Caitlin Kittredge - The Iron Thorn

“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.

“I suppose,” I said. I didn’t want to be here, out in the cold. I didn’t want to see a person burned. The Proctors would say that made me unpatriotic, but dead flesh and screaming reminded me too much of the madhouse.

I had to read Conrad’s letter. If he was in trouble, if he needed me … The thought that I wouldn’t be quick enough to do any good cut at me and I crossed my arms and tucked my chin against the wind.

“Heretics.” Cecelia pursed her lips, pink like her nails. “Is there anything more disgusting than trafficking in unnatural arts?”

I watched her wet tongue flick out and take off a patch of lipstick. I could think of a few things. “I suppose you could strip the skin off of corpses and wear it, like the springheel jacks down in Old Town,” I said aloud. Cecelia wrinkled up her nose.

“You are so strange, Aoife, I swear. I guess it comes from doing such mannish work in the School of Engines, hmm?”

At least she wouldn’t come out and call me trash, like Marcos. Cecelia regarded herself as refined. I regarded her as an idiot.

“Without the Engine, there wouldn’t be any burnings,” I pointed out. “The Engine creates the steam. The steam is the blood of the city.”

“All glory to the Master Builder,” Cecelia mumbled automatically, unwinding one of her curls between her fingers.

Banishment Square was half full of people, just normal-looking people, some of whom were eating a late lunch from twists of newspaper. The centerpiece of the square, the castigator, was deserted.

“I hope the scum’s accused of something good this time,” Cecelia said. “Not just conjuring or selling magic or fortune-telling.”

Cecelia had a gram of belief under her parroting of the Proctor’s laws. Most of the students did. They wanted to believe that magic could be real, something to be giggled over in secret, like smoking or kissing or wearing a garter belt instead of the ugly, itchy underthings the Academy issued us.

I had learned the day my mother was committed that crimes against the Proctors mattered very little, individually. Belief or disbelief in heretical topics mattered even less. Some of us were just unfortunate. I was supposed to be afraid of the man about to be burned, but I was more afraid of being next.