The Iron Thorn (13 page)

Once the excitement of liftoff abated, I found myself leaning my head against the hull, feeling the vibration of the wind and the turbines against my skull. Lulled, I felt my eyelids dip and exhaustion wind like wire through every bit of me, twisting and tugging and coaxing me toward sleep.

I decided that sleeping in a shipful of heretics and criminals might not be in my best interest. To keep awake, I focused on Dean. I’d never met a heretic who wasn’t strapped to the castigator or locked in a madhouse, and I wanted to memorize him, because soon enough he’d be gone and I’d be …

I didn’t know. Alone? Searching for Conrad, certainly. Wandering through another person’s delusions, the way I had been since I was a child.

Dean reached up and smoothed back his hair, shiny and black as his leather jacket in the aether glow. He plucked the cigarette from behind his ear and stuck it in his mouth, shutting his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck. I was wondering what the short hairs at the base of his skull would feel like under my hand when Alouette spun around in her pilot’s chair, her eyes wide through the small slice of open hatch I could see. She leaped up, closed the distance across the hold like a swift golden cat, ripped the cigarette
away from Dean and threw it across the cabin. I jumped at her sudden movement, and her shouting. “Are you crazy, boy?” she demanded. “We’re floating underneath tons of hydrogen and you want to light up?”

Dean’s lips twitched and his entire body stiffened, like a valve with too much pressure on it. “I’m not an idiot, Allie, but I am bored. Being in this sardine can ain’t my idea of a fun Friday night.”

“You’re welcome to step out any old time,” Alouette flared, flicking her long fall of golden hair in Dean’s face. Dean dropped his eyes and chuckled, taking the Lucky Strikes from his pocket and sticking another cigarette between his lips.

“Don’t tempt me, Allie. You’d drive any sane guy off a ledge.” I watched the two of them stare at each other for a moment, until Dean crossed his ankles and leaned back against the hull, stretching himself out to his full height. “Go back to playing nursemaid. I’ll behave, I promise.”

Alouette threw up her hands and went to Cal, brushing me aside as if I were inconvenient baggage. “Let’s see about that ankle now that we’re up.” She pulled off his oxford and his sock, her mouth quirking at the hole in the toe, and slid his school pants up to the knee, her pale hands brushing his skin. “My, my,” Alouette said, gently wiggling the swollen joint. Cal hissed, his cheeks caving in and his teeth showing. He looked like he wanted to bite Alouette, but he pulled himself together, covering his mouth to hide the feral grimace. I wanted to sit by him and let him squeeze my hand, like I had when he burned himself during our fabricating class, but I had the feeling Alouette might bite
me
if I did.

“Like I said, miss,” Cal told her. “It’s worse than it looks.”

Alouette fluttered at his words. “Listen to you, ‘miss’ this and ‘miss’ that. It’s Alouette, or Allie.”

Cal swallowed and took his hand away from his face, and he was easygoing Cal again. “All right, mi—Alouette. Sorry I’m not in better humor—it does smart a bit.”

“You did a number on yourself,” Alouette agreed. “Looks like a real war wound.”

“It was my fault he fell,” I said, rather more loudly than I had to. Her hands were still on his leg. “He was trying to help me,” I explained.

Alouette spread a slow smile. “What a gentleman you are.” She whipped his ankle to the left, and Cal let out a yell, going stark white in the face. Alouette giggled at his expression.

“Well, it’s not broken if you felt that. We’ll bandage you up, but no slaying dragons or chasing damsels for a week or so, all right?”

Dean snorted. “Watch yourself, cowboy. I think the pirate wench has taken a shine to you.” He stood and twirled a small hatch open, one that I saw led to an outside deck. Cold air rushed in, lifting my hair and dappling my skin with moisture.

“Close her up!” Captain Harry shouted from the cockpit, to my relief. “We none of us arctic creatures!”

“Same Dean,” Alouette tsked when the hatch clanked shut behind him. “Still a child at heart.”

I didn’t think Dean not wanting to be in the same space as Alouette was very childish. I wanted to get away from her cheap bottle-blond hair and tinny laugh just as much as he seemed to.

“I’ll be happy when we’re rid of him,” Cal told her. “He’s just some freak Aoife hired to get us out of the city, but I’ll take care of her from there. Dean’s not an upright moral person like you.”

“I’m upright, but honey, I’m far from moral,” Alouette said, giving him a practiced smile. “Hold still now and let me bandage this.”

