The Nightmare Garden

13 The Spine of the Earth

NOTHING COULD HAVE prepared me for the cold outside the submersible, or the strange half-night sky that confronted us, bright on the horizon but fading to velvet black at the top, much like the ever-shifting sky of my dream place. I’d thought the wind was bad back home, that the ice and snow that enveloped Lovecraft from Hallows’ Eve to spring thaw most years was as cold as anything could be, but it wasn’t.

Even wrapped in a thick coat as I was, mask strapped over the lower half of my face and fur-lined goggles over my eyes to protect them from the wind, the cold crept in through all the cracks and stole my breath. Rasputina, wearing a navy greatcoat and a similar mask and goggles, gave no indication she even noticed it, and I envied her fortitude.

It was so cold that I felt like I might shatter, drop off the top of the Oktobriana’s conning tower, and become part of the ice, forever staring at the empty sky. Beyond the boat launch the sub rested in, which was only a small hole carved into the glacier allowing ocean water to surface, I saw nothing. The whiteness was gleaming and absolute, as if we stood atop the skeleton of a great beast of incalculable size.

“That’s strange.” Rasputina gingerly held a pair of binoculars. It was so cold that any spots of moisture clung to her gloves and ripped out tiny chunks of leather. She aimed the glasses at a tiny wooden shack at the edge of the launch. It barely hung on to the ice along with a ramshackle dock.

“What’s strange?” I tried to shrink deeper into the coat and fur-lined pants and boots I’d been given, which wasn’t hard since everything was at least two sizes too large. Another kind of cold crept in, that sixth sense I was developing that said things had gone horribly wrong. I was getting it now, and I hoped I was mistaken.

“There’s no moon,” Rasputina said.

“New moon,” I said with a shrug, trying to seem unconcerned even though my heartbeat had picked up and my shivering was no longer entirely from the bone-deep cold.

Rasputina shook her head. “Half-moon. I checked the chart.”

I turned my face up and scanned the sky. More stars than I had thought existed scattered the silver-black field of the sky, turning their unearthly white light on the glacier, which glowed as if alive.

But no moon. Not even the pockmarked slice Rasputina had said should be there. Not a sliver.

“That is strange,” I agreed, because saying anything else would come across as either silly or panicked. Celestial bodies were constants. They did not change.

This was unnatural, and I wondered what had happened to make the sky so foreign here.

“I don’t like this at all,” Rasputina said, echoing my thoughts aloud.

I turned a slow circle. We were alone. I had never felt so exposed as I did at that moment, certain the great eye of something as ancient as the starlight was turned on the boat, the same something that was blotting out the moon and causing the dead, chill atmosphere that wrapped the Oktobriana.

“We’re leaving,” Rasputina said. “This launch has always been a bad spot. The captain who told me about it got his throat cut a week later. It’s a cursed place.”

“You don’t seem like you’d believe in curses,” I murmured.

“I believe in a lot of things,” Rasputina snapped. “We’re diving. Get below.” She climbed down the conning tower, the thump of her boots against the ladder amplified in the ice field until each footstep was the thump of a coffin lid.

I stayed outside for a moment longer, hearing only my own breath against my mask.

At first I found the night around me silent except for the wind, but slowly I realized it wasn’t. The launch was about the size of a soccer pitch, ridiculously small when you thrust a military submersible into it. Displaced water sluiced against the hull, and out in the night I could hear the ice cracking and knocking, over and over. It was an endless rattle, the sound of bone against bone.

Bone against bone.

My Weird tingled, and I gasped at the sharp pain against the front of my skull. I fumbled at my goggles, yanking them off, trying to get all the metal off my body to relieve the pain. As the filtered glass came away from my eyes, a thin finger of violet light unfurled in the sky above me, like pale blood in dark water. It was joined by greens, blues, yellows, dancing in concert.

I’d seen lanternreels of the aurora borealis, but these lights were nothing like that. The violet streak moved with a pattern, a purpose, with none of the randomness that indicated true northern lights. It flowed toward a point directly to the east of me, where the moon should have been.

