The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [140]
If I was being taken to him, I couldn’t imagine what might have happened since I ran away. I wondered what sins I’d been accused of and what my fellow students were saying about me.
When I stepped through the innermost doors of Ravenhouse everything had changed. Walls were solid metal, held in place with rivets the size of my fist. Doors were submarine hatches, fully airlocked. Even the aether globes were constrained by mesh cages, useless to any prisoner wily enough to break them. My already leaden stomach sank further.
“Here,” the officer grunted finally. “Stand still and straight until the door opens.”
“I don’t understand why Mr. Draven wants to see me,” I said, trying one last ploy for innocence. “I’m just a student.”
“Shut up,” the Proctor told me. “I don’t want to listen to you yap, and I don’t have to.”
The door we stopped at was a real door, bound in brass, polished wood reflecting my pale face and sleepless eyes back at me. The Proctor pressed the call button on the phonovox next to it, not without hesitation.
“Yes.” The voice was high, thin, smooth like glass. It chilled me as if I’d stepped into an icebox.
“Mr. Draven. One of your flagged fugitives, sir. She surrendered to us at the jitney depot a few hours ago.”
There was a wait, while the Proctor stared at me and I stared at my reflection. Trying to stay calm was just making things worse.
“Bring her in.” The gears at the top of the door turned, releasing lock bars, and the door swung inward.
Draven’s office was enormous, a long room that took up the entire back of Ravenhouse. It was also largely empty, floors and shelves bare, windows covered by metal shutters like a war shelter. A desk and two chairs sat at one end of the vast space, underneath a mural on the ceiling of a man in a chariot pulled by a light horse and a dark one traveling above the map of the world, constellations glowing softly in the light of the aether lamps.
“Miss Grayson. Sit.” Draven rose and pulled out a chair. The Proctor shoved me, none too gently. I let out a small squeak as the hard chair impacted with my spine.
Draven narrowed his eyes at the Proctor. “Leave, please.”
The Proctor got out of the office so quickly that he left a wake of air. I kept my eyes on Draven as he walked with measured tread back to the seat behind his desk. He was tall, thin-faced, hair cropped so one could see the scalp underneath. Younger than I had imagined him by at least a decade, lines were beginning around his eyes, but his gaze still cut straight through me. They were frightening eyes, absolutely flat and yet alive. Predatory, was how I would classify Draven’s gaze, and I felt a dull chill work its way over my skin, like I’d pressed against a cold sheet of iron.
Draven took a black cigarette from a silver case and offered me one.
I shook my head. “I don’t.”
“Good girl.” Draven lit his from a tubular jet lighter and exhaled toward the ceiling. “I noticed you looking at the mural.”
“It’s very … detailed,” I said gamely. Anything but talking about why I was really here. Any amount of time for Cal and Dean to escape.
“That, my dear, is Apollo, chasing the night across the face of the world. It is a blasphemous and heretical depiction of a dead religion, practiced by a fearful, craven civilization that the Master Builder ground under his heel.”
I looked at my hands rather than make eye contact as he lectured. The shackles were beginning to burn as they chafed my skin.
Draven let out a low chuff of laughter. “Don’t look so scared. I didn’t paint it over—it’s important to remember our history.”
“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,” I quoted. I felt tremors all over, and terribly cold, almost like I had a touch of influenza.
Draven’s mouth curved up. When he smiled, all of his graveness disappeared and he looked like a boy at the School. One who