Her face relaxed, and she stepped inside. “That’s all right, dear. I’ll keep this brief. I was going to tell you at supper, but …”
I lowered my head and hoped I looked appropriately guilty. Really, I was just praying Don’t look at the bed.
“Aoife, there’s no easy way to tell you this,” Mrs. Fortune said, crossing her broad arms under her equally broad bosom. “The Headmaster requires your presence on Tuesday, after supper, for a meeting about your future here.”
I kept my expression blank, though inside everything lurched. If you want a course on keeping your face composed, become a city ward and go through a few strict homes where the nuns smack your hand or mouth for the slightest snicker or frown. “I don’t understand,” I said, though I did. I was keeping up the order, the routine and sameness that kept truth at bay. Mostly. Not now, with the letter burning a hole in my mattress.
“Aoife, you’re not unintelligent,” said Mrs. Fortune. “For a girl to be accepted into the School of Engines at all is a feat. Don’t disgrace yourself by playing dumb.”
“I don’t understand,” I repeated, softly and innocently. My voice broke and I hated myself for it. “My birthday isn’t for another month.”
“Yes, and on that day, if we are to look at things historically, certain … events may occur,” said Mrs. Fortune. “Your mother began to show signs at sixteen, although sadly I understand we don’t know when or how she was exposed. Your family carries a latent infection, this has been proven by her doctors. The Headmaster needs to prepare you with certain truths. That’s all.” Her big face was flushed, red from neck to hair, and she swayed from one side to the other in her hiking boots, like we were on the deck of a ship.
I stayed quiet and listened to my breath hiss in and out through my nostrils. Proven my behind. There was no reliable test for the necrovirus—half the time someone was committed because someone else didn’t like their look. That much, I had learned from Dr. Portnoy and my dealings with the asylum.
Mrs. Fortune clucked when I was quiet. “Do you have anything to say for yourself, Aoife?”
“I’m not my mother,” I snarled, vicious as the nightjar. I was different than Nerissa. I didn’t want to wander lost in dreams. I had iron and engines in my blood.
“No, dear, we’re not saying anything of the sort, but you must admit that Conrad …,” she started. I glared at her, a hard glare made of tempered glass. Mrs. Fortune swallowed her last words.
“I’m not my brother, either,” I ground out. “Is that what the Headmaster will say? We’re mad because my mother didn’t marry our father? Her being easy made us mad? Well, it’s not true and I’m not mad.” Heat rose in my cheeks like too much steam in a feed pipe. The pressure was going to make me explode.
Mrs. Fortune, for her part, looked relieved to be back on familiar footing. “You will not speak to a head of house so, young woman. Now finish your schoolwork and get into your nightclothes. Lights out in one hour.”
“I’m not going to go mad,” I said again, loudly, as she backed out of the room.
“Oh, Aoife.” Mrs. Fortune sighed. “How can anyone possibly know that for sure?” She smiled sadly and shut the door.
The aether hissed. I felt tears spill over my cheeks and I didn’t wipe them away, just let them grow cold on my skin.
I waited for a good while after Fortune’s footsteps moved away, then grabbed the letter from under my pillow and tore it open with my thumbnail. Three other letters had come in the year since my brother Conrad went away, and I kept the envelopes in my footlocker, underneath my blue sweater with the moth hole in the armpit.
The letters in his handwriting always arrived invisibly, never more than a few lines, but they told me that Conrad was still alive. After his escape from the madhouse, where the Proctors sent him after his sixteenth birthday, it was the only sign I had left. Treated with ghost ink, the letters smelled of vinegar and smoke. Ghost ink had been Conrad’s favorite trick—treat the paper and the ink with the patented Invisible Ghosting Liquid, and when you held the missive over heat and set it aflame, innocuous poems turned into full-length letters written in smoke that would disappear when the paper finally burned down to ash.