I felt irritation swell in me, and it expelled itself with a huff of air. Cal would still be collecting baseball cards and building model airships, hiding in his dormitory, if it weren’t for me. I was the one who’d taken us on the hour-long jitney ride to the machine shop where they milled gears for the Engine, who found the best pastries on Derleth Street, who coaxed Cal out into the wide city. I’d swear he was allergic to light before I’d dragged us outside the walls of the Academy. How dare he get to play the adventurer to Alouette while she treated me like a dumb kid? And why’d she have to keep rubbing his leg?

“You look very moral to me,” Cal said, in a comically deep tone he no doubt adopted from some lanternreel actor. “And you’ve got a soft touch.…” He hissed. “But your hands are cold.”

Alouette simpered at his attention. “I’ll have to see if I can do something about that. I like my patients comfortable.”

I stood up and grabbed the hatch release Dean had used, yanking at it with force that I really wanted to put into slapping that too-innocent smile off of Alouette. A girl—a woman—like her wouldn’t give Cal the time of day if we were in Lovecraft. But if he couldn’t see through her act, then it was his own fault. I stepped out. The wind grabbed my breath and sucked it away into the void.

A narrow ribbon of walkway ran the length of the
Belle
, leading to a small lip of deck underneath the turbines at the rear, in a dead spot for wind and drag. Dean stood hunched inside his coat at the aft, smoke trailing behind the airship like a banner. I let the hatch fall shut behind me with a coffin clang.

“Airsick?” Dean’s breath joined his exhaled smoke, a ghost floating next to him before it blew away.

“Something like that,” I said over the roar of wind and turbine. “Alouette certainly is … friendly.”

“She’s a piece of work.” Dean shook his head. “Hellcat in a fight. Could drink an Irish sailor under the table.”

“You’d know.” My words came out tinged with acid, for reasons I couldn’t entirely identify. “You and she have all the history.”

Dean chuffed. “Can’t put much past you, Miss Aoife.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t have to work very hard on that one. She’s been staring a hole through you since we got on board.”

“Like I said,” Dean muttered. “Hellcat.”

“How much farther?” I crossed my arms and pouted, as if I were six years old. I felt like stamping my feet and demanding that Alouette keep away from
my
friends. Felt out of control. Spinning, spiraling, dancing …

No. I began to recite a Fibonacci sequence in my head and clung to Dean’s voice and to the cold fingers of the wind against my cheeks. Keeping order. Keeping calm. Shutting the door on the madness that made my blood boil.

“To Arkham? Two hours, maybe three.” Dean flicked his glowing cigarette over the rail and I watched it sail into the darkness.

I shivered. “The sooner, the better. I don’t think I like being this far off the ground after all.” Truly, I didn’t like being shown as the scared schoolgirl next to Alouette and her crew. I already had enough presumptions to deal with back home. To be looked down on by heretics and shoved aside by Cal at the slightest hint of attention was entirely too much.

“I like it.” Dean shoved his hands into his armpits for warmth. “It’s free air up here. Nobody pointing and saying who’s a heretic and who’s a Rationalist. No Proctors. Just flying.”

I turned to go inside. “I’d better go check on Cal. Make sure he hasn’t agreed to run off and marry Alouette.”

“She has that effect on a man, sure.” Dean whistled. “Poor old Cal has no chance.”

“He’s never even had the opportunity before now,” I grumbled. Dean searched out a comb in his pockets and fixed his hair against the wind.

“I deduced.” He followed me through the hatch and shut it behind him. “Come on. You want to see the rest of the
Belle
? Take your mind off Cal?”

I nodded. If Cal was going to behave like a dolt, I didn’t need to concern myself. And who knew when I’d be on an airship again? I should make it count. “Very much so.”

Dean led me back inside, through the hold and down a narrow corridor to the aft, where the whirring of the turbine blades vibrated my back teeth. “Bunk room.” He pointed out a chrome door with an empty brass nameplate, the slot for a card held in the talons of a rigid-winged eagle.

I ran my hand down the chevron wings stamped under the nameplate, the scarred spot where a ship’s name and
operating number had been burned off with a torch. “This ship was someone else before it was the
Belle
?”

Dean nodded. “She was an enemy rig in the war,” he offered. “Officer transport, from what Harry told me. He and his navy boys crashed outside of Bern in ’forty-four and hijacked it from a squad of enemy officers and their necrodemons.”

