terrible idea.”
Over the roar of blood in my ears, borne on the rush of fear, I heard myself say, “I can’t. Conrad—”
“Conrad’s cast his lot, Aoife! Don’t be stupid!”
“Why don’t you let the girl make up her own mind?” Dean snapped. “She has got one, you know.”
“Why don’t you mind your own business before I put my knuckles through your heretic teeth?” Cal snarled.
“Both of you be quiet!” My voice echoed off the suspension cables. The automaton turned its blank slate of a face to me.
“Blood on the iron. Blood … isss the toll,” it droned.
I flexed my hands. How did you choose which one went into the mouth of the iron beast? I was left-handed —another mark against me as far as the Proctors and the Academy were concerned—but I needed both for any task I might encounter in the Engineworks.
“Just prick your finger, Aoife,” Dean said softly. He dipped his head, so his words tickled my ear. “It doesn’t hurt. I promise you.”
“I’m not worried about the pain,” I said. Madhouses, the Catacombs, no one left to watch out for my mother, Conrad desperate and alone … but not the pain. Pain was something I could choose to acknowledge, or not. That, at least, I’d learned long ago.
“If you want to get out of Lovecraft before the sun goes up, this is the way to do it,” Dean said. “Now, I know no Uptown princess is going to come down to the Rustworks looking for yours truly. No girl who can’t pay the toll would come this far.” Dean grinned at me. “You’re no princess.”
I swallowed hard. My throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper. “And you’re no white knight,” I told Dean, and before my nerve failed me, stuck my hand into the gap an acetylene torch had cut in the tollbooth’s side. My fingers brushed a thin iron spike set where the coin slot should be.
I placed it against my index finger and pressed down. My blood dribbled into the crevice of my knuckle, warming the skin. The spike was cold where it bit into my flesh.
No Proctors swooped down on me and no fanciful black magic swarmed up to turn me into the wanton heretic that Professor Swan and his newsreels warned about. My finger started to ache, and I pulled my hand away, sucking on it and getting an aftertaste of iron.
The automaton regarded me with its flame eyes and then withdrew its arm into the booth. “Proceed, travelerssss.”
“There,” Dean said. “Not so bad, is it?”
Cal stepped up. “What about me? What do I do?”
“Nothing,” Dean said. “You didn’t hire me, she did.” He tilted his head toward me. “You’re awful quiet, Miss Aoife. You all right?”
I tried not to think about the warm throbbing brass of the castigator where it waited in Banishment Square. Dean pulled a stained red bandanna from his back pocket and held it out. “Here. A little more blood won’t matter to this old rag.”
“What, and risk an infection?” Cal fumbled in his knapsack. “Hold it, Aoife. I’ve got a plaster.”
“Cal,” I sighed. “You remind me of Mrs. Fortune sometimes.”
Dean’s mouth curled up at that. He stepped past the tollbooth, onto the bridge. The wire grating beneath our feet bounced and creaked as we advanced, and I unwillingly flashed on the images of the twisted span after the collapse, suspension cables flapping in the wind like tangled hair.
As we walked, the holes grew wider, until finally we were just walking on the mesh used by Babbage to under-sling the roadbed, a thin half-inch of wire keeping us out of the river. I looked back at Cal and saw that his face had gone sheet white with an undertone that matched his thatch of hair.
“Come on,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m sure it’s perfectly safe. We don’t weigh that much.”
He looked at me, looked at Dean, and then stepped forward, his jaw twitching. He ignored my hand and shoved his own into the pockets of his car coat. “Let’s just get across, okay?”
I pulled my hand back to my side, a small pain with it. Cal had never refused my help before. At least my bleeding had stopped and I didn’t appear to be branded a heretic for it. Not like the five-pointed stars and crosses and sutra wheels the Proctors told us to watch out for, because a mark like that was the first sign. Heretics believed in gods, in magic, and carried their marks. A rational person knew there was no need of such decoration.
Dean walked with me, Cal a little behind, and together we crept across the span, over dark water and cracking ice. When we’d passed under the halfway mark, the Gothic arch that Babbage had proudly declared the gateway to New England, Dean spoke. “So, Miss Aoife. Arkham. What’s a city girl want with that worm-eaten little town?”
I didn’t answer for a moment that stretched long and thin, listening to our feet clang against the span.
“Something that’s none of my business?” Dean guessed. “That’s usually the way. But the more I know, the quicker I can get you to your Point B.”
“I have a brother,” I said. “His name is Conrad.” I glanced back at Cal, trudging a few paces behind with his eyes glued to his feet. “He needs my help,” I told Dean. “In Arkham.”
“Answer me straight, Miss Aoife, and I won’t bother you again,” Dean said. “Are you in trouble?” He held up a hand, long knobby fingers spreading like spider legs. “I’m not talking sneaking out of school, lifting a pack of cigarettes, and going out to the jitney races. I’m talking bad trouble. Bloody trouble.”
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“You want to tell me the truth on this one, Miss Aoife. If it’s trouble that can get me beat up or buried six feet under, and you don’t fess up, your guide might be disinclined to pull your fat out of said trouble. Catch my meaning?” Dean’s face looked like it had when he’d confronted Dorlock—perfectly pleasant, except in his eyes. They were hard like stone and my chest went tight in response. I didn’t want Dean looking at me like that.
“There’s no trouble,” I said, and even managed a smile. Up until Conrad’s birthday, I’d never made a habit of lying. My mother babbled endlessly about things that weren’t there and couldn’t exist. I preferred to keep on solid ground. After Conrad came at me with the knife, I lied out of necessity, to keep the eyes of the school and the Proctors turned away from me.
Those had all been small lies, more voids of truth than falsehoods. I looked Dean in the eye. “I’m not in trouble,” I repeated. “Not yet, anyway.”
He loosed a small chuckle. “All right, miss. That’s all I wanted to know.”
“Now I should get to ask you something,” I said. Dean shoved his hands into his pockets.
“I don’t know about that, sweetness. I think you’re much smarter than I am.”
Behind us, Cal gave a snort. “Isn’t that the truth.”
“Why do you do this sort of thing?” I said, before Cal could get a nose full of Dean’s fist. “Smuggling people in and out of Lovecraft, I mean. It seems, well … dangerous, for starters.”
“About the only thing I’m suited for,” Dean said. “My old man wore out his bones as a gear monkey in the Rustworks, and my brother got himself killed in Korea a few years back. Got no money, got no family. Nothing but this talent of mine to get folks where they need to be. It’s a rambling life, but it’s mine.”
“What about your mother?” Cal said. “Surely even you have one.”
Dean fixed Cal with his hard stare. “Don’t bring up my mother unless you want me to talk some crap about yours.”
There was a sentiment I could take to heart, and shame over interrogating Dean heated my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to pry,” I told him. “I just wanted to know a little bit about you, seeing as you’re taking us so far and—”
His head whipped skyward. “Button your lip, Miss Aoife.”
I followed the finger he touched to his mouth, up and up through the black bones of the Night Bridge. We were in the darkness between the embankments of Lovecraft and the glow and burn of the foundry beyond. Wind whipped my hair into a fury of knots; over the wind, the whirr of wings carried on frozen air.
“Raven patrol,” Dean said. “Flying out from Ravenhouse.”
“They’ll see us,” Cal hissed, instantly panicked. “The Proctors will take us into custody and lock us up in the Catacombs and—”
