Shadowlark (25 page)

The second guard fired as I looked out around the corner. For a moment I could only stand there, frozen, my eyes blinded by the wave of magic flowing toward me. I couldn’t think what would happen if it struck—I was already full to capacity after the first time I was zapped.

And then the wave exploded inches from my face. My dazzled eyes barely made out the tiny, metallic form of the pixie dropping to the ground from where it had flown between me and the weapon’s bolt. Without thinking I reached out and pulled, dragging enough magic away from the two guards to send them twitching to the floor. Wesley’s training stopped me short of taking all they had—but only just.

It felt as though my entire body had turned to mist—I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet or hear anything going on around me. With their magic added to what I’d already been given, my head was spinning so much I could barely stand. And still, even now, part of me wanted more. I could see the last bits of power lurking inside the guards, the vestiges that kept the machinery of their bodies working—and I wanted it.

Hands wrapped around my shoulders and shook hard, and my second sight fell away. My vision returned, Basil’s features wavering in front of my face.

“Snap out of it!” he was hissing, still shaking me. “What did you
do?
”

“I—took their magic,” I said with an effort. “You have the same power. It’s what the Institute did to us.”

He was staring at me like he no longer recognized me. “No,” he murmured. “I can’t do any of that, Lark. I can pull power from machines, from crystals—anywhere the magic’s been removed already and put somewhere else. And I have to be touching them. I can’t . . .” He trailed off, eyes slipping past me down the hall to where the guards lay unconscious.

I struggled to focus despite the insane urge to laugh through my grief, despite the giddiness coursing through me. “But—we’re the same.”

Basil just stared at me, eyes tracking me as I sagged to my knees, reaching for the motionless form of the pixie. “I don’t know if it’s something intrinsically different about us or if they changed the process since they did it to me,” he said slowly. “But we’re not the same. I can’t do what you just did.”

I swallowed, pushing away the flickers of despair that kept trying to edge in. All this time I’d thought that if I could just find Basil, he’d know what was wrong with us. He’d know how to fix me. “That’s why the glass chair, up in the throne room,” I whispered. “It’s connected to Renewables on the other end, so you can pull the life out of them.”

I kept my gaze on the pixie, trying to force my eyes to work right. I willed the extraneous magic to flow from me to it, the way it did when it was Nix. I couldn’t see Basil, but I heard him shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“To the reserves taken from them, yes.” His voice was strained, quiet. “I’m the only one who can do it. Work magic and machine that way. That’s why it has to be me, little bird.”

“Don’t call me that.” I took a deep breath. “Just don’t. You could’ve found another way. You were brilliant, Basil. You were—you could have done it.”

“I tried. I’m
trying.
I’ve been designing a machine that’ll let an ordinary person do what I do, manipulate this power, but it doesn’t work. It’s too unstable, it’s dangerous for the Renewable and for the user. I’ve tried everything.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t even look at him. Part of me wanted to just get up and walk away, because who could stop me? Not Basil. Not his Eagles. Not Adjutant. Walk away into the wasteland above and never come back.

But Oren was here, and Wesley, who risked everything for us.

“Let’s go.” My voice sounded cold even to me. I got to my feet, my back to my brother.

“Wait.” Basil touched my shoulder, but I felt nothing, no tingle, no pull of shadow, nothing but the weight of his hand. “Let me see.” He reached for the lifeless pixie cradled in my hands.

I felt my fingers curl around its body, protective. “It saved me,” I mumbled. “Even though it didn’t remember me, it flew in front of the blast.”

“Lark,” Basil said softly in the same voice he’d used when I was a child, when I’d wake from a nightmare. “I’m good with machines. Let me look, please.”

What could it hurt? Nix was gone twice over—first its thoughts and memories, now its very life. I let my brother take it gently from my palm.

We made a strange picture, huddling over a tiny machine in a pool of flickering light. The corridor stretched away on both sides, silent and still. The Eagles hadn’t even had time to call for assistance. We had time—but how much?

Basil turned the machine over in his hands, inspecting it carefully, lifting it to his ear to listen for any signs of life. Though my ears strained, I heard nothing—and I could tell from Basil’s lack of reaction that he didn’t either.

