I kept quiet at that. I didn’t know how I’d ever explain to Chang how it had been me who released the Old Ones. But I did know if he found out, he’d never help me.
“I’ve heard they’re not bad,” I said. “Not evil, I mean. That even though they birthed things like the shoggoths, they also gave people technology and art and the knowledge of the Gates—that there are other worlds besides Iron out there among the stars.”
“Maybe that was well and good when humans were still living in mud huts,” Chang said. “But now it’ll sow chaos, no matter what their intentions.” He tapped his fingers against the arms of the chair. “They need to be stopped, or I fear the whole world will suffer.”
“I …” I chewed on my lip, thinking of how to phrase my enticement. “If you help me get to the Deadlands, I might be able to do something about them.”
Chang cocked his head, but he didn’t regard me as if I were insane, so I pressed on. “I can … I can visit other lands, travel between them, but I can’t go to the Deadlands. Maybe there, there’s some answer to keep the living world safe.”
I agreed with Chang. The world wasn’t the same as when the Old Ones had come before. They could do real damage, and beyond damage, they could finally destroy life as we knew it. What I’d done in Lovecraft would pale in comparison. I wanted to prove Crow wrong—I wanted to prove that I could help the Iron Land, not just tear it down.
If I wanted to help Dean, I wanted to find a way to undo my bargain with the Old Ones nearly as much. If there was a choice, I knew what I should do—but maybe I wouldn’t have to choose after all.
“The question is, can you help me cross over?” I said. “And after I cross, come back again?”
“I know how to work the séance machines,” Chang said, “and I can do this, but you have to realize the cost. Even if we do contact this Dean, he might not have anything to say. Depending on how rough a soul has it when it crosses over … sometimes they’re going to be nothing but shreds. They won’t even remember what it was to be alive.”
“I don’t want to just contact Dean,” I said. That caused Chang to go still, and his perfect face to fold into a frown.
“Then … why are you here?”
“Because I know the machine can do more,” I told him. “I don’t want to contact the Deadlands. I want to go there. I want to find Dean, and I want to undo this mistake. He was never supposed to die. It should be possible to bring him back. And if you want to stop the Old Ones, I have to actually cross over. Either way, I can’t just commune with Dean’s spirit.” I fixed Chang with the stare I’d learned from my father, hard and unyielding. “Or am I wrong?”
He stared back at me, worrying the buttons on his suit vest and the chain on his watch, and narrowed his eyes. “How do you know so much about the doctor’s work?”
“Let’s just say I have a thing for machines,” I said. “Does it work to cross over or does it not?”
“You can’t,” Chang said instantly. Too fast. I was a good liar, and because of that I could spot a bad one in a second. “It was purely an experiment. It never worked right—”
“But it did work,” I insisted, standing. “At least once, correct?”
“Not really!” Chang cried. “The doctor … he …” He sighed and went to the window, pressing his forehead against the glass.
“I begged him to let me try. I didn’t want him to risk his body, his genius … but he wouldn’t hear of it. Dangerous, he said. He said he’d never send a boy to do a job he should be doing himself.”
He turned to me and ran his hands through his hair, disturbing the carefully Brylcreemed strands. “Now he’s that mess you see downstairs. He went from being sober and respectable and a great mind of science to a paranoid junkie. That’s what touching the Deadlands does to you. Not to mention the actual process you must use to cross over.”
I straightened my spine. If he was telling me all this, he was close to yielding, so I pressed my advantage. “I’m different,” I said. “I told you, I can cross worlds. It won’t affect me like it would a normal person, and besides, I’m not going there as an experiment. I’m going there to get the boy I love back, to save him from torment for all eternity. Either I’ll find him and we’ll return or I’ll be stuck there, but I’m not concerned with after. I’m just concerned with doing it.”
Chang exhaled. “I don’t know who this Dean is, but now I kind of want to meet him.”
He went to the stairs. “Follow me. I want to show you exactly what you’re in for.”
