“I have to go,” I insisted, although there was a roaring in my ears. Madhouses are fortresses, I reminded myself. They weren’t connected to sewers, were surrounded by thick granite walls topped with razor wire. Christobel was the most secure of them all, the place for dangerous lunatics, said to be escape proof. What kept the infected and the heretical inside could keep ghouls out. Maybe. The alternative I couldn’t handle thinking about without curling up into a useless ball.
“I have to go,” I repeated. “I left her there.”
Casey sighed and fidgeted. She looked back at the rest of the mob; they had put out the automaton fire and were scavenging usable parts off it like a particularly efficient swarm of fire ants. Angel stood to one side, his hair singed away, muttering invective that was no doubt directed at me.
“Well?” I said, folding my arms and hoping my bluff of heroic toughness passed muster. “If I’m such a hero, you should trust that I know what I’m doing.”
“Of course you do,” Casey said. “It’s just … you ain’t scared? Of what’s over there?”
“Not a bit,” I lied, crisply and without pause.
I was becoming a good liar. I realized that without any surprise, just like you notice that your hair has gotten longer and that your clothes are hanging off you because of the miles of walking and only intermittent food.
Of course I was scared. I never wanted to go back to the city. I didn’t want to see the dour spires and the cold gray edifice of Ravenhouse ever again. I didn’t want to see the crater the destruction of the Engine had left, or the wreckage of the places I’d once walked through with my school bag slung over my shoulder and, relatively speaking, not a care in the world.
I was scared. I was more scared than I’d ever been. But I was learning to hide it, to become as smooth and facile as any of the Fae I’d encountered.
And that scared me most of all.
7
The Lair of Monsters
CASEY CARRIED A pack from the Lovecraft Academy, the kind issued to boys, with two shoulder straps. She gestured to it proudly. “Those little Uptown brats cut and ran like nobody’s business. Left a treasure trove behind.”
Those “brats” had been my fellow students. I hadn’t called any of them my friends, but the thought of them meeting a fate normally reserved for the worst of criminals turned my stomach a bit.
“So what’s the plan, Casey?” Dean asked her as she tromped ahead of us, red hair swinging almost gaily.
“The Boundary Bridge is the only way in or out, but the Proctors have set up quarantine checkpoints. Regular boat patrols too. We gotta cross under the span, and we gotta do it fast, before they spot us.”
“What do people know?” I blurted. “About the Engine, and the city? What have the Proctors been saying?”
“That you acted alone,” Casey said. “That you’re some kind of radical. Your picture went in all the papers. Reporters came from New Amsterdam to poke around the foundry, with cameras and such. Proctors are claiming the big blow was your fault, and there was a huge ceremony when they made that fink Draven director of the Bureau.” Her brows drew together. “They ain’t said much about what came out of the ground afterward. That’d mess with their big old lie of a story.”
That figured. Any fabricated explanation for the “viral creatures” never before seen would strain the credulity of even the dumbest citizens of Lovecraft. And Draven, only the city Head then, was doubly in control now, had the whole machine of the Proctors to back up whatever story he cared to spin like the venomous spider he was. He was a big man now, bigger than everyone except the president and a few other men who were equally cruel and conniving. He had somebody to blame—me. As long as he had my face to put to the disaster, uncomfortable truths could be swept aside, the way uncomfortable truths often were when the Proctors got involved.
“So, you’re a wanted criminal now,” Dean said, grinning. “I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me like you even more, princess.”
I tried to smile back but mostly just felt sick at the thought. My picture would be in every paper in every part of the world that didn’t belong to the Crimson Guard. Terrorist. Heretic. Lies. But there was nothing I could do, unless I could turn back time. And that was about as likely as Draven asking me out for tea.
Casey led us off the main road and down an access path. I could hear the ice creaking in the river as we drew closer. Wind cut into me, and I was glad for the jacket Shard had given me in Windhaven. “The trusses on this side aren’t too heavily guarded,” she called. “We just gotta be quick.”
“And then getting to Old Town?” I asked. Casey chewed her lip and cut her eyes to the river below.
“Getting to Old Town means you’re gonna have to be even quicker,” she said. “You’re not bleeding, are you? Any of you? Ghouls’ll sniff blood a week old.”
“We’re square,” Dean said. “Nobody’s cut so’s it’ll bleed freely.”
Casey bit her lip. “For the record, I still think this is a stupid idea.”
“Duly noted,” I told her.
Ahead of us, I saw one of the great trusses of the Boundary Bridge planted in the riverbank like the resting foot of an iron animal.
The supports traveled down into the bedrock, but from here at the base they looked impossibly thin and high, the span above creaking in the harsh wind.
Casey cast a look at my hands, which I’d tucked as far as they’d go into my sleeves. Exposure to the cold air felt like scraping my knuckles across a brick wall. “Here,” she grumbled, shoving a spare pair of fingerless leather gloves at me.
“I’m fine,” I insisted, though the idea of clinging to a piece of iron with my bare skin above a hundred-foot drop was about as far from fine as I could conceive.
“You’ll be fine until you get about halfway across,” Casey said. “Then either your hands will freeze to a piece of iron or they’ll get so cold they can’t grip the iron at all. Best case, you lose the skin off your palms. Worst case, you go swimming.”
I looked out at the river, the surface a rumpled canvas of ice floes and black water. I put the gloves on.
Casey went first, climbing the support as quickly and surely as a pirate from Cal’s adventure stories going up a mast. I followed, using the massive rivets as foot- and handholds, as she had. Conrad came next, and Dean was last.
I knew exactly how high and wide the bridge ran, of course. Every engineering student in the world probably knew its dimensions, marvel that it was. Joseph Strauss’s masterwork, along with the Cross-Brooklyn Bridge in New Amsterdam. The Boundary Bridge was one hundred twenty feet high. Just shy of one-half mile across. Two hundred lengths of wrist-thick cable suspending it above the river.
As we climbed, I could feel the bridge humming. My Weird didn’t crackle like it did when I encountered a machine with moving parts, but I could feel the river’s force running through the iron, the never-ceasing current working to push the bridge aside and be free. Working through me, into the cracks and crannies of my mind, working at the madness, trying to pick the lock and set it free.
The higher we climbed, the worse the wind got, until it was a trial to even breathe when a gust blew straight at my face.
I just kept going. Hand up, foot up. Muscles crying out, every fiber straining. Grab rivet, test for ice, pull myself to the next. I had to get into the city, had to find Nerissa, get her out of there. Then, I knew, and only then, I could rest.
Hand up, foot up. I couldn’t feel my cheeks or the tips of my fingers. Up ahead, Casey reached the span, the metal lattice that supported the roadbed, slick with ice. With one last tug I joined her and slumped, panting, in the crooked embrace of the iron while we waited for the boys to join us.
“See that?” She pointed at a small black launch with a prow shaped like a blunt battering ram that was working its way through the river below. “Proctors patrolling in an icebreaker,” she said. “We’ll have about three minutes before they get down to the point and start to come back.”