The Iron Thorn

5 Nightfall

RUNNING AWAY HAD never crossed my mind before. Certainly, I was an orphan for all intents and purposes, but I’d been accepted into the School and I had at least a journeywoman’s career ahead of me at the Engineworks. I wasn’t a cinder-girl from a storybook. A prince didn’t need to ride up on his clockwork steed and take me away.

When I was small, my mother told me that before the spread of the necrovirus and the madness it inflicted, before the Proctors had burned every book that even smacked of heresy, fairy tales had been different. They’d contained actual fairies, for one thing.

I didn’t take any memories of her when I packed my things, just a change of clothes, a toothbrush and hairbrush, all the money I’d received from the city when they auctioned Nerissa’s effects—a paltry fifty dollars—and my toolkit, the leather pouch of engineer’s equipment that every student was issued upon their acceptance into the School of Engines. I withheld one uniform shirt and unscrewed my last bottle of ink, splashing it down the front in a violent pattern.

As soon as everything was secreted in my satchel, I went to the first floor and knocked at Mrs. Fortune’s pin-neat room. She cracked the door and sighed at the sight of me. “I’m very busy, Aoife.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s a bit of an emergency,” I said, holding up the shirt. “I was drawing my schematic, and—” I had the lie planned to the last word, but Fortune cut me short.

“Oh, stars, Aoife.” She shook her head. “You’re clumsy as a fawn. It’ll be comportment classes next year if you don’t pull yourself together and learn how to be a lady.”

I chewed my lip in remorse and dropped my head. “I’m ever so sorry, ma’am. But if you could have the security officer let me out, I could run up Cornish Lane to the China Laundry before they shut,” I said. “I only have two shirts, as you know”—I moved my toe across the crack in the floor—“being a ward, and all.” People like Mrs. Fortune—wealthy and well-meaning—were conditioned from birth to be charitable to the less fortunate. Even when the less fortunate were lying to their faces.

Fortune patted her own cheek in sympathy, but stayed firm. “You are most certainly not running about the city after curfew on your own. What would the Headmaster say?”

“Oh, it’s not a problem,” I said, prepared for this variable. “Cal will go with me. And I’ll be back before I have to meet the Headmaster about me going mad and killing people on my birthday. I swear.”

Mrs. Fortune raised her eyes heavenward. “The mouth on you, Aoife Grayson, could fell a Proctor. Master Builder forgive me the blasphemy.” She waved the edge of her tartan shawl at me. “Go on. I’ll have the man at the side gate let you out.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, keeping my eyes on the floor so my victory wouldn’t live in my gaze. I struggled to keep my shoulders drooping and my expression contrite. “It should take me no time at all.”

Waiting by the autogarage in the cold, doubt swooped down on me like the Proctor’s clockwork ravens on their black silken wings. Conrad could be sitting contentedly in some pub, whispering to his invisible friends while he wrote fanciful letters that put me in danger.

Or Conrad could really be in danger, as he’d never lied to me, not even on his birthday.

He picked up the knife from his toolkit, the same toolkit I’d receive at the start of term, and ran his thumb along the blade. “Have you ever seen your own blood, Aoife?” he murmured. “Seen it under starlight, when it’s black as ink?”

They said the virus was in our blood, an infection passed from mother to child until time immemorial. Dormant, until a signal from within our biology woke it up, brought on the madness. No one could tell me how far back it went, as my mother refused to speak of her parents at all. I’d wormed my father’s name out of her before she dipped too deep into the pool of illusion and fancy. I’d verified that Archibald existed in the city records at the Academy library, that he was real and not cut from the whole cloth of her madness. I’d also discovered that he didn’t appear to be mad. But he’d been with Nerissa, so there must have been something cockeyed in the man’s schematic.

My fingers were cold inside my gloves and I stamped my feet, expelling steam breath into the night. A hand on my shoulder made me shriek in alarm and slam my palms over my mouth. I tasted lanolin and soap.

“It’s me!” Cal hissed. “It’s only me.”

“Don’t do that,” I cried, rasping. “That sneaking. That’s for ghouls and thieves.”