The purple light gathered into a starburst, and it touched the very top of something growing out of the ice, the same color as the glacier and nearly invisible in the low light. Something so large that, from my vantage on the tower of the Oktobriana, it was blotting out the moon. Something that was reflecting starlight, like the ice and the sky, invisible until the aurora touched its spire.

It was ice and sky, I realized as I stared, forgetting that I was cold and ignoring the tears the wind sparked in the corners of my eyes. The aurora illuminated the massive shape by degrees, gleaming against its translucent ice walls. It was a palace, the kind you’d see in lanternreels of faraway lands or read about in forbidden fairy tales.

Or maybe it was a giant tomb, the kind that held the kings and princes of old, before the Storm or any of this at all.…

The Bone Sepulchre. My breath hitched, and I was helpless to look away as the violet light illuminated the surface. It was beautiful.

“Effie!” Sorkin bellowed from below. “We’re diving! Get yourself below!”

“Just a minute!” I yelled back over the wind, unable to tear my eyes from the great edifice before me. I could pick it out of the glacier easily now. Smooth surfaces I’d taken for natural flaws became columns and balconies and a tower that reached so high it became part of the night sky.

The aurora flashed and vanished, all its energy running in lines down the Bone Sepulchre like an electric current through a living thing, lighting every window, every rampart, every spire. Shocked and overjoyed, I shouted for Rasputina and Sorkin to come topside and look, pulling aside my mask to scream until the cold stole my voice.

They came rushing up the ladder. The dive siren sounded below, but they ignored it, as transfixed as I was by the glowing sight before us.

Rasputina stared, her face slack with disbelief. “I’ll be damned. It’s real.”

“It was the ice. The—the sound it makes,” I stammered. “The sound like breaking bones. It made me think, and then I saw the lights.…”

“It was right here all this time,” Rasputina muttered. “I could have been making a fortune doing this run.”

I swung my leg over the conning tower and grabbed hold of the ladder leading down the outside, knowing what I had to do. I was so close—just a jump to the ice and a short walk to the dock.

“Where in this frozen hell do you think you’re going?” Rasputina shouted at me. “You’ll die out there with nothing but your coat!”

“Going where I meant to when I got on this boat!” I shouted back. I couldn’t risk waiting around for more trouble in getting where I was going. I could make it. The Bone Sepulchre was so close, I had to tilt my head back to see the top spire.

“You can’t trek over ice!” Rasputina bellowed. “The snow could be six feet deep, and who knows how far away that thing really is!”

“Thanks for everything,” I shouted, jumping from the bobbing boat to the ice. I turned back to wave to Rasputina and Sorkin. They’d taken me far enough. This part I could do on my own. The thought warmed me a bit. My satchel was under my coat—I had barely let it out of my sight since I’d boarded the Oktobriana, because if Rasputina or her crew found the compass or my diary … well, it didn’t bear thinking about. I had everything I needed, minus a plan, but I’d deal with that when I actually reached the Brotherhood.

“Dammit, girl!” Rasputina shouted, leaning over the railing of the tower. “I am not responsible for you any longer! You are insane!”

My feet dug into the ice for balance, and I stood for a moment, staring at the Bone Sepulchre. I couldn’t argue with Rasputina—the idea of trekking across ice and knocking on the Brotherhood’s door unannounced was insane—but off the boat, in the open air with no iron close to me, I felt more lucid than I had in days.

I started walking, Rasputina’s voice and the Oktobriana’s bulk fading behind me, until I was alone on the glacier, with only the stars for company.

The Bone Sepulchre was much farther away than it had looked under the glow of the aurora, and I felt as if I’d been walking for hours when I heard the bells. Not the dull tolling of the bells at St. Oppenheimer’s back in Lovecraft, but a light tinkling that traveled to my ears across the windswept waste.

