Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (40 page)

Casey looked crestfallen. “Mr. Crosley has the only copy of the keys. There’s no way I’m getting my hands on them.”

At least here, I was in my element. I could do something about Casey’s misery. “Good thing I don’t need his keys, then, eh?” I said, placing my hands on the door to the cage. Casey was right—the locks were strong, complicated, not the sort of kid stuff I could break open easily with my Weird.

But it could be done. Was going to be done. I laid my forehead against the iron. I didn’t have much time, and the pressure didn’t help my concentration, but I let the locks speak to me, let my Weird speak to them, allow the meshing of two machines, one ethereal and one iron, to occur.

After a moment, the locks popped open, and Casey gave a small squeak. “I’ll never get used to that,” she explained when I gave her a questioning look. “Closest thing to magic I’ll ever see.”

I thought of my father trying to teach me control back on the beach and felt a small pang. I did want to see him again, to give us a chance to spend more than a few days together, to really be father and daughter.

But for the sake of everything else, I shoved the tightness in my chest aside and pointed into the cage. “I probably shouldn’t spend too much time enclosed in all that iron,” I told Casey. “Can you get the Tesla stuff and bring it out here?”

“Sure can,” she said, seeming relieved to have a task. I looked back at the guards, wondering how we were going to explain them. While Casey collected diaries, blueprints, journals and bound papers, I rooted through the librarian’s desk until I unearthed a flat bottle of whiskey.

Perfect. I upended it over the unconscious guards’ clothes, then left the bottle lying near the outstretched hand of the one Casey had beaten up. Not that whiskey would explain the bruises, but it would at least cast doubt on the story that two grown men had been beaten by two teenage girls—if they admitted such a thing at all.

When Casey had finished stacking a table high with archived documents, I took a seat before them, pulling the
aether lamp close while she kept a lookout. I figured I had a few hours at most—the Brotherhood never truly slept, and sooner or later somebody would notice that I wasn’t in my room, nor was Casey in hers. I had to be fast, to focus, even though my mind was still spinning from Tremaine’s visit and felt like it might never stop.

Just think
, I cajoled myself.
You’re holding the same plans in your hand that were once in Nikola Tesla’s. How many Academy students would crawl over broken glass to do the same
? Then again, I doubted most students of engineering realized that when he wasn’t building coils and finding the alternating current, Tesla was building magical devices to keep a race of predatory Fae at bay.

His plans weren’t anything special to look at—his handwriting was precise, his drawings meticulous, but they didn’t glow or catch fire beneath my fingers, as would seem to fit such a portentous occasion. And there were lots of plans and diaries—hundreds at least. Tesla was prolific, and I’d heard that, unlike his competitor Edison, he recorded most ideas, even the wholly impractical ones. “This is going to take forever,” I muttered. Casey shrugged.

“The ones Mr. Crosley thinks are particularly special are bound up in that big blue book,” she said, shoving toward me a ledger that was almost too large for me to turn the pages of. It was full of blueprints, most of them for terrestrial inventions that I’d seen back in Lovecraft—the prototype steam jitney engine, a Tesla coil, an aether feeder that became the system everyone in the world whose home was piped with the stuff was familiar with.

I set the book aside. Crosley’s ego display didn’t interest
me. I tried a few of Tesla’s personal journals, and then started looking through loose plans, some folded and faded so that the machines were almost unrecognizable. But the clock wasn’t among them. There were no notes to even indicate Tesla had entertained the idea of such a machine.

I had a terrible sensation in my stomach that I might have gone about this all wrong, but I persisted. The nightmare clock had to be here. For so many reasons.

Casey looked back at me, chewing on her lip. “I can hear people moving around out there. We should probably get going soon.”

“If we do get caught,” I said, opening another bound volume, the paper so decayed the corners turned to dust in my hands, “blame me. Crosley needs me—I’ll be punished less.”

Casey gave me a tentative smile. “Thanks. But I don’t want you punished either.”