He grinned at me halfway in the dim light of the auto yard, his crooked teeth and blond hair standing out stark like a negative photoplate. “Sorry. I’m quiet enough to be either, I guess.”

I pressed my hands together to regain my composure and smiled to hide the shaking. “Not funny, Cal.”

He chuckled softly. “You know, for a girl taking me to the Nightfall Market you’re as jumpy as if you’re juggling aether tubes.”

“You’re not?” I said, incredulous, as we started for the gates. “Scared, I mean.” The Academy was brick banded in iron fencing to keep out viral creatures, and spiked with finials along the fence’s top to keep students bent on mischief in. The iron spikes’ jagged shadows breathed out cold when we approached.

“I’m a young man set out on a great adventure,” Cal said. “The way I see it, the least that can happen is I have a story to tell the guys when I get back.”

“When. Aren’t you the optimist,” I teased.

“You did save me from the nightjar,” Cal said with a smile. “I feel my chances of coming back to school with all of my fingers and toes are better than average.”

I knew that fighting off viral creatures was unladylike at best, but to have Cal’s praise warmed me a bit, even though my extremities and nose were still numb. It made me feel that maybe this wasn’t a doomed idea, that we could find the Nightfall Market, find Conrad and manage to come back again. Never mind that I’d never heard anything but thirdhand rumors of how to find the place, and the Proctors were eager to deny its existence at every turn. Something they couldn’t shut down and couldn’t even find was a grave embarrassment to law and order.

When we reached the gate, a plump ex-Proctor sat in the security officer’s hut, and he stepped out to stop us. Before he could shout at us for being out of doors without permission, I held up the shirt. “Mrs. Fortune said I might be let out to go to the China Laundry.” I practiced my poor-ward-of-the-city look again.

The guard examined us. “Just you,” he said. “You, boy—stay in.”

“Oh no,” I said, couching the protest as alarm. A regular girl would be terrified to leave the safety of the Academy after dark. “She was very firm that I have an escort.”

“Old Fussbudget Fortune ain’t his head of house,” said the guard. “He stays.”

“But—” Cal started. The guard rattled his nightstick against the post.

“You deaf, kid? Get back to supper and leave me be.”

The old lump was clearly immune to my charms, so I switched to the other sort of false face I knew—the snooty Academy student with no time for the help. “Could you just open the gate and let me launder my only blouse?” I snapped, trying to adopt the tone of Marcos Langostrian or Cecelia. The guard grunted, but he took the keys off his belt and walked over to the bars.

“Get ready,” I murmured to Cal, slipping my gloved palm into his. His hand was cool and thin, and when I squeezed I could feel all his small bones.

The gate opened, and I started walking, Cal pulled with me. The officer gawped. “You there! Student out of bounds!”

“Dammit to the deep, anyway,” Cal said. He just stood there, and I jerked him with me.

“Run, idiot!”

We made an odd pair fleeing down Cornish Lane, past closed-up shops and slumbering vendor carts. Cal loped along, stumbling over his own feet. I put my head down and ran as if all the ghouls of Lovecraft’s sewers were on my heels.

At the intersection of Cornish and Occidental, I could still hear the shriek of the officer’s whistle, and I ran harder. Cal gasped like the faulty bellows in the machine shop. “Maybe … we … should … go … back.”

“And then what?” I shouted as we took a hard left, pelting past the colorful Romany shacks of Troubadour Road, toward the train tracks and the bridge.

“I don’t”—Cal sucked in a lungful of the night air—“I don’t know, but this is a terrible … terrible … idea!”

We crossed the tracks, like a frontier border in their cold iron gleam under the moonlight. I twisted my ankle in the gravel as we stumbled down the other side of the embankment, and then Joseph Strauss’s marvelous bridge was in front of us, leading across the river and into the maze of the foundry complex.

We were in the train yard, among rusted boxcars and Pullman carriages waiting for engines that would never arrive. I could see the pedestrian walkway of the bridge beyond the fence, and I watched it while Cal and I leaned against a United Atlantic car to catch our breath.

Two Proctors in black hoods stood at the crossing, silent, their long coats fluttering around their legs in the wind off the river. One hid a yawn behind his fist, but the other’s eyes traveled into all the dark corners of the train yard. Searching, watching for movement in the shadows.

