The Nightmare Garden

11 Journey to the Sea

THE NOR’EASTER INN was as deserted as the rest of Innsmouth, at least from the outside. All of the residents seemed to fear the Proctors as much as the farmers we’d rescued did. I nudged open the front door with my foot and peered around the jamb to the inside while trying to keep the sun behind me. Backlit, I could get a look at the interior of the tavern before anyone inside got a look at me.

I gazed back at the street once more. A few Proctors moved in groups, Draven’s new needle pistols at the ready. One of them met my eyes and quickly looked away as he passed on the other side of the street without a second glance. No Proctor would touch me now; that much was clear. Not while I was marked as Draven’s agent.

The weight of the compass in my bag increased, or I imagined it did. The complicated clockwork within was driving my Weird crazy, like the tickle of a feather on my skin.

I was going to find a way to defy him, of course. There was no possibility of doing as he asked, allying myself with the Proctors. Draven might think he owned me by threatening to hurt Dean and my family, but hadn’t Tremaine threatened the same thing? I’d obeyed him out of what I thought was a lack of choice, and the results had been horrific. This time I had to fight. Had to be the girl my father told me I was—strong and smart. A Grayson, not a scared child.

Besides, Draven hadn’t discerned my entire mission in finding the Brotherhood. They were welcome to slug it out, but I had one goal in going north, and that was to find the nightmare clock. And once I did, the clock, if it worked, would set things right.

That was the promise I made to myself as I turned back and edged into the Nor’easter, letting the shadows dip across my face. It was oddly quiet and, as far as I could tell, empty. Dust motes were suspended in the gray midwinter light streaming through the broken windows. They cast jagged kaleidoscopic patterns on the dirty floor and showed just how shabby the place was.

“Hello?” I called.

Nobody answered me. I wandered a circuit of the small room, glass crunching under my shoes. The Nor’easter was beyond shabby, but that gave me a little hope. A place this run-down wasn’t likely to be harboring the law-abiding types who’d take one look at me and scream for a Proctor.

I determined that nobody was around, then pushed into the back room. Somebody screamed, and I raised my hands reflexively, until I realized it was the farmer’s daughter I’d seen at the barn.

“Great Old Ones return,” she hissed. “You do have a habit of popping up on people, don’t you?”

“Why are you here?” I said, shocked. The girl had changed from her nightclothes, but her face was still bruised and swollen. She gestured to her apron and the broom she held. “Proctors or not, if I don’t show up to work, I get fired. We can’t afford that in my house.”

“You seem all right,” I offered hesitantly.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks to you.” She stuck out her hand, awkwardly, and I shook it, just as awkwardly. “I’m Maggie,” she said. “Maggie Fisher.”

“You seem to already know who I am,” I said.

Maggie blushed. “I’m sorry about that stuff I said. I weren’t thinking. You did save me from the Proctors.”

“Forget it,” I said. I would have done the same in her position. I didn’t hold it against her. “Your mom all right?”

Maggie’s face fell. “She’s in and out, but the doc said she’d be okay. Might be in bed for a few weeks.”

“I’m sorry to ask you this now,” I said. “But do you know a woman named Rasputina Ivanova? Apparently she comes in here a lot.”

“Sure.” Maggie snuffled. “She’s always with this group of shady Russians. Hate ’em. They never tip.” She pointed back to the main room, to a round table in the corner. “She sits there and never talks, least not to decent types.”

I took a breath. “I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m just going to be frank. They smuggle people out of Innsmouth, don’t they?” I couldn’t exactly hop aboard a commercial steamer bound north, not with the sort of place I was heading for. And I didn’t want to run into any more Proctors if I could help it. My encounter with Draven had been more than enough.

Maggie stared at me, and I could see the struggle taking place behind her eyes.

“Do they pay you to point desperate people in their direction?” I lowered my voice, drawing closer, hoping to impress on her how serious I was. “I’m desperate, Maggie. Desperate as they come. I know you don’t trust me, but the sooner you point me in the right direction, the sooner I’ll be out of your village.”

One hand crept up to touch the bruises on her face, and Maggie flinched. “The submersible comes up out past the jetty, eleven-thirty or so on nights with a new moon. Tonight, I don’t know. So many Proctors out there … but there’ll be desperate folks too. There always are, and Captain Blood out there never turns down a quick buck.”

“I thought her name was Ivanova.” I shouldered my bag and prepared to go find a place to lie low until midnight.

“Yeah, it is,” Maggie said. “But we all call her after that old pirate story, because that’s exactly what she is. A bloody pirate.”

I looked out at the angry ocean, past the jetty to the clanging buoy that signaled the start of deep water. “Terrific,” I said. More pirates. More people out for my blood. Just what I needed.

Maggie told me how when the sky was dark, the submersible would creep into shallow water, past the jetty, and signal those hiding beneath the pier. Sometimes they sent a boat, but I doubted they would with the Dire Raven crouched over Innsmouth like an ill omen.

I spent the time as the sun set in the back room of the Nor’easter, where Maggie had agreed I could stay. I found an old vulcanized raincoat and turned it into a rubber sack for my journal, the compass and anything else vulnerable to seawater. I sealed it with a little glue and wrapped it tightly with rope, shoving it back into my satchel.

The hours as the clock crept toward midnight were agonizing. Nobody came into the pub, and Maggie paced restlessly, sweeping up broken glass, washing dishes and mopping the floor, chores to occupy a restless mind. In times past I had done math to keep my thoughts quiet, but I couldn’t focus that much tonight.

At last, the nautical clock chimed the quarter-hour, and I shrugged into my jacket and picked up my things. I couldn’t miss the sub.

“Hey,” Maggie said as I pushed open the door to the main room. “Be careful.” I stuck my head out the front door and checked the deserted street. “Those Russians on the sub ain’t exactly friendly.”

“I think it’s a little late for careful,” I told her. “But thanks all the same.”

The temperature had dropped from merely chilly to agonizingly cold, sea wind cutting across my bare cheeks like animal claws. I snuggled into my jacket and walked down to the end of the dock, scanning the dark-capped waves for any sign of life.

