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into their chairs.
    Shay slammed his cards down onto the table. “Goddamned bloody cursed motherf—”
    “Shay Jones!” his mother barked, and Shay leaped to his feet. “What!” he spat, face livid. “I can’t swear? The goddamned Proprietor is sucking our lives away—purposefully!—and I can’t bloody curse? What’s going to happen? Is the blessed Diermani going to strike me dead where I stand? Is He going to send lightning to crisp me into ash? Because at this point I’d bloody well welcome it!”
    “Shay,” Colin’s father said, and then repeated more harshly. “Shay! Sit down!”
    Shay collapsed back into his seat, but the rage on his face didn’t change. “What did we cross the bloody Arduon for? Not for this.” He motioned toward the rest of the hut, toward all of Lean-to. “Not to live in a shack, begging for menial work on the docks. Not scouring the beaches for crabs or scavenging the plains for rodents, just to eat.” Leaning forward, he hissed, “I didn’t give up an apprenticeship with one of the finest guilds in Andover for this . Something has got to change or, Diermani is my witness, I’ll make it change.”
    He hesitated, eyes locked on Tom, then shoved back from the table, the crate he’d been sitting on tilting and tumbling to the ground. He’d ducked out into the storm, the shutter thrown aside, before anyone had even drawn a breath.
    No one moved; Sam and Paul sat with stunned looks on their faces, cards held before them. Thunder rumbled.
    Then Ana set her butchering knife down and wiped her hands on an already bloody cloth. “Well,” she said. “I’d say Shay’s a little . . . angry.”
    “He’s not the only one,” Sam said, tossing his cards into the center of the table.
    Ana hesitated at the warning in Sam’s voice, then moved toward the entrance to the hut to replace the shutter.
    “A large group of people in Lean-to have gotten tired of waiting,” Colin’s father said.
    “Some of them have already left,” Sam added. “The Havensworths gave up and returned to Andover. They used the last of their money for passage. The Colts and the Ferruses both took ship to other settlements along the coast.”
    “The Wrights packed up and headed inland, to settle their own land,” Ana said with a huff.
    “And the Wrights haven’t been heard from since,” Colin’s father said meaningfully, watching his mother’s back. “I’m not a farmer, Ana. I’m a carpenter. I don’t think we’d survive long if I simply packed you and Colin up and headed off into the plains alone. And we don’t have any funds left to get passage back to Andover or even down the coast.”
    After a moment, his father shifted, gaze dropping back to Sam and Paul. “But Shay is right. Sartori is doing everything he can to push us out, to force us to leave, and I’m tired of it. Tired of the restrictions, of the pressure. Of the threats that are becoming more and more overt, like the presence of the Armory. Something needs to change. Soon. If it doesn’t . . .”
    Paul snorted. “Shay isn’t one to waste words when action will do. And he’s got plenty of followers. He’s been recruiting from the dissidents in Lean-to, the criminals who opted for the New World rather than the Armor y in Andover, and there’s a lot more of them here than honest folk. There’s what? Thirty guildsmen here in Lean-to? There are four times as many of them. It could get ugly.”
    Ana frowned as she returned, her eyes going to Colin. She hugged him from behind and murmured, “I don’t want you going into town, Colin. Not for the next few days.”
    Colin pulled out of her embrace. “Why not?”
    “Because I don’t know what Shay might do.” When Colin rolled his eyes, she added, “And because I said so! Now, go take this bucket of innards to Nate. He’ll make good use of it.”
    “But it’s raining!”
    “I don’t care,” his mother said, voice black, and she held out the bucket. “Now go! And stick to