relieved he’d appeared when he had.
Nerissa’s eyes flickered between me and Portnoy when he stepped into the room. Anxious eyes, filled with animal cleverness. Portnoy patted the breast pocket of his white coat, the silver loop-the-loop of a syringe poking out.
“I’ll kiss you goodbye,” my mother whispered, as if it were our secret, and then she grabbed me in a stiff hug. “See, Doctor?” she shouted. “Just a mother’s love.” She gave a loud laugh, a crow sound, as if it were a colossal joke to be a mother in the first place, and then she backed away from me and sat in the window again, watching the dusk fade to nighttime. I turned my back. I couldn’t stand seeing her for another moment.
“I’m very concerned about your mother,” Dr. Portnoy said. He’d walked me to the end of the ward and had the mountain of an orderly open the folding security gate. “Her delusions are becoming more pronounced. You know if she continues this behavior we’ll have to move her to a secure ward. I can’t risk her infecting the other, trustworthy patients if her madness worsens.”
I flinched. My mother was undeniably mad, but a secure ward? That meant a windowless room and a bed with straps. The contents of the syringe in Portnoy’s pocket. No visitors.
“Now, I know you’re a ward of the city,” Portnoy continued. “But she’s still your mother, and you have a better chance of connecting with her than I. You must impress upon her the urgency of her situation, the need for improvement in her diagnosis.”
I put my hand on the big front door of the madhouse. I could feel the cold air seeping in around the cracks. “Dr. Portnoy.” I felt the stone again, dragging me back, back to my mother no matter how I struggled. “Nerissa doesn’t listen to anyone, least of all me. She’s been crazy my entire life.”
“The preferred term is ‘virally decimated,’ ” he scolded me with a smile. “Those poor souls who lose their mind to the necrovirus can’t help it, you know. No one would choose to have viral spores eat her mind away until only delusion is left.”
I did know. Too well. Before the necrovirus had appeared and begun its spread across the globe, seventy years before Nerissa was even born, I supposed the mad occasionally got better. But never in my lifetime. Never my mother.
Done talking, I pushed open the door, letting in the roar of Derleth Street at the foot of the granite steps and the smell of cooking from the diner across the sea of jitneys and foot traffic. Steam wafted from exhaust pipes in the pavement and the vents of wheeled vendors’ carts alike, making a low mist that hung over the asylum like a cloud of ill omen. Far away, just a whisper under my feet, I could feel the din of the Lovecraft Engine as the great gears in the heart of the city turned and turned. Trapped aether powered the machine that gave the city steam and life.
Portnoy waited for an answer like an unpleasant professor in a class I was already failing. I sighed in defeat. “However you call it, she’s mad and I can’t help you, Dr. Portnoy.”
I stepped out the door, and he caught me. His grip was hard, but not desperate, not like Nerissa’s. This grip was hard like the grasp of a foundry automaton lifting a load of new iron. “Miss Grayson, you have a birthday coming up.”
I swallowed the millstone in my throat. Panic. “Yes.”
“And how are you feeling? Any dreams? Any physical symptoms?”
His grip tensed as I did, and I couldn’t get away. “No.”
Portnoy frowned at me and I looked at my shoes. If he couldn’t see my eyes, he couldn’t see the lie therein.
At last, Portnoy said, “I suggest you think about your mother’s final disposition before your birthday, Aoife. Make arrangements with the city while you are able. It can go badly for charity patients with no one to care for them. Cristobel is an experimentation facility, you know.”
My mother tethered me to her madness, but no matter how much I wanted escape, I didn’t want it to happen like that.
The bells on St. Oppenheimer’s cathedral started tolling five, and I pulled my arm out of Portnoy’s grasp. He looked at me, the steam from the outside world fogging the lenses of his spectacles. “I have to go,” I said, and tried to still my hammering heart.
“A pleasant evening to you then, Miss Grayson,” he said. The sentiment didn’t reach his eyes. Portnoy slammed the door behind me with a final bang, a tomb sound. All of the madhouses had the same heavy doors, the kind that let you know they always kept a piece of you, even when you could leave.
As I walked, I wrapped my school scarf around my face to keep the cold air out of my lungs. Leaving the madhouse always felt like a temporary stay of execution. I’d just have to go back next week, assuming my mother hadn’t lost her visitor privileges again. I hurried, letting the cold burn the torrent of anger and panic out of me, calm me, turn me back into an anonymous girl rushing to catch the jitney. The White Line, back to the Academy and the School of Engines, was three blocks away, on the corner of Derleth and Oakwood, and it only ran once an hour after five bells.
I arrived at the corner just as the jitney pulled away in a roar of gears and a dragon belch of steam. Cursing, I kicked the pavement. A passing pair of Star Sisters glared at me and made the sign of the eye, two fingers to their foreheads. I looked away. The Star Sisters and their Great Old Ones could curse me all they liked—it wouldn’t supersede the curse that was already ticking time down in my blood.
I put my scarf up over my head and walked on, since there was nothing to do but walk until I caught up to a jitney that would take me back to Uptown. Dr. Portnoy’s words turned in my mind, mingling with Nerissa’s dreams. My head hurt, steadily throbbing in time with my heart, and I still had studying to do, an exam in the morning. My day wasn’t likely to improve.
When I’d gone a few blocks, my mood worsening with each step, I heard a voice yelling to me from across the traffic stream.
“Aoife? Aoife! Wait!”
A nimble figure darted in front of a pedal jitney pulling a roast-nut cart, and the driver shouted something in German. I’d taken enough courses to know it wasn’t the least bit polite, but Calvin Daulton hadn’t.
“Made it to you!” he panted, pulling up beside me, his cheeks twin combustions of red in the cold. “Almost didn’t. Saw you walking by.”
“Why are you all the way in Old Town?” I said, surprise coloring my question. Cal hefted a sack from the stationer’s store across the way.
“Nibs and ink. Only store in the city that carries a decent india ink. We’ve got a schematic due tomorrow—or did you forget again?”
“Of course not. Mine’s already finished.” Only a small lie. Not like my lie to Dr. Portnoy about my dreams. The sketches for my schematic were finished, but the transcription to good paper, the writing in of technical specifications, the math—all of that was waiting for me back at the girls’ dormitory. That bit, I’d forgotten about. Nerissa ate up my thoughts the way the Great Old Ones were said to devour suns on their journey through the spheres.
“Course it is,” Cal said, catching his breath. “You missed the jitney too, huh?”
“Only by a little,” I said, feeling furious all over again. If Portnoy hadn’t kept me in the madhouse …
“I guess it’s leftovers for us,” Cal sighed. Even though Cal was the rough size and shape of a pipe-cleaner boy, he ate like a barbarian at a feast. He’d been my friend since the first day of our time at the Academy, and if he wasn’t thinking about comic books or asking me for advice on getting my roommate, Cecelia, to notice him, Cal was thinking about food. Leftovers was a tragedy of the same order as being expelled from the School of Engines and having to transfer to the School of Dramatics. Me, I couldn’t care less tonight. My stomach was still in knots.
We were at the foot of Derleth Street, the wide blood-rust expanse of the Erebus River boiling with slow- moving ice before us. To one side lay the river walk, lit up ghost-blue by aether lanterns and packed with late- evening tourists and shoppers. The arcade whistled enticingly, the penny prizes a temptation that I could feel pulling at Cal.
