Lark Ascending (31 page)

I rose to my feet, my sudden movement stirring the pages and sending half of them skittering back into the stacks.

“Hey!” cried Basil, trying in vain to grab at the delicate sheets.

“Leave them,” I snapped. “We don't need them anymore. Kris, can you make this intercom work?” I jabbed my finger at the speaker-box next to the light switches.

Kris rose slowly to his feet, glancing from me to the others. “What? I think so, but—”

“Do it. Hurry.”

Kris pried the casing loose, exposing a number of wires and glass filaments turned flexible with magic. It took him only a few moments to shove the panel back into place. “It should work now, but you'll only hear anything if—”

“I don't need to hear anything.” I moved past Kris, headed for the intercom, and pressed the switch to talk. Kris and Basil both leaped for me; even Nix screeched alarm.

“Gloriette!” I shouted into the intercom, holding up my hand to forestall my friends. “I know you're here. And I know you're looking for me.”

“What are you doing?” hissed Basil, eyes wide with alarm. Only Oren, strangely enough, seemed unperturbed; when I met his eye he gave me a small, grim smile.
I trust you.

There was no reply from the intercom, so I pressed the switch again. “Well, I'm here. I'm in the archives. And I know about your Machine.” I could hear my own voice echoing from far away, down the empty corridors, through the abandoned rotunda and the dark, dusty museum.

“This is not a good plan,”
Nix whispered in my ear, its voice jangling with perturbation.
“We must run, now.”

I swallowed hard and leaned in toward the speaker. “Come find me.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Kris exclaimed, trying without much success to keep his voice down. “We have to go
now.
” He reached for my arm, clearly intending to drag me bodily from the room if need be.

Oren stepped in, putting himself between Kris and me. “All this way, you claim to trust her, and now you think she's failed you?”

“We have to stop hiding,” I said quietly, my voice carrying with it the eerie sense of calm I felt, waiting for the Institute's forces to organize and find us. “It could take us weeks to figure out the Machine from those schematics, and we don't have that kind of time. Eve is here, somewhere, and she's stronger than I am. Gloriette will come, and we'll make her bring us to the Machine.”

“If she doesn't just take us to the nearest cell,” Kris hissed. “And that's if we're lucky. Or maybe you forgot, these people already tried to kill me once.”

I looked up, meeting his eyes; the fear there was bright and hot, pleading. “You can run,” I said softly. “I won't think less of you, Kris. They're after me—they won't stop you if you try to leave. I choose to believe that you were right all along; that the Institute is only trying to find a way to save this city, just as we are. I have to believe it.”

Kris swore, turning away to pace, though he made no movement toward the exit. Basil was quieter but didn't look any more pleased than Kris, his expression grim. Oren stood just beside me, and when I glanced at him, he was as collected as ever; but then, he'd learned to control that wildness in his nature. It didn't mean he was any less prepared to fight.

I lifted my hand to my shoulder, and Nix crawled out from under my hair in order to bump its metallic head against my knuckle. “What about you?” I whispered. “Not too late for you to fly away.”

Nix gave a tiny sniff.
“I dislike extended effort,”
it said.
“I'll remain here for now.”

I grinned, but before I could reply, the door leading from the archives shifted, clanged, and then swung open.

I turned, the noise jolting me from my calm; I expected to see a dozen armed Enforcers and a dozen more architects standing there, waiting to arrest me. But instead my eyes found just one architect. Gloriette.

“Well, gosling,” she said slowly, her eyes sweeping from me to my friends, lingering on Basil with some surprise. “That was unexpected.”

I'd forgotten the effect her voice had on me. Unprepared, the sweep of hatred through my body left me unbalanced. “Hello, Administrator,” I said through gritted teeth. There was only one of her, and yet she stood there like she had an army at her back. There had to be some trick, some reason she felt sure we couldn't overpower her. “No army this time?”

