of the diaphragms. “It’s a clever contraption.”
“If you were wondering so much why didn’t you find out?” the man with the lamp on his head said as they continued along the tunnel.
Mattie faltered for words.
“I guess you weren’t really wondering then,” the man continued. There was no anger in his voice, just the habitual bitterness of an unhappy person. “You just thought of it now, making conversation.”
“Yes,” Mattie admitted. “I don’t know anyone like you.”
“Anyone who works for a living, you mean,” the second man said and spat.
“I work,” Mattie said. “I’m an alchemist.”
“You’re in the elite then.” The man chuckled, making the beam of light jump up and down. “It’s all right though. There are quite a few of you helping us. I won’t say no to a helping hand, although it beats me what your types see in it.”
Mattie was starting to wonder about the same question—even if a few alchemists or mechanics or courtiers weren’t happy with the way things were, they had so little in common with these crude men that she doubted that any alliance was meaningful. “Are there any other mines like these?” she asked instead.
The men laughed. “Sure,” the second one said. “The ground here, it’s riddled with mines like a honeycomb. You in the city, you think you walk on solid ground, and you don’t know what’s beneath you.”
“They extend under the city?”
The men nodded. “No exits there, so as not to bother the pretty ladies and the merchants, but there are mines there.”
“I meant other mines where people meet,” she said.
“Sure,” the first man said. “There are meeting places aplenty, only I’m not telling you where.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“Good, ‘cause I’m not telling.”
They fell silent, but now there were other people and other light beams—they came from behind and from the side tunnels, and soon Mattie found herself walking in a small crowd. She looked over the faces, hoping to glimpse someone familiar, but they were all the same, the same men who attacked her the day before. But now they seemed different, as if the laws of the surface failed to apply to them and Mattie here.
She whirred and clunked along, feeling trapped and out of place. What if they decided to turn on her? What if Sebastian denied ever knowing her? Who would miss her, who would even know she was gone? She did not like to think of the answer.
Chapter 15
We cannot help but think of the shafts now, winding deep in the stone below, looping through and running up and down; we cannot help but think of all the people underneath. They seem to like it lately, and we watch the furtive figures down below, certain that they are invisible in the darkness, dash through the streets snaking beneath us. The city smells of smoke and trouble, and we think that this smell is more appropriate for fall than spring, this tang of burning leaves and bitterness. It reminds us of the underground, of its suffocating air and the bite of brimstone and magma, boiling not too far underneath.
We did not understand why they had to change the city we’ve built, just like we do not understand now why they must destroy it—befuddled and distraught, we huddle closer together on the roofs, wing brushing against wing, our mouths mute, heavy with unborn words, the taste of gemstones still fresh in their crevices.
We do not like the metal girl going underground; we fear that the stone that gave us birth will lead her away from us, just like the books, just like the books. We feel selfish and undeserving as we consider our impending death and her reluctance to help us, her preoccupation with other concerns. But we suppose she cannot help herself, and we just try to maintain our faith, and we hold onto each other, as if a touch of hands will prevent our rough flesh from becoming stone, as if we won’t have to wake up with our arms wrapped around yet another one of our number cold and unresponsive and dead.
The meeting place felt as if it were in the