The Iron Thorn

6 Across the Night Bridge

WE FOLLOWED DEAN away from the pipe fire, away from the music and the light. I never thought I’d regret leaving the Nightfall Market, but as the noise faded, my apprehension swelled.

The groan and creak of the ice on the Erebus River grew loud as we approached the embankment, like two giants shouting at each other.

“What kind of backwards way are you taking us?” Cal demanded. I wondered too—there was nothing on the other side of the river but the foundry, and the road was patrolled by Proctors.

Dean stopped at a set of steps slick with ice and river water. The river rushed below our feet, beneath a walkway bolted to the bulwark with flimsy rivets oozing rust. I could look down through the gaps and see black, freezing nothing waiting to swallow me whole.

“I’m taking you out,” Dean said. “What you wanted, ain’t it?” His engineer’s boots, leather over steel toes and hobnail soles, clanked on the metal as he descended the stairs.

Cal grabbed my arm and slowed my steps, so we fell paces behind Dean. “I don’t trust him, Aoife. He could be leading us right into a trap.”

I concentrated on placing my feet on the icy steps. The water whispered to me as it swept along the ancient embankment and the old sewer lines that emptied out at the base of Derleth Street. A ghoul could practically reach up and touch the sole of my foot, we were so far down.

“If I wanted to trap you,” Dean yelled back, “I would have turned right instead of left back at the Rustworks fence.” His roughened voice was loud enough to echo from the opposite bank of the river.

Even in the cold, my face flushed. I gave Cal a censuring glance. This wasn’t one of his adventures—if he made Dean cross, we’d be at the mercy of the Proctors. Or something worse.

I fell into step behind Dean, careful not to slip and pitch myself over the walkway into the water. “Why? What’s right instead of left?”

“Right is the old submersible launch. Ran the Hunleys and the diesel subs down to Cape Cod during the war. Nowadays, the mill workers come from Lowell and snatch pretty little girls like yourself to work your fingers to the bone on the assembly lines and in the mills.” He tilted his head to Cal. “Him, they’d just put a shank in his skinny gut and leave him to freeze to death on the riverbank.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said quietly.

Dean shrugged. “Now you do, miss.”

“I can handle myself,” Cal huffed. “And you’re going to find out if you keep up the lip.”

“How much farther?” I said, attempting to keep things peaceable.

“Not far now,” Dean said. “The Night Bridge is just up and around the bend. It’s always waiting for travelers who need it, and for those who don’t … well.” He jerked his thumb over the rail, toward the black and rushing river.

“That sounds like something my brother would say,” I murmured without thinking. Dean cocked his head.

“Oh? He a heretic too?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shivered, tucking my hand back into my pocket.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I graduated the School of Engines.

If I came back from Arkham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean’s mouth curled up at that. He stepped past the tollbooth, onto the bridge. The wire grating beneath our feet bounced and creaked as we advanced, and I unwillingly flashed on the images of the twisted span after the collapse, suspension cables flapping in the wind like tangled hair.

As we walked, the holes grew wider, until finally we were just walking on the mesh used by Babbage to under-sling the roadbed, a thin half-inch of wire keeping us out of the river. I looked back at Cal and saw that his face had gone sheet white with an undertone that matched his thatch of hair.

“Come on,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m sure it’s perfectly safe. We don’t weigh that much.”

He looked at me, looked at Dean, and then stepped forward, his jaw twitching. He ignored my hand and shoved his own into the pockets of his car coat. “Let’s just get across, okay?”

I pulled my hand back to my side, a small pain with it. Cal had never refused my help before. At least my bleeding had stopped and I didn’t appear to be branded a heretic for it. Not like the five-pointed stars and crosses and sutra wheels the Proctors told us to watch out for, because a mark like that was the first sign. Heretics believed in gods, in magic, and carried their marks. A rational person knew there was no need of such decoration.

Dean walked with me, Cal a little behind, and together we crept across the span, over dark water and cracking ice. When we’d passed under the halfway mark, the Gothic arch that Babbage had proudly declared the gateway to New England, Dean spoke. “So, Miss Aoife. Arkham. What’s a city girl want with that worm-eaten little town?”

