The Iron Thorn (11 page)

Dean’s mouth curled up at that. He stepped past the tollbooth, onto the bridge. The wire grating beneath our feet bounced and creaked as we advanced, and I unwillingly flashed on the images of the twisted span after the collapse, suspension cables flapping in the wind like tangled hair.

As we walked, the holes grew wider, until finally we were just walking on the mesh used by Babbage to under-sling the roadbed, a thin half-inch of wire keeping us out of the river. I looked back at Cal and saw that his face had gone sheet white with an undertone that matched his thatch of hair.

“Come on,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m sure it’s perfectly safe. We don’t weigh that much.”

He looked at me, looked at Dean, and then stepped forward, his jaw twitching. He ignored my hand and shoved his own into the pockets of his car coat. “Let’s just get across, okay?”

I pulled my hand back to my side, a small pain with it.
Cal had never refused my help before. At least my bleeding had stopped and I didn’t appear to be branded a heretic for it. Not like the five-pointed stars and crosses and sutra wheels the Proctors told us to watch out for, because a mark like that was the first sign. Heretics believed in gods, in magic, and carried their marks. A rational person knew there was no need of such decoration.

Dean walked with me, Cal a little behind, and together we crept across the span, over dark water and cracking ice. When we’d passed under the halfway mark, the Gothic arch that Babbage had proudly declared the gateway to New England, Dean spoke. “So, Miss Aoife. Arkham. What’s a city girl want with that worm-eaten little town?”

I didn’t answer for a moment that stretched long and thin, listening to our feet clang against the span.

“Something that’s none of my business?” Dean guessed. “That’s usually the way. But the more I know, the quicker I can get you to your Point B.”

“I have a brother,” I said. “His name is Conrad.” I glanced back at Cal, trudging a few paces behind with his eyes glued to his feet. “He needs my help,” I told Dean. “In Arkham.”

“Answer me straight, Miss Aoife, and I won’t bother you again,” Dean said. “Are you in trouble?” He held up a hand, long knobby fingers spreading like spider legs. “I’m not talking sneaking out of school, lifting a pack of cigarettes, and going out to the jitney races. I’m talking bad trouble. Bloody trouble.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“You want to tell me the truth on this one, Miss Aoife. If it’s trouble that can get me beat up or buried six feet
under, and you don’t fess up, your guide might be disinclined to pull your fat out of said trouble. Catch my meaning?” Dean’s face looked like it had when he’d confronted Dorlock—perfectly pleasant, except in his eyes. They were hard like stone and my chest went tight in response. I didn’t want Dean looking at me like that.

“There’s no trouble,” I said, and even managed a smile. Up until Conrad’s birthday, I’d never made a habit of lying. My mother babbled endlessly about things that weren’t there and couldn’t exist. I preferred to keep on solid ground. After Conrad came at me with the knife, I lied out of necessity, to keep the eyes of the school and the Proctors turned away from me.

Those had all been small lies, more voids of truth than falsehoods. I looked Dean in the eye. “I’m not in trouble,” I repeated. “Not yet, anyway.”

He loosed a small chuckle. “All right, miss. That’s all I wanted to know.”

“Now I should get to ask you something,” I said. Dean shoved his hands into his pockets.

“I don’t know about that, sweetness. I think you’re much smarter than I am.”

Behind us, Cal gave a snort. “Isn’t that the truth.”

“Why do you do this sort of thing?” I said, before Cal could get a nose full of Dean’s fist. “Smuggling people in and out of Lovecraft, I mean. It seems, well … dangerous, for starters.”

“About the only thing I’m suited for,” Dean said. “My old man wore out his bones as a gear monkey in the Rustworks, and my brother got himself killed in Korea a few years back. Got no money, got no family. Nothing but this
talent of mine to get folks where they need to be. It’s a rambling life, but it’s mine.”

“What about your mother?” Cal said. “Surely even you have one.”

Dean fixed Cal with his hard stare. “Don’t bring up my mother unless you want me to talk some crap about yours.”

There was a sentiment I could take to heart, and shame over interrogating Dean heated my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to pry,” I told him. “I just wanted to know a little bit about you, seeing as you’re taking us so far and—”

His head whipped skyward. “Button your lip, Miss Aoife.”

I followed the finger he touched to his mouth, up and up through the black bones of the Night Bridge. We were in the darkness between the embankments of Lovecraft and the glow and burn of the foundry beyond. Wind whipped my hair into a fury of knots; over the wind, the whirr of wings carried on frozen air.

