“Don’t you think that’ll be kind of dangerous?” Cal said. “Going back to Lovecraft? Even with no Proctors, they don’t exactly welcome people like us.”
“I’m not going to just waltz in,” I said. “I’ll let you buy the tickets and I’ll stick to the shadows.” Of course, if we needed immigration papers or Proctors were still watching the airfield, then everything would go wrong. Theoretically, one could travel between quarantined cities without papers, but if the Proctors en route were feeling mercurial, who was to say what could happen?
“Okay,” Cal said, casting me a sidelong look. We came to the three-sided shelter that was the Arkham jitney stop, the path that would take us to the airship field outside Lovecraft. “I gotta say, this isn’t the most genius of your plans, Aoife.”
“It’s a bad plan,” I agreed, shifting the weight of my bulging bag. “But it’s the only one I’ve got.”
* * *
Logan Airfield was supposed to be a modern marvel, something all the good citizens of Lovecraft could lord over San Francisco and New Amsterdam. The first things I saw when the express jitney pulled up were the swooping gull wings of the main terminal’s roof, and the first thing I heard was the trumpet of loudspeakers announcing departing and arriving flights.
We joined the stream of well-dressed travelers and their luggage. Nobody gave us more than a cursory glance, and I stayed beneath the great sign, lit from within, that scrolled through flights, destinations and times.
In the shadows, I was able to watch the ordinary people approaching the ticket desks, giving their luggage to porters, retrieving their tickets. They all seemed so carefree, even the men with briefcases and frowns and the woman trying to wrangle four small, screeching children. Even the Proctors, standing with their arms folded, bored, or talking in groups while travelers flowed around them, didn’t seem particularly concerned.
Maybe they hadn’t heard about what had happened in Arkham. Maybe they were all willfully ignoring their bad dreams.
Cal shot me a look from the miles-long line, and I shrugged in sympathy. Patience wasn’t something either of us possessed in spades. The next flight to San Francisco was in forty minutes, and if we didn’t make it we’d be stuck at the airfield until morning, under the watchful eye of the high windows and the gleaming steel walls engraved with scenes of great engineering feats from the past—the Eerie Canal, the Babbage Bridge, the Lovecraft Engine.
That last was no more. Thanks to me. I shrank against one of the steel pillars holding up the monitor showing the flight departures, certain that my face was like a beacon to everyone passing. In my effort to be inconspicuous, I caught sight of another figure across the terminal trying to do the same thing.
The two-story terminal was open to the girdered ceiling, where every other panel was frosted glass. The shadows cast a great grid pattern on the floor and made it easy to lean against a wall in darkness and not be seen. The man was standing between the women’s loo and a bank of aethervoxes contained in wooden booths, available for public use.
He’d be unremarkable to anyone but me, because I recognized him. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been in the Arctic, wrapped in cold-weather gear but with the same suspicious face. The same calculating eyes, eyes that had looked at me as little more than a lab rat, another cog in the machine that they’d use to drive back both the invasion of the Fae and the incursion of the Proctors. I thought the Proctors had locked him up, but without Draven and the breaking of their ranks, who knew what had happened since I’d been in Thorn?
The doctor of the Brotherhood of Iron stared at the crowd, calculated and discarded each face in turn. He hadn’t seen me yet, and that was my only saving grace.
Cal turned away from the ticket counter in triumph, waving two red Pan Am ticket booklets. I shook my head as imperceptibly as I could, but it was too late. The doctor followed Cal’s gaze to me.
There was nothing else to do. I had to draw them away from Cal. To the Brotherhood, he’d be worse than a lab rat—just something to be studied, poked, prodded and tortured, until he was of no more use and was vivisected to further the Brotherhood’s fight against the ghouls.
I broke and ran. The doctor followed me, in a surprising burst of speed for an old man. I saw another figure in a black trench coat break and run after Cal as he bolted in the opposite direction. Good. They were divided. There’d be other agents outside at the curb, as well as watching the entrance to the gates, but they couldn’t know where we were going—they had to have followed us.
