library. I waited outside my father’s room while Cal asked Bethina to look after him until we got back. I didn’t want to antagonize Conrad any more than I had to, but I also didn’t trust that he wouldn’t go running off and leave my father to his own devices. Bethina was tough and trustworthy, and I knew my father would be safe with her.
“Now what?” Cal asked when he came back and handed me my bag. The white cat watched us leave from one of the upstairs windows. I looked at the road ahead. I didn’t want to be reminded that my father was back there, insensible to the world, and that it was probably my fault.
“Airship terminal,” I said, “and hope we have enough to buy passage to San Francisco.”
“Don’t you think that’ll be kind of dangerous?” Cal said. “Going back to Lovecraft? Even with no Proctors, they don’t exactly welcome people like us.”
“I’m not going to just waltz in,” I said. “I’ll let you buy the tickets and I’ll stick to the shadows.” Of course, if we needed immigration papers or Proctors were still watching the airfield, then everything would go wrong. Theoretically, one could travel between quarantined cities without papers, but if the Proctors en route were feeling mercurial, who was to say what could happen?
“Okay,” Cal said, casting me a sidelong look. We came to the three-sided shelter that was the Arkham jitney stop, the path that would take us to the airship field outside Lovecraft. “I gotta say, this isn’t the most genius of your plans, Aoife.”
“It’s a bad plan,” I agreed, shifting the weight of my bulging bag. “But it’s the only one I’ve got.”
Logan Airfield was supposed to be a modern marvel, something all the good citizens of Lovecraft could lord over San Francisco and New Amsterdam. The first things I saw when the express jitney pulled up were the swooping gull wings of the main terminal’s roof, and the first thing I heard was the trumpet of loudspeakers announcing departing and arriving flights.
We joined the stream of well-dressed travelers and their luggage. Nobody gave us more than a cursory glance, and I stayed beneath the great sign, lit from within, that scrolled through flights, destinations and times.
In the shadows, I was able to watch the ordinary people approaching the ticket desks, giving their luggage to porters, retrieving their tickets. They all seemed so carefree, even the men with briefcases and frowns and the woman trying to wrangle four small, screeching children. Even the Proctors, standing with their arms folded, bored, or talking in groups while travelers flowed around them, didn’t seem particularly concerned.
Maybe they hadn’t heard about what had happened in Arkham. Maybe they were all willfully ignoring their bad dreams.
Cal shot me a look from the miles-long line, and I shrugged in sympathy. Patience wasn’t something either of us possessed in spades. The next flight to San Francisco was in forty minutes, and if we didn’t make it we’d be stuck at the airfield until morning, under the watchful eye of the high windows and the gleaming steel walls engraved with scenes of great engineering feats from the past—the Eerie Canal, the Babbage Bridge, the Lovecraft Engine.
That last was no more. Thanks to me. I shrank against one of the steel pillars holding up the monitor showing the flight departures, certain that my face was like a beacon to everyone passing. In my effort to be inconspicuous, I caught sight of another figure across the terminal trying to do the same thing.
The two-story terminal was open to the girdered ceiling, where every other panel was frosted glass. The shadows cast a great grid pattern on the floor and made it easy to lean against a wall in darkness and not be seen. The man was standing between the women’s loo and a bank of aethervoxes contained in wooden booths, available for public use.
He’d be unremarkable to anyone but me, because I recognized him. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been in the Arctic, wrapped in cold-weather gear but with the same suspicious face. The same calculating eyes, eyes that had looked at me as little more than a lab rat, another cog in the machine that they’d use to drive back both the invasion of the Fae and the incursion of the Proctors. I thought the Proctors had locked him up, but without Draven and the breaking of their ranks, who knew what had happened since I’d been in Thorn?
The doctor of the Brotherhood of Iron stared at the crowd, calculated and discarded each face in turn. He hadn’t seen me yet, and that was my only saving grace.
Cal turned away from the ticket counter in triumph, waving two red Pan Am ticket booklets. I shook my head as imperceptibly as I could, but it was too late. The doctor followed Cal’s gaze to me.
There was nothing else to do. I had to draw them away from Cal. To the Brotherhood, he’d be worse than a lab rat—just something to be studied, poked, prodded and tortured, until he was of no more use and was vivisected to further the Brotherhood’s fight against the ghouls.
I broke and ran. The doctor followed me, in a surprising burst of speed for an old man. I saw another figure in a black trench coat break and run after Cal as he bolted in the opposite direction. Good. They were divided. There’d be other agents outside at the curb, as well as watching the entrance to the gates, but they couldn’t know where we were going—they had to have followed us.
Followed me. From the moment I’d reentered the Iron Land. I didn’t know how I could have been so stupid, but I couldn’t dwell on it now.
The doctor was gaining ground as we raced through the terminal, and I saw him throw aside a well-dressed woman and her travel case. She fell with a scream, case breaking open and scattering clothes and toiletries across the marble floor.
I wasn’t going to outrun him. Wasn’t going to evade the Brotherhood. My father had told me I had to think on my feet, to stop analyzing everything if I wanted to survive against adversaries who knew my every move. Knew about my Weird, knew about the other Lands, knew that the Proctors were full of it.
I made my decision, and as I skidded around a corner, I let myself fall against the black-clad, brass- buttoned chest of a ticket agent. “Oh, help me,” I gasped, putting on my most pitiful expression and praying that my red face and flying hair would shield me from recognition. “There’s a man chasing me, he tried to grab me. …”
I shouldn’t have worried. The agent barely looked at me before he blew his whistle for a security guard, who shoved me aside.
I didn’t linger. I was around the corner and gone before the doctor could do more than give an outraged yell.
Making my way to the gate for San Francisco, I nearly shrieked when a short, pudgy boy with brown hair tapped me on the arm. “What?” I demanded.
“Calm down,” the boy said. “It’s me, Cal.”
“Cal?” I stared. I knew Cal had to work to look human—shift his shape, as it were—but I hadn’t known he could look like other people.
“I swear,” he said. “I had to duck into the boys’ room to do this, but I think I lost that Brotherhood mook. He sure was confused when I didn’t come out again.”
“We have to get out of here.” Now that I’d escaped, my heart was throbbing with how narrow that escape had been. If I was captured again by the Brotherhood, I’d never see the light of day. And now it would only be a matter of time before they figured out Cal was a ghoul.
Next time, they’d be ready with the appropriate measures.
“Boarding’s started,” Cal pointed out, and we joined the queue. After what had just happened, I expected there to be a problem with our tickets, and I didn’t really breathe until we’d sunk into our seats.
We were in the first-class cabin, all red leather seats and dark wood paneling between the iron ribs of the zeppelin.
“I told the ticket gal we were flying home to see our sick father,” Cal said. “She bumped us up without me even asking.” His smug grin was only a small placebo against being in the proximity of so much iron.
“How long is this flight?” I asked, fidgeting in my seat. I was already hearing the whispers, the scraping of fingernails across metal that signaled the onset of iron poisoning.
“We stop in Cleveland, St. Louis and Las Vegas,” Cal said. “That is, assuming the Las Vegas quarantine holds. That’s what the ticket gal told me. It’ll be about seven hours until we get a break.”
“Stones.” I pressed my face into my hands. I could hold out. I could stay sane. I’d managed it for fifteen years before I’d known the truth, I could manage it until Cleveland. At least, that was what I told myself as passengers flowed around us and stewardesses passed up and down the aisles fetching drinks and cigarettes and
