Shadowlark (24 page)

“You’re not my brother,” I said shortly. “I don’t know you.”

He gazed at me and I stared back, unwilling to crumble first. This world had broken my brother, but I wouldn’t let it break me. Basil—Prometheus—swallowed and then, very carefully, knelt and gathered up the paper birds, breaking eye contact. I closed my eyes and kept them closed, even when I heard the door open with a screech and then clang shut again.

It was only after he left that I let myself go, sinking to the floor where I’d stood, too shell-shocked to cry.

“Nix.” My own voice sounded alien, as if it belonged to a stranger. “What do I do?”

But the pixie wasn’t programmed to deal with such a vague question. It couldn’t answer me.

It was impossible to track the passage of time. There were no windows in my room, but even if there had been, I had the nagging suspicion that we were so far underground that it wouldn’t have mattered.
Underground
, I thought dully. I’d been underground from the moment I arrived in Lethe— when had I started to think of Lethe itself as the world, rather than underground itself?

I kept replaying what I’d seen in my brother’s journal— the drawings of machines, the schematics for altering the flow of magic. My face, here and there. Always on his mind.

How could Basil have fallen so far in the past few years to think that this was what I wanted? That peace and safety, even in this wilderness, was worth these monstrosities?

This landscape twisted things. Took good things and made them something dark.

I sat up, unable to sit still any longer. I tried asking the pixie what time it was, but it didn’t understand the question.

“Is it day? Night?”

“The position of the sun is irrelevant here.”

“Yes, but is it . . . are people sleeping now? Awake?”

The pixie gave no sign of thinking, none of Nix’s little ticks and tells that showed it was considering the question. Kris told me that they’d programmed Nix to appear more human—to think, to learn, to be sympathetic. Without those little touches, this creature was just a machine. “Without concrete data, it is plausible that some will be awake and some asleep.”

I gave up. I crossed the room and spread both palms against the door’s cold, metal alloy surface. Grimacing at the chill against my face, I pressed my ear to it. I could hear sound, but warped through the metal it sounded only like clinking and clanking. It could be pipes—it could be footsteps. I had no way of knowing whether there were still guards outside my door, but it seemed likely. And surely Prometheus would be smart enough to post Renewable guards, capable of sensing if I used too much magic.

In all the confusion, they still hadn’t searched me thoroughly. I still had Oren’s knife in its sheath in my boot. I also still had the blackout device—but after what the talon had done to me, I wasn’t quite willing to try it. If it knocked me out the way Parker had theorized, I’d be worse off than before.

Closing my eyes, I let my awareness trickle out through the door. Although it wasn’t solid iron, the particular alloy made it difficult to sense what lay beyond it. I could, however, sense the lock. It was risky, if there were guards outside who could sense me, but I had no choice. I refused to sit here quietly, waiting for Prometheus to come back and try some other way of winning my understanding. Besides, somewhere out there was Oren—and Wesley—and they might need my help. Not to mention Olivia and her crew, who had surely been captured by now.

Carefully, I gathered up a thin tendril of magic and sent it through the surface of the door toward the lock. It buzzed in response, making my heart jump—it was responding to the magic. I could do this. Fraction by fraction, quietly.

And then something landed on my shoulder, whirring. I jerked back, flinching away. The pixie, dislodged as I lurched backward, hovered in the air a few inches away. Its eyes were still blank. It said nothing.

“What are you doing?” I gasped, clasping a hand to my chest, willing my heart to stop pounding. “Are you trying to stop me?”

“I am programmed to see to your needs,” it replied in that jarring female voice.

“I need you to leave me alone.” I tried to shoo it away, but it dodged my hand in a smooth dip to the side.

“Do not attempt to open the lock.”

I ground my teeth. “So you
are
programmed to keep me from leaving.”

“No.”

“But—”

The pixie made an odd sound, a high-pitched whine of gears that I’d never heard before. Then, after a pause, it said, “The lock.”

I stared at it. Although it gave no impression of emotion or effort, it seemed as though it was trying to say something. “What about the lock?”

“Do you wish to ask me about the locking mechanisms in CeePo?” The pixie spoke swiftly.

“Yes. Yes, tell me.”

“The locks here are wired with explosive energy, rigged to detonate when tampered with.”

A chill ran down my spine. The lock had buzzed when I touched it with magic—but I’d thought it was just responsive. What would’ve happened if I’d pushed harder, tried to open it?

“Why help me?” I asked, searching the blank eyes for some hint of Nix, anything. “You may have saved my life. Did they program you to do that?”

“No.”

The pixie just hovered there, motionless but for the blur of its wings through the air, blank eyes fixed on me. I thought of Nix’s very first command, given to it by its programmer, Kris:
Keep Lark alive.
If that command was still active, what else was still in there?

“Nix?” I whispered.

“My name is PX-148.”

Tears blurred my eyes, and I blinked them away angrily. “Go away. Just—go away!”

Before the pixie could respond to my order, a clunk from the door sent me backing away. Someone was opening the lock. I gathered up my magic. I wasn’t sure I could attack my own brother—but if it was a guard, then so help him. I was getting out of here, one way or another.

The door swung open, the entryway filled for a moment by a guard in Eagle uniform. Then I heard a grunt of pain and a crackle of magic, and the guard sagged to the floor. A man stepped over him into the room, head turned to look behind him. He slipped something small and mechanical and crackling with energy into his pocket—then turned to face me.

“Basil!” I stared, hardly recognizing him out of his Prometheus clothes. He was wearing plain pants and a shirt with a hood, pulled over his head to help conceal his features.