If the Headmaster or the Proctors in Ravenhouse, dedicated to protecting us from the heretics and viral creatures, found out I was getting letters from a condemned madman, I’d be locked up as quickly as Conrad had been. I unfolded the thick paper, feeling the fibers coarse against my fingertips, expecting something like the last letter:
Winter comes with sharp teeth
Wind to polish my bones
Which, burned, read:
Dear Aoife,
Cold here, and snowing, dreary and dark as the Catacombs in Ravenhouse at home …
Conrad never sounded mad in his letters. Then again, to anyone who didn’t know her, my mother didn’t seem particularly mad at first glance. Until she started talking about lily fields and dead girls. You had to look deep, in the cracks and crevices, to see the madness of the infection eating her insides. Once you really looked, though … there was no question it was there. Just like Conrad’s words in smoke.
This newest letter was crinkled, like it had been shoved in a pocket too quickly, and across the center of the page a single word sprawled.
HELP
I stared at the word, the word in Conrad’s hand, the desperate word glaring at me from the page. I stared for a long time, my mind whirling like a winter storm. It was so unlike him, so brief and terrifying. The Conrad I knew could always organize his thoughts, like a professor laying out a lesson plan. He was the man of our house. Conrad never asked me for my help. With anything.
I didn’t know that Conrad was in danger. I didn’t know that the letter was anything except the deranged mind of a boy driven mad with the necrovirus, spilled on the page.
But I still sat, looking at the letter and wishing I could creep away to burn the real words inside out, until Cecelia came back from her rehearsal and the heads of house dimmed the lamps for sleep.
Heresy and Banishment
I FELL ASLEEP with Conrad’s letter crumpled in my fist, still unburned, and was little use to anyone the next day, least of all myself during my classes. Fortunately, our only morning engagement was Civic Duty with Professor Swan, something all students in Schools were required to take and, I was fairly certain, none paid any attention to.
Cal leaned across the aisle when I slid into my seat. “This should be good. He’s got new pamphlets.”
Marcos Langostrian turned around and glared at us. “Show some respect. The Bureau of Proctors print those for a reason.”
“Yeah.” Cal leaned back in his seat and laced his fingers behind his head. “To make naughty little boys like you afraid of the dark.”
“Cal,” I sighed. Cal’s favorite program on the tubes was Have Gun, Will Travel and sometimes he took it entirely too far.
“Get bent, Honor Scout,” Marcos hissed. Cal flushed. The muscles in his neck tensed and I reached across the aisle and touched him on the elbow.
“He’s not worth getting a detention over.”
Marcos sneered at me, and I rolled my eyes at him. The Langostrians lived on College Hill. They dined with the Head of the City on Hallows’ Eve. I’d prefer to spend the rest of my life with Cal and his flat wrong-side-of-the-track accent than five seconds alone with Marcos.
Professor Swan rapped his podium with a pointer. “That’s enough, students. This instruction is your duty to the city, to the country and to the Master Builder.” He turned and tacked a new notice, bearing the black border of the Proctors and the signature of Grey Draven, Head of the City, on the board, then glared at each of us in turn.
Cal smirked at me. “Told you,” he mouthed. I kept my eyes on the new pamphlet the professor had hung. It looked like a funeral notice, heavy with ink and import.
Conrad’s letter, the weight of it in my pocket, reminded me that the Proctors, Draven and the Master Builder were watching.
It was hard to smile back at Cal.
“Stand and recite the pledge,” Swan ordered. He was thin and sallow, and his collegiate robes flapped around him like a black version of his namesake bird. More than his robe, his beaky nose and his hard black eyes, which picked out any imperfection or deviation from the laws of the Master Builder, reminded me of a crow, not a swan.
I mouthed the pledge while the rest of the class droned. “I pledge to remain rational and faithful to the foundations of science, laid down by my forefathers in defense of reason.…” I hadn’t spoken the words since Conrad left. They weren’t words that held any comfort. You couldn’t defend against a virus no one had found a cure for in seventy years. You couldn’t fight off a person’s delusions with science. Not if they really believed.
