“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear,” the Proctor said. “If you’re wanted, you’ll be processed and sent to a central facility. Understand?”
“Better than you know,” I muttered as the jitney lurched into motion.
We rattled and shook over the road until we reached a brick building, bleached nearly the same color as the desert around it by dust, wind and time.
Cal squinted as they hauled us out into the sun, but when he started to say something I shook my head. I didn’t want to incriminate us any more than I had to.
Maybe everything would be all right. Maybe the panic in my guts wasn’t a harbinger of what I knew was coming but a natural reaction to being grabbed by the Proctors.
Maybe, but I knew I was in denial. This was about as bad as things could get, short of us having plunged to our deaths in that nearly destroyed airship.
I couldn’t let it paralyze me. I had to stay alert and figure out a new plan. Adapt. That was what my father had tried to teach me, and now that I couldn’t rely on him anymore, I had to rely on myself.
The Proctors separated Cal and me, and I was thrown in a holding cell occupied by two other women, both clearly smugglers or thieves of some sort. They were dusty and tired-looking, and I tried to sit well clear and look only at the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the Proctors move beyond the cells.
These weren’t the sharply dressed, brass-buttoned Proctors of Lovecraft. Their uniforms were patched and often had pieces missing. Nobody wore a cap or carried the protective goggles, masks and truncheons the street patrols back home used to break up riots. But they were still organized, unlike the ones in Lovecraft. Still clearly upholding the mission of the Bureau: hunt down and punish anyone they considered a heretic or a criminal. All things considered, my day could have been going a lot better.
An aethervox droned about contamination levels in the Mojave Desert, and it caused an odd sensation in me to think that there were still people who believed every strange thing in this world was caused by the necrovirus, the Proctor’s fable to explain what happened when humans touched other worlds, and when creatures from those worlds came into the land of Iron.
A placard on the far wall read GREY DRAVEN, BUREAU DIRECTOR, but someone had torn down Draven’s portrait, leaving only a lighter spot on the brick where the photograph had hung.
Thinking about how furious Draven would be made me smile in spite of myself.
“You,” a female Proctor said, gesturing at me. “Up.”
She took me to a room lit by a single aether globe, patted me down, made me strip to my underwear and put on a scratchy gray uniform shirt and skirt and then dragged me into an interrogation room and sat me in a hard wooden chair eerily similar to the ones in the headmaster’s office at Lovecraft Academy.
After a time, a Proctor wearing an unbuttoned black jacket and a gray undershirt came in, and regarded me wearily.
“I know who you are,” he said, passing a piece of vellum across the desk, “so don’t bother denying it.”
My face stared back at me, a blowup of a class photo from the Academy. AOIFE GRAYSON. WANTED FOR TERRORISM, SEDITION, SABOTAGE AND ACTS OF TREASON.
It was an impressive list. I sighed and looked up at the Proctor, who appeared as if he wished he was doing anything else.
“So?” I said. “What now?”
“Now you’ll be transported to San Francisco to stand trial,” he said, and formally arrested me.
I was made to change again—this time into dark gray coveralls bearing a prisoner number, and along with Cal, boarded a jitney filled with other silent and similarly gray-suited convicts.
When the Proctor who’d searched me stopped at my seat, she grinned. “These others are mostly headed for San Quentin for detention,” she said. “But not you, missy. You’re going straight to Alcatraz.”
She kept talking, droning off the rules of the transport, but I wasn’t listening. I was too busy feeling frantic. I’d heard of Alcatraz, the island in the San Francisco Bay where the great Engine turned below the rock, powering the entire city. Where eerie blue lights were said to emanate from the compound built atop it, and where if you went as a prisoner, you never returned.
It was the greatest Proctor stronghold in the country, and I was barreling directly toward it.
6
The Island of Pelicans
IT TOOK US almost a full day to reach San Francisco, even as the jitney cruised along, overtaking all other vehicles we encountered. We were allowed off twice for rest-stop breaks, during which people jeered at us. A small, sticky-faced boy threw what remained of his sandwich at Cal, who bared his full ghoul smile and sent the brat screaming back to his mother.
I’d been a prisoner before, less than nothing in the eyes of all the people around me, and it was the same vile feeling I remembered from when Draven had locked me up in Lovecraft. I didn’t even feel like a person anymore, but like something on display, and the closer we came to the city, the sicker to my stomach I got.
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.
A small girl, younger than me, sat there, dressed in the sort of clothes you only saw in old magazines: pinafore, bloomers, a giant floppy bow holding back meticulous barrel curls.