Then he reached into his pocket and took out sheath of soft brown leather, which he unrolled on the floor to reveal a set of tiny, delicate tools. Architect’s tools. Was this something the Institute gave him before he went, or did he have them made for him here? I didn’t ask, gritting my teeth as Basil opened up Nix’s tiny body, gazing down at it through a tiny magnifying glass that fit between his brow bone and the top of his cheek when he squinted.

Nix’s inner workings were made up of hair-thin wires and pins, and gears so small I couldn’t even see their teeth. Behind all of it, nestled amidst the incomprehensible clockwork, was its tiny crystal heart. When I’d half-destroyed Nix when I first encountered it, its heart had pulsed blue as it repaired itself. Now it was quiet, still. Dead.

I leaned away, pressing my back to the wall and forcing myself to breathe. Even when Nix vanished without a trace, I’d never truly believed anything had happened to it. I always assumed it was holed up somewhere, hiding. I always, always thought I’d simply wake up one morning and find it perched on my bedpost, watching me with its unblinking stare and criticizing my laziness. But now it was here, dead, the man I used to call brother poking around in its corpse.

I was about to tell Basil to stop, to close it up, let it be, when my brother let out a soft “Hmm,” voice registering surprise. I felt, rather than saw, Basil reach out with his own magic to feel around inside the pixie.

“That explains how they got around its programming,” he said, fascinated. “There’s some kind of override here. The blast must have overloaded it.”

“Override?”

“The Institute built this model like a tank—the programming is so well shielded even I can’t get to it. But this—Adjutant must have had them put something here that supersedes that programming, takes over before the incoming data even reaches it.”

In spite of myself I felt a flare of familiarity, listening to my brother speaking gibberish as he tinkered with some machine or other. While I sat with him on the couch, in our home. How could he be so like him, and so unlike him, all at the same time? More and more I didn’t know how to feel, how to react. There’s no one I loved more than my big brother, and yet—and yet.

“I didn’t even know we had anyone who could do this,” he continued softly, fascination shifting to confusion. “Adjutant handles recruiting, and he never . . .”

“Maybe you let him run too much of your city.” My voice was soft too, but bitter. “Maybe it’s all getting away from you.”

Basil looked up, the magnifying glass falling from his eye into his lap. “Adjutant is absolutely devoted,” he replied, a flare of anger in his voice. “He’s my oldest supporter, my oldest friend. He’s been with me since the beginning—without him, none of this would be here.”

“You mean the enslaved Renewables? The all-powerful uniformed guard everywhere? The people forced to live in secret and fight for their freedom? None of that would be here?”

Basil’s jaw clenched. “This city wouldn’t be here.”

Just then, footsteps echoed down the corridor. Basil tore his gaze from mine, glancing down the hall behind me. Then, silently, he pulled me into the alcove of a doorway, pressing me back against the wall and then pulling as far into the corner as he could. We each held our breath as a pair of guards approached the intersection behind us.

If they happened to look to the right, down our hallway, and saw the two bodies lying at its far end, then we’d have to add two more bodies to our count.

We waited, ears straining. But the footsteps soon faded again, the two guards continuing on their patrol, not even noticing that two of their fellow Eagles lay unmoving at the other end of the corridor.

Basil let out his breath. He glanced at me, his brown eyes meeting mine for a brief moment. Then he looked back down at the pixie in his hand and closed his eyes.

“What are you doing now?” I whispered.

“Seeing if I can remove the override.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know how it was done.”

“I said I didn’t think anyone else did.” Basil sent tendrils of magic out, making the air taste of copper and silk. “I never said I couldn’t. Its original programming may well be intact underneath.”

I closed my eyes as well, the better to watch as he explored the pixie. His movements were so subtle I could barely follow what he was doing. When I acted using magic it was like swinging a battle-ax. Basil wielded it like a scalpel.

Trying not to hope, I reminded myself that even if he could remove the programming, the pixie was still dead.

I itched for action—the magic buzzing through me demanded an outlet, and I couldn’t sit still while I knew that Oren was here somewhere, in danger. I started tapping my fingers against the floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Long moments stretched in which I strained to listen for the sound of footsteps or an alarm that would mean they’d discovered I was missing. I wondered if it was nighttime here, if everyone was asleep except for the Eagles on patrol.

And then there was a sound. A tiny screech of metal on metal jerked my eyes back down to the ground where Basil was working on Nix. As I stared, the empty crystal heart flickered once as though it contained a tiny bolt of lightning. Then, like a star winking into existence, the blue glow swelled.

