The Iron Thorn

“Cal,” I said sharply when a lean, angry look came over his face. “Why don’t you make sure we have all of our supplies before we head out?” It was for his own good—Dean was twice his heft and carrying a knife, but Cal wasn’t the type to consider mathematical odds.

“I’m not leaving you alone with him,” he told me, pointing at Dean.

“She’s snug as a bug with me, brother.” Dean flashed me a smile that promised rule breaking and breathlessness. I decided to be interested in the laces on my shoes rather than risk turning red.

“I’m not your brother,” Cal grumbled, but he found a space to open his duffel and check out his supplies. I did the same with my book bag.

“So, Miss Aoife,” said Dean. “I guess now’s a decent time to tell me what’s on the other end of this skedaddle.”

Oh, nothing much. Just a plan to find my mad brother and rescue him from a danger he may or may not actually be in. I settled for the abbreviated version.

“My father’s house. In Arkham.” I counted the number of pens and pencils in my satchel, refolded all of my spare clothes and tried to look like I knew what I was doing.

“Woman of few words,” Dean said. “I like that. Here’s the deal, pretty one: I get half when we’re clear of the city and half when I deliver you safe and sound and without any Proctors crawling all over you. Dig?”

“How much?” I said, bracing myself for a price even worse than Dorlock’s. I’d learned one thing at least in the Nightfall Market, and that was nothing came free or easy.

Dean lifted his shoulder. His leathers and grease-spotted denim were as far from my idea of a guide as I probably was from Dean’s idea of an adventurer, but in an odd way we fit. Neither what the other thought we should be. I rather thought we complemented each other.

“Bargains are different for everyone,” Dean said. “From some I take a lot and some nothing they’ll miss at all. You’ll know when it’s time to pay up.”

I thought of Dorlock’s hand on me, and shivered. But Dean had intervened, and he hadn’t tried to con me out of my money, either.

Conrad would be decisive, show that he wasn’t worried. I gave a nod. “All right.”

“Good,” Dean agreed. “For now, we gotta shake a leg if we want to be out of raven’s sight by sunrise.” He whistled to Cal. “Saddle up, cowboy! The Night Bridge is waitin’ for us and the earth is turning fast.”

6 Across the Night Bridge

WE FOLLOWED DEAN away from the pipe fire, away from the music and the light. I never thought I’d regret leaving the Nightfall Market, but as the noise faded, my apprehension swelled.

The groan and creak of the ice on the Erebus River grew loud as we approached the embankment, like two giants shouting at each other.

“What kind of backwards way are you taking us?” Cal demanded. I wondered too—there was nothing on the other side of the river but the foundry, and the road was patrolled by Proctors.

Dean stopped at a set of steps slick with ice and river water. The river rushed below our feet, beneath a walkway bolted to the bulwark with flimsy rivets oozing rust. I could look down through the gaps and see black, freezing nothing waiting to swallow me whole.

“I’m taking you out,” Dean said. “What you wanted, ain’t it?” His engineer’s boots, leather over steel toes and hobnail soles, clanked on the metal as he descended the stairs.

Cal grabbed my arm and slowed my steps, so we fell paces behind Dean. “I don’t trust him, Aoife. He could be leading us right into a trap.”

I concentrated on placing my feet on the icy steps. The water whispered to me as it swept along the ancient embankment and the old sewer lines that emptied out at the base of Derleth Street. A ghoul could practically reach up and touch the sole of my foot, we were so far down.

“If I wanted to trap you,” Dean yelled back, “I would have turned right instead of left back at the Rustworks fence.” His roughened voice was loud enough to echo from the opposite bank of the river.

Even in the cold, my face flushed. I gave Cal a censuring glance. This wasn’t one of his adventures—if he made Dean cross, we’d be at the mercy of the Proctors. Or something worse.

I fell into step behind Dean, careful not to slip and pitch myself over the walkway into the water. “Why? What’s right instead of left?”

“Right is the old submersible launch. Ran the Hunleys and the diesel subs down to Cape Cod during the war. Nowadays, the mill workers come from Lowell and snatch pretty little girls like yourself to work your fingers to the bone on the assembly lines and in the mills.” He tilted his head to Cal. “Him, they’d just put a shank in his skinny gut and leave him to freeze to death on the riverbank.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said quietly.

Dean shrugged. “Now you do, miss.”

“I can handle myself,” Cal huffed. “And you’re going to find out if you keep up the lip.”

“How much farther?” I said, attempting to keep things peaceable.

“Not far now,” Dean said. “The Night Bridge is just up and around the bend. It’s always waiting for travelers who need it, and for those who don’t … well.” He jerked his thumb over the rail, toward the black and rushing river.

“That sounds like something my brother would say,” I murmured without thinking. Dean cocked his head.

“Oh? He a heretic too?”

A stone dropped into my stomach, cold and smooth as the ice churning below my feet. As the walkway creaked and shuddered, I shuddered with it.

Dean swiveled his head toward my silence, his bright eyes searching my face. “I say something wrong, Miss Aoife?”

“Forget it,” I gritted, concentrating on where I stepped. Conrad wasn’t any of Dean Harrison’s business. Dean was a criminal, who smuggled other criminals for cash. What did I care if he thought my family was strange or common? We were strange. No power in science or the stars could change that. To all Rationalist folk, Conrad was a heretic—a boy who’d rejected reality and substituted the fantastical lie of magic and conjuring for science and logic. Heretics were, by their very definition, liars. Dean and Conrad would probably get along famously.

“Forgotten as yesterday’s funny papers,” Dean said easily, and then let out a low whistle. “Night Bridge ahead. In the shadows. This isn’t something many from Uptown get to see.”

Like one of Conrad’s hidden picture puzzles, the Night Bridge revealed itself to me by degrees. I saw the struts, the dark iron towers reaching for the bleak velvet sky, piercing it with sharp finials. The scrollwork railings crawled into focus, the cables knitting themselves into cohesion as my eye pierced the darkness. I felt something sharp catch in my chest as I beheld the antique span, dark and skeletal, drifting through the night air.

“Well?” Dean spoke close to my ear. I could feel his breath.

“I’ve seen this before,” I said. The Gothic bridge arched a spiny back, cables rattling in the harsh wind blowing up the channel from the Atlantic.

“Reckon you have,” Dean agreed. “In history books at whatever fancy school that uniform of yours belongs to.”

The bridge before me was as familiar as the ceiling of my own room at the Academy, a span that dominated my structural engineering texts. The Babbage Bridge, a marvel of design, erected by Charles Babbage in 1891.

“This isn’t possible,” I said out loud. “The Babbage collapsed in ’twenty-nine.”

“That’s what they said,” Dean agreed. “But you tell me, Miss Aoife—what are you seeing now?”

The Babbage Bridge, known to the citizens of Lovecraft as the Bouncing Baby, was a marvel in every way except one—its thin spiky towers and ultralight span were ill-equipped for the nor’easters and winter ice that bound up New England during the cold months, and on a particularly breezy January morning, the Babbage had given up the ghost, plunging twenty-one to their deaths in the Erebus. Condemned by the city, the usable pig iron had been