“It seemed wise not to bring machines you could harvest.” She'd lost weight since we faced each other in the Iron Wood—I'd been too distraught to notice when she'd been standing over Kris's body. The rebels weren't the only ones going hungry. “Besides, how could I respond with violence to such a polite invitation?”

“We expected Enforcers,” Kris broke in. “Not smart, coming alone.”

“You can't touch me,” she replied, her black eyes glittering. I couldn't read her expression, but I thought I saw a flinch, a tiny chink in the drawling façade. There was fear there, deeply hidden; but very much alive. “Didn't I kill you?

“You're unarmed,” Kris replied, ignoring her barb, though I could see it cost him. “There's no one else here, and there are four of us.”

“Five,”
spat Nix, its mechanisms trembling.

“And your friend down below?” asked Gloriette, raising an eyebrow. “What happens to him if something happens to me?”

“You caught Dorian.” Oren's voice was low, but tense.

“Did you really think one Renewable would get the better of all my architects?”

“We've got Lark,” replied Kris, tension singing through his voice. “You want to try your luck against her?”

“Stop it,” I broke in sharply. “She came alone. It's a show of good faith.”

Gloriette's eyes slid back toward me, hesitating for an instant before her mouth widened into that saccharine smile. Everything in me wanted to leap at her, to tear at her face and eyes, to throttle her with the chain she wore around her neck. She'd ruined my life, turned me into a monster, destroyed my family beyond repair. I wanted to rip away the magic beating in her heart, and see it in her eyes the moment she realized what had happened.

There was no good faith there. But even a lie could get me where I needed to go.

“Indeed,” Gloriette replied. “I didn't come here to kill you or arrest you. Your Renewable friend attacked
us
.” Though her words were directed at the others, her eyes were on me. “I came to ask for your help.”

Her words were met with a thick silence, until Basil lurched to his feet, striding forward until he stood at my side. “Why the hell would we help
you?
” he spat. “You betrayed Lark—you betrayed me. You hid the truth from all of us, you made us think the Renewables destroyed the world, when it was
you.
”

“It was our ancestors,” snapped Gloriette. “My parents weren't even born when the cataclysm occurred.”

“But you
lied
to us.” Basil's hands curled into fists. “Everyone in this city thinks that the world was shattered during the Renewable wars. But you've been the enemy all along.”

Gloriette's face was hard, her eyes narrowed under her sharp brows. “If this city falls, we fall too, Mr. Ainsley. What good would it do if every citizen knew the truth? How would that change our circumstances?”

“She's right,” I said quietly, cutting through the rising swell of angry voices. I didn't bother to hide the dislike in my voice; there were no illusions here, no pretense at friendship.

When Gloriette turned back to me, I could see the hatred there in her gaze, reflected at me as in a mirror. Her eyebrows lifted in a show of surprise. “And here I thought I'd have to fend you off with a stick. You used to be such a little savage.”

“I used to be a lot of things,” I replied softly. “Before you happened.”

Gloriette made a derisive sound in her throat, but her gaze slid away from mine as though she no longer wished to look at me. She looked instead at the partially assembled diagram at our feet. “I see you already know about the Machine.”

“And so does Eve.”

That shattered Gloriette's façade, her eyes widening. “Eve—Eve's here?”

“And she's not pleased,” said Kris, a little of that dry humor underpinning the tension in his voice.

Gloriette's fear shifted, her gaze falling on me. “If you'd just done what you were programmed to do, we'd have brought more Renewables in, and none of this would be happening.”

“Torturing people in order to power a city is not a sustainable situation,” I replied through gritted teeth.

“And if we'd brought the entire population of the Iron Wood into our city? With that much magic, it wouldn't be torture. It'd be an hour or two of discomfort every few weeks. And there's no argument you can make against that.”

I glanced at Basil; I couldn't help it. Because that's exactly what we'd done to save Lethe, bringing the Renewables there to volunteer to have their magic siphoned off to run the city.