Nothing stirred except the wash of the waves against the dock, and as my chronometer crept past midnight, I began to lose hope. They have to come, I thought; even though I didn’t relish the journey, it was the only way I was getting north. The only way I could get far enough from Draven to figure out how I was going to outsmart him.

Heights didn’t bother me, but I didn’t like water. It was black, and cold, and the rocking made me feel as if I’d lost my grip on both the earth and gravity. I couldn’t think about that now, though. I could only think about the nightmare clock, the one thing that could help me.

The clanging of the buoy reached my ears again, and clouds scudded above my head. Lit only by faintest starlight, they were black hulking things, like the creatures that strove endlessly through the hundred skies above the black figure’s dome in my dreams.

Just then, far off in the shipping channel, I saw a single blue spot glow, slowly joined by others as something long and sleek slid from the depths. It bobbed to the top of the water with a knocking groan, the sound of rivets and iron rather than soft, slippery flesh. That was the only hint I had that it wasn’t something entirely of the sea.

The submersible floated where it was for a moment, and then a hatch clanged faintly. A red light joined the blue, the pinpoint of a lamp. It flashed Morse code, a simple sequence asking if there was anyone on shore. My Morse wasn’t the best, but I grabbed one of the dock lanterns and flashed back, using the blue glass filter in place for just such a purpose.

Come quickly, the red light said.

I was about to flash back that I didn’t have a boat and they’d have to come closer when I picked up another sound over the buoy bell and the waves. A powerful spring-wound motor, the kind that could move a craft along at tremendous speed. I caught the movement of blacker on black, a craft with no running lights.

Proctors. I swore under my breath.

Though Draven had surely told them to steer clear, the crew of the submersible didn’t know that, and one of the faceless crew opened fire on them with some sort of gun that rattled fast and loud, striking sparks against the patrol boat’s metal hull.

I cried out, even though they couldn’t hear me, but then realized I had both an advantage and a much bigger problem. I wouldn’t be marked as one of Draven’s agents if the Proctors engaged the Russians. But then again, I wouldn’t have a ride in another minute, if the sub crew was being shot at.

The submersible was barely a hundred yards offshore. I could do this. I could reach the ship and be gone from this place, on my way toward fixing everything I’d broken. My fear couldn’t stop me. Not this time.

I stepped to the edge of the dock, wriggled out of my shoes and coat, strapped my satchel across my back and jumped into the ocean.

At first, when the water hit me, I felt nothing. It was like burning myself on an acetylene torch—my nerves simply went dead, and a great envelope of unfeeling covered me.

I surfaced and swallowed a mouthful of salt water, choking and sputtering as I tried to keep my head above the waves. I wasn’t a horrible swimmer—everyone at the Academy had had to take a swimming unit—but I wasn’t a great one either, and with my clothes and satchel weighing me down, I wasn’t making much progress.

I stroked against the aching cold, straining toward the row of lights on the side of the submersible, the tracers of light from the guns as they exchanged fire with the Proctors. I didn’t hear any screaming—the Proctors were aiming wide, their shots splashing on the sub’s hull and coming nowhere near the crew. Draven really wanted me on board the sub, wanted me heading north to the Brotherhood.

The cold came to me by degrees and was heavy as any lead. It compressed my lungs and dulled my nerves, until I knew that I was freezing, sinking, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I was so close. I could almost touch the sub, could see its running lights dazzling my salt-stung eyes, but I would never get there on my own. I was swallowing more water than air, and I could feel the cold tugging my numb body down.

Light engulfed me, bizarrely, as if the moon had at last shown its face. I had the absurd notion I was in the grip of one of the creatures said to live under the waves, enfolded in clammy, webbed hands. And then there was the brightest flash of all, a searing, stabbing pain through my chest, and everything went dark.

The glass dome of dreams was black now, smoke and thunderheads swirling outside. The gear ticked frantically, sending spiderweb cracks through the glass. Lightning illuminated the dark figure, and he looked at me in profile. His nose was sharp, his skin the gray of something long dead and buried. It was the first time I had glimpsed anything of him besides his eyes, and I was frightened by what I saw.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he rasped at me, hands buried in the mechanism of the great gear, fiddling with bolts and tiny components that even my hands weren’t delicate enough to manage. Lightning flashed over the dome again, and I realized that I stood on fresh-turned earth rather than transparent glass. All around me, flowers bloomed, their buds opening to reveal skeletal hands reaching toward the dark sky.

“What happened?” I asked. It seemed a question far too small to encompass the destruction all around me.

“You happened,” the figure snarled. “You stole into my world, and you were the first I’d seen in so long, I was careless. You listened to me whisper secrets and now the barriers have broken, because you were never supposed to come here.”

“I … I did this?” I whispered in confusion.

“You will,” the figure whispered as the glass began to shatter and fall, slicing through the stems of the bone flowers as it rained around us. “When you die.”

The flowers oozed blood, red and wet, that stained the dirt. I stood rooted where I was. “I’m dying?”

“Not yet,” the figure said. “Go away. Stop dreaming about this, or do like the others you care for and stop dreaming at all. Stop stealing into my world, Aoife. Or you’ll be here much sooner than you think.”

Something bright and hot cut through me when the lightning flashed again, and the dome cracked completely, vanishing from before my eyes.

“There’s a good girl,” a cigarette-tinged voice boomed in my ear. I rolled away from the voice, from the blinding light in my dazzled eyes, and vomited what even in my delirious state I could tell was an impressive amount of seawater.

I blinked the sparks from my vision while I coughed. I was lying on a brass walkway, mesh digging into my legs through my soaked stockings. The walls around me were curved, riveted, and painted a humorless gray. Iron pierced my brain, all around me. Lettering spun before my eyes until I realized I wasn’t delusional but was merely seeing a language I couldn’t read.

“Am I …,” I gasped. Breathing, never mind talking, embedded a cluster of small knives in my chest when I tried it. The light dazzled me again, and I slumped. Strong hands caught me, and my nostrils were invaded by the smell of pipe tobacco.

“Take it easy,” said the same voice. “Back from the dead and trying to walk so soon. Tough little thing.”

