Iron Cast(50)

Madeline exchanged a glance with James. “Maybe that’s our cue to go,” she said, rising to her feet.

“No one expects you to stay,” Corinne said. There was no anger in her tone, but there was no kindness either.

Madeline pulled James by his wrist toward the back door.

“Wait—you’re just going to leave?” Saint asked. He was staring at them, a wrinkle in his pale brow.

“Corinne is right,” James said, ostensibly to the group, but he was looking at Saint. “We’re not one of you. It’s not our fight.”

“You mean it’s not your problem,” Saint said.

James looked like he wanted to reply, but Madeline tugged him through to the storage room. When the door shut behind them, a heaviness settled over the room. Corinne turned to Gabriel, who was still leaning against the bar, his arms crossed.

“What about you?” she asked. “It’s not your problem either. You won’t be getting a paycheck anytime soon.”

His eyes on her were cool and inscrutable.

“Do I look like I’m going anywhere?” he asked.

When the afternoon settled into evening, Corinne was curled up on her bed, under every blanket she could find, staring hard at a crack in the wall. Ada had slept for a few hours that morning and left. She came back in occasionally, pretending to busy herself, but Corinne knew she was just checking on her. Corinne ignored her each time. She was too exhausted to move, too miserable to sleep. Her grandfather’s watch was loose between her fingers, but it gave her no comfort. Instead of the sweet memories of her grandfather in his study, telling her of Alice the adventurer or Alice the enchantress, her head was fogged with a rainy spring day four years ago, with her grandfather sitting behind his desk, running his fingers over and over the engraving while tears streamed down his pocked cheeks. She was someone I couldn’t save, he had told Corinne in a moment of such pure vulnerability that she hadn’t known how to respond. And when he had pressed the beloved watch into her hands and told her that Alice would have wanted her to have it, Corinne hadn’t felt anything but a sadness that she couldn’t understand.

Less than a month later, her grandfather was dead.

Corinne pulled her knees tighter to her chest, unable in that moment to separate the loss of Johnny from the loss of her grandfather, and she couldn’t separate either from the aching certainty in her chest that nothing could ever be the same. That everything beautiful they had built here was gone.

This time when the door opened, Ada stood in the doorway for a long time. Then she rustled around on her side of the room for a few minutes before sitting cross-legged at the foot of Corinne’s bed.

“Let’s play a round,” she said.

Corinne turned her head just enough to see that Ada was holding her violin. She pulled the covers over her head.

“No,” she mumbled into the blankets.

“It’ll make you feel better.”

“I don’t want to feel better.”

Ada tugged at the blankets until Corinne was exposed again to the chilly air.

“One round, then I’ll leave you alone,” she said.

“Fine,” Corinne snapped, jerking upright.

“Break, break, break

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.”

Instantly they were back on the towering cliffs by the raging, boiling sea. The sky was a maelstrom of blood-red clouds, scarred with lightning. Normally when Corinne tried to create an all-encompassing illusion, it took immense concentration to maintain every detail, to hold each piece together. But this one seemed to erupt from deep inside her, feeding on her grief and fury. Corinne couldn’t see her own illusions the way others could. They existed only as images in her mind to be sculpted and offered into the world.

This landscape, shaped as it was by her own turmoil, felt more real than anything she’d ever created before.

Ada lifted her violin and began to play. At first the song matched the intensity of the illusion, buffeting against the rocks and spiraling upward with the howling wind. Ada’s bow flew so fast against the strings that Corinne thought for sure she would lose control of the song, but each note landed with fierce precision. Corinne could feel the pain and anger finding new life as the music filled her. Her illusion responded to her rising torment. The storm hurled dagger-sharp rain against them, and the wind shrieked and spiraled, threatening to tear the world apart.

Then the music began to shift, guiding Corinne down from the terrible height. She shook her head and closed herself off to the emotions that Ada offered. She didn’t want to leave behind the fury of her grief. Johnny Dervish had found her when she was broken and scared. He had given her a place to call home. Now he was dead, and it didn’t seem fair that they had to go on. It didn’t seem fair that without him, they might not be able to.

“What if we never find out who killed him?” Corinne asked. Her voice seemed too soft to carry over the punishing storm, but she knew Ada could hear her. “What if we can’t save the Cast Iron?”

It wasn’t a fear she could entrust to anyone but Ada. It wasn’t even something she had admitted to herself until this moment. She was supposed to be the fearless one, the one with no qualms and no limits. Yet somehow she always ended up right here, trying to break into pieces while Ada calmly refused to let her.