“When. Aren’t you the optimist,” I teased.
“You did save me from the nightjar,” Cal said with a smile. “I feel my chances of coming back to school with all of my fingers and toes are better than average.”
I knew that fighting off viral creatures was unladylike at best, but to have Cal’s praise warmed me a bit, even though my extremities and nose were still numb. It made me feel that maybe this wasn’t a doomed idea, that we could find the Nightfall Market, find Conrad and manage to come back again. Never mind that I’d never heard anything but thirdhand rumors of how to find the place, and the Proctors were eager to deny its existence at every turn. Something they couldn’t shut down and couldn’t even find was a grave embarrassment to law and order.
When we reached the gate, a plump ex-Proctor sat in the security officer’s hut, and he stepped out to stop us. Before he could shout at us for being out of doors without permission, I held up the shirt. “Mrs. Fortune said I might be let out to go to the China Laundry.” I practiced my poor-ward-of-the-city look again.
The guard examined us. “Just you,” he said. “You, boy—stay in.”
“Oh no,” I said, couching the protest as alarm. A regular girl would be terrified to leave the safety of the Academy after dark. “She was very firm that I have an escort.”
“Old Fussbudget Fortune ain’t his head of house,” said the guard. “He stays.”
“But—” Cal started. The guard rattled his nightstick against the post.
“You deaf, kid? Get back to supper and leave me be.”
The old lump was clearly immune to my charms, so I switched to the other sort of false face I knew—the snooty Academy student with no time for the help. “Could you just open the gate and let me launder my only blouse?” I snapped, trying to adopt the tone of Marcos Langostrian or Cecelia. The guard grunted, but he took the keys off his belt and walked over to the bars.
“Get ready,” I murmured to Cal, slipping my gloved palm into his. His hand was cool and thin, and when I squeezed I could feel all his small bones.
The gate opened, and I started walking, Cal pulled with me. The officer gawped. “You there! Student out of bounds!”
“Dammit to the deep, anyway,” Cal said. He just stood there, and I jerked him with me.
“Run, idiot!”
We made an odd pair fleeing down Cornish Lane, past closed-up shops and slumbering vendor carts. Cal loped along, stumbling over his own feet. I put my head down and ran as if all the ghouls of Lovecraft’s sewers were on my heels.
At the intersection of Cornish and Occidental, I could still hear the shriek of the officer’s whistle, and I ran harder. Cal gasped like the faulty bellows in the machine shop. “Maybe … we … should … go … back.”
“And then what?” I shouted as we took a hard left, pelting past the colorful Romany shacks of Troubadour Road, toward the train tracks and the bridge.
“I don’t”—Cal sucked in a lungful of the night air—“I don’t know, but this is a terrible … terrible … idea!”
We crossed the tracks, like a frontier border in their cold iron gleam under the moonlight. I twisted my ankle in the gravel as we stumbled down the other side of the embankment, and then Joseph Strauss’s marvelous bridge was in front of us, leading across the river and into the maze of the foundry complex.
We were in the train yard, among rusted boxcars and Pullman carriages waiting for engines that would never arrive. I could see the pedestrian walkway of the bridge beyond the fence, and I watched it while Cal and I leaned against a United Atlantic car to catch our breath.
Two Proctors in black hoods stood at the crossing, silent, their long coats fluttering around their legs in the wind off the river. One hid a yawn behind his fist, but the other’s eyes traveled into all the dark corners of the train yard. Searching, watching for movement in the shadows.
“Come on,” I said, tugging on Cal’s arm when he just stared at the Proctors, licking his lips. “We can cut through the yard and take the old coal paths down to the Rustworks.” Cal still didn’t move, so I tugged harder and he grunted.
“You’re not very gentle. Girls are supposed to be gentle,” he grumbled, finally creeping after me.
“You should know me better by now,” I teased softly. I stuffed my ruined blouse into a dustbin as we crept by the South Lovecraft Station, its brick spires reaching up into the night, and we threaded between rolling stock sleeping on the rail, leaving the lights of Uptown behind. As they faded, my breath-stealing fear of being spotted diminished a little. Even Proctors hesitated to go into the Rustworks. The wreckage was dangerous and there were supposed to be old entrances to the sewers hidden among them, leaving the ghouls easy access to aboveground.
Of course, those facts brought their own set of fears.
At last, the train yard ended at a ditch, and the terrain grew more turbulent, treacherous under my slick school shoes. A fence loomed above me, the border between Lovecraft and the Rustworks. For a gateway between worlds, it wasn’t much. Just corrugated steel eaten away into lace by exposure to salt air and rain. Beyond, I saw indistinct piles of slag and metal—small mountains, really, of everything from jitneys stacked high as a house like domino tiles to disused antisubmarine rigs, with their great steam-powered harpoons blunted, which had been brought back from the defense lines on Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras after the war. So many machines, all of them dead. It was like happening upon the world’s largest open grave, silent and devoid of ghosts. If I’d believed in ghosts.
I slipped through a gap in the fence, and the last of the aether lamps of Uptown winked out behind me, eclipsed by the wreckage. As Cal and I were enclosed by the bulk of the Rustworks, I felt a curious lightness in my step. I never walked out of bounds at the Academy. Storybook orphans were always meek, well-behaved, mousy things who discovered they possessed rich uncles who’d find them good husbands. Not the sort with mad brothers and mothers, who would rather stick their hands into a gearbox than into a sewing basket.
Now I was as far out of bounds as one could go, and it felt like a crisp wind in my face or jumping from a high place. I looked to Cal’s comforting height, and smiled at him as we walked.
I’d heard whispers from older students that you could buy anything at the Nightfall Market—outlawed magic artifacts, illegal clockworks and engine parts, women, liquor.
Most importantly, I’d heard from Burt Schusterman, who’d been expelled during my first year for hiding a still in his dormitory room, that you could buy a guide in and out of the city after lockdown and before sunrise. A guide who wouldn’t necessarily need passage papers to cross the bridges out of Lovecraft.
I just hoped he didn’t want more than fifty dollars, or strike his bargains in blood, or dream fragments, or sanity. I didn’t know that I had anything of the sort to give.
I chided myself as we walked through the silent, frostbitten lanes of the Rustworks, enormous mounds and heaps of junk threatening to topple their aging bones onto our heads. “Grow up, Aoife.” I was so lost in staring at the dead machinery in the junk piles that I didn’t realize I’d voiced the thought. Burt Schusterman could have been the most enormous liar. Rotgut was supposed to fiddle with your brain, wasn’t it?
“Huh?” Cal said at my outburst.
My flush warmed my cheeks. “Nothing.” I walked a bit faster. The light wasn’t here, and the shadows were long, with fingers and teeth. On a night like this, with a scythe-shaped moon overhead, it was easy to believe, as the Proctors did, in heretics and their so-called magic.
It crossed my mind, only for a second, to suggest we turn back, but the thought of Conrad somewhere just as dark and cold, and by himself, kept me climbing over half-rusted clockworks, through the hull of a burnt-out dirigible and past all the wreckage of Lovecraft’s prewar age, before the Proctors, when heretics had run rampant and viral creatures waited in every shadow to devour the unwary.