Iron Cast

by Soria, Destiny;

  “What are you talking about?” Knox demanded. He threw out an arm to shove Corinne back as she tried to move forward, which was the moment when Ada put it together.

  “Knox’s eyes aren’t blue,” Wilkey said, raising the gun.

  Before his finger made it to the trigger, Johnny whirled on him, something glinting in his hand. Ada saw that it was his pocket-knife half a second before he sliced it across Wilkey’s throat. For a moment everything was still. Wilkey coughed once. It was a wet, horrible sound. The gun fell to the floor, and he pressed his hands against his neck. They were immediately rimmed with blood. He staggered, and Johnny gave him a shove. Johnny’s expression was one of pure disgust as he watched Wilkey fall.

  “I never liked you much,” he said to the twitching form. Then he cast an appraising glance over Dr. Knox, who seemed to be sagging around the edges. “Let me guess. James Gretsky?”

  “We all thought you were dead,” James said, becoming himself again in less than the time it took for Ada to blink.

  “How did you even get in here?” Johnny asked. He knelt down and started unbuckling Ada’s ankles.

  “We called ahead,” Corinne said. “James imitated Mr. Haversham so that the nurse would have the gate open.”

  “And she bought that?”

  “There may have been a very persuasive French horn in the background,” James said.

  “Where have you been?” Corinne asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Johnny said. He pushed his hands through his greasy hair. “I had to take care of some things, but it’s over now.”

  He met Ada’s eyes, and she felt him searching her. Trying to guess how much she had figured out. How much she was going to tell the others.

  “Johnny, why?” she whispered.

  She could see in his expression that his mind was racing, but she couldn’t tell what choices he was weighing. She did know the moment he made his decision. She saw it in the set of his jaw, in the flash of regret in his eyes. He stopped his work, having freed only her left ankle, and sat back on his heels.

  “You were never supposed to know,” he said softly. “I tried to keep you both out of it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Corinne asked.

  “Johnny, all those people.” Ada’s gaze was drawn over his shoulder, toward the rows and rows of unmoving bodies. They’d been snatched off the street and murdered by a madman’s experiments. And Johnny had been the one to give them up.

  “Can we talk about this later?” Corinne looked between the two of them, frowning. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  She moved to help Ada but hesitated when Johnny stood. He turned his knife over once in his hands. Wilkey’s blood still gleamed red along its edge.

  “I can’t let you leave,” he said. “No one else can know.”

  He spoke so frankly, so simply. Then he drove his blade into Corinne’s belly, aiming upward for her heart.

  Ada’s vision slanted, but in that moment her nausea and headache deserted her. She was left with nothing but the clarity of Johnny Dervish with a bloody knife in his hand, and Ada knew he was coming for her next. She closed her eyes and told herself to sing, but the music had deserted her too. A hot, aching sob was building in her chest. She couldn’t breathe.

  In a faraway and foggy part of her mind, she had the thought that maybe she couldn’t live without Corinne. Maybe her lungs knew that. Maybe her heart would stop next.

  When she heard Corinne’s voice, echoing around her in a cloud of static, she almost couldn’t comprehend the words.

  “This is a public service announcement, brought to you by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who gave a lot more thought to the meaning of life than is strictly healthy.”

  The cavalier tone was entirely Corinne’s. Ada opened her eyes to the impossibility before her and immediately felt sick again. James was kneeling on the floor, and the girl in his arms was Madeline, her long hair tangled around her face as she gasped for breath.

  Johnny was staring down at them, knife in hand. He looked wildly around the room; then realization dawned on his face. Ada followed his eyes to the loudspeaker mounted over the door. Johnny swore and fumbled for his earplugs. He ran into the corridor.

  “Maddy, come on,” James was saying, his voice breaking. “Maddy, please.”

  Ada struggled against her restraints, but of course it was useless.

  “James, you have to untie me,” she said.

