The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [161]
“Hatch!” I managed to gasp. “Open it and get through before … before …”
Dean grasped my meaning and caught the hatch wheel with his full weight, attempting and failing to spin it open. “It’s rusted shut!” he shouted.
The floor shook in earnest now, and my hair started to curl up as the humidity and heat rose. Every pipe I could see through the goggles was full, dancing with the ghosts of steam.
I grabbed the wheel, my hands over Dean’s, but it was impossible to budge.
“Open it! I know you can!” Dean screamed above the whine of venting steam. This time, I didn’t argue with him about the Weird. I pressed my forehead against the hatch, focused on the wheel, the machine within. Light exploded in front of my eyes like a sulfur bulb on a camera, and then I fell.
For an awful moment, I thought I was back in the Thorn Land, but the floor was hard steel and there was shrieking steam just outside the hatch as we tumbled through.
I watched Dean give the wheel a hard twist, shutting us off from the vent pipe. He was panting, sopping wet with sweat running down his face like tears. “Let’s never have a close one like that again.”
My breath didn’t want to come back, my throat fighting it with the tightness of near death. “I … no. Let’s not …,” I managed.
Dean cast around the small iron room. “Where in the cold starry hell are we?”
I lifted the goggles from my eyes and examined our surroundings. Heavy treated-canvas suits hung in orderly rows, along with hoods that were a grim and greasy parody of the Proctors’ uniforms. The opposite wall held axes and pressure scissors, the large blades used to free a man crushed under the sort of metal wreckage that happened when rods threw and boilers exploded.
“It’s the fire room,” I said. “The accident brigade can suit up in here. It’s completely iron like a submersible—if there’s a fire or an explosion they can still go rescue the survivors.”
Dean lifted one of the fire suits from its hook and held it to his chest experimentally. “Whatcha think? About my size?”
I could breathe a bit easier, so I joined him, taking down the smallest suit. I still swam in it when I pulled it on, but now I appeared as a short, squat, genderless Engine worker rather than a slight and out-of-place teenage girl.
The goggles back over my eyes and the hood over my head caused Aoife Grayson to cease. I was anonymous, the very thing I’d wished for most of my life.
“I’ll go first,” I told Dean. “Just follow me. If someone stops us, say we’re doing a routine safety inspection.”
“And they’ll buy that?” Dean frowned.
“Dean, when you work at a job as miserable as a steam ventor’s, routine safety is the only thing keeping you from boiling alive,” I said. “Trust me. This will work.”
There is a sound to an Engine, the particular hiss and clank of steam and gears that is like no other sound on earth. It’s a heartbeat more than a machine, and it pulsed and thrummed through my feet, so that I felt it from my toes to the top of my head.
The Engine was alive, and my Weird snaked out, reached into the vast and complex chambers of its heart, nearly burned up in the great mechanical organ that gave aether, steam and life to Lovecraft.
I gasped and Dean gripped my arm. “Keep it straight, doll. You went all funny.”
Day workers passing gave us a curious glance, but no more. The entire outer Engineworks was a hive, full of engineers and control operators and foremen, entrances and exits guarded by bored Proctors who yawned or stared into space.
Only the best mechanics were allowed into the works themselves. A steel hatch manned by a Proctor saw to that.
Under all of my fear and anxiety, all of the chatter around me, the Engine sang. It was a siren song, and I felt my focus slipping again.
“Aoife!” Dean gave me a sharp shake, and I knew I’d begun to wander not just in mind. “You have the plan, girl. Tell me where we need to go.”
“Main ventilation,” I said. “There.” The man-sized vent was in plain sight of the Proctor, but the goggles