“Come on,” I said, tugging on Cal’s arm when he just stared at the Proctors, licking his lips. “We can cut through the yard and take the old coal paths down to the Rustworks.” Cal still didn’t move, so I tugged harder and he grunted.

“You’re not very gentle. Girls are supposed to be gentle,” he grumbled, finally creeping after me.

“You should know me better by now,” I teased softly. I stuffed my ruined blouse into a dustbin as we crept by the South Lovecraft Station, its brick spires reaching up into the night, and we threaded between rolling stock sleeping on the rail, leaving the lights of Uptown behind. As they faded, my breath-stealing fear of being spotted diminished a little. Even Proctors hesitated to go into the Rustworks. The wreckage was dangerous and there were supposed to be old entrances to the sewers hidden among them, leaving the ghouls easy access to aboveground.

Of course, those facts brought their own set of fears.

At last, the train yard ended at a ditch, and the terrain grew more turbulent, treacherous under my slick school shoes. A fence loomed above me, the border between Lovecraft and the Rustworks. For a gateway between worlds, it wasn’t much. Just corrugated steel eaten away into lace by exposure to salt air and rain. Beyond, I saw indistinct piles of slag and metal—small mountains, really, of everything from jitneys stacked high as a house like domino tiles to disused antisubmarine rigs, with their great steam-powered harpoons blunted, which had been brought back from the defense lines on Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras after the war. So many machines, all of them dead. It was like happening upon the world’s largest open grave, silent and devoid of ghosts. If I’d believed in ghosts.

I slipped through a gap in the fence, and the last of the aether lamps of Uptown winked out behind me, eclipsed by the wreckage. As Cal and I were enclosed by the bulk of the Rustworks, I felt a curious lightness in my step. I never walked out of bounds at the Academy. Storybook orphans were always meek, well-behaved, mousy things who discovered they possessed rich uncles who’d find them good husbands. Not the sort with mad brothers and mothers, who would rather stick their hands into a gearbox than into a sewing basket.

Now I was as far out of bounds as one could go, and it felt like a crisp wind in my face or jumping from a high place. I looked to Cal’s comforting height, and smiled at him as we walked.

I’d heard whispers from older students that you could buy anything at the Nightfall Market—outlawed magic artifacts, illegal clockworks and engine parts, women, liquor.

Most importantly, I’d heard from Burt Schusterman, who’d been expelled during my first year for hiding a still in his dormitory room, that you could buy a guide in and out of the city after lockdown and before sunrise. A guide who wouldn’t necessarily need passage papers to cross the bridges out of Lovecraft.

I just hoped he didn’t want more than fifty dollars, or strike his bargains in blood, or dream fragments, or sanity. I didn’t know that I had anything of the sort to give.

I chided myself as we walked through the silent, frostbitten lanes of the Rustworks, enormous mounds and heaps of junk threatening to topple their aging bones onto our heads. “Grow up, Aoife.” I was so lost in staring at the dead machinery in the junk piles that I didn’t realize I’d voiced the thought. Burt Schusterman could have been the most enormous liar. Rotgut was supposed to fiddle with your brain, wasn’t it?

“Huh?” Cal said at my outburst.

My flush warmed my cheeks. “Nothing.” I walked a bit faster. The light wasn’t here, and the shadows were long, with fingers and teeth. On a night like this, with a scythe-shaped moon overhead, it was easy to believe, as the Proctors did, in heretics and their so-called magic.

It crossed my mind, only for a second, to suggest we turn back, but the thought of Conrad somewhere just as dark and cold, and by himself, kept me climbing over half-rusted clockworks, through the hull of a burnt-out dirigible and past all the wreckage of Lovecraft’s prewar age, before the Proctors, when heretics had run rampant and viral creatures waited in every shadow to devour the unwary.

Finding the market was a bit like seeing a ghost—I didn’t truly believe it was real until we happened on it, and I saw shadows in the corner of my eyes and smelled the dankness of an eldritch thing, its breath misting on my face.

