The Iron Thorn

7 The Berkshire Belle

I DEVELOPED A discordant rhythm walking with Cal, down from the county road outside the foundry, through a ditch that soaked my feet to the ankles with freezing brackish water, up the other side and across a frozen field patchy with forgotten cornstalks. Dean stayed a few feet ahead, his back and body tense, hands shoved in his dungaree pockets like a gunfighter waiting to draw. I knew better than to ask him where we were going, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t wondering. As an Academy student, I was rarely permitted to leave the grounds, never mind the city. The last in recent memory was a field trip to a quarry. Even by engineering standards, not exciting.

The pulse of the lighthouse on Half-Moon Point winked through the trees as our footsteps disappeared into a carpet of early snow and pine needles, the field ending at a broken stone wall.

“How much farther?” I whispered to Dean, as Cal’s soft pants of pain warmed my right ear.

“Not far,” Dean said. “Other side of the woods, on the point. That’s where the airship lands.”

“Airship?” I almost lost my grip on Cal from surprise.

“Sure thing.” Dean grinned. “You want to get to Arkham—the Berkshire Belle and her crew are the quickest route.”

The trees thinned as the ground became rock and I could hear the rush of the ocean and feel the tinge of salt on my skin. We were much farther away from the city than I’d realized.

Directly beyond was the Lovecraft lighthouse, the white spire with its black band standing guard at the mouth of the river. Moored beyond, where the water met the rock, was an airship.

I’d seen airships before, small skimmers that flew from Lovecraft to New Amsterdam, or out to Cape Cod and Nantucket when the weather was fair. This craft was different from all of them—the silvery hide of the rigid balloon was patched and the passenger cabin was battered, windowless and military gray, not sleek and welcoming like the Pan Am and TWA zeppelins that took off from Logan Airfield. The fans clicked as they rocked back and forth against their tie-downs in the wind. It was beautiful, in its own way, scarred and slippery—a shark built for air.

“Now, you let me do the talking,” Dean said. “Captain Harry’s here every night, and passage is included in your fee, but if he doesn’t like your look …” Dean drew a thumb across his throat. My scar itched in response.

“This Captain Harry sounds like a real pirate,” Cal said. Cal would bring up pirates. As if we hadn’t had a year’s supply of excitement just getting here.

I looked at the Berkshire Belle’s hulk and listened to the moan of its moorings as we came closer, the sound like the murmuring of the madhouse after lights out, or the whispering of a ghost, if I believed in such things. Which I emphatically did not, but seeing the Babbage appear from nowhere, the ghostly dirigible, the moonlight and the frost called up echoes of a spectral world. The Proctors abhorred unsanctioned tales of witchcraft and fairies, angels or demons, but I’d never been chastised for listening to a ghost story. Now I wished that the girls in my hall hadn’t delighted in passing them around quite so much. Tonight, I could almost believe.

“Harry’s a card,” Dean said. “Came out of Louisiana, swamp folk. He’d cut your tongue out soon as look at you, but the Belle ain’t never been stopped by the ravens.”

“Never?” I said. The ravens saw everything—nothing lifted more than a foot off the ground under its own power in Lovecraft without Proctor approval.

“Never,” Dean said. “Harry’s too fast for ravens.”

“Yeah, well,” Cal groused. “Fast, slow … he better have someplace for me to sit, with this bum ankle.”

Dean banged on the hull. After a moment the hatch wheel spun and it opened with a creak and a rumble of abused gears. Captain Harry might be stealthy in the sky, but he needed to learn his way around an oilcan.

“Evening,” Dean said to the figure in the hatch, a massive man in a greatcoat, profile shielded in shadow. “Got two with me looking to take passage up Arkham way. The usual fee.”

There was silence for a long time, and even though I only caught the gleam of lenses and brass where the man’s eyes should be, I could feel him staring. I shifted under the silence and the stare, letting out a small cough. “Hello, sir. Captain, I mean.”

“Bonsoir, mam’selle,” he said, finally. “And Dean Harrison. I think I not see you again for some time after that trouble up Lovecraft way.”

“Trouble?” Cal perked like a poodle sniffing hamburger meat. “What trouble?”