My eyes wandered to the twin portraits of the President and Grey Draven above the board. Draven’s piercing eyes accused me of all the sins I already knew I was guilty of—lying, communicating with a madman, shirking my duties as a scientist and a citizen. I felt the weight of every one of my transgressions under Draven’s eyes, the gimlet stare that had made him the youngest Head of the City Lovecraft had ever seen. He’d promised to clean Lovecraft of heresy, to keep every rational citizen safe in their home. With the might of the Bureau of Proctors behind him, he did what everyone who bought their party line considered a fine job. And he never missed a chance to plaster his picture on every surface.
Head of the City was a dire and powerful position, but there was talk that Draven could be the president of the country before he was through. I hated having him stare at me in every classroom. I looked at the floor until the pledge was through and Swan snapped, “Sit down. No talking.”
He rapped his pointer against the new Proctor notice. “There have been reports of viral creatures as far north as Storm Avenue,” he said. “The Lovecraft Proctors remind us all, for our own safety, that consorting with those poor souls struck down and changed into inhuman fiends by the necrovirus is a crime punishable by confinement in the Catacombs.”
Cal sobered, and I knew he was remembering the nightjar. The Proctors did their best to keep Lovecraft free of viral creatures, but there were old sewers, old train tunnels and the river itself gave birth to some of the worst. No one could keep the horrors from creeping in at the edges of things. We weren’t an island, like New Amsterdam, and we weren’t walled like the modern marvel of San Francisco. Lovecraft was a previrus city, and it was dangerous.
“Contact with a viral creature can what, students?” Professor Swan fixed us with his pale eyes. His robes made him appear to be bodiless, just a diaphanous mass.
Marcos raised his hand. “Cause madness in a healthy person, Professor. In almost every case.”
Cal dropped his Civic Duty text on the floor with a crack like a steam rifle. “Or sometimes just a nasty case of influenza. Isn’t that what you had last week, Langostrian? Been kissing ghouls?”
The class tittered, and Professor Swan tinted from pale to flushed like a developing sepia. “Daulton. Two detention hours.” The rest of us got another sweep of his lantern eyes. “You think it’s a diversion, this talk of protecting our city, the city the Master Builder gave us?” He hit the podium again. “The world is a harsh place, a dark place, made darker by the heretics who would fill your heads with fancy notions like magic spells and fortune-telling. They do this to keep you from your true purpose. The necrovirus is not fancy. It exists, and it eats at each and every one of your reprehensible, superstitious cores. Now each of you will write an essay on the menace of madness infection to Lovecraft and how you suggest we better defend our city.”
The class groaned. Marcos muttered, “Thanks a lot, Cal.”
“You started it, twit,” I grumbled back. Marcos gave me a baleful look.
“Don’t you have a birthday coming up, Grayson?”
My cleverness died in my throat, replaced by a lump. Was there no one in this damn school who didn’t know about that?
Before I could grab him again, Cal started out of his seat. “You need to learn how to speak to a lady, pip-squeak.” Someone Cal’s size calling anyone a pip-squeak would have been funny, if Marcos hadn’t looked ready to pound his face.
“Sit down,” Swan bellowed. “Two more hours.”
“Just leave it,” I said to Cal. It was plain truth that I’d always be a city ward, the daughter of a madwoman, to Marcos. It was a fact of life, like uniform stockings itching behind the knees—unpleasant and inevitable. Fighting back just told the Marcoses of the world that their barbs hit home.
Cal glared at the back of Marcos’s head, slick with hair oil. “He shouldn’t say those things.”
“He can say whatever he wants. His brother is a Proctor in their national headquarters and his family could buy and sell me ten times over.” Not that it wouldn’t give me immense satisfaction to see Marcos take a sock in the jaw, just once. I filled up my pen and pressed it against the ruled paper. A little bit of ink dribbled out and made a dark sunburst on the top line.
“One last announcement before you begin work,” Swan said. “The heads of house will be conducting their monthly sweep for heretical contraband tomorrow. Remember, merits will be granted to those who turn in their roommates. Informants are the backbone of the Proctors. All glory to the Master Builder.”