The Nightfall Market crept up on Cal and me in shadows and song—I saw a low lump of tent, and heard a snatch of pipes, and slowly, slowly, like a shy cat coming from under a porch, the Nightfall Market unfolded in front of our eyes.

Tucked into the dark places of the Rustworks, below the crowns of old gears and the empty staring heads of antique automatons, the Nightfall Market pulsed with movement, with sound and laughter. I hadn’t expected laughter. Heretics were meant to be grim, weren’t they? Concerned only with the trickery they called sorcery and the overthrow of reason?

I put aside my nerves. I didn’t belong here, that much was obvious, in my plain wool uniform skirt and with Uptown manners, but if I showed that I was terrified of ending up an example to next year’s frosh—“Did you hear about Grayson? The crazy one who got taken by heretics?”—the citizens of the Nightfall Market would never help me find Conrad.

Cal and I wound among the tents and stalls, made up of oddities and things that regular people would cast aside—fabric and metal and leather, stitched or riveted into a riot of color and odd shapes. The strange bit was, that haphazard as it first appeared, there was a sense of permanence to the place.

A pretty redheaded girl smiled and winked at Cal, her eyes an invitation into a big candy-striped tent that smelled like overripe oranges and orchids. “You looking for a port, sailor?” she called.

“Keep walking, partner,” I told Cal when his head swiveled toward the girl. He gave me a lopsided smile.

“You’re not the type to let a guy have any fun, are you?”

“When we’re safe in Arkham and we’ve found Conrad you can have all the fun your immune system can stomach,” I said, with an eye on the girl and her cosmetic-caked face. She reminded me of a cheaper, brassier version of Cecelia.

Cal made cat noises, and I didn’t hesitate to punch him on the shoulder, though not too hard.

“If you wanted a date, Aoife, you should have passed me a note or two during Mechanical Engineering,” Cal teased. “There were plenty of school dances we missed our chance for.”

I snorted. The idea of a respectable boy like Cal with a girl like me was as ridiculous as the idea of him with the girl from the tent. She’d probably be more acceptable to the professors and his parents. Boys were allowed to go wild once or twice.

“Believe me, Cal, nothing is further from my mind than a date right now,” I told him as I tossed the girl a glare. She waggled her fingers at me before sticking out her tongue. I returned the gesture. I suppose I often don’t leave well enough alone, but Cal was my companion on this little adventure. She could go and find her own.

We turned a bend in the market’s alleyways and came to a square thronged with people. I paused. I had expected the girls of questionable reputations, accompanied by bandits and vagrants of the type popular with sensational writers. But in actuality, an old pipe fire from a house long ago made wreckage was open to the air, and vendors had set up grills and kettles over the flame. The smell was oaky, earthy, a good cut of meat rubbed with spices. My stomach burbled at the scent, and I was reminded that I’d had to miss supper to come here.

“Books!” A boy in a checkered cap and an outdated newsie coat, half again as old as I was, shoved himself into my path, chest puffed like a bullfrog’s. “Spell books! Charmed paper! Never needs erasin’! Tinctures! Good for what ails you!” He squinted into my face. “Not much, by the look of it. Face like an angel on you, girlie.”

“I don’t have any money,” I returned. “You can save your pitch for some superstitious twit who does.”

“Ain’t no superstitions for sale here, miss,” he chimed back. “All of my charms ’er one hundred percent gen-nu-wine. I’ve got magics in my pen and a witch in my kitchen.”

“Magic’s not real,” I said. “If you’re so smart, you should know that.” I was trying to seem like someone who wasn’t easily conned, but my voice sounded small against the chatter of the market.

“Sure, an’ if you really believe that you’d be home in bed.” The kid wrinkled up his nose at me. “I could tell you where to buy a hairbrush instead, maybe. You need it.”

“Say,” Cal intervened, before I could make a move to strangle the little brat. “Where’s a guy find a guide around here?”

The boy spat in the dirt near Cal’s feet. “Piss off, townie. I look like I give out help to Proctor-lovers?”

Cal swiped at him. “You don’t know anything, you little rat.…”

I fished in my pocket for a half-dollar and held it up. The boy’s eyes gleamed to match. “What’s your name?” I said.