I didn’t answer for a moment that stretched long and thin, listening to our feet clang against the span.

“Something that’s none of my business?” Dean guessed. “That’s usually the way. But the more I know, the quicker I can get you to your Point B.”

“I have a brother,” I said. “His name is Conrad.” I glanced back at Cal, trudging a few paces behind with his eyes glued to his feet. “He needs my help,” I told Dean. “In Arkham.”

“Answer me straight, Miss Aoife, and I won’t bother you again,” Dean said. “Are you in trouble?” He held up a hand, long knobby fingers spreading like spider legs. “I’m not talking sneaking out of school, lifting a pack of cigarettes, and going out to the jitney races. I’m talking bad trouble. Bloody trouble.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“You want to tell me the truth on this one, Miss Aoife. If it’s trouble that can get me beat up or buried six feet under, and you don’t fess up, your guide might be disinclined to pull your fat out of said trouble. Catch my meaning?” Dean’s face looked like it had when he’d confronted Dorlock—perfectly pleasant, except in his eyes. They were hard like stone and my chest went tight in response. I didn’t want Dean looking at me like that.

“There’s no trouble,” I said, and even managed a smile. Up until Conrad’s birthday, I’d never made a habit of lying. My mother babbled endlessly about things that weren’t there and couldn’t exist. I preferred to keep on solid ground. After Conrad came at me with the knife, I lied out of necessity, to keep the eyes of the school and the Proctors turned away from me.

Those had all been small lies, more voids of truth than falsehoods. I looked Dean in the eye. “I’m not in trouble,” I repeated. “Not yet, anyway.”

He loosed a small chuckle. “All right, miss. That’s all I wanted to know.”

“Now I should get to ask you something,” I said. Dean shoved his hands into his pockets.

“I don’t know about that, sweetness. I think you’re much smarter than I am.”

Behind us, Cal gave a snort. “Isn’t that the truth.”

“Why do you do this sort of thing?” I said, before Cal could get a nose full of Dean’s fist. “Smuggling people in and out of Lovecraft, I mean. It seems, well … dangerous, for starters.”

“About the only thing I’m suited for,” Dean said. “My old man wore out his bones as a gear monkey in the Rustworks, and my brother got himself killed in Korea a few years back. Got no money, got no family. Nothing but this talent of mine to get folks where they need to be. It’s a rambling life, but it’s mine.”

“What about your mother?” Cal said. “Surely even you have one.”

Dean fixed Cal with his hard stare. “Don’t bring up my mother unless you want me to talk some crap about yours.”

There was a sentiment I could take to heart, and shame over interrogating Dean heated my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to pry,” I told him. “I just wanted to know a little bit about you, seeing as you’re taking us so far and—”

His head whipped skyward. “Button your lip, Miss Aoife.”

I followed the finger he touched to his mouth, up and up through the black bones of the Night Bridge. We were in the darkness between the embankments of Lovecraft and the glow and burn of the foundry beyond. Wind whipped my hair into a fury of knots; over the wind, the whirr of wings carried on frozen air.

“Raven patrol,” Dean said. “Flying out from Ravenhouse.”

“They’ll see us,” Cal hissed, instantly panicked. “The Proctors will take us into custody and lock us up in the Catacombs and—”

“Is there any shelter on the bridge?” I demanded in the loudest whisper I could manage. The hum grew louder, filled the air and drowned out the ice.

“Not unless you’re gonna swing down among the pilings like a river rat,” Dean murmured.

“What are we supposed to do?” Cal shoved his hands through his hair. “We’re sitting ducks. We’re totally exposed!”

I started when Dean grabbed my hand. “We hoof it.” He tugged and I stumbled. “Run!” he elaborated when Cal stood, wavering between us and the way back to Lovecraft.

“Move it, Cal!” I shouted, silence forgotten. Avoiding capture mattered more than detection. Besides, nothing escaped the notice of the ravens.

Dean’s loping stride easily outmatched mine, and sharp pain shot up my arm as he dragged me along, our feet pounding on the span.

They could not drown out the sound of wings.

I knew that I shouldn’t look back, that I should tuck in and run like my life depended on it, because it did, but I couldn’t help turning my head to see what was coming.

