The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [4]
“Course it is,” Cal said, catching his breath. “You missed the jitney too, huh?”
“Only by a little,” I said, feeling furious all over again. If Portnoy hadn’t kept me in the madhouse …
“I guess it’s leftovers for us,” Cal sighed. Even though Cal was the rough size and shape of a pipe-cleaner boy, he ate like a barbarian at a feast. He’d been my friend since the first day of our time at the Academy, and if he wasn’t thinking about comic books or asking me for advice on getting my roommate, Cecelia, to notice him, Cal was thinking about food. Leftovers was a tragedy of the same order as being expelled from the School of Engines and having to transfer to the School of Dramatics. Me, I couldn’t care less tonight. My stomach was still in knots.
We were at the foot of Derleth Street, the wide blood-rust expanse of the Erebus River boiling with slow-moving ice before us. To one side lay the river walk, lit up ghost-blue by aether lanterns and packed with late-evening tourists and shoppers. The arcade whistled enticingly, the penny prizes a temptation that I could feel pulling at Cal.
On the other side crouched Dunwich Lane, a completely unlit expanse of cobble street, except for the old-fashioned oil lantern hanging in front of a pub called the Jack & Crow.
Dunwich Lane ran under the feet of the Boundary Bridge, the iron marvel that Joseph Strauss had erected for the city some thirty years before. Cal and I—along with the rest of the sophomore class—had taken a field trip to it at the beginning of the year. It was the model we practiced drawing schematics with, until we were judged competent to design our own. If you couldn’t re-create the Boundary Bridge, you had a visit with the Head of the School and a gentle suggestion that perhaps your future was not that of an engineer. There had been three other girls in the School until that exam. Now there was only me.
The bridge looked much different from below, crouched over the river like a beast at rest, its iron lattice black against the dusk. I plucked at Cal’s arm. “Come on.”
He looked blank. “Come on where?”
I started down Dunwich Lane, the cobbles slick under my feet from the frost. Cal bounded after me. “Are you crazy? Students can’t be down here—all of Old Town is off-limits. Mrs. Fortune and Mr. Hesse will have our hides.”
“And who’s going to tell either of them?” I said. “This is the quickest way back to the Academy on foot. There’s nothing to be worried about if we’re together.” I didn’t know that for fact. I’d never walked through Old Town after dark. Students, especially charity cases, couldn’t afford to bend the rules of the Academy, and like Cal said, Old Town, night or day, was not a place where a nice girl went. Not if she wanted to stay nice.
Still, we were in a city, far from necrovirus outbreaks and the heretics that Rationalists preached against. No storefront fortune-tellers or charlatan witches, or the “virally decimated,” were going to leap out and attack us.
At least, I really hoped not.
Cal waffled, looking back at the bright glow of the aether lamps and the arcade.
“Leftovers,” I reminded him. That did it—Cal caught up with me and stuck his chest out, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his buffalo plaid coat like some tough in a comic book.
We walked for a bit, the sounds of Derleth Street fading and new ones creeping in. The faint music from the Jack & Crow. The drip of moisture from the roadbed of the bridge above. The rumble of lorries crossing the span to and from the foundry with their loads of iron.
“This isn’t so bad,” Cal said, too boldly, too loudly. We passed boarded-up row houses, their windows all broken, diamond panes like insect eyes. Alleys that wound at head-turning angles to nowhere. I felt the damp of the river, and shivered.
No student of the Schools was allowed to come to Dunwich Lane. I’d always thought it was to keep the boys away from the prostitutes and poppy dens that we weren’t supposed to know about, but now I wondered if I’d been wrong. The cold worsened. My exposed skin was so chilled it felt crystalline.