  He didn’t look up. Over the PA system, Corinne was flying through the poem at a breathless rhythm. Underneath her voice Ada could hear a sonorous tune, churning out persuasion so powerful that Ada almost lost herself in it. It was a French horn. She shook her head to break away from the music and whatever illusion Corinne’s poem would conjure.

  “James!” Ada cried. “Look at me. He might come back. We have to go.”

  At last he tore his gaze away from Madeline and laid her gently on the floor. He fumbled at the buckles with shaking hands but finally managed to free Ada’s right wrist. She helped him with the other straps and jumped up. Together they dragged Madeline to her feet. She screamed through gritted teeth but stayed upright between them, her arms over their shoulders. Ada had never seen so much blood on a person. Madeline’s pale pink dress was drenched in crimson.

  They staggered through the iron-paved corridors. Ada kept looking over her shoulder, certain that someone would be following them. The hall remained empty. The loudspeakers were silent now, but the uneasy quiet was short-lived. A bell started ringing from the upper floor—the fire bell, Ada realized. Corinne’s poem must have fabricated flames for everyone in earshot. Under the dual spell of her words and Charlie’s horn, no reg without earplugs would have been able to resist.

  She made sure that James had a good hold on Madeline and started to open the door.

  “Wait,” James said. His voice was hoarse. “Corinne said to wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Ada whispered.

  “She said we’d know.”

  There were nurses running past, as well as a few men in suits who must have been HPA. None of them noticed that the basement door was cracked. Ada watched the flashes of color until there was no one left in the hall. Another few interminable seconds passed, and Ada itched with the impulse to throw open the door and run for freedom. She waited.

  The speakers crackled again, and Corinne’s voice filled the hall.

  “That’s all for tonight, ladies and gents. Don’t forget to tip the band.”

  Ada pushed open the door and helped James and Madeline up the last few steps. The three of them weaved through the corridors toward the lobby. Madeline was gasping in her ear, and Ada’s hand was so slick with blood that she could barely keep a grip on her.

  Corinne and Charlie ran to meet them as they stumbled into the lobby. The fire bell was still clanging with deafening fervor. Looking over Corinne’s shoulder, Ada saw that the desk nurse was slumped over her paperwork, snoring loudly.

  “Go!” Corinne shouted.

  Charlie wrenched open the front door. Corinne pushed at Ada and James from behind. They barely managed to keep Madeline supported between them. The cold air assaulted Ada as Charlie yanked the door shut behind them. He was saying something, but Ada couldn’t hear him over Madeline’s cries and the ringing echo of the fire bell in her ears.

  Someone grabbed her arm, and Ada whipped her head around. It was Saint.

  The world was cacophony and blood. Haversham’s night-shift employees were scattered across the edges of her vision, watching them with numb confusion. Charlie’s playing would only just be wearing off. Any second now they would start to realize what had happened. Saint pulled her across the gravel drive, away from the people. Ada couldn’t focus on anything but Madeline’s weight. She squeezed Madeline’s wrist so hard that she couldn’t tell if the erratic pulse she felt was Madeline’s or her own. The doors to the asylum opened again, and Dr. Knox emerged, flanked by three HPA agents.

  Ada realized that even if the gate
was still open, they had nowhere to go.

  She had the thought, brief but piercing, that they weren’t going to make it. They were going to die in the basement of Haversham, strapped into chairs while Dr. Knox recorded the time in his little notebook.

  Saint was still pulling on her arm. He wasn’t leading her toward the car that was parked near the gate but onto the grassy lawn to the left of the drive. There was a blanket spread across the ground—no, it was a giant painted canvas, like a backdrop for a play. Ada recognized it from a recent production at the Mythic Theatre. That was all she had time to register before Saint stepped through the canvas, dragging her with him.

