Cal and I hustled down what seemed an endless maze of halls, taking sharp rights and lefts, while the entire time my heart was screaming that at any moment this was all going to end with a bullet or the zap of a shock pistol.
Cal and I came to a mesh-enclosed staircase, which led down, into darkness, or up, toward the pulsing blue light.
This close, I could discern another sound over the buzzing of electric current—screaming. It was so high and sustained I’d taken it to be background noise, but it was the droning cry of a creature in unbearable pain.
Cal’s nostrils flared and he began to shake. I couldn’t move, shackled as I was, so I nudged him with my elbow. “What’s wrong?”
“I know that sound,” he whispered. “I remember that sound.…”
Before I could stop him, he was up the stairs, leaving me to follow awkwardly.
I had some inkling of what had Cal so upset, but nothing could have prepared me for what we saw when we crested the stairs and came to a small room at the top of the cell blocks.
Six tables were arranged in a circle, the sort of tables I’d often seen in the madhouse while visiting Nerissa—hard enamel surfaces fitted with leather straps to keep the patients still. A wheel and spring on the underside allowed the tables to be tilted this way or that.
My stomach lurched as I looked at the ghouls strapped to the tables. They didn’t look like Cal—they had the gray sagging skin, stringy hair and vaguely canine faces of depth-dwelling ghouls, ones that had rarely seen the light.
Attached to each of their heads was a metal apparatus, and blue light pulsed from a glowing globe suspended from the ceiling. Each time it did, symbols projected on a screen flashed before the ghouls’ eyes, and they started screaming anew.
I knew we should move, but Cal stood stock-still, shaking. In Lovecraft, Proctors burned ghoul nests, and the stink of burning hair and flesh sometimes wafted on the wind as far as the Academy.
But this was different—this wasn’t something I had to imagine and could forget if I needed to. The ghouls were alive, and they were in pain.
I hadn’t had the best encounters with Cal’s more bloodthirsty brothers, but his pack, and Cal himself, had never given me any reason to hate ghouls.
Cal snarled, and I could see his human face start to slip away. He could only “take the skin” when he wasn’t under stress or in pain, and when he started to lose control, the real Cal came out.
Distracted as we both were, it was a wonder I saw the flash of white before a doctor wearing a long coat leaped from the shadows beyond the table and slashed at Cal with a scalpel. It caught the arm of his too-big Proctor uniform and he howled in pain, lashing out blindly.
The doctor danced out of the way. He was screaming something, but it was hard to hear over the constant cries of pain, the buzzing of the current and the hiss of aether powering the whole thing.
Even shackled, I knew I had to do something. Cal was too angry and panicked to defend himself, so I slammed into the doctor from the side, using all my weight. My scarred shoulder, where the muscles had never quite been the same, gave a scream of pain as loud as the keening ghouls’.
We both went over, but the doctor had his hands free and got on top of me. When he saw my face, he blinked. “You’re—” he started, but I snapped my forehead up and into his nose. It was a desperate move, and my skull rang with pain. I felt elated, though, when the doctor yelped and fell back, dropping the scalpel.
Cal appeared at my shoulder. “Stay down,” he snarled, in a voice I’d only heard him use once before, “unless you want worse than that.”
I didn’t want to look at him, but I forced myself to. This was my friend. He wouldn’t hurt me.
I hoped.
Cal’s jaw was long, and his teeth were longer, poking over his lips. The uniform had shredded at the pressure points where his spiny limbs had changed. His eyes were pure gold, pupilless and inhuman. I held out my hands to him, in what I hoped was a slow and nonthreatening gesture. This is Cal, I reminded myself. If you don’t panic, he won’t panic.
“Can you unlock these?” I asked. “I think the secret of our daring escape is out.”
Cal fumbled for the keys, his long veiny fingers having a hard time grasping the tiny tool.
I took it from him, and our skin brushed. My shoulder throbbed, the scar reminding me that even if I trusted him with my life, Cal was still a monster in this moment.
