Caitlin Kittredge - The Iron Thorn

I gasped and Dean gripped my arm. “Keep it straight, doll. You went all funny.”

Day workers passing gave us a curious glance, but no more. The entire outer Engineworks was a hive, full of engineers and control operators and foremen, entrances and exits guarded by bored Proctors who yawned or stared into space.

Only the best mechanics were allowed into the works themselves. A steel hatch manned by a Proctor saw to that.

Under all of my fear and anxiety, all of the chatter around me, the Engine sang. It was a siren song, and I felt my focus slipping again.

“Aoife!” Dean gave me a sharp shake, and I knew I’d begun to wander not just in mind. “You have the plan, girl. Tell me where we need to go.”

“Main ventilation,” I said. “There.” The man-sized vent was in plain sight of the Proctor, but the goggles showed me the clear path to the inner workings of the Engine. I chewed my lip. “Hang it. We need a distraction.”

“In that case,” Dean said, “allow the master of misdirection to thrill and astound you once again.”

He grabbed hold of a passing worker. “Hey, buddy, what’s the word?”

“Huh?” The worker tried to back away, but Dean balled up his fist. “I saw you looking at my girl last night at Donnelly’s! She’s high-class, friend! She goes to the Academy! Grease monkeys like you got no business eyeballing that!”

The worker, young as Cal or me, swung his tin lunch box at Dean. “Screw off, chucklehead!” The lunch box connected with the side of Dean’s head, and even though it was protected by his fire hood he doubled over, selling the effect.

Attracted by the noise, the Proctor left his post. I turned around and put my hand against the vent lock, asking my Weird for one last favor.

After a stab against the inside of my forehead, the lock clicked, and I pulled the hatch open and stepped in. A small platform for my feet preceded a ladder and a long, black drop.

I started down, and after a moment a shadow flashed. Dean appeared, and mounted the ladder after me.

“Are you all right?” I whispered.

“Clocked me,” he said. “Bleeding a little. Going to have a scar. Should make me look dangerous.”

“As if you need any help with that,” I murmured, relieved he was all right.

We climbed down in the dark, quiet. I wanted to enjoy these last minutes with Dean.

At the bottom, I pulled the plan I had sketched from under my fire suit. “Light?” I said. Dean handed me his lighter. I checked the route, for the hundredth or thousandth time, I couldn’t be sure.

I checked what I’d drawn against the goggles. Only one hatch here, in the depths of the Engineworks, was shielded with lead sheeting, just a black blank patch in the gaze of the schema goggles. I pointed at it, flipping them onto my forehead. “There.”

We opened the hatch, and I went first once again, bracing myself to find Proctors, arrest, Grey Draven himself waiting for me on the other side.

Instead, we were alone, the mechanics and the chief engineer absent from their posts. I decided to count it as luck. I had no sense of time—they could all be having a birthday party or simply a lunch break for all I knew. I was just glad I didn’t have to trip the pressure alarm and fight my way through chaos after all.

The four-chambered heart of the Engine hummed just out of view around the iron blasting walls, and I mounted the spiraling iron steps that rose from the venting floor to concentric walkways about the heart of the works. And looking down, into the center of them …

The Engine was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The great gears turned on their planetary assembly, and the aether within the Engine’s four glass hearts burned, creating the heat that drove the city. My Weird thudded violently at contact with the only kind of machine on earth that could harness steam and aether together to create a power that could crack the world in half.

Only the four great Engines held that power.

And I was about to steal it.

I LOOKED BACK to Dean as we crested the highest catwalk. I needed his calm face and storm cloud eyes, even hidden behind a hood. The Engine sang to me slowly, and I drew its enchantment around me, warm and close and humming with so much power my head went light.

When I looked away from Dean, Tremaine was there instead.

“Aoife. You have arrived at the heart of all things.”

The Engine sound faded around me, the foreign air of another time reaching me through my mask, and I saw only a frail, rust-bitten skeleton where my feet should be resting on solid metal. The Engine itself groaned and shuddered, in death throes of grinding gears and pistons. The aether in its four gigantic globes was a sickly violet. Above and far away, air-raid Klaxons wailed. This wasn’t happening—I was being shown something, something I’d only glimpsed in the shoggoth’s dream before now.

“Where are we?” I said, my stomach dropping in concert with the shaking walkway. This wasn’t right. Wasn’t real. Something was dreadfully out of prime with the world Tremaine and I stood in. My Weird curdled, retreating into my mind like it had been burned.

“The end,” Tremaine said simply. “I cannot pass through the Iron Land, and you cannot yet venture alone into Thorn. As iron poisons the Folk, this is the intersection of time and tide upon which we must meet while you linger in that infernal Engine.” He spread his arms to encompass the ruined Engine. “You’ve seen it before, Aoife. In your dreams, perhaps? The end of all things, if you do not break the curse?”

He pointed at the Engine, now a shuddering wreck of metal, now perfectly fine and whole. My mind was playing tricks on me, my madness digging its claws tighter into my brain. “Harness that power vaster than any in Thorn. Wake the queens, Aoife. Even now that foul machine sings its desire in your blood.”

The Engine gave another clank and rattle in this time-crossed vision I was seeing. Toxic smoke and gas poured from its ruptured core, and it begged me, in the language of machines, to set it free, to channel its great death-blast away from the innocents of Lovecraft and across the lands of Thorn instead, to the queens, who would soak it up and save my city from immolation.

I could feel the Engine in my blood. All I had to do was turn the channel toward Tremaine and his queens. The Weird was my blood, my legacy. The last thing I could do before I, a small and insignificant girl, went mad and lost the gift that my lineage had granted me. I could save Dean, Cal and the Folk. That had to be enough.

Dean’s voice came to me from far away. “Aoife, wake up!”

“Why, child,” Tremaine said, stronger and more present as I hesitated for just a moment, Dean’s voice tugging at me. “Surely you are not afraid?”

The power at my fingertips gibbered and whispered seductively. It begged to be grasped, and it burned when I did. I felt I could disintegrate on the tide of power from the Engine.

“I’m not,” I told Tremaine, knotting my fists. “But I’d feel better if you stood with me.” Everything except the Weird—Dean’s voice, the real Engineworks, even the vision—was fading like a spotty aether connection. The combination of the Weird and the hallucination had crossed the wires in my mind.

Tremaine came to me, the knifelike smile playing about his face. “Of course I will stand with you, child.”

I pulled the lighter and the paper knot free of my suit and, with a flick of my thumb, touched the flame to the paper. The geas, at least, was something I was certain I wanted to send at Tremaine. Dead certain.

“And while you stand with me, I’d like it if you told the truth,” I said to Tremaine as the paper hung suspended in the air, pulling in the flame, turning into a prism of fire. The enchantment of the thing tickled and bedeviled my Weird, as if I’d sat on my hand and gotten pins and needles all up and down my arm.