I shrugged. “I’m not scared of Harold Crosley. You helped me, now I’ll help you. That’s how it works.”

Casey lowered her eyes. “Maybe in your world. I’m not used to it.”

“What do you …,” I started, but was distracted by the spidery handwriting at the top of the last blueprint in the bound journal.
Arctic Gate—Transportive Device for Inter-dimensional Travel, commissioned by Raymond Crosley, 1899
.

I felt my mouth drop open in surprise, and I flipped the book around so Casey could see. “There’s a Gate? Here?”

Casey nodded, looking as if she’d done something wrong. “But it never worked right. Mr. Crosley won’t let anyone use it—there’ve been folks who’ve lost limbs and horrible stories about people who got shot out into the vacuum of
space and whatnot.” She chewed her lip. “Said it was just a prototype Tesla fiddled with. He locked that whole wing. Nobody goes there.”

I heard Octavia’s whisper.
The man who built the Gates. It started with him, and it will end with him
.

I carefully tore the blueprint from the book, tucking it under my shirt. My heart was pounding again, but this time it was from excitement and urgency at finally being so close to what I needed. “We’re going there. Right now.”

Tesla’s Lost Gate

T
HINGS WERE WAKING
up in the Bone Sepulchre as the short day—only a few hours of light, this time of year—got under way. Casey took me to the blocked-off staircase that led to where she said the Gate rested.

This had to be it—not a Gate, but the clock Tesla had conceived. I couldn’t think of anywhere else Tesla could have hidden a doorway into the very dreams of the world. Faulty it might be, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

“Are you sure about this?” Casey whispered as I performed my lock-picking trick again. It hurt more this time. My Weird had been making me suffer more and more with even the smallest exercises. I didn’t know what that heralded—iron madness, fatigue, or something worse—but I had to sit down for a moment and catch my breath when the door sprang open.

“No,” I told Casey, swiping at my bloody nose. “I have no idea if this will work. But I have no other options.”

“I hear you there,” Casey murmured, and then whipped around at the sound of approaching footsteps. “Inside!” she hissed, the fear back in her face. Later, when this was over, when things were back to how they should be, if I still knew her, I needed to ask Casey exactly what the Brotherhood had done to her, why she feared them so much.

They wanted to keep me locked up and use my talents as a weapon, and had tried to do the same to my father, so I doubted her story would be pleasant.

We crouched inside the stairwell, which was icy cold compared to the rest of the Bone Sepulchre, shivering and watching our breath form thunderheads as it escaped our mouths. The footsteps approached, passed and retreated. Casey doubled over, gasping with relief. I looked up, cringing when I saw the broken steps in the ice-covered spiral staircase leading up into nothing. “At least we’re not afraid of heights,” I said.

Casey shoved her hands into her armpits, shivering. I already couldn’t feel my exposed skin. If Crosley didn’t catch us, the Arctic chill might. This wasn’t a cold you could shake off—it could stop your heart, freeze your skin and kill you between one breath and the next. We had to be quick and get back to where it was warm.

Casey and I climbed, clinging to the railing that remained in a few spots. Wood, like metal, would peel the skin off your palms at these temperatures. The steps groaned beneath our weight, the same bone-cracking sound the ice had made around the
Oktobriana
. It was almost a relief to have a tangible fear, something concrete I could concentrate on
rather than Tremaine and Draven. Fear of plummeting to your death was a lot easier to cope with than fear of being exiled to the Thorn Land and having your boyfriend killed.

Casey’s foot slipped through one of the gaping holes in the ice, and she grabbed at me. I grabbed the railing in turn, but the bolts ripped free from the wall. I let out a scream that was choked off when I hit the floor. Casey clung to my leg, dangling in space through one of the concentric holes, as if the floor had been burned away. I felt myself sliding backward and grabbed for a ridge, which mercifully held. I tried to pull us up, gasping. It felt as if I were being ripped apart. My fingers slipped, slicking the ice with blood, and I knew I was going to lose my grip, and then we were going to fall. The thought didn’t make me particularly panicked—it was just a fact, a hard fact.

