by Aria Noble
She set down the menu and glanced over at Felix, who was grinning again, apparently amused by whatever expression had leaked onto Ember’s face. “Hot chocolate and an egg,” he said before she could ask. “That’s my favorite.”
When the doll in the black apron came back and asked them what they wanted, Ember asked for hot chocolate and an egg.
“Whipped cream?” the doll said.
Ember didn’t have a chance to look confused or ask her what she meant before Felix answered for her. “Yes.”
He asked for a sausage muffin and a cafei, then went back to grinning happily at Ember when the doll bustled off, menus in its hand again. “You don’t know what apples or eggs or hot chocolate are — what do you eat up there?”
Had someone else asked the question, she might’ve been offended. But Felix was so sincere, so innocently curious, that she didn’t even mind answering. “Rice. Tea. Every week, we get a ration of jerky. Once in a great while, we’ll get a bit of cafei. I’d been saving that up for a special occasion.”
She fought against the urge to blush at the admission. Hoarding rations was as close to a crime as was possible to get in Dusk, and she hadn’t told anyone but Eli that she was doing it for fear of being attacked in the streets.
Surely such a thing wasn’t a terrible thing to admit here in Frost, where rationing didn’t even seem to be a practice. Why should it be? Frost grew its own food.
Felix was quiet for a single beat after she finished, as though waiting for her to go on and continue listing the sorts of food people ate in Dusk. “Is that all?” he prompted when he seemed to realize that Ember wasn’t about to go on.
Again, a sort of question that might infuriate her had it not been Felix who was asking it. “Yes. Rice, tea, jerky. All of it was stored away Before and has been running out ever since.”
Another flush of heat crept across her face, and again, she tried to breathe slowly in and out to cool it. Everyone in Dusk knew that the rations were running out — portions had gotten smaller, and sometimes they went as many as ten days between one jerky ration and the next. The council was trying to spread out the decreasing stores thinner so they would last longer. But, like hoarding rations, mentioning the fact that they were running low was about as close to a crime as was possible to commit.
Everyone knew it, and everyone was in denial.
“You’re running out of food?” Felix asked, interrupting Ember’s thoughts.
She couldn’t meet his eyes; she nodded toward the wooden table instead.
“Is that why you came here?”
It would be simple to say yes, to let him think that was the main reason that had motivated her to leave Dusk. It was such a simple, obvious answer. But it wasn’t the truth, or at least not all of it. And she found that she wanted to tell Felix the truth, at least as best as she could.
“I came because Eli was going, and nothing I could say would make him stay. There was nothing there for either of us, and if I hadn’t come with him, then there would’ve really been nothing there for me.” She was aware even as she said it that she was jumbling her words, tripping over what should’ve been a simple sort of explanation. “Does that make sense?”
Felix nodded. The grin was gone from his face; his expression had turned serious. “He’s your … boyfriend? Husband?”
“Eli?” She chuckled. “Oh, no. He’s been like my brother my entire life, and I love him dearly, but there’s nothing romantic between us.”
Felix lifted an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “Everyone in Dusk expected us to get married, but…” She shuddered, exaggerating it a bit so there would be no question in his mind what she thought of the idea.
That Eli himself had mentioned it, once, at the start of the summer, just before his desire to find Frost went from a dream to an obsession, she didn’t want to admit, and certainly not to Felix.
“So you’re unattached?” He asked like the words tasted bad coming out, but they were words that he needed an answer to.
She must’ve not been as clear as she’d hoped. She tried again. “Yes.”
Felix reached out, a little hesitantly, and rested his fingers on Ember’s. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. His eyes kept flickering down toward the table, his voice quiet and uncertain, as though he wasn’t sure if this was something he was allowed to say.
Ember looked down at their hands, just barely touching each other in the space the table had set between them. No boy had ever touched her like that, soft, hesitant, like he was ready to take his hand back at the slightest twitch that might indicate she didn’t like it.
But she didn’t want to twitch away, although something somewhere inside her more suspicious self was telling her maybe she should. After all, she didn’t really know Felix. For all that he seemed genuine and kind, he could be hiding any number of worrisome motives. He could be a spy for the queen or an assassin sent to get close to her before sticking a knife in her belly and harvesting her for meat.
Ember dismissed all those thoughts, turned her hand over, and closed her fingers around his.
There was beat of silence, a strained sort of uncertainty between them. Ember didn’t dare look up, even when she could feel Felix watching her, for fear that the heat in her face would give her away; she kept her eyes stubbornly on their hands. She liked the way they looked like that, her Dusk-dark skin against his Frost-pale, the way it felt for someone to touch her like that, soft, hesitant, uncertain, but obviously wanting.
She’d never been wanted before.
The doll in the apron came back to the table at that moment, balancing two plates and two large porcelain cups in its hands, and both Ember and Felix jerked away from each other as if they’d nearly been caught doing something wrong. Ember could light a fire with the heat in her face.
