in fictional form and in the cheesy aether plays the Bureau of Proctors broadcast over the tubes. Being told he had to stay behind might grate on him, but if he went into Lovecraft, he’d be eaten alive. That was, if the Proctors didn’t capture and torture their former informant to death first.
It was the truth, and Cal knew it just as well as I did.
“Stay here?” Bethina trilled, loud enough to reach Dean and Conrad. “But this is an awful place to stay! Stone knows what’s hiding in these houses.”
“No, this place is good,” Cal soothed. “It’s fine, Bethina. We’ll be fine.”
“Well, of
“Probably best,” Dean chimed in before Bethina could read the flinch on my face. I hadn’t told her about the Proctors’ lie. Escaping the Mists was already more than she could handle. In a way, I guessed I was just as guilty as Cal. “We’ll move quicker that way,” he added. “No offense, Bethina.”
Cal pointed to a cottage that was in relatively good shape. “We’ll wait in there, okay? I’ve got a pack of cards. It’ll be like no time at all.”
Bethina cast a wary look back at me as Cal escorted her into the cottage. I smiled and waved, feeling not one iota of the cheerful expression plastered across my face.
“Thank goodness,” I muttered, once they were inside without more protests. Bethina wasn’t stupid—soon Cal’s and my carefully constructed tower of falsehood was going to collapse like so many blocks, and when it did, I wouldn’t blame her one bit if she smacked us both across the face. Repeatedly.
“Yeah,” Conrad agreed. “That girl’s sweet, but she’s deadweight.”
Dean shot me a look, but I waved him off, hoping to avoid yet another contest to see who could puff his chest out farther. Conrad didn’t know about Cal’s little skin-changing trick either, and right now that was best. I wasn’t up to explaining to my brother, especially considering how he’d been acting lately, exactly why we were running around with a ghoul to watch our backs.
We approached the foundry gates, which hung open at odd angles, as if something large and out of control had smashed them in its mad dash for freedom.
Dean pressed a finger to his lips, moved along the iron of the foundry fence and peered around the gate without letting anything that might be on the other side get a look at him. I pressed against his back, curling my fingers in the leather of his coat, and followed his eyes.
Great tread tracks led to the gate from the innards of the foundry, where the forge and the assembly sheds lay, and one side of the nearest sheds was smashed, bricks lying in piles. The automatons that worked in the hottest, most dangerous parts of the foundry had vanished.
“I don’t like this at all,” I said in Dean’s ear. So much destruction, and now the foundry was so quiet.
I was close enough to Dean that I could smell his hair cream, like a hint of sweetness on my tongue, when he turned to reply.
“Me either,” he said. “But like they say, princess—only way out is through. No other road to the bridge on this side of the river, and swimming’s going to get us a nice case of hypothermia and not much else.”
“Forward, then,” I said, and I slipped my hand into Dean’s as we walked, making Conrad snort as he brought up the rear. “Grow up,” I muttered at him, but he pretended not to hear me. Brothers didn’t make life easier, not even the jinxed sort of life we’d found ourselves in, I decided. They were tailored by evolution to be annoying.
The foundry grounds were as quiet as the town behind us, but unlike that of the town, this wasn’t the silence of abandonment. It was more like walking along a darkened street at night, with the pressure on the back of your neck that let you know something was watching you from the shadowed places along the way.
Conrad pointed to a bright spray of paint splashed along the walls, overlaying the wing-and-crucible logo of the foundry. The paint was red and black, violent slashes that depicted blood pouring from the crucible, great arrowheads through the wings. The sort of things the Proctors would have had scrubbed away immediately, before.
“We’re gone two weeks and this place goes full-on anarchist?” Dean said. “This is nuts.”
“Maybe we should be quiet,” I suggested nervously. The foundry was silent and felt wrong. No smoke belched from the stacks, and the resounding clang and clank of cooling ingots that used to echo across the river and into my dormitory room had ceased.
Dean, Conrad and I formed a sort of line, Conrad at the rear and Dean at the head. I wanted to tell them I didn’t need the press of a boy’s body to keep me safe—whatever was running loose here would just as soon chew on their flesh as mine.
We passed through the smaller wooden outbuildings, several of which had been crushed to matchsticks, presumably by the vast weight of runaway automatons. One such machine slumped in its tracks near the last shed, the aether globe in its chest that had kept it powered smashed and a broad burn mark scorching its metal torso. The scent of burnt paper was still in the air.
Conrad approached the thing and touched one of its tracks, which had come off the wheels. Each tread was twice the span of his arm.
My eye was caught by movement from behind the automaton. Just a flicker, but my heart clenched with surprise and fear, and I tapped Dean on the arm, pointing. “Something’s over there.”
He followed my finger, and we both saw the flicker of red on the unbroken gray brick of the foundry walls.
“Son of a bitch,” Dean growled, jamming his hand in his pocket and pulling out his switchblade. “Hey!” he bellowed at the moving shadow. “Hey, you!”
“Dean …,” I started, thinking that perhaps shouting at the figure wasn’t the best idea.
“I see you!” Dean shouted. “No point in hiding.”
“Dean, we don’t know what it is,” I whispered, worried that if he made a move, whoever or whatever lurked beyond the automaton would take it badly. Dean shook his head.
“Relax, princess. It’s a kid.” He advanced on the shadow. “Aren’t you?”
“Up yours, mister!” the shadow shouted back. I pressed a hand over my mouth, both to stifle a laugh and from relief. To find another person in this wasteland was ten times more unexpected than finding a creature like the nightjars and ghouls that populated Lovecraft’s underground.
“Say,” Dean drawled, brows drawing together. “I know you, kid.”
“I know your mother!” the kid retorted. “And she has some disappointing things to say about you.” The kid’s brassiness didn’t worry me half as much as his actually wandering around out in the open, but Dean’s lip curled back and he balled up his hands.
Before Dean could swing a fist, I closed distance, reached out and grabbed the boy’s red scarf, jerking him into the light.
“Tavis?” Dean said.
The boy and I gaped at one another for a moment. I realized that Dean did know him, and so did I. Tavis, the peddler boy in the Nightfall Market. I’d met him the same night I’d met Dean, when Cal and I had run away from the Academy. Tavis had steered me to a guide who wasn’t a guide at all, but a man who sent people to be devoured by ghouls in exchange for free passage and scavenging rights in the old Lovecraft sewers.
“Oh, cripes,” Tavis sighed, relaxing a bit. “The wags in the Market said you were long gone, Dean.”
“No such luck for them,” Dean told him. “What are you doing all the way on this side of the river?”
“Live here now, don’t I?” Tavis squirmed in my grip. “Come on, girlie. Give a guy a break.”
I let go of him, and his bright red scarf fluttered to the crushed gravel. I picked it up and ran it through my hands. Soft wool, dyed and still smelling of woodsmoke. “This is an Academy scarf,” I said, the unexpected appearance of an object from my former life making my voice barely a whisper. “Where did you get this?”
Tavis shrugged, but his gaze darted away from mine as he tried to disguise the lie. One end of the scarf was darker than the other, stiff and soaked in blood.
I let the scarf fall from my hands. “What happened over there?” I asked Tavis. “In Lovecraft? After the blast.”
“Hey,” he said, ignoring my question and looking back and forth between Dean and me. “Are you two going steady? Harrison, you sly dog.”
“You’re way too young to be throwing that kind of talk around,” Dean said. “You still dealing in piss-poor information and tonics that are mostly rusty tap water?”
