were in the train yard, among rusted boxcars and Pullman carriages waiting for engines that would never arrive. I could see the pedestrian walkway of the bridge beyond the fence, and I watched it while Cal and I leaned against a United Atlantic car to catch our breath.
Two Proctors in black hoods stood at the crossing, silent, their long coats fluttering around their legs in the wind off the river. One hid a yawn behind his fist, but the other’s eyes traveled into all the dark corners of the train yard. Searching, watching for movement in the shadows.
“Come on,” I said, tugging on Cal’s arm when he just stared at the Proctors, licking his lips. “We can cut through the yard and take the old coal paths down to the Rustworks.” Cal still didn’t move, so I tugged harder and he grunted.
“You’re not very gentle. Girls are supposed to be gentle,” he grumbled, finally creeping after me.
“You should know me better by now,” I teased softly. I stuffed my ruined blouse into a dustbin as we crept by the South Lovecraft Station, its brick spires reaching up into the night, and we threaded between rolling stock sleeping on the rail, leaving the lights of Uptown behind. As they faded, my breath-stealing fear of being spotted diminished a little. Even Proctors hesitated to go into the Rustworks. The wreckage was dangerous and there were supposed to be old entrances to the sewers hidden among them, leaving the ghouls easy access to aboveground.
Of course, those facts brought their own set of fears.
At last, the train yard ended at a ditch, and the terrain grew more turbulent, treacherous under my slick school shoes. A fence loomed above me, the border betweenLovecraft and the Rustworks. For a gateway between worlds, it wasn’t much. Just corrugated steel eaten away into lace by exposure to salt air and rain. Beyond, I saw indistinct piles of slag and metal—small mountains, really, of everything from jitneys stacked high as a house like domino tiles to disused antisubmarine rigs, with their great steam-powered harpoons blunted, which had been brought back from the defense lines on Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras after the war. So many machines, all of them dead. It was like happening upon the world’s largest open grave, silent and devoid of ghosts. If I’d believed in ghosts.
I slipped through a gap in the fence, and the last of the aether lamps of Uptown winked out behind me, eclipsed by the wreckage. As Cal and I were enclosed by the bulk of the Rustworks, I felt a curious lightness in my step. I never walked out of bounds at the Academy. Storybook orphans were always meek, well-behaved, mousy things who discovered they possessed rich uncles who’d find them good husbands. Not the sort with mad brothers and mothers, who would rather stick their hands into a gearbox than into a sewing basket.
Now I was as far out of bounds as one could go, and it felt like a crisp wind in my face or jumping from a high place. I looked to Cal’s comforting height, and smiled at him as we walked.
I’d heard whispers from older students that you could buy anything at the Nightfall Market—outlawed magic artifacts, illegal clockworks and engine parts, women, liquor.
Most importantly, I’d heard from Burt Schusterman, who’d been expelled during my first year for hiding a still in his dormitory room, that you could buy a guide in and out of the city after lockdown and before sunrise. A guide who wouldn’t necessarily need passage papers to cross the bridges out of Lovecraft.
I just hoped he didn’t want more than fifty dollars, or strike his bargains in blood, or dream fragments, or sanity. I didn’t know that I had anything of the sort to give.
I chided myself as we walked through the silent, frostbitten lanes of the Rustworks, enormous mounds and heaps of junk threatening to topple their aging bones onto our heads. “Grow up, Aoife.” I was so lost in staring at the dead machinery in the junk piles that I didn’t
Two Proctors in black hoods stood at the crossing, silent, their long coats fluttering around their legs in the wind off the river. One hid a yawn behind his fist, but the other’s eyes traveled into all the dark corners of the train yard. Searching, watching for movement in the shadows.
“Come on,” I said, tugging on Cal’s arm when he just stared at the Proctors, licking his lips. “We can cut through the yard and take the old coal paths down to the Rustworks.” Cal still didn’t move, so I tugged harder and he grunted.
“You’re not very gentle. Girls are supposed to be gentle,” he grumbled, finally creeping after me.
“You should know me better by now,” I teased softly. I stuffed my ruined blouse into a dustbin as we crept by the South Lovecraft Station, its brick spires reaching up into the night, and we threaded between rolling stock sleeping on the rail, leaving the lights of Uptown behind. As they faded, my breath-stealing fear of being spotted diminished a little. Even Proctors hesitated to go into the Rustworks. The wreckage was dangerous and there were supposed to be old entrances to the sewers hidden among them, leaving the ghouls easy access to aboveground.
Of course, those facts brought their own set of fears.
At last, the train yard ended at a ditch, and the terrain grew more turbulent, treacherous under my slick school shoes. A fence loomed above me, the border betweenLovecraft and the Rustworks. For a gateway between worlds, it wasn’t much. Just corrugated steel eaten away into lace by exposure to salt air and rain. Beyond, I saw indistinct piles of slag and metal—small mountains, really, of everything from jitneys stacked high as a house like domino tiles to disused antisubmarine rigs, with their great steam-powered harpoons blunted, which had been brought back from the defense lines on Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras after the war. So many machines, all of them dead. It was like happening upon the world’s largest open grave, silent and devoid of ghosts. If I’d believed in ghosts.
I slipped through a gap in the fence, and the last of the aether lamps of Uptown winked out behind me, eclipsed by the wreckage. As Cal and I were enclosed by the bulk of the Rustworks, I felt a curious lightness in my step. I never walked out of bounds at the Academy. Storybook orphans were always meek, well-behaved, mousy things who discovered they possessed rich uncles who’d find them good husbands. Not the sort with mad brothers and mothers, who would rather stick their hands into a gearbox than into a sewing basket.
Now I was as far out of bounds as one could go, and it felt like a crisp wind in my face or jumping from a high place. I looked to Cal’s comforting height, and smiled at him as we walked.
I’d heard whispers from older students that you could buy anything at the Nightfall Market—outlawed magic artifacts, illegal clockworks and engine parts, women, liquor.
Most importantly, I’d heard from Burt Schusterman, who’d been expelled during my first year for hiding a still in his dormitory room, that you could buy a guide in and out of the city after lockdown and before sunrise. A guide who wouldn’t necessarily need passage papers to cross the bridges out of Lovecraft.
I just hoped he didn’t want more than fifty dollars, or strike his bargains in blood, or dream fragments, or sanity. I didn’t know that I had anything of the sort to give.
I chided myself as we walked through the silent, frostbitten lanes of the Rustworks, enormous mounds and heaps of junk threatening to topple their aging bones onto our heads. “Grow up, Aoife.” I was so lost in staring at the dead machinery in the junk piles that I didn’t
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