The Iron Thorn (3 page)

At least, I really hoped not.

Cal waffled, looking back at the bright glow of the aether lamps and the arcade.

“Leftovers,” I reminded him. That did it—Cal caught up with me and stuck his chest out, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his buffalo plaid coat like some tough in a comic book.

We walked for a bit, the sounds of Derleth Street fading and new ones creeping in. The faint music from the Jack & Crow. The drip of moisture from the roadbed of the bridge above. The rumble of lorries crossing the span to and from the foundry with their loads of iron.

“This isn’t so bad,” Cal said, too boldly, too loudly. We passed boarded-up row houses, their windows all broken, diamond panes like insect eyes. Alleys that wound at head-turning angles to nowhere. I felt the damp of the river, and shivered.

No student of the Schools was allowed to come to Dunwich Lane. I’d always thought it was to keep the boys
away from the prostitutes and poppy dens that we weren’t supposed to know about, but now I wondered if I’d been wrong. The cold worsened. My exposed skin was so chilled it felt crystalline.

“Say,” Cal said, making me jump. “Did you listen in to
The Inexplicables
on the aether tubes last night? Really good this week. ‘Adventure of the Black Claw.’ ”

I clenched my fists and resolved that I’d be braver from now on. Dunwich Lane was poor and seedy, but it wasn’t going to sneak up on me. “Didn’t catch it. I was studying.” The only time it was acceptable for us to hear about the way the world used to be—before the virus spread, before the Consortium of Nations built Engines after the first great war, before any of the curfews and government police in every city—was when it was being mocked by cheap, state-sanctioned tube plays.

Cal ate them up. I rather hated them.

“You do too much of that. Studying,” Cal said. “You’re going to need glasses before long, and you know what they say: boys don’t make passes—”

“Cal …” I stopped, irritated, in the center of the street. I was all set to lecture him when a scream echoed out of an alley between the next pair of houses. “… shut your piehole,” I finished.

Cal’s mouth twisted down and he froze next to me. We stood in the road, waiting. The scream came again, along with soft sobs. I had a memory, unwanted, of the Cristobel madhouse and the madhouse before that, the ever-present crying on the wards. If my fingers hadn’t been balled up, they’d have been shaking like dead leaves.

Cal started forward. “We should go help.”

“Wait,” I said, pulling at his coat. “Just wait.” I didn’t want to walk ahead, and I sure didn’t want Cal leaving me here alone. Why had I taken the shortcut? Why had I tried to be clever?

The sobbing escalated, and Cal jerked his arm out of my grasp, running forward and making a hard turn into the alley. “I’m going to help her!” he yelled at me before he disappeared around the corner.

“Dammit,” I swore, because no professors were around to stick a detention hour on me for cursing. “Cal! Cal, don’t go down there!”

I followed him into the alley, his straw-colored hair bobbing in the dark like a swamp light. “Cal,” I whispered, not out of discretion but purely out of fear. I’m not a boy. I admit when I’m scared, and the screams had done it to me. “It might not be what you think.” If Cal got himself hurt, and it was my fault … I hurried after him.

From the entrance of the alley, I could spy a pile of rags, a hunched hobo’s form in oilskins and overalls. The smell of decay permeated everything, sweet like a rotted flower is sweet. Cal had plowed to a stop, confused.

“That stinks.”

I watched as the nightjar lifted its head from its feast of the transient, the few scraps of hair still clinging to its skull fine as cobwebs. My throat constricted, sweet bile creeping onto the back of my tongue. I’d never seen a nightjar up close. Never
smelled
one. It was worse than any warning our professors could give.

“Oh, please help me,” it said in a human girl’s voice. “I’m so cold … so very alone.…” It drew back swollen black lips to reveal its set of four fangs.

“Oh, shit,” Cal said plainly.

The nightjar stirred the rest of its body, pale leathery limbs fighting to free themselves from its camouflage skin. The hobo’s clothing and the remains of the man himself slithered away in a heap, and the nightjar expanded desiccated arms with tattered wings growing on the underside. “Come to me,” it pleaded, still in that plaintive, soft voice. “Just one kiss, that’s all I need.”