A shape came into view, whiter than the starlit ice field: a low conveyance of some kind, pulled by another hulking white shape.

The shape stopped, and something that at least looked human tugged at reins hung with sleigh bells. “Whoa.”

The shape was alive. I stood perfectly still in surprise, wind buffeting the empty bits of my too-large coat and pants, as it huffed a puff of dragon’s breath at me. Horns curled behind the creature’s ears, and its fur hung shaggy and white. It stamped its black hooves and returned my stare with glowing gold eyes. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just put up my hands in surrender. Better to let them think I was harmless, at least to start with.

Despite my gesture of surrender, the human in the sleigh pointed a very businesslike gun at me, which I found to be a bit extreme. “State your business,” the man snapped. His eyes were covered by goggles like my own, and his winter gear was completely white, down to the fur on his collar, which looked suspiciously like the coat of the thing that pulled the sleigh. I didn’t like talking to faceless people, be they Proctors or the Brotherhood, but I backed up a step and raised my hands higher.

“I’m Aoife Grayson,” I said, over the howling wind. “I’m here to—”

Before I could finish, the faceless man vaulted from his seat and grabbed me, pressing the gun into my side and shoving me toward the sleigh. “Get in and get on the floor. Facedown.”

I tried to comply, but he shoved me and I fell. My bulky coat saved me from smashing my ribs on the bench, but I landed on the satchel, and Draven’s compass dug uncomfortably into my side. That was fine. As long as this man didn’t think I was a spy, he could shove me around all he wanted. I’d do what I’d always done back in Lovecraft when faced with a bully: keep my head down and try not to draw attention.

The man holstered his gun and turned the sleigh around, clucking loudly at the creature pulling it until it broke into an awkward gallop.

“Boy oh boy,” the man muttered to himself. “Wait until they see who I’ve got here.” He let out a surprisingly high-pitched cackle for such a big, gruff type. I stayed quiet not so much because he scared me, but because I was finally sheltered from the wind, which was a relief.

The ride was bumpy, at least from where I lay on the floor. The ice looked smooth, but we jittered and bounced, and the thing pulling us panted in a harsh rhythm in sync with my heartbeat.

When we slowed, I chanced a look up. We had passed through a carved archway, and doors slid shut behind us—doors of ice that blurred the outside world but didn’t cause it to disappear entirely. If I hadn’t been being held at gunpoint, I would have been thrilled by the engineering skill it took to carve an entire room and working mechanical doors from a glacier.

“Get up,” the man ordered, and I did as he said. The cold wasn’t so paralyzing indoors, but it still sliced straight through my coat. I wrapped my arms around myself protectively to keep the bulge of the satchel hidden as he shoved me down from the sleigh.

“Goggles and hood off,” the man ordered, and snatched them off my head before I could comply on my own. I chewed on my lip and waited for his reaction, my stomach knotted with apprehension.

He looked at me and then snorted behind his own mask. “You know, for all the flap about you back in the world, you’re still just a kid.”

“And you’re not a gentleman,” I responded. “What of it?”

He raised his free hand and pointed a scolding finger at me. “Destroyer of the Engine or not, Gateminder heir or just Grayson’s bastard—you don’t get to speak to me like that, and I’ll put you in your place next time you do.”

I bristled at the mention of my father. The destroyer label was going to stick to me—I accepted that now—but my family was off-limits.

“Now, now, Bruce,” someone said before I could slap the man across the face. The voice was full and resplendent, as if it should have been echoing from a pulpit somewhere. “That’s no way to talk to the favorite child of the Gateminder.”

I turned to look, curious about my rescuer. The man who’d spoken wore a white padded coat trimmed in fur, like the first man’s, but suit pants protruded from beneath, along with shoes shined to a high gloss. Not clothes for the outside, and not the clothes of someone low on the totem pole. His hood was down, and I took in a full head of white hair gleaming under the violet-tinged light that still danced through the ice walls all around us. “Well, well,” he said. “Aoife Grayson, in the flesh.” He frowned at me. “Do you know who I am?”

