The Iron Thorn Read Online Free PDF

remembering the nightjar. The Proctors did their best to keep Lovecraft freeof viral creatures, but there were old sewers, old train tunnels and the river itself gave birth to some of the worst. No one could keep the horrors from creeping in at the edges of things. We weren’t an island, like New Amsterdam, and we weren’t walled like the modern marvel of San Francisco. Lovecraft was a previrus city, and it was dangerous.
    “Contact with a viral creature can what, students?” Professor Swan fixed us with his pale eyes. His robes made him appear to be bodiless, just a diaphanous mass.
    Marcos raised his hand. “Cause madness in a healthy person, Professor. In almost every case.”
    Cal dropped his Civic Duty text on the floor with a crack like a steam rifle. “Or sometimes just a nasty case of influenza. Isn’t that what you had last week, Langostrian? Been kissing ghouls?”
    The class tittered, and Professor Swan tinted from pale to flushed like a developing sepia. “Daulton. Two detention hours.” The rest of us got another sweep of his lantern eyes. “You think it’s a diversion, this talk of protecting our city, the city the Master Builder gave us?” He hit the podium again. “The world is a harsh place, a dark place, made darker by the heretics who would fill your heads with fancy notions like magic spells and fortune-telling. They do this to keep you from your true purpose. The necrovirus is not fancy. It exists, and it eats at each and every one of your reprehensible, superstitious cores. Now each of you will write an essay on the menace of madness infection to Lovecraft and how you suggest we better defend our city.”
    The class groaned. Marcos muttered, “Thanks a lot, Cal.”
    “You started it, twit,” I grumbled back. Marcos gave me a baleful look.
    “Don’t you have a birthday coming up, Grayson?”
    My cleverness died in my throat, replaced by a lump. Was there no one in this damn school who didn’t know about that?
    Before I could grab him again, Cal started out of his seat. “You need to learn how to speak to a lady, pip-squeak.” Someone Cal’s size calling anyone a pip-squeak would have been funny, if Marcos hadn’t looked ready to pound his face.
    “
Sit
down,” Swan bellowed. “Two more hours.”
    “Just leave it,” I said to Cal. It was plain truth that I’d always be a city ward, the daughter of a madwoman, to Marcos. It was a fact of life, like uniform stockings itching behind the knees—unpleasant and inevitable. Fighting back just told the Marcoses of the world that their barbs hit home.
    Cal glared at the back of Marcos’s head, slick with hair oil. “He shouldn’t say those things.”
    “He can say whatever he wants. His brother is a Proctor in their national headquarters and his family could buy and sell me ten times over.” Not that it wouldn’t give me immense satisfaction to see Marcos take a sock in the jaw, just once. I filled up my pen and pressed it against the ruled paper. A little bit of ink dribbled out and made a dark sunburst on the top line.
    “One last announcement before you begin work,” Swan said. “The heads of house will be conducting their monthly sweep for heretical contraband tomorrow. Remember, merits will be granted to those who turn in their roommates.Informants are the backbone of the Proctors. All glory to the Master Builder.”
    The class chorused back raggedly. I didn’t join in. Heretics—heretics who practiced magic, at any rate—were a child’s story. Those glass-eyed fanatics who threw Molotov cocktails at Proctor squads could no more practice
real
magic than I could fly without a dirigible. Magic couldn’t hold a candle to the necrovirus, to the great Lovecraft Engine that turned below the city, to the invisible grace of the aether. There was no magic. Not the way the heretics believed. If there were, why would I be stuck in Civic Duty writing a pointless essay?
    The Engine had powered the city for twice as long as my