“Or desperate,” said another voice, strongly accented and female.

“Or that,” the smoker agreed.

“I made it,” I gasped as I lay staring at the round ship’s hatch above me. “I’m on the submersible.” I was honestly surprised not to be dead. I remembered the suffocating feeling of the water, the hands of the sea tugging me down, and shivered uncontrollably.

A face came into view, wavering around the edges as my eyes worked to dispel the ocean’s tears. “You are indeed aboard,” agreed the female voice. “And that brings us to the thorny question of who you might be.”

The face, when my eyes focused, belonged to a woman, her rich brown hair woven into two meticulous braids. She wore a coat the same gray as the walls, with red trim at the collar and cuffs and two spots on the breast pocket where insignia had been ripped off.

“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I said. “Dean Harrison sent me to meet Rasputina Ivanova. He told me to ask her about the Hallows’ Eve they spent in New Amsterdam.”

The woman flushed bright pink and then drew back out of my line of sight. She snapped a few orders in Russian, and before I knew it I was on my feet, being helped down a walkway by a bear-sized man in an undershirt, red suspenders and filthy, oil-stained pants. “Easy, sweetheart,” he rumbled, in an accent twice as thick as the woman’s. “You’ll be walking on your own in no time.” We came to a galley where a half-dozen sailors stopped eating and stared at me. Another command from the woman and their eyes dropped back to their plates.

The man shoved a ratty blanket at me, along with a steel cup full of tea.

“Drink,” he ordered. “Or you’ll never get warm.”

Now that I wasn’t seeing things or drowning, I became aware that I was shivering so violently my muscles were spasming. Still, I hesitated to take a drink from a stranger.

“Drink,” he insisted, shoving it at me again and slopping a little on my skin this time. I could see every vein, every freckle and every scrape on the back of my hand painted in stark relief. It was as if the sea had sucked every drop of blood from me and left icy water in its place.

I grabbed the cup and drained it. The tea burned my tongue, but the pain reassured me at least that I was thawed enough to feel something. I wrapped the blanket around myself, still shivering hard enough to rattle the bench I sat on.

“You weren’t in the water very long,” said the man, refilling the cup, “but you might still have the hypothermia. Keep warm and keep drinking, if you please.” His English was good, but each word was as heavy and precisely formed as an ingot, and he fidgeted, as if he was afraid of saying the wrong thing.

The woman came back into the galley and barked something at him in Russian, and he bobbed his head at me apologetically and left the room.

The woman took his place across the table from me. She moved like a man, taking up a lot of space. She folded her arms so that her elbows hit the table. “I am Rasputina Yelena Ivanova,” she said. “Captain of this vessel.”

I tucked deeper inside the blanket, wilting under her gimlet gaze. She didn’t look much older than I was, but her eyes were older by decades. Eyes that had seen and absorbed too much. I couldn’t hold them.

“Nice to meet you,” I murmured, staring down at my hands.

“Yes, whatever,” Rasputina said brusquely. “So. You know Dean Harrison.”

“He said you’d get me where I need to go.” I forced myself to meet her eyes again and found them now full of cautious curiosity. “Was I wrong?”

“A girl comes from a village full of Proctors, we’d be suspicious on a good day,” said Rasputina. “But a girl who jumps into freezing water to get away from that village, well.” She shoved my waterproof satchel across the table at me, along with a pair of utilitarian black shoes to replace what I’d left on the dock. “I suppose I can at least hear you out.”

Rasputina wasn’t particularly pretty, in the sense of delicate features, ruby pouts and pleasant smiles. She had a broad mouth that looked like it wouldn’t know a smile if it bit her, cheekbones that stood out from her face like they were trying to escape and wide black eyes that felt like drill bits boring into the center of my forehead. They were the eyes of a crow, a primeval thing that missed nothing and knew every lie before you told it.

“All right,” I said, deciding a mostly true story would get me further with her bull-like directness than an outright lie. “Those Proctors were after me. I’m a fugitive, and I’m going to the Arctic Circle. A place called the Bone Sepulchre.”

Rasputina’s eyes widened, and her hard face split into an expression of shock. “Maybe you aren’t cracked,” she muttered. “I knew that kid Harrison had a taste for the strange, but this …” She shook her head and stood. “Even if I knew how to get there, I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” I insisted, determined not to let her put me off. “Dean said you’d take anyone anywhere, for a price.”

“I plucked you out of the sea, girl,” Rasputina told me. “At great personal risk. You have no proof that you are who you say you are, and you have no money. I don’t have to do a damn thing for you besides not stuff you into a torpedo tube and shoot you back to the surface.”

“That’s fair,” I said. “But please, hear me out. I swear I do know Dean, and he’s in a lot of trouble.”

Rasputina pulled a bottle of clear liquor over and poured herself a glass.

“If you spend enough time with Dean, you’ll learn he’s always in a lot of trouble,” she said, tossing back the shot. “So, here’s the situation: you’ll ride with us until we get out of territorial waters, and then we’ll drop you at Newfoundland or somewhere like that, and you can tell Dean that I said I hope like hell I get the chance to meet him again so I can smack him in his smart mouth.”

I didn’t have the strength to argue. I was shivering too hard, and my teeth clacked when I tried to talk. Rasputina softened a bit and offered me the bottle.

“No,” I said. “I feel like I could pass out as it is.”

She stood and pointed down the corridor. “Take one of the empty bunks. We’ll be running underwater until we clear Maine. Then we’ll find a place to put you off.”

“I can pay you,” I said to Rasputina. “I have money.” I don’t know why I lied. Desperation, most likely, but I shouldn’t have worried, because she saw right through me.

“No amount of money could convince me to tangle with what lives under that ice,” Rasputina told me. “Get some rest.”

She was probably right. I was exhausted, and I had a little while before they dumped me off. I could figure out how to change the captain’s mind, but not when I was exhausted and half frozen.

I went into the small, curved cabin Rasputina had pointed out. Something on the other side of the wall hummed, and the bunks, though steel framed, looked like the most comfortable things on earth at that moment. I crawled into one and pulled both blankets over me.