“Tavis. Thought you said you didn’t have any scratch?”

I made a second half-dollar join the first. Conrad had liked sleight of hand, though the Proctors frowned on something so close to what heretics considered magic. Tavis was practically panting. “We need a guide out of Lovecraft,” I said. “All the way to Arkham. I have money for that, and you seem like you know how things work around here. Or do you have a big mouth and nothing else?”

The first thing you learned in the School of Engines—if you want to understand how something works, ask the one who does the dirty job. Gear scrubbers and steam ventors and their foreman were in the pits. They knew their Engine intimately.

“I do, at that,” Tavis said. He pointed past the pipe fire to a blue tent. “You want old Dorlock back there. He’s a guide, best damn guide in the Rustworks. He could guide steam back into water. He could—”

I held up a hand, and dropped the two coins into his. I wondered what a pair of silvers bought in the Nightfall Market, besides bad manners from a shyster kid. “That’s fine. And for the record, I like my hair this way.” Truly, I hated it and toyed with chopping it into a modern style daily, but like I said, sometimes I don’t know when to leave it. Besides, I had a feeling Dorlock wasn’t as easily put in his place, and it might well be my last chance to feel in control of things tonight—or ever. Once I found Conrad, I’d have to face running off. I might be expelled. I didn’t think beyond that, because beyond expulsion was a cell in the Catacombs, shock therapy to burn the madness out of me and finally, a place next to my mother. If I lived.

“Sure there isn’t,” Tavis snorted, brandishing his worn wares again. “And hey, townie,” he said to Cal as we started into the crowd. “You watch your girl. She’s got an edge of the pale on her, that one, and it’s like honey in a beehive down here.”

I shuddered, feeling like something rotten had touched me. Cal rolled his eyes. “Stupid little runt.”

“You mean, you don’t feel the urge to be my white knight?” I teased, nudging him in the ribs. “Thought that was your dream job.” This was my idea, and I wasn’t about to let Cal see that second thoughts had started the moment we left the Academy. A good engineer stood behind her plans as sound until they’d been tested and proved otherwise.

“Like you said, Aoife,” Cal grumbled, sounding for all the world like Professor Swan, “grow up.”

An edge of the pale. If I’d had more coins to spare, I’d have asked Tavis what he meant. But my mother’s money was precious, and I needed every penny of it for this man Dorlock.

We skirted the fire and approached where Tavis said the guide lived, my feet slower with each step. Still, I grasped the tent flap firmly and pulled it aside. “Hello?” I peered into the tent, which smelled like a barbershop mixed with cheap liquor. “M-Mr. Dorlock, sir?”

“Hello!” The voice boomed back, sonorous and clearly used to the stage. Dorlock was entirely bald and sported a handlebar mustache, like a circus strongman. Somehow I had expected our guide to be thin and shady, dark as the shadows he slunk through. But Dorlock would stand out at a Hallows’ Eve carnival.

“Why look at you, young lady!” he exclaimed. “Aren’t you ripe as a peach!”

If I were to treat him mathematically, take his measurements, he’d be extraordinarily large—a rolling tub of a man boiling over with cheer. I didn’t see what was so funny.

“We need a guide,” I said. “We need to leave Lovecraft. Tonight.”

Dorlock laughed, his kettledrum stomach trembling. “Doesn’t waste any time! Going to grow into one of those modern women, I fear, always in a rush!” He reached out to pinch my cheek, and I ducked. I’d grown an aversion to being touched a long time ago. Nuns will do that to a person.

“Please, sir,” I protested, trying to keep myself stiff and ladylike, like Mrs. Fortune. “Can you help us, or not?”

“Of course,” Dorlock boomed. “Of course, of course.” He crossed his bare arms over his leather vest and matted chest hair. I tried to look only at his face. “It’s all a question of payment, lassie.”

I looked back at Cal. “I have fifty dollars,” I said. Cal’s eyes went wide at the mention of the sum. Dorlock’s eyes, by turn, narrowed.

“Fifty United States American dollars, eh? Well, missy, it won’t buy much Uptown way but down here in the rat hole of the Rustworks, you just might have yourself a deal.”

