The Mirrored Shard (10 page)

I didn’t sleep, just sat on the edge of the deck and watched the land glide beneath us while Cal kept an eye on the instruments. I let myself imagine just for a few hours that I’d left my troubles on the ground and when I landed I’d know exactly what to do—about the return of the Old Ones, about getting Dean back, about everything.

The illusion lasted until the airship’s balloon bladders
started to lose pressure somewhere over eastern California as the sun was coming up. Relieved that it was at least light out, I started looking for a place to land. Flat land wasn’t in short supply—the earth below was barren, and I followed a dirt highway that was little more than jitney tracks carved out of scarred beige dirt, the sunrise already pale and waning as the day started.

My landing wasn’t going to win any awards, but I managed to deflate the balloon enough that we simply set down, without needing to tie the ship up and use a ladder to reach the ground. It was all I could have hoped for—I was lucky we hadn’t broken to pieces. Reaching San Francisco in the ship had been a pipe dream.

Cal and I stumbled back to the earth, and he squinted up at the sun. “This is cracked. We need to find food and water. And shade.” Ghouls were nocturnal creatures—even in human skin, they didn’t do well in direct sunlight.

“I know,” I said. The road was below us, down a slope covered in scrub and loose gravel. We just had to follow the jitney tracks. “Come on,” I said. “We follow the road long enough, we’re bound to find someone.”

We’d lost everything—my pack, Cal’s bags, all of our meager cash. Walking was our only option.

A sign, pockmarked with buckshot, announced that we were fifteen miles from Bakersfield. “We can make it that far,” I told Cal. “And then we’ll figure something out.”

He sighed, but wrapped his shirt around his head to keep off the sun and trudged after me. That was what I liked about Cal: the situation might be dire and he might be hating every minute of it, but he’d stick by me until the
journey was done, and he complained a heck of a lot less than my brother would have.

Thinking of Conrad made me think of being in Arkham, what had happened to my father and how it was likely my fault.

I just had to get Dean back, and then I could help Archie. My dad would have to wait. I could deal with only one crisis at a time.

It took us half a day to get to Bakersfield, and we were parched, sweaty and covered in soot and dust by the time we stumbled into a jitney way station.

A fan made lazy, ineffective turns overhead, and the tile walls and floor put me in mind of a doctor’s office or a madhouse dayroom, a place where nobody could get too comfortable.

A lunch counter, studded with silver rivets across the front, sat to one side and a ticket window to the other. Since we didn’t have any money, I headed for the counter.

The woman behind it regarded us suspiciously from under a severe bun. “Yeah?”

I sat down, and noticed that soot and dust shook off my clothes as I did. Her frown deepened. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Could we please have some water?”

She pointed at a hand-lettered sign. “Five cents.”

“Oh, come on,” Cal said. “We got stranded and we just walked from the back of beyond.” He gave her his best gee-whiz look. “We only need one glass. We can share.”

The woman pointed again. “Water rationing’s been going on for months now. Five cents.”

“Forget it,” I told Cal, glaring at the woman with at least as much force as the look she gave me. “Some people just aren’t helpful.”

I looked at the arrival and departure board above the ticket window, and then turned to leave. There was nothing for us here.

“Hey,” the clerk said. She was younger but bore a startling resemblance to the witch behind the lunch counter, minus the severe bun and the canyon-sized frown lines.

“What?” I sighed. “We’re leaving, all right?”

“No,” she said. “You should clean up before you go. In the washroom.” She pointed to a blue door in the far wall. “Plenty of water there,” she said in a low, conspiratorial way. “Hasn’t been filtered, so it tastes like dirt, but it won’t do nothin’ bad to you.”

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

Washing off and getting a drink sounded like heaven, but I let Cal go first, to spend a little time in a cool room without any windows. I was sure he needed it more than I did.

“You all have an accident?” the ticket girl asked.

“You might say that,” I said. “We had a long walk, that’s for sure.”

“Sometimes folks come in’ll give you a few cents for toting their luggage,” she said. “Fare to Folsom is only fifty cents, and they have a wire office where you can have someone send you money.”

“Thanks again,” I said. If carting suitcases was what it took to get moving again, then so be it. I wasn’t some snooty rich girl too good to work.

The ticket taker shrugged.

“Just hate to see folks in a bad situation,” she said, and went back to counting receipts.

Cal came out, clean of dirt except for directly around his hairline, and I slipped into the washroom.

I stripped to my underwear, washed and then took a long drink. The ticket girl was right—the water was earthy and bitter but cold, and I gulped it down.

I was getting dressed again when I heard a commotion from outside, and Cal shouting. “Aoife, run!”

Fists landed on the washroom door. “Bureau of Proctors!” a male voice bellowed. “Open this door or we’ll break it down.”

I shut my eyes, leaning my head back against the tile wall. I felt so stupid—kindness of strangers was something that existed only in cheap romance novels and morality plays. In reality, strangers were willing to turn in their own mothers for a favor from the government, or a few dollars for an informant’s fee.

“Miss, you hearing me?” the man bellowed. “Come out of there!”

“All right!” I shouted. “I’m coming. Don’t shoot.”

I opened the door and two Proctors with shock pistols stood outside, business ends pointed at me. I put up my hands.

Sure enough, the ticket girl was peeking over the shoulders of the four-man squad, two of whom had Cal restrained.

“You—” I started, but she silenced me with a look.

“Save it,” she said. “This isn’t like some fancy city. Out here, you do for yourself or nobody will.”

“Dammit, Sadie,” her mother snapped. “They weren’t doing anything. Just being a nuisance.”

“And if they’re wanted, we might actually make rent this month,” the girl snarled.