The class chorused back raggedly. I didn’t join in. Heretics—heretics who practiced magic, at any rate—were a child’s story. Those glass-eyed fanatics who threw Molotov cocktails at Proctor squads could no more practice real magic than I could fly without a dirigible. Magic couldn’t hold a candle to the necrovirus, to the great Lovecraft Engine that turned below the city, to the invisible grace of the aether. There was no magic. Not the way the heretics believed. If there were, why would I be stuck in Civic Duty writing a pointless essay?
The Engine had powered the city for twice as long as my lifetime, a heart made of brass and iron and steam. The Engineworks would be my eventual workplace, my home. Unlike spells and scrying, the Engine was a real place, a real device that managed to keep an entire city warm and lit and free of ghouls. That was real magic, not the ephemeral and heretical conjurations of self-proclaimed witches.
That was what Professor Swan and the Proctors would say, at any rate. My mother would disagree.
Instead of writing the essay Swan wanted, I pulled out Conrad’s letter and read it. HELP, over and over again.
Things didn’t improve during our schematics exam in the afternoon. I watched, my stomach leaden, as each student went forward and placed their folded plans on the professor’s table.
Finally, when it was just Cal and me left in the room, I gathered my things and walked out.
Cal caught up with me in the passageway, in between the stone pillars that held up the slate-roofed porch of the main classrooms. The rain was light, just fingers of mist drifting over the peaked gables of Blackwood Hall.
“Hey,” Cal said. “You didn’t turn in your schematic.”
“Hey, you’ve got eyes,” I returned, my anger landing on Cal instead of the one I really wanted to scream at. Cal’s mouth twisted downward.
“Aoife, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I grumbled. The failed exam was just the final nail in the coffin. Nothing had been right since I’d seen my mother. Cal leaned against the opposite pillar, a genial scarecrow after all the crops have gone.
“You know, if you fail exams this year we can’t apprentice at the Engineworks together next.”
Apprenticeships were far from my mind at that moment. Conrad’s letter was a guilty secret barbing me from where it sat in the pocket of my uniform skirt, and Dr. Portnoy’s words were its sound track. An experimentation facility. HELP. Over and over.
“I have to go,” I said, gathering my books and satchel. “Study,” I added.
Cal drooped at the shoulders like a sad clockwork man.
“Yeah. I have to get to detention anyway. See you after supper.” Cal loped away and I fingered
the letter again. I needed to find a quiet place to burn it, to read the real words hidden in the ink. My dorm room was useless, with Cecelia meddling in everything. I’d make up for snapping at Cal later. That was the thing about Cal—you could push him away and he kept coming back. Cal was loyal. He wouldn’t hold my mood against me, and because of that I felt doubly guilty for snapping. I didn’t think of it as often as I should, but truthfully Cal was the kind of friend a poor girl like me should thank the Master Builder for.
And I would. Once I’d read Conrad’s letter.
“Aoife!” Cecelia’s bell of a voice cut into my thoughts and made me jump. She grinned at me. “Did you want to come?”
“No, I have to make up my schematics exam …,” I started, surprised to see her outside our building. The Lovecraft Conservatory, where she studied, was on the other side of the campus. “Come to what?” I cocked my head at her flushed cheeks.
“It’s a burning!” Cecelia exclaimed. “It’ll be the last one before Hallows’ Eve. Come on!” She tugged me along and I had to follow, or be yanked off my feet.
“I have a lot of work to do …,” I tried again, diplomatically hinting I’d rather not go. Students were filtering in and out the front gate, crimson scarves like comet tails in the bright afternoon. The mist-shrouded night before seemed like a year ago.
“Work, shirk.” Cecelia giggled. “Get it? Besides, you work too much anyway. Just look at your hair. You’d think you’d never met a brush.”
She tugged me along and we walked down Storm Avenue, the leaves from the oaks swirling around our ankles. The rain stopped as we walked and the sky turned bright. The stone in the houses along Storm sparkled diamond hard.
“This is exciting, huh?” Cecelia trilled, squeezing my arm. I managed to pull away, this time. Cecelia was small, every bit of her round and bouncy from her curls to her patent-leather pumps. She could be excited over everything from a concert to a burning. I was less excitable. Mrs. Fortune would say that was why I was an engineer.
The Iron Thorn Page 3