The Iron Thorn Read Online Free PDF Page A

Duty with Professor Swan, something all students in Schools were required to take and, I was fairly certain, none paid any attention to.
    Cal leaned across the aisle when I slid into my seat. “This should be good. He’s got new pamphlets.”
    Marcos Langostrian turned around and glared at us. “Show some respect. The Bureau of Proctors print those for a reason.”
    “Yeah.” Cal leaned back in his seat and laced his fingers behind his head. “To make naughty little boys like you afraid of the dark.”
    “Cal,” I sighed. Cal’s favorite program on the tubes was
Have Gun, Will Travel
and sometimes he took it entirely too far.
    “Get bent, Honor Scout,” Marcos hissed. Cal flushed. The muscles in his neck tensed and I reached across the aisle and touched him on the elbow.
    “He’s not worth getting a detention over.”
    Marcos sneered at me, and I rolled my eyes at him. The Langostrians lived on College Hill. They dined with the Head of the City on Hallows’ Eve. I’d prefer to spend the rest of my life with Cal and his flat wrong-side-of-the-track accent than five seconds alone with Marcos.
    Professor Swan rapped his podium with a pointer. “That’s enough, students. This instruction is your duty to the city, to the country and to the Master Builder.” He turned and tacked a new notice, bearing the black border of the Proctors and the signature of Grey Draven, Head of the City, on the board, then glared at each of us in turn.
    Cal smirked at me. “Told you,” he mouthed. I kept my eyes on the new pamphlet the professor had hung. It looked like a funeral notice, heavy with ink and import.
    Conrad’s letter, the weight of it in my pocket, reminded me that the Proctors, Draven and the Master Builder were watching. It was hard to smile back at Cal.
    “Stand and recite the pledge,” Swan ordered. He was thin and sallow, and his collegiate robes flapped around him like a black version of his namesake bird. More than his robe, his beaky nose and his hard black eyes, which picked out any imperfection or deviation from the laws of the Master Builder, reminded me of a crow, not a swan.
    I mouthed the pledge while the rest of the class droned. “I pledge to remain rational and faithful to the foundations of science, laid down by my forefathers in defense of reason.…” I hadn’t spoken the words since Conrad left.They weren’t words that held any comfort. You couldn’t defend against a virus no one had found a cure for in seventy years. You couldn’t fight off a person’s delusions with science. Not if they really believed.
    My eyes wandered to the twin portraits of the President and Grey Draven above the board. Draven’s piercing eyes accused me of all the sins I already knew I was guilty of—lying, communicating with a madman, shirking my duties as a scientist and a citizen. I felt the weight of every one of my transgressions under Draven’s eyes, the gimlet stare that had made him the youngest Head of the City Lovecraft had ever seen. He’d promised to clean Lovecraft of heresy, to keep every rational citizen safe in their home. With the might of the Bureau of Proctors behind him, he did what everyone who bought their party line considered a fine job. And he never missed a chance to plaster his picture on every surface.
    Head of the City was a dire and powerful position, but there was talk that Draven could be the president of the country before he was through. I hated having him stare at me in every classroom. I looked at the floor until the pledge was through and Swan snapped, “Sit down. No talking.”
    He rapped his pointer against the new Proctor notice. “There have been reports of viral creatures as far north as Storm Avenue,” he said. “The Lovecraft Proctors remind us all, for our own safety, that consorting with those poor souls struck down and changed into inhuman fiends by the necrovirus is a crime punishable by confinement in the Catacombs.”
    Cal sobered, and I knew he was