The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [166]
The end of that lanternreel showed a burning, cratered city. A great wound on the earth, burned from the inside out.
I had only meant to divert the Engine’s power, just for a moment. I hadn’t meant to cause overload.
I hadn’t meant to unleash Tremaine and his Folk on the Iron Land.
What had I meant to do? What had I done?
Dean grabbed my good hand and together we joined the stream of evacuating workers, up staircase after staircase as the earth shuddered and convulsed beneath us.
Up and up, into the free, fresh air. It tasted like nothing except metal and death to my tongue. Tremaine said the iron drove me mad. Drove changelings mad. He’d said so many things.
Tremaine had done the thing my father had sought to deter his entire life. The Gateminder and the Folk need one another. To maintain a balance, to hunt down things that crossed from one to the other, to keep the gates between Thorn and Iron shut.
And I’d opened them. I’d let magic into a world that called it a lie, that couldn’t absorb it. That was what I’d done.
“Move, kid!” Dean bellowed in my ear. “This monster is gonna blow!”
The Engineworks had vents, all over the city, and they were sending out jets of steam that were melting the stone and iron around them as we crested the ground. Manhole covers flew off like bullets and Klaxons screamed in the air.
The grounds of the Engineworks were chaos, workers running headlong for the fences, piling up at the gate, screaming at the Proctors, who were themselves running for their lives.
In the city itself I could see the steam gathering over the tall spires of Uptown like a pair of vast wings, stretching to engulf everything that the Proctors and the Rationalists held dear.
The screaming wasn’t just sirens, I realized. There was a drone in the air, of human voices that rose and fell with the air-raid Klaxons. Outside the fences of the Engineworks, black shapes darted and hissed at the people inside. Nightjars, in the daytime. They were freed from the gates at last—every Proctor in the city was occupied, and the population was theirs for the picking.
Thorn’s children would feast.
“It’s horrible …,” I whispered. “I am so sorry. I didn’t want this.…”
“Enough,” Dean said. He ripped off his fire suit and helped me do the same. “We have to go, doll.”
The mob of workers were breaking the fences, only to be set upon by a cluster of nightjars and springheel jacks still wearing vestiges of their human faces. New screams joined the faint ones rolling back from the hills of Uptown.
Dean turned away from the carnage at the gates and ran for the river, dragging me with him. The icy black rushed up at us, and before I could protest or balk we went over the edge, off the pier.
In midair, a great hand snatched me and pulled me away from Dean, a crackle like a thousand rifle shots and then a boom and a loss of air.
A great emptiness opened up where my Weird sang.
I plunged into the dead winter water of the Erebus River knowing that the Lovecraft Engine was no more.
The cold kept me from fainting at the great bodily shock the overload of the Engine caused. It seized my lungs and forced me to kick for the surface. I scraped my palms on floating chunks of ice, but when I broke free of its grasp I sucked down air and tried to kick against the current.
From my vantage on the water, I watched Lovecraft burn. Crimson smoke from the Engineworks blanketed the sky like a red tide, and screams floated over the water. Clockwork ravens swirled aimlessly overhead, flummoxed by the devastation.
By the shore, black shapes crawled, coming out of sewer drains and shadows and the air itself. I couldn’t discern which screams came from the Engine and which from the crawling remnants of the Folk.
“Dean!” I shouted. My voice was gone, stolen by ice and smoke. “Dean!”
“Aoife!” His shout came from a piling on the bridge, toward which I rapidly swept. “Hold on! I’ll catch you.”
I caught his hand, nearly lost it again, grabbed on to his leather and