vendors had set up grills and kettles over the flame. The smell was oaky, earthy, a good cut of meat rubbed with spices. My stomach burbled at the scent, and I was reminded that I’d had to miss supper to come here.
“Books!” A boy in a checkered cap and an outdated newsie coat, half again as old as I was, shoved himself into my path, chest puffed like a bullfrog’s. “Spell books! Charmed paper! Never needs erasin’! Tinctures! Good for what ails you!” He squinted into my face. “Not much, by the look of it. Face like an angel on you, girlie.”
“I don’t have any money,” I returned. “You can save your pitch for some superstitious twit who does.”
“Ain’t no superstitions for sale here, miss,” he chimed back. “All of my charms ’er one hundred percent gen- nu-wine. I’ve got magics in my pen and a witch in my kitchen.”
“Magic’s not real,” I said. “If you’re so smart, you should know that.” I was trying to seem like someone who wasn’t easily conned, but my voice sounded small against the chatter of the market.
“Sure, an’ if you really believe that you’d be home in bed.” The kid wrinkled up his nose at me. “I could tell you where to buy a hairbrush instead, maybe. You need it.”
“Say,” Cal intervened, before I could make a move to strangle the little brat. “Where’s a guy find a guide around here?”
The boy spat in the dirt near Cal’s feet. “Piss off, townie. I look like I give out help to Proctor-lovers?”
Cal swiped at him. “You don’t know anything, you little rat.…”
I fished in my pocket for a half-dollar and held it up. The boy’s eyes gleamed to match. “What’s your name?” I said.
“Tavis. Thought you said you didn’t have any scratch?”
I made a second half-dollar join the first. Conrad had liked sleight of hand, though the Proctors frowned on something so close to what heretics considered magic. Tavis was practically panting. “We need a guide out of Lovecraft,” I said. “All the way to Arkham. I have money for that, and you seem like you know how things work around here. Or do you have a big mouth and nothing else?”
The first thing you learned in the School of Engines—if you want to understand how something works, ask the one who does the dirty job. Gear scrubbers and steam ventors and their foreman were in the pits. They knew their Engine intimately.
“I do, at that,” Tavis said. He pointed past the pipe fire to a blue tent. “You want old Dorlock back there. He’s a guide, best damn guide in the Rustworks. He could guide steam back into water. He could—”
I held up a hand, and dropped the two coins into his. I wondered what a pair of silvers bought in the Nightfall Market, besides bad manners from a shyster kid. “That’s fine. And for the record, I like my hair this way.” Truly, I hated it and toyed with chopping it into a modern style daily, but like I said, sometimes I don’t know when to leave it. Besides, I had a feeling Dorlock wasn’t as easily put in his place, and it might well be my last chance to feel in control of things tonight—or ever. Once I found Conrad, I’d have to face running off. I might be expelled. I didn’t think beyond that, because beyond expulsion was a cell in the Catacombs, shock therapy to burn the madness out of me and finally, a place next to my mother. If I lived.
“Sure there isn’t,” Tavis snorted, brandishing his worn wares again. “And hey, townie,” he said to Cal as we started into the crowd. “You watch your girl. She’s got an edge of the pale on her, that one, and it’s like honey in a beehive down here.”
I shuddered, feeling like something rotten had touched me. Cal rolled his eyes. “Stupid little runt.”
“You mean, you don’t feel the urge to be my white knight?” I teased, nudging him in the ribs. “Thought that was your dream job.” This was my idea, and I wasn’t about to let Cal see that second thoughts had started the moment we left the Academy. A good engineer stood behind her plans as sound until they’d been tested and proved otherwise.
“Like you said, Aoife,” Cal grumbled, sounding for all the world like Professor Swan, “grow up.”
We skirted the fire and approached where Tavis said the guide lived, my feet slower with each step. Still, I grasped the tent flap firmly and pulled it aside. “Hello?” I peered into the tent, which smelled like a barbershop mixed with cheap liquor. “M-Mr. Dorlock, sir?”