Elated, I followed. I was so close. I was going to get Dean back. Then I could decide what to do about the Brotherhood, the Old Ones, all of the disasters of the living Lands.
But first, Dean. Was it selfish? Maybe. But I couldn’t live without him, with his death on my conscience. I’d be useless to the rest of the world if I didn’t have him. I could function, get through the gray sameness of each day, but part of me would always be in the Deadlands, with him.
And I owed the rest of the world more than that. Not to mention I owed Dean. He wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t tried to help me above and beyond anything I could have asked for.
Chang bypassed the doctor’s cube and led me to a back porch closed in with tin walls and a tar-paper roof. Everything was covered with cloths and looked as if it hadn’t been used in years.
Chang lit an oil lamp above the main mass of the device, the bulk nearly as tall as I was, and pulled the cloths off. “We use a Tesla coil to generate enough power, and the doctor’s apparatus opens a small door on the same electromagnetic frequency as the Deadlands. It vibrates on the same frequency as spirits. That’s how we communicate.”
He pointed to an aethervox equipped with a wax record that had been hooked into the apparatus. “This records their voices, and we play it back to get answers to the questions people ask.”
I watched as he moved around, smoothing the dust off things with his sleeve. So far it all sounded possible, but it wasn’t what I needed.
“The real trick is the other way,” Chang said. “The doctor had a theory that you could make a living person’s soul vibrate at the same rate, let it cross the door into the Deadlands temporarily and then change the vibration to call it back. Enable your consciousness to cross over.”
“How do you do it?” I asked, staring at the machine. It seemed impossible, but I was desperate and willing to try anything. I’d made peace with that fact long before I’d made it to San Francisco.
“That’s the part I need to tell you about,” Chang said, his expression somber. “In order to cross over to the Deadlands, your soul has to be untethered from your conscious mind. And to untether it, you have to die.”
I must have stared at him, my mouth open. That defeated the whole purpose, didn’t it? If you crossed into the Deadlands dead, you stayed. That was how they worked. That was why they were impenetrable even to someone like me, who could cross any living barrier between the Lands.
Draven’s taunting grin popped back into my mind. To get to the Deadlands, you have to die. He couldn’t be right. If Grey Draven was right about something and I was wrong, I was going to scream.
“Not permanently die,” Chang clarified, sensing my disbelief. “Just for a minute or two. To touch the same frequency as the dead. Then the operator brings you back and keeps you breathing, but your soul is free, floating outside your body.”
“And your body?” I said. This was sounding worse and more foolhardy by the second.
“As long as you’re crossed over,” Chang said, “your body is vulnerable, lying there in a coma. It’s soulless. Anything could fill the vessel. The doctor had some ideas to combat that, but we never got to try them. He came back and he was … well, different. Whatever he saw over there destroyed him.”
“And that’s the only way?” I said. I was desperate, but I also fervently wished there was an alternative.
“That’s it,” Chang said. “And we never found a trustworthy method of causing death, e
ither. The doctor had me smother and then resuscitate him. I won’t do that again. I just won’t.”
I contemplated the apparatus, the horn of the aethervox, the power coil, all of it. This was the only way, I reminded myself. The only way I could begin to even contemplate trying to stop what I’d caused with the Old Ones. Dean’s soul was in there, just beyond what I could see, tormented and alone and afraid.
“All right.” I faced Chang. “If I find a way to die that doesn’t render my body useless or ask you to kill me, you’ll help?”
“Will you leave me alone until I do?” Chang said. “Honestly, I thought that whole speech would put you right off, but you just might be even crazier than the doctor.”
“Crazy and I are old friends,” I confirmed. “So will you do it?”
“Fine,” Chang sighed. “But only if you find a better way to go under. Smothering is dangerous—you might not wake up again if the other person presses too hard. You need something that will stop your heart without hurting the rest of you.”
I thought of Madame and her deft hand with laudanum.
“That part won’t be a problem,” I told Chang.
