Caitlin Kittredge - The Iron Thorn

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.

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.”