I didn’t sleep, though. I listened to the engines churn and tried to ignore the sharp pain in my skull reminding me that the longer I was trapped inside an iron tube, the worse I was going to feel.

After hours of staring at the rust spots on the ceiling and listening to the engines, the entire ship shuddered, and the tilting in my stomach that let me know we were moving ceased.

Footsteps rang in the corridor outside, and I swung out of my bunk and peered into the hallway. “What’s going on?” I asked a passing crewmember. He growled something in Russian and shoved past me, slamming me into the bulkhead, hard.

“Ow,” I muttered, but it was lost as sirens blared and the light in the corridor changed to red.

Rasputina barreled past me, and I caught her arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Another sub,” she snapped. “You might as well come up to the bridge.”

Heart sinking, I followed her up a ladder and into a room similarly lit with red warning lights, stuffed with controls, a wheel and a periscope at the center. Rasputina grabbed a floppy rain hat and then leaned into the periscope, icy seawater raining down from the seal that led to the top of the sub.

She spat out a curse and put the periscope up. “You,” she said to me. “Who are you? Really?”

Before I could blink, I found the thin barrel of a pistol leveled at my face. “Answer me,” Rasputina said. “Or I’m going to paint the dive controls with your brain.”

“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I whispered, wondering what on earth Rasputina had seen through the periscope to make her react in such a way. Nothing good, clearly. “I haven’t told you one lie since you brought me on board.” That in itself was a lie, but I’d told the truth where it counted, hadn’t I?

Rasputina pointed behind her, at a young girl, younger even than me, sitting at a radar station. “Explain that,” she said to me. She snapped at the girl in Russian, and she took off her earphones and spoke to us in English.

“Ping bearing one mile off port side, visual range in fifteen seconds. Border Guard destroyer. Seems to be holding its position, ma’am.”

The Border Guard—the Proctors who patrolled coastal waters to keep out Crimson Guard spies and heretics of all stripes—were notorious for their black ships, their silent gliders and their brutal interrogations of anyone who crossed their path. We’d watched a few reels on them at the Academy.

“We are six miles off the coast of Maine,” Rasputina told me. “They have us dead to rights, and they aren’t moving. No torpedoes. Not even a screw turning. Now, were I a Proctor, I wouldn’t hesitate to blow us right out of the water and into the sky like the pirates we are.” She pressed the pistol against my forehead until it bit into my flesh. “The only thing that’s different on this trip is you. The only reason those bastards haven’t opened fire on us is you. Who are you?”

“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I repeated. My shivering now had nothing to do with being frozen.

“All right, Aoife Grayson,” Rasputina snarled. “If that’s who you are, what’s so special about Aoife Grayson? Why is she so precious and dear to those squawking blackbirds?”

“Captain,” said the old man. “We’re on a full charge. We can outrun them.”

“And drain our batteries halfway to land and drift around like a piece of garbage until we sink, suffocate, or run aground,” Rasputina told him. “No. We’re getting to the bottom of this now.”

“I destroyed the Engine,” I blurted. Rasputina snapped her gaze back to me, and the pistol wavered away from my head. The barrel was as black and endless as the space outside the dome in my dreams, and when it dropped to her side I let out a breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding.

“Good lord,” Rasputina said. “I knew you looked familiar.”

“The Proctors are keeping Dean hostage until I get to the Bone Sepulchre. I have to …” I kept my eyes on the gun. My heart was thumping so loudly I could barely hear my own words. “I have to do what I did to the Engine. I have to destroy the heretics who live up there, where the Proctors can’t reach, or they’re going to kill the person I care about most.”

That sounded plausible to me, and left out both the nightmare clock and Draven’s compass, ticking away like a tiny evil bomb in my satchel.

Rasputina holstered her pistol. She looked at the blinking blob on the radar screen and back at me. “So you’re not a spy. You’re an assassin.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m doing what I have to, for Dean. I’m not happy about it, but if either of us wants to survive long enough to try to find a way out of this, you better get the hell away from the coast while they’re holding their fire.”

Rasputina’s mouth set in a hard, long line, like the blade of a knife. “You better be telling me the truth.”

“I am,” I said quietly.

“Dive,” Rasputina said to the old man. “Ten degrees down. Make your depth one-zero meters.”

The dive officer grumbled his assent in Russian, and a bell rang three times, short and sharp. The sub dove, the rivets of the hull creaking and groaning all along its length. Rasputina straightened her cap and jacket after she removed the rain gear, then touched me on the arm. “Come with me, Aoife.”

She took me to the captain’s quarters this time, a small, curved room like the one I’d tried to sleep in, but paneled with real wood instead of rust-bubbled steel. The insignia of the Crimson Guard was inlaid in the wall above the bed. Someone had hacked a thick slash mark through it.

Rasputina got a bottle of clear liquid out of her foot-locker, along with two glasses. She poured an inch into each and pushed one at me. “I suppose I should apologize,” she said. “For holding a gun to your head.”

“You had a good reason,” I said. I would have done exactly the same in her position, and I knew it. I wasn’t angry that she’d threatened me, just terrified that she’d realize that the story I’d come up with about destroying the Brotherhood was bunk. If she found out Draven was tracking me, using her ship as a pilot fish, I’d be out a hatch faster than I could blink.

“We’re going to be dead in the water after that dive, unless we put in at Newfoundland,” Rasputina said. She let the words hang between us, regarding me as she swirled her drink in her glass.

I sniffed at mine. It smelled faintly like the incendiaries rioters tossed at Proctors during the every-other-day upheavals in Lovecraft. “I’m going to the Bone Sepulchre one way or the other,” I told Rasputina. “I won’t let the Proctors hurt Dean.”

“And to protect your love, you will destroy another’s life? All of the Brotherhood?” Rasputina asked.

“It’s not …,” I started, my face heating. Was love the right word to describe what Dean and I had?

“A woman after my own heart,” Rasputina said. She tossed her drink back. “Na Zdorov’ye.”

I drank mine. It burned my throat and made me cough. Rasputina chuckled. “You can walk around the boat, but don’t get in the way. We’ll be a few hours yet up the coast.”