“Raven patrol,” Dean said. “Flying out from Ravenhouse.”

“They’ll see us,” Cal hissed, instantly panicked. “The Proctors will take us into custody and lock us up in the Catacombs and—”

“Is there any shelter on the bridge?” I demanded in the loudest whisper I could manage. The hum grew louder, filled the air and drowned out the ice.

“Not unless you’re gonna swing down among the pilings like a river rat,” Dean murmured.

“What are we supposed to do?” Cal shoved his hands through his hair. “We’re sitting ducks. We’re totally exposed!”

I started when Dean grabbed my hand. “We hoof it.” He tugged and I stumbled. “Run!” he elaborated when Cal stood, wavering between us and the way back to Lovecraft.

“Move it, Cal!” I shouted, silence forgotten. Avoiding capture mattered more than detection. Besides, nothing escaped the notice of the ravens.

Dean’s loping stride easily outmatched mine, and sharp pain shot up my arm as he dragged me along, our feet pounding on the span.

They could not drown out the sound of wings.

I knew that I shouldn’t look back, that I should tuck in and run like my life depended on it, because it did, but I couldn’t help turning my head to see what was coming.

The raven’s feathers gleamed liquid black in the cold starlight. Their eyes blazed with yellow aether, burning up the night sky like a flock of sparks. Their beaks were glass and their talons were sets of tiny gears and rods that clacked and grasped as they swooped in a low V over the river. Their feathers were hammered aluminum, painted black, and their innards were marvels of clockwork that printed everything their burning eyes saw onto tiny lanternreels.

A raven, unlike an automaton,
could
see, and if it marked a heretic, it could fly back to Ravenhouse and croak to its masters from its metal throat. The whirr of their gears and the hiss of their aether flames drowned out everything, even my own heartbeat.

“Not but a hundred steps,” Dean panted. “Then we’ll be in the foundry. Those spy birds can’t spy through steel.”

I dug down, my feet clanging against the grate, my school bag slapping my hip, breath scissoring its way in and out of my lungs. Cal trailed us, his limbs flying in every direction as panic caught his feet and took him to ground.

“Cal!” I whirled, and my wrist wrenched in Dean’s grasp. He stumbled in turn, cursing.

“What in the blue hell are you doing, kid?”

I covered the two steps back to Cal, as the faint ghostly lamps atop the span of the Night Bridge winked out, one by one, covered by dusky wings.

“My ankle,” Cal moaned. “I think I broke it.”

“Aoife, we need to
go,
” Dean snapped, his panic creeping up to his eyes. “If I get caught and dragged to Ravenhouse, it’s curtains for the whole trio, you get me?”

Cal’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring in pain. I slung his arm over my shoulder. “Up. Put your weight on your good leg.”

“Just leave me,” he groaned. “Just leave me here … I swear I won’t give you up.…”

“Cal Daulton,
I
swear that if you don’t shut your trap, get up and run, I am going to sock you in the jaw and give you to the Proctors myself.” I had passed the point of my usual nervy fear, the kind that made my hands shake and my voice go soft. Now I was afraid on a much more basic level. I wasn’t going to the Catacombs. I wasn’t leaving Conrad on his own.

I’d come this far. I wasn’t turning around.

I stood, heaving Cal along with me. He was much heavier than his frame belied and I felt the rush of air along my face as the raven’s wings stirred the air.

Cal’s weight lifted all at once, and Dean was next to me, taking Cal’s other arm. “It’s a good thing I took a shine to you, Miss Aoife,” he said. “Because this is above and beyond.”

Dean muttered a swear as we dragged Cal between us.
“Hard left. Head for the automaton sheds inside the foundry fence.”

The gates of the Nephilim Foundry were shut for the night, but Dean found a gap in the fence and I helped Cal through. In the shadow of the outbuildings and the loaders—the sleds that ferried the slag, the by-product of the foundry—we stumbled through a patchwork world of glow and shadow, iron and frozen ground.

I could barely breathe from our dash and Cal’s weight, but I forced myself on, staying close to Dean.

He rattled the doors of the nearest building, a machine shed with the phantom shapes of automatons waiting for repair beyond the dirt-coated glass panes. “In here,” he rasped. “Put yourself on the floor—those things are still coming.”

