BEFORE THE OTHERS woke and after Dean had gone to check that the road was clear, I got my battered composition book out of my bag and opened it on my knees. The book was half full of my engineering homework. It was from my other life, from when I was a schoolgirl who thought that magic was a lie and that a virus was responsible for things like inhuman creatures and uncanny abilities, ghosts and prophetic dreams.
That girl was gone. The Aoife writing was a new girl, one who’d discovered that the necrovirus was a hoax perpetrated by men who sought the magic for themselves. Who were hunting me, even now. The old Aoife wanted to panic, felt the tightening in her chest even now, watched ink dribble from her pen as her hand started to shake. How was I ever going to stop being a fugitive, knowing what I knew?
But the new Aoife didn’t have the luxury of curling up in a ball and pretending the outside world didn’t exist. She had to learn how to be strong and unbending, how to evade the men chasing her and the disease that was eating her mind away from within. Had to, because she had no other choice.
I wrote it all down. I had to write. It was my duty now, because the person who should have been writing this account, my father, was long gone and my brother wasn’t interested. I was the last Grayson still able to record her strange life, as all Graysons before me had. Still, I felt like a fraud the moment I put pen to paper.
First entry:
My name is Aoife Grayson, and I am the last person who should be writing this account, but know I am the only one left who can.
Others like me and my family, the Gateminders, who watch the thin spots known as Gates between the Iron Land, the Mists and the land of Thorn, have the confidence of those who have come before. They know how to navigate the Gates, how each different type works, from the Fae hexenring to the mechanical marvels of the Erlkin. I know nothing.
I have nothing. I am the Gateminder by default, due, I believe, to chaos and chance. It sometimes feels like I’m being punished for uncovering the hoax of the necrovirus, as my father did. For daring to question the Proctors, the order of things. Gateminders before us labored in secret, but at least the rest of the world was not actively encouraged to believe they deserved death.
The Proctors told us that the strange creatures, my family’s madness, everything in the world that could not be explained by science and reason, was a virus. A powerful virus with no origin and no cure. They never hinted that its origin was inhuman and that the cure was to embrace my Faerie blood, the inhuman, immortal side of me, and to stay far away from iron.
At the time, all I saw was that my mother was one of the mad, that my brother was a fugitive and that I was about to follow in their footsteps and go mad. I would be locked up, another victim of the “virus.”
It was all a lie. I was trapped in the stone and iron of Lovecraft, trapped by my own mind and by the lie I believed. And now Lovecraft lies ruined. Ruined because I was stupid.
I scratched out that word, stupid, so many times, writing this. But it’s the right word. I believed the Fae creature Tremaine when he came from Thorn and told me I was the heroine who would free the Fae from bondage, curing my iron madness in the process. He set me up, and I fell, harder than I ever could have imagined.
I should have listened to the words my father left behind, in his own diary: as a Gateminder, you should trust only yourself. Only you stand between the Iron Land of men and what lies beyond. And in that role, you have only your own mind to rely on, your own wit and intellect.
I should have listened to Dean, too. He said it—you can’t trust the Fae. They lie. And Tremaine did lie to me. I destroyed the Lovecraft Engine, in a great cataclysm of magic. I broke down the barriers my father and his Brotherhood of Iron were so careful to construct, over hundreds of years, before the lie of the necrovirus. Barriers the evil things of Thorn had never broken.
I left my mother in Lovecraft.
I can forgive myself, possibly, for being the gullible little girl Tremaine thought I was, but I can never forgive myself for abandoning my mother.
The only way I can sleep at night is by promising myself that I am going to find her and help her escape the city and the iron madness, as I have escaped it, at least temporarily. Conrad, my brother, said that as long as we stay out of the cities, and out of the Iron Land entirely, with its train tracks, iron pipes, steel conveyances, we might stave off madness. In his case, spending months away from the Iron Land meant total remission. In my case, the progress has slowed; I avoided the full psychotic break that usually occurs around age sixteen, and suffer only the occasional headache, visual disturbance out of the corner of my eye and bad dream.
But nothing I’m doing now seems any saner than the dreams I started having weeks ago, before my birthday and the inevitable onset of madness. The dreams are the first sign of acute and chronic iron poisoning, the warning bell. Though I’m still reasonably sane because I fled, the dreams haven’t stopped. I don’t know now if they come from madness or from another source. From something worse.
I do know we’re running, me and Conrad and Dean, Cal and Bethina, too. It seems like there’s no one we aren’t running from. The Proctors and Grey Draven, who has some bizarre notion I’ll lead him to my father, his true target.
The Fae, who did not exact their full price from me after I woke their sleeping queens and ripped the thin, thin barrier between our worlds. Tremaine has more for me to do. He said as much. Opening the Gates between Thorn and Iron was only the beginning.
It was like knocking aside a spiderweb. How could breaking something so huge feel like less than nothing?
These things I do have: My brother. Dean and my friendship with Cal, and I suppose with Bethina, too—she was loyal to my father before I came along, even though she’s only human and the law dictates she should have turned me in. But Bethina is steadfast, and stubborn to a fault; plus, it’s good to have another girl along.
Things I don’t have: A plan to hold off the iron madness and keep ahead of the Proctors and Grey Draven. A way to get to Lovecraft. Anything to go home to if I can get to the city, because the Lovecraft Academy sure isn’t my home any longer. I don’t know what is.
I meant what I said—I’m the last person who should have taken over my father’s burden, recording my life for the next Gateminder. Yet I continue to write in the books that the Brotherhood calls witches’ alphabets, grimoires of power and experience that are supposed to help me along, to keep me safe.
Fat lot of good my father’s records did me. And he’s not here, even though I’ve never needed him more and his absence makes me want to sob or scream.
The one thing he asked of me was to be strong, willful and resolute, and I couldn’t do it.
All I can truthfully say now is that my name is Aoife Grayson, and I have my freedom, and my sanity. I could at least temporarily cure my mother, if I could take her from the Iron Land and the poison that’s clouding her mind.
But I don’t know how much longer she’ll survive in ruined Lovecraft. And if I go back to the iron, I don’t know how much longer I’ll have, either.
After the days of walking, of little food and less sleep, of cold and wet and none of the comforts of the human world—like, say, beds, bathrooms and hot food—the Mists had lost their charm.
The Mists weren’t exactly the world as humans understood it. Humans saw a single world with no others sitting beside it. Really, the Iron Land sat beside all the others like marbles in a sack. But at least the Mists weren’t Thorn, home of the Fae. We’d run here from my father’s house, Graystone, in Arkham, in a desperate bid to escape both the Proctors and my iron madness. The Mists were where the tides of reality ebbed and flowed, and the edges
