The Iron Thorn (10 page)

“Oh? He a heretic too?”

A stone dropped into my stomach, cold and smooth as the ice churning below my feet. As the walkway creaked and shuddered, I shuddered with it.

Dean swiveled his head toward my silence, his bright eyes searching my face. “I say something wrong, Miss Aoife?”

“Forget it,” I gritted, concentrating on where I stepped. Conrad wasn’t any of Dean Harrison’s business. Dean was a criminal, who smuggled other criminals for cash. What did I care if he thought my family was strange or common? We
were
strange. No power in science or the stars could change that. To all Rationalist folk, Conrad
was
a heretic—a boy who’d rejected reality and substituted the fantastical lie of magic and conjuring for science and logic. Heretics were, by their very definition, liars. Dean and Conrad would probably get along famously.

“Forgotten as yesterday’s funny papers,” Dean said easily, and then let out a low whistle. “Night Bridge ahead. In the shadows. This isn’t something many from Uptown get to see.”

Like one of Conrad’s hidden picture puzzles, the Night
Bridge revealed itself to me by degrees. I saw the struts, the dark iron towers reaching for the bleak velvet sky, piercing it with sharp finials. The scrollwork railings crawled into focus, the cables knitting themselves into cohesion as my eye pierced the darkness. I felt something sharp catch in my chest as I beheld the antique span, dark and skeletal, drifting through the night air.

“Well?” Dean spoke close to my ear. I could feel his breath.

“I’ve seen this before,” I said. The Gothic bridge arched a spiny back, cables rattling in the harsh wind blowing up the channel from the Atlantic.

“Reckon you have,” Dean agreed. “In history books at whatever fancy school that uniform of yours belongs to.”

The bridge before me was as familiar as the ceiling of my own room at the Academy, a span that dominated my structural engineering texts. The Babbage Bridge, a marvel of design, erected by Charles Babbage in 1891.

“This isn’t possible,” I said out loud. “The Babbage collapsed in ’twenty-nine.”

“That’s what they said,” Dean agreed. “But you tell me, Miss Aoife—what are you seeing now?”

The Babbage Bridge, known to the citizens of Lovecraft as the Bouncing Baby, was a marvel in every way except one—its thin spiky towers and ultralight span were ill-equipped for the nor’easters and winter ice that bound up New England during the cold months, and on a particularly breezy January morning, the Babbage had given up the ghost, plunging twenty-one to their deaths in the Erebus. Condemned by the city, the usable pig iron had been salvaged and turned into the bones of Joseph Strauss’s newer, stronger, more practical bridge.

Of course, people said you could still hear the screams of the twenty-one the Babbage claimed moaning through the cables of the new span, if the wind was from the east.

But this was impossible—I was not seeing the bridge that had broken its back against a gale nearly thirty years earlier. That bridge was gone.

“I’m not seeing things,” I told Dean. “That is not the real Babbage.”

“Let me ask you something,” Dean said, walking again. I was forced to follow or be left behind. “You think just because the Head of the City or the Proctors down in Washington say a thing doesn’t exist, all memory up and fades away? You think twenty-one deaths don’t resonate in the aether to this day, on this spot?”

“I don’t … I … Cal, are you seeing this?” I looked to him in confusion. Tales of phantoms were one thing. A phantom bridge was another, entirely.

He grunted. “Uh-huh.” Cal couldn’t take his eyes from the span either, stumbling over his own feet as he approached it with the same reverence he used when opening the newest issue of
Weird Tales
. But this was beyond anything the Proctors used to make heretics seem like either fearful phantoms or a joke with the stories they paid people like Cal’s favorite pulp writer, Matt Edison, to pen. This looked
real
, in the way my own hand was real.

“The Babbage became the Night Bridge,” Dean said. “Don’t ask me to explain all that existential beatnik stuff, about memory and manifest will, ’cause I can’t, but what I know is that the Night Bridge is here when I need it, because I can find it.”

“If you expect me to believe that we’re crossing out of
Lovecraft on some
ghost bridge,
” I started, drawing myself up severely like Mrs. Fortune, “you’re patently crazy.”

“Boss design,” Cal said. “But is it sound?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It wasn’t sound in ’twenty-nine, was it? Babbage didn’t account for the wind drag and … I can’t believe I’m even explaining this. That is
not
the Babbage. It’s a trick.”