9
Beyond the Spirit Wall
I SLEPT FITFULLY, AND only slept at all because I was so exhausted my body decided it didn’t trust me to keep my eyes open. I didn’t dream, and that was something. Constant nightmares had been my companion ever since Dean died.
I missed him so much it was a physical ache. His hands, his smile, the feel of his gaze against my skin. I needed him, and there was no use pretending otherwise.
Dawn was just a thought around the edges of the sky when I got up and got dressed. Or rather, I started to get dressed, then looked at the jumpsuit I’d worn since Alcatraz and wrinkled my nose.
“Clothes in the wardrobe.”
I jumped at the voice, then saw Chang standing in the doorway, holding a mug that smelled of coffee and regarding me. I pulled the blanket around myself.
“Sorry. I didn’t see you there.”
“I’m quiet,” he said, and smiled at me. “They’re not girl’s clothes, but they smell better than what you showed up in.”
“Thank you,” I said, shutting the door on him while I got dressed. I thought about Chang while I put on trousers and a shirt and jacket with sleeves far too long for my arms.
Chang was charming, that much was sure, and handsome, but in the balance of things he had agreed to help me awfully easily, and I hadn’t survived by falling for every handsome face that offered me assistance without questioning the motive behind it. I’d made that mistake with Tremaine. It wasn’t happening again. When I was clothed, I went down to the main part of the shop.
“Why are you doing this?”
Chang was cooking eggs on a small burner on top of a potbellied woodstove in a corner, and he raised an eyebrow at me. “Doing what?”
“Helping me,” I said. “Really, you gave in with hardly any fight.” I looked around and saw all the sharp and heavy things I could use to defend myself. That and Cal being within screaming distance emboldened me. “Are you with them? The Brotherhood of Iron?”
“Brotherhood?” Chang looked genuinely confused, eyebrows drawn and mouth slack. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Aoife.”
“I know the Brotherhood can be persuasive when it wants something,” I said. “I know they keep tabs on people like you and the doctor. And I know that getting me to willingly put myself in a coma, ripe for capturing, would be just the sort of thing they’d pull.”
I picked up the knife sticking out of the cutting board at Chang’s elbow and ran the blade against my thumb. “It’s a simple question. Did they bribe or threaten you to get to me? I know they’re in San Francisco. Tell me the truth.”
Chang shook his head. “I don’t know where you’re getting this idea from, Aoife, but I’m just doing this because I can tell you’re going to keep trying with or without me. And next time, you might not run into someone who’s as nice as I am. You might run into someone who truly wants to hurt you and your friends. Someone this Brotherhood of yours has gotten to.”
He put the eggs on a plate and sat down to eat. “Desperation makes people stupid. I’ve seen that with the doctor, and I’d really prefer to keep others from that path, if I can.”
He gestured to a seat across from him. “Now can I have the knife back? I need it to cut my fruit.”
I took my seat, warily. Chang sighed when I handed over the blade. I still had misgivings, but he was so calm and open, so unruffled by my accusation, I had a hard time believing my own paranoia. The Brotherhood was sneaky, but they couldn’t be everywhere.
“You haven’t had many people be kind to you, have you?” Chang asked.
“No,” I said honestly. “Nobody, really, except Cal and Conrad. And Dean.”
“That explains it, then,” he said. “Why you want him back so badly. And I’m smart enough to know I can’t stop you. So why don’t you eat something, and I’ll see about getting the lab back to specs.”
A bell jangled from the back room where the doctor stayed, and Chang’s pleasant expression vanished. “I’ll be back,” he sighed. “Just have to go and see what he needs.”
As soon as Chang left, I got up and found a pad of receipts and a pen. I scribbled a note to Cal and Conrad so they wouldn’t worry about me, and then found a heavy rain jacket hanging by the back door. I had an idea of where I was going, and knew I wouldn’t get another chance before I had to tell Cal or Conrad where I was going and they tried to convince me otherwise.
They’d probably be able to talk me out of it—I knew even as I slipped out this was a bad idea, but I didn’t have a better one.