“What did you do?” I gasped, afraid to move for fear of dashing the illusion.

“Removed the override,” Basil said, leaning back with a grin. “It was fried by the blast, clogging up its systems. Remove it, and it’s back to normal.”

As I watched, Nix’s spindly little legs came shooting out, busily putting itself back together where Basil had taken it apart. It made a spluttery sound of indignation, as if protesting the state in which it had found itself.

“Nix?” I whispered, my heart pounding.

Its dull eyes flickered a few times and then lit with the same blue glow as its heart.
“That was unpleasant.”

A sound that was half-shriek, half-sob escaped a second before I clapped both hands tightly over my mouth. Nix righted itself, extra repair arms folding away. Buzzing its wings experimentally, it made a click of satisfaction. Then it looked at me, the blue eyes unblinking and so familiar.
“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” My smile forced its way through despite my hands pressed to my mouth. “Nothing.” I tore my eyes away from Nix to look at my brother, who was watching, bemused, as the pixie began to groom itself furiously, as though it had been rolled in the mud since the last time it tidied up.

“Thank you,” I said softly.

Basil looked up at me, startled. Beads of sweat dotted his brow, his face weary. Still, hesitantly, the corners of his mouth twitched up in a smile. He nodded. It was only fleeting, gone again in moments, replaced by that same desperate sadness. He folded away his tools and shoved them back under his belt, then got to his feet and offered me a hand. “Let’s go find your friends,” he said quietly.

Nix zipped up onto my shoulder after Basil pulled me to my feet. As my brother led the way down the corridor, Nix flicked its wings in irritation.
“Not another one,”
it murmured in my ear.
“And we only just got rid of the other ones.”

I hid my smile as best I could and followed my brother.

Basil led me down a dizzying maze of corridors and staircases. He avoided the elevators for fear of running into somebody who might ask who we were or what we were doing. We were taking the roundabout way down, he said. Longer, but safer.

I had no option but to trust him. And although my mind knew he was Prometheus, knew he’d done horrible, monstrous things to get to where he was, it was growing harder and harder to keep him away. I wanted to forget everything and just let him be my brother again. He was helping me, after all. He would help me rescue Oren and Wesley. He’d brought Nix back to me.

And he was no better than the architects at the Institute, with their secret, dying Renewable.

We paused at the bottom of a stairwell while Basil fiddled with the lock on the door. “What are you going to do when we get there?” I stood behind him, speaking in a low voice. Basil’s hands paused for a few seconds, then resumed their work until the lock opened with a soft click. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“You’d better figure it out.”

We slipped through the door. Moving more quietly now, Basil led me past patrols and through side corridors to avoid more guards. Nix rode on my shoulder, its weight so familiar, comforting in a way I hadn’t noticed before it was gone. Eventually we reached a hall that ended in a thick iron door flanked by guards. We paused around a corner, peeking out at them.

“They’ll let me through,” Basil said tightly. “I’m their god.”

“But you left your costume behind,” I pointed out.

“I believe I can be of assistance,”
Nix said, rustling its wings.

“Oh no you don’t.” I craned my neck to the side so I could eyeball the pixie. “Last time you made a diversion you were captured, brainwashed, and then killed.”

“Brainwashed is perhaps not the right word.”

“Let me handle this.”

I closed my eyes and started searching for the hungry void inside me, but Basil reached out and touched my arm, interrupting me. “These are loyal men,” Basil hissed. “They’ve done nothing wrong.”

Except be complicit in slavery and torture.
But I just took a deep breath. “I’m not going to hurt them. Just trust me.”

He hesitated, then let his arm fall. I breathed deeply, in through my nose, then blew the air out through my pursed lips, letting it focus me. The reservoir for magic inside me was overfull already. Still, I reached out with my thoughts until I could sense the tiny currents of magic running through the guards’ systems.

I’d never tried to harvest magic from two people at once, not since I’d leveled the army sent from my city to enslave the Iron Wood. Then, it had nearly killed me. But I didn’t have the same training then, the same awareness of what made my power work—and what made it kill. Silently thanking Wesley for his insistence on learning control, I eased open a channel between myself and the two Eagles at the end of the hall.

For a long moment, nothing happened. I dragged at whatever scraps of magic I could get, and then finally, little by little, the shadow in me stirred and woke. As much power as there was already buzzing through my veins, it still wanted more—and once it caught the scent of the men down the hall, it was all I could do to hold it back.