As my shackles unlocked, the doctor sprang up again and made a beeline for me. I turned, gripping one side of the shackle and swinging the other at his head. It connected with his temple and he dropped, his body making a wet, heavy sound against the cement floor.
“He doesn’t listen,” I told Cal. He was already starting for the tables, though, and paid me no attention.
“We have to help them,” he said. “We have to do something.”
“All right,” I agreed tentatively. “But if we free them, they’re going to attack me.” I pointed at the sharp rib bones and cracked lips of every ghoul. “They’re starving.”
I wanted to help them—truly I did—but I would be no good to anyone, Cal included, if I were in pieces.
Cal ignored me, though, and I held tight to the shackles. Even though they’d eventually be poison to me, I wasn’t about to leave myself defenseless.
He freed each ghoul gently and started to unhook the steel contraption on the closest one’s head, but then stopped. He went even paler, and gripped his stomach.
“I can’t,” he said. “They’re bolted in.”
I shut my eyes, forcing myself to breathe normally, and then approached. The ghoul on the table moaned, translucent eyelids fluttering.
“No way out,” he muttered to Cal. “They tried to put pictures in my brain. Tried to make me into a killer. For the humans. Tried to make me take their orders. All of us. The pictures are in our brain.”
I looked at Cal, whose face slackened. A cloudy tear worked its way down his cheek.
“I’m so sorry this was done to you,” he murmured. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“No,” the ghoul croaked. “Nothing to be done. You have to help us.”
“I am,” Cal told him. “I am helping you. I’ll get this off somehow and you can get out of here.”
“NO,” the ghoul gasped. “You need to end it. We’re not going anywhere. The pictures, they talk to us. Tell us to kill our own kind for the Proctors.” He looked up at Cal. “You have to flip the kill switch. End it now.”
He pointed at a circuit panel with a master switch, one that I could tell would release enormous voltage if flipped.
Understanding dawned on Cal’s face, and he started to shake his head, but the ghoul on the table snarled. “You owe it to us,” he said. “We’re brothers, under the skin. We don’t want to live like this.”
I touched Cal on the other arm. “It would be the kindest thing,” I whispered, and meant it. Whatever the Proctors had done to these ghouls, it was cruel and had destroyed their minds beyond repair. Trapped as they were in this infernal machine, death would be the kindest way out.
Cal nodded at the ghoul and then at me, and then walked toward the circuit board.
“I’m sorry,” I told the ghoul. “So sorry about everything.” Was this where I’d been headed, I wondered? This room, to be brainwashed into being whatever the Proctors wanted me to be? Or tortured? Or simply to stay in that cell until I starved?
Who knew? And who cared? I’d known the Proctors were evil, but I’d never had it driven home quite so thoroughly how sick and disgusting the entire system and the lie it supported were.
Maybe the Great Old Ones coming was the best thing that could happen. Clean slate, start over. Wipe the Proctors and their ideas from the face of the world.
The ghoul grabbed my arm with his clawed hand and I shrieked, startled, as he gasped out a few words at me.
“You,” the ghoul said. “You, the destroyer. The one who walks. He knows you. His great eye sees e
verything. There is nothing you can hide, nothing you can do. Stay away,” he rasped. “Stay in the light, and keep away from his sign. Do not gaze upon it. Do not even speak his name.”
“Who?” I demanded. “Who are you talking about?”
“He who lives beyond,” the ghoul whispered. “The enemy of the one who walks. Never meet. Never let him gaze into your soul.”
Cal threw the switch. All six of the ghouls gasped and twitched, but they stopped after a time and, one by one, went still.
The ghoul’s grip slackened, and his hand fell away from me, but I stayed where I was, frozen to the spot, until Cal grabbed me and I realized the ghouls’ screaming had been replaced by the whoop of alarms.
“Time to go,” Cal said. He was human again, his face set into the sort of grim expression I’d hoped never to see on my happy, optimistic best friend.