I felt crestfallen, realizing at the gleam in Dorlock’s gaze why Cal had looked so alarmed. It was all my money. I should have struck a harder bargain. A boy would have bargained. Conrad probably would have made money on the deal.

“We’ll leave in an hour or so, to beat the sunrise,” said Dorlock. “Up and down and all around we’ll go. It’ll be a grand adventure for you two kids.”

“I care less about the adventure than the Proctors,” I said, trying to stay firm.

“Yeah, and we’re fifteen,” Cal interjected. “We’re not kids.”

“Of course not, you’re a strapping young lad, aren’t you?” Dorlock chuckled. “Going to feed you up and get you big. Why don’t you go get something from the fires for your lady friend, strapping lad? It’s a long walk down under the ground.”

I frowned at that. “Ghouls live underground,” I said. Not even Proctors went into the old sewers and railway tunnels, the only “underground” I knew of. The new sanitation system ran on clockwork and didn’t need tending. Nobody went underground. Nobody alive, anyway.

Dorlock shook his head, brows drawing in like a bank of thunderheads. “You just have a head stuffed full of learning, don’t you, young lady? Worry less. You’ll get wrinkles before your time.” He laughed like he was the chief audience for his own joke.

I opened my mouth, knowing there was murder in my eyes, but Cal touched me on the arm. “I’ll get you a weenie with chili. If these people even know what one is.” He gave me a small nod before he walked away. I knew that nod—it was the please don’t get us into trouble nod. If Dorlock was responsible for us not getting arrested, mouthing off would just be stupid.

As it turned out, the Nightfall Market didn’t possess any weenies or any chili to put on them, and Cal ended up standing in line to buy us two newspaper cones full of fish-and-chips. I sat on the fender of a Nash jitney that had rusted to chrome and bones next to Dorlock’s tent, where I could keep Cal in sight. Dorlock grinned at the white of my knees, and I pulled my skirt down over them.

“You do look sweet,” Dorlock said, reaching to push the hair out of my face. “Beauty soon fades, down here. You’re a rare treat.”

I glared up at him, knowing the knot in my throat that had started when he grabbed for me wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. “Don’t. We hired you to guide, and that’s all.”

“I’m just being friendly,” Dorlock said. “Loosen up, lassie.” He laid a hand on my shoulder and I shrunk, but it was like trying to pull myself out of a bear trap. “It’s a long time out of the city, and we might as well get along.”

Maybe that was the single blessing Nerissa’s madness had given me—I’d never had a mother to teach me smiles and manners, to do what a nice girl would do. I reached up and knocked Dorlock’s hand off my shoulder, hard. “Perhaps I don’t want to get along that way.”

Dorlock’s pouchy face fell in on itself, anger stealing into his small eyes. Hidden anger, like a snake. The most dangerous type.

“You don’t have any weight to throw around, lassie. I’m the one watching your hide underground, and it’d behoove you to treat me sweet.”

Before I could snap back at him, the Nash creaked as someone sat down next to me. “You know, Dorlock, I’m impressed. Behoove is a big word for you.”

I turned to stare at the stranger and met his eyes. They were silver. His smile was crooked, and his hair was long, swept back with a rash of comb tracks. The stranger’s hand was firm and ridged when he took mine and shook it. “Dean. Dean Harrison. And you might be?”

I opened my mouth, shut it. I didn’t quite know what to make of the stranger, except that he didn’t seem to care for Dorlock any more than I did, and his hand was warm.

“I might—” I started.

“She might be with me.” Cal reappeared, irritably juggling his camp duffel and two helpings of takeaway. I watched Dean tilt his head back and look up to Cal’s considerable knobby-kneed height.

“Sorry, brother. I didn’t know she was spoken for.”

“Oh, for the sake of all His gears,” I huffed at Cal. Of all the times for Cal’s tough act, this was the absolute worst. I shook Dean’s hand in return. “I apologize for my friend’s manners. I’m Aoife Grayson.”

Dean’s eyes and smile were both slow, but there was nothing dumb about them. He took the seconds to memorize everything about my face. I’d seen the same look on master engineers, contemplating a new device or problem. Dean took me in, and he smiled. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Aoife.”

