The Iron Thorn

trying to get sent to the madhouse, Aoife? Is what everyone’s saying true?”

My wrist burned under his grasp, flesh heating, while my face matched it at his words. Out of all students in the Academy, I’d hoped Cal wouldn’t buy into the rumor. I squirmed, but Cal didn’t let go. “What are they saying this time?”

Cal’s jaw worked. “That the Grayson line has bad blood. From the first infected on down. They say that you all go mad sometime around sixteen … that you’re dangerous.”

Tears burned behind my eyes, but I shut them, so the tears wouldn’t betray me by falling. “Cal, I thought you were my friend.”

“I am,” he said. “I’m your only friend right now, Aoife. I don’t believe any of it, but you know what they say. You know what Conrad did.”

My throat went tight. I remembered the point of the knife warmed to the temperature of skin, Conrad’s tears wetting my hair as he held me close. “I don’t want to, Aoife, but they whisper and watch and they lap up the blood. I don’t want to listen, but they won’t stop, until there’s blood on the stone.…”

“Conrad didn’t mean to hurt me,” I told Cal. “Dammit, Cal, you know that.” I pulled away then. If Cal thought that I carried the necrovirus in me, then I’d never be more than a thing to be pitied in his eyes.

My school scarf covered up the crooked scar most days, unless it was getting near the end of the year, when the wet breath of summer on my skin made wool unbearable.

“He went mad on his birthday, Aoife, and he tried to cut your throat. Your birthday is coming and now you’re talking about helping him. Like it or not, that sounds mad.”

“Conrad was your friend too,” I whispered. My only friends: Conrad and Cal. Cal and Conrad. I had thought nothing could change that.

Cal grimaced. “Yeah, and when he snapped, how stupid do you think I felt for believing he’d fight off the madness? This—this gibberish he’s feeding you—is just a delusion. Same as the fairies and demons that your mother sees.”

I didn’t think, I just lashed out and slapped Cal across the cheek with my free hand. He recoiled, hissing in pain. “I’m sorry,” I said instantly, though my blood still pounded through my ears and I didn’t feel sorry. At all.

“Dammit, Aoife, you really clocked me.” He wiggled his jaw.

“Conrad isn’t like my mother,” I insisted. Conrad had never showed any signs of madness. He never told me his dreams. My brother had to be different. Because if he wasn’t, then there was no hope for me. “He needs my help,” I told Cal, “and I thought you just said I could trust you.”

Cal sighed and scratched at the top of his ear, a habitual gesture that meant his nature was warring with the rules of the Academy and the Proctors. “What do you want from me, Aoife?”

“Read it,” I said, putting my palm under his nose. Cal frowned.

“What’s Graystone? What are these numbers?”

“Graystone is my father’s house. It’s upstate, in Arkham,” I said. “At least, that’s what my mother told me.” I sighed. “The numbers … I don’t have the faintest idea.”

Truthfully, I hadn’t the faintest idea about my father, either. I had his name—Archibald Grayson—and my mother’s rambling about his strong hands and moss-green eyes. They were my eyes, and they caused Nerissa by turns to be doting and furious toward me. Most days, I wished the bastard had kept his eyes to himself.

But if Conrad had evaded the Proctors long enough, if he’d made it to Arkham … he could have found our father. A man who’d fall for and get a woman with the necrovirus in a family way, twice, unafraid of madness. A man who might help him.

“Please, Cal,” I said when he hesitated. “I just need someone to believe that this might not all be madness.”

“I can’t believe I’m helping him again—or you,” Cal sighed. “The Proctors could have me in the Catacombs in a heartbeat.”

I nudged his shoulder. “Not if you don’t run up to Ravenhouse and confess to them.” Relief lightened me and stopped my heart from thudding. Cal wasn’t going to turn me in. He was still the boy I’d met on Induction Day.

“Ravens are wise, Aoife,” Cal said. The rain was coming down in earnest now, and I dug my collapsible umbrella out of my satchel while we walked back to the common house. “The Proctors use them for a reason.”