Followed me. From the moment I’d reentered the Iron Land. I didn’t know how I could have been so stupid, but I couldn’t dwell on it now.
The doctor was gaining ground as we raced through the terminal, and I saw him throw aside a well-dressed woman and her travel case. She fell with a scream, case breaking open and scattering clothes and toiletries across the marble floor.
I wasn’t going to outrun him. Wasn’t going to evade the Brotherhood. My father had told me I had to think on my feet, to stop analyzing everything if I wanted to survive against adversaries who knew my every move. Knew about my Weird, knew about the other Lands, knew that the Proctors were full of it.
I made my decision, and as I skidded around a corner, I let myself fall against the black-clad, brass-buttoned chest of a ticket agent. “Oh, help me,” I gasped, putting on my most pitiful expression and praying that my red face and flying hair would shield me from recognition. “There’s a man chasing me, he tried to grab me.…”
I shouldn’t have worried. The agent barely looked at me before he blew his whistle for a security guard, who shoved me aside.
I didn’t linger. I was around the corner and gone before the doctor could do more than give an outraged yell.
Making my way to the gate for San Francisco, I nearly shrieked when a short, pudgy boy with brown hair tapped me on the arm. “What?” I demanded.
“Calm down,” the boy said. “It’s me, Cal.”
“Cal?” I stared. I knew Cal had to work to look human—shift his shape, as it were—but I hadn’t known he could look like other people.
“I swear,” he said. “I had to duck into the boys’ room to do this, but I think I lost that Brotherhood mook. He sure was confused when I didn’t come out again.”
“We have to get out of here.” Now that I’d escaped, my heart was throbbing with how narrow that escape had been. If I was captured again by the Brotherhood, I’d never see the light of day. And now it would only be a matter of time before they figured out Cal was a ghoul.
Next time, they’d be ready with the appropriate measures.
“Boarding’s started,” Cal pointed out, and we joined the queue. After what had just happened, I expected there to be a problem with our tickets, and I didn’t really breathe until we’d sunk into our seats.
We were in the first-class cabin, all red leather seats and dark wood paneling between the iron ribs of the zeppelin.
“I told the ticket gal we were flying home to see our sick father,” Cal said. “She bumped us up without me even asking.” His smug grin was only a small placebo against being in the proximity of so much iron.
“How long is this flight?” I asked, fidgeting in my seat. I was already hearing the whispers, the scraping of fingernails across metal that signaled the onset of iron poisoning.
“We stop in Cleveland, St. Louis and Las Vegas,” Cal said. “That is, assuming the Las Vegas quarantine holds. That’s what the ticket gal told me. It’ll be about seven hours until we get a break.”
“Stones.” I pressed my face into my hands. I could hold out. I could stay sane. I’d managed it for fifteen years before I’d known the truth, I could manage it until Cleveland. At least, that was what I told myself as passengers flowed around us and stewardesses passed up and down the aisles fetching drinks and cigarettes and stowing baggage.
“I’d be more worried about those Brotherhood cats,” Cal said. “I mean, how are they even still around? I thought the Pro
ctors had ’em all rounded up.”
“Who knows if they stayed that way?” I said. “Besides, I wouldn’t put it past Valentina’s father to still have it in for me.”
Harold Crosley, Valentina’s repulsive, scheming father, deserved to be locked up. He wanted to replace the Proctors with something that bargained with the Fae, that used their power as ours, and I knew nothing could come of that except betrayal and death. An alliance between Thorn and Iron wasn’t natural.
Out of all the things the Proctors had done, locking up Harold Crosley was the one bright spot. But it appeared either he was out, or the Brotherhood had chugged right along without him.
“We have to be careful,” I told Cal. “They’re never going to stop trying to use my Weird, as long as their members are free.” They wouldn’t hesitate to lock me up and use me until my brain was mush, to further their goals. My father had left the Brotherhood, broken with the only family he’d known to protect me from that, and I’d be damned if I was going to hand myself over without a fight.