Staring at the thing was hypnotic, like looking at a study corpse in the School of Hospice, and its smell overpowered me; the voice that drifted to Cal and me was as lulling as a caress on the cheek, or the scent of poppy that caught the wind in the summer, when the air came from Old Town. Cal took a shuffling step forward, reaching out one hand. He and the nightjar were mere feet apart. “Don’t …,” Cal whispered.

That snapped me awake. The thought of the thing touching Cal, that foul black-nailed hand with its waterlogged dead skin on Cal’s face, passing the necrovirus into his blood with the contact, so that slowly, day by day, he’d turn to a nightjar as well, made my stomach turn violently and brought me back to the wintry night, in the alley, not the floating summer place the nightjar’s voice had shown me.

I plunged a hand into my satchel. There were safety guidelines, drills. The Academy projectionist had shown us a lanternreel about this.
The Necrovirus and You!
How to understand transmission, infection, and lastly, how to deal with a person who was beyond help.

I’d been bored as I always was during those presentations.
Everything useful, if there had been anything useful, had flown from my head at the sight of the thing’s frozen-pond eyes and rotted skin.

I tried to think. Nightjars hated iron filings. Unfortunately, I didn’t generally make a point to carry a handful of those in my bag, next to my lipstick and hairbrush. That strategy was out.

Light. Nightjars hated light, their skin photosensitized by the virus. My scrabbling fingers found my portable aether tube, filled with the blue marvel of Mr. Edison’s gas, charged only enough to listen to scratchy music or receive the latest reports on protest activity so I could avoid spots where the Proctors were tangling with rioters in the city. It couldn’t even pick up the serial plays Cal loved from the big antennae in New Amsterdam. But it would be enough, I hoped.

“Cal,” I said sharply. “You better move.” He blinked, but he did as I said. I cocked my arm and threw the aether tube straight at the pavement. The brass housing flew apart and the electric coil sparked. The tube itself exploded, shards of treated glass flying everywhere as the gas inside struggled to escape. I’d watched aether reactions before on lanternreels, huge ones that the government detonated in the desert, but this close, even a small wisp of gas was like a bomb. “Cover your eyes!” I cried, and threw myself against the alley wall.

The aether let out a
whump
when it made contact with the oxygen in the air and blue flame blossomed, glowing like a lightning strike for a few seconds before the reaction gasped away, leaving the scent of burnt paper.

The nightjar began to scream. It wasn’t anything like the bell-tone voice from before. This was harsh, guttural and hungry.

Cal got me up, tugged me by the hand. “We should go now.” I clung to his bony fingers and let him pull me away. My feet refused to work, my knees wouldn’t bend, but somehow I ran.

I looked back once to see the nightjar writhing on the ground, great swaths of skin flaking off into the air as the last bits of the aether danced above it on the breeze.

I didn’t need to see any more. I caught up with Cal, and we ran for the Academy.

The School of Engines

W
E REACHED THE
head of Dunwich Lane and turned onto Storm Avenue before I realized I was still shaking. The gates of the Academy weren’t far, but I stopped and leaned against a lamppost.

Cal tilted his head. “Aoife, you hurt?” He fumbled in his satchel. “I’ve got my first-aid kit somewhere in here … had a valve-fitting lab earlier today.”

“I … I …” I wrapped my arms around myself, even though I had on a peacoat and my uniform jumper beneath it. I was freezing. It felt like death had put a hand on my cheek, put the chill inside me down to my bones, even though the Rationalists taught there was no death, only an end. A period on a sentence, and a blank page.

“I just want to go inside,” I said, unable to take Cal’s anxious expression. Cal was an advanced worrywart. In the two years I’d known him, he never got any less skittish.

“All right,” Cal said. He offered his elbow and I took
it, just grateful to hide my shaking legs. I’d never seen a viral creature so close. Madwomen like my mother were one thing, merely infected. A thing fully mutated by the necrovirus from a person with a consciousness and a face into an inhuman nightjar was quite another. The smell of it lingered, like I’d fallen asleep in a nightmare garden.

