The Iron Thorn

might bite me if I did.

“Like I said, miss,” Cal told her. “It’s worse than it looks.”

Alouette fluttered at his words. “Listen to you, ‘miss’ this and ‘miss’ that. It’s Alouette, or Allie.”

Cal swallowed and took his hand away from his face, and he was easygoing Cal again. “All right, mi— Alouette. Sorry I’m not in better humor—it does smart a bit.”

“You did a number on yourself,” Alouette agreed. “Looks like a real war wound.”

“It was my fault he fell,” I said, rather more loudly than I had to. Her hands were still on his leg. “He was trying to help me,” I explained.

Alouette spread a slow smile. “What a gentleman you are.” She whipped his ankle to the left, and Cal let out a yell, going stark white in the face. Alouette giggled at his expression.

“Well, it’s not broken if you felt that. We’ll bandage you up, but no slaying dragons or chasing damsels for a week or so, all right?”

Dean snorted. “Watch yourself, cowboy. I think the pirate wench has taken a shine to you.” He stood and twirled a small hatch open, one that I saw led to an outside deck. Cold air rushed in, lifting my hair and dappling my skin with moisture.

“Close her up!” Captain Harry shouted from the cockpit, to my relief. “We none of us arctic creatures!”

“Same Dean,” Alouette tsked when the hatch clanked shut behind him. “Still a child at heart.”

I didn’t think Dean not wanting to be in the same space as Alouette was very childish. I wanted to get away from her cheap bottle-blond hair and tinny laugh just as much as he seemed to.

“I’ll be happy when we’re rid of him,” Cal told her. “He’s just some freak Aoife hired to get us out of the city, but I’ll take care of her from there. Dean’s not an upright moral person like you.”

“I’m upright, but honey, I’m far from moral,” Alouette said, giving him a practiced smile. “Hold still now and let me bandage this.”

I felt irritation swell in me, and it expelled itself with a huff of air. Cal would still be collecting baseball cards and building model airships, hiding in his dormitory, if it weren’t for me. I was the one who’d taken us on the hour- long jitney ride to the machine shop where they milled gears for the Engine, who found the best pastries on Derleth Street, who coaxed Cal out into the wide city. I’d swear he was allergic to light before I’d dragged us outside the walls of the Academy. How dare he get to play the adventurer to Alouette while she treated me like a dumb kid? And why’d she have to keep rubbing his leg?

“You look very moral to me,” Cal said, in a comically deep tone he no doubt adopted from some lanternreel actor. “And you’ve got a soft touch.…” He hissed. “But your hands are cold.”

Alouette simpered at his attention. “I’ll have to see if I can do something about that. I like my patients comfortable.”

I stood up and grabbed the hatch release Dean had used, yanking at it with force that I really wanted to put into slapping that too-innocent smile off of Alouette. A girl—a woman—like her wouldn’t give Cal the time of day if we were in Lovecraft. But if he couldn’t see through her act, then it was his own fault. I stepped out. The wind grabbed my breath and sucked it away into the void.

A narrow ribbon of walkway ran the length of the Belle, leading to a small lip of deck underneath the turbines at the rear, in a dead spot for wind and drag. Dean stood hunched inside his coat at the aft, smoke trailing behind the airship like a banner. I let the hatch fall shut behind me with a coffin clang.

“Airsick?” Dean’s breath joined his exhaled smoke, a ghost floating next to him before it blew away.

“Something like that,” I said over the roar of wind and turbine. “Alouette certainly is … friendly.”

“She’s a piece of work.” Dean shook his head. “Hellcat in a fight. Could drink an Irish sailor under the table.”

“You’d know.” My words came out tinged with acid, for reasons I couldn’t entirely identify. “You and she have all the history.”

Dean chuffed. “Can’t put much past you, Miss Aoife.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t have to work very hard on that one. She’s been staring a hole through you since we got on board.”

“Like I said,” Dean muttered. “Hellcat.”

“How much farther?” I crossed my arms and pouted, as if I were six years old. I felt like stamping my feet and demanding that Alouette keep away from my friends. Felt out of control. Spinning, spiraling, dancing …

No. I began to recite a Fibonacci sequence in my head and clung to Dean’s voice and to the cold fingers of the wind against my cheeks. Keeping order. Keeping calm. Shutting the door on the madness that made my blood boil.

“To Arkham? Two hours, maybe three.” Dean flicked his glowing cigarette over the rail and I watched it sail into the darkness.

I shivered. “The sooner, the better. I don’t think I like being this far off the ground after all.” Truly, I didn’t like being shown as the scared schoolgirl next to Alouette and her crew. I already had enough presumptions to deal with back home. To be looked down on by heretics and shoved aside by Cal at the slightest hint of attention was entirely too much.

“I like it.” Dean shoved his hands into his armpits for warmth. “It’s free air up here. Nobody pointing and saying who’s a heretic and who’s a Rationalist. No Proctors. Just flying.”

I turned to go inside. “I’d better go check on Cal. Make sure he hasn’t agreed to run off and marry Alouette.”

“She has that effect on a man, sure.” Dean whistled. “Poor old Cal has no chance.”

“He’s never even had the opportunity before now,” I grumbled. Dean searched out a comb in his pockets and fixed his hair against the wind.

“I deduced.” He followed me through the hatch and shut it behind him. “Come on. You want to see the rest of the Belle? Take your mind off Cal?”

I nodded. If Cal was going to behave like a dolt, I didn’t need to concern myself. And who knew when I’d be on an airship again? I should make it count. “Very much so.”

Dean led me back inside, through the hold and down a narrow corridor to the aft, where the whirring of the turbine blades vibrated my back teeth. “Bunk room.” He pointed out a chrome door with an empty brass nameplate, the slot for a card held in the talons of a rigid-winged eagle.

I ran my hand down the chevron wings stamped under the nameplate, the scarred spot where a ship’s name and operating number had been burned off with a torch. “This ship was someone else before it was the Belle?”

Dean nodded. “She was an enemy rig in the war,” he offered. “Officer transport, from what Harry told me. He and his navy boys crashed outside of Bern in ’forty-four and hijacked it from a squad of enemy officers and their necrodemons.”

I jerked my hand back to my side.

Dean examined me, leaning in a bit. “You look a little green, kiddo,” he said. “Sure you’re not airsick?”

“Necrodemons …,” I murmured. “Not very pleasant …”

“Yep,” Dean said, shaking his head. “But they’re long gone, miss. Not going to jump out and bite you.” He twisted the eagle insignia upside down and chuckled.

“It’s not that,” I whispered. “I mean, I’m not afraid of necrodemons.” I could become a necrodemon, if the virus took hold of me. I could be worse than anything that had flown over Europe in the ship that would become the Belle. “It’s just a bit close to home,” I told Dean, and cut him off by pointing at a shut hatch. “Show me something else. I don’t want to talk about the necrovirus any longer.”

Dean opened his mouth like he wanted to pry, but then shut it again and flipped a hand. “That’s the aether room. Where they do communications and nav and the like. Just a bunch of tubes and instruments. Snoresville.”

I bit my lip. Anything to take my mind off thoughts of my infection. “I’d still like to see.”

“Suit yourself.” Dean shrugged. He opened the hatch to a much smaller space, and I gasped at the tangle of wires and shattered aether tubes, the burnt-parchment scent rolling out to smother my senses.

“Is it …” I coughed and pulled out my handkerchief to hold over my face as noxious blue-white smoke