Spurred by the ever-present sound of wings, I skip-hopped across the open space with Cal and we ducked through the doors just as the ravens swooped over the towers and tin roofs of the foundry and banked, turning back toward Lovecraft in the same rigid pattern that mimicked life but was as cold and precise as a surgeon’s tool.

I let Cal down gently, and slumped next to him. My heart was beating on my ribs like a fist on a madhouse door.

Dean exhaled and leaned his head back against the corrugated wall. “That was entirely too near for my taste.” He pulled a flattened packet from his back pocket and a silver lighter from his jacket. “Care for one?” he said as he bit off a Lucky Strike from the pack.

“Girls with good breeding don’t smoke.” I quoted Mrs. Fortune without even realizing it, and then blushed. Dean wasn’t the kind of person who’d care what a school matron thought. He wasn’t the kind of person who put stock
in girls who did, either, and the last thing we needed now was for him to think me silly. Which I was, to be worrying about comportment at a time like this.

“All right, then,” Dean said, touching the flame to the tip. “Lemme know if you decide not to be good, miss.”

I gave him what I could of a thankful smile before I crouched next to Cal, taking in his flushed face and shallow breaths. He looked like poor Ned Connors had, after Ned chopped off his little finger in a drill press during Machine Shop. I moved Cal’s hair, soaked with freezing sweat, off his forehead. “How’s the ankle?”

“Awful,” he said. He kicked off his boxy school shoe and pulled down his argyle sock. I winced at the sight of the swelling around the joint. I had barely passed our first-aid course—to treat the burns, breaks and slashes associated with work in the Engine—but I gingerly prodded Cal’s foot, and he yelped.

“Quiet!” Dean commanded. “You think the foundry doesn’t have its own bits of mean metal rolling around after dark?”

I considered being stuck here overnight, and our chances of escape in the light of day. Even with the raven patrols, the night was our only friend right now. I bit my lip, looking at Cal. “We’re just going to have to wait until we get to Arkham,” I told him. “I’ll find you a surgeon or a hospice there, I promise. Can you walk at all?”

Cal pressed his lips together. “I can try, if you help me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “But we have to keep moving.” I reached for him, tried to lever us into some kind of duet.

“I’m your guide, full stop,” Dean said quickly. “Don’t expect me to get in on that dance.”

“Nobody asked you to dance with anyone,” I snapped, helping Cal up. My shoulders protested the weight, but I let him lean on me. “Just do what I’m paying you for.” Dean Harrison might not be a heretic in the sense the Proctors understood the word, but he was certainly no gentleman.

Dean dropped his Lucky Strike and ground it under his boot. “Aye, aye, Miss Aoife.” He rolled the door back without another word and stuck his head out. “All clear.”

The narrow avenue between the long steel sheds before us rippled with fog, the aether lamps nailed to poles on each building face spitting in the moisture. In the distance I heard the whine of gears and saw a pair of blue lamplike eyes riding through the fog. I shivered, not just because of the wind on my sweat-scrimmed skin. The automatons of the foundry reminded me too much right now of everything I’d left in Lovecraft—nightjars, madmen, the looming turn of the year since Conrad had gone away. The feeling hadn’t left me that this journey into the wilds of Arkham was all a terrible mistake, and we weren’t even off the foundry grounds. There were worse things waiting for me outside the city gates than madness. Ghouls, roadside bandits, and the specter of heresy that my brother represented. If I came back from Arkham alive, I wouldn’t just be a potential infected—I’d be condemned as a heretic.

If I left the city, I might never be able to come back. Conrad had to have known when he sent the letter. He needed my help enough for me to risk it.

Or he was mad, and I was following him, the infection dropping my guard, making me take risks. Follow criminals. Act irrationally.

I rubbed the scar under my jaw with my free hand. My
other was around Cal’s waist, fingers pressed between his ribs. “Thanks, Aoife,” he whispered. “But maybe we can just forget this bit when I tell the guys about our trip?”

He smiled at me, and I managed to smile back through my effort of supporting half his weight. “Whatever you say, Cal. You’re the hero of that story.”

Dean whistled low from up ahead. “Back gate,” he said. “Locked, though.” He extended his palm to me. “Got a hairpin you can spare, miss?”

I pulled the bobby pin out of the left side of my regulation bun and handed it to him. Dean bent it open with his teeth and worked on the padlock. It popped with an irritable creak. I wished misbehavior came as easily to me, with as few compunctions. The nervous knot in my guts wouldn’t be nearly choking me now.