It had to be. According to the laws of the Rationalists, the bridge was impossible.

“No trick,” Dean said. “And it’s sound enough for your footsteps, Miss Aoife. I promise you.” He beckoned when he reached another set of steps, spiraling upward toward the span. “Come on. Now that we’ve seen it, we can’t very well not cross it.”

“Let me guess—I’ll be cursed by the ghost of faulty engineering?” I said as we started up, to the bridge bed. Sarcasm wasn’t befitting a young lady, but I had to say something or I’d be too terrified to go another step. I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing. And yet I was walking it, feeling the frozen iron of the span under my hand, crossing a bridge that existed only in memory.

“Now the Night Bridge has seen you, too,” Dean said, “and if you turned back, it could keep your soul forever.”

I shivered, tucking my hand back into my pocket.

“People don’t have souls,” Cal interjected. “That’s blasphemy.”

“Do us a favor, cowboy,” Dean said. “If you have the urge to call blasphemy again on this trip … don’t.”

Cal’s lip curled back, but I grabbed his hand. “It’s not worth it. We need his help.” I didn’t believe in souls the way the Rationalists explained them, but something was
keeping this bridge hidden—keeping it
in existence
—and it wasn’t engineering.

Cal growled in his throat. “I don’t like him, Aoife. He’s a heretic, and he’s common besides.”

I stopped in my tracks, shoving a finger into Cal’s chest. “Why is he common, Cal?” I demanded. “Because he’s poor? Because he doesn’t have a family? Because he’s not like you?”

He backed away from my prodding. “Aoife, I didn’t mean …”

I dropped my hand and placed myself equidistant between Cal and Dean, in the orbit of neither. “Leave it. I don’t want to talk about it. With either of you,” I added when Dean’s ears pricked. I put my attention on the bridge. It could still be a trick. Mirrors, or a modification to Mr. Edison’s light-lantern.

The stairs ended at a dilapidated tollbooth at the beginning of the span. Through cracks and holes the size of my body in the roadbed, I could see down to the water. My stomach flipped. I had no fear of heights, but a healthy one of drowning.

From where I stood, I watched the span sway in the light wind, groaning and shuddering down to its base deep below the riverbed. I looked upward, at the towers moving. Bony fingers clawing at a cloud-streaked sky, trying to peel back the vapor to the stars. I shook my head at Dean. “This is unsafe. We need to turn back.” I didn’t care any longer if it was a trick or … something not a trick. I simply didn’t want to step foot on it.

Dean lifted his shoulders. “Told you already, Miss Aoife—too late.”

With a creak, the tollbooth window swung open. I jumped inside my coat. A brass face topped by a ragged cap and a brass arm encased in the tatters of a city worker’s uniform swung forth, nearly nose to nose with me. “Toll, pleassssse.”

Dean reached inside his white T-shirt and pulled out a worn iron key on a chain. “Just a traveler, friend.”

The automaton’s eyes flashed with a blue spark and it cranked its hand backward to pull aside the tatty blue uniform jacket hiding the rusted ribs beneath. A keyhole sat in place of a heart.

“Pleasssse insert youuuur passsss … key,” the automaton creaked. The voice box wound slow, and every syllable dragged forth from the dented throat.

I watched with fascination. Automatons were the purview of graduate students, those who passed their apprenticeships and were recommended to be master engineers. Powered by aether or clockwork, they worked in the foundries or in stately homes like the Langostrians’. This was likely the closest a common engineer like me would ever get to one.

Dean inserted his key and turned it. Something whirred to life inside the automaton, its clockwork innards firing with a click-clack of gears wanting oil. Its eyes lit, small blue aether flames that stared at me. This wasn’t usual—automatons couldn’t see, couldn’t hear or feel. They were just metal laborers, doing tasks too punishing or delicate for human labor. Someone had modified this one, made it look and act like a man. It was wrong, like a springheel jack taking on the face of a trusted friend, until it could show its true, monstrous face and gobble you up. I didn’t want to
look into its blue-flame eyes, any more than I wanted to look into the heart of the Engine without shielding goggles.

The automaton croaked at me. “The traveler walkssss the Night Bridge freely. The ssssstranger paysss the toll.”

“Does it want money?” I asked Dean, reaching into my skirt pocket. “How much?”

“Easy,” he said, removing the key and tucking it back under his shirt. “Your money’s no good on the Night Bridge.”