“Aoife,” Casey gasped. “Don’t let go!”

“You’re going to have to climb over me,” I gritted out. “Use me to get to the next step.”

To Casey’s credit, she didn’t argue. To mine, I didn’t scream when her weight increased exponentially and I felt a sick, wet popping in one of my elbow joints.

Her foot hooked in my belt, and then her weight was off me and her hands were around my tingling wrists, pulling me up by any bit of shirt or skin she could grasp. We both sprawled on the icy floor atop the spiral staircase.

I couldn’t remember when I’d been in more pain. Though, on the bright side, I wasn’t cold any longer.

Once I’d gathered my breath and my wits, I rolled onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t stand just yet, and my arm was on fire, but I was alive, and I decided that for the time being, that was enough.

I saw we were at the top of the Bone Sepulchre, in a spire barely large enough for four people to stand shoulder to shoulder. I poked Casey with my good arm. “Are you all right?”

“More or less,” she panted. “Can’t stop shaking.”

“We’re lying on ice,” I said, and giggled. There was no rationality behind laughing—I was just glad to be alive, even with a busted arm, trapped at the top of a frozen spire. I tried sitting up and found it wasn’t an entirely impossible feat.

The spire room wasn’t polished like the rest of the Bone Sepulchre. The ice was rough here, icicles dripping from the ceiling, as if we were standing inside a pincushion. The walls were covered with black marks, and the floor, when I managed to clamber to my feet, was jagged and uneven.

“This is nuts,” Casey said. “We’re never going to get back down those stairs, and Mr. Crosley will skin me alive for sure.” She looked ready to cry. I held up a hand.

“It’s going to be all right, Casey. With any luck, we won’t have to climb down anywhere.” I hoped, at least. I really didn’t have the faintest idea.

But then I saw Tesla’s Gate. It sat in a corner, almost as if it had been shoved against the wall and forgotten, like unwanted holiday decorations in someone’s attic. Spindly and wholly unlike the Gate the Erlkin had constructed in the Mists, the whole thing rested on three squat legs, like a hat stand. A pair of metal arms arched overhead, a giant circuit connected at the top to a Tesla coil, which was attached in turn to a bulb of aether, sickly opalescent white with age and disuse, that barely moved any longer.

Two dials were attached to either side, just waiting for somebody to activate them, and I shivered, a shiver born not of cold but of pure excitement. This was the experience I’d hoped for, when I’d been holding Tesla’s journals. This connection, across time, to a man who’d envisioned such a thing, such a delicate piece of machinery that had the power to move whole bodies between worlds.

I couldn’t waste any time, I knew. Casey was right—by now, somebody had to have discovered we were both missing from our quarters. I checked for a power source, but the coil was it. I activated it and was rewarded with a spark of electricity before the thing began cycling. I was elated, but Casey shrank back.

“I don’t like the look of that thing,” she said. “Lots of faulty machines back in the Rustworks would kill you if you touched ’em. And that one looks rickety.”

I approached the Gate slowly, reaching out with my Weird. The coil was snapping and the ancient aether was drifting around inside its teardrop-shaped globe, but nothing pricked my Weird. The machine was, for all intents and purposes, alive but dead. It didn’t function, not even a whisper beyond the ions of electricity I could taste on the back of my tongue.

My hopes sank. A faulty Gate I could fix. But one that was simply dead, a lump of iron where a vortex into other worlds should be? I had no idea how to fix that, and my Weird wouldn’t help me if I did.

I tried both dials and was rewarded with electricity writhing across the ground as the Tesla coil released its pent-up energy, but there was still no flutter in the fabric of
the space around us. Nothing. My Weird felt nothing. The machine was as dead and cold as the ice field outside.