“Run them down,” the automaton’s pilot bellowed. “Run those devils straight to Hades!”
A serrated horror of a blade whizzed past my face and embedded itself in the wall of the nearest building.
I stopped, spinning to face the person who’d thrown it. It was a woman—wild eyed, red hair bound up with gears and bolts that clanked and clacked when she moved. “I’ve had just about enough of this,” I snarled, my fear having been burned away by indignation. We weren’t a threat. We were just like them—wanted by the Proctors, just trying to survive. How dared they think they could run us down like prey? I looked forward to showing this girl she’d underestimated me.
The girl raised another blade. “Make your move, demon!” she screamed.
I didn’t think; I just scooped up a stray brick from near my feet and flung it at her. It thumped her in the chest and she staggered, dropping her knife. I snatched up another brick and waved it at the encroaching crowd. “Who’s next?” I yelled.
The automaton pilot bore down on me, causing the crushing pincers that made up the thing’s hands to scissor open and shut.
Too furious to even think of running, I pushed back with my Weird. I’d never tried to move something without touching it, or at least being within a few feet, but I pushed with all my strength, and with a great rattle and scream of rivets the tracks of the automaton seized, steam and smoke rising from the thing along with the smell of tortured metal. It shuddered to a stop.
I stood where I was, my heart pounding, my blood roaring. Far from feeling the falling-away sensation using my Weird usually brought on, I felt inexplicably alive, all body and blood rather than that detached piece of myself that floated around inside my mind. It was exhilarating, and yet I sort of wanted to scream.
Before I could do anything about either screaming or holding it in, Conrad grabbed me and abruptly broke the spell. “Are you crazy?” he shouted over the death throes of the automaton, which had started to shoot sparks and jets of flame from its innards as all its mechanisms failed in turn. Acrid steam blanketed the scavengers, and us.
The scavengers milled nervously a few yards away, and then one by one they bowed their heads in my direction, nodding rhythmically and drawing toward Conrad, Dean and me in a tight knot. Behind them, the automaton pilot fell from his vehicle, beating at the flames on his jacket.
I realized as all the scavengers’ eyes looked at me what I’d done: I’d shown my Weird to perfectly ordinary people. People who were already on edge, and would likely just as soon burn me alive as a Proctor would for my unexplained trick. I pressed my lips together, my heart throbbing with anxiety. After everything I’d done, I’d shattered it with one thoughtless move. Stupid, Aoife. So stupid.
“We’re sorry,” the woman I’d hit with the brick wheezed. “We didn’t know.”
I blinked at her, my rage and dread replacing itself with confusion. “Didn’t know what?”
“That it was you,” she said. “You are Aoife Grayson? The destroyer? The one who made the big blow?”
I was speechless for a moment, then answered hesitantly. “I’m Aoife, yes. But the Engine …” I stopped myself, unsure what to say next. “This isn’t important. Are you going to let us go?” I shouldn’t have been shocked that my name was known on the other side of the Erebus River. The Wytch King had said Draven was painting me as a radical, a heretic terrorist responsible for the senseless destruction of Lovecraft. What was more shocking about the girl’s words was that she seemed happy about what I’d done, the wreckage and the ruin. What was wrong with these people?
“Anything you say, Destroyer,” the woman murmured, bobbing her head. She was only a few years older than me, I could see now, but her face was streaked with grease and painted up with blue woad.
“Don’t call me that,” I said. The shakes were starting, and the familiar light-headedness of my nosebleeds. The iron was creeping in, inexorably, and fraying my emotions. “Don’t you ever call me that again.” Such a hateful name, said with such reverence. I was no better than the Crimson Guard and their aether bombs. Destroyer wasn’t a name that would ever pass my lips without making me cringe.
“But you saved us,” the girl insisted. “You freed us from the Proctors and you rained down destruction on their world.” She stretched out her arms to point to the world around her. “You saved all of us. The ones ground under the heel of the Proctors,” she said, and the other scavengers murmured assent.
“I didn’t do a damn thing,” I snarled at the girl, knocking her hands away from me, “except do what I thought was right.” Her reverence just reminded me all over again of my mistake, how I’d let myself be manipulated by Tremaine. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t even clever, I was gullible.
“You’ll have no more trouble from us,” the girl promised. Then she tried a different approach, sticking her hand straight out to shake, like an eager schoolboy. “I’m Casey.”
“Apparently you already know who I am,” I said, and sniffed, not interested in making friends with someone who’d been ready to stick a blade in me not five minutes before.
“We all do,” Casey reiterated. “You’re a hero.”
“How’s the bridge?” Dean cut in before I could open my mouth and start screaming incoherently at the word hero. “We need to make tracks into Lovecraft.”
“You don’t wanna do that,” Casey told him. “The Proctors got the bridge locked down tight. And in the city, well …” She shivered, her braids clanking again.
“You’ve been getting in all right,” I pointed out. “You have Academy and Proctor gear. I seriously doubt you carted all that with you while you were running for your lives.”
Casey reddened a little, her freckles standing out against her pink cheeks. “I guess there’s one or two of us who make the run, yeah. Mr. Angel tells us what he needs and we go in after dark. Nephilheim is stripped bare—those people evacuated. They were the smart ones.”
“Is Angel the cracked nut with the automaton?” Conrad said, pointing to where the hunched old man sulked at the back of the crowd.
Casey nodded. “He was a street heretic—he preached down in the Rustworks. When the big blow happened, he said it was a sign. That we were to go and form a new city on the ashes of the old.”
“A new city based on raiding and pillaging? History is on your side, for sure,” I said. Casey raised her skinny shoulders, missing my sarcasm.
“He’s kinda cracked, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. My parents were transported as heretics and my trade was smuggling. Nothing to smuggle now, is there?”
I sighed. Much as I wanted to dislike her, I couldn’t. She was skinny and starving and pathetic, more like a kitten nipping at your ankles than a junkyard dog. “Yeah, I get not having anywhere else to go,” I told her.
“If you need supplies, you can show us how you get in and out of the city,” Dean said to her. “We can pay you.”
I gave Dean a hard look when he mentioned payment, and he shook his head minutely at me, which I took to mean he must have something the girl wanted that wasn’t cold, hard cash. Because cash was in very short supply among our trio.
“You really want to go?” Casey directed her question to me rather than Dean.
I nodded. “My mother is in there. I need to get to Christobel Asylum, near Old Town.” If I could just get there, then at least I’d know. Know if she’d survived, or if I’d really done the worst thing a daughter can do, even worse than leaving the city without her.
Casey instantly made a negative gesture. “If your mum was in Old Town, she’s gone. That place was the first to go full-on chum bucket. Ghouls up to your ears, and worse. You could hear the screaming for days.”