“Hello!” The voice boomed back, sonorous and clearly used to the stage. Dorlock was entirely bald and sported a handlebar mustache, like a circus strongman. Somehow I had expected our guide to be thin and shady, dark as the shadows he slunk through. But Dorlock would stand out at a Hallows’ Eve carnival.
“Why look at you, young lady!” he exclaimed. “Aren’t you ripe as a peach!”
If I were to treat him mathematically, take his measurements, he’d be extraordinarily large—a rolling tub of a man boiling over with cheer. I didn’t see what was so funny.
“We need a guide,” I said. “We need to leave Lovecraft. Tonight.”
Dorlock laughed, his kettledrum stomach trembling. “Doesn’t waste any time! Going to grow into one of those modern women, I fear, always in a rush!” He reached out to pinch my cheek, and I ducked. I’d grown an aversion to being touched a long time ago. Nuns will do that to a person.
“Please, sir,” I protested, trying to keep myself stiff and ladylike, like Mrs. Fortune. “Can you help us, or not?”
“Of course,” Dorlock boomed. “Of course, of course.” He crossed his bare arms over his leather vest and matted chest hair. I tried to look only at his face. “It’s all a question of payment, lassie.”
I looked back at Cal. “I have fifty dollars,” I said. Cal’s eyes went wide at the mention of the sum. Dorlock’s eyes, by turn, narrowed.
“Fifty United States American dollars, eh? Well, missy, it won’t buy much Uptown way but down here in the rat hole of the Rustworks, you just might have yourself a deal.”
I felt crestfallen, realizing at the gleam in Dorlock’s gaze why Cal had looked so alarmed. It was all my money. I should have struck a harder bargain. A boy would have bargained. Conrad probably would have
“We’ll leave in an hour or so, to beat the sunrise,” said Dorlock. “Up and down and all around we’ll go. It’ll be a grand adventure for you two kids.”
“I care less about the adventure than the Proctors,” I said, trying to stay firm.
“Yeah, and we’re fifteen,” Cal interjected. “We’re not
“Of course not, you’re a strapping young lad, aren’t you?” Dorlock chuckled. “Going to feed you up and get you big. Why don’t you go get something from the fires for your lady friend, strapping lad? It’s a long walk down under the ground.”
I frowned at that. “Ghouls live underground,” I said. Not even Proctors went into the old sewers and railway tunnels, the only “underground” I knew of. The new sanitation system ran on clockwork and didn’t need tending. Nobody went underground. Nobody alive, anyway.
Dorlock shook his head, brows drawing in like a bank of thunderheads. “You just have a head stuffed full of learning, don’t you, young lady? Worry less. You’ll get wrinkles before your time.” He laughed like he was the chief audience for his own joke.
I opened my mouth, knowing there was murder in my eyes, but Cal touched me on the arm. “I’ll get you a weenie with chili. If these people even know what one is.” He gave me a small nod before he walked away. I knew that nod—it was the
As it turned out, the Nightfall Market didn’t possess any weenies or any chili to put on them, and Cal ended up standing in line to buy us two newspaper cones full of fish-and-chips. I sat on the fender of a Nash jitney that had rusted to chrome and bones next to Dorlock’s tent, where I could keep Cal in sight. Dorlock grinned at the white of my knees, and I pulled my skirt down over them.
“You do look sweet,” Dorlock said, reaching to push the hair out of my face. “Beauty soon fades, down here. You’re a rare treat.”
I glared up at him, knowing the knot in my throat that had started when he grabbed for me wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. “Don’t. We hired you to guide, and that’s all.”
“I’m just being friendly,” Dorlock said. “Loosen up, lassie.” He laid a hand on my shoulder and I shrunk, but it was like trying to pull myself out of a bear trap. “It’s a long time out of the city, and we might as well get along.”
Maybe that was the single blessing Nerissa’s madness had given me—I’d never had a mother to teach me