Gloriette turned away, pacing back toward the shelves, her eyes on the sputtering lights overhead. “It's not worth fighting about now; the Renewables are gone, except for that one we've got in the chamber down below. That option is gone.”

“Eve told me that the original architects used the Machine, and that's what tore the Resource apart.” I tried to keep my tone even. “Let us try to reverse it.”

“Reversing it is impossible,” Gloriette snapped. “Don't you think we tried that?”

“Then why come to me asking for help?” It was becoming harder and harder not to let the fury win. Talking in circles was making my jaw ache with tension.

“We can't reverse the process—but with Eve's power, or with yours, we can try to finish what they started.”

“Finish—” My voice broke and I stopped, staring at her in confusion. “I don't understand. The founders were trying to destroy all Renewables. Why would I ever help you do that?”

Gloriette's head dropped for an instant before she turned back, hands clasped in front of her. “They weren't trying to destroy the Renewables, you stupid girl. You think everything's so easy, that morals are black and white, that some actions are good and the rest are bad. You think we're monsters.”

“You are,” I whispered, feeling the shadow inside me stir in response to my anger. “Desperation has made us all into monsters.”

“We're the reason you're alive today,” Gloriette replied, her voice shaking with effort—effort to speak calmly, I assumed. This time, when I met her gaze, I saw the loathing there. She hated me as much as I hated her. “We're the reason you were even born—the reason everyone in this city has a home.”

“Pardon me if I don't fall on my knees to thank you.” I felt Nix buzzing against my neck, the comforting weight of its body lending me a little strength.

Gloriette shook her head. “It's easy to preach moral superiority when you aren't the one who has to come up with an alternate plan.” She gazed at me with her sunken eyes, glittering black in the sagging flesh on her face. “It's easy to be good.”

“Poor you,” I said, coldly, holding onto that anger. It was all too easy to let those words stab into me, echoing the same thoughts that had been following me ever since I fled the Iron Wood. Because it was easier. When there was nothing riding on it but my own beliefs, it was easy to call the architects monsters. But had I ever come up with another way to save my people? I cleared my throat. “You still haven't told me why I'm going to help you commit genocide against the Renewables.”

“It was never going to kill the Renewables,” said Gloriette briskly, shrugging off that loathing for the time being. “Well, it might have killed a few, the very old and the very young, those without defenses. But it wasn't designed to kill them, it was designed to—”

“Harvest them,” I interrupted, staring. “The Machine. The part that you use to harvest children, it's the same principle.”

Gloriette nodded. “Originally the Machine was designed to operate on a global scale. It's tied into the fabric of the Resource itself. The Machine was supposed to remove the power from those too selfish not to abuse it and place it in the hands of those who'd act responsibly and judiciously.”

“The founding architects.”

“Indeed. But it failed partway through the procedure. Instead of gathering the fabric of the Resource, the Machine fractured it, stripping the land and leaving it as it is now.”

“And you think completing the process will heal the land and place the power back in your hands, where you think it should be.”

Gloriette hesitated. “We don't know what it'll do, but that's our hope, yes.”

“So why not just do it? Why do you need me?”

“We don't know how it works.”

I stopped short, blinking. “What do you mean, you don't know?”

“The technology is over a hundred years old. The people who built it and operated it are long dead. We've held onto a few things—the ability to harvest individuals, for one. And we've been able to keep the Wall running, until now. And we figured out how install Eve.”

Install
, like she was no more than a component in a machine. Which, from their perspective, she was.

“Miss Ainsley,” said Gloriette, her voice sharpening a little. “We didn't run all those tests on you all those months ago for fun. We wanted to know why only you, and your brother, survived the process. Being stripped, then refilled, and stripped again. Because you're the key. You and Basil, and Caesar too. Some twist of genetics, some mutation just now coming to light generations after the cataclysm. The world has been stripped of magic, and we're trying to put it back.”

“Just like you did to us.” My head spun as I glanced at Basil beside me, who was staring grim-faced at the red-coated architect in front of us.