I flinched. My mother was undeniably mad, but a secure ward? That meant a windowless room and a bed with straps. The contents of the syringe in Portnoy’s pocket. No visitors.

“Now, I know you’re a ward of the city,” Portnoy continued. “But she’s still your mother, and you have a better chance of connecting with her than I. You must impress upon her the urgency of her situation, the need for improvement in her diagnosis.”

I put my hand on the big front door of the madhouse. I could feel the cold air seeping in around the cracks. “Dr. Portnoy.” I felt the stone again, dragging me back, back to my mother no matter how I struggled. “Nerissa doesn’t listen to anyone, least of all me. She’s been crazy my entire life.”

“The preferred term is ‘virally decimated,’ ” he scolded me with a smile. “Those poor souls who lose their mind to the necrovirus can’t help it, you know. No one would choose to have viral spores eat her mind away until only delusion is left.”

I did know. Too well. Before the necrovirus had appeared and begun its spread across the globe, seventy years before Nerissa was even born, I supposed the mad occasionally got better. But never in my lifetime. Never my mother.

Done talking, I pushed open the door, letting in the roar of Derleth Street at the foot of the granite steps and the smell of cooking from the diner across the sea of jitneys and foot traffic. Steam wafted from exhaust pipes in the pavement and the vents of wheeled vendors’ carts alike, making a low mist that hung over the asylum like a cloud of ill omen. Far away, just a whisper under my feet, I could feel the din of the Lovecraft Engine as the great gears in the heart of the city turned and turned. Trapped aether powered the machine that gave the city steam and life.