But the doll didn’t seem to notice, or maybe just didn’t care — it smiled and set down a plate and cup in front of each of them without comment. “Enjoy,” it chirped, “and don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything.”
Ember stared down at her plate, at the strange semi-solid puddle of what she assumed was eggs — thin whitish skin, slightly burned at the very edges, surrounding a bright yellow centers. The cup was full to overflowing, a small trickle of thick brown liquid spilling out from underneath a swirling pile of white.
Felix was grinning again. “Try it,” he urged.
She stuck her finger experimentally into the pile above the lip of the cup. The stuff was so foamy and light that even when she scooped some onto her finger, she didn’t feel like she’d grabbed anything at all. She slid the finger into her mouth and giggled like a little girl at the sweetness that filled it.
“Like it?”
“It’s like eating a cloud.” She took another finger of the stuff. “Is this the whipped cream?”
He nodded. He was grinning just as foolishly as she was, enjoying her enjoyment.
She slid her finger along the trail of spilled beverage and tasted that, too. Recognition was immediate: that was the rich brown drink she and Eli had when they first got into their apartment.
Hot chocolate. She’d have to tell him that she’d found out what it was called.
But that would mean she’d have to tell him about going out with Felix, and that was a conversation she wasn’t eager to have.
She wasn’t sure what about this time made it so different from the last two times she’d run into Felix, but it was. She shoved those thoughts aside for now and focused on trying the eggs instead. It was delicious, salty and crisp around the edges, with a middle that oozed. When Felix offered her his untouched sausage muffin and cafei, insisting that he wasn’t hungry and had ordered it for her anyway, she couldn’t refuse it.
“Frost loves its food,” she observed when she’d recovered the urge to speak.
“It helps to have enough,” he agreed.
The doll flounced back to the edge of their table. “How is everything?”<
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Felix grinned at it, looking just as happy as Ember had yet seen him. “Everything’s great.”
Ember waited for the doll to move away again before speaking. She sensed the time had come to broach the real subject, but she knew she had to be careful about it — she didn’t want to toggle Felix’s switch that turned him from eager to closed-off by saying anything wrong.
“The dolls,” she started at last, attempting a slightly sideways entry into the topic. “There’s a lot of them here?”
“Oh, lots,” he answered, but then hesitated, and his voice came out just a little more slowly when he spoke again. “Why?”
Ember poked at her plate, dragged her fork through the leftover ooze from the eggs. “Well, some of them aren’t working right, and the queen wants me to fix them. But I can’t figure out what’s wrong with them. I’m not a scientist, not like my father — I just like to tinker with things. I was wondering…” She hesitated. Maybe she was pushing a little too far, creeping a little too close to things that would shut Felix up entirely, but since she was already here, there was no reason not to at least try.
She took a breath and decided to go for it. “They say the wall is cracking. But I don’t know what that means, and I can’t get anyone to tell me.”
Felix’s face drained of color, and he stared at her for a long moment with the same kind of shock she’d seen on the queen’s face when repeating the dolls’ words to her. His voice, when he seemed to have finally recovered it, came out thin and surprisingly harsh. “They’re talking about the wall?”
“The ones they say are malfunctioning, yes.” She hesitated a moment, considered, then pressed on with a bit more decisiveness. “Is it cracking?”
Felix shook his head. “It can’t be. That’s not … not possible. But dolls — they don’t lie.”
“You know which wall they’re talking about?”
He blinked at her, long and slow. “There’s only one it could be.”
Chapter Sixteen
They slipped out of the cafe, though the doll, of course, noticed their passing — how could it not when the bell hanging at the top of the door chimed when it opened. It smiled that absurd smile of all the dolls and waved one human-looking hand. “Come back soon, dears!”
Felix gave it a quick grin. Ember just walked through the door and out into the cool streets without acknowledging it.
It was edging toward daylight now. Though the electrics were still the primary source of light on the roads, the sky had melted from the inky black of proper night toward the grayish blue of nearing sunrise. Ember wasn’t sure when, exactly, she was expected to return to the workshop, or the palace, or wherever she was supposed to go for her day’s work, but at this point, she didn’t really care.
“The wall?” she prompted in a whisper when Felix hesitated outside the door of the cafe.
He looked back at her, his expression deadly serious. “We’re not supposed to go to the wall. Getting too close might interfere with the magic.”
She let the mention of magic slide. “I just want to see it. To know what the dolls are talking about, so I can fix them,” she added when Felix didn’t look convinced. “I couldn’t tell what was broken in them yesterday, but if I could see what they were talking about…”
She let the sentence fade off before she had to come up with the way to properly end it. She didn’t actually know if seeing the wall could help her understand what was wrong with the dolls, but if she didn’t let on about that, maybe that was a believable reason.
Maybe it would be enough.
Or maybe Felix would tell her to go back to wherever she came from and stop bugging him with mysteries that weren’t hers — or his — to solve.