The raven’s feathers gleamed liquid black in the cold starlight. Their eyes blazed with yellow aether, burning up the night sky like a flock of sparks. Their beaks were glass and their talons were sets of tiny gears and rods that clacked and grasped as they swooped in a low V over the river. Their feathers were hammered aluminum, painted black, and their innards were marvels of clockwork that printed everything their burning eyes saw onto tiny lanternreels.

A raven, unlike an automaton, could see, and if it marked a heretic, it could fly back to Ravenhouse and croak to its masters from its metal throat. The whirr of their gears and the hiss of their aether flames drowned out everything, even my own heartbeat.

“Not but a hundred steps,” Dean panted. “Then we’ll be in the foundry. Those spy birds can’t spy through steel.”

I dug down, my feet clanging against the grate, my school bag slapping my hip, breath scissoring its way in and out of my lungs. Cal trailed us, his limbs flying in every direction as panic caught his feet and took him to ground.

“Cal!” I whirled, and my wrist wrenched in Dean’s grasp. He stumbled in turn, cursing.

“What in the blue hell are you doing, kid?”

I covered the two steps back to Cal, as the faint ghostly lamps atop the span of the Night Bridge winked out, one by one, covered by dusky wings.

“My ankle,” Cal moaned. “I think I broke it.”

“Aoife, we need to go,” Dean snapped, his panic creeping up to his eyes. “If I get caught and dragged to Ravenhouse, it’s curtains for the whole trio, you get me?”

Cal’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring in pain. I slung his arm over my shoulder. “Up. Put your weight on your good leg.”

“Just leave me,” he groaned. “Just leave me here … I swear I won’t give you up.…”

“Cal Daulton, I swear that if you don’t shut your trap, get up and run, I am going to sock you in the jaw and give you to the Proctors myself.” I had passed the point of my usual nervy fear, the kind that made my hands shake and my voice go soft. Now I was afraid on a much more basic level. I wasn’t going to the Catacombs. I wasn’t leaving Conrad on his own.

I’d come this far. I wasn’t turning around.

I stood, heaving Cal along with me. He was much heavier than his frame belied and I felt the rush of air along my face as the raven’s wings stirred the air.

Cal’s weight lifted all at once, and Dean was next to me, taking Cal’s other arm. “It’s a good thing I took a shine to you, Miss Aoife,” he said. “Because this is above and beyond.”

Dean muttered a swear as we dragged Cal between us. “Hard left. Head for the automaton sheds inside the foundry fence.”

The gates of the Nephilim Foundry were shut for the night, but Dean found a gap in the fence and I helped Cal through. In the shadow of the outbuildings and the loaders—the sleds that ferried the slag, the by-product of the foundry—we stumbled through a patchwork world of glow and shadow, iron and frozen ground.

I could barely breathe from our dash and Cal’s weight, but I forced myself on, staying close to Dean.

He rattled the doors of the nearest building, a machine shed with the phantom shapes of automatons waiting for repair beyond the dirt-coated glass panes. “In here,” he rasped. “Put yourself on the floor—those things are still coming.”

Spurred by the ever-present sound of wings, I skip-hopped across the open space with Cal and we ducked through the doors just as the ravens swooped over the towers and tin roofs of the foundry and banked, turning back toward Lovecraft in the same rigid pattern that mimicked life but was as cold and precise as a surgeon’s tool.

I let Cal down gently, and slumped next to him. My heart was beating on my ribs like a fist on a madhouse door.

Dean exhaled and leaned his head back against the corrugated wall. “That was entirely too near for my taste.” He pulled a flattened packet from his back pocket and a silver lighter from his jacket. “Care for one?” he said as he bit off a Lucky Strike from the pack.

“Girls with good breeding don’t smoke.” I quoted Mrs. Fortune without even realizing it, and then blushed. Dean wasn’t the kind of person who’d care what a school matron thought. He wasn’t the kind of person who put stock in girls who did, either, and the last thing we needed now was for him to think me silly. Which I was, to be worrying about comportment at a time like this.

