He would bring them all down, he promised himself, make them all suffer the unseasonable cold that was ever in his heart. He began his journey down to the Below once more, his eyes on a certain bridge and the warm glow of firelight peeking out from beneath it already. The sun was still low in the sky when he began to formulate his plan. Destiny had saved him five years ago and Made him who he was for this purpose. And if he was to get his revenge in a proper way, he had best research and prepare.
Bringing down the Maker would require planning and transportation.
But if revenge was a dish best eaten cold he was surely the best man to enjoy both its taste and temperature.
Holgate
“Today we will try something new,” the Maker told Jordan.
Her stomach flopped like a fish caught in the net of her gut. Silently she assumed her spot by the board, offering her manacled wrists to be bound for the day’s new torture.
“No, no,” he corrected. “Today we will have a spot of kindness. And a spot of tea.” He smiled and opened the door to the laboratory. In walked Meggie, carrying a tray with a teapot and cups and saucers balanced on its surface.
“Sit, please,” Bran requested, motioning for Jordan to perch on a chair.
It was then, as she sipped tea with her torturer, that Jordan realized he was quite insane. It was also then that she wondered if perhaps she would not soon follow in the same manner.
Following the new treatment he asked her if there was anything he might do to make her feel more comfortable. He made it clear he would not remove her from the Tanks, but was there anything else she might appreciate? Her eyes fell on the tea set and narrowed. “A daily cup of tea in my Tank.”
His eyes crinkled at their edges and he nodded. “That I can most certainly provide.”
And for the next several days, he was good to his word, hoping that kindness might make magick blossom when nothing else would. For those days tea became the shared ritual of Jordan and her cell mates—a spot of sanity amid the pain and darkness. And on those days, unbeknownst to Jordan, the Maker was a kind, gentle, and happy man.
One day Jordan would take a sip and pass the cup and saucer through the hole between her cell and Caleb’s, the next she took a sip and passed it the other direction to Kate.
But the happiness was short-lived. Jordan still summoned no storms and, having proof that she could, the Maker had to presume she was refusing or required a different method to trigger her skills. So the torture resumed, but the tea kept coming.
It was on one such a day after Jordan had returned from her time on the Eastern Tower’s top, her hand aching all over again from the Maker’s attentions, that the trio first argued over who received the precious liquid.
Jordan passed the cup through the hole in the wall, her shaking hand making the cup clatter against the saucer. “Apologies,” she whispered, tea spilling onto her fingers.
“Stop,” Caleb insisted. “You need it more than I…”
“No,” Jordan said.
But the cup and saucer paused and Caleb scooted it back so it rested just in the shared shadow of the wall.
“I will leave it there,” Jordan challenged. “You should drink it—enjoy it so it does not go to waste.”
There was a groan from the wall’s other side. “It is on your side of the wall.”
“It is not,” Jordan protested.
“Indeed it is.”
“Not.”
“You are the most difficult neighbor I have yet had,” Caleb muttered. With a grinding and chattering noise the cup and accompanying saucer walked closer to her in the grip of her mysterious neighbor’s hand.
It was the most Jordan had ever glimpsed of Caleb and just one look made her stomach do flips. The hand was as dirty as hers—that was far from surprising, but the marks that crisscrossed the back of Caleb’s hand were a system of cross-hatched scars, white and rising from the skin’s already pale surface and a testament to Caleb’s continued courage.
He said he wouldn’t give in to the Maker and he hadn’t, though it had cost him.
Before Caleb could withdraw his hand, Jordan knocked the cup awkwardly aside to grasp his fingers.
For a moment they were still and silent that way, tea leaking from the overturned cup, Jordan’s hand clenching the fingers of the boy next door.
“Please don’t,” he whispered, his voice rasping to finally break the shared silence. “You’re wasting good tea.”
But she wrapped her fingers more tightly around his. “How did you come to be here?”
“Although I do not mind your questions normally…” He shifted in the straw on the hole’s other side. “You must not ask me that.”
His fingers twitched against her palm.
“You must let me go,” he said.
“Not yet.” She twisted closer, trying to get her face close enough that she could see his face.
But the darkness between them was too deep.
“I don’t wish to let go just yet.”
“We never do.” He groaned. “Who are you really holding on to, Jordan? It can’t be me … You barely know me…”
She sighed.
“Who was he?”
She released him then, pulling away to tuck her knees up and wrap her arms around them. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Liar. You’re holding on to someone. In your heart. I know it.”
“How would you know?”
“Because we do that—hold on. It’s what keeps us going. It’s all that keeps us going.”
She heard him move in the straw again and she imagined him mirroring her position just a wall away. “Is that what keeps us going?”
“Well, it certainly isn’t the love of one’s family … not for me.” Silence soaked up the moments like a sponge falling into water for the first time. He reached through the gap in the wall again, this time even farther into the grim space of her cell. His fingers fidgeted, wanting hers, and she could not help but take them again.
“Who keeps you going?” she asked into the dark.
“Thomas.”
She nearly pulled back in surprise at him naming another man. But his delivery of the name, so soft and sweet and … loving, made her brow furrow, and not thinking of her own imperfections or the wrinkles she’d surely earn, she squeezed his fingers tight, whispering, “Tell me all about him.”
And they rested that way in the dirt and the straw, neither of them worrying over filth or social convention, holding hands and remembering a brighter, better time when love was fresh and new and within reach. It was remembering those things that next spurred Jordan to action. Caleb was right, she was holding on to someone and realized then in her Tank how lost she felt without him.
En Route to Holgate
Rowen was lost and he’d been lost for days. How was it that a man of his education and breeding could be so utterly turned around in a forest? He sat with a huff at the base of a tree and ran his hands across his face, scratching at the stubble growing there. He growled out his despair. He no longer had clean clothing, a ramrod for his pistol, or his horse, and, to make things worse, he was growing whiskers to rival his grandfather’s. Soon he’d have a full beard and mustache and children would flock to him and call him Father Christmas …