It was so very far away. My breath jabbed in and out of my chest like a pickax, and my heart throbbed in time with the Engine. Dean’s damp, hot hand was the only thing I felt besides the blinding pain of sprinting.
“Hatch!” I managed to gasp. “Open it and get through before … before …”
Dean grasped my meaning and caught the hatch wheel with his full weight, attempting and failing to spin it open. “It’s rusted shut!” he shouted.
The floor shook in earnest now, and my hair started to curl up as the humidity and heat rose. Every pipe I could see through the goggles was full, dancing with the ghosts of steam.
I grabbed the wheel, my hands over Dean’s, but it was impossible to budge.
“Open it! I know you can!” Dean screamed above the whine of venting steam. This time, I didn’t argue with him about the Weird. I pressed my forehead against the hatch, focused on the wheel, the machine within. Light exploded in front of my eyes like a sulfur bulb on a camera, and then I fell.
For an awful moment, I thought I was back in the Thorn Land, but the floor was hard steel and there was shrieking steam just outside the hatch as we tumbled through.
I watched Dean give the wheel a hard twist, shutting us off from the vent pipe. He was panting, sopping wet with sweat running down his face like tears. “Let’s never have a close one like that again.”
My breath didn’t want to come back, my throat fighting it with the tightness of near death. “I … no. Let’s not …,” I managed.
Dean cast around the small iron room. “Where in the cold starry hell are we?”
I lifted the goggles from my eyes and examined our surroundings. Heavy treated-canvas suits hung in orderly rows, along with hoods that were a grim and greasy parody of the Proctors’ uniforms. The opposite wall held axes and pressure scissors, the large blades used to free a man crushed under the sort of metal wreckage that happened when rods threw and boilers exploded.
“It’s the fire room,” I said. “The accident brigade can suit up in here. It’s completely iron like a submersible—if there’s a fire or an explosion they can still go rescue the survivors.”
Dean lifted one of the fire suits from its hook and held it to his chest experimentally. “Whatcha think? About my size?”
I could breathe a bit easier, so I joined him, taking down the smallest suit. I still swam in it when I pulled it on, but now I appeared as a short, squat, genderless Engine worker rather than a slight and out-of-place teenage girl.
The goggles back over my eyes and the hood over my head caused Aoife Grayson to cease. I was anonymous, the very thing I’d wished for most of my life.
“I’ll go first,” I told Dean. “Just follow me. If someone stops us, say we’re doing a routine safety inspection.”
“And they’ll buy that?” Dean frowned.
“Dean, when you work at a job as miserable as a steam ventor’s, routine safety is the only thing keeping you from boiling alive,” I said. “Trust me. This will work.”
There is a sound to an Engine, the particular hiss and clank of steam and gears that is like no other sound on earth. It’s a heartbeat more than a machine, and it pulsed and thrummed through my feet, so that I felt it from my toes to the top of my head.
The Engine was alive, and my Weird snaked out, reached into the vast and complex chambers of its heart, nearly burned up in the great mechanical organ that gave aether, steam and life to Lovecraft.
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.
37
The Kindly Folk’s Bargain
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.”