“I thought you said you wanted to help me,” I told her, meeting her eyes. If I could instill some guilt, so much the better.

“I’m helping myself,” she said with a serene smile. “I told you, I hate seeing people in bad situations, especially me.”

“You’re horrible,” I told her as the Proctors handcuffed me. The bite of iron caused a flare of pain in my mind, but I tried to push it away.

“Hey!” Sadie shouted, ignoring me. “Is there a reward for them, or what?”

“Somebody will be in touch,” the Proctor grunted, and dragged us out, Sadie squeaking indignation the whole way.

I didn’t bother protesting my innocence. As far as I knew, I was still a wanted terrorist in the eyes of the Proctors, and I’d be on my way to a dark hole unless I thought of something fast.

Cal caught my eye as we were loaded into a jitney, one Proctor sitting across from us.

“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear,” the Proctor said. “If you’re wanted, you’ll be processed and sent to a central facility. Understand?”

“Better than you know,” I muttered as the jitney lurched into motion.

We rattled and shook over the road until we reached a brick building, bleached nearly the same color as the desert around it by dust, wind and time.

Cal squinted as they hauled us out into the sun, but when he started to say something I shook my head. I didn’t want to incriminate us any more than I had to.

Maybe everything would be all right. Maybe the panic in my guts wasn’t a harbinger of what I knew was coming but a natural reaction to being grabbed by the Proctors.

Maybe, but I knew I was in denial. This was about as bad as things could get, short of us having plunged to our deaths in that nearly destroyed airship.

I couldn’t let it paralyze me. I had to stay alert and figure out a new plan. Adapt. That was what my father had tried to teach me, and now that I couldn’t rely on him anymore, I had to rely on myself.

The Proctors separated Cal and me, and I was thrown in a holding cell occupied by two other women, both clearly smugglers or thieves of some sort. They were dusty and tired-looking, and I tried to sit well clear and look only at the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the Proctors move beyond the cells.

These weren’t the sharply dressed, brass-buttoned Proctors of Lovecraft. Their uniforms were patched and often had pieces missing. Nobody wore a cap or carried the protective goggles, masks and truncheons the street patrols back home used to break up riots. But they were still organized, unlike the ones in Lovecraft. Still clearly upholding the mission of the Bureau: hunt down and punish anyone they considered a heretic or a criminal. All things considered, my day could have been going a lot better.

An aethervox droned about contamination levels in the
Mojave Desert, and it caused an odd sensation in me to think that there were still people who believed every strange thing in this world was caused by the necrovirus, the Proctor’s fable to explain what happened when humans touched other worlds, and when creatures from those worlds came into the land of Iron.

A placard on the far wall read GREY DRAVEN, BUREAU DIRECTOR, but someone had torn down Draven’s portrait, leaving only a lighter spot on the brick where the photograph had hung.

Thinking about how furious Draven would be made me smile in spite of myself.

“You,” a female Proctor said, gesturing at me. “Up.”

She took me to a room lit by a single aether globe, patted me down, made me strip to my underwear and put on a scratchy gray uniform shirt and skirt and then dragged me into an interrogation room and sat me in a hard wooden chair eerily similar to the ones in the headmaster’s office at Lovecraft Academy.

After a time, a Proctor wearing an unbuttoned black jacket and a gray undershirt came in, and regarded me wearily.

“I know who you are,” he said, passing a piece of vellum across the desk, “so don’t bother denying it.”

My face stared back at me, a blowup of a class photo from the Academy. AOIFE GRAYSON. WANTED FOR TERRORISM, SEDITION, SABOTAGE AND ACTS OF TREASON.

It was an impressive list. I sighed and looked up at the Proctor, who appeared as if he wished he was doing anything else.

“So?” I said. “What now?”

“Now you’ll be transported to San Francisco to stand trial,” he said, and formally arrested me.

I was made to change again—this time into dark gray coveralls bearing a prisoner number, and along with Cal, boarded a jitney filled with other silent and similarly gray-suited convicts.

When the Proctor who’d searched me stopped at my seat, she grinned. “These others are mostly headed for San Quentin for detention,” she said. “But not you, missy. You’re going straight to Alcatraz.”

She kept talking, droning off the rules of the transport, but I wasn’t listening. I was too busy feeling frantic. I’d heard of Alcatraz, the island in the San Francisco Bay where the great Engine turned below the rock, powering the entire city. Where eerie blue lights were said to emanate from the compound built atop it, and where if you went as a prisoner, you never returned.

It was the greatest Proctor stronghold in the country, and I was barreling directly toward it.

The Island of Pelicans

I
T TOOK US
almost a full day to reach San Francisco, even as the jitney cruised along, overtaking all other vehicles we encountered. We were allowed off twice for rest-stop breaks, during which people jeered at us. A small, sticky-faced boy threw what remained of his sandwich at Cal, who bared his full ghoul smile and sent the brat screaming back to his mother.

I’d been a prisoner before, less than nothing in the eyes of all the people around me, and it was the same vile feeling I remembered from when Draven had locked me up in Lovecraft. I didn’t even feel like a person anymore, but like something on display, and the closer we came to the city, the sicker to my stomach I got.

When at last we reached the outer wall, I craned my neck to look out the window. I was finally here, and I couldn’t have been more helpless or less thrilled.

San Francisco was built atop a series of hills that plunged down into the deep, velvety water of the bay. I noticed a conical white tower atop the largest hill, fingers of aether drifting to and from it. Communications, I decided, and maybe power, a line running under the water directly to the engine.

Gentle fog ringed the hills like lace collars on refined women, and small beetle-backed streetcars ran on cables up and down the hills to charging stations glowing with green aether. They looked like lampreys in a stormy sea, their green lights drifting among the fog-capped hills.