I recognized the blunt nose, not nearly as attractive on a man, and the snapping eyes. I tried to sound as if I knew what I was talking about, as if my being here having this conversation were normal. “You’re Valentina Crosley’s father.”

“Ah, very perceptive,” he said. “I see you’ve met my dear daughter. Tell me, how is she faring on her own, with your … father?”

I pretended not to notice that he evidently would much rather have used another word in place of father and put a smile I wholly didn’t feel on my face. “She’s well. They both are.”

He held out his hand, and his smile was also false. So we were going to be achingly polite rather than confrontational. That suited me just fine—I wanted the Brotherhood to like me. “My name is Harold Crosley, and I hope that you and I will get along very well indeed, Miss Grayson. It’s such a relief to have you among the fold.”

I didn’t take his hand. It was crucial that I choose the right response, if I was going to make the Brotherhood trust me. Or trust me for long enough that I could find the nightmare clock and figure out how to use it, at any rate. “Really?” I said. “A relief? A happy occasion? Do you think I’m stupid, Mr. Crosley?” I took a breath and kept going, even though I was quaking with the fear that they wouldn’t let me finish my performance and the big jerk with the gun would just shoot me for insolence. “You know what I did in Lovecraft,” I told Crosley. “You should want to throw me in a deep, dark hole and never let me see daylight again. Not only did I destroy the Engine and break the Gates in the Iron Land, I weakened all the others. Plus, I’m Archie Grayson’s daughter. The Archie Grayson who stole your darling daughter Valentina away.” I folded my arms across my chest in an imitation of Dean’s posture, hoping I looked tough. “And yet you’re happy to see me at your doorstep? Why is that, Mr. Crosley?”

“Why are you here?” he countered with a smile. It wasn’t the false smile he’d shown before—this one told me he’d been proven right about something he’d suspected. “If we’re so bound to do you wrong and you’re such a villain,” Crosley continued, “I’d have to conclude you’re only here because you want something from us, and that you’re going to try to use deceit to get it. I’d hate to think such a thing of a Grayson, young lady. Even if Archie and I are no longer civil.”

“You have something my father doesn’t,” I said. For once, I could tell lying wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Crosley was a lot more accomplished at it than I was.

“And what’s that?” His mouth twitched with amusement. He must have loved having somebody from my family need something from him.

“I need to look at the Iron Codex,” I said. My father’s journals had told me a little when I’d read them back in Massachusetts, but not everything. Not much of actual use. Short of being knocked unconscious, I didn’t even know how to reach the dream room, with its dark figure. I had no idea how to manipulate the clock should I make it there. I needed the Codex.

“That’s interesting,” Crosley said. “You need my Codex and I need somebody with a Weird, which we’re fully aware that your brother does not possess.”

Valentina’s hushed and frantic conversation came back to me. Now it made sense. Mr. Crosley wanted my Weird, and she hadn’t wanted to give me up. “Then you’ll let me look at it?”

“Maybe.” Crosley shrugged. “If your Weird can help us as much as I think it can.”

He didn’t trust me, that was obvious. “I don’t know how much my Weird can help anyone,” I murmured. “You’ve seen what it can do.”

“You’ll come to understand, Aoife,” Crosley said quietly, “we don’t revile you for what happened. We know how the Fae can be, and that it wasn’t your fault, the incident with the Gates. We’re glad you came to us.” He put a hand on my shoulder, snaking me into his grasp. “What say before we continue this conversation we get you warmed up somewhere a little more comfortable. Are you hungry?”

“Famished,” I said truthfully. Relief coursed through me. I was in.

Crosley smiled even wider when I assented. It was a sweet trap of a smile this time, the kind designed to entice little girls who wanted to show they were clever.

“I’m glad you found your way home, Aoife. It’s good work we do here, and the Gateminder and future Gateminders like you are needed for every bit of it. We’re glad to have you.”

