The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  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?”

  “Nightfall Market’s gone,” Tavis said, kicking at the broken bricks with the toe of his boot. “Proctors raided the Rustworks right after the big blow. Rounded up everyone they could find. Ghouls got the rest. Monsters’ve been crazed lately—even springing out on folks in broad daylight.”

  Dean rubbed his chin, a calm gesture, but I saw the thunderheads of anger steal into his eyes. “Figures.”

  I dropped my gaze to the vicinity of Tavis’s boot. The people in the Rustworks might have been rough and dishonest, but they hadn’t deserved the blame for the Engine. The Proctors were all too eager to name scapegoats for every little thing that went wrong in their city.

  “Some of us came here,” Tavis said. “Foundry workers ran when the automatons went nutty and started smashing things. It’s safe here. For the most part.”

  Conrad waved at us from near the wrecked sheds and mouthed We should go.

  “Good seeing you, kid,” Dean told Tavis, ruffling his hair. “Keep yourself safe, you hear?”

  Tavis gave Dean a smile, and it was as sly and slippery as the tongue of a snake. “Oh, I don’t gotta worry about that,” he said. “I kept you talking. I’ll get my cut.”

  My heart sank. Dean pulled his knife again. “What did you say?”

  A low rumble started from behind the sheds, the gravel around my feet jumping. With it came the clamor of voices and the clatter of an automaton’s tread.

  I grabbed Tavis by the front of his shirt. “What did you do?”

  “Can’t have you tipping off the Proctors!” he squeaked. “And we need food! Weapons! Cash!”

  “Do we look like we’d tip off the Proctors, you weaselly little bastard?” Dean snarled. His switchblade gleamed in the low gray light coming down through the smoke.

  “Rules of the Rustworks,” Tavis said. “You’re gone a little while and you forget. Every man for himself.”

  A foundry automaton rolled around the corner of the shed, surrounded by a dozen men and women wearing identical red scarves and carrying weapons, from pump-action shotguns and the sort of electric rods the Proctors carried to simple tools like axes and pitchforks and, in one case, a baseball bat with rusty nails driven into the business end. I stared, rooted to the spot by both shock and the hungry look in their eyes. Hungrier than any ghoul, and twice as frightening.

  The man driving the automaton had a scar that closed one eye, a gray beard, and white hair flying out from under a ratty top hat. He wore evening clothes, wildly mismatched, and his high-collared shirt was so blood-soaked that it was the color of Tavis’s scarf.

  “Throw down your weapons!” he bellowed at us through the automaton’s vox system. The things weren’t meant to be driven, but I could see where a torch had cut away the chest plate to make a spot for a man to sit and manipulate the controls in real time, rather than having an engineer program the thing and send it on its way. I might have admired the wild-eyed man’s ingenuity if he hadn’t clearly been about to crush us with his metal appendages.

  “Screw off!” Dean shouted back. “You’re not getting a damn thing from us!”

  “Not that we have anything to give, anyway,” I murmured so only Dean could hear.

  “Don’t be so sure, princess,” he said softly. “Those boots and my coat will get fought over down in the dirt by types like this.”

  I realized he had a point—the refugees from the Rustworks were starving, likely freezing as winter set in, and clean clothes and sturdy shoes would be worth as much as fine steel or aether. They didn’t appear to be reasonable, so I braced myself to either fight or run, waiting for Dean’s cue.

  The man grinned, showing several prominent gaps in his teeth. “This here is my town now. Nephilheim, the city of the angels. And I’m the voice on high!”

  Crazy talk wasn’t exactly rare among people in the Rustworks—it was why most of them were fugitives. They said things the Proctors deemed heretical and thus were condemned to lives in madhouses, at best, or execution at worst. But the conviction with which the man shouted reminded me of my mother, utterly sure her iron-induced nightmares were true and happening before her eyes.

  “He’s not going to back down,” I said to Dean.

  “Perfect. Got a plan, then?” he asked, not relaxing his grip on his knife.

  “Yeah,” I said, sliding my foot backward and shifting my weight. It was the same plan I always had when I was outnumbered by people much crazier and meaner than I was, from schoolyard bullies to these rust rats. “Run.”

  Conrad got the idea, and the three of us bolted. The ground under my feet shook as the automaton rumbled to life and the group of scavengers gave chase. One of the women let out a battle cry,
which the rest quickly took up.

  “Were people in the Rustworks always this unfriendly?” I shouted at Dean.

