Caitlin Kittredge - The Nightmare Garden

I paused, the teacup halfway to my lips. “Tests?” I said, pulling back from Crosley warily. Nothing that started with “running a few tests” ever ended well, in my experience.

“Relax!” Crosley boomed genially. “We just want to see what your Weird can do, and how much we can still teach you. We must use the Gates for good instead of as instruments of disaster going forward, and to do that we have to see where your talent lies.”

His hand landed on my shoulder, and the weight pushed me deeper still into the armchair. “Does that sound all right to you, my dear?”

That sounded just the opposite of all right. “I’ll prove to you I have my Weird,” I said. “But I don’t relish being poked at like a laboratory rat.”

Crosley folded his fingers together in a motion I recognized from when my professors were trying to make a pop quiz appealing. “Terrible what happened to your mother, Aoife. Just terrible. And young Conrad showed symptoms as well before he removed himself from the Iron Land. We know that if you stay away from iron, out of cities and such, the onset is slower, and comes not at all in Thorn, but if you stay in the Iron Land, you’ll inevitably go mad, and I think it’s a crime that Archie would never allow me to help him with his children’s … unique bloodline. I’m confident that with time, we can find a way to help you. So you won’t have to risk iron madness every time you go into a city.”

That all sounded, to put it mildly, just a bit too good to be true. “How do I know you won’t just chain me up and force me to use my Weird to do whatever you want with machines and the Gates?”

Crosley laughed. It was deep and wet, from the lungs of a man, I realized, who was gravely ill. His face turned crimson, with amusement or lack of air, I couldn’t tell. “Aoife, if we wanted to imprison you, wouldn’t doing so immediately after you’d arrived have made more sense than offering you a conversation and a nice cup of tea?”

I set the teacup back down and looked him in the eye. “There are all different kinds of prisons, Mr. Crosley.”

“Smart girl. So there are,” he said, “but this is not a prison, it’s a promise. You let me run my tests and cooperate, and I will not only give you access to the Codex, I will find a solution to your iron madness. A permanent one. You won’t have to end up like poor lost Nerissa.”

I twitched at my mother’s name crossing his lips. He didn’t know anything about us, spies or not. Nerissa had done the best she could. In our small apartment, before she was committed, we’d at least been free.

I didn’t let any of that come across to Crosley, and he spread his hands. “I ask again—does this sound equitable to you, young Miss Grayson?”

I looked into his eyes and found the same falseness there I knew I was showing in my own. “Sounds fantastic,” I said dryly, but Crosley didn’t pick up on my sarcasm, just grinned again and left me in the care of Casey.

She sat with me while I drank my tea, chattering about the great cause of the Brotherhood of Iron, Tesla and his prototype Gate, and how she’d personally seen two Fae! In the flesh! “They were creepy,” she said, and shuddered. “Had hollow spaces where their eyes should be, and fangs.”

I didn’t bother telling her that she’d most likely seen something that had crawled from the Mists rather than full-blooded Fae. Besides, perfect faces with gleaming beauty and dead, unblinking eyes weren’t really any less terrifying.

After I finished my tea, she guided me to a guest room, where a cot piled high with furs and lit by the same eerie purple aether lamps greeted me. The Brotherhood, for all their status as fugitives, had means far beyond even the Proctors. Clean clothes waited for me, thick woolen socks and silk pajamas that trapped the heat next to my skin, and I burrowed under the blankets, some of the hides nearly as thick as carpets.

It was pure luck, burrowed as I was, that I heard the door lock from the outside. I’d probably been meant to fall asleep, warm and dry and full of soporific tea, lulled into a false sense of security by Casey and her uncomplicated nature.

That jibed a bit with what Archie had told me. I didn’t think his view of the Brotherhood of Iron was entirely fair, but I also knew my father wasn’t stupid. If he’d broken with the Brotherhood, there was a good reason. At the very least, I was the daughter of the man who’d stolen Harold Crosley’s own daughter, and I’d broken the Gates besides. Nobody, no matter their nature, was that forgiving.

And now I was locked in, and even if I wasn’t, they’d taken away my cold-weather gear. If I went back onto the ice dressed as I was, I’d be dead inside of ten minutes.

With that cheerful thought ringing in my head, along with a dozen considered and discarded plans to find information about the clock, I managed to fall asleep, but too lightly for any dreams except the dark things, writhing and twisting through an empty, starless sky.

The next day, I was woken by a white-clad servant. He gave me breakfast in my room, and soon after, Casey appeared. After I’d dressed in more brand-new clothes, smart trousers and a black jacket this time, we went together to a sort of laboratory, just a long table and a few microscopes and other scientific instruments arranged along the wall.

Crosley and a panel of stern-faced men waited for me. A single chair sat before the table, and in front of me was a machine with a variety of needles for scratching data onto a roll of paper.

The other end of the machine had wires running out of it, and one of the anonymous men taped two of the electrical leads to my temples. They were cold, and I flinched, but I tried to act as if everything were all right.

“It’s just for a few readouts,” Crosley assured me, placing his hand on my shoulder. “We need to quantify your Weird scientifically.”

I turned to look at him. “Did you do this to my father?”

“Of course,” Crosley said smoothly, not missing a beat. “All Gateminders go through these tests when they ally themselves with the Brotherhood of Iron.” His grip tightened, his nails digging in beneath my collarbone just a fraction, and I bit my lip. Don’t react. Don’t give him any reason to doubt you .

I sighed, trying to focus on my Weird. There was virtually no metal in the Bone Sepulchre, and my headaches and the shadows I glimpsed from the corners of my eyes had all but ceased. That, at least, was a relief. “What am I supposed to do for these tests, then?” I asked Crosley.

He took his pocket watch off the fob and placed it before me. “Can you wind it?” he asked. “Destroying things isn’t terribly useful in the long run, Aoife. The best weapon is one that you can carefully aim and fire.”

“Is that what I am to you?” I asked him, examining the watch. It was heavy, gold-plated, overdone. Much like Harold Crosley himself. “A weapon?” That was a stupid question. I already knew the answer.

“It’s what we’d like you to be,” Crosley said, with that clasp on my shoulder that was becoming all too familiar. “We’re not the Proctors, Aoife. We won’t force you to do anything. But we’d very much like you to choose to use your gift for the good of all, not just the few the Proctors deem worthy.” He leaned down as if to share a secret. It was a ploy that hadn’t worked on me when I was eight, and it didn’t work now. I was actually a bit insulted that he’d patronize me so. Maybe I’d overdone it on the simpleton act.

“Wind the clock, Aoife,” Crosley murmured. “Use your Weird for us. Show me that you’ll use it for the Brotherhood and be the loyal soldier your father refused to be.”

That was it, I realized. I had to tell the truth now, and then I could lie with impunity. I had to let the Brotherhood see the full extent of my skill with my Weird, and then I would be home free, because if they knew what I could do, they’d think they owned me, that only they could keep me from another event like the Engine. They’d believe that I was being honest with them, and I’d be free to do what needed to be done.