The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [55]
“I saw something in the dark and I didn’t want to get digested by a nasty, slobbering viral creature for the second time today.” The knuckles on my left hand were skinned and turning purple. Cal always assumed the worst. He didn’t realize that sometimes a girl just got irritable.
“We could still go back, you know,” Cal said, taking my injured hand in his and producing his handkerchief. He wrapped my hand once, twice. My blood made small blooms on the snowy fabric and he stared at them, his throat working. “You’d have to be in quarantine for six months, but there’s always a chance they’d let you out if you didn’t … you know.”
I yanked my hand out of his. The handkerchief fluttered to the ground and he snatched it up. “You’re so sure I’m going mad, Cal, then why are you still here? I’m sure if you ran home now and licked the headmaster’s boots he’d be overjoyed to readmit you.” It was bad enough thinking that madness was encroaching. I didn’t need my best friend accusing me as well.
Cal’s lips disappeared into a thin line. “That was cruel, Aoife.”
“Well,” I blustered, “you want me in quarantine.” Quarantine meant a hospital on the river, outside the city limits. A place full of sterile white halls and sterile aether lamps burning night and day. Far from the madhouse, where the doctors had given up on the patients. In quarantine, the doctors tried to beat the advance of the necrovirus. To shock, burn and drown the heresy out of a human body.
When a court officer suggested quarantine for Nerissa, she grabbed the man’s pen and jammed it into the back of his hand, screaming that he was a Crimson Guard witch come to remove her memories and replace them with bird-song.
They decided to skip quarantine after that.
“Sometimes, madness isn’t the worst of life,” Conrad told me afterward. We sat on the steps even though it was raining, looking down from the courthouse at the dense brick-lined veins of Lovecraft, where normal, usual, uninfected people lived. “Sometimes, it’s the belief that madness has a cure.”
Every time I passed the Danvers State Viral Hospital after Nerissa’s commitment hearing, fingers of ice played notes up and down my spine.
“I’m just trying to help you,” Cal said. “Cram it, Aoife, can’t you see that?”
I held out my hand again, offering it to his ministrations. “I suppose. I’m sorry.”
Cal rewrapped my hand. “Me too.” He looked gamely at the books. “This isn’t so bad. Kind of stuffy. You know, I hear that you can still go to school in quarantine … maybe not to be an engineer, but a teacher or a personal secretary for sure. You’re bright enough—”
“Cal. Don’t try to help me, like I’m some dame in one of your dumb aether plays,” I said. “Don’t try to be my hero. Just be Cal.” I stood on tiptoe so I could move the straw stalks of hair away from his eyes. “I like just Cal.”
Cal shuffled his feet in the dust coating the broad boards of the library floor, but at least he’d stopped talking about quarantine for the time being. I looked at my feet, too. The spectral glow of the lantern made everything sharp, the tear in my stocking and my footprints in the dust. Beneath them, I discerned an older set, smaller than my feet, heel and toe, period and question mark.
“Look.” The footprints crossed the library in a careful, unhurried line and disappeared at the bookshelves on the far wall. I grabbed Cal’s arm. “Somebody else was here.”
Cal’s arm went rigid under my grip, and I watched his throat twitch painfully as he swallowed. “Your father must have had a lady visitor.”
“A lady visitor who can evaporate through the walls?” I started for the spot and Cal attempted to pull me back.
“Aoife, you don’t know what’s going on here.”
I shrugged free of his bony grip. “The dust is settled over her prints. She’s long gone. And since my father never married, I’m doubting she has any business in this house.”
“Never remarried,” Cal corrected me, holding up the lantern for a pale imitation of light as I ran my fingers over the shelf. A hidden door