The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [20]
When we reached the gate, a plump ex-Proctor sat in the security officer’s hut, and he stepped out to stop us. Before he could shout at us for being out of doors without permission, I held up the shirt. “Mrs. Fortune said I might be let out to go to the China Laundry.” I practiced my poor-ward-of-the-city look again.
The guard examined us. “Just you,” he said. “You, boy—stay in.”
“Oh no,” I said, couching the protest as alarm. A regular girl would be terrified to leave the safety of the Academy after dark. “She was very firm that I have an escort.”
“Old Fussbudget Fortune ain’t his head of house,” said the guard. “He stays.”
“But—” Cal started. The guard rattled his nightstick against the post.
“You deaf, kid? Get back to supper and leave me be.”
The old lump was clearly immune to my charms, so I switched to the other sort of false face I knew—the snooty Academy student with no time for the help. “Could you just open the gate and let me launder my only blouse?” I snapped, trying to adopt the tone of Marcos Langostrian or Cecelia. The guard grunted, but he took the keys off his belt and walked over to the bars.
“Get ready,” I murmured to Cal, slipping my gloved palm into his. His hand was cool and thin, and when I squeezed I could feel all his small bones.
The gate opened, and I started walking, Cal pulled with me. The officer gawped. “You there! Student out of bounds!”
“Dammit to the deep, anyway,” Cal said. He just stood there, and I jerked him with me.
“Run, idiot!”
We made an odd pair fleeing down Cornish Lane, past closed-up shops and slumbering vendor carts. Cal loped along, stumbling over his own feet. I put my head down and ran as if all the ghouls of Lovecraft’s sewers were on my heels.
At the intersection of Cornish and Occidental, I could still hear the shriek of the officer’s whistle, and I ran harder. Cal gasped like the faulty bellows in the machine shop. “Maybe … we … should … go … back.”
“And then what?” I shouted as we took a hard left, pelting past the colorful Romany shacks of Troubadour Road, toward the train tracks and the bridge.
“I don’t”—Cal sucked in a lungful of the night air—“I don’t know, but this is a terrible … terrible … idea!”
We crossed the tracks, like a frontier border in their cold iron gleam under the moonlight. I twisted my ankle in the gravel as we stumbled down the other side of the embankment, and then Joseph Strauss’s marvelous bridge was in front of us, leading across the river and into the maze of the foundry complex.
We 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