  Corinne was last in the chain that Saint pulled through the backdrop. She felt someone’s fingers—she didn’t know if it was Dr. Knox or one of the agents—brush across her coat sleeve just before the painting swallowed her. She fell downward, feetfirst, but almost as soon as the asylum’s lawn and iron gate disappeared, the world shifted and suddenly she was stepping forward. She closed her eyes against the twisting sensation, willing herself not to be sick. Charlie’s hand fell from hers, and for a split second she was utterly alone, with only the solid ground beneath her feet to reassure her that she had made it to the other side.

  When she opened her eyes, Corinne was staring across a body of water. The sun was starting to rise, inching over the horizon to her right. Boats bobbed on the choppy waves, their tiny lights twinkling in the hazy distance. Through the early-morning fog she could see the smokestacks and masts of the Navy Yard across the harbor. They were in the North End.

  The clanging of the fire bell was gone, replaced by a faint buzzing in her ears.

  She looked down to see James on his knees, clutching Madeline. There were angry streaks of red across his cheek and in his blond hair. Ada had pulled off her coat and was pressing it into the wound, but Corinne could already see that there was too much blood.

  She knelt down on Madeline’s other side and took her hand. She brushed the dark hair out of her face so that Madeline could see dawn blossoming in the sky overhead. James was sobbing in short, shallow bursts, gripping Madeline’s arm as if he could somehow pull her back. Corinne looked pointedly at Saint, who knelt down beside James and put his arm around his shoulders.

  “Guess I’m pretty good at being you,” Madeline said to Corinne, her voice weak and slurred. She started to cough. More blood.

  “It’s my fault,” Corinne said. She wasn’t crying. It wasn’t a lamentation or a plea for forgiveness. Just a statement of fact. There were a dozen different ways of sneaking into the asylum. Using Madeline and James as a distraction was the one she had chosen, and now Madeline was going to die.

  Madeline shook her head, still coughing. “God, Cor, it’s not all about you,” she said. She made a wheezing sound like a laugh, then winced. “It hurts—really bad.”

  Corinne looked at Ada, who nodded and began to hum. After a few seconds, Charlie joined in beside her. The song settled over them slowly, gently.

  The pain in Madeline’s expression began to fade. “James,” she said. She had started to cry. “James, you’ll be all right. Say you’ll be all right.” She gripped at the front of his shirt.

  “Maddy,” he said, taking her hand. “Maddy, hold on.”

  “Thank you for the Mythic,” she said.

  “You did that. It was all you, Maddy.”

  She smiled through her tears. “You are the best thing that ever happened to me,” she told him. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m—I’m—”

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Corinne,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Cor, I always wanted to see Paris again. Just one last time.”

  Corinne gripped her hand more tightly and swallowed at the lump in her throat. She leaned forward to put her lips near Madeline’s ear. She didn’t have her grandfather’s watch, but it didn’t matter somehow with Madeline’s limp hand pressed so tightly in her own. Her focus had never been so absolute. She whispered:

  “Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne . . .”

  It was a French poem about trudging alone through forests and mountains, about a bouquet of holly and heather and a grave to lay it on.

  As she quoted, Madeline’s eyes glazed over with the sights of Paris. By the time Corinne finished the last stanza, Madeline was gone. James buried his face in Saint’s chest, his shoulders shaking. Corinne found her feet and walked closer to the water’s edge. The sun had almost broken free from the horizon, and the water reflected its light in blinding white.

  For a long time she stared at the rippling waves, cresting toward the light, then falling back into the blue-black of the harbor. Eventually, Ada joined her.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Ada said.

  Her voice was thick, and when Corinne glanced at her, she could see that Ada had been crying.

  “I dragged them out of their beds,” Corinne said. “I told them this was the only way, that if we did nothing, we’d all be human science experiments. I didn’t give them any choice but to help me.”

  “You weren’t lying,” Ada said.

  “I guess not,” Corinne said. “Probably the first time in my whole damn life that I told the honest-to-God truth, and now Madeline’s dead.”

  They stood without talking for several minutes, just letting the daylight wash over them. The day was going to be warm for this time of year. Corinne had the distant, irrelevant thought that her brother was getting married today.

