“Dean, we don’t know what it is,” I whispered, worried that if he made a move, whoever or whatever lurked beyond the automaton would take it badly. Dean shook his head.
“Relax, princess. It’s a kid.” He advanced on the shadow. “Aren’t you?”
“Up yours, mister!” the shadow shouted back. I pressed a hand over my mouth, both to stifle a laugh and from relief. To find another person in this wasteland was ten times more unexpected than finding a creature like the nightjars and ghouls that populated Lovecraft’s underground.
“Say,” Dean drawled, brows drawing together. “I know you, kid.”
“I know your mother!” the kid retorted. “And she has some disappointing things to say about you.” The kid’s brassiness didn’t worry me half as much as his actually wandering around out in the open, but Dean’s lip curled back and he balled up his hands.
Before Dean could swing a fist, I closed distance, reached out and grabbed the boy’s red scarf, jerking him into the light.
“Tavis?” Dean said.
The boy and I gaped at one another for a moment. I realized that Dean did know him, and so did I. Tavis, the peddler boy in the Nightfall Market. I’d met him the same night I’d met Dean, when Cal and I had run away from the Academy. Tavis had steered me to a guide who wasn’t a guide at all, but a man who sent people to be devoured by ghouls in exchange for free passage and scavenging rights in the old Lovecraft sewers.
“Oh, cripes,” Tavis sighed, relaxing a bit. “The wags in the Market said you were long gone, Dean.”
“No such luck for them,” Dean told him. “What are you doing all the way on this side of the river?”
“Live here now, don’t I?” Tavis squirmed in my grip. “Come on, girlie. Give a guy a break.”
I let go of him, and his bright red scarf fluttered to the crushed gravel. I picked it up and ran it through my hands. Soft wool, dyed and still smelling of woodsmoke. “This is an Academy scarf,” I said, the unexpected appearance of an object from my former life making my voice barely a whisper. “Where did you get this?”
Tavis shrugged, but his gaze darted away from mine as he tried to disguise the lie. One end of the scarf was darker than the other, stiff and soaked in blood.
I let the scarf fall from my hands. “What happened over there?” I asked Tavis. “In Lovecraft? After the blast.”
“Hey,” he said, ignoring my question and looking back and forth between Dean and me. “Are you two going steady? Harrison, you sly dog.”
“You’re way too young to be throwing that kind of talk around,” Dean said. “You still dealing in piss-poor information and tonics that are mostly rusty tap water?”
“Nightfall Market’s gone,” Tavis said, kicking at the broken bricks with the toe of his boot. “Proctors raided the Rustworks right after the big blow. Rounded up everyone they could find. Ghouls got the rest. Monsters’ve been crazed lately—even springing out on folks in broad daylight.”
Dean rubbed his chin, a calm gesture, but I saw the thunderheads of anger steal into his eyes. “Figures.”
I dropped my gaze to the vicinity of Tavis’s boot. The people in the Rustworks might have been rough and dishonest, but they hadn’t deserved the blame for the Engine. The Proctors were all too eager to name scapegoats for every little thing that went wrong in their city.
“Some of us came here,” Tavis said. “Foundry workers ran when the automatons went nutty and started smashing things. It’s safe here. For the most part.”
Conrad waved at us from near the wrecked sheds and mouthed We should go.
“Good seeing you, kid,” Dean told Tavis, ruffling his hair. “Keep yourself safe, you hear?”
Tavis gave Dean a smile, and it was as sly and slippery as the tongue of a snake. “Oh, I don’t gotta worry about that,” he said. “I kept you talking. I’ll get my cut.”
My heart sank. Dean pulled his knife again. “What did you say?”
A low rumble started from behind the sheds, the gravel around my feet jumping. With it came the clamor of voices and the clatter of an automaton’s tread.
I grabbed Tavis by the front of his shirt. “What did you do?”
“Can’t have you tipping off the Proctors!” he squeaked. “And we need food! Weapons! Cash!”
“Do we look like we’d tip off the Proctors, you weaselly little bastard?” Dean snarled. His switchblade gleamed in the low gray light coming down through the smoke.
“Rules of the Rustworks,” Tavis said. “You’re gone a little while and you forget. Every man for himself.”
A foundry automaton rolled around the corner of the shed, surrounded by a dozen men and women wearing identical red scarves and carrying weapons, from pump-action shotguns and the sort of electric rods the Proctors carried to simple tools like axes and pitchforks and, in one case, a baseball bat with rusty nails driven into the business end. I stared, rooted to the spot by both shock and the hungry look in their eyes. Hungrier than any ghoul, and twice as frightening.
The man driving the automaton had a scar that closed one eye, a gray beard, and white hair flying out from under a ratty top hat. He wore evening clothes, wildly mismatched, and his high-collared shirt was so blood-soaked that it was the color of Tavis’s scarf.
“Throw down your weapons!” he bellowed at us through the automaton’s vox system. The things weren’t meant to be driven, but I could see where a torch had cut away the chest plate to make a spot for a man to sit and manipulate the controls in real time, rather than having an engineer program the thing and send it on its way. I might have admired the wild-eyed man’s ingenuity if he hadn’t clearly been about to crush us with his metal appendages.
“Screw off!” Dean shouted back. “You’re not getting a damn thing from us!”
“Not that we have anything to give, anyway,” I murmured so only Dean could hear.
“Don’t be so sure, princess,” he said softly. “Those boots and my coat will get fought over down in the dirt by types like this.”
I realized he had a point—the refugees from the Rustworks were starving, likely freezing as winter set in, and clean clothes and sturdy shoes would be worth as much as fine steel or aether. They didn’t appear to be reasonable, so I braced myself to either fight or run, waiting for Dean’s cue.
The man grinned, showing several prominent gaps in his teeth. “This here is my town now. Nephilheim, the city of the angels. And I’m the voice on high!”
Crazy talk wasn’t exactly rare among people in the Rustworks—it was why most of them were fugitives. They said things the Proctors deemed heretical and thus were condemned to lives in madhouses, at best, or execution at worst. But the conviction with which the man shouted reminded me of my mother, utterly sure her iron-induced nightmares were true and happening before her eyes.
“He’s not going to back down,” I said to Dean.
“Perfect. Got a plan, then?” he asked, not relaxing his grip on his knife.
“Yeah,” I said, sliding my foot backward and shifting my weight. It was the same plan I always had when I was outnumbered by people much crazier and meaner than I was, from schoolyard bullies to these rust rats. “Run.”
Conrad got the idea, and the three of us bolted. The ground under my feet shook as the automaton rumbled to life and the group of scavengers gave chase. One of the women let out a battle cry, which the rest quickly took up.
“Were people in the Rustworks always this unfriendly?” I shouted at Dean.
“This is above and beyond, princess!” he shouted back. “Don’t know what’s gotten into them!”
Personally, I thought sanity was a thinner thread than most people realized. And I knew the thread could snap quicker than you could take a breath.
My own breath sawed in my chest; it seemed as if the narrow foundry avenues ran on forever, one folding into another.
Dean skidded, his ankle twisting under him, and he fell and rolled. I reached down without breaking stride and grabbed him by the shoulder of his leather jacket, yanking him along. A bottle shattered on the ground where his head had just been, and I looked back to see the fastest of the scavengers closing in.