The gates of the Academy loomed up from the low river fog, and we passed underneath the gear and the rule, the insignia of the Master Builder. The ever-present sign that watched us everywhere, from the stonework of our dormitories and the badges on our uniforms to the arch of the Rationalist chapel at the edge of the grounds. The sign of reason, a ward against the necrovirus and the heretics, that all rational citizens of Lovecraft who followed the Master Builder’s tenets adhered to.

Cal looked at the dining hall, still lit, and sighed. “I guess it’s useless to try and pretend we’re just late.”

Mrs. Fortune proved him right by flying out the hall’s double doors, her long wool skirt and cape flapping behind her. “Aoife! Aoife Grayson, where on Galileo’s round earth have you been?”

Mr. Hesse was hard on her heels. “Daulton, front and center. You know you’re past curfew.” Mr. Hesse was as sharp as Mrs. Fortune was round, and they stood like an odd couple in the lights of the dining hall.

“Aoife, you’re filthy and you stink like a whore’s perfume,” Mrs. Fortune said. I was still chilled but I felt my cheeks heat in humiliation—and in relief that she hadn’t pried at me further. “Go to your room and wash up,” she continued. “You’ll get no supper as punishment.”

No supper might as well have been a warm embrace. If
Mrs. Fortune found out I’d been in Old Town and had contact with a viral creature, I could be expelled.

Mr. Hesse cleared his throat loudly, and Fortune favored him with a raised eyebrow. Mrs. Fortune had climbed mountains and trekked Africa as a girl, before she’d landed here. Few crossed her. “What is it, Herbert?” she demanded. I waited. Hesse was notorious for handing out canings and detentions. He was also far more suspicious that we were all misbehaving at all times than Mrs. Fortune. I drew a breath, held it.

“Well?” Mrs. Fortune asked him.

“The girl was wandering the city after six bells, doing stone knows what, and you’re merely withholding a meal?” Hesse said. To punctuate his opinion of my punishment he snapped, “Daulton, the quadrangle. Now. Stand at attention until I come for you.” Standing in formation on the quad didn’t seem unpleasant, on the surface, until you’d be standing at attention, perfectly still, for hours in the cold. Marcos Langostrian had lost a small toe last year from frostbite after he’d been outside all night. He’d deserved it, the little worm, but I felt a pang for Cal as Mr. Hesse glared at him.

Cal heaved a sigh. “See you tomorrow, Aoife. And thank you for … er … before. You’re pretty great.” He set off at a jog for the quad. Hesse peered at me through his glasses. The thick Bakelite frames were too big for his face and made him look even mousier.

“What was he thanking
you
for, Grayson? Did you lift your skirt for him on the way home? I know you city wards and how you operate, especially the ones with mothers in a—”

“
Mister
Hesse,” Mrs. Fortune said in a voice that could have stripped gears. “Thank you for your assistance. Aoife,
go on to your room. Don’t you and the unfortunate Mr. Daulton have an exam tomorrow?”

“Yes,” I said, glad it was mostly dark and Hesse couldn’t see that he’d made me turn colors. I’d learned a long time ago that shouting and fighting over my mother or my reputation just made things worse, and talking sass to a Head of House, well … it didn’t bear thinking about after the trouble I was already in.

It didn’t mean that the thought didn’t spring to mind, to wipe Mr. Hesse’s superior smirk from his mouth. He thought he knew me. The entire Academy thought they had the blueprint of Aoife Grayson, city ward and madwoman’s daughter.

They didn’t know a thing.

“Off you go, then. You’ve been dismissed.” Fortune made a shooing motion with her hands. I trudged to the girls’ dormitory, mounting the four flights of stairs to the second-year floor, tucked beneath the garrets of the old place. The Lovecraft Academy of Arts and Engines was built from several stately homes and their assorted outbuildings, and the girl’s dorm had been a stable. In the summer you could still smell hay and horses up under the eaves. It reminded me of a ghost, a tiny connection to a past that had no necrovirus, no madhouses and no Aoife Grayson, charity student.