The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [66]
“Thought you’d be halfway home by now,” I said at last. Cal leaped up.
“Aoife.” He eyed the full length of my body, for a good few seconds, eyes darkening. “You look … different. Those aren’t your clothes.”
“My uniform is a lost cause,” I said. “This was in the wardrobe.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea?” Cal worried the poker. “I’ve heard it’s bad luck to wear other people’s clothes.”
I touched the comb in my hair. “What would your professors say, they heard you taking stock in superstition like that? Besides, I like these and that’s a stupid rumor.”
“It’s, well. The dress is very bright. Red, like a Crimson Guard flag.” Cal struck another match and cursed when the flame came too close to his fingers.
“I’ll be in the library,” I sighed. “And for future reference, girls might not be flattered to have you compare their attire to the symbol of a national enemy.”
“Aoife, I wanted to say I’m sorry …,” Cal rushed, and then sighed, composing his face and standing. “I’m sorry about what I said to you last night. I don’t believe that you’re naive.”
“But you do think I’m wrong about Conrad?” I should simply accept Cal’s apology and let things be right between us. The space where I’d kept Cal’s friendship was bruised and smarting this morning, after the shouting match we’d endured, but I wouldn’t abandon my brother either. Not even in words.
“I don’t want us to fight,” Cal said. “Can’t we just agree that we’ll go home tomorrow? He’s not here, Aoife.”
I drew myself up, the dress falling about my legs making me feel older, taller. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to find where he’s gone.”
“Aoife, be reasonable …,” Cal started, but I walked away from his words. Cal and I had been friends ever since we’d both been without a partner for our first tour of the School of Engines, but lately we sat at odds over everything, our conversations going in unfamiliar directions that twisted them into something angry with jagged edges.
Losing my only friend over my family sat poorly, like something rotten and too large in my gut. If I had no Cal, then right now I’d have no one.
To distract myself from my thoughts, which were swirling off in a black direction indeed, I went back to the library, brushing past the doors like I had nothing to worry over.
Conrad had told me to fix the clock, and I would use machines and math to soothe my troubles.
The clock waited at the far end of the long high room, pendulum twitching at random like a rat’s tail. I knelt before it and opened the case, staring into the wicked, sharpened gears.
“I’ll fix you,” I said. “If you’ll let me.”
For a moment, nothing happened and then the gears turned faster, pendulum lashing like the shoggoth’s tentacles.
“I’m not going to break anything,” I promised the clock. “Please. I have to fix you.” Was this the first sign of madness? Talking to inanimate machines? Perhaps I was only mad if I got a reply.
I reached slowly toward the clock’s case, even though sticking my hand inside the whirl of gears with the way they spun would result in me losing a crop of fingers. “Conrad told me,” I whispered. “I have to fix it. I have to fix you.”
My fingertips tingled, and my head echoed as the clock began to chime; I felt as if a pipe fire had sparked to life in my chest. My entire body ran fever-hot, and dampness broke out under the silk of my dress. The dancing snare of static spread up my arm, all through me, and the tolling of the clock became a single reverberation, splitting my skull in half.
I shrieked. “Stop!”
Quickly as it had ramped up at my appearance, every gear within the clockwork ground to a halt, fine metal shavings raining to the bottom of the case as gears fouled themselves against one another’s filed teeth.
I waited for a moment, the idea that the clock had stopped on my command ludicrous even to my mind, but the mechanism was still. As if it were waiting.
I reached into the case, mindful of my cut thumb and bruised knuckles. Every sharp edge of the clock’s innards was hungry,