“I’m so very glad to be here,” I replied, and let him lead me through the doors.

Beyond the doors lay a great hall, at least thirty feet from floor to ceiling. Icicles dangled from the roof. “Is this whole place made of ice?” I asked in wonder. I couldn’t conceive of such a feat.

“It is. And never more than thirty-two degrees,” Crosley said proudly. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of that outfit and into something that’ll keep you warm.” He marched straight through the hall, ignoring the stares of the other occupants. There were a fair number of people in the room. Reading tables lined the gleaming ice walls, along with workbenches, and there was even a depression in the ice where a pair of mechanics bent over the innards of a clockwork jitney.

“Why do you use those sleighs if you have mechanicals?” I asked. I figured the more inane questions I asked of him, the less suspicious he would be of any ulterior motives I might have.

“Engines seize up in low temperatures,” Crosley said. “That critter that pulled you in here with the sleigh—it’s a yetikin—bred for the cold.”

“I see,” I said, and forced a ladylike smile. I couldn’t care less about what pulled the Brotherhood’s sleighs, but Crosley seemed content to chatter while we walked, and as long as I acted like a simpering schoolgirl, nothing I said would give him a second’s pause.

“This way, my dear,” he said, and ushered me into what looked like a men’s clubroom: all dark furniture, distinguished suits and jackets on the occupants, and air full of their cigar smoke and heavy, hushed conversation. A carved bar took up the back portion, a bartender in a natty white jacket and scarf hard at work.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Crosley asked, sitting me in one of the engulfing armchairs. I sank so deep that I wouldn’t easily get out again, especially in my bulky cold-weather clothes.

“A cup of tea would be lovely, please,” I said. “Thank you so much.” I didn’t like being backed into a corner, in this chair, unable to gauge what was happening around me, but I forced myself to stay calm. Crosley wasn’t going to try to cut my throat, at least not yet. He didn’t know I was really after the nightmare clock.

“Well, now that I can get a proper look at you, you’re quite lovely,” Crosley said. “You remind me of Valentina, before her unfortunate decision to leave her place in society and take up a … front-line position in the Brotherhood, doing things unsuitable for a well-bred young woman like her.” The way he said it, lips pursing, left no doubt how he felt about his daughter’s allegiances. Apparently I, not being of the same breed of rich jerk, was exempt from such disapproval.

He excused himself to the bar and claimed a silver tea service with two cups and saucers. I watched him until somebody flopped into the chair opposite me. “Hey. You made it.”

I nearly choked when I recognized the face. “Casey? You’re alive!”

“You act like you’re surprised,” she said. “Takes more than a few ghouls to keep me down. Also, you trust people way too easy when you’re getting what you want. Your old man’s right—you need to learn if you’re gonna live to be seventeen.”

Rage flamed in me, and for a moment I forgot that I was supposed to be acting harmless. “You … you … backstabber,” I spat. “You’re not a street kid! You’re not even from Lovecraft!”

Casey wagged her hand. “I was born there,” she said. “I’ve been working for the Brotherhood for a long time, keeping tabs on the Rustworks and anyone who might be useful to the cause.”

“The Brotherhood was spying on me?” I was flabbergasted. I expected this sort of thing from the Proctors, but not from people who knew the truth about the world. “For how long?” I asked. Another, darker possibility was creeping through my mind like a hungry ghoul—if Casey had been following me, had she seen what happened in Innsmouth? Was I about to be thrown under the train before I’d even had a chance to find the nightmare clock?

“Until I lost you in Old Town you took off from the Crosley house for Innsmouth,” Casey said. “Lost you. Too many damn ghouls running around.”

My breathing started again, fast and full of relief. Casey hadn’t seen me with Draven. She hadn’t dipped below the first layer of my reason for coming to the Bone Sepulchre.

“So, this place is pretty crazy, right?” Casey said. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re bugging out.”