The guard on the left fell first, dropping so fast that my own heart stuttered as if in sympathy. Dimly, as though from half a mile away, I felt Basil grab my arm. I couldn’t pay any attention to him, though, not with the other guard stumbling forward, trying to reach his partner’s side. He fell to his knees, clutching at his chest, and then slumped to the floor.

I couldn’t move, locked in a struggle against myself. I wanted to finish the job. I wanted to feast. It wasn’t until Basil gave my arm a jerk and started hurrying me toward the door that I was jarred free, sending the beast snarling back into my subconscious. Dazed, I watched as Basil stooped to check the two men for signs of life. He said nothing, just glanced at me with his lips pressed together. I knew they were alive, though—if they’d died, I would’ve felt it. It was always those last scraps of magic that tasted sweetest. And I’d cut myself off before going that far.

Basil wasted no more time, turning his attention to the door. It was locked with one of the same turning wheels that were on some of the forgotten doors inside the walls, and he turned it with a grunt of effort and a sigh of oiled bearings.

We slipped through the door and eased it shut behind us. Then we turned.

Behind the door lay the prison complex for Prometheus’s enslaved Renewables. The corridor stretched on into what seemed like infinity, lined on either side by heavy doors. I took a few steps into the room, skin crawling at the presence of so much iron, more than I’d felt in one place since the tunnels between Lethe and the world above. Each door seemed to be made of solid iron, with only a grate maybe a foot square for the prisoners to look out of—or for the guards to look in. There were lights over the doors closest to us, barely more than dim red spots. There were only six of them. Did that mean the rest of the cells stretching onward were empty?

Basil’s jaw was tight, his eyes cold, shut down. He didn’t look at the cell doors but instead kept his eyes on the endless hallway, standing by the door. “Go look for them,” he said shortly.

Nix launched itself from my shoulder to explore as I walked forward, skin crawling with more than iron now. It was as though I could feel the eyes of the Renewables on me as I passed. No wonder Basil didn’t like to come here—guilt roiled inside me simply for being free while they were captive. What must it be like to come here when you were
actually
their captor?

I cleared my throat and called softly, “Wesley? Oren?”

For a moment all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. Then, so rattly and tired that my chest tightened, came Wesley’s voice. “About time,” he called, his voice coming from the end of the row of lights.

I hurried down and peered in through the grating. He was there, waiting for me. His face didn’t show any signs of mistreatment, but I knew the damage would be deeper, harder to see. He smiled at me, though, when my face came into view.

“Does this mean you got him? Got Prometheus?”

I glanced back at my brother, who was still standing just inside the doorway, not looking at us or at anything else.

“We can talk later,” I said finally. “Let’s get you out of here. Which one is Oren’s cell?”

“Which one?” Wesley stuck a hand through the grating, wrapping his fingers around a bar. “Open all of them, get us all out of here.”

I closed my eyes, feeling sick. “I can’t,” I whispered. “For now I can only get you and Oren. Where is he?”

Wesley gazed at me, confusion quickly shifting to wariness in his features. “He’s not here,” he said quietly. “They’re keeping him somewhere else.”

My heart sank. For a moment I just wanted to scream at Wesley for letting Oren out of his sight, at Basil for allowing any of this to happen, at myself for not realizing that they wouldn’t be keeping a seemingly normal person with the Renewables, even if he came with one. Instead I drew in a shaky breath and said, “Basil, open the door.”

“Basil?” Wesley’s eyes grew round. “Your brother—the one—”

But he was interrupted by a mechanical whine and a heavy clunk in his door. I grabbed for the indented handle and pulled, and Wesley stepped out into the hallway. His eyes went past me to Basil, whose hand was still on the heavy switch that controlled the lock.

“The boy who wrote the journal,” Wesley breathed, staring at Basil the way that Adjutant had stared at Prometheus.

Basil’s gaze shifted toward me, but I had no answer either. How to tell Wesley that the journal was written by none other than Prometheus himself, before he came to power? That the one saving him now was the one who’d ordered him captured in the first place? It didn’t matter that Adjutant had taken it upon himself to arrest Wesley—he was acting in Prometheus’s name.

I turned back toward the cells and called tensely, “Tansy? Tansy, are you in here?”