We ran down the stairs and all the way to the docks. The source of the alarm was clearly the ghouls’ room, and Proctors shoved past us without taking much notice. I kept my face shielded, and Cal slung his Proctor jacket over me and gave me his hat, so we looked as if we’d been rousted out of our bunks rather than escaped from a cell.
The boat Conrad had stolen, a small Proctor launch, was bobbing at the dock, and he stared at us as we jumped aboard.
“You can never manage to make a quiet exit, can you, Aoife?” he said. “I’m just sitting here and suddenly the entire place lights up. Are we going to get shot at?”
“Not if you drive the boat,” I said. “And by the way, I’m happy to see you, too.”
Conrad turned the boat around and pushed us out into the bay. He gave me a quick smile that let me know he wasn’t really mad, and I had the sneaking suspicion he might even be enjoying himself a little. I decided that he deserved to forget about what had happened to Archie for a little while, and I surely was glad to see him.
Conrad opened up the throttle and Alcatraz retreated, becoming only points of light behind us, indistinguishable from the leviathans roaming the bay.
Cal was silent, and I was equally mum, wrapping my arms around myself to guard against the chill and spray.
Relieved as I was to escape, and happy as I was that we’d all made it back toward the city, I couldn’t shake the ghoul’s words from my mind, and the terror they instilled within me was positively unnatural.
That made two messages now about what awaited me in the Deadlands, should I manage the crossing. Nothing specific, but that just made it worse. The phrase played over and over, like a broken aethervox, as the boat bounced across the waves toward the light and steam and life of the city.
“He who lives beyond,” the ghoul had whispered in my ear. “Enemy of the one who walks.”
7
Chinatown
WE PULLED UP to a rotting pier surrounded by sea lions sleeping on the decrepit platforms and long, thin boats lashed together to make seagoing homes. In the distance, a junk drifted just offshore, and I could hear music floating across the water.
“Only unguarded pier in the city that I could find,” Conrad said. “Earthquake put a gap in the wall, and the local tongs control access.”
“How do you know that?” Cal said, hopping out and tying up the boat. He was destroyed, I could tell from his posture and his voice, but I knew Cal, and knew he wasn’t about to let Conrad see it. He’d always looked up to my brother, seen him as the stronger one, even though personally I’d always thought Cal was—he had a resilience at the core that no human I’d met had ever possessed. He could weather any storm and keep going. Most days, I wished I had his strength.
“I’ve had a day to poke around,” Conrad said. “It’s amazing what a little cash and a clean-cut face can get you in this town. Everyone says Chinatown is a place to lie low and not be seen, so that’s where I headed after I got Cal.” He helped me onto the dock. “We better ditch this blackbird gear,” he said, unbuttoning his Proctor jacket and shoving it into an oil drum at the end of the dock. “Proctors aren’t exactly welcome here.”
I looked at the wall ahead, shattered and cracked just as Conrad said. Beyond, I could see red light and smell thick smoke, sweet and savory at the same time. Steam drifted above the wall, the same crimson, as if we were walking into a giant cooking pot.
Dean had said Chinatown had been his favorite place in the city. I wasn’t as quick on my feet or as street-smart as he’d been, but I could manage. It made me feel a little better that we’d ended up in his old haunt, his favorite spot, as if I could pick up a glimpse or a whisper of him, even though he was gone. But not for long. He was coming back.
At the wall, two Chinese men wearing suits and silk ties and hefting machine guns stopped us. “What’s your business?” one said, glaring at us. He had a thin mustache that made him look even more suspicious. Aside from the gangster suit and antique weapon, he would have made a fantastic Proctor.
“We’re just passing through,” Conrad said.
“And bringing trouble with you.” One of the men spit. “Piss off, gwai lo. We don’t need your kind.”
“We’re not here to cause trouble,” I said, leaving off the part about how Cal and I had just escaped from the Proctor prison. “We’re in the city to get a friend of mine back.”
The second said something in Chinese, and the first snapped at him. Then they stepped aside.
“Fine, crazy girl,” said the first. “You want in so bad, go ahead.”