The airship bumped and jostled as it rose from its tie-downs, and I breathed a little easier.
“We’re going to be all right now,” Cal said, and patted the back of my hand. I gave him an insincere smile in response, then stared out the window as the countryside fell away below us, wishing I shared his convictions.
I made it to Cleveland, and practically ran off the ship and to the terminal’s outside area, where I gulped great breaths of fresh air. The iron caused a throbbing headache and black spots to appear behind my eyes.
If we could have crossed the country by jitney, it would have been slightly more bearable, but I didn’t have the time. Even as I relished being free of iron poisoning for a few moments, I scanned the crowd for the Brotherhood, but nobody paid Cal and me any attention. He’d kept his new shape. I’d had a hard time not jumping every time I looked at the seat beside mine and saw a pudgy brunet rather than my familiar lanky, blond friend.
The bell sounded, and Cal breathed a sigh of relief when I sat back down next to him. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d ditched me.”
“Never,” I said. “I’m just not sure how much longer I can take this.”
Iron poisoning was insidious—it started small, flickers out of the corner of your eyes, then grew to pain in your joints and skull that progressed until you could no longer tell what was real and what was the iron working on your Fae blood, and you’d do anything to make the pain stop.
Cal closed his hand over mine, surprising me. “You’ll be all right, Aoife,” he said. “You’re the strongest person I know.”
The flight to St. Louis was a little easier—the stewardesses fussed over Cal and served lunch, and the food helped settle my stomach. Once we took off for Las Vegas, I watched the plains ripple and change by the hour to mountains, spiky and so close I felt I could reach out and grab a handful of snow from their caps.
The mountains bled into desert, and I saw the carcass of an airship below, iron bones scattered across the landscape, the track of its crash cutting into the belly of the land, exposing bloodred dirt.
I saw another, and another. “Cal,” I said, and pointed.
“It’s the updrafts,” he said sagely. “Warm air from the desert and cold from the mountains. Turbulence.”
I didn’t bother to ask how he knew—Cal had an answer for almost everything. I guessed it came from being a ghoul, stuck in the sewers with nothing to do except read human books and adventure stories and dream of life above.
The airship bounced, and I gripped the arms of my seat. A woman behind me gave a small cry.
“Ladies and gentlemen”—a smooth voice came out of the trumpet-shaped speaker above my head—“we’ve encountered a little rough air, so we’re going to ask everyone to remain in their seats until further notice.”
I heard the rivets in the hull strain as the airship gained altitude. We bounced again, as if a giant child had us on the end of a string that he tugged mercilessly.
“Jeez,” Cal said, wincing. “I’m going to upchuck if this keeps happening.”
I passed him the empty bowl from my ice cream sundae. “If you throw up on me, I’ll kill you.”
“I can’t help it!” he moaned. “I get a nervous stomach when I eat human food.”
The next jolt knocked bags from their perches and slammed my head against the back of my seat so hard I saw stars. I heard a whine from the back of the airship, and we lurched, losing a hundred feet in the blink of an eye.
“Okay,” Cal said, and screams and shouts went up from the other passengers. “What on the scorched earth is going on?”
“That wasn’t normal,” I agreed, craning a glance out of the bubble-glass window next to our seat. A trail of smoke blossomed against the pale white-blue sky, sprung from a black dot that quickly resolved itself into another airship as it gained on us.
“I don’t think this is a good sign,” I said to Cal. He peered over my shoulder. We both saw the flash, and a second later the impact rocked our ship.
A stewardess clawed her way through our cabin to the cockpit, and I could hear the pilots shouting at one another as she opened the door.
The airship behind us drew closer. Half of its cabin had been blasted away, leaving the batteries and fans exposed to the open air. Noxious-looking smoke filled the rest of the skeletal cabin structure, and I could see tiny figures moving back and forth inside.
“Oh man,” Cal said. “Oh man. What are we going to do, Aoife?”
“I have no idea,” I said as our craft shuddered and I heard the whine of the fans die. “I just hope our pilot stops running before we get shot down.”