  “Where’s Gabriel?” Ada asked.

  The way she asked it was like she already knew the answer. Corinne bit her lip. She didn’t want to think about her hand in his, or the lipstick on his cheek at the Lenox, or his mother calling him myshka.

  She made herself think about the room in the basement of Haversham, the glossy tile floors so white beneath so much death. She thought about the woman screaming, the scratching of Dr. Knox’s pencil, and the look in Ada’s eyes as she sang Corinne into submission.

  If Gabriel had told the HPA about the secret passage at Down Street, then he was the reason that Ada and Corinne had been caught in the first place. He was the reason that Madeline was dead.

  “He’s been helping the HPA this whole time,” Corinne said. “He was just going to let them take me and Saint back to the asylum.”

  She felt like there was more to say. There was so much more inside her, pushing to be free. She closed her eyes.

  “Cor, we can’t stay here,” Ada said. “They’re going to figure out where we are. Knox or Johnny or—”

  “Johnny?” Corinne’s eyes flew open, and she looked at Ada, whose lips were twisted with uncertainty.

  “He was in the basement,” she said. “He—”

  “That’s impossible,” Corinne said.

  She backed away from Ada and stalked toward the group. There was a sudden cluster of pain behind her eyes that made her feel ill.

  “Just listen to me,” Ada said, chasing after her.

  “Johnny can’t be alive,” Corinne said. He would never have abandoned them to the HPA like that. He would never have let the Cast Iron go dark.

  “Who else do you think stabbed Maddy?” James was climbing to his feet. He was covered in her blood.

  “What did you just say?” Corinne demanded, her fingers clenching into fists.

  “You heard me,” James said, shaking off Saint when he tried to put a hand on his arm. “Your precious Johnny Dervish gutted Madeline with a knife when he still thought she was you.”

  Corinne fell back a step.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” she said. Her vision was swimming with her headache. “It had to be someone else.”

  “You think I wouldn’t know another thespian if I saw one?” James asked. There was a terrible sneer on his face, birthed of all his rage and bitterness. “I’m sure it was in his best interest to play dead while Boston fell to pieces.”

  “You’re wrong!” Corinne was dimly aware that she was shouting. �
�Johnny would never do this to us.”

  Ada’s touch on her arm was whisper soft, and Corinne’s tight fists loosened just the slightest bit.

  “If it had been a thespian, he would have seen through Madeline’s disguise,” Ada said. “Johnny’s been selling names of hemopaths to the HPA. He was there to collect his money. I think—I think he wanted to kill us so that we wouldn’t tell anyone the truth.”

  The implications of Ada’s words swarmed Corinne, adding to the anger and grief that had nowhere to go. She felt like the world was falling in on itself. Like something nameless had splintered inside her. She felt like she had when Gabriel had locked that door, when the first few notes of Ada’s song had wrapped around her mind.

  She felt broken.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Within half an hour, the shore was empty once again, with only a dark stain seeping into the winter ground to tell of the morning’s tragedy. James had refused to leave Madeline, and so it was decided that he would take her to the hospital with a story of a mugging. He promised to meet up with them later, but Ada wasn’t sure when that would be, and if he would even be able to find them.

  Ada had led the others into the safety of the city, keeping to the empty side streets. She was ahead of the others, with Charlie a few steps behind her, and Saint trailing even farther back with Corinne, who hadn’t said a word since they’d left the shore. She had that same fatalistic look in her eye that she’d had outside Down Street and in the basement of Haversham, only now it was tinged with defeat instead of determination. Ada had never felt so far away from her before, even when they were miles apart.

  There was a knot of grief and guilt and fury balled up so tightly in Ada’s chest that she could barely breathe. When she’d shaken hands with Johnny Dervish four years ago, on the day she’d first decided to help Corinne on a con, she had never dreamed it would end like this. All she had wanted was enough money to give her mother a good life, and maybe the chance to take back some of the power that had been stripped from her because of the color of her skin, the affliction in her blood.