salvaged and turned into the bones of Joseph Strauss’s newer, stronger, more practical bridge.
Of course, people said you could still hear the screams of the twenty-one the Babbage claimed moaning through the cables of the new span, if the wind was from the east.
But this was impossible—I was not seeing the bridge that had broken its back against a gale nearly thirty years earlier. That bridge was gone.
“I’m not seeing things,” I told Dean. “That is not the real Babbage.”
“Let me ask you something,” Dean said, walking again. I was forced to follow or be left behind. “You think just because the Head of the City or the Proctors down in Washington say a thing doesn’t exist, all memory up and fades away? You think twenty-one deaths don’t resonate in the aether to this day, on this spot?”
“I don’t … I … Cal, are you seeing this?” I looked to him in confusion. Tales of phantoms were one thing. A phantom bridge was another, entirely.
He grunted. “Uh-huh.” Cal couldn’t take his eyes from the span either, stumbling over his own feet as he approached it with the same reverence he used when opening the newest issue of
“The Babbage became the Night Bridge,” Dean said. “Don’t ask me to explain all that existential beatnik stuff, about memory and manifest will, ’cause I can’t, but what I know is that the Night Bridge is here when I need it, because I can find it.”
“If you expect me to believe that we’re crossing out of Lovecraft on some
“Boss design,” Cal said. “But is it sound?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It wasn’t sound in ’twenty-nine, was it? Babbage didn’t account for the wind drag and … I can’t believe I’m even explaining this. That is
It had to be. According to the laws of the Rationalists, the bridge was impossible.
“No trick,” Dean said. “And it’s sound enough for your footsteps, Miss Aoife. I promise you.” He beckoned when he reached another set of steps, spiraling upward toward the span. “Come on. Now that we’ve seen it, we can’t very well not cross it.”
“Let me guess—I’ll be cursed by the ghost of faulty engineering?” I said as we started up, to the bridge bed. Sarcasm wasn’t befitting a young lady, but I had to say something or I’d be too terrified to go another step. I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing. And yet I was walking it, feeling the frozen iron of the span under my hand, crossing a bridge that existed only in memory.
“Now the Night Bridge has seen you, too,” Dean said, “and if you turned back, it could keep your soul forever.”
I shivered, tucking my hand back into my pocket.
“People don’t have souls,” Cal interjected. “That’s blasphemy.”
“Do us a favor, cowboy,” Dean said. “If you have the urge to call blasphemy again on this trip … don’t.”
Cal’s lip curled back, but I grabbed his hand. “It’s not worth it. We need his help.” I didn’t believe in souls the way the Rationalists explained them, but something was keeping this bridge hidden—keeping it
Cal growled in his throat. “I don’t like him, Aoife. He’s a heretic, and he’s common besides.”
I stopped in my tracks, shoving a finger into Cal’s chest. “Why is he common, Cal?” I demanded. “Because he’s poor? Because he doesn’t have a family? Because he’s not like you?”
He backed away from my prodding. “Aoife, I didn’t mean …”
I dropped my hand and placed myself equidistant between Cal and Dean, in the orbit of neither. “Leave it. I don’t want to talk about it. With either of you,” I added when Dean’s ears pricked. I put my attention on the bridge. It could still be a trick. Mirrors, or a modification to Mr. Edison’s light-lantern.
The stairs ended at a dilapidated tollbooth at the beginning of the span. Through cracks and holes the size of my body in the roadbed, I could see down to the water. My stomach flipped. I had no fear of heights, but a healthy one of drowning.
From where I stood, I watched the span sway in the light wind, groaning and shuddering down to its base deep below the riverbed. I looked upward, at the towers moving. Bony fingers clawing at a cloud-streaked sky, trying to peel back the vapor to the stars. I shook my head at Dean. “This is unsafe. We need to turn back.” I didn’t care any longer if it was a trick or … something not a trick. I simply didn’t want to step foot on it.
Dean lifted his shoulders. “Told you already, Miss Aoife—too late.”
With a creak, the tollbooth window swung open. I jumped inside my coat. A brass face topped by a ragged cap and a brass arm encased in the tatters of a city worker’s uniform swung forth, nearly nose to nose with me. “Toll, pleassssse.”
Dean reached inside his white T-shirt and pulled out a worn iron key on a chain. “Just a traveler, friend.”
The automaton’s eyes flashed with a blue spark and it cranked its hand backward to pull aside the tatty blue uniform jacket hiding the rusted ribs beneath. A keyhole sat in place of a heart.
“Pleasssse insert youuuur passsss … key,” the automaton creaked. The voice box wound slow, and every syllable dragged forth from the dented throat.
I watched with fascination. Automatons were the purview of graduate students, those who passed their apprenticeships and were recommended to be master engineers. Powered by aether or clockwork, they worked in the foundries or in stately homes like the Langostrians’. This was likely the closest a common engineer like me would ever get to one.
Dean inserted his key and turned it. Something whirred to life inside the automaton, its clockwork innards firing with a click-clack of gears wanting oil. Its eyes lit, small blue aether flames that stared at me. This wasn’t usual—automatons couldn’t see, couldn’t hear or feel. They were just metal laborers, doing tasks too punishing or delicate for human labor. Someone had modified this one, made it look and act like a man. It was wrong, like a springheel jack taking on the face of a trusted friend, until it could show its true, monstrous face and gobble you up. I didn’t want to look into its blue-flame eyes, any more than I wanted to look into the heart of the Engine without shielding goggles.
The automaton croaked at me. “The traveler walkssss the Night Bridge freely. The ssssstranger paysss the toll.”
“Does it want money?” I asked Dean, reaching into my skirt pocket. “How much?”
“Easy,” he said, removing the key and tucking it back under his shirt. “Your money’s no good on the Night Bridge.”
Cal shifted behind me. “I don’t like the look of this.”
“What does it cost?” I demanded of Dean. “I’m not doing anything inappropriate.”
“And I wouldn’t ask you to, Miss Aoife—least, not while you’re paying me as a guide. That’s a sacred, serious bond between guide and traveler and breaking it isn’t something I do.” His frown drew a line between his dark eyes, and he swiped a loose strand of hair off his forehead.
“Fine,” I said. “What is it I have to pay?”
Dean pointed with his chin at the slot below the tollbooth window, while the automaton looked on. “From an Academy girl like you, only blood will do.”
My eyes must have gone wide even as I felt the color drain out of my cheeks, said blood coursing hard through my heart. I could be forgiven for going to the Rustworks, even the market. In the eyes of the Proctors, I was only a girl, and I couldn’t be expected to display the sense of a boy. A week’s suspension, a lecture or two from Mrs. Fortune and Professor Swan, and I could go on with my life at the School.
But this was real, heretical dealings I’d be a part of. Giving blood in oath was a grievous offense, something the Proctors would have your hands in the castigator for. Blood was too much like the old ways, the old superstitions the Rationalists had burned out of the world when the necrovirus came.
Dean tilted his head to the side. “That’s the toll, Miss Aoife. Prick your finger on the spindle and tumble on into dreamland, or go back to those safe stone walls and those cold metal gears before you’re a heretic and a criminal besides.”
Cal gripped the straps of his pack so hard the buckle creaked. “We should turn back, Aoife. This was a