The other airship drew alongside us, and I saw the figures inside clearly. They wore masks—that explained how they could stand the high altitude and the thick smoke. Long chains with hooks on the end bit into our hull, closing the distance between the skeletal ship and ours. One shattered the window next to our seats and clasped the sill, and I shrieked as glass spilled into my lap.
Cal put an arm around me as the other ship passed a flexible gangway between the crafts, but I shrugged him off.
“Pirates,” he said, excitement bleeding into his voice. “I never thought I’d actually see pirates.…”
“This is not going to be an adventure,” I said. Inside, I was panicking. I’d heard stories of pirates lighting airships on fire after they’d stripped them, leaving the passengers to burn alive, or breaking into the cockpit and setting the planes to crash to earth.
Worse, I’d heard of passengers being press-ganged into service on the pirate craft, or sold overseas to slavers in countries beyond the reach of the Proctors.
That couldn’t happen to me. I had to get to San Francisco.
I watched as the pirates made their way across the gangplank to our airship, moving slowly and heavily, even considering the equipment that weighed them down.
I grabbed Cal’s arm. “We have to hide,” I hissed. I couldn’t be caught here, not when we were still so far from San Francisco.
“Where?” Cal demanded. “Where are we supposed to go?”
I cast my eye about and saw the door to a water closet at the back of the cabin. “This way,” I said. A clang resounded through the first-class cabin as the hatch blew off its hinges, and people screamed.
I didn’t have any money or jewelry for the pirates, which meant that all they had to take from me was myself. I couldn’t be kidnapped now.
The water closet wasn’t big enough for both of us, really, and the door wouldn’t shut completely. I squeezed in close to Cal, sharing air and heartbeats.
We heard shouting in the cabin, but it was all passengers. None of the usual screams of robbery. I peered through the tiny crack left in the door.
The pirates moved soundlessly and with purpose, snatching jewels off necks, watches off chains and wallets from shaking fingers. I felt my stomach tighten. This was all wrong. They were mechanical. They might have been automatons for all the em
otion they showed.
They wore canvas pants and jackets, rusty weapons strapped to their bodies. Gas masks with bulging glass eye sockets and flexible hoses covered their faces explained how they could have survived in their half-ruined ship.
The leader glared at everyone he passed, and I could sense the weight of his gaze even through his mask.
“Something’s wrong,” I whispered to Cal. They didn’t move like men, didn’t speak. It was as if they’d been conjured out of the air and the smoke that surrounded their battered ship.
Cal flared his nostrils and sniffed. “They don’t smell like men,” he murmured. “They smell like dead things.” His face rippled, and I could tell that he was fighting to keep the ghoul inside him under control. I didn’t want to be close to him if it came out, but I’d rather be pressed against Cal as a ghoul than deal with whatever was out there.
“What do we do?” Cal whispered.
I watched as the pirates advanced. “I’m supposed to know?” Why did I always have to be the one with the plan? Why did I always get stuck in these horrible situations?
I thought about what Conrad had said, that creatures were spilling into the Iron Land from everywhere else. Could this be a part of it, these strange, lumbering creatures chasing humans through the sky? Could the airmen out there have risen from the wrecks in the desert below, animated once again to take to the sky and pillage crafts full of the living?
Given what was happening in Arkham, I decided that was as likely as anything else. But reasons didn’t really matter now—what mattered was getting us out of this.
“Here’s the plan,” I whispered. “We stay here, and we don’t move, and we hope they just pass us by.”
“That’s a crappy plan,” Cal whispered back.
I shoved my hand over his mouth as the pirate leader drew within feet of us, head swinging back and forth as if he was sniffing the air.
The feeling of my heart nearly throbbing out of my chest was joined by a sharp, lancing pain in my shoulder. The shoggoth bite venom gave off only the faintest sense for Cal when he was in human shape, but from the pirate, also in human shape, there was pain so intense that flashbulbs exploded in front of my eyes.
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