I admit I wondered the same, but I had the sense to keep quiet about it in front of Dean and Captain Harry.

“Nothing you need to get excited about, kid,” Dean snapped. “Got no time for gossip, Harry. I’ve charged this young lady fair and square and I’m her guide.”

“Mais oui,” Captain Harry said. His accent was slow as syrup on a cold morning, but his voice was gravel, hardened and crushed by years of smoke and wind. “She’s a different class of traveler, no? Young.” He stepped out of the hatch, his big steam-ventor boots—bigger, thicker, brass-bound versions of the boots Dean wore—crushing the rock beneath the airship with a grating like bone on bone. In the light, Harry was about Professor Swan’s age, massive and unkempt, sporting red hair shot with white through the left temple, like he’d been struck by lightning. Bug-eyed ruby glass flying goggles covered his eyes and crimson stubble his face, which was split by a wide grin. He fit with the Berkshire Belle—scarred and rough, but in fine working order.

Harry stuck out a large hand and said, “Who might you be, mademoiselle?” I didn’t take it. His paw could have crushed both of my hands with room to spare, and I’d abused them enough crossing the bridge.

“I might be Aoife Grayson, and I might be in a hurry,” I said, tightening my grip on Cal. I wasn’t going to be the pretty, delicate thing who needed men to do her talking. Harry didn’t seem hostile, but Dorlock hadn’t either.

“Pretty, hein,” Captain Harry hooted. “But even less manners than you, eh, Dean?”

“We almost got peeped by some ravens on the bridge,” Dean said. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to see the Lovecraft in my taillights just as much as the young lady.”

“Oui, course you would.” Captain Harry gestured with a sweep of his greatcoat. The material was deep blue, and hid a red silk vest and oil-streaked gray trousers. It was a navy uniform, I realized on a second glance, from the war before the last one. Harry did look like he’d be at home manning the furnace on a war zeppelin, or pulling his weight as an antiaircraft gunner on a destroyer.

“Come on, then,” Harry told me. “The night, she ain’t getting longer. Allez.” He pulled himself into the ship without another word, leaving us alone. I let out my breath, at long last. He hadn’t challenged me on being young, or female, or dragging along a friend with a bad ankle. Maybe this would end all right.

Once I’d managed to wrest myself and Cal through the hatch, Dean followed and spun it closed. “We’re right and tight back here, Harry!” he hollered.

The hold of the Berkshire Belle was one large convex room, hard benches bolted to the arched rib cage of the inner hull, and cargo netting swaying back and forth overhead like Spanish moss. I settled Cal on a bench in easy reach of a tie-down, should we hit rough weather, and tried to give him a reassuring smile. I think I managed one that made me seem only slightly nauseated. “I’m just going to look around, all right? Try to keep your ankle up so it doesn’t swell any more.” In truth, I was dying to get a look at the Belle, to examine her engines and her clockworks, see how she flew. It would calm me down, and give me something to think of besides I’m a runaway madwoman and the Proctors are coming.

“Be careful,” Cal murmured. “I don’t trust these miscreants.”

“You don’t trust your own mother, Cal.” I gave his good foot a nudge. “I’ll be fine.”

Dean was slouched on a bench opposite Cal, and no one else in the crew seemed to be paying attention to me, so I poked at the various supplies slung into cargo nets, and when I’d determined there wasn’t anything more interesting than spare parts and hardtack, went looking for the cockpit. I might never be on an airship—a real airship—again, and I wanted to soak up as much as I could. Girls weren’t allowed to attend the School of Aeronautics. Our changeable nature made us unsuitable for flying or the precision work needed to maintain a machine that was really just a steel box slung under a balloon full of deadly explosive gas.

I didn’t particularly think that a twitchy idiot like Marcos Langostrian and his ilk would be suited either, but no one had asked me my opinion.

I went forward first, and peeped into the fore compartment, trying to stay out of the crew’s way. For all her outward plainness, the Belle’s cockpit was a thing of beauty. The windscreen was divided into four parts like rose petals, each a bubble of solid glass. The flight controls, worked in brass, shimmered under the aether lamps laid into the swooping brass walls, and the knobs and switches for the PA system and pitch controls were ebony inlaid with ivory chevrons, like a V of spirit birds.