“So you’ll take me to the Arctic Circle?” I said, refusing to budge. Rasputina waved me away with an annoyed gesture.

“I can’t very well leave Dean Harrison to rot, can I? Damn that boy.” She stood and opened her door, the signal for me to leave. I started to obey, then stopped. “Why do you trust me? Just like that?”

“Because,” Rasputina said. I didn’t know if the drink had made her more expansive, or outrunning the Proctors, but her iron-hard face softened. “Once, I was a girl who believed in the Crimson Guard above all else. I signed on to the navy at fourteen. And I served, until the day our engine batteries ruptured and the commander abandoned ship. The batteries were leaking toxins, and we were left to die. Expendable to the cause.” She cleared her throat. “A few of us made a lifeboat, but it sank in the freezing waters, and I washed ashore near Lovecraft. A heretic boy took me in, fed me, got me clothes. And when I found the commander who’d left us all to die for his own ends, I took his new ship and I never looked back, at his cause or any other.”

She moved aside to let me out then, her stony expression falling back into place. “Dean Harrison is a good boy, Aoife. And if he’d risk his neck for you, I’ll help you risk yours for him. I just hope you have a plan of your own and not just the Proctors’.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, though I was sure it wasn’t the kind of plan Rasputina was thinking of. My secrets were still my own. That was Dean’s only real chance. “It’s a good plan,” I assured her. She looked like she doubted me, but before she could say anything, there was a great clanking groan, and the entire sub vibrated beneath us.

“What now?” Rasputina snarled, shoving past me. The old man with the beard met her halfway down the corridor.

“Captain, the main rotors on the starboard propeller are jammed,” he said. “The jam is tearing the entire screw assembly apart. We’re bleeding power.”

“Then have someone fix it, chief,” she snarled. “What do I have Jakob and Piotr for if they’re not going to fix the damn ship when it breaks down?”

“They’re trying,” the chief said. “But it’s a complicated problem.”

I could fix their problem. At what cost, I didn’t know. Being inside iron was already starting to make me feel woozy, see flickers of light and shadow at the corners of my eyes. But if we didn’t get moving, Dean would be doomed for sure and I’d never reach the Brotherhood. I went to Rasputina and lifted my hand. “I can fix it.”

Rasputina and the chief both scoffed at me. “You?” Rasputina said. “You can’t even fix that bird’s nest you call hair.”

“I’m good with machines,” I insisted, ignoring her jab. “If your engineers can’t fix it, then what do you have to lose by letting me try? I was an engineering student in Lovecraft. I can’t make things any worse.”

“You could blow up the boat, and all of us with it,” the chief snapped. “Get back to your bunk, little girl.”

“Look,” I said, glaring at him. “I’m not an idiot. I can fix your propeller without blowing up your submersible. So you can accept that the little girl might know what she’s talking about, or we can all sit here until this bucket rusts through and we sink to the bottom.”

“She’s right,” Rasputina said, heading off what was sure to be a shouting match between the chief and me. “We’re dead. Never mind that the Proctors, the Canadian Coast Guard, or another rogue sub could pick us up at any moment.”

“Fine,” the chief snapped. Rasputina cocked her head.

“Yes, it is fine. I’m the captain, and I give the orders, and you nod.”

The chief muttered a slew of Russian, and I watched Rasputina’s brows draw together. “If my father were here, he’d give the same order. But he’s not here. This is my boat now, so take the girl to the engine room, get her a suit and a set of tools and get her working.” She pointed a leather-gloved finger at me. “Fix my ship, Aoife Grayson.”

I felt the urge to salute but quashed it. “Yes, ma’am.” I just hoped fixing the propeller would actually be a feat of engineering, rather than a feat of magic that caused my brain to short-circuit from the pressure of my Weird.

The chief grabbed me by the arm and dragged me toward the rear of the boat, despite my protests that I could walk on my own. “Aoife, eh,” he grunted. “What kind of name is Aoife?”

“It means ‘radiant,’ ” I said. “At least, that’s what my mother always told me.”

The chief snorted his obvious derision. “Why?” I demanded. “What’s your name?”

“Alexei Sorkin,” he grunted. “Dive chief of this boat. And medical officer, since we have no real one. I am the one who restarted your heart when the cold water stopped it.”

“And what’s the boat’s name?” I asked. I was chattering a bit, trying to keep my mind focused outside of myself so that I couldn’t think about the slowly blossoming flower of a headache just behind my eyes.

Not a headache, I knew. Madness.

“Her name is the Oktobriana,” Chief Sorkin answered. “After the warrior heroine of the Crimson Guard.”

“You were one of them?” I asked. “Like Captain Ivanova?”

“You ask a lot of questions for such a little girl,” Sorkin said curtly, and ducked through a hatch into a steamy space that smelled of oil and metal shrieking against metal. When I hesitated, he grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me along with him. “I thought you said you knew your way around engines.”

“I do,” I said curtly. I didn’t know why I expected a bunch of grouchy Russian sailors to treat me like a lady, but it was starting to irritate me that they didn’t at least treat me like I had a brain. “I like engines better than people, most of the time. I definitely do right now,” I added, and Sorkin surprised me by barking a laugh.

“Ah, so you are little but you have sharp teeth! I like it.” We delved farther into the engine room, and steam all but obscured my vision, giving me uncomfortable memories of the Mists.

“Who’s there?” said a voice from the white world beyond.

“Jakob, this is Aoife,” said the chief. He mispronounced it “Effie” instead of “Ee-fah,” but I didn’t bother correcting him. “She claims she can fix our boat.”

When he finally came into view, I was surprised to see that Jakob was as thin as Cal and about my height. He was practically miniature, and his ocean-blue eyes shone from his grease-streaked face with an eerie brightness. “Huh” was all he said.

“Have at it. Piotr will be forward if you need him,” Sorkin told me, and turned around to stomp back to the main part of the sub.

Alone and suddenly out of my element, I stared at Jakob for a long, awkward moment, and he stared back. “Do you speak much English?” I asked at last.

