The soldiers of House Pyrecrest took their time.
There were eight of them at the black arch, in long coats the color of dried blood, with a gold flame sewn over the heart. They didn’t look like the guards at the foundry gates, who were old and bored. These were Awakened, every one of them, and they stood with the lazy calm of men who had never met anything on this stone that could hurt them.
The sergeant held a slate. He was a big man with a shaved head and a nose that had been broken more than once.
"Name."
"Maverick Silkborn."
The sergeant’s pen stopped.
He looked up slowly, and a smile spread across his face like oil across water. He said the name again, louder, and the seven others turned to look.
"Silkborn. Well, well. You’re the one with the weed." He glanced at the green scarf. "Wildroot took you. Of course it did. The Doghouse takes anything."
Mav waited.
"Your father’s name is in our soldiers’ hall, you know," the sergeant went on, in a friendly voice. "It’s on a board, by the door. We keep a list of the traitors our house has put down. He’s fourth from the top. The new soldiers salute it."
The heat went through Mav so fast that for a second he couldn’t see. His hands closed into fists. Under his shirt, One shifted against his ribs, and he didn’t know whether the seaweed was answering his anger or warning him.
He made himself breathe slowly. He had learned to do that at 10 years old, in a schoolyard, with his back against a wall.
After a few breaths, the red had gone out of his sight, and what was left was cold and very clear.
’I don’t know your name yet, but I’ll find it.’
"I’ve paid for passage," he said. "Is there a problem with the gate?"
The sergeant blinked. He had expected tears, or a punch that would have given him the right to break a jaw.
"You call me sir, boy."
Mav looked at him, and let the silence stretch until two of the soldiers shifted their feet.
He had said sir all his life. He had said it to teachers who called him the traitor’s son, and to foremen, and to the officer who had come to the Lowes’ door when he was 10 and looked through him as if he were a stain. He had said it because the other choice was a beating.
Now the word wouldn’t come. He simply didn’t want to say it anymore.
"Is there a problem with the gate?" he said again.
The sergeant’s face darkened. But the Arbiter’s rule hung over the Nexus like a roof, and they both knew it. A soldier who struck a paying traveler in front of this arch would answer for it.
"There’s a problem with the line," the sergeant said at last. "It’s long. You’ll wait over there until I call you."
Mav went and stood where he was told. He stood there for three hours, while a hundred people were waved through in front of him.
Ronald, who had been waved through at once, refused to go. He sat down on the white stone beside Mav with his back against a pillar, took a piece of bread from his pocket, and broke it in two.
"He’s an idiot," Ronald said, with his mouth full, loudly enough to carry.
"I know."
"My father says you can tell a man who has never been hungry by how much he enjoys making people wait."
Mav chewed his half of the bread, and the knot in his chest loosened a little. It felt good to have a friend beside him.
-----
The gate let him out into rain.
It let One out with him. No Subject could cross the Homegate, and every guard there knew it. But none of them had thought to look under the shirt of a boy from the poorest school on the Row, and to the Genesis, One was simply a part of him.
He had stepped through a sheet of white light, and now he stood on wet stones under a low gray sky, in the square behind the Concord Hall. The air smelled of coal smoke. It was the smell of his whole childhood, and he hadn’t known that he missed it until his eyes stung.
It was strange to see how small everything was. He had lived in this city for 18 years, and he had never noticed that the streets were narrow, or that the people in them walked with their heads down.
He and Ronald said goodbye at the tram stop with a simple nod, because neither of them knew what to say.
The foundry district was 40 minutes away, and it hadn’t changed. The same six chimneys stood over it, pouring the same black smoke into the rain. The same black dust lay on every window. He walked past the surplus market, where a man was still selling ration bars from a cart, and past the school with the stone in its hall.
On the corner of his own street, a coal wagon had lost a wheel.
It was loaded to the top, and one corner had sunk into the ditch at the side of the street. Two men in foundry aprons were pushing at it. The older one was gray in the face.
Mav hadn’t meant to stop. But the old man reminded him of his uncle, and his hands had already found the edge of the wagon bed.
"Let me do it."
"It’s a ton and a half, lad. You’ll put your back out."
Mav lifted it.
He didn’t even have to strain. He had known that he was stronger now, but not that it was this much, and he liked it. He simply straightened his legs, and the corner of the loaded wagon came up out of the ditch in one hand as if it were a kitchen table. It stayed there, steady, while the rain ran off it.
The two men stared at him.
"Put the wheel on," Mav said.
They put the wheel on, and neither of them spoke. When he set the wagon down, the younger man took off his cap, which nobody had ever done for Mav in his life.
"You’re an Awakened," the old man said. Then he frowned. "Wait. I know your face. You’re Garrett Lowe’s boy. The one on the..."
He stopped himself, and looked away.
"The one on the what?" Mav asked.
But the old man was suddenly very busy with the straps. Mav went on up the street with a cold feeling settling in his stomach.
-----
The Lowes lived on the third floor, above a shoe repair shop, up a staircase that leaned.
Mav stood in front of the door for a while. He had faced an eel with less trouble. His heart was going like a hammer, and he had no idea what to do with his hands.
He knocked.
Feet came running, and the door flew open.
Juno stood there with a wooden spoon in her fist. She was 17, a head shorter than he was, with a sharp chin and a thick black braid over one shoulder. There was a yellow bruise on her cheekbone, a few days old.
She looked at him. She looked at the new jacket, the pale face and the green scarf.
"You said not long," Juno said.
Her voice cracked in the middle. Then she hit him in the chest with the spoon, and threw both arms around his neck.
"MOTHER! He’s here! He’s alive, he’s HERE!"
Something fell and broke in the kitchen. His aunt Mira came through the doorway with flour to the elbows, a small, square woman with gray in her dark hair, and she stopped with both hands over her mouth.
Mav had prepared something to say, but it went out of his head completely.
"I brought back the jar," he said.
His aunt made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob, and then she was holding him too, and the three of them stood in the narrow hall in a knot. He let them. He stood very still, with his throat aching, and breathed in onions and wet wool. He would have crossed the trench twice over for this.
His uncle came home in the evening.
Garrett Lowe filled the doorway, as he always had. He was a big man with a bent back, burn scars on both hands and a gray, unshaved jaw. He hung up his cap. Then he saw who was sitting at his table, and he stood there with the rain dripping off his coat.
He didn’t run, and he didn’t shout. He walked across the kitchen, put one heavy hand on Mav’s shoulder, and held it very tightly.
"You came back," Garrett said.
It was only three words, and his voice was rough on the last one.
Mav nodded, because he couldn’t speak.
It was a long moment before he noticed what was wrong with his uncle’s coat. For 26 years, Garrett had come home in a foreman’s gray. Tonight, he was wearing the black coat of the furnace line, and it was soaked with sweat. The furnace line was the hardest and worst-paid work in the foundry.
Then Mav saw the screen in the corner. It was on, with the sound turned down. A smiling presenter in white and gold stood in front of a wall of names.
At the bottom of the wall, there was a face. It was his own, from his school record, thin and unsmiling.
Under it ran a line of bright letters.
THE TRAITOR’S SON: DEAD LAST.