Or ravens. I chased the thought away. The ravens hadn’t seen me. As far as the Proctors knew, the worst I was guilty of was being out of bounds after Academy curfew.

Captain Harry came up behind me. “Welcome aboard,” he boomed. “Making yourself right at home, I see.” His voice made me start. I could tell myself we’d escaped the city cleanly all I wanted, but my nerves believed differently.

“I was just looking at the cockpit,” I offered. “I’m sorry—”

“No sorries!” Harry exclaimed. “She’s a magnificent flying machine, ma Belle.” He gestured to the twin pilot’s chairs, crimson thread stitched into oxblood hide, and the two pilots occupying them. “This here’s Jean-Marc and Alouette, the two finest canailles ever to sail the stormy skies.”

Jean-Marc was thin and unremarkable, rather like Mr. Hesse, while Alouette wasn’t much older than Dean, with a round face and blond ringlets like a lanternreel starlet. She had the same cold, calculating look in her blue eyes as one of the femme fatales in the serials Cal loved—that icy cut-glass beauty that belonged to my mother, before sedatives and too much time locked up with her madness dulled it.

“Hello there,” I said. Alouette jerked her chin over my head.

“What did your boyfriend do to his ankle?”

“He’s not …,” I started with a sigh, but she climbed out of her seat, brushed past me and knelt in front of Cal.

“Boy,” she told him crisply, “we don’t take cripples on this boat. You’ll be the first one the Proctors snatch up, we get shot down.”

“I fell,” Cal said. “It’s nothing really. Doesn’t even hurt anymore.” The veins in his neck pulsed as Alouette prodded his ankle. He did a good enough job of hiding his wince when she poked the swollen joint, but I saw it and so did Dean, who gave a snort.

Alouette’s frosty expression changed to a smile as she inspected Cal. “Guess you did bang it up, at that. Once we’re airborne, I’ll dress it. I was a nurse down in Shreveport before I took up flying.”

Dean rolled his eyes behind Alouette’s back, and pulled a harness around himself. “Best to sit down, Miss Aoife,” he told me. “Don’t want you knocking your noggin, and the way these cats drive, you will.”

“Oui, sit,” Captain Harry commanded. “On board this ship, you are citizens of the air, and the air, she has a streak of mischief and malice. You disobey an order, you be over the deck rail. Otherwise, you keep quiet and you arrive up Arkham in one piece, oui?”

Cal and I nodded that we understood. There was nothing angry about Harry, but he had an air of command that brooked no argument.

Dean leaned his head back against the hull and shut his eyes, like this was all painfully everyday. I fleetingly wished I were calm. How many times had Dean made this trip? More than I ever would in my life.

“Lift, you bastards!” Captain Harry bellowed. “And if a storm do swallow us, may she spit us back up again!”

There was a jolt as the mooring lines retracted and then, with a dip in my stomach, the Belle sailed aloft, borne on the winter wind.

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.”

Captain Harry’s lips tightened until they nearly disappeared. “Tell me.”

“ ‘Fugitives on board. Bearing north-northwest, destination Arkham. Send reinforcements.’ ” Jean-Marc held the drum out to Harry. “Sent after we flew this night, boss. Someone on board, still on board.”

I shot a look at Cal, but he was rapt, his eyes on the captain. He didn’t seem to share my alarm.

Captain Harry’s massive hands changed to fists, so tight that his leather airman’s gloves popped their hand-stitched seams. “Thrice-damned Proctors. Voxed from my ship.”

Dean stood up. “Are the Proctors wise to this flight?”

I had the same question. If the Proctors knew where we were going, I might as well give myself up now. They’d be waiting when we landed in Arkham, and I’d be going somewhere that the Academy threatened us with when we got out of line.

It didn’t seem real.

“Harry,” Dean snapped. “Answer me—Proctors, or no?”

Before Captain Harry could respond, a sound reverberated from the cockpit—the sound of a body striking glass. Alouette let out a shriek and her nails left a constellation of half-moons in the oxblood hide of her chair.

We turned to the cockpit as one and met the glaring gaze of a raven, its mangled gears and brass-boned wings spread across a cobweb of broken glass.