The way back to Madame Xiang’s wasn’t hard to figure out—we’d only made a few turns when she’d brought us to the Boneyard. The streets were quieter in the early morning, but not by much. Drunks were stumbling out of bars and laborers were crowding into round-the-clock diners. The smells and sounds were still persistent.
A Proctor airship hummed overhead, toward the bay, but it didn’t slow down or drop altitude. This place truly was closed off to the Proctors, and, I hoped, to the Brotherhood after we’d escaped them.
Fang from the night before opened Madame’s door with his same lack of expressiveness. I stood my ground.
“I need to see Madame,” I said.
“She’s asleep,” Fang grunted.
“It’s important,” I told him. “I’ll owe her a favor.”
Fang grinned. “I think you already owe her one, little girl. I doubt you want to owe her a second.”
“Fang, for goodness sake, stop letting all the warm air out.” Madame was wearing an impeccable silk robe printed with cherry blossoms, and her hair was wrapped in an orange scarf that set off her skin. If possible, she was even more gorgeous than before.
“Oh,” she said. “You again. I thought I’d shooed all the strays away from my doorstep.”
“I need something,” I said. Madame smiled, taking a cigarette from a small mesh purse and waiting for Fang to come light it. When he did, I moved inside and shut the door, which made him grunt with irritation. I hoped he didn’t take too much offense. I didn’t want to be on the bad side of somebody that large.
“I thought you needed something last night,” Madame said. “I was under the impression I’d already bargained with you.”
“I know, and I’ll still carry the message,” I said. “But in order to do that I need something, and I think you’re the only one who can help me.”
Madame sighed and stubbed out her cigarette in a nearby bowl. “Fine. What now?”
“I need something that will stop my heart,” I said. “Just for a few moments. I need to be dead, but I also need something that will let them bring me back.”
“So basically, you’re asking me to help you cheat,” Madame said. “Tsk, tsk.”
“Please,” I said. “It’s the only way this will work.”
“I didn’t sa
y no,” Madame said. “I rather like cheating.” She drew close to me, and I could smell cold cream and a hint of old perfume rolling off her. “But you’re going to owe me a lot more than a little message to my brother. You do understand, yes? What it means to owe the tong a favor?”
“I’ve owed favors to people a lot worse than you,” I told Madame, and met her eyes.
She laughed. “All right. Come with me.”
I felt my body loosen, the tension I’d been holding inside running out of my skin and bones. “Thank you, Madame Xiang.”
“Call me Lei,” she said. “Close as we’ve become, it seems only fitting.”
She led me through the curtain, into the back room, which was a parlor and a small kitchen crammed together. Lei didn’t stop, though. She took me to a door that led to the first floor, a windowless room that couldn’t be seen from the street.
“I’d much rather do this in a basement,” she said, “but this place isn’t stable. Rat-infested mud hole that this city is. You know when they started the Engine under Alcatraz, it cracked the whole city in two? That there’s still wreckage under the streets they covered up and pretended wasn’t there? There’s a giant chasm in the basement. Under this whole section of the city, really. We use the tunnels for smuggling, when we have things we’d rather the Proctors not see.”
She lit an oil lamp and perused the shelves. They seemed to close in all around us, full of bottles and jars, some containing specimens of things both recognizable and not, most containing brilliantly hued liquids in every color of the spectrum.
“The medium thing just makes ends meet,” Lei said. “What my mother taught me is to be a poisoner. I can mix and match anything you’d like from these jars. Even death.”
I watched her as she ran her hands over the bottles. I didn’t think Lei would poison me in any way that I couldn’t wake up from eventually, but I didn’t trust her either, so I kept my eyes on her.
“You’re certainly good at knocking people out,” I said.
“That?” She laughed lightly. “That’s just a little sleepy-time, some opium and a few herbs. I have one that will leave you with no memory at all. But I wouldn’t use that one on stupid kids. That’s reserved for real problems.”
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