“Ravens are too busy chasing real live heretics and Crimson Guard spies down in the Rustworks,” I said, hoisting the umbrella over Cal’s much taller head. I left out the rumor that Conrad had told me, that the Crimson Guard were witches who could do impossible things. Cal was sensitive enough. “Ravens have bigger worries than a couple of Academy students.”

“If you say so,” Cal muttered darkly, looking over his shoulder as if a Proctor were closing in on us.

“I do say so,” I told him as we climbed the steps and shook off the rain inside the common-house door. I patted Cal on his damp shoulder. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“So what are you going to do?” Cal asked, looking longingly at the other boys sitting around the aether tube listening to the baseball game. “Maybe you could send him a letter back, or something. You can write it and I can get the score.”

The truth that had been circling my thoughts since I read the letter solidified. Writing wasn’t going to help Conrad. “I’m going to Graystone,” I said. “Like Conrad asked.”

Cal choked. “What? Right now?”

Mrs. Fortune loomed in my head, and the meeting with the Headmaster. “Tonight.”

I thought Cal was going to faint on the floor of the common house. “You really are mad, Aoife.”

“Stop saying that,” I warned. I unwound my scarf and passed my fingers over the scar that Conrad’s knife had left. Conrad wasn’t like our mother. Conrad fixed our meals. Conrad braided my hair for school.

But no one cared about the Conrad before. They just saw him standing over me, his knife crimson on the tip, madness burning in his eyes. They didn’t see the torture he went through, how hard he tried to hold it back.

If Conrad needed my help, he’d get it, for all the years before he came into my room on his birthday, holding the knife.

They won’t be silent until I do it, Aoife. I’m so sorry.

“How are you proposing to just … take flight from the Academy with nothing except this wild notion to go to Arkham?” Cal demanded, when I stood silent for too long.

“Will you speak up?” I said, jolted to attention as the group of boys turned toward us. “I don’t think everyone on Academy grounds heard that.”

Cal pulled me down onto one of the threadbare sofas and leaned close, as close as we’d ever been. “This isn’t a simple thing, Aoife. Even if we made it out of the school—which is impossible, by the way—there’s still the city lockdown at dusk. We’d never make it over the bridges before they close the roads and the sewers against the ghouls. We’re underage. We could never convince the Proctors we had passage papers.”

“I’m aware of the variables,” I said. Lovecraft was a fortress against the necrovirus, and its citizens; at night, when the viral creatures were most active, the same citizens became prisoners within the city blocks.

Cal shook his head. “Math isn’t going to give us one lick of help this time, Aoife.”

I chewed on my bottom lip, a habit Mrs. Fortune deplored as unladylike. “ ‘Us’?” I said after a time, casting a sidelong glance at Cal to test his expression. He heaved a sigh too large for his skinny chest.

“If you think I’m letting you run off from school on the word of some madman on your own? Then you’re not mad, Aoife … you’re just nuts.”

As quickly as I’d slapped him before, I threw my arms around Cal. He let out a small grunt. “Thank you,” I whispered fiercely. He returned my grasp, tentative.

“All right, Miss Engineer … how are we hauling out of Lovecraft?”

“Well … I …” My reasoning hadn’t led me much beyond “help Conrad.” Cecelia, her sharp eyes and sharp words during the burning, came back to me. “The Nightfall Market.”

Cal let out a groan. “Great. We barely get clear of Dunwich Lane, and you want to go someplace twice as dangerous.”

“Oh, listen to you. You’re worse than an old woman. When have I ever lead you into danger?”

“Yesterday,” Cal said. “That bloodsucker in the alley.”

“And I got you back out again, didn’t I? Don’t go to supper,” I said, the plan forming and gaining momentum in my mind. I felt the same when I sketched new machines, things that could fly or burrow or glide under the river like fish. “That’ll be our chance.” Supper was the one time all of the students and heads of house gathered in one