The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [157]
I nodded and tried to smooth down my hair in a token effort to look human. “Where are we, exactly?”
“Near the riverwalk,” Cal said. “Close to where we met the nightjar, below Old Town.”
I shrugged back into my jumper, chilled now that my sweat had beaded and cooled on my skin. “I need a pen and some paper.”
I settled in one of the hammocks in the hearth room, and presently Dean brought me what I’d asked for.
“Won’t be easy,” Dean said as I sketched.
“No,” I said. “It won’t be.” I thought of my goggles and the invigorator, back in some cold evidence locker at Ravenhouse.
Damn Grey Draven three times over. Him and his lies, and his peculiar fascination with my father.
The paper was the back side of an ancient Metrocar schedule, and the pen was barely more than a nub dipped in cheap, grainy ink, but working from remembered diagrams and lectures and the rough coordinates Cal had provided, I soon had a rudimentary sketch of the vent tunnels into the Engine. I handed it to Dean.
“Some of it is from memory, but I think we can use it to get in.”
“Not bad,” Dean said, examining the sketch. “Of course, there’s the small matter of getting out again.”
For once, I was on sure footing and had an answer for him. After weeks of drifting anchorless, it made me a bit giddy. “We can trip the pressure alarms in the Engineworks,” I said. “There will be an evacuation. It happened once when I was doing field study. People scrambling everywhere, no order. Nobody will notice us.” A pressure vent could fling shards of Engine, gears and rods at hundreds of PSI in every direction. Another way a ventor could die. Anyone caught in the line of fire looked like they’d been in the path of a war Engine. If I went to the heart of the Engine, I’d be going the opposite way from everyone else and could be unobserved, hopefully for as long as I needed to use my Weird. If I could do what I’d claimed to Tremaine. Right now it was a theory, and I knew I could be very, very wrong. But I couldn’t be scared. Cal’s and Dean’s futures and my own were riding on me being strong, stronger than even my father.
I could be. I had to be.
“I can get a message to Captain Harry to get us out of the city once we go topside,” Dean said, “but up until then … it’s up to you to make this work, princess.”
“Don’t worry.” I elbowed him. “I’m the brains of the operation, remember?”
Dean leaned down and kissed me, and I still wasn’t used to the weightlessness it brought on. He helped me fly for a moment, and I slid my hands under his jacket, so I could touch cotton and skin. “That’s not what I meant. If this goes badly …,” he said.
I touched my finger to his lips. “If it goes badly … I’m glad I met you, Dean.”
We sat quietly after that, watching the ghoul pups play with a doll among the piles of junk in the corners of the nest, stalking and killing the crude human shape over and over. It didn’t get darker or lighter under the city, but when night closed in, I curled in my hammock and dreamed, of a burning city and falling stars.
I woke, frantic and alone. My mother stood over me, in her nightgown, a man’s cardigan and bare feet. Her expression twisted up, the one that came when she wanted me so badly to believe her and knew I wouldn’t, because she was crazy.
“You shouldn’t have walked in the lily field, Aoife.”
“You’re not real,” I said. My mother reached out and slapped me. It stung.
“I warned you! I warned you, daughter. The dead girls dance on the ashes of the world and we will all weep for what they do.”
I held my cheek where it stung. “You are mad, Mother.”
“And what do you think seeing me makes you?”
When I came awake into actuality, where the world was real and solid, I was screaming. Dean grabbed me, caught me as I fell from the hammock.
“Aoife, what is it?”
“I saw …” My teeth chattered so hard they stole my speech and my thoughts were racing faster than my tongue could form words anyway. “My mother,” I managed.