Chapter 1: Nina CHAPTER 1 NINA
In late September, I boarded a train.

The smokestack left plumes in our wake, dirtying the carriage windows, and I wondered if the smoke hadn’t followed us from home. I pressed my nose to the glass and made out the silhouette of Scurry in the distance, then saluted the town with my middle finger and turned away from it forever.

The carriage was filled to the brim with children: twelve years of age, fraying socks, soot on their eyelashes and mush in their heads, I imagined. Lady chaperones in long woolen skirts and slickened faces stumbled down the aisle against inertia. One leaned across the seat and flattened the lace trim collar of my blouse without looking me in the eye.

They yelled ineffectually at those who hung over their seats, at the boys who dared take off their caps, at the girls who bunched their dresses above the knee. Sit proper! Wipe your nose! Roll down your sleeves! The pleas went unnoticed. The children of Scurry bickered and caterwauled. We were teeming and swelling and spilling over with adventure. Something new was upon us. Something vast and frightening and intoxicatingly possible.

Possible.

I clung to that word. I wasn’t swept away by the same vicious thrill as the rest. I sat quiet and still. I gripped a badly bound wad of parchment, its pages filled with profile sketches and plant anatomy. I looked dead ahead and saw the possibilities my brain conjured. It drew me pictures of white marble walls and clean canvas. Of starched white blouses and badly stained aprons, imbued with years of paints and clay and charcoal. A landscape stretched in my mind of never-ending rooftops, where the church steeples and bell towers stretched high enough that one could see all the way to the edge of the continent from their rafters.

Soon, the pictures turned to dreams. The chaos aboard ebbed and flowed. The steam chest coughed. The floor rattled atop the cranks. We were carried farther and farther away from all we’d ever known.

I journeyed all the way to the Artisan capital city without a single thought for home. There were only dreams of brilliant crimson blood that turned inky blue.