Glad of any topic except her following me around for stone knew how long, I nodded. “More than pretty crazy,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

Casey sat forward in excitement, eyes lighting up as she talked. “We pull aether right out of the air. There’s a device in the tower that they say was designed by Tesla himself. You don’t need to refine it; you can pull a full charge and disperse it into a feed just like normal. That’s why it’s purple, not blue. No refining chemicals.”

That explained the “aurora borealis” I’d seen. Not light. Aether. The energy of the cosmos ripped directly from the air. A machine like that, especially one built by Tesla, would normally be something I’d be eager to see, but not now. Now, I was fishing. “Seems kind of boring around here,” I said. “No lanternreels, no books that I can see.”

“Oh, you’re wrong. There’s a giant library,” Casey said. “I know you’re a bookworm.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Exactly how long have you been watching me?”

“Me personally? Only since you rabbited from the Academy,” Casey said. “Before that, I couldn’t say if Mr. Grayson or someone else had an agent watching you.” She sat back in the chair and regarded me. “Nobody else can do what you do, Aoife. You’re important to a lot of people for that reason, and a lot of things that aren’t people at all. But I’m glad you chose us and not the Proctors.”

“Of course I did,” I said, shrugging as if there were no question at all. “I believe in what you’re doing. Draven and the Proctors are vile.” True. I knew it was always best to put a little truth in your untruths. It made you believable.

“Ah, Miss Casey,” said Crosley, returning with the tea. “So good of you to take Miss Grayson under your wing.” He grinned at me. “Casey is a very capable girl, much like yourself. She can show you to your room, order you some supper, and explain to you the kinds of tests we’ll be running.”

I paused, the teacup halfway to my lips. “Tests?” I said, pulling back from Crosley warily. Nothing that started with “running a few tests” ever ended well, in my experience.

“Relax!” Crosley boomed genially. “We just want to see what your Weird can do, and how much we can still teach you. We must use the Gates for good instead of as instruments of disaster going forward, and to do that we have to see where your talent lies.”

His hand landed on my shoulder, and the weight pushed me deeper still into the armchair. “Does that sound all right to you, my dear?”

That sounded just the opposite of all right. “I’ll prove to you I have my Weird,” I said. “But I don’t relish being poked at like a laboratory rat.”

Crosley folded his fingers together in a motion I recognized from when my professors were trying to make a pop quiz appealing. “Terrible what happened to your mother, Aoife. Just terrible. And young Conrad showed symptoms as well before he removed himself from the Iron Land. We know that if you stay away from iron, out of cities and such, the onset is slower, and comes not at all in Thorn, but if you stay in the Iron Land, you’ll inevitably go mad, and I think it’s a crime that Archie would never allow me to help him with his children’s … unique bloodline. I’m confident that with time, we can find a way to help you. So you won’t have to risk iron madness every time you go into a city.”

That all sounded, to put it mildly, just a bit too good to be true. “How do I know you won’t just chain me up and force me to use my Weird to do whatever you want with machines and the Gates?”

Crosley laughed. It was deep and wet, from the lungs of a man, I realized, who was gravely ill. His face turned crimson, with amusement or lack of air, I couldn’t tell. “Aoife, if we wanted to imprison you, wouldn’t doing so immediately after you’d arrived have made more sense than offering you a conversation and a nice cup of tea?”

I set the teacup back down and looked him in the eye. “There are all different kinds of prisons, Mr. Crosley.”

“Smart girl. So there are,” he said, “but this is not a prison, it’s a promise. You let me run my tests and cooperate, and I will not only give you access to the Codex, I will find a solution to your iron madness. A permanent one. You won’t have to end up like poor lost Nerissa.”

I twitched at my mother’s name crossing his lips. He didn’t know anything about us, spies or not. Nerissa had done the best she could. In our small apartment, before she was committed, we’d at least been free.

I didn’t let any of that come across to Crosley, and he spread his hands. “I ask again—does this sound equitable to you, young Miss Grayson?”