She would have looked pretty normal, if out of date, except that she was almost entirely translucent, like one of the reels for an Edison lamp held against a light. She had the same oily, filmy quality, like she might flicker out of existence at any second.
“I’m dead,” she said in confirmation. “I died right here, in this room.”
“You don’t seem too upset about that,” I ventured. I stayed where I was, not sure if I even could move.
Ghost stories were popular among my old classmates at the Academy, but they’d always been just that—stories. Things to scare one another with that wouldn’t get us locked up for heresy, like stories of the Fae, or magic, or anything that wasn’t based in science would.
Ghosts, nobody could quantify. I’d certainly never expected to be sitting here talking to one.
Then again, I’d never expected to be locked up in the worst Proctor prison in the country, either.
“Of course I am,” she said. “I was the daughter of a guard. I had diphtheria, and I was in a fever haze. I heard a voice calling me, calling me.… In the fever, I thought it was an angel sent to take me home. But then I was here, in front of this door. I went in and I collapsed. Prisoners found me, shut my eyes, watched over me until my father came. But it was too late. This place drags you down. It always has.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
She sighed. “Just nine. But they always said I was bright for my age.”
“You talk to everyone who gets thrown in here?” I asked. Normal conversation was the only way I could keep my mind from screaming, There’s a dead girl, right in front of you, talking, and you need to panic.
“Oh no,” she said, and gave a smile that was a black razor slash across her face—a strange oily substance dribbling from her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils. “Just you, Aoife Grayson. Just you.”
Her voice wasn’t a little girl’s voice any longer. Had never been, I realized. She wasn’t a sad little ghost trapped here, dead of diphtheria. She was a recording, left in this place by someone who knew I’d be here.
“Why me?” I said again, a whisper this time. I was terrified. I’d traveled by the Gates, hopping worlds, and I’d spent enough time around the Fae that their cold skin and silver smiles hardly bothered me.
This, though—this wasn’t Fae or human, just pure malice talking to me, using my name.
“Because you’re looking for something you cannot have,” the ghost hissed. “You’re traveling to a place none of the living should go. And if you come any closer to the cold flame of death, it will burn you, Aoife Grayson.”
She flickered, and was so close to me we could have shared breath, if she’d had any. “Then you’ll come and you’ll stay,” she growled at me in a voice that sounded like rusty nails raking across bones. “You’ll stay in the Deadlands, just like all the rest who came before.”
She grabbed me by the chin, and her mouth was full of teeth, black lava glass bursting from her little-girl mouth. She was going to tear out my throat, and there was nothing I could do. Nothing except let pure panic flood my brain.
The cell door opened with a clang, and I screamed as light flooded in, burning the ghost out of existence and causing my pupils to react painfully.
“Come on,” a guard said, grabbing my arm. He was tall and rail-thin. I hadn’t seen him before. I struggled, still sure the thing in the cell was going to burst from the shadows and sink its teeth into me.
“Be quiet,” he snarled. “Come.”
Once I realized I was being taken out of the cell, I practically ran. The guard clamped down on my arm.
“Stay calm,” he said. “Act normal.”
I twisted my head to look at him, and I saw the flicker as his features changed, just for a second.
“Cal?” I hissed.
“I said, act normal,” he growled, and moved me to the side as two Proctors passed, holding flashlights and passkeys, doing cell checks.
“Where you taking the terrorist?” one asked, curiosity lighting his eyes. “They got her in the box already?”
“Top floor,” Cal said authoritatively.
“What, already?” said the other. “They ain’t even gonna ask her any questions?”
“Hey, I don’t give the orders,” Cal said, and I could smell the sweat seeping through his ill-fitting uniform. I decided I didn’t want to know where he’d gotten it.
“I hear that,” said the first, and they walked on.
Cal exhaled. “That was close. Conrad’s waiting down at the dock. We have to be fast, before they realize anything’s amiss.”
“Conrad?” I blinked in shock. It took me a moment to realize the only way my brother could have known where we were going, or that we’d been caught and taken to Alcatraz, was if he’d been following us. And for him to follow us, Cal would have had to tell him our eventual destination.
“I cannot believe him,” I said. “Or you. Of all the bone-headed, stupid risks to make Conrad take … He doesn’t even have a Weird, Cal! He could be in real danger coming after us!”
“Shut up,” Cal said. “You’re a prisoner, remember? Act like you’re afraid of me.”
I lowered my eyes, realizing he was right. If I wanted out, I had to act obedient. And Conrad might not have been able to change his skin or create Gates, but the plain fact was, he was outside the prison and we weren’t. I was going to give my brother the largest hug. Right after I slapped him for taking such a huge chance and putting himself in real danger.
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