“We should move!” Casey bellowed. “While they’re distracted.”
Dean nodded at me. “Get back on the wire. I’ll help you.” He put his hands on my hips without any more preamble and lifted me like I didn’t weigh a thing.
The wire swayed and bounced under the assault of the leviathan, and I screwed my eyes shut, focusing on the sting in my palms as the wire bit into them.
I moved forward, concentrating so hard that I started when hands grabbed me and Casey pulled me onto the last support. We were below the elevated section of Derleth Street, the gray half-light shining through the slats of the river walk. There was a gaping hole in the boards, and Casey pulled herself up.
“We owe that old deep water bugger a thank-you,” she panted. “He distracted those blackbirds right and proper.”
“I’ll feel better when everyone’s across,” I said, squinting against the ice glare to make out the others where they clung tightly to the great structure. The leviathan roared as the Proctors shot at it, then battered its entire weight into the bridge. There was a groan and the iron vibrated under my feet, and then everything stilled as the leviathan slid back into the river, causing violent waves of ice and black water to crash into either shore.
The sound was small in comparison, but it was high and close—a light ping as the rusted bolts holding the wires of the suspension assembly in place snapped in half, one by one, like aether bulbs blowing on a circuit. The wires whipped free like the tentacles of a second, metal leviathan hanging in the air above the first.
Dean dropped and caught himself by the elbows on the support where Casey and I were crouching. Casey grabbed Dean’s arm, and I reached out for Conrad, but just like when we’d been in the balloon, I grasped only air.
My heart stopped and I watched helplessly as Conrad plummeted, a scream ripping from his throat, until the wire he was clinging to reached the end of its arc and snapped. Conrad swung a good thirty feet below us, small above the vast expanse of the river.
I locked my arm through the iron lattice to brace myself and grabbed the top of the wire with my free hand. “Help me!” I screamed at Dean and Casey, the icy air tearing my throat raw.
“No!” Conrad yelled up to us. “Just go!”
I shook my head, trying to pull the wire up and bring Conrad with it. I wasn’t leaving him.
Casey, on the other hand, made a move to crawl up to the roadbed.
“What’s that for?” she hissed when she saw Dean’s reproachful look. “He said leave him, and we gotta move before that boat sees us!”
Dean just grunted and grabbed the wire along with me. Between the two of us, we hauled Conrad up, and the three of us climbed after Casey to the roadbed, leaving the Proctors and the bridge behind us.
Once we stood on Derleth Street, behind the arcade of the river walk to hide us from the Proctors, I ran and caught up to Casey, leaving Dean to walk with Conrad, who was swaying like a tree in a hurricane. He was pale, but I knew he’d be all right. Conrad was tough in ways you couldn’t see. He didn’t let fear or panic ever get their hooks into him. I wished I could be more like that.
“That was way closer than I like to cut things,” Casey told me. “From now on, Miss Grayson, you need to listen to me and do as I say.”
I had only intended to talk to her, but her comment sliced through my patience, and all the frustration and horror of the last few days exploded to the front of my mind. I balled up my fist, hard and sure like Conrad had taught me, and smacked Casey in the face.
She reeled, and there was already a fat red bruise growing near her lip when she turned back. “What on the scorched earth is your malfunction?”
“The next time you suggest leaving
“Aoife, whoa.” Dean appeared at my side. He squeezed my shoulder. “Take it easy.”
Casey touched her lip and winced. “I’m just doing what you asked me to do. Gee whiz.”
“You know who else just does what they’re asked? Proctors,” I snapped back.
Casey yanked her blade from her belt. “Okay, girlie, I respect you, but that crosses the line. I ain’t in bed with the Proctors.”
“Why don’t we all calm down?” Dean suggested. “You two girls want to slug it out later, I’m not going to stop you.”
I uncurled my fist. My palm was red and raw, rubbed bloody from holding frozen metal. “He’s right,” I told Casey. All the rage ran out like so much water, and in its place was just embarrassment. I was supposed to fix problems with my mind, not my fists. I was the smart girl, the civilized one, who didn’t resort to what my female teachers at the Academy would have called “tawdry emotional displays.”
At least, I had been, until all of Tremaine’s lies and everything that had gone on since then. “I’m sorry about that,” I said to Casey, feeling my cheeks heat. “I think we can take it from here.”
“Nah, look,” Casey said. “
“Fine,” I said shortly, glad she wasn’t going to try to turn things into a real brawl. I wasn’t much of a hand- to-hand fighter unless the element of surprise was on my side. “Let’s just get going, all right?”
“Hell of a right cross,” Dean muttered as we started walking again. “Remind me never to get you testy.”
“Consider yourself warned,” I said, nudging him with my elbow and flashing a grin. Despite where we were and what had almost just happened, I felt a little lighter for the first time since I’d walked out of the Academy and away from the life I’d had there.
We were going to get my mother back, take her far away from the iron that made her mad, and have our family, me and her and Conrad, together.
And then I would find some way to make everything in Lovecraft and the worlds beyond all right again.
Walking through Lovecraft was like walking through the dream I’d kept having in the Mists, except I was awake. Awake enough to see the wrecked shops and burnt-out houses. To know, finally, the toll of having destroyed the Engine and broken the Gates to the Thorn Land. I was awake enough to feel the cold bite against every inch of exposed skin, and awake enough to taste the smoke rising in the south on the back of my tongue.
South was where the Engineworks had been.
The people who had worked in the Engine had evacuated. As far as I knew, I hadn’t killed anyone outright. But how many had died afterward, as a result of what I’d done?
Old Town was silent, the crumbling brick storefronts and row houses painted all the colors of the rainbow now pale and faded, deserted and, in many cases, destroyed beyond recognition or repair.
Christobel Charitable Asylum had been a convent a long time ago, when there had still been such things as nuns and people who believed in gods and not the reason-based Master Builder or the Great Old Ones, drifting through the outer stars in their endless, frozen sleep. You could still see the spire poking above the sharp Victorian rooflines, and I angled toward it, up Derleth Street.
I’d walked here so many times as a student, on my way to and from the madhouse. I’d hated the walk then, the obligation to go visit my mother almost a physical weight. I’d never noticed how alive the street was, bustling with life in a way the Academy and Uptown weren’t. Now that it lay silent, windows staring at us with our own reflections, old newspapers caught against the fences and lampposts flapping like wounded birds, I missed the activity acutely.
“I don’t like this at all,” Casey murmured. We walked in a loose, staggered line, choosing whichever side of the street kept us clear of shadows and alleyways. “It’s way too calm,” she elaborated. “No sirens, no screaming, no Proctors.” She inhaled deeply. “Something bad in the air.”
“Could you be any more doom-and-gloom?” Conrad complained. “I’m already sour enough on this whole idea without your naysaying, all right?”
I agreed with Casey. I could feel the iron of this place tickling the back of my mind, and its whisper didn’t even cover the snuffling and scraping I could hear in every patch of darkness, tangible reminders that we could be