I jerked my hand back to my side.

Dean examined me, leaning in a bit. “You look a little green, kiddo,” he said. “Sure you’re not airsick?”

“Necrodemons …,” I murmured. “Not very pleasant …”

“Yep,” Dean said, shaking his head. “But they’re long gone, miss. Not going to jump out and bite you.” He twisted the eagle insignia upside down and chuckled.

“It’s not that,” I whispered. “I mean, I’m not afraid of necrodemons.” I could
become
a necrodemon, if the virus took hold of me. I could be worse than anything that had flown over Europe in the ship that would become the
Belle
. “It’s just a bit close to home,” I told Dean, and cut him off by pointing at a shut hatch. “Show me something else. I don’t want to talk about the necrovirus any longer.”

Dean opened his mouth like he wanted to pry, but then shut it again and flipped a hand. “That’s the aether room. Where they do communications and nav and the like. Just a bunch of tubes and instruments. Snoresville.”

I bit my lip. Anything to take my mind off thoughts of my infection. “I’d still like to see.”

“Suit yourself.” Dean shrugged. He opened the hatch to a much smaller space, and I gasped at the tangle of wires
and shattered aether tubes, the burnt-parchment scent rolling out to smother my senses.

“Is it …” I coughed and pulled out my handkerchief to hold over my face as noxious blue-white smoke blanketed us. “Is it supposed to …” The aethervox that Harry no doubt used for ship-to-ship was smashed beyond repair, just a slag heap of no use to anyone. Wires and char marks were flung to the four corners of the room, and the recorder roll, the drum covered in thin brass coating that recorded messages sent across the aether, had rolled away and bumped against my feet as the
Belle
banked. “This can’t be an accident.”

Dean spun away from the hatch and ran for the cockpit. “Sure isn’t. That’s sabotage.”

Jean-Marc let the shredded wires from the vox run through his fingers as if he were holding the last scraps of a broken treasure. “Fire ax,
capitaine
. They chewed it up and spat it out. Wondered why I wasn’t picking up no chatter from the aether broadcasts.”

Captain Harry punched his fist into the bulkhead. A dent blossomed. “
Merde
. You see anything, boy?”

Dean shook his head. “We were outside. I was showing Miss Aoife the ship when we found it. She’s never flown.”

Harry turned his ruby goggles on me and I focused on the zigzag scar across his chin instead. “What about you, mademoiselle? You eyeball any black rat bastards taking steel to
my ship
?” His bellow made everyone, including Dean, flinch.

“No, sir,” I whispered, not able to even look at his face.

“You got enemies, girl?” Harry demanded. “You got a reason to go
aliénée
on my poor
Belle
?”

My cheeks heated to boiling as his accusations crept too close to truth. “No, sir! I didn’t do this.”

After a long stare, Captain Harry snorted. “Aye. Get back to the hold and stay put,” he ordered. “You too, Harrison.”

I marched in lockstep with Dean back to the benches, relief warring with worry for a spot in my head. Alouette watched us through the sliver of open hatch to the cockpit, her fingers moving over the controls with their own will. Altitude and windspeed tilted and righted, and my insides with them. But the
Belle
couldn’t land at night without a ping from the radio tower in Arkham, could she? Couldn’t call for help. We’d had our eyes put out. In daytime, an airship could fly without a radio, but at night in the wind … I shuddered.

Cal tugged on my sleeve. “What’s going on?”

“Someone destroyed the aethervox,” I murmured. “Dean said it was sabotage.”

“Well, it wasn’t me or Alouette,” he said. “She was right here talking with me about the city life until you two started hollering for the captain.”

“I didn’t say your precious Alouette had anything to do with this,” I growled. Cal darted a glance at Dean and then leaned in so that only I could hear.

“Are we in danger, Aoife?”

We were. I had the same certainty I got when I knew Professor Swan was springing a surprise quiz. “We’re fugitives from the Proctors, Cal,” I said aloud. “What do you think?”

At that moment, Jean-Marc and Captain Harry stepped
into the hold and I stood again. Jean-Marc held the recorder drum between his palms. Small clusters of nail taps paraded over the surface, the groupings in Mr. Morse’s code spelled out for posterity in the paper-thin brass. If we went down, someone would know what happened.

Jean-Marc’s spider-fingers caressed the drum like a blind man searches for meaning on the surfaces of the world. “I got the last transmission,
Capitaine.
”