“All right, then,” Dean said, touching the flame to the tip. “Lemme know if you decide not to be good, miss.”

I gave him what I could of a thankful smile before I crouched next to Cal, taking in his flushed face and shallow breaths. He looked like poor Ned Connors had, after Ned chopped off his little finger in a drill press during Machine Shop. I moved Cal’s hair, soaked with freezing sweat, off his forehead. “How’s the ankle?”

“Awful,” he said. He kicked off his boxy school shoe and pulled down his argyle sock. I winced at the sight of the swelling around the joint. I had barely passed our first-aid course—to treat the burns, breaks and slashes associated with work in the Engine—but I gingerly prodded Cal’s foot, and he yelped.

“Quiet!” Dean commanded. “You think the foundry doesn’t have its own bits of mean metal rolling around after dark?”

I considered being stuck here overnight, and our chances of escape in the light of day. Even with the raven patrols, the night was our only friend right now. I bit my lip, looking at Cal. “We’re just going to have to wait until we get to Arkham,” I told him. “I’ll find you a surgeon or a hospice there, I promise. Can you walk at all?”

Cal pressed his lips together. “I can try, if you help me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “But we have to keep moving.” I reached for him, tried to lever us into some kind of duet.

“I’m your guide, full stop,” Dean said quickly. “Don’t expect me to get in on that dance.”

“Nobody asked you to dance with anyone,” I snapped, helping Cal up. My shoulders protested the weight, but I let him lean on me. “Just do what I’m paying you for.” Dean Harrison might not be a heretic in the sense the Proctors understood the word, but he was certainly no gentleman.

Dean dropped his Lucky Strike and ground it under his boot. “Aye, aye, Miss Aoife.” He rolled the door back without another word and stuck his head out. “All clear.”

The narrow avenue between the long steel sheds before us rippled with fog, the aether lamps nailed to poles on each building face spitting in the moisture. In the distance I heard the whine of gears and saw a pair of blue lamplike eyes riding through the fog. I shivered, not just because of the wind on my sweat-scrimmed skin. The automatons of the foundry reminded me too much right now of everything I’d left in Lovecraft—nightjars, madmen, the looming turn of the year since Conrad had gone away. The feeling hadn’t left me that this journey into the wilds of Arkham was all a terrible mistake, and we weren’t even off the foundry grounds. There were worse things waiting for me outside the city gates than madness. Ghouls, roadside bandits, and the specter of heresy that my brother represented. If I came back from Arkham alive, I wouldn’t just be a potential infected—I’d be condemned as a heretic.

If I left the city, I might never be able to come back. Conrad had to have known when he sent the letter. He needed my help enough for me to risk it.

Or he was mad, and I was following him, the infection dropping my guard, making me take risks. Follow criminals. Act irrationally.

I rubbed the scar under my jaw with my free hand. My other was around Cal’s waist, fingers pressed between his ribs. “Thanks, Aoife,” he whispered. “But maybe we can just forget this bit when I tell the guys about our trip?”

He smiled at me, and I managed to smile back through my effort of supporting half his weight. “Whatever you say, Cal. You’re the hero of that story.”

Dean whistled low from up ahead. “Back gate,” he said. “Locked, though.” He extended his palm to me. “Got a hairpin you can spare, miss?”

I pulled the bobby pin out of the left side of my regulation bun and handed it to him. Dean bent it open with his teeth and worked on the padlock. It popped with an irritable creak. I wished misbehavior came as easily to me, with as few compunctions. The nervous knot in my guts wouldn’t be nearly choking me now.

“Nice work,” I said. He shrugged and tucked the pin inside his pack of cigarettes.

“Easy trick. If you like, I’ll teach you sometime.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Cal said. “Aoife’s a nice girl.”

“You don’t spend a lot of time around the fair sex, do you?” Dean teased, that insufferable grin coming into play.

“It’s fine,” I told Cal when he tensed. Cal was easy to tease—the Master Builder knew that for a fact—but he was hurt and Dean wasn’t playing fair. I cast Dean a sharp look. “It’s not such a far journey upstate. It’ll be over before you know it.”

“Not soon enough,” Cal huffed, but he let me help him through the foundry gate all the same.