“Just a little,” he admitted. His accent wasn’t the rich, rounded syllables of Rasputina’s or the bear’s growl that Sorkin had. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I wouldn’t have called it Russian. Well, they were a pirate crew. Jakob could be from anywhere. I had the niggling thought I’d heard that sort of accent somewhere before, but I put it aside.

“That’s better than no Russian, which is what I speak,” I said to him. “What happened here?”

Jakob extended a handful of what looked like limp rubber noodles, nipped neatly at the ends. “Somebody cut the coolant lines. Batteries, they power the propellers. We recharge in port, but the batteries need coolant or they can overheat and then …” He made a boom motion with his hands. Rasputina’s story came back to me with new, stark reality. Overheated batteries could rupture and start leaking acid, causing toxic fumes. A sub trapped below the waves with no power to surface and no fresh air would have a dead crew in a matter of hours.

It was imperative I get this boat working again, not just for the sake of our journey, but for the sake of all our lives, not to mention my sanity. My head throbbed a bit and the pain warned me not to get overexcited or I’d speed the passage of the iron through my system.

“That’s bad,” I said.

“We don’t start the starboard propeller again, we go in circles, but nowhere else,” Jakob said. He twirled his finger to demonstrate.

“But if somebody sabotaged the boat …,” I said. What on earth could be going on? Even if Draven had a spy on board, he wanted me to reach my destination. Sabotaging the Oktobriana accomplished nothing.

“I said, we can’t worry about that right now,” Jakob said. “Unless we want to drift where the current takes us, what matters now is getting the boat started again.”

“All right, all right,” I told him. “I’m working on it.” I wasn’t used to being so easily dismissed, but Jakob was right. What mattered now was fixing the boat.

I put my hands on the casing of the rotors, the whole assembly of the motor that drove the sub, feeling out the gears and pistons and letting my mind get a sense of the machine within. “Will you be able to replace the coolant?”

Jakob nodded. “I’m working on it now.”

I nodded back and placed my forehead against the engine case. My Weird whispered to me, and I looked at Jakob. “You have some tools I can use?”

I didn’t have the control to fix the broken bits of the Oktobriana purely with my mind. It was different from picking a lock or starting an aethervox. And my Weird was better at destruction, anyway.

We worked in silence for a while, Jakob’s taciturn grunts when I asked him to pass me a tool the only sounds. My sweat soaked through every layer of my clothes, and I stripped down to my undershirt. Jakob took off his shirt, period. His upper torso was smooth and perfect, not a scar, not a mark. For a pirate mechanic, he was in remarkably good shape. He saw me looking and his blue eyes sharpened. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, blushing furiously. “I’m sorry.”

Jakob drew closer to me, and his pale, almost translucent skin caught the aether lamps lighting the engine room, making him look as if he were carved from stone. I backed up, banged into the side of the rotor assembly and realized too late I had nowhere to go.

I was totally alone with Jakob. It was doubtful anyone at the other end of the Oktobriana would hear me if I screamed. Stupid, Aoife, I berated myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

My shoulder began throbbing, as if someone held a hot iron to it, and I gasped as I cringed from Jakob’s hot breath in my face. His hand landed on my shoulder, and a thin blade found the soft spot on my neck, under the jawbone, pressing tight and causing me to suck in my breath lest it nick my skin. “Don’t move,” Jakob purred in my ear. His strange, musical accent filled my ears, even more than my panicked, pounding heart, and all at once I placed the voice, the too-bright eyes, the unearthly alabaster skin.

“Fae,” I said, my voice strained as I tried not to move against the knife. “You’re Fae.”

He didn’t reply, just pressed the knife harder against my flesh. It didn’t make any sense. Why try to leave us helpless in the water if all he wanted was my death, in the end? Was he an agent of Tremaine’s? How was he surviving, trapped in an iron tube, when I was already getting the first symptoms of poisoning?

Jakob still didn’t say anything. The pain in my shoulder was dizzying, and I felt tears squeeze from the corners of my eyes from fear. “Who are you?” I choked out. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I got you alone to deliver a message,” Jakob said. “You always have to be the clever one, Aoife. The one to fix things.” He kicked the door to the engine compartment shut, never moving the blade from my throat. Thin, and made from pure hardened silver—Tremaine had a similar knife. He’d also held it to my neck, and it hadn’t made me any more inclined to listen to him than I was to listen to Jakob. “Nobody can break in here. Nobody will hear you scream.” The knife pressed, and I felt a thin line of blood trickle down into the hollow of my throat. “The message is this, Aoife—the Brotherhood can’t help you. The nightmare clock can’t help you. Your only chance to find your mother is to come back to Tremaine and beg for forgiveness.”

A pounding started up outside the door. “Effie! Effie, girl! What is happening in there?”

Jakob cut his eyes toward Chief Sorkin’s voice, but he was immovable, and quick as a cat besides. I stood no chance of trying to get away on my strength alone. My father’s words came back to me: You’re not much in a stand-up fight.

“Shut up, Dad,” I grumbled. Jakob cocked his head, then smiled, a thin smile. He turned his wrist to dig the knife in more, and I caught a flash of a flaw in the skin of his wrist, a brand of some sort, which surrounded a small metal rivet. My Weird responded, frantic and hot against my mind in my panic. I had an idea, just a germ of one. I might not be a fighter, but I was smart. And Jakob hadn’t counted on how badly I wanted to live.

Rasputina’s voice joined the clamor outside. “Open this door, Jakob! What’s happening in there?” Something heavy hit, and Sorkin shouted.

“Jammed, Captain! Something is wrong!”

Rather than focus on Jakob, his pointed features, his now-pupil-less blue eyes, I focused on the door. Using my Weird felt like driving a drill through my temple, and blood gushed from my nose, but the wheel that opened the door turned, ever so slowly, and then, with one last push, flew back and dented the bulkhead with a clang like a coffin lid.

Rasputina and Sorkin stood there, and Jakob spun me to face them, arm clamped across my shoulders, knife at my neck. I was closer to this Fae than I’d ever been to anyone, even to Dean, and I could feel his heart beating. “You little sneak,” he hissed in my ear.