I looked into his eyes and found the same falseness there I knew I was showing in my own. “Sounds fantastic,” I said dryly, but Crosley didn’t pick up on my sarcasm, just grinned again and left me in the care of Casey.

She sat with me while I drank my tea, chattering about the great cause of the Brotherhood of Iron, Tesla and his prototype Gate, and how she’d personally seen two Fae! In the flesh! “They were creepy,” she said, and shuddered. “Had hollow spaces where their eyes should be, and fangs.”

I didn’t bother telling her that she’d most likely seen something that had crawled from the Mists rather than full-blooded Fae. Besides, perfect faces with gleaming beauty and dead, unblinking eyes weren’t really any less terrifying.

After I finished my tea, she guided me to a guest room, where a cot piled high with furs and lit by the same eerie purple aether lamps greeted me. The Brotherhood, for all their status as fugitives, had means far beyond even the Proctors. Clean clothes waited for me, thick woolen socks and silk pajamas that trapped the heat next to my skin, and I burrowed under the blankets, some of the hides nearly as thick as carpets.

It was pure luck, burrowed as I was, that I heard the door lock from the outside. I’d probably been meant to fall asleep, warm and dry and full of soporific tea, lulled into a false sense of security by Casey and her uncomplicated nature.

That jibed a bit with what Archie had told me. I didn’t think his view of the Brotherhood of Iron was entirely fair, but I also knew my father wasn’t stupid. If he’d broken with the Brotherhood, there was a good reason. At the very least, I was the daughter of the man who’d stolen Harold Crosley’s own daughter, and I’d broken the Gates besides. Nobody, no matter their nature, was that forgiving.

And now I was locked in, and even if I wasn’t, they’d taken away my cold-weather gear. If I went back onto the ice dressed as I was, I’d be dead inside of ten minutes.

With that cheerful thought ringing in my head, along with a dozen considered and discarded plans to find information about the clock, I managed to fall asleep, but too lightly for any dreams except the dark things, writhing and twisting through an empty, starless sky.

The next day, I was woken by a white-clad servant. He gave me breakfast in my room, and soon after, Casey appeared. After I’d dressed in more brand-new clothes, smart trousers and a black jacket this time, we went together to a sort of laboratory, just a long table and a few microscopes and other scientific instruments arranged along the wall.

Crosley and a panel of stern-faced men waited for me. A single chair sat before the table, and in front of me was a machine with a variety of needles for scratching data onto a roll of paper.

The other end of the machine had wires running out of it, and one of the anonymous men taped two of the electrical leads to my temples. They were cold, and I flinched, but I tried to act as if everything were all right.

“It’s just for a few readouts,” Crosley assured me, placing his hand on my shoulder. “We need to quantify your Weird scientifically.”

I turned to look at him. “Did you do this to my father?”

“Of course,” Crosley said smoothly, not missing a beat. “All Gateminders go through these tests when they ally themselves with the Brotherhood of Iron.” His grip tightened, his nails digging in beneath my collarbone just a fraction, and I bit my lip. Don’t react. Don’t give him any reason to doubt you.

I sighed, trying to focus on my Weird. There was virtually no metal in the Bone Sepulchre, and my headaches and the shadows I glimpsed from the corners of my eyes had all but ceased. That, at least, was a relief. “What am I supposed to do for these tests, then?” I asked Crosley.

He took his pocket watch off the fob and placed it before me. “Can you wind it?” he asked. “Destroying things isn’t terribly useful in the long run, Aoife. The best weapon is one that you can carefully aim and fire.”

“Is that what I am to you?” I asked him, examining the watch. It was heavy, gold-plated, overdone. Much like Harold Crosley himself. “A weapon?” That was a stupid question. I already knew the answer.

“It’s what we’d like you to be,” Crosley said, with that clasp on my shoulder that was becoming all too familiar. “We’re not the Proctors, Aoife. We won’t force you to do anything. But we’d very much like you to choose to use your gift for the good of all, not just the few the Proctors deem worthy.” He leaned down as if to share a secret. It was a ploy that hadn’t worked on me when I was eight, and it didn’t work now. I was actually a bit insulted that he’d patronize me so. Maybe I’d overdone it on the simpleton act.