Beyond it, in the wind-tossed night sky, a dozen more sets of eyes sprang to life. I stared, unable for a moment to move, as if my heart and blood had turned to glass.

“Ravens!” Jean-Marc squeaked. “Boss—”

“It ain’t the ravens we got to worry about.” Captain Harry slotted himself into the pilot seat and pushed the throttles to full. “It’s their masters.”

A whine cut the low growling of the Belle’s fans, the sound of gears brought to life by coiled inertia. A winding engine, used by some jitneys, sleek British beetles that hugged the road, and warplanes.

Cal grabbed for me, but I evaded his hands deliberately and cycled the deck hatch, leaning over the rail to look toward the Belle’s six o’clock. Bouncing in the wake of the big ship like pilot fish, twin chrome gliders swooped like owls in the moonlight, matching the Belle’s speed.

“Buggies!” I shouted at Dean as the wind stole my breath. We were speeding so fast it felt like all of my skin was being stripped away by the wind and cold. “P-51 Mustangs!” The snub-nosed shape and the fixed wing were unmistakable.

The moon showed its face, gibbous as the eye of a Great Old One, and revealed to me twin black wings stamped on the Mustang’s noses.

I froze, caught out in the moonlight. I could even see the pilots, black leather caps and black goggles shielding their faces from the punishing air. I could see the long guns swiveling, coming to bear on the corpulent bulk of the Belle’s gas balloon.

Dean yanked me back through the hatch by my collar as the first line of lead cut loose from the Mustang’s guns. I fell against him, boneless for a moment, shock rendering me deadweight.

“Your buddy got one thing right,” Dean said, righting me. “To Proctors, these cats are pirates. And pirates get shot down.”

The Belle shook. Harry bellowed orders in French. Cal clutched his tie-down harness and squeezed his eyes shut.

“What do we do, Dean?” I grabbed the nearest rail as another volley ripped through the night, bouncing the Belle as if it were a toy.

“Ride it out. Or ride it down.” Dean grabbed my arm and dropped me into the seat next to Cal. “Strap in, miss.”

The Belle dipped and swayed, dancing with the air. I grabbed for Dean’s hand. It was the only solid thing I could reach, and just then I needed something solid very badly.

Cal shuddered as another burst from the Mustang’s guns rattled past the hull like knucklebones. “We shouldn’t be here,” he blurted. “We should land. We should land and turn ourselves in and beg for mercy. They won’t burn me if I give myself up … they won’t …”

I wanted to comfort him, but before I could say anything, Alouette was in front of us, clutching the cargo net. I saw the fury in her face first and then the pistol in her hand.

“The Belle lands for no Proctor.” Her voice was as cold as her eyes.

“Allie”—Dean held up a hand—“put that away. The kid’s just scared.”

“That better be all, or I’ll throw him out the hatch for the Proctors myself. I swear by the gears of this boat.”

“Leave Cal alone!” I snarled. “Maybe if you didn’t hire traitors we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

The pistol bounced toward me, and my next stream of invective died on my lips. Never knew when to leave well enough alone …

“Alouette! Bluebird! I can’t fly this bastard ship alone!” Captain Harry bellowed, and saved us.

Alouette lowered her pistol, spun as if she were dancing ballet on the tilting deck and made her way forward, hand over hand on the cargo nets.

All I could concentrate on was not throwing up all over Dean as we lurched from side to side, shaken like dice in a cup.

The Mustangs rolled in concert and pulled up in front of the Belle’s bow, visible through the cockpit glass. The pilots were good, but one miscalculated his turn, and I saw him close enough to pick out the name stitched into his airman’s leathers. Bowman. The pilot turned his head, agonizingly slow, and stared right into the Belle’s cockpit as we rushed up at his plane.

Absurdly, I wanted to scream a warning to him.

Then time righted itself. The silver sky became a garden of orange fire-flowers, tangled in vines of smoke. The sound of screaming metal stabbed my ears as the prow of the Belle cut the Mustang in half and threw me against my harness, against Dean. His arms closed around me, kept me from falling or snapping my spine. I dug my fingers into his leather and held on.