I snarled, not willing to be afraid of his blade or the fact that a Fae was here, alive, aboard an iron ship. “What? Did Tremaine fail to mention that?”

Rasputina drew her pistol and aimed it at us. “Jakob,” she said softly. “Your eyes. What’s wrong with your eyes?”

Jakob’s laugh was short and harsh as a seal’s bark. “My eyes? Nothing, you idiot woman. My eyes are open. Yours are closed. You are ignorant to everything around you, especially me.”

I twisted my neck a bit while he ranted, trying to see if I had any give with the knife. There wasn’t much. Jakob’s skin felt cold and clammy where his bare torso pressed against me, and I caught a glimpse of his eyes, which had so alarmed Rasputina. Fae eyes gleamed with an inner light. If I were Rasputina, I’d have been losing my cool staring into them as well.

“Speak,” Rasputina said. “You’ve been loyal crew for months, Jakob. What are you going to do to this girl?”

“Cut her throat if you don’t lower that crude weapon and leave us to our business,” Jakob snarled. “And also if she declines to obey my terms.”

Fury flared in me. Tremaine still thought he controlled me, either via an agent or directly, through my fear of the Fae catching up to me. Now it had happened, and strangely, I wasn’t panicking. I was just furious. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I told Jakob. “My brother sliced my throat. He almost killed me. I was bleeding all over myself. I’m not going to scream and beg.”

“You mad bastard,” Rasputina said, lowering the hammer on her pistol. The click echoed in the closed space, and I swallowed in fear, acutely aware that I was in the way of the bullet.

“Let the girl go.” Her voice had gone soft, placating, more like that of a kindly teacher than that of a captain. “This can still end with everyone alive, Jakob.”

“She’s a destroyer,” Jakob snarled. “When she turns the wheel and opens the kingdom, they will come and come and come, come from the stars and cover this world, and the next, and the next.…”

Finally, my opening. I recognized those ramblings—iron madness, eating into your brain until you just rambled endlessly, about the things only you could see. My mother had talked about the same things.

I snapped my head back into Jakob’s face, feeling something give—something nose-shaped. Jakob yelped, the knife skidding down my neck and over my collarbone as he wind-milled.

Rasputina’s arm never wavered; she didn’t even blink. The gunshot was impossibly loud, stole all sense of sound from me, and I felt the bullet fly through the air next to my face.

She missed Jakob by inches, the bullet digging another dent in the bulkhead, and he bared his teeth. They weren’t pointed like Tremaine’s, but they were white and sharp, ready to tear flesh.

I didn’t know for sure that it’d work, but I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed Jakob’s wrist, above the brand surrounding the curious metal rivet. Fae couldn’t survive in iron. I dug my fingernails into the spot and accessed my Weird.

Jakob groaned and swiped at me with the knife, but Sorkin darted forward and pinned his arm to the bulkhead with a roar. I felt skin, blood and metal beneath my nails, and Jakob’s screams spurred me on. I yanked on the piece of metal—silver, I saw now, carved in the shape of a tapered screw, going all the way down to Jakob’s bone—with my fingers and my Weird together.

Splitting pain in my skull, a shattering scream from Jakob, and he collapsed, still, on the floor of the engine room.

I looked down at my bloody hand, which gripped the silver screw. My shoulder throbbed at the contact with it. Powerful Fae enchantments were wound around this piece of silver—powerful enough, I thought, to keep a Fae citizen alive in the Iron Land for months.

“Jakob,” said Rasputina, bending down and feeling for his pulse. Jakob thrashed and screamed when she touched his skin, as if her touch were flame, and I darted back, into the arms of Sorkin, who held me steady.

“It’s all right, little girl,” he rumbled. “It’s going to be all right.”

I tried to pull away, to get to Jakob and make sure he was really finished. Rasputina had no idea what she’d let onto her boat, and as she shook Jakob by the shoulders, I wanted to snatch her away, to scream that she wasn’t nearly as afraid as she should be.

Jakob was even paler than he had been, all his veins standing out, as he grabbed for Rasputina.

“Burn, witch!” he shrieked. “You burn! Bright as the red fire they put into your blood!”

Rasputina jerked her hand back. “What are you saying?” Her face had gone from flushed to pale in an instant, and she drew away from Jakob’s twitching body.

He giggled, and I flinched. It wouldn’t be long now. This much iron around a full-blooded Fae … I didn’t want to think about what would happen when the poison took full effect.

It would be too much like looking into my future.

“The fire and the ice,” Jakob hissed. “The beginning and the end. The waking dreamer there, Aoife Grayson, will end you. She’ll drown the whole world, and she’ll do it with a smile.” His laughter turned into a shrill scream. “I don’t want the clockwork inside me! I don’t want the dreams!” His hand lashed out again, and he snatched Rasputina’s pistol from her belt.

“No—” she started. Not a shout, not an exclamation, just the softest beginning of a plea, before Jakob put the barrel to his chin and squeezed the trigger.

I immediately tucked my head down against my shoulder, and the force of the gunshot slapped me like a hand. Rasputina screamed, and I stayed perfectly still, with my eyes screwed shut, until she stopped. I didn’t want to look.

Footsteps raced, and other crewmembers who’d heard the shot from outside came spilling in. There was yelling, in Russian and French and half a dozen other languages, and still I stayed where I was, until Rasputina got off the floor, scraping the fine spray of blood off her cheeks, and grabbed me by the arms. I braced myself to be hit. The rage and confusion on her face were plain, and those feelings only led to one place, in my experience.

But after a long moment, she let go of me. “You better be worth it” was all she said before she picked up her cap from the floor and put it back on her head, sweeping past the crew and out of the engine room.

I stayed. I had to see, to make sure Jakob was really gone. Crewmembers bundled his body into an oilcloth sack and hauled it away, and only then, as they brought a mop and bucket to scrub up the blood, did I open my hand.

The enchanted silver had bitten deep divots into my flesh, but the thing was dead now, no more magical than a bread box.