I returned the smile, writ much smaller. Boys—men—weren’t in the habit of smiling at me. I was odd, and I knew it. The few smiles before Dean’s had lead to pranks, but when I looked Dean in the eye, his pupils just grew wider.

Cal grumbled, his face turning colors. “Aoife. We need to go with Mr. Dorlock.”

Dorlock himself had turned a plummy shade of purple, huge hands clenching and unclenching like they wanted for a neck. “Harrison, you little ratlick, what are you doing yakking to my clients? They hired me fair and square—go poach somebody else’s hire, vulture.”

“Like I was about to bend your girl’s ear on,” Dean said. “You don’t want Dorlock, miss. He pays the barter boys down here to talk him a good game, and he poses the part, but it’s all fancy. Man will have you chumming a ghoul nest inside an hour if you go with him.”

“Guttersnipe!” Dorlock roared, raising his fist to Dean. “They chose me. Market rule says free hires to all. The sweetheart here and her companion want to go underground, and underground they’ll go.” He didn’t have the false face of a kind old uncle any longer. Rage had turned him crimson.

“Never knows when to shut his yap, either,” Dean muttered, standing up. His full height was a head shorter than Cal, but Dean was broad and solid where Cal was still disappearing inside his school clothes. Dean’s face wasn’t but a year or two older than mine, but it held a spark of wickedness, a blade-edge of worldly knowledge that a person could only light by seeing too much, too soon. Conrad had the same look. I didn’t trust Dean, but I was starting to like him.

“Listen, Dorlock,” Dean said. “I’m being a pal and giving you a chance to walk away dignified-like.”

Dorlock’s nostrils flared. “Or?”

This time, Dean’s smile wasn’t slow and it wasn’t warm. “Or,” Dean said, “I can show your shame to these nice Uptown folk. You choose.”

I stepped back to stand by Cal in anticipation of a blow or a knife between the two. Dean had to be crazy, mouthing off to someone the size of Dorlock.

“You runt,” Dorlock panted, a vein in his temple throbbing like a swollen river. “What do you mean, poaching on this sweet little thing?” He reached for me again, my hair, my cheek, and I swatted at him again. It was like fending off an ungainly octopus.

“She’s a little young for you, don’t you think?” Dean drawled. “By decades or so?”

I took another step back, this one involuntary.

Dorlock let out a yell and pulled a length of pipe with a wrapped handle from his belt. Dean reached into the pocket of his leather coat and brought out a palm-sized black lacquer tube. “You know that saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight?” he asked Dorlock. “Same principle applies, old man. Don’t think I won’t show steel just because we’re in market grounds.”

“They hired me,” Dorlock rumbled. “You’re just a huckster, kiddo, not worth my time to spit on.” He turned to me with a smile revealing one missing front tooth. “Come on, lassie. Come away from that trash now and we’ll go down under and on to the country like you wanted.”

Dean moved just a bit, so that his body was between Dorlock and me. It was an artful move, executed like a dance. “All right, hard road is your road, old man.” He gestured, his leather jacket creaking. “Show her your arm, Dorlock. Show off a little for us here.”

Dorlock fell silent. “You,” he said to me. “Come on now.”

“No,” I said, shrinking away from his grasp. “If I’m paying you fifty dollars, you can show your arm.”

Dorlock sneered. “I don’t need the whingeing of a spoiled schoolgirl,” he said. “Or a deadbeat doper boy who doesn’t know his north from his south.”

“North,” Dean said, pointing over Dorlock’s shoulder. “True iron in my blood. What’s in yours?”

“I think you better show us your arm, mister,” Cal said. “See what this guy’s on about.”

Dorlock balled up his fist, but Dean caught it and turned Dorlock’s great fleshy slab outward. Three straight lines were burned into the skin, puckered and red with trapped infection. Cal grimaced. I didn’t want to move closer, but at the same time I couldn’t resist staring at the pus-filled wounds. They were wide as my wrist, weeping and hideous.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Those, boys and girls, are ghoul kisses,” Dean said. “Comes from the acid on their tongues, when they lay them against you to claim ownership. This fat bastard has a deal with one of the dens downside in the sewer, to deliver fresh meat when he’s able.” He released Dorlock and folded his arms. “Ain’t that right, tubby?”