“Wind the clock, Aoife,” Crosley murmured. “Use your Weird for us. Show me that you’ll use it for the Brotherhood and be the loyal soldier your father refused to be.”

That was it, I realized. I had to tell the truth now, and then I could lie with impunity. I had to let the Brotherhood see the full extent of my skill with my Weird, and then I would be home free, because if they knew what I could do, they’d think they owned me, that only they could keep me from another event like the Engine. They’d believe that I was being honest with them, and I’d be free to do what needed to be done.

I put my fingers on the edge of the table and slid them forward so the tips just touched the pocket watch. My Weird gave a tickle, an itch I couldn’t quite reach. The watch was complex, and I breathed in and out, shallower and shallower, focusing on the mechanism that would make the tiny hands spin backward. The only time I’d managed this was with my father, and then I hadn’t been a virtual prisoner, being stared at like a curiosity by a cadre of men who could keep me locked up indefinitely. The pressure didn’t help.

After one tick, two, three, four, the hands finally stopped. After another breath, they began to run in reverse, my Weird sending the gears spinning back and back until they stood at exactly midnight.

More. I had to do more. I had to show them the earth-shattering power waiting in the dark places of my mind.

The watch was spinning so fast now it vibrated on the table, and I picked out each individual gear and cog as my Weird flowed, not a trickle now but a flood, one that could drown me if I let it have too much more rein. I could feel every bit of clockwork in the place now.

I was the machine. And the machine was me. Just as it had been in Lovecraft.

The glass face of the clock cracked open and the hands went flying, embedding themselves in the far wall. I picked it apart piece by piece, until every bit of the watch was turning around my head, spinning of its own accord.

As quickly as it had come, the flash flood of power vanished, as I knew it would. My control wasn’t that good yet.

The gold case dropped to the floor, smoking, and a few heartbeats after that I lost my grip on the clockwork and it too fell, raining gears and brass.

Murmurs, and an excited but subdued round of applause broke out among the Brotherhood members. My mind still itched, and I felt the familiar trickle of blood from my nose. The needles on the machine I was hooked to danced wildly. “I’d like to be excused,” I told Crosley. My head was spinning, I was sick to my stomach, and I was not going to faint in front of these men if I had any say.

“Of course, of course,” he said, and rang for Casey to take me back to my room.

“You’re bleeding,” she said, but made no move to offer me a handkerchief or a rag. I wiped the blood on my sleeve, where it stood out damp and dark.

“I’ll live,” I said. The walls of the Bone Sepulchre wavered in front of me. The ice appeared to shimmer in the low light, and with the way my head was pounding, I wasn’t sure I could make it out of the room. I scrabbled against the slick walls, vision blurring, and Casey caught me.

“Whoa!” she said. “You don’t look so good, Aoife. Are you all right?”

My shoulder began to throb again, ten times worse than it had on the submarine. Tears squeezed from my eyes, and I saw that they were red when they landed on the backs of my hands.

“This is wrong …,” I choked out, my tongue feeling too large for my mouth. My heart kicked into overdrive with fear, and it exacerbated the pain in my shoulder. Hot pain, searing pain, bone-deep pain that clutched at every bit of me, held me and didn’t let me go.

The sensation of falling gripped me as well, beyond the pain, the displacement of gravity acting on my stomach, and then the vertigo of being in two places at once, neither quite here nor there.

Fae magic. The kind that could rip me from one place to the next as quickly as I breathed.

I braced myself to land, but when I opened my eyes, I was in the same spot, standing just outside the door of the library, heart pounding and my breath coming not at all.

The Fae magic hadn’t reached out to grab me, but had thrust another figure into my path.

Tremaine smiled at me, his pointed teeth gleaming silver.

“Hello, Aoife. You have no idea how glad I am to catch up to you.”