When at last we reached the outer wall, I craned my neck to look out the window. I was finally here, and I couldn’t have been more helpless or less thrilled.
San Francisco was built atop a series of hills that plunged down into the deep, velvety water of the bay. I noticed a conical white tower atop the largest hill, fingers of aether drifting to and from it. Communications, I decided, and maybe power, a line running under the water directly to the engine.
Gentle fog ringed the hills like lace collars on refined women, and small beetle-backed streetcars ran on cables up and down the hills to charging stations glowing with green aether. They looked like lampreys in a stormy sea, their green lights drifting among the fog-capped hills.
The wall itself wasn’t much to look at. Iron spikes, rusty from the sea air, studded the outside, and ghoul traps, spitting aether fire laced with sulfur, ringed the base.
The gate was manned by a set of Proctors at ground level and two gunners with hunting rifles high in the tower. Nothing was getting into the city unseen, that much was certain.
I heard the horn of an airship as it drifted overhead sending out cables to tie up at the aether-ringed white tower I’d spotted earlier, and I felt an almost unbearable sense of longing. That should have been me. Not this, shackled in a filthy jitney with iron biting harder into my wrists and my sanity with every passing second.
The Proctors handed over some paperwork to the guards, and, as one, all three turned to stare at me.
Get a good look, I thought. Everybody stare at the big, bad, underweight teenage girl. A supervillain if there ever was one.
Cal was shuffled off the jitney with the other prisoners, but when I rose to follow, the guard pushed me back.
“Oh no,” she said. “Don’t you remember? You’re a special case, Miss Grayson. You’re going right across the bay.” She grinned. “To Alcatraz.”
The journey to Alcatraz Island felt nearly as interminable as the jitney ride, though it was in fact much shorter. The jitney moved at a snail’s pace through streets thronged with crowds, up and down hills so steep and sharp they jutted from the earth like razor blades.
Steam and smoke that smelled like a million different flavors coated my skin and tongue.
A bottle banged off the side of the jitney and exploded, scattering shards of glass across the roads, and the guard leaned out and let off a shot above the crowd’s head with her shock pistol.
There were screams, and all at once we had a clear path through the crowd.
“Damn hooligans,” the guard muttered. “You’d think this was the Wild West, not the biggest city in California.”
I remembered what Dean had said about San Francisco, that, unlike Lovecraft, the wall kept people too close together, that there often wasn’t enough food or enough aether or power, and that there were parts of the city where even the Proctors wouldn’t set foot.
Lovecraft had old sewers infested with ghouls, but at least I didn’t feel like I was closed in with a hundred thousand malcontents who could explode at any second.
We reached a pier, and I was transferred to a barge that stank of fish. More Proctors surrounded me in a tight ring, and all I could see was the rough water ahead and the glowing lamps strung across the Golden Gate Bridge.
The water grew rougher, and the Proctors seemed nervous, muttering and shifting the grips on their guns. Before us, I saw a great, glowing body slide to the surface and then duck back under. Not man-made aether, not running lights on a submersible, but something organic, a luminescence that kept pace with the boat until we reached the dock.
I’d seen a leviathan before, but it had been angry and starving, driven close to shore by the blast of the Lovecraft Engine. That leviathan had terrified me, but this one was different—it stared at us out of its many eyes studded all along its lean body, and then, with a keening cry, dipped back below the waves with a splash. I could tell we mattered less to it than the pull of the currents.
My shoulder had started to throb at its approach, the shoggoth venom recognizing its own kind.
“Will you look at that?” said my female guard. “Never seen one that close.”
“It’s that damn dot in the sky,” said another. “Been calling every monster out of the shadows. Must have something to do with the necrovirus.”
The woman snorted. I had to wonder how many of the Proctors even believed the lie.
The dock at Alcatraz wasn’t much to look at—I’d expected it to be far more intimidating. It was a simple wood pier; the only thing making it remarkable was the steel cage enclosing the walkway to a small white-brick building, probably to keep anyone from making a desperate leap over the side into the freezing bay. Knowing the leviathan was down there was plenty of deterrent for me, and I was shoved into the brick building, where the Proctors searched me again and blasted me with a controlled stream of steam to knock any parasites off me. It was unbearably hot, and then incredibly cold as the steam left moisture beads all over my exposed skin, dampening my clothes. I shivered, my teeth chattering.
“What’s going to happen to me?” I asked my guard.
She narrowed her eyes. “Use your imagination.”
I watched the tall square structure in front of us as we crossed the courtyard. Bars on the windows, the clang of cell doors echoing from inside and the general chatter of a lot of people locked in too small a space.
If you weren’t looking too closely, you’d have thought it was a normal prison. But I spotted wires running to a central hub on the roof and down to each bar. Electrified iron—to keep prisoners in or something else out, I couldn’t tell.
I also saw a flash from the top floor, blue light that flickered rhythmically and then shut off, over and over again. Each time it happened, the wires on the windows would buzz. Something was draining enormous power, and I had the distinct feeling I was about to find out what it was.
The guard handed me off to another woman, who processed my paperwork and then shoved me into a cell. When the door closed, the darkness was absolute.
I sat down, feeling my way to a dry spot, and put my head on my knees.
This could not have gone worse. I had completely failed. Failed Dean, failed my mother and father both.
I let a few tears leak out of my eyes, because if I didn’t, I was going to start screaming like many of the voices around me.
I wasn’t lost yet, I thought. I still had my sanity, at least until the iron lacing this place started to poison me.
Before it did, though, I could find a way out. I might not have been strong, and I might not have had much in the way of the sort of skills Dean had traded in—subterfuge and picking locks and being unseen—but I could use my wits to get out of this mess.
I breathed in, but the stench just reminded me where I was and I started to sob again.
“Don’t cry.”
The voice was a whisper, but I shrieked, not expecting anyone to be with me in this dark hole.
“Hello?” I said.
“Don’t cry, Aoife,” the voice whispered again.
I swallowed hard. My scar wasn’t throbbing, so I knew it wasn’t a monster, but a disembodied voice was never not going to be unsettling.
“How do you know my name?”
“I know a lot of things,” the voice said. “Been here a long while. Long before the Storm. Saw it all.”
“Are you …,” I started to ask, but my question was answered when the same kind of unearthly glow the leviathan had manifested sprang to life in the corner of the cell.