I started to walk forward, keeping my eyes down, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm. I sucked in a breath, afraid I was going to have to fight him off. “Your friend,” he said. “If he’s inside the wall, in this part of town, he’s probably dead.”
I met his eyes. They were flat and black, eyes that had seen so much they were simply mirrors now, with nothing behind them. I knew my own held the same emptiness. “No probably about it,” I said. “Now, do you want to take your hand off me?”
He moved aside, one eyebrow skating up, and I stepped around him. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “You go in there, you ain’t coming out again.”
“All right,” Conrad said when we’d passed through the broken wall, past a knot of vendors and carts hawking food and cheap jewelry and porters trying to get work guiding us to various hotels. “We need to stop and regroup. What’s this crazy idea you were telling Cal about that involves going to the Deadlands?”
I turned to shout at Cal, and he spread his hands to placate me. “I had to let Conrad know how urgent this was,” he said. “He didn’t want to leave your father.”
“We shouldn’t be arguing in the street,” Conrad said, and I saw the obvious interest on the faces of passersby. We stood out, three non-Chinese young people in a street full of Chinese residents just going about their business, and sooner or later the wrong person was going to notice us. That couldn’t happen, not until I’d had a chance to scour the city for Nerissa’s doctor and find out what he knew.
Cal pointed to a teahouse with signs in Chinese and English proclaiming it the Jade Monkey. “In there,” he said. “It’s quiet.”
I didn’t want to stop—I wanted to find this man my mother had told me about and get it over with. But I could tell from the set of Conrad’s shoulders that he wasn’t going anywhere, and I was going to have to convince him that this was what I needed to do.
I let him and Cal lead me across the street. The red light we’d seen came from hundreds of lanterns strung between the thin, encroaching buildings of Chinatown. Red silk glowed like living things floating in the steam that reached from the manhole covers and grates scattered haphazardly across the rutted street.
Shouts and cries and a dozen languages floated around my ears, but I felt safe in the throng. I was anonymous here. Nobody cared, and I relaxed for the first time since Cal and I had boarded the airship.
I could see why Dean had loved it here. This place was like him, alive and hotheaded and unpredictable.
The Jade Monkey had ornate woo
den furniture, low cushions to sit on, and a censer belching sweet smoke toward the ceiling. Statues of dragons and foo dogs looked down at us from alcoves, their blank ceramic eyes catching the low light and seeming to spring to life.
A figure paused outside the glass but then moved on, and I finally allowed myself to relax. The Proctors wouldn’t come here. Nobody was going to recognize me, take up the cry of “destroyer” that I hated, whether it was pejorative or worshipful.
“Tea, please,” Conrad said to the woman who approached. She was wearing a smart dress and had her hair done up.
“Maybe some food, too?” she said. “You look hungry.”
I thought back to the girl at the jitney station in Bakersfield who had betrayed us. But I was hungry—starved, in fact—so I nodded.
“Mm-hmm,” she said, as if it had been completely obvious we’d say yes. “Be right back.”
“Now,” Conrad said, turning to me, “explain why you ran off to follow some idea that’s obviously suicide.”
“Explain why you followed me when you’re putting yourself in far more jeopardy,” I countered. Conrad always acted like he knew best simply by virtue of being older, and it always got my back up.
“Because when my kid sister runs off, it’s my job to bring her back.”
“I’m doing this for Dean, Conrad,” I said. “It’s the only way. I have to make up for what I did. It’s my fault he got shot, and Nerissa said …” I drifted off, not able to continue my train of thought. My mother’s information was probably just a flight of fancy, but it was all I had.
Conrad rubbed his forehead and then spread his hands out on the table, a move that reminded me too much of our father. “Aoife, you have to know that it can’t be real. To visit the Deadlands, you have to be dead.” He moved one hand subtly, to cover mine. “I don’t want you to be dead.”
I felt a stab in my gut then. Conrad could be a pain. He was vain and superior and had a bad temper, but he was my brother, and I’d never doubted for a second that he loved me.
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