Cal shifted behind me. “I don’t like the look of this.”

“What does it cost?” I demanded of Dean. “I’m not doing anything inappropriate.”

“And I wouldn’t ask you to, Miss Aoife—least, not while you’re paying me as a guide. That’s a sacred, serious bond between guide and traveler and breaking it isn’t something I do.” His frown drew a line between his dark eyes, and he swiped a loose strand of hair off his forehead.

“Fine,” I said. “What is it I have to pay?”

Dean pointed with his chin at the slot below the tollbooth window, while the automaton looked on. “From an Academy girl like you, only blood will do.”

My eyes must have gone wide even as I felt the color drain out of my cheeks, said blood coursing hard through my heart. I could be forgiven for going to the Rustworks, even the market. In the eyes of the Proctors, I was only a girl, and I couldn’t be expected to display the sense of a boy. A week’s suspension, a lecture or two from Mrs. Fortune and Professor Swan, and I could go on with my life at the School.

But this was real, heretical dealings I’d be a part of.
Giving blood in oath was a grievous offense, something the Proctors would have your hands in the castigator for. Blood was too much like the old ways, the old superstitions the Rationalists had burned out of the world when the necrovirus came.

Dean tilted his head to the side. “That’s the toll, Miss Aoife. Prick your finger on the spindle and tumble on into dreamland, or go back to those safe stone walls and those cold metal gears before you’re a heretic and a criminal besides.”

Cal gripped the straps of his pack so hard the buckle creaked. “We should turn back, Aoife. This was a terrible idea.”

Over the roar of blood in my ears, borne on the rush of fear, I heard myself say, “I can’t. Conrad—”

“Conrad’s cast his lot, Aoife! Don’t be stupid!”

“Why don’t you let the girl make up her own mind?” Dean snapped. “She has got one, you know.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business before I put my knuckles through your heretic teeth?” Cal snarled.

“Both of you be quiet!” My voice echoed off the suspension cables. The automaton turned its blank slate of a face to me.

“Blood on the iron. Blood … isss the toll,” it droned.

I flexed my hands. How did you choose which one went into the mouth of the iron beast? I was left-handed—another mark against me as far as the Proctors and the Academy were concerned—but I needed both for any task I might encounter in the Engineworks.

If
I graduated the School of Engines.

If
I came back from Arkham.

“Just prick your finger, Aoife,” Dean said softly. He dipped his head, so his words tickled my ear. “It doesn’t hurt. I promise you.”

“I’m not worried about the pain,” I said. Madhouses, the Catacombs, no one left to watch out for my mother, Conrad desperate and alone … but not the pain. Pain was something I could choose to acknowledge, or not. That, at least, I’d learned long ago.

“If you want to get out of Lovecraft before the sun goes up, this is the way to do it,” Dean said. “Now, I know no Uptown princess is going to come down to the Rustworks looking for yours truly. No girl who can’t pay the toll would come this far.” Dean grinned at me. “You’re no princess.”

I swallowed hard. My throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper. “And you’re no white knight,” I told Dean, and before my nerve failed me, stuck my hand into the gap an acetylene torch had cut in the tollbooth’s side. My fingers brushed a thin iron spike set where the coin slot should be.

I placed it against my index finger and pressed down. My blood dribbled into the crevice of my knuckle, warming the skin. The spike was cold where it bit into my flesh.

No Proctors swooped down on me and no fanciful black magic swarmed up to turn me into the wanton heretic that Professor Swan and his newsreels warned about. My finger started to ache, and I pulled my hand away, sucking on it and getting an aftertaste of iron.

The automaton regarded me with its flame eyes and then withdrew its arm into the booth. “Proceed, travelerssss.”

“There,” Dean said. “Not so bad, is it?”

Cal stepped up. “What about me? What do I do?”

“Nothing,” Dean said. “You didn’t hire me, she did.” He tilted his head toward me. “You’re awful quiet, Miss Aoife. You all right?”

I tried not to think about the warm throbbing brass of the castigator where it waited in Banishment Square. Dean pulled a stained red bandanna from his back pocket and held it out. “Here. A little more blood won’t matter to this old rag.”

“What, and risk an infection?” Cal fumbled in his knapsack. “Hold it, Aoife. I’ve got a plaster.”

“Cal,” I sighed. “You remind me of Mrs. Fortune sometimes.”