The Iron Thorn Read Free

them?” I said. “This is the quickest way back to the Academy on foot. There’s nothing to be worried about if we’re together.” I didn’t know that for fact. I’d never walked through Old Town after dark. Students, especially charity cases, couldn’t afford to bend the rules of the Academy, and like Cal said, Old Town, night or day, was not a place where a nice girl went. Not if she wanted to stay nice.
    Still, we were in a city, far from necrovirus outbreaks and the heretics that Rationalists preached against. No storefront fortune-tellers or charlatan witches, or the “virally decimated,” were going to leap out and attack us.
    At least, I really hoped not.
    Cal waffled, looking back at the bright glow of the aether lamps and the arcade.
    “Leftovers,” I reminded him. That did it—Cal caught up with me and stuck his chest out, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his buffalo plaid coat like some tough in a comic book.
    We walked for a bit, the sounds of Derleth Street fading and new ones creeping in. The faint music from the Jack & Crow. The drip of moisture from the roadbed of the bridge above. The rumble of lorries crossing the span to and from the foundry with their loads of iron.
    “This isn’t so bad,” Cal said, too boldly, too loudly. We passed boarded-up row houses, their windows all broken, diamond panes like insect eyes. Alleys that wound at head-turning angles to nowhere. I felt the damp of the river, and shivered.
    No student of the Schools was allowed to come to Dunwich Lane. I’d always thought it was to keep the boysaway from the prostitutes and poppy dens that we weren’t supposed to know about, but now I wondered if I’d been wrong. The cold worsened. My exposed skin was so chilled it felt crystalline.
    “Say,” Cal said, making me jump. “Did you listen in to
The Inexplicables
on the aether tubes last night? Really good this week. ‘Adventure of the Black Claw.’ ”
    I clenched my fists and resolved that I’d be braver from now on. Dunwich Lane was poor and seedy, but it wasn’t going to sneak up on me. “Didn’t catch it. I was studying.” The only time it was acceptable for us to hear about the way the world used to be—before the virus spread, before the Consortium of Nations built Engines after the first great war, before any of the curfews and government police in every city—was when it was being mocked by cheap, state-sanctioned tube plays.
    Cal ate them up. I rather hated them.
    “You do too much of that. Studying,” Cal said. “You’re going to need glasses before long, and you know what they say: boys don’t make passes—”
    “Cal …” I stopped, irritated, in the center of the street. I was all set to lecture him when a scream echoed out of an alley between the next pair of houses. “… shut your piehole,” I finished.
    Cal’s mouth twisted down and he froze next to me. We stood in the road, waiting. The scream came again, along with soft sobs. I had a memory, unwanted, of the Cristobel madhouse and the madhouse before that, the ever-present crying on the wards. If my fingers hadn’t been balled up, they’d have been shaking like dead leaves.
    Cal started forward. “We should go help.”
    “Wait,” I said, pulling at his coat. “Just wait.” I didn’t want to walk ahead, and I sure didn’t want Cal leaving me here alone. Why had I taken the shortcut? Why had I tried to be clever?
    The sobbing escalated, and Cal jerked his arm out of my grasp, running forward and making a hard turn into the alley. “I’m going to help her!” he yelled at me before he disappeared around the corner.
    “Dammit,” I swore, because no professors were around to stick a detention hour on me for cursing. “Cal! Cal, don’t go down there!”
    I followed him into the alley, his straw-colored hair bobbing in the dark like a swamp light. “Cal,” I whispered, not out of discretion but purely out of fear. I’m not a boy. I admit when I’m scared,