The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [6]
I plunged a hand into my satchel. There were safety guidelines, drills. The Academy projectionist had shown us a lanternreel about this. The Necrovirus and You! How to understand transmission, infection, and lastly, how to deal with a person who was beyond help.
I’d been bored as I always was during those presentations. Everything useful, if there had been anything useful, had flown from my head at the sight of the thing’s frozen-pond eyes and rotted skin.
I tried to think. Nightjars hated iron filings. Unfortunately, I didn’t generally make a point to carry a handful of those in my bag, next to my lipstick and hairbrush. That strategy was out.
Light. Nightjars hated light, their skin photosensitized by the virus. My scrabbling fingers found my portable aether tube, filled with the blue marvel of Mr. Edison’s gas, charged only enough to listen to scratchy music or receive the latest reports on protest activity so I could avoid spots where the Proctors were tangling with rioters in the city. It couldn’t even pick up the serial plays Cal loved from the big antennae in New Amsterdam. But it would be enough, I hoped.
“Cal,” I said sharply. “You better move.” He blinked, but he did as I said. I cocked my arm and threw the aether tube straight at the pavement. The brass housing flew apart and the electric coil sparked. The tube itself exploded, shards of treated glass flying everywhere as the gas inside struggled to escape. I’d watched aether reactions before on lanternreels, huge ones that the government detonated in the desert, but this close, even a small wisp of gas was like a bomb. “Cover your eyes!” I cried, and threw myself against the alley wall.
The aether let out a whump when it made contact with the oxygen in the air and blue flame blossomed, glowing like a lightning strike for a few seconds before the reaction gasped away, leaving the scent of burnt paper.
The nightjar began to scream. It wasn’t anything like the bell-tone voice from before. This was harsh, guttural and hungry.
Cal got me up, tugged me by the hand. “We should go now.” I clung to his bony fingers and let him pull me away. My feet refused to work, my knees wouldn’t bend, but somehow I ran.
I looked back once to see the nightjar writhing on the ground, great swaths of skin flaking off into the air as the last bits of the aether danced above it on the breeze.
I didn’t need to see any more. I caught up with Cal, and we ran for the Academy.
The School of Engines
WE REACHED THE head of Dunwich Lane and turned onto Storm Avenue before I realized I was still shaking. The gates of the Academy weren’t far, but I stopped and leaned against a lamppost.
Cal tilted his head. “Aoife, you hurt?” He fumbled in his satchel. “I’ve got my first-aid kit somewhere in here … had a valve-fitting lab earlier today.”
“I … I …” I wrapped my arms around myself, even though I had on a peacoat and my uniform jumper beneath it. I was freezing. It felt like death had put a hand on my cheek, put the chill inside me down to my bones, even though the Rationalists taught there was no death, only an end. A period on a sentence, and a blank page.
“I just want to go inside,” I said, unable to take Cal’s anxious expression. Cal was an advanced worrywart. In the two years I’d known him, he never got any less skittish.
“All right,” Cal said. He offered his elbow and I took it, just grateful to hide my shaking legs. I’d never seen a viral creature so close. Madwomen like my mother were one thing, merely infected. A thing fully mutated by the necrovirus from a person with a consciousness and a face into an inhuman nightjar was quite another. The smell of it lingered, like I’d fallen asleep in a nightmare garden.
The gates of the Academy loomed up from the low river fog, and we passed underneath the gear and the rule, the insignia of the Master Builder. The ever-present sign that watched us everywhere, from the stonework of our dormitories and the badges