Tremaine had known where I would be before I’d known myself. Had sent an agent ahead to retrieve me. Had willfully put close to fifty lives in danger just to get me alone, to deliver his message to me. And I wasn’t surprised at any of it. That was Tremaine’s way—destroy an Engine, destroy a city, destroy my life. Nothing mattered but the agenda of the Fae, and his agenda in particular.

I made my way back to my bunk, past crew who gave me a wide berth. I looked down at myself and saw that I was covered in Jakob’s blood. I was as numb as I’d been when Sorkin and Rasputina had pulled me from the ocean—all that mattered was that the Fae knew where I was.

My legs were rubbery and my heart was thudding as I collapsed on my bunk, listening to the Oktobriana’s screws come back to life and feeling the slight sway in my stomach that said we were under way. At least I’d accomplished that much. We were still headed north. Draven wouldn’t take out his wrath on Dean just yet.

Having come that close to being taken to Tremaine again made me nauseous. Draven was malicious, but I could out-think him, outmaneuver him. I knew I was smarter, and that I could make a plan that both kept Dean alive and got me what I wanted from the Brotherhood.

With Tremaine, I had no such assurances. He’d fooled me before, made me a virtual puppet, and now he’d gotten close enough to draw blood, all without my seeing it. I’d done what he wanted, I thought, with the same burning rage I’d felt when I’d fought off Jakob. I’d started a slow hurricane that would eventually sweep the entire Iron Land bare. And yet he still wanted me. For what?

The only answer I could muster was that it was more important than ever for me to find the nightmare clock. It could deal with Draven, with the Fae, with all my mistakes. Find it, use it, set things right. That was my only course now, no matter what the cost.

Being resolute helped me calm down a little, but only a little. I wiped the blood off myself as best I could with the single towel Rasputina had provided and shut the door. I got back into bed, and pulled my legs up to my chest and a blanket around my shoulders. Draven might have given me passage that kept me safe from the Proctors, and Rasputina had agreed to carry me, but the journey to the Bone Sepulchre was turning out to be anything but easy.

Rasputina knocked on my door after a time. “Join me in my cabin,” she said, and gestured me into the corridor. I was too tired to argue, or even to wonder what she was going to do to me. Nothing she could come up with would be worse than Draven or Tremaine.

We took the same seats, the two small chairs, but there was no offer of a drink this time, and Rasputina didn’t stare a hole in me as if she could read my thoughts. “Are you going to tell me what happened to Jakob?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I did,” I said. I could have put my head down and slept there—Rasputina’s cabin was warm and smelled faintly of cinnamon. It reminded me a bit of our old apartment in Lovecraft, the last we’d had before Nerissa was committed.

“You looked scared when he talked to you,” I said. “He knew things about you nobody does, right? Things you never told anyone?”

Rasputina took off her cap and rubbed her forehead in distress. She’d washed most of the blood off, but a faint line of pink lingered at her hairline. I looked down at my own rust-streaked hands and shuddered. The gunshot seemed to echo in my ears.

“And how do you know that?” Rasputina asked at last.

“Jakob isn’t a man,” I said, and then amended it. “Wasn’t. He was a creature from a world that’s close to ours, but isn’t ours. He was poisoned by iron in the ship. He was here to spy on me.” That was as simple as I could make it. The Crimson Guard didn’t deny magic and the other lands as heresy like the Proctors did, so I thought maybe Rasputina would be willing to believe me. I hoped she was, because otherwise she was sure to think I was insane, just as all those people back in Lovecraft did.

“I grew up in a village called Dogolpruydny,” Rasputina said softly. She tipped her head back and shut her eyes. “A wild place, mostly run by crime lords. The Crimson Guard press-gangs children to serve as grunts in their army, but otherwise, the people there are less than cattle to those in the capital.” She sighed. “There are things roaming the streets at night. Halfway between men and dogs. They feed on your blood, and they are deathless. Not even bullets can stop them.”

My mouth felt dry. I remembered some of the creatures that lurked below the surface of Lovecraft. Even Cal’s family, the only ghouls I’d met not out for my blood, was unsettling. I couldn’t imagine how Rasputina had survived.

“One caught me one night,” Rasputina said. “I was small, and slow. Sick much of the time. It bit me, but it didn’t like my taste.” She opened her eyes again and went to the steam hob, rattling a teapot. “I found out in that moment that my blood is poison to the deathless creatures that come from that dark place, the place your Proctors insist doesn’t exist.” She turned on the water and watched it hiss from the tap with great concentration. “I just don’t know what they want with you.”

“They want me to do something,” I said. “It’s part of why I’m going north. I can’t do what they ask, and I can’t escape them, as you saw.” I wrapped my arms around myself. Since I’d come aboard the Oktobriana, I hadn’t been able to get warm. I didn’t know if it was from having been frozen or from my creeping apprehension that I was making a huge mistake.

But I couldn’t think that way. This was my only choice.

“And the other part is Dean?” Rasputina poured the hot water over a tea strainer and swirled the pot a bit, steam rising to obscure her face.

I looked at my hands, not able to meet her eyes. “I don’t know if we should be talking about this, seeing as you two have history. Dean tends to make me say things I don’t mean to.”

Rasputina choked on the tea she’d poured and then started to laugh. I flushed and blinked at her, surprised. I wasn’t sure what I’d said that was so funny.

“Oh,” she said, “he does, does he. Rest well, Aoife—we are friends, and I am grateful to him for saving my life, but Dean is not my type, not in age and not in the sense that he’s … well, a boy.”

“Oh,” I said, realization dawning. “Oh.”

“See? You are smart,” Rasputina told me. “And loyal. And fearless. Dean is damn lucky to have you.” She checked her chronometer, a wrist style that I’d always wanted but could never afford. “We’ll be at Newfoundland in a half hour or so. Try to keep out of the way until then, all right? My crew will be busy.”

I got up and managed to smile my assent, but at that moment all I could think of was that I might never see Dean again. There was a chance I wouldn’t even make it back to the United States, never mind free him from Draven and tell him I thought Rasputina was right but the reverse was also true—I was lucky to have Dean.

At least I knew it in my heart, even if I never got a chance to tell him.