No answer. My heart pounded in the silence, and I walked up the row of cells, trying to feel for her familiar power signature. But aside from Wesley, the golden Renewable glows here were faint, flickering and weak. These people had been drained.

“Is someone there?” The voice was tired, weak—and unfamiliar. I turned to see hands curling around the bars in the door, all that could be seen of the prisoner behind it.

Basil took a step backward, away from the panel of door release switches, swallowing hard. He looked sick, even as he squared his jaw. “Let’s go,” he called softly.

“No.” I planted my feet, gazing at him across the prison block. “We take them all, or I stay here and wait for Adjutant. I’m not leaving without them.”

Basil’s hands curled into fists. “Lark, I can’t have this fight with you, not here. We have to go. We have to just—we have to get out of here.”

“And then what?” I hissed back. “We just run away and find some new place to live? Some new place to turn into your idea of a utopia?”

“I never said this place was perfect!” Basil fired back. “If you hadn’t noticed, the world out there is far from perfect. This is the best we can do. We go, we disappear, we try to live our lives as best we can with what we’ve got. That’s all there is, Lark!”

“Maybe that’s true,” I whispered, my voice echoing in the chamber. I knew Wesley might overhear, might figure it all out—but I didn’t care. “Whether it is or not, I’m not leaving while these people are still enslaved. So you can make your choice.”

My brother stared at me across the gulf of space between us, his muscles tense, his gaze unreadable. He looked sad— sadder than he did the day he left me, volunteering for the Institute’s top secret mission. He looked tired.

And then he turned and flipped every switch on the wall, causing a cascade of metallic thuds all down the corridor as every door swung open.

Half a dozen captive Renewables streamed out into the hallway, exclaiming, murmuring relief. Wesley hurried toward them, recognizing some as members of the resistance who’d been captured. I didn’t care about what he was doing, though—I could only look at my brother. It was like there was a line between us, connecting us again, and even though people crossed through it again and again as they reunited with each other, it stayed unbroken.

I whispered, “What are you going to do?” If Basil was right, then without the Renewables, Lethe would fall.

He was too far away for the sound to carry over the sounds of relief and celebration, but somehow he heard me anyway. “I don’t know,” his lips said back, the words carrying directly to my heart.

“All right,” Wesley said, cutting through the rapidly rising wave of sound from the newly freed Renewables. “We’re not free yet. We’re going to go find Prometheus and end this once and for all—and Lark’s going to need our help.”

My eyes were still on Basil’s. He shook his head slightly— don’t interrupt. If they knew Basil was Prometheus, they’d turn on him right here and now. We’d never find Tansy. And Wesley was right, I was going to be grateful for the help once we reached the harvesting room.

“If any of you are too weak or injured,” Wesley continued, “then raise your hands and we’ll arrange one group to go back. You two, I don’t recognize you—you’re welcome to join us in the walls. We live free of Prometheus’s grip.”

But not a single person raised their hands, not even the man with pale, brittle-looking skin and purple bruises around each eye—the man who had clearly just been harvested.

“Very well,” said Wesley. It was a relief to have him back— to have someone else making the decisions again. I felt wrung out, too many horrors and revelations in one day. “Then we all go.” But then he turned to me—and waited.

I stared back at him, uncomprehending.

“This is your party,” he said, smiling that irritatingly selfassured smile. This time, however, there was a glint of sympathy in his face.

For a long moment I struggled not to beg him to take over, to finish this mission. Take the decisions out of my hands, handle everything. But then Basil stepped up beside me, and I found myself nodding.

“We have to find Tansy. She would’ve been about my age, taller than me, strong—”

“I know the girl you’re talking about,” Wesley interrupted. “She’s gone. She’s not here.”

“What do you mean she’s not here?”

“They took her.” Wesley’s face was thin, drawn. Afraid. There was a faint dull gleam of perspiration on his thinning scalp. “They brought one of the men across the way back, empty, and took her. I think she’s the one they’re draining now.”

I remembered the Renewable in the Institute, the one they held captive in secret, in eternal torment as they drained her power away and let it regrow in a never-ending cycle. I remembered the agony of the Machine as they tore my natural magic away and replaced it with dark, twisted city magic.

I turned to Basil, who had walked back toward the door and then stopped. He was watching me, his face calm, his eyes sad. For a long moment we just stood there, at either end of the row of occupied cells, looking at each other.

Then he said quietly, “She’ll be in the harvesting room. I’ll show you.”