“You know, if you fail exams this year we can’t apprentice at the Engineworks together next.”
Apprenticeships were far from my mind at that moment. Conrad’s letter was a guilty secret barbing me from where it sat in the pocket of my uniform skirt, and Dr. Portnoy’s words were its sound track.
“I have to go,” I said, gathering my books and satchel. “Study,” I added.
Cal drooped at the shoulders like a sad clockwork man.
“Yeah. I have to get to detention anyway. See you after supper.” Cal loped away and I fingered the letter again. I needed to find a quiet place to burn it, to read the real words hidden in the ink. My dorm room was useless, with Cecelia meddling in everything. I’d make up for snapping at Cal later. That was the thing about Cal—you could push him away and he kept coming back. Cal was loyal. He wouldn’t hold my mood against me, and because of that I felt doubly guilty for snapping. I didn’t think of it as often as I should, but truthfully Cal was the kind of friend a poor girl like me should thank the Master Builder for.
And I would. Once I’d read Conrad’s letter.
“Aoife!” Cecelia’s bell of a voice cut into my thoughts and made me jump. She grinned at me. “Did you want to come?”
“No, I have to make up my schematics exam …,” I started, surprised to see her outside our building. The Lovecraft Conservatory, where she studied, was on the other side of the campus. “Come to what?” I cocked my head at her flushed cheeks.
“It’s a burning!” Cecelia exclaimed. “It’ll be the last one before Hallows’ Eve. Come on!” She tugged me along and I had to follow, or be yanked off my feet.
“I have a lot of work to do …,” I tried again, diplomatically hinting I’d rather not go. Students were filtering in and out the front gate, crimson scarves like comet tails in the bright afternoon. The mist-shrouded night before seemed like a year ago.
“Work, shirk.” Cecelia giggled. “Get it? Besides, you work too much anyway. Just look at your hair. You’d think you’d never met a brush.”
She tugged me along and we walked down Storm Avenue, the leaves from the oaks swirling around our ankles. The rain stopped as we walked and the sky turned bright. The stone in the houses along Storm sparkled diamond hard.
“This is exciting, huh?” Cecelia trilled, squeezing my arm. I managed to pull away, this time. Cecelia was small, every bit of her round and bouncy from her curls to her patent-leather pumps. She could be excited over everything from a concert to a burning. I was less excitable. Mrs. Fortune would say that was why I was an engineer.
“I suppose,” I said. I didn’t want to be here, out in the cold. I didn’t want to see a person burned. The Proctors would say that made me unpatriotic, but dead flesh and screaming reminded me too much of the madhouse.
I had to read Conrad’s letter. If he was in trouble, if he needed me … The thought that I wouldn’t be quick enough to do any good cut at me and I crossed my arms and tucked my chin against the wind.
“Heretics.” Cecelia pursed her lips, pink like her nails. “Is there anything more disgusting than trafficking in unnatural arts?”
I watched her wet tongue flick out and take off a patch of lipstick. I could think of a few things. “I suppose you could strip the skin off of corpses and wear it, like the springheel jacks down in Old Town,” I said aloud. Cecelia wrinkled up her nose.
“You are so strange, Aoife, I swear. I guess it comes from doing such mannish work in the School of Engines, hmm?”
At least she wouldn’t come out and call me trash, like Marcos. Cecelia regarded herself as refined. I regarded her as an idiot.
“Without the Engine, there wouldn’t be any burnings,” I pointed out. “The Engine creates the steam. The steam is the blood of the city.”
“All glory to the Master Builder,” Cecelia mumbled automatically, unwinding one of her curls between her fingers.
Banishment Square was half full of people, just normal-looking people, some of whom were eating a late lunch from twists of newspaper. The centerpiece of the square, the castigator, was deserted.
“I hope the scum’s accused of something good this time,” Cecelia said. “Not just conjuring or selling magic or fortune-telling.”
Cecelia had a gram of belief under her parroting of the Proctor’s laws. Most of the students did. They wanted to believe that magic could be real, something to be giggled over in secret, like smoking or kissing or wearing a garter belt instead of the ugly, itchy underthings the Academy issued us.
I had learned the day my mother was committed that crimes against the Proctors mattered very little, individually. Belief or disbelief in heretical topics mattered even less. Some of us were just unfortunate. I was supposed to be afraid of the man about to be burned, but I was more afraid of being next.
Two Proctors, their midnight black cowls around their faces, led a skinny man in iron shackles up the steps of the castigator. The brass fixings hissed as escaping steam met the biting air. A third Proctor, his cowl thrown back so that I could see he was just a young, dark-complected man in a black uniform with brass buttons on the chest, followed with a key. The pair of them, Proctor and heretic, could have been anyone. They could have been my brother.
Cecelia sneered. “Heretic looks like a deviant. What do you suppose he did?”
“I’m sure they’ll tell us,” I muttered. I knotted my hands together for warmth, and tried not to look, but it was impossible. It was like watching a person being hit by a jitney. You freeze, and you can’t even blink.
The Proctor with the key inserted it into the castigator, a contraption that resembled a brass coffin with three holes in the front and a gear assembly in the back. I knew from Mechanics in first year that a pipe connected it directly to the Engine, far below.
Heretic or not, the man in the shackles looked terrified. He sagged, gray, a puppet of a man held up by the Proctors. Cecelia sniffed. “It’s so cold. I hope they get on with this.”
“The charges are as follows,” said one of the Proctors holding the heretic. “Consorting with dark forces.”
That was a given. Anything not explained by the necrovirus could be nothing in a Proctor’s eyes but heretics attempting magic.
“Corruption of human flesh, desecration of the dead and performance of pseudo-magic rites, outlawed under the Ramsay Convention of 1914,” the Proctor rang out. His voice reverberated off the black stone of Ravenhouse and washed over the crowd. The murmur settled and for a moment the scream of the wind and the hum of the Engine were the only sounds.
Then the heretic began to sob. It was a droning sound. I’d heard it in the madhouse, the helpless sobbing of a mind whose gears have fouled into slag. My chest clenched for the man. I’d heard that same fear the day they took my mother.
“Human flesh.” Cecelia’s tongue flicked out. Another wedge of pink. “Decadent. For once.”
“At this time,” the Proctor said, “for rejecting the great truths of the Master Builder, the truth of aether and of steam, for rejecting the twin foundations of reality and science”—he looked over the crowd, the no-face beneath the cowl rippling black—“burning of the hands is penalty.”
I curled up my own hands inside my gloves. They were numb, slow to respond.
“Just the hands?” Cecelia echoed the grumble from the crowd. “I say hands and face, for that sort of thing. Human flesh. Honestly.”
The heretic struggled only a little as the Proctors put his hands into the two lower holes in the castigator. The third Proctor turned the key one, twice, thrice.
Steam rushed into the October air. The heretic screamed. I couldn’t blink.
Suddenly, my stomach lost its tolerance for my lunch and I felt turkey casserole lurch up my throat. I turned and staggered to the gutter at the edge of the square. Cecelia bolted after me.
“Poor thing.” She pulled my hair away and rubbed my back. “I know you don’t like to think about what that disgusting man must have done, but it’s all right. He’s being punished now.”
I shoved Cecelia off me.
“
