The Iron Thorn

for.

“Won’t be easy,” Dean said as I sketched.

“No,” I said. “It won’t be.” I thought of my goggles and the invigorator, back in some cold evidence locker at Ravenhouse.

Damn Grey Draven three times over. Him and his lies, and his peculiar fascination with my father.

The paper was the back side of an ancient Metrocar schedule, and the pen was barely more than a nub dipped in cheap, grainy ink, but working from remembered diagrams and lectures and the rough coordinates Cal had provided, I soon had a rudimentary sketch of the vent tunnels into the Engine. I handed it to Dean.

“Some of it is from memory, but I think we can use it to get in.”

“Not bad,” Dean said, examining the sketch. “Of course, there’s the small matter of getting out again.”

For once, I was on sure footing and had an answer for him. After weeks of drifting anchorless, it made me a bit giddy. “We can trip the pressure alarms in the Engineworks,” I said. “There will be an evacuation. It happened once when I was doing field study. People scrambling everywhere, no order. Nobody will notice us.” A pressure vent could fling shards of Engine, gears and rods at hundreds of PSI in every direction. Another way a ventor could die. Anyone caught in the line of fire looked like they’d been in the path of a war Engine. If I went to the heart of the Engine, I’d be going the opposite way from everyone else and could be unobserved, hopefully for as long as I needed to use my Weird. If I could do what I’d claimed to Tremaine. Right now it was a theory, and I knew I could be very, very wrong. But I couldn’t be scared. Cal’s and Dean’s futures and my own were riding on me being strong, stronger than even my father.

I could be. I had to be.

“I can get a message to Captain Harry to get us out of the city once we go topside,” Dean said, “but up until then … it’s up to you to make this work, princess.”

“Don’t worry.” I elbowed him. “I’m the brains of the operation, remember?”

Dean leaned down and kissed me, and I still wasn’t used to the weightlessness it brought on. He helped me fly for a moment, and I slid my hands under his jacket, so I could touch cotton and skin. “That’s not what I meant. If this goes badly …,” he said.

I touched my finger to his lips. “If it goes badly … I’m glad I met you, Dean.”

We sat quietly after that, watching the ghoul pups play with a doll among the piles of junk in the corners of the nest, stalking and killing the crude human shape over and over. It didn’t get darker or lighter under the city, but when night closed in, I curled in my hammock and dreamed, of a burning city and falling stars.

I woke, frantic and alone. My mother stood over me, in her nightgown, a man’s cardigan and bare feet. Her expression twisted up, the one that came when she wanted me so badly to believe her and knew I wouldn’t, because she was crazy.

“You shouldn’t have walked in the lily field, Aoife.”

“You’re not real,” I said. My mother reached out and slapped me. It stung.

“I warned you! I warned you, daughter. The dead girls dance on the ashes of the world and we will all weep for what they do.”

I held my cheek where it stung. “You are mad, Mother.”

“And what do you think seeing me makes you?”

When I came awake into actuality, where the world was real and solid, I was screaming. Dean grabbed me, caught me as I fell from the hammock.

“Aoife, what is it?”

“I saw …” My teeth chattered so hard they stole my speech and my thoughts were racing faster than my tongue could form words anyway. “My mother,” I managed. “She was here.”

“There’s no one here,” Dean said gently. “No one but me.”

Cal crept in from the nests. The fires were low and I knew that this was what passed for night under the earth. Cal’s face fell. “It’s the madness dream? You’re still having it.”

“At least you’re not saying necrovirus any longer.” I half-smiled.

“No need.” Cal’s tongue flicked in and out. “All a lie, isn’t it? You don’t know how it stuck in my craw pretending to be scared of the Proctor’s fable. Ghul weren’t made by any virus. We’ve always been here, under the skin of your world.”

“It’s no comfort, the lie,” I said. “My family does go mad, no matter what causes it. I feel like there’s an abyss in front of me, and a wind at my back.…”

“Aoife.” Cal wrapped his long, skeletal arms around himself. “No matter what happens, you’ll be Aoife. I’ll come visit you in the madhouse, if that’s what it takes, but I won’t desert you. I’ll learn a new boy-shape. Draven will never catch me.”

“Why can’t I just go back?” I whispered, ignoring his attempts at comfort. “Erase all of this and go be a student whose biggest problem was a schematic she couldn’t draw?”

“Because,” Dean said, “then you’d lose everything you’ve gained since. Truth, magic. Even the real face of your obnoxious little friend here.”

“You’re calling me obnoxious,” Cal huffed. “If you could only hear yourself.”

I managed a laugh. “At least some things haven’t changed.”

“I’m still the Cal you knew,” he said. “I know you don’t trust me, but underneath I’m the same. I’ll go to the Engineworks with you. If I don’t make it, or the Proctors grab me again—”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said, moving away from Dean and straightening up. “You won’t be coming.”

Cal sighed. “I’m not working for Draven anymore. I swear it.”

“I mean,” I said, “we need someone to meet the airship. To come for us if Dean and I get caught again.” I gave Cal a smile, a whole one, even though it was purely meant to make him cooperate. I guessed I had learned a thing or two from Dean. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have looking out for me.” And if Cal did decide that his loyalties lay elsewhere, at least we wouldn’t be together in the Engine when he did.

Dean stayed when Cal crept back to his nest. “I can stay,” he said. “If you want me.”

I moved and made room for him in the hammock. I wanted Dean to stay, badly. I never, I realized, wanted him to leave again. “Please.”

Dean slipped out of his leather jacket and his heavy boots and settled next to me, letting me sink back into the comfort of his chest, wrapping his arm around my waist and resting his chin on the top of my head. His breath ruffled my hair. I stayed still, afraid I might break our comfortable silence like a soap bubble.

Dean spoke, eventually. “Dreams, huh?” he whispered in my ear. “Bad ones?”

“The worst imaginable,” I said. “Ever since I was a little girl.”

“Well,” Dean said softly. “I’m here now. Any bad’s going to have to get through me.” He ran his fingers down my cheek, over my neck and arm, and then kissed the back of my neck before settling his head onto the pillow. “Sweet dreams, princess.”

I knew that no one, not even Dean, could keep the dreams at bay, but I allowed myself to think he might, until I fell back into a fitful, smoke-tinged sleep.

I woke alone, shivering in the chill of a dead fire. Ashes blew softly across the hearth, as if subterranean snow had fallen while I slept.

“Dean?” I whispered, scrubbing vision back into my eyes. I was stiff and sore from sleeping in the crook of the hammock, but I had slept soundly and long. Light fell from somewhere far above, in bars and crosses across the rough earthen floor.

“He went to smoke a cigarette,” Toby’s guttural voice piped from the corner of the hearth. “I don’t understand why you breathe the smoke in willingly. Your city is covered in it.”

“We all have our vices,” I said. Toby grinned at me, his bluish fur almost silver in the early light.

“I said I’d watch you so you didn’t turn into breakfast. Although I am hungry.”

I swung myself down from the hammock, planting my feet with a thud. “We both know you’re not going to do anything of the kind as long as Cal’s around, so why don’t you shove a sock in it?”

Toby laughed. I was beginning to see subtle differences in the ghouls—Cal was slight and skinny no matter what shape he was in, while Toby was larger, darker. Tanner’s voice had been nightmarish, but Toby’s and Cal’s were strange in a way that made me want to listen.

“I sorta see why Carver decided to protect his meat friend,” he said.