Cal grabbed my arm and slowed my steps, so we fell paces behind Dean. “I don’t trust him, Aoife. He could be leading us right into a trap.”
I concentrated on placing my feet on the icy steps. The water whispered to me as it swept along the ancient embankment and the old sewer lines that emptied out at the base of Derleth Street. A ghoul could practically reach up and touch the sole of my foot, we were so far down.
“If I wanted to trap you,” Dean yelled back, “I would have turned right instead of left back at the Rustworks fence.” His roughened voice was loud enough to echo from the opposite bank of the river.
Even in the cold, my face flushed. I gave Cal a censuring glance. This wasn’t one of his adventures—if he made Dean cross, we’d be at the mercy of the Proctors. Or something worse.
I fell into step behind Dean, careful not to slip and pitch myself over the walkway into the water. “Why? What’s right instead of left?”
“Right is the old submersible launch. Ran the Hunleys and the diesel subs down to Cape Cod during the war. Nowadays, the mill workers come from Lowell and snatch pretty little girls like yourself to work your fingers to the bone on the assembly lines and in the mills.” He tilted his head to Cal. “Him, they’d just put a shank in his skinny gut and leave him to freeze to death on the riverbank.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said quietly.
Dean shrugged. “Now you do, miss.”
“I can handle myself,” Cal huffed. “And you’re going to find out if you keep up the lip.”
“How much farther?” I said, attempting to keep things peaceable.
“Not far now,” Dean said. “The Night Bridge is just up and around the bend. It’s always waiting for travelers who need it, and for those who don’t … well.” He jerked his thumb over the rail, toward the black and rushing river.
“That sounds like something my brother would say,” I murmured without thinking. Dean cocked his head.
“Oh? He a heretic too?”
A stone dropped into my stomach, cold and smooth as the ice churning below my feet. As the walkway creaked and shuddered, I shuddered with it.
Dean swiveled his head toward my silence, his bright eyes searching my face. “I say something wrong, Miss Aoife?”
“Forget it,” I gritted, concentrating on where I stepped. Conrad wasn’t any of Dean Harrison’s business. Dean was a criminal, who smuggled other criminals for cash. What did I care if he thought my family was strange or common? We were strange. No power in science or the stars could change that. To all Rationalist folk, Conrad was a heretic—a boy who’d rejected reality and substituted the fantastical lie of magic and conjuring for science and logic. Heretics were, by their very definition, liars. Dean and Conrad would probably get along famously.
“Forgotten as yesterday’s funny papers,” Dean said easily, and then let out a low whistle. “Night Bridge ahead. In the shadows. This isn’t something many from Uptown get to see.”
Like one of Conrad’s hidden picture puzzles, the Night Bridge revealed itself to me by degrees. I saw the struts, the dark iron towers reaching for the bleak velvet sky, piercing it with sharp finials. The scrollwork railings crawled into focus, the cables knitting themselves into cohesion as my eye pierced the darkness. I felt something sharp catch in my chest as I beheld the antique span, dark and skeletal, drifting through the night air.
“Well?” Dean spoke close to my ear. I could feel his breath.
“I’ve seen this before,” I said. The Gothic bridge arched a spiny back, cables rattling in the harsh wind blowing up the channel from the Atlantic.
“Reckon you have,” Dean agreed. “In history books at whatever fancy school that uniform of yours belongs to.”
The bridge before me was as familiar as the ceiling of my own room at the Academy, a span that dominated my structural engineering texts. The Babbage Bridge, a marvel of design, erected by Charles Babbage in 1891.
“This isn’t possible,” I said out loud. “The Babbage collapsed in ’twenty-nine.”
“That’s what they said,” Dean agreed. “But you tell me, Miss Aoife—what are you seeing now?”
The Babbage Bridge, known to the citizens of Lovecraft as the Bouncing Baby, was a marvel in every way except one—its thin spiky towers and ultralight span were ill-equipped for the nor’easters and winter ice that bound up New England during the cold months, and on a particularly breezy January morning, the Babbage had given up the ghost, plunging twenty-one to their deaths in the Erebus. Condemned by the city, the usable pig iron had been salvaged and turned into the bones of Joseph Strauss’s newer, stronger, more practical bridge.
Of course, people said you could still hear the screams of the twenty-one the Babbage claimed moaning through the cables of the new span, if the wind was from the east.
But this was impossible—I was not seeing the bridge that had broken its back against a gale nearly thirty years earlier. That bridge was gone.
“I’m not seeing things,” I told Dean. “That is not the real Babbage.”
“Let me ask you something,” Dean said, walking again. I was forced to follow or be left behind. “You think just because the Head of the City or the Proctors down in Washington say a thing doesn’t exist, all memory up and fades away? You think twenty-one deaths don’t resonate in the aether to this day, on this spot?”
“I don’t … I … Cal, are you seeing this?” I looked to him in confusion. Tales of phantoms were one thing. A phantom bridge was another, entirely.
He grunted. “Uh-huh.” Cal couldn’t take his eyes from the span either, stumbling over his own feet as he approached it with the same reverence he used when opening the newest issue of Weird Tales. But this was beyond anything the Proctors used to make heretics seem like either fearful phantoms or a joke with the stories they paid people like Cal’s favorite pulp writer, Matt Edison, to pen. This looked real, in the way my own hand was real.
“The Babbage became the Night Bridge,” Dean said. “Don’t ask me to explain all that existential beatnik stuff, about memory and manifest will, ’cause I can’t, but what I know is that the Night Bridge is here when I need it, because I can find it.”
“If you expect me to believe that we’re crossing out of Lovecraft on some ghost bridge,” I started, drawing myself up severely like Mrs. Fortune, “you’re patently crazy.”
“Boss design,” Cal said. “But is it sound?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It wasn’t sound in ’twenty-nine, was it? Babbage didn’t account for the wind drag and … I can’t believe I’m even explaining this. That is not the Babbage. It’s a trick.”
It had to be. According to the laws of the Rationalists, the bridge was impossible.
“No trick,” Dean said. “And it’s sound enough for your footsteps, Miss Aoife. I promise you.” He beckoned when he reached another set of steps, spiraling upward toward the span. “Come on. Now that we’ve seen it, we can’t very well not cross it.”
“Let me guess—I’ll be cursed by the ghost of faulty engineering?” I said as we started up, to the bridge bed. Sarcasm wasn’t befitting a young lady, but I had to say something or I’d be too terrified to go another step. I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing. And yet I was walking it, feeling the frozen iron of the span under my hand, crossing a bridge that existed only in memory.
“Now the Night Bridge has seen you, too,” Dean said, “and if you turned back, it could keep your soul forever.”
I shivered, tucking my hand back into my pocket.
“People don’t have souls,” Cal interjected. “That’s blasphemy.”
“Do us a favor, cowboy,” Dean said. “If you have the urge to call blasphemy again on this trip … don’t.”
Cal’s lip curled back, but I grabbed his hand. “It’s not worth it. We need his help.” I didn’t believe in souls the way the Rationalists explained them, but something was keeping this bridge hidden—keeping it in existence—and it wasn’t engineering.