  “This is above and beyond, princess!” he shouted back. “Don’t know what’s gotten into them!”

  Personally, I thought sanity was a thinner thread than most people realized. And I knew the thread could snap quicker than you could take a breath.

  My own breath sawed in my chest; it seemed as if the narrow foundry avenues ran on forever, one folding into another.

  Dean skidded, his ankle twisting under him, and he fell and rolled. I reached down without breaking stride and grabbed him by the shoulder of his leather jacket, yanking him along. A bottle shattered on the ground where his head had just been, and I looked back to see the fastest of the scavengers closing in.

  “Run them down,” the automaton’s pilot bellowed. “Run those devils straight to Hades!”

  A serrated horror of a blade whizzed past my face and embedded itself in the wall of the nearest building.

  I stopped, spinning to face the person who’d thrown it. It was a woman—wild eyed, red hair bound up with gears and bolts that clanked and clacked when she moved. “I’ve had just about enough of this,” I snarled, my fear having been burned away by indignation. We weren’t a threat. We were just like them—wanted by the Proctors, just trying to survive. How dared they think they could run us down like prey? I looked forward to showing this girl she’d underestimated me.

  The girl raised another blade. “Make your move, demon!” she screamed.

  I didn’t think; I just scooped up a stray brick from near my feet and flung it at her. It thumped her in the chest and she staggered, dropping her knife. I snatched up another brick and waved it at the encroaching crowd. “Who’s next?” I yelled.

  The automaton pilot bore down on me, causing the crushing pincers that made up the thing’s hands to scissor open and shut.

  Too furious to even think of running, I pushed back with my Weird. I’d never tried to move something without touching it, or at least being within a few feet, but I pushed with all my strength, and with a great rattle and scream of rivets the tracks of the automaton seized, steam and smoke rising from the thing along with the smell of tortured metal. It shuddered to a stop.

  I stood where I was, my heart pounding, my blood roaring. Far from feeling the falling-away sensation using my Weird usually brought on, I felt inexplicably alive, all body and blood rather than that detached piece of myself that floated around inside my mind. It was exhilarating, and yet I sort of wanted to scream.

  Before I could do anything about either screaming or holding it in, Conrad grabbed me and abruptly broke the spell. “Are you crazy?” he shouted over the death throes of the automaton, which had started to shoot sparks and jets of flame from its innards as all its mechanisms failed in turn. Acrid steam blanketed the scavengers, and us.

  The scavengers milled nervously a few yards away, and then one by one they bowed their heads in my direction, nodding rhythmically and drawing toward Conrad, Dean and me in a tight knot. Behind them, the automaton pilot fell from his vehicle, beating at the flames on his jacket.

  I realized as all the scavengers’ eyes looked at me what I’d done: I’d shown my Weird to perfectly ordinary people. People who were already on edge, and would likely just as soon burn me alive as a Proctor would for my unexplained trick. I pressed my lips together, my heart throbbing with anxiety. After everything I’d done, I’d shattered it with one thoughtless move. Stupid, Aoife. So stupid.

  “We’re sorry,” the woman I’d hit with the brick wheezed. “We didn’t know.”

  I blinked at her, my rage and dread replacing itself with confusion. “Didn’t know what?”

  “That it was you,” she said. “You are Aoife Grayson? The destroyer? The one who made the big blow?”

  I was speechless for a moment, then answered hesitantly. “I’m Aoife, yes. But the Engine …” I stopped myself, unsure what to say next. “This isn’t important. Are you going to let us go?” I shouldn’t have been shocked that my name was known on the other side of the Erebus River. The Wytch King had said Draven was painting me as a radical, a heretic terrorist responsible for the senseless destruction of Lovecraft. What was more shocking about the girl’s words was that she seemed happy about what I’d done, the wreckage and the ruin. What was wrong with these people?

  “Anything you say, Destroyer,” the woman murmured, bobbing her head. She was only a few years older than me, I could see now, but her face was streaked with grease and painted up with blue woad.

  “Don’t call me that,” I said. The shakes were starting, and the familiar light-headedness of my nosebleeds. The iron was creeping in, inexorably, and fraying my emotions. “Don’t you ever call me that again.” Such a hateful name, said with such reverence. I was no better than the Crimson Guard and their aether bombs. Destroyer wasn’t a name that would ever pass my lips without making me cringe.

  “But you saved us,” the girl insisted. “You freed us from the Proctors and you rained down destruction on their world.” She stretched out her arms to point to the world around her. “You saved all of us. The ones ground under the heel of the Proctors,” she said, and the other scavengers murmured assent.