I stared at Dorlock, feeling sour creep up the back of my tongue. I’d been ready to hand over my money to a man who’d sell us for meat. Conrad would have seen this. All I’d done was nearly gotten Cal and myself eaten.

Dorlock’s stomach jiggled with fury, and he let out a roar. Dean stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. “Spare me! Free hires within market bounds, Dorlock, you said it yourself. You want to debate the law, we can take it to the old spider-lady who keeps the books.” He winked at me. “Nice old gal. Bites the head off of you if the verdict don’t come down on your side. Figuratively speaking.”

There was a long, razor-sharp moment between the four of us, and then Dorlock swore. “It’s your funeral, stupid girl. Next time you trust a pretty face I hope it’s a springheel jack waiting underneath.”

He stomped back to his tent, and Dean flipped the black cylinder one last time before he shoved it back into his pocket. “So, it seems you folks are in need of a guide.”

“Y-yes,” I managed. I sounded like a child who’d been caught out of bed, and I cleared my throat. “I mean, we are. Still.”

Cal scoffed. “And let me guess—you’re the answer to our plight?”

Dean passed a hand over his hair, putting the slick strands that Dorlock had mussed back in place. “I’m a bit of a tradejack, and guiding is one of my trades. I don’t need to advertise because I’m good. And I sure won’t charge you any fifty dollars.”

“Was Dorlock really going to feed us to ghouls?” I asked him, the blue tent now crouched like a poison mushroom. It seemed like the sort of thing you’d read in a Proctor manual, something that was supposed to scare us into behaving.

“Sweetheart, your white flesh would be their filet mignon,” said Dean. I flinched. Cal glared.

“Watch your language, fella. That’s a young lady you’re talking to.”

“Word of advice, kid,” said Dean. “This may be the Wild West down here, but you ain’t a cowboy. You’re not even a boy in a cowboy suit.”

“Cal,” I said sharply when a lean, angry look came over his face. “Why don’t you make sure we have all of our supplies before we head out?” It was for his own good—Dean was twice his heft and carrying a knife, but Cal wasn’t the type to consider mathematical odds.

“I’m not leaving you alone with him,” he told me, pointing at Dean.

“She’s snug as a bug with me, brother.” Dean flashed me a smile that promised rule breaking and breathlessness. I decided to be interested in the laces on my shoes rather than risk turning red.

“I’m not your brother,” Cal grumbled, but he found a space to open his duffel and check out his supplies. I did the same with my book bag.

“So, Miss Aoife,” said Dean. “I guess now’s a decent time to tell me what’s on the other end of this skedaddle.”

Oh, nothing much. Just a plan to find my mad brother and rescue him from a danger he may or may not actually be in. I settled for the abbreviated version.

“My father’s house. In Arkham.” I counted the number of pens and pencils in my satchel, refolded all of my spare clothes and tried to look like I knew what I was doing.

“Woman of few words,” Dean said. “I like that. Here’s the deal, pretty one: I get half when we’re clear of the city and half when I deliver you safe and sound and without any Proctors crawling all over you. Dig?”

“How much?” I said, bracing myself for a price even worse than Dorlock’s. I’d learned one thing at least in the Nightfall Market, and that was nothing came free or easy.

Dean lifted his shoulder. His leathers and grease-spotted denim were as far from my idea of a guide as I probably was from Dean’s idea of an adventurer, but in an odd way we fit. Neither what the other thought we should be. I rather thought we complemented each other.

“Bargains are different for everyone,” Dean said. “From some I take a lot and some nothing they’ll miss at all. You’ll know when it’s time to pay up.”

I thought of Dorlock’s hand on me, and shivered. But Dean had intervened, and he hadn’t tried to con me out of my money, either.

Conrad would be decisive, show that he wasn’t worried. I gave a nod. “All right.”

“Good,” Dean agreed. “For now, we gotta shake a leg if we want to be out of raven’s sight by sunrise.” He whistled to Cal. “Saddle up, cowboy! The Night Bridge is waitin’ for us and the earth is turning fast.”