The Iron Thorn

itself was a brick chimney built around a heat source drifting up from below the brick. The rotten-egg scent of a pipe fire was missing, but the chimney exuded warmth, and I curled against the outer wall.

Presently, Cal and Reason returned, Cal’s bruises and cuts faded to weeks old rather than hours. Cal crouched next to me, and I brushed a finger over his temple. His skin as a ghoul had a velvet cast, nothing like the slimy, clammy hide I’d first touched when he’d changed.

“You’re all fixed,” I said. “Good as if I fixed you myself.”

Cal grinned at me. I still wasn’t able to reconcile his teeth with the boy I’d known, but it was getting easier to look at him. “I’m not sorry about what happened in Ravenhouse.”

I smiled. “Me either.”

He pointed down a tunnel off the hearth. “I’m going to sleep. You and Dean can stay by the hearth. None of the others will bother you there, but don’t wander around. You smell pretty tasty.”

“Just what every girl wants to hear,” I told him. “We won’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Not all of us feel the same way about humans.” He crawled off down the tunnel, and after a time Toby took his leave as well.

I poked in corners of the hearth room a bit, while Dean dozed with one eye open against the warm brick. “You need a pillow, princess, I’ve got an arm,” he said.

“I’m not tired,” I told him, fingering a dog-eared, year-old copy of Amazing Stories. I smiled to myself. Knowing that Cal’s love for trashy pulps, at least, hadn’t been a lie eased the wound his true face had left.

Dean drifted to sleep while I examined the detritus that the ghouls had collected—broken china, collections of gears that came from a hundred different machines, a single red patent-leather pump. Shards of glass and metal hung on red string from the ceiling, refracting the gentle light from the gaps in the hearth chimney. Broken dolls were nailed in rows along the walls of the nest, their empty eyes staring down at me. At the apex of the roof, glass globes from old lamps had been arranged on wire to reflect our solar system. A ghoul had made a miniature universe above my head, stars and planets spinning slowly in their orbit.

Even here, ghouls saw the same stars I did, though not in the same way. They saw broken, fractured, fragile glass, while I saw the only constant in the world. The sky was the sky, no matter where I stood.

Except, it appeared, under the ground.

To distract myself from the cold knowledge of where I’d ended up in my mad plan to awaken the queens, I tried to discern how the hearth chimney worked. A small cooking door sat nestled into the hand-laid brick, and I turned the wheel to crank it open. Heat pinked my face as I squinted into the depths of the hearth. A steam pipe sat in the center of the brick, puffing fragrant warmth into the open air. My Weird prickled as I realized what I was seeing. I gasped and then shouted for Dean.

He came upright with a start, and Cal and Toby appeared from the nest tunnels.

“What’s wrong, Aoife?” Dean demanded. “You find trouble?”

“No,” I said. “Just the opposite.” I pointed to the gear and sickle stamped into the pipe casing, just above where it had snapped and left itself open to the ghouls.

“You’re gonna have to explain this one,” Dean said. “I’m not seeing the excitement in a grody old pipe.”

I beamed, feeling sweat trickle down my spine from the proximity to the steam. “You will, Dean.” I pointed at the pipe, at its route down and back, toward the heart of the city. “This is how we’re going to get into the Engineworks.”

The ghouls had collected a vast store of lost things, and Toby showed me the nest where most of it was kept. “It’s all here,” he said. “Meat keep the strangest things, and they throw even stranger things away.”

I beckoned to Dean. “We need to find some climbing gear. Something to make a harness and crampons from.”

Dean cocked an eyebrow. “I know you’re not talking about climbing down that thing, kid. You’ll roast.”

“Not if we can vent this chimney,” I said. “Ventors work in the pipes every day. I can certainly make one trip.”

Dean uncovered a length of sturdy rope, and I found a pair of golf shoes roughly the same age as I was. “These’ll do,” I said.

“Well, find a pair for me, too,” Dean said. I blinked at him, already pulling the spikes off the bottom of the shoes.

“Whatever for?”

“If you think you’re going down there alone all on the spur of the moment, you’re cracked,” Dean said. “We’ve already gotten sucked into a ghoul nest—I’d hate to see what else is down here.”

I gave Dean a small smile. Him coming with me meant I’d come back. Dean could always find his way back. I clung to the sentiment as I found a toolkit with most of the tools missing. A few minute’s work had fashioned the golf spikes and some wire into a serviceable pair of crampons, which I strapped to new shoes I found amid the mess.

I took a deep breath. I couldn’t turn around now.

My only adventure into a steam pipe had come the previous year, when the chief ventor of the Engineworks took us into the bowels of the Engine, one by one. I’d never forgotten the roar, the oppressive heat and the weight of the water in the air as we journeyed as close as an unprotected person could come. As I lowered myself down the side of the steam pipe, the heat stippling my skin with moisture, I thanked every ventor I’d known at the School for their wisdom.

“You all right down there?” Dean shouted.

My foot found the bottom of the pipe’s junction, and I tugged on the rope. “Yes! Come down.”

Dean lowered himself until he landed next to me, panting. We’d both stripped down to our bottom layer: I to my dress and stockings, Dean to his white T-shirt. His hair hung lank, while mine became like a thundercloud in the humidity.

“If the Proctors are wrong, and there is a heaven … this is definitely hell,” he said, swiping his hand over his face.

“The Proctors are wrong,” I said, sure of that if nothing else. “So very, very wrong about so much.”

We crouched to make our way down the pipe, until it widened, and a grate blocked our path. The sign hanging from the mesh had nearly rusted away, but the flared symbol, like a blooming flower, was familiar from our first-year safety lectures.

I snatched Dean’s arm. “Get back.”

“Why—” he started, but was drowned out by a great rumbling. A moment later a jet of concentrated steam shot along the pipe, heating the mesh so that it glowed.

“It vents up,” I said. “Direct from the Engine to aboveground.”

Dean whistled. “Well, we sure aren’t getting in that way.”

“If we can’t go in through the river then we have no choice,” I said. “This is the only way into the Engineworks besides the front gate, and we’re sure as hell not getting in that way.” I tugged at Dean’s hand. “Let’s go back. I need to ask Cal exactly where we are relative to the Engine and make some sketches.” And get out of the heat before I collapsed into a puddle. I never would have made it as a ventor.

The climb back into the ghoul nest was far harder than the climb out, now that I was tired and wrung of moisture. Dean had to pull me out and onto the soft floor of the nest. Cal hovered where he’d obviously been waiting since we’d gone, claws flexing in and out. “Stop breathing so hard!” he ordered me. “You sound like prey!”

I concentrated on bringing my heartbeat and breath back under control. Dean found a scrap of burlap and blotted some of the sweat and grit from my face.

“That’s better,” Cal said at last, as a few of his skulking brethren who’d been watching me from the tunnel entrance retreated. “Did you find anything?”

I nodded and tried to smooth down my hair in a token effort to look human. “Where are we, exactly?”

“Near the riverwalk,” Cal said. “Close to where we met the nightjar, below Old Town.”

I shrugged back into my jumper, chilled now that my sweat had beaded and cooled on my skin. “I need a pen and some paper.”

I settled in one of the hammocks in the hearth room, and presently Dean brought me what I’d asked