  “I didn’t do a damn thing,” I snarled at the girl, knocking her hands away from me, “except do what I thought was right.” Her reverence just reminded me all over again of my mistake, how I’d let myself be manipulated by Tremaine. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t even clever, I was gullible.

  “You’ll have no more trouble from us,” the girl promised. Then she tried a different approach, sticking her hand straight out to shake, like an eager schoolboy. “I’m Casey.”

  “Apparently you already know who I am,” I said, and sniffed, not interested in making friends with someone who’d been ready to stick a blade in me not five minutes before.

  “We all do,” Casey reiterated. “You’re a hero.”

  “How’s the bridge?” Dean cut in before I could open my mouth and start screaming incoherently at the word hero. “We need to make tracks into Lovecraft.”

  “You don’t wanna do that,” Casey told him. “The Proctors got the bridge locked down tight. And in the city, well …” She shivered, her braids clanking again.

  “You’ve been getting in all right,” I pointed out. “You have Academy and Proctor gear. I seriously doubt you carted all that with you while you were running for your lives.”

  Casey reddened a little, her freckles standing out against her pink cheeks. “I guess there’s one or two of us who make the run, yeah. Mr. Angel tells us what he needs and we go in after dark. Nephilheim is stripped bare—those people evacuated. They were the smart ones.”

  “Is Angel the cracked nut with the automaton?” Conrad said, pointing to where the hunched old man sulked at the back of the crowd.

  Casey nodded. “He was a street heretic—he preached down in the Rustworks. When the big blow happened, he said it was a sign. That we were to go and form a new city on the ashes of the old.”

  “A new city based on raiding and pillaging? History is on your side, for sure,” I said. Casey raised her skinny shoulders, missing my sarcasm.

  “He’s kinda cracked, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. My parents were transported as heretics and my trade was smuggling. Nothing to smuggle now, is there?”

  I sighed. Much as I wanted to dislike her, I couldn’t. She was skinny and starving and pathetic, more like a kitten nipping at your ankles than a junkyard dog. “Yeah, I get not having anywhere else to go,” I told her.

  “If you need supplies, you can show us how you get in and out of the city,” Dean said to her. “We can pay you.”

  I gave Dean a hard look when he mentioned payment, and he shook his head minutely at me, which I took to mean he must have something the girl wanted that wasn’t cold, hard cash. Because cash was in very short supply among our trio.

  “You really want to go?” Casey directed her q
uestion to me rather than Dean.

  I nodded. “My mother is in there. I need to get to Christobel Asylum, near Old Town.” If I could just get there, then at least I’d know. Know if she’d survived, or if I’d really done the worst thing a daughter can do, even worse than leaving the city without her.

  Casey instantly made a negative gesture. “If your mum was in Old Town, she’s gone. That place was the first to go full-on chum bucket. Ghouls up to your ears, and worse. You could hear the screaming for days.”

  “I have to go,” I insisted, although there was a roaring in my ears. Madhouses are fortresses, I reminded myself. They weren’t connected to sewers, were surrounded by thick granite walls topped with razor wire. Christobel was the most secure of them all, the place for dangerous lunatics, said to be escape proof. What kept the infected and the heretical inside could keep ghouls out. Maybe. The alternative I couldn’t handle thinking about without curling up into a useless ball.

  “I have to go,” I repeated. “I left her there.”

  Casey sighed and fidgeted. She looked back at the rest of the mob; they had put out the automaton fire and were scavenging usable parts off it like a particularly efficient swarm of fire ants. Angel stood to one side, his hair singed away, muttering invective that was no doubt directed at me.

  “Well?” I said, folding my arms and hoping my bluff of heroic toughness passed muster. “If I’m such a hero, you should trust that I know what I’m doing.”

  “Of course you do,” Casey said. “It’s just … you ain’t scared? Of what’s over there?”

  “Not a bit,” I lied, crisply and without pause.

  I was becoming a good liar. I realized that without any surprise, just like you notice that your hair has gotten longer and that your clothes are hanging off you because of the miles of walking and only intermittent food.

  Of course I was scared. I never wanted to go back to the city. I didn’t want to see the dour spires and the cold gray edifice of Ravenhouse ever again. I didn’t want to see the crater the destruction of the Engine had left, or the wreckage of the places I’d once walked through with my school bag slung over my shoulder and, relatively speaking, not a care in the world.