Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker #3)(66)

When she left she didn’t even bother to close the door behind her. And why should she? Privacy was an illusion.

Toshi hadn’t wanted to believe her. He thought that there had to be malcontents—people who wouldn’t be bought out by the perks of perfect living. So far, he hadn’t found anyone. After two days of talking in code with family and friends, he was leaving the restricted zone more frustrated than when he’d entered it. He’d thought that if ever there were a place to find rebels, it would be there. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The people in the restricted zone didn’t care one way or the other if the Hive controlled the city or if Grace controlled the city by controlling the Hive. They just wanted to be a part of it.

His father’s advice was given in Japanese. The closest equivalent in English was “don’t rock the boat.”

Toshi spent a day in his family’s apothecary shop, trying to feel out customers to see who would rise up if they knew that Grace, and not the inscrutable and invincible Hive, had kept them poor and sickly. He’d asked hypothetical questions that were met with blank stares and embarrassed laughs. They lived in a world where it was acceptable, even normal, to curse the Hive, but beyond curses all anyone seemed to want was to be accepted by them—to be ushered past the checkpoints and into the shining city by the sea.

At night, Toshi sat with his dying mother. He could see the cancer in her growing by the second, thinking how easily he could pluck it from her body. Like picking spilled seeds off the floor. But he wasn’t allowed to do that.

Toshi asked his mother why she didn’t want change. She placed her shriveled hand next to his smooth one and smiled up into his eternally young face. “You are not sick. You will never be sick,” she said.

And that was enough for her. It seemed to be enough for most in the restricted zone. As long as they had the hope that their children would live charmed lives in Bower City, they didn’t want change.

Toshi jumped a trolley and hung from the bar, glaring hopelessly out the window. The clean streets glittered at him smugly and the legions of fit people mocked him with their healthy bodies and pretty, smiling faces.

Grace was right. They would probably fight him—not her—if Toshi tried to change anything. That was the genius of what Grace had done. Her victims were far away and somebody else’s problem. The punishment was to be locked out of Bower City, and so everyone wanted in.

He got off the trolley and walked the last few blocks to the Governor’s Villa. Grace hadn’t even hinted that she was going to throw him out or demote him in any way. Still, Toshi was certain now that he had no hope of ever learning how to grow willstones. Grace would never trust him with that. If the formula for growing willstones was ever leaked it would end Bower City’s stranglehold on magic and therefore its dominance in the world.

But, as Toshi considered it, he realized that he’d never had a chance of becoming Ivan’s second. Grace had stopped trusting him enough for that when he saw the hardness in her eyes and ended their brief romance. She knew that if he didn’t love her she couldn’t control him, and Grace would never allow anyone she couldn’t control to know the secret of willstones. He wondered what Grace had on Ivan.

Toshi went inside, but he didn’t go up to his rooms. Instead, he went to find Ivan. He wove through the myriad rooms and down passageways that led to other buildings. The fa?ades of these buildings were made to look like they were separate, but behind them, nearly all the buildings in the governing area were connected. They all led back to Grace.

Toshi found Ivan in the power relays. The windy, stadium-size room was humming with the electricity being generated by the three dozen crucibles and witches who were transmuting energy for the city. They each stood in their niche in the marble walls, suspended in a gentle column of witch wind, their faces underlit by their glowing willstones. They looked like lovely floating statues. The mechanics grouped below them and monitored their bodies, making sure they didn’t transmute to the point of taxing themselves. Salt and herbs were strewn on the floor. A banquet of food was ready in a niche to refuel them when they had completed their shift. Out of respect, the food was always presented spilling out of a cornucopia.

The only things that marred the hypnotic beauty of the relays were the thick cables that carried the electricity out to the city, but since they were the whole point, the cables were regrettably unavoidable. Ivan made sure they were kept out of the way nonetheless. A serene witch was a productive witch, and it just made sense to keep the generators of the city’s power happy.

Ivan was checking an output gauge when Toshi came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and smiled when he saw his protégé.

“I didn’t see you on the schedule today,” Ivan said, his smile falling as he took note of Toshi’s expression.

“Can we talk?” Toshi asked.

Ivan waved someone over to take his place. They went down a corridor and through some back doors in silence until they got to Ivan’s laboratory. Unlike the grand and stately space of the relays, Ivan’s laboratory was a cramped, untidy room full of glass beakers and tiny crystal vials of strange potions.

There were few places in the world where Toshi felt as comfortable as he did here. It was filled with memories of his childhood. After being chosen by the Hive and the subsequent commotion of bonding with such a large and impressive willstone, Ivan’s laboratory was the only place that reminded Toshi of his parents’ apothecary shop. It was unheard of for Toshi to wish himself back to the restricted zone, or to even speak of it, and so Ivan’s acrid-smelling, usually sticky, and occasionally explosive laboratory became the only place Toshi could go as a boy to ease the homesickness he was told he shouldn’t feel.