She smiled, aiming for guileless, and widened her eyes just a little. She’d seen people flirt before, but she’d never done it herself. She’d never had anyone to flirt with before, and she was pleased to see Felix’s face once again tinge pink under the expression. “Please? Just for a minute? I only want to look.”
Felix bit his lip. She could see him wavering, uncertain. A desire to show her something, give in to her request, maybe even his own curiosity, warring behind his eyes with the apparently ingrained belief that no one should do what she was asking of him.
She slid a little closer to him, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off his skin, that she could, if she wanted, reach out and take his hand. Her fingers twitched, but she folded them together and forced them still. “Do you know what’s on the other side?”
“Nothing,” he answered, too quickly.
“You sure?”
“It’s the end of the world. There’s nothing beyond the wall.”
“But what if there was?”
His curiosity was winning — she could see that spark, that light, that came on inside of him when she’d touched on something interesting.
She dared to needle just a little more. “It can’t hurt to look, can it? If there’s nothing there, what is there to be afraid of?”
Felix let out a breath, big enough that it puffed visible in the air before floating away. “We can’t get too close. It might interfere with the magic that holds it up.”
Ember nodded.
He reached out, bolder than before, and took her hand, then turned halfway around and tugged her along after him. “This way.”
Felix dropped her hand after a couple of steps without looking at her, and walked with sudden purpose away from the cafe and toward what Ember thought was in the direction of the palace square for a couple of blocks before turning right and heading east.
They went only another block before taking a left, then another left, so they were going west, then a third left like he was determined to take them in a circle.
He took the turns sharply, as if deciding on them midstride, and there was an intentionality that Ember couldn’t make out to it. Finally, after another few blocks and a new easterly direction, she had to ask which direction they were actually meaning to go.
“South,” Felix answered in a whisper almost too low to hear.
“South?” she repeated with a pointed glance at the sunrise brightness visible directly in front of them.
Felix peeked over his shoulder, quick and furtive. “We’re being followed.”
Ember looked behind her. There was a small stream of people in the streets with them, at least half of them going in the same easterly direction as they were. No one seemed particularly suspicious — she just saw the same doll smiles and half-interested expressions that she’d seen on most of the Frost citizens so far. “How—?”
Felix grinned wryly, interrupting her question before she’d even finished asking it. His voice stayed well below a whisper, barely loud enough to make out even as Ember was listening for it. “I’ve spent at least half my life dodging a tail.”
She dropped her own voice to match his. “Why?”
“My father works for the queen.”
Was that all it took to get someone followed?
Felix glanced over his shoulder again, then turned to face straight into the sun, squinting slightly. “The short man in the brown hat, about twenty steps behind us.”
Ember looked again. There were a couple of people moving in a small clump with the same sense of purpose as them. Behind those people, she could just glimpse the man Felix was talking about: a doll dressed in the Frost men’s usual attire, shorter and somewhat rounder than the other people on the street. Their eyes met. Its attention was fixed on her, its smile blank and empty.
She swallowed hard. She’d seen that sort of doll before — it was the same kind as the trolley drivers she’d seen, practically identical except that this one wore a man’s hat.
“Alexei,” Felix muttered. “Not too bright. Shouldn’t be hard to—”
He took another sharp turn east, then darted into a tiny space between two windowless brick walls. He pulled Ember into the space beside him and held one finger to his lips.
Ember froze,
barely even daring to breathe, as she pressed instinctively to Felix’s side and waited to see what the doll would do.
Between the walls, in the space where she could just make out the street they’d just been on, she could see the doll, their tail, its smile undeterred as it passed blithely by their hiding spot.
Felix watched it go, peering out past the opening for a moment, then grinned at Ember. “Alexei,” he whispered, his words going nearly directly into her ear. “Not the Envoys’ brightest and best.”
They slipped out of the space and took the road back the way they’d come at a half-run. After another block and a few small clusters of people separated them from the doll, Felix let out a breath and smiled. “Someone must’ve overheard,” he said, though Ember wasn’t sure if he’d meant the words for her or not. Then he glanced over at her, his grin turning playful. “They always get weird when people start talking about going places.”
“Why would we be followed now?” Ember wondered, keeping her voice low so the people around them couldn’t hear.
Felix shrugged. “We were followed the entire time the other day, out to the old city.”
“What?” Ember stopped walking, startled by this news. Being followed was something she’d been watching for, even expecting, and the fact that she hadn’t seen anyone doing it was part of what had her so on edge.
Felix paused only for a moment, then kept walking, his forward movement pulling Ember’s legs back into working. “Yeah. The guy sitting across from us on the trolley? I don’t know if he followed you to and from your place, but he was following us from the square to the old city and back.”
“I … didn’t notice,” Ember admitted. Her face felt warm. So much for her powers of observation — that was a pretty big thing for her to have overlooked.
Felix shrugged again as if this was nothing to comment on. “Most of the time, an Envoy tail isn’t anything to worry about. The man probably just went back to the Envoy office, wrote out a detailed report about you being fascinated by the light posts, and stuck the paper in a drawer somewhere where no one will ever see it again.”