“There’s a battle raging in the city,” he whispered. “I take it that’s courtesy of your friends?”

Olivia.

I drew in a shaky breath, trying not to get carried away by the little spark of warmth I felt at that news. “What’re you doing here?” I whispered back.

“I’m here for you. Let’s go.”

“Go?”

His face tightened. “I’m getting you out of here. We’re leaving.”

I hung back. How could I trust him now? “Why not just order them to let me go?” I asked bitterly. “These people would do anything for you.”

He gazed at me from the shadow of the hood. “They’d do anything for Prometheus,” he said quietly. “The man who’ll stop at nothing to save them. And what do we need more than someone with your abilities? If I let you go—that’d be the end of Prometheus anyway.” He shook his head. “Come on.”

Basil crossed swiftly to the doorway and stuck his head out, scanning the hall in both directions. He then stepped through, gesturing for me to follow. I hesitated—but what better way to escape than with Prometheus himself helping me? Just because I accepted his help didn’t mean I’d have to side with him.

And so I went after him—and the pixie came after me.

Basil’s face locked down as soon as he saw it. He pulled the mechanical device out of his pocket and stretched out his hand. I felt him gathering magic and in that instant realized what he meant to do.

“No!” I shoved at his arm, knocking it away and breaking his concentration. “Don’t. I think there’s still something of Nix in there.”

“Nix?” Basil stared at it. “Lark—is that your
tracker
pixie? From the Institute? Are you insane?”

“Yes.” I glanced at it, still hovering emotionlessly in the air. “You don’t understand—it’s changed. It learns, and it can make its own decisions. Maybe yours was different, or you destroyed it too quickly, but this one—this one is my friend.”

His gaze had swiveled toward me, eyebrows drawn in. I could almost see him wondering if his little sister had experienced some complete mental breakdown.

“Your people scrubbed it,” I continued, swallowing. “It doesn’t recognize me anymore, except—I think there’s something there still.”

He shook his head. “These models can’t be scrubbed. Believe me, I tried—their memories are buried too deeply in their programming. That’s why I destroyed mine.”

“They did something to it,” I insisted, trying to ignore the thread of hope flaring up inside me. Maybe Nix really was in there somewhere. “And I won’t leave it here.”

“Maybe they just put some sort of programming in on top of the old, bypassing it.” Basil glanced at it again. “Fine. Fine, bring it with us. But I’ll kill it the second it tries anything.”

Basil led the way out into the hall and down the corridor. He was still holding that thing in his hand—I couldn’t get a good look at it, but he clutched it in his fist as though it was all that stood between us and certain death.

“Basil,” I whispered as we turned a corner. “I can’t leave without my friends. I came here with others—I can’t leave them here to be tortured or killed by your people.”

He stopped, retreating into the alcove of a doorway. “Lark—you’re in no position to make requests. I’ve got to get you out. You don’t know what they’ll do to you—what I’ll be forced to do to you. We don’t have time to make stops for others.”

I inhaled slowly. This wasn’t the brother I knew. The Basil I knew would’ve stopped at nothing to rescue innocent people. “Then you’ll have to watch them torture me, because I’m not leaving without them.”

He stared at me, anger and fear clouding his features. I realized that he wasn’t used to anybody arguing with him anymore—no one ever debated Prometheus. He leaned back, staring down the corridor again, then turned back to me. Struggling with himself, he shut his eyes, teeth grinding against each other. “Fine. Fine. Okay—we’ll find your friends, then we’ll go.”

“And the rest of the Renewables too.”

He took a step back, staring at me. For a moment he was speechless, mouth opening with no sound coming out—then he shook his head. “You don’t understand. Those Renewables go free, this city falls within the week. And then everyone will die, or become Empty Ones. I can get your friends out, but we can’t let them all go. Lark, we
can’t
.”

You can,
I wanted to scream at him. But for the first time, the tiniest tendrils of doubt came snaking into my thoughts. Could I really demand they all go free, knowing that it was a death sentence for everyone else? Which counted for more, the lives of a handful of Renewables, or the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people?

I thought of Nina, lying prone in an infirmary bed. One life for dozens—Marco, Parker, Dorian, and all the Renewables with him were alive because I took that power from her. In the heat of it, I’d made the same decision my brother had.

“Let’s go,” I said tightly, shoving the question aside—I would deal with it later. I’d have to make my decision when it came to it. I could always free them myself once Basil led me to where they kept the Renewables. “Wesley’s a Renewable, I’m assuming he’s wherever the rest of them are. Oren’s— Oren’s not. But I’m hoping he’s there too.”

“Wesley?” Basil had begun to step out of the alcove but stopped short, eyes widening. “Wesley—no, he was the one who arrested you and the murderer.”

I stared back at him. “You didn’t know? Adjutant came and ordered him and Oren taken away. I thought . . . I thought you had ordered it.”

“Why would I?” Basil was still standing, stricken. “Wesley’s one of my closest . . . ”

“He’s one of us,” I said simply. “A member of the resistance. You really didn’t know?”

Basil swallowed, his eyes sliding down to the floor. “I didn’t know,” he confirmed, his gaze troubled. “Adjutant has a certain amount of autonomy—he has to, or else he’d never get anything done. But I thought . . . I thought he’d just arrested you two.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could speak, sparks exploded from the archway over Basil’s head. He ducked, cursing. Without thinking, I took a step out and looked down the hallway. A pair of Eagles stood there, holding out the same magical weapons that the Eagles in the square had—the same weapon Adjutant had. Talons.

And they didn’t even recognize their leader.