Fire crowned the Belle now, and the night before us looked like Dresden rather than Arkham.

We fell. Like a bird with a lead shot in its heart, we fell into the jaws of the waiting earth. Alouette, not strapped down or sitting, conversely flew to the ceiling, lips peeled back, her scream lost in the cacophony of everything else, human and mechanical, on board the Belle.

We fell, and the cruel mistress of the air took sight and sound from me, until all I could feel were Dean’s arms.

I woke hanging in space, my tie-down slicing my shoulders. The groan of rivets and the gentle hiss of hydrogen came in, and then, more slowly, the weight of my own body. It felt as if a giant had picked me up and thrown me far as he could, and I’d landed badly.

“Cal?” I croaked. Talking started a fire under my ribs. “Dean?”

“Cripes.” Dean groaned, swiping blood from his face. “That was a rough reentry, for sure.”

So he was all right. My chest loosened a bit. I swiveled as well as I could, and looked for Cal. He wasn’t there. “Cal! Cal, call out if you can hear me!”

“That …” Cal raised his head from a diaphanous blob of cargo netting and broken tie-down at the top of the cabin, which was now the bottom. He struggled to his feet, jaw muscles jumping when he put weight on his ankle. “That was a lot more … exciting than I expected. Can we please never do it again?”

“Are you all right?” I called to him. He nodded, after a moment of consideration.

“Alive. What matters, right?”

I examined my position. “That and getting out of this blasted harness.”

“No help for it,” Dean said, craning his neck at the wall of the hull. The Belle had shifted onto her side, and we were now strapped to the ceiling. “Gonna have to drop.” He jerked free of his harness and fell, landing and rolling. “Come on, Miss Aoife.” He beckoned. “The gasbag’s ruptured. One spark is going to light us up like Atlantic City.”

The inversion was beginning to dizzy me, squashing the fear I’d otherwise be feeling, and Dean’s face swam in front of my eyes. “If I land on my head, it’s going to be all your fault,” I told him, trying to shake my eyes back into focus.

He smirked, even as he stood on the wall of the crazily tilting Belle. “I’ll take that chance, miss.”

I shut my eyes against vertigo and then jerked on my straps. I didn’t fall straight down, like the graceful swans we girls were supposed to be in Academy dance classes. I tumbled, as Mrs. Fortune would have put it, arse over teakettle.

When I opened my eyes after the inglorious thump of my landing on the cargo nets, I found that I was staring into Alouette’s face.

“All His gears!” I gasped, scrambling away from her.

Alouette was entombed in an avalanche of boxes and netting, the veins in her skin like a road map on old paper. I tugged at her shoulders to free her, to no avail. Getting to my feet and gaining purchase, I yanked again, only to have the hot brand in my chest stab me again. I fell back, panting. “We have to get her out of there.” A few minutes ago I’d wanted to slug Alouette, and now the same impulse caused a fervor in me that made me yank uselessly at her body until my own gave out, bruised and battered as it was. Alouette hadn’t been polite, but no one deserved that plunging, screaming death.

Cal reached down, unzipped Alouette’s high leather collar and pressed his fingers against her neck. “She doesn’t have a pulse.”

“And you’re a surgeon now?” I demanded.

“I never thought I’d be saying this, but the kid’s right,” Dean said. He kicked at the exterior hatch, bowed badly on impact. “You ain’t strapped down, you don’t survive a handshake with the ground.”

“Say.” Cal exhaled a whistle. “She’s got a stigma.”

“What?” Surprised, I leaned over his shoulder and beheld the small white scar on Alouette’s breastbone. Stamped by a hot iron that left an indelible kiss, the puckered spot on her skin made me think of the heretic in Banishment Square.

“I thought only sailors and delinquents got these,” Cal said. He reached out to brush his fingers over the twin wings etched into the scar tissue, and I slapped his hand away.

“Cal, that’s disgusting. She’d dead!”

“They’re bird wings,” said Cal, his fingers traveling back to the spot like it was magnetized. He licked his lips. “You know, pirates used to get swallows tattooed on their skin. To help them find land again. Birds find land.”

