The Iron Thorn

flames and gave a whip-crack snap of yellow powder as the chemical of the ghost ink combusted. I stomped on the flames until they went out, leaving a burn hole in the carpet.

That was simply terrific. If my father did return to Graystone, he was going to tan my hide.

A floorboard croaked in the hallway and I froze, mind and muscle. I’d watched a lanternreel about feudal Japan in history during my first year. The emperors of centuries past had fabulous peak-roofed palaces, and in the palaces, nightingale floors. Wood that sang, and announced the presence of the enemy, that warned the feudal lords when assassins were close.

My heart became a stone. My hand itched for Dean’s switchblade.

A long thin shadow crawled through the open doors of the library, echoes of long thin footsteps following.

I blew out the lamp and inched back against the books, their soft spines flexing under my weight.

The figure in the door was long-legged and loping, and tangled its feet in the carpet. One pale hand with pale wormy fingers reached out and felt its way along the books, coming close. The shoggoth’s bite throbbed in time with my heart, and I shrank back, but too slowly. The fingers brushed my hand, leaving contrails of cold.

Terror fired me, and I struck, balling up my fist with my thumb tucked outside and under like Conrad taught me and carrying my blow with the weight of my shoulder behind it. My knuckles glanced off jawbone and it felt like broken glass had buried itself in my hand. The long shadow and I both yelped.

“Cal?” My heart could have outpaced a jitney.

“Eyes of the Old Ones!” Gears chattered from an unseen device and then a thin, wavering line of blue lit up the space between me and Cal. Cal carried an aether lantern with a crank handle, the bubbly glass filmed over from age.

“I’m sorry …” I tried to touch the rising welt on his jaw, but he jerked his head away. “I thought you were something else.”

“What else would I be?” Cal cranked the lantern again, to little effect. The aether inside the globe was ancient and nearly white.

“I thought …” A living shadow, a cold thing from the primordial pool of the necrovirus, something from under the ground looking for a feast. “I guess I don’t know,” I finished, looking at my hands— anywhere but Cal’s face.

Cal put a finger under my chin and lifted my gaze to his own. “Are you seeing things, Aoife? We can go home right now, petition the city for quarantine. You’re a girl. They won’t send you to the Catacombs. Probably won’t,” he amended. “You are a runaway.”

“I saw something in the dark and I didn’t want to get digested by a nasty, slobbering viral creature for the second time today.” The knuckles on my left hand were skinned and turning purple. Cal always assumed the worst. He didn’t realize that sometimes a girl just got irritable.

“We could still go back, you know,” Cal said, taking my injured hand in his and producing his handkerchief. He wrapped my hand once, twice. My blood made small blooms on the snowy fabric and he stared at them, his throat working. “You’d have to be in quarantine for six months, but there’s always a chance they’d let you out if you didn’t … you know.”

I yanked my hand out of his. The handkerchief fluttered to the ground and he snatched it up. “You’re so sure I’m going mad, Cal, then why are you still here? I’m sure if you ran home now and licked the headmaster’s boots he’d be overjoyed to readmit you.” It was bad enough thinking that madness was encroaching. I didn’t need my best friend accusing me as well.

Cal’s lips disappeared into a thin line. “That was cruel, Aoife.”

“Well,” I blustered, “you want me in quarantine.” Quarantine meant a hospital on the river, outside the city limits. A place full of sterile white halls and sterile aether lamps burning night and day. Far from the madhouse, where the doctors had given up on the patients. In quarantine, the doctors tried to beat the advance of the necrovirus. To shock, burn and drown the heresy out of a human body.

When a court officer suggested quarantine for Nerissa, she grabbed the man’s pen and jammed it into the back of his hand, screaming that he was a Crimson Guard witch come to remove her memories and replace them with bird-song.

They decided to skip quarantine after that.

“Sometimes, madness isn’t the worst of life,” Conrad told me afterward. We sat on the steps even though it was raining, looking down from the courthouse at the dense brick-lined veins of Lovecraft, where normal, usual, uninfected people lived. “Sometimes, it’s the belief that madness has a cure.”

Every time I passed the Danvers State Viral Hospital after Nerissa’s commitment hearing, fingers of ice played notes up and down my spine.

“I’m just trying to help you,” Cal said. “Cram it, Aoife, can’t you see that?”

I held out my hand again, offering it to his ministrations. “I suppose. I’m sorry.”

Cal rewrapped my hand. “Me too.” He looked gamely at the books. “This isn’t so bad. Kind of stuffy. You know, I hear that you can still go to school in quarantine … maybe not to be an engineer, but a teacher or a personal secretary for sure. You’re bright enough—”

“Cal. Don’t try to help me, like I’m some dame in one of your dumb aether plays,” I said. “Don’t try to be my hero. Just be Cal.” I stood on tiptoe so I could move the straw stalks of hair away from his eyes. “I like just Cal.”

Cal shuffled his feet in the dust coating the broad boards of the library floor, but at least he’d stopped talking about quarantine for the time being. I looked at my feet, too. The spectral glow of the lantern made everything sharp, the tear in my stocking and my footprints in the dust. Beneath them, I discerned an older set, smaller than my feet, heel and toe, period and question mark.

“Look.” The footprints crossed the library in a careful, unhurried line and disappeared at the bookshelves on the far wall. I grabbed Cal’s arm. “Somebody else was here.”

Cal’s arm went rigid under my grip, and I watched his throat twitch painfully as he swallowed. “Your father must have had a lady visitor.”

“A lady visitor who can evaporate through the walls?” I started for the spot and Cal attempted to pull me back.

“Aoife, you don’t know what’s going on here.”

I shrugged free of his bony grip. “The dust is settled over her prints. She’s long gone. And since my father never married, I’m doubting she has any business in this house.”

“Never remarried,” Cal corrected me, holding up the lantern for a pale imitation of light as I ran my fingers over the shelf. A hidden door would be simple enough, and a fine carpenter could make a hinge invisible with ease.

“No,” I said, brushing over the spines. Emerson, Thoreau, Kant. Not heretical texts, but not the sort of thing upstanding rational folk read on Sunday afternoon, certainly. The old ways of superstition and belief, the search for a human soul, were like Nancy Granger. Nancy Granger snuck off to the Rustworks and met a boy at the jitney track. Nancy Granger had gotten in the family way. No one at the Academy talked about Nancy Granger after she went back to Minnesota.

“No?” Cal frowned. “What d’you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean he never married,” I said. “Not my mother or anyone else.”

Cal’s mouth opened, and then he shut it again. I knew his thoughts by heart even though he avoided my eyes. Nice girls aren’t bastards. Nice girls have fathers who come home and take off their ties and have a cocktail with the evening paper.

At least Cal knew me well enough to keep his thoughts as thoughts. The only fight I’d ever seen Conrad lose was to a bully over nearly the same words.

It mattered very little. I was already an orphan, a potential madwoman and possibly a heretic. What difference would Archibald and Nerissa having rings on their fingers when I was born really make?

It had bothered Conrad more. He felt like Archibald had denied him and set him up to fail. Without a recommendation from his father, a boy couldn’t hope to pluck a prime job as a Maintainer in the Engineworks. He might as well be stuck in the pit next to the steam ventors or doing menial tasks like sweeping or greasing.

Had Conrad and Archibald finally spoken? Or had Conrad found the same deserted corpse of a house I had? For that matter, where was he if not at Graystone?