The Iron Thorn

place. “Play sick if you have to. Meet me behind the autogarage once the dining bell rings.”

Cal nodded grimly. “Be careful, Aoife. I’d hate to see you … taken away. Before your time.” He squeezed my hand and went and joined the boys listening to the tubes.

5 Nightfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Run, idiot!”

We made an odd pair fleeing down Cornish Lane, past closed-up shops and slumbering vendor carts. Cal