“That’s no swallow’s wing,” Dean said, his expression darkening like thunderheads. “Now, she’s shuffled loose this here mortal coil and I don’t love the plan of getting roasted when the hydrogen blows, so let’s get into gear.” He kicked the hatch free at last. “We hoof it, we can still make Arkham by dawn. Proctors probably think we all died in this bang-up.”

Cal still crouched by Alouette. “Raven’s wings,” he said. “Only Proctors can wear a raven’s mark.…”

Professor Swan’s bleating about us turning in fellow students with contraband books and things like tarot cards or Ouija boards—heretical items—unspooled again in my head, along with one of his interminable lanternreels. How We Fight! Joining the Bureau of Proctors.

“She’s a spy.” The word tasted sour. All of the heretics I’d seen burned and hauled away to Ravenhouse, all of the eyes of the clockwork ravens watching, and there were still people who sold out neighbors and friends and even family to the Proctors.

Evil, that was heretics if you listened to the Proctors. Wanton carriers of necrovirus. Breeders of things like the nightjar.

My mother.

“You think she spied on witches?” Cal frowned.

“Open your eyes, Calvin. She was spying on us. She probably radioed her pals at Ravenhouse the minute we came on board.”

Finding the hold of the Belle very small and hot, all at once, I clambered over wreckage to the hatch.

“But”—Cal panted after me—“Proctors only go undercover to spy on traitors. Foreigners and stuff.”

I lashed my head around. “You don’t get it, do you, Cal? You ran away with a heretic and with me. We are traitors to the Proctors, and the Proctors keep their eyes inward. Nobody cares about some far-off country. They watch us. They burn us. They spy and they kill and they stamp on lives with those horrible shiny jackboots they wear.”

Cal just stared at me, fiddling with the buckles on his camp bag. “You know what they tell us, Aoife. We’d all be dead if it weren’t for the Proctors. Professor Swan says—”

“Oh, grow up, Cal! Think a thought that the Proctors didn’t give you for once!” I snapped and took off at a march. We’d landed in a field, the grass and its frost veil knee high. I struggled on, school shoes and school stockings woeful against the frigid gloom.

Dean ran and caught up with me. “Whoa, there. Pump your brakes, kiddo.”

“I’m sorry.” I was already shamefaced, burning with humiliation. Young ladies didn’t lecture and they certainly didn’t shout. “That was rude.”

“Don’t care if the kid riled you,” Dean said. “Hell, he’d rile most anyone spent more than a hot minute with him. I can’t have you running off, is all. This isn’t the city. No Proctors keeping the critters out.”

“I don’t care,” I hissed, fierce as a wounded cat. “Let them digest me.” I was practically mad anyway. What harm would it do the world if I wasn’t in it?

Dean looked at the dark ground rippling with cold mist, to the high moon slashed with clouds, the bleak barren humps of the Berkshire Mountains beyond, and the ink stain of forest between us and them. “If it’s all the same, Miss Aoife, I’d rather keep you alive.”

I let a stanza of footsteps pass without speaking, my shoes breaking through the frost with a sound like grinding teeth.

“How far to Arkham?” I said at length. It seemed the most inoffensive topic at the moment.

“Four hours walking. Maybe a little more. We’ll set eyes on your old man’s house by dawn.” Dean yawned and stretched, popping his back like a cat. “Stay awake. Don’t let the cold get its teeth into you.”

“The Proctors will send out dogs and men to the crash site,” Cal piped up. “To be sure.” He was hopping along, and I slowed and offered him my arm. Cal didn’t know how cruel he could be sometimes, with his parroting of the Proctors and by listening to their crowing about the necrovirus, his tacit agreement with them that I would inevitably go mad.

Cal took my arm with a part-smile, and his dogged recitation of propaganda didn’t matter as much. That was Cal’s way—calm and reliable, bumbling and normal. If only he knew how normal he was compared with me.

“We can’t be caught,” I told Dean. “Not after what that wretched Alouette must have told them.” Behind us I saw Jean-Marc and Harry emerge from the wreckage, battered but intact. I hoped they’d make it to wherever they called home without any further trouble.

“Don’t worry your pretty brunette head, miss,” Dean said. He lit a cigarette as we marched, and puffed a smoke ring. “They haven’t managed to catch me yet.”