The Iron Thorn

when to leave well enough alone …

“Alouette! Bluebird! I can’t fly this bastard ship alone!” Captain Harry bellowed, and saved us.

Alouette lowered her pistol, spun as if she were dancing ballet on the tilting deck and made her way forward, hand over hand on the cargo nets.

All I could concentrate on was not throwing up all over Dean as we lurched from side to side, shaken like dice in a cup.

The Mustangs rolled in concert and pulled up in front of the Belle’s bow, visible through the cockpit glass. The pilots were good, but one miscalculated his turn, and I saw him close enough to pick out the name stitched into his airman’s leathers. Bowman. The pilot turned his head, agonizingly slow, and stared right into the Belle’s cockpit as we rushed up at his plane.

Absurdly, I wanted to scream a warning to him.

Then time righted itself. The silver sky became a garden of orange fire-flowers, tangled in vines of smoke. The sound of screaming metal stabbed my ears as the prow of the Belle cut the Mustang in half and threw me against my harness, against Dean. His arms closed around me, kept me from falling or snapping my spine. I dug my fingers into his leather and held on.

Fire crowned the Belle now, and the night before us looked like Dresden rather than Arkham.

We fell. Like a bird with a lead shot in its heart, we fell into the jaws of the waiting earth. Alouette, not strapped down or sitting, conversely flew to the ceiling, lips peeled back, her scream lost in the cacophony of everything else, human and mechanical, on board the Belle.

We fell, and the cruel mistress of the air took sight and sound from me, until all I could feel were Dean’s arms.

I woke hanging in space, my tie-down slicing my shoulders. The groan of rivets and the gentle hiss of hydrogen came in, and then, more slowly, the weight of my own body. It felt as if a giant had picked me up and thrown me far as he could, and I’d landed badly.

“Cal?” I croaked. Talking started a fire under my ribs. “Dean?”

“Cripes.” Dean groaned, swiping blood from his face. “That was a rough reentry, for sure.”

So he was all right. My chest loosened a bit. I swiveled as well as I could, and looked for Cal. He wasn’t there. “Cal! Cal, call out if you can hear me!”

“That …” Cal raised his head from a diaphanous blob of cargo netting and broken tie-down at the top of the cabin, which was now the bottom. He struggled to his feet, jaw muscles jumping when he put weight on his ankle. “That was a lot more … exciting than I expected. Can we please never do it again?”

“Are you all right?” I called to him. He nodded, after a moment of consideration.

“Alive. What matters, right?”

I examined my position. “That and getting out of this blasted harness.”

“No help for it,” Dean said, craning his neck at the wall of the hull. The Belle had shifted onto her side, and we were now strapped to the ceiling. “Gonna have to drop.” He jerked free of his harness and fell, landing and rolling. “Come on, Miss Aoife.” He beckoned. “The gasbag’s ruptured. One spark is going to light us up like Atlantic City.”

The inversion was beginning to dizzy me, squashing the fear I’d otherwise be feeling, and Dean’s face swam in front of my eyes. “If I land on my head, it’s going to be all your fault,” I told him, trying to shake my eyes back into focus.

He smirked, even as he stood on the wall of the crazily tilting Belle. “I’ll take that chance, miss.”

I shut my eyes against vertigo and then jerked on my straps. I didn’t fall straight down, like the graceful swans we girls were supposed to be in Academy dance classes. I tumbled, as Mrs. Fortune would have put it, arse over teakettle.

When I opened my eyes after the inglorious thump of my landing on the cargo nets, I found that I was staring into Alouette’s face.

“All His gears!” I gasped, scrambling away from her.

Alouette was entombed in an avalanche of boxes and netting, the veins in her skin like a road map on old paper. I tugged at her shoulders to free her, to no avail. Getting to my feet and gaining purchase, I yanked again, only to have the hot brand in my chest stab me again. I fell back, panting. “We have to get her out of there.” A few minutes ago I’d wanted to slug Alouette, and now the same impulse caused a fervor in me that made me yank uselessly at her body until my own gave out, bruised and battered as it was. Alouette hadn’t been polite, but no one deserved that plunging, screaming death.

Cal reached down, unzipped Alouette’s high leather collar and pressed his fingers against her neck. “She doesn’t have a pulse.”

“And you’re a surgeon now?” I demanded.

“I never thought I’d be saying this, but the kid’s right,” Dean said. He kicked at the exterior hatch, bowed badly on impact. “You ain’t strapped down, you don’t survive a handshake with the ground.”

“Say.” Cal exhaled a whistle. “She’s got a stigma.”

“What?” Surprised, I leaned over his shoulder and beheld the small white scar on Alouette’s breastbone. Stamped by a hot iron that left an indelible kiss, the puckered spot on her skin made me think of the heretic in Banishment Square.

“I thought only sailors and delinquents got these,” Cal said. He reached out to brush his fingers over the twin wings etched into the scar tissue, and I slapped his hand away.

“Cal, that’s disgusting. She’d dead!”

“They’re bird wings,” said Cal, his fingers traveling back to the spot like it was magnetized. He licked his lips. “You know, pirates used to get swallows tattooed on their skin. To help them find land again. Birds find land.”

“That’s no swallow’s wing,” Dean said, his expression darkening like thunderheads. “Now, she’s shuffled loose this here mortal coil and I don’t love the plan of getting roasted when the hydrogen blows, so let’s get into gear.” He kicked the hatch free at last. “We hoof it, we can still make Arkham by dawn. Proctors probably think we all died in this bang-up.”

Cal still crouched by Alouette. “Raven’s wings,” he said. “Only Proctors can wear a raven’s mark.…”

Professor Swan’s bleating about us turning in fellow students with contraband books and things like tarot cards or Ouija boards—heretical items—unspooled again in my head, along with one of his interminable lanternreels. How We Fight! Joining the Bureau of Proctors.

“She’s a spy.” The word tasted sour. All of the heretics I’d seen burned and hauled away to Ravenhouse, all of the eyes of the clockwork ravens watching, and there were still people who sold out neighbors and friends and even family to the Proctors.

Evil, that was heretics if you listened to the Proctors. Wanton carriers of necrovirus. Breeders of things like the nightjar.

My mother.

“You think she spied on witches?” Cal frowned.

“Open your eyes, Calvin. She was spying on us. She probably radioed her pals at Ravenhouse the minute we came on board.”

Finding the hold of the Belle very small and hot, all at once, I clambered over wreckage to the hatch.

“But”—Cal panted after me—“Proctors only go undercover to spy on traitors. Foreigners and stuff.”

I lashed my head around. “You don’t get it, do you, Cal? You ran away with a heretic and with me. We are traitors to the Proctors, and the Proctors keep their eyes inward. Nobody cares about some far-off country. They watch us. They burn us. They spy and they kill and they stamp on lives with those horrible shiny jackboots they wear.”

Cal just stared at me, fiddling with the buckles on his camp bag. “You know what they tell us, Aoife. We’d all be dead if it weren’t for the Proctors. Professor Swan says—”

“Oh, grow up, Cal! Think a thought that the Proctors didn’t give you for once!” I snapped and took off at a march. We’d landed in a field, the grass and its frost veil knee high. I struggled on, school shoes and school