Skylark (2 page)

I kept gasping for breath, trying to hold numbers in my mind.
No
, my thoughts screamed at me.
Not now
. But was it better to rot down here? The alternative was unthinkable. Illegal use of the Resource was the only offense a child could be Adjusted for.

The fog thickened, dizziness swelling and making it hard to concentrate. Panic urged it on.

Iron
, I thought desperately. Images flashed through my mind, none of them what I needed. I needed cold iron, potent enough that the thought of it was enough to stop the Resource in its tracks.

Iron, like the sharp thing digging into my leg. I jammed my leg against it, trying to snuff out whatever was burning inside me. The dizziness eased, letting me blink away the blurry sparks of light obscuring my vision.

I forced myself to drag in a deep breath.
Think of Basil
. The pipe wasn’t so tight I couldn’t breathe. I was only imagining it. I was just stuck. I got myself in here, and I could get myself out.
Don’t panic
.

I gave an experimental jerk of my leg, my pants resisting the movement. I stretched forward with my hands, seeking some kind of hole or crack in the brick of mortar that I could hold on to for leverage. There: a bit of crumbling brickwork. I raked it away with my fingertips, nails scraping against the mortar, until I had enough room to get some purchase on it.

I took another long breath in and then exhaled all the way, making myself as small as possible—and jerked.

My leg came free with a dreadful long
rip
of fabric. I scrambled forward, nails scrabbling on brick, feet scraping. Ahead of me yawned the cleaner chamber, and with a last burst of effort I spilled out onto its floor, the edge of the pipe taking several layers of skin off my arms as I did.

Air. I needed any air but the horrible, Resource-soaked air in the pipe.

Though the mechanics did their best, there were always leaks in the giant bellows moving the air. I crawled forward until I found one, and then turned over and lay there, lungs heaving and eyes shut. Gasps of fresh air brushed my face, tossing my hair around.

Safe.

After a few long moments, the trembling in my arms and legs stilled, and the burning in my lungs eased. I was lying in an inch or two of water, soaked to the bone. I opened my eyes.

The chamber housing the air cleaner was roughly spherical, with the cycling machinery taking up most of the floor space. Gears bigger than I was spun in ponderous, perpetual motion, their bottoms disappearing into grooves gouged in the stone floor. The giant bellows in the middle of it all kept the air moving, pumping recycled air into the school. The noise was deafening.

I would have lay in the muck for an hour, but I couldn’t afford it. I could no longer hear the sun disc, had no way of gauging the passage of time. But I’d come this far—I wasn’t going to turn back now without seeing that list, even if it meant Caesar catching me covered in sewer muck.

I sucked in a few deep breaths until my arms stopped shaking, and then reached for the maintenance ladder, just able to grab the bottom rung. I hauled myself up inch by inch, feet kicking against the wall behind it until I could get them onto the ladder.

The hatch came up inside the janitor’s closet. I carefully shut it behind me and turned my attention to the door: locked, as always. But Basil had taught me about this, too. Years of practice had made it second nature. Grab the handle and pull, lower your hip, slam it into the laminate just below the lock.

Clunk
. The lock’s tumblers jarred into place.

The door swung open, and I slipped inside the school.

Even though I’d done this every Harvest Day for the better part of five years, praying to anything listening that I’d be harvested next, the sight of my school darkened and empty always gave me an odd chill down my spine. I slunk down the corridor, keeping to the shadows. My steps squelched lightly in the silence, leaving wet footprints against the spotless tile floor. Whoever the other group had been, they hadn’t beaten me here. I felt a strange surge of pride at that thought. Basil had taught me well.

The dean’s office was just down from the school’s classrooms. Its locking mechanism suffered from the same weaknesses as the closet’s, and following a loud
thunk
that echoed down the hall, I ducked inside. The faint light of morning filtered in through the windows, illuminating the furniture inside.

There was a leather folder on the desk. Suddenly everything else fell away, the whole room narrowing, roaring in my ears. Nothing mattered, except that here was my ticket out of limbo.

I knew my name was on the paper inside this time. It
had
to be. It had to be. It was as though my eyes could see through the folder’s cover, my name printed there dark and clear as if burned into the sheet.
Ainsley, Lark
.

My fingers shook as I picked up the folder. I didn’t care that my damp skin left wet spots all over the folder and the paper inside. My eyes took forever to focus. The letters, written in neat, orderly rows, were gibberish until I forced my mind to decipher them.

Baker, Zekiel, I read, the blood roaring in my ears. Dalton, Margaret. Kennedy, Tam. Smithson, James.

My brain didn’t even process that the names were in alphabetical order, that it was over before I’d read the first name. My eyes raked over each of the four names twice. I turned the paper over, but only white space greeted me. Empty.

Water dripped onto the paper, spots of translucence that blurred the names. For a strange moment, a detached part of my mind wondered if I’d started crying. Then I realized that it was dirty water from my hair, which had fallen forward over my shoulder.

As the buzzing in my head began to fade, another sound intruded upon the unnatural quiet of the empty school. It was faint first, like the sound of my own blood coursing past my eardrums. Then I picked out a humming, something almost mechanical, rising and falling. I stood listening for long, precious moments, unwilling to believe the sound.

Pixies.

Chapter 2

I threw the folder back onto the desk, not even bothering to make it look undisturbed. The paper inside was already waterstained and crumpled. No hiding my presence now. I took two quick steps to the door, easing it open and peering around it just enough to see a sliver of the hallway.

Dark, still, silent. Except—just there. A flash of copper, darting from one room to the next. The tiniest of hums, the sound of the Resource twined with clockwork.

I froze. A thousand half-invented stories whispered about the pixies flashed through my brain. Part of me had been hoping I was imagining it, sensing something else and jumping to the wrong conclusion. I waited, counting the seconds silently. Again it zipped out of the room and into the one across the hall. Twenty seconds it spent in each room, as steady as the ticking of a clock. Twenty seconds with the corridor free.

There were ten rooms in all, five on each side. The janitor’s closet lay in between the second and third rooms on the left. I tried to gauge the distance from the dean’s office to the closet.

As the pixie darted into the next room down, I took deep breaths until I was dizzy. As soon as the pixie came out and zipped into the room across the hall, I made for the closet.

My wet shoes squealed against the floor. Pixies weren’t supposed to have ears, only a sensor for the Resource, but my skin burned nevertheless as though I could feel eyes on me. I skidded once for a heart-stopping second, then careened into the closet’s door. Fumbling with the handle, I finally got it open and lurched inside. I slammed it behind me and stood listening, straining for sound, the side of my face and my ear pressed against the door.

A voice. “Holy shit.”

I whirled to see three pairs of wide eyes glittering at me through the gloom, reflecting the faint light emanating from the crack under the door.

The other kids I’d heard in the tunnels.

“What’s with all the noise?” came one voice. Without light I couldn’t identify him. I didn’t bother getting to know my classmates very well anymore. They inevitably got harvested and moved on without me. “Are you trying to get us all caught?”

“Sorry. I got spooked.” The words were out before I could stop them. I blinked in the gloom. Why hadn’t I told them about the pixie?

“Is that Lark?” demanded the same voice. He must be the leader of this little expedition.

“Who’s Lark?” came another voice, younger.

“The dud, you moron.” The leader grinned, a flash of slightly uneven teeth in the darkness.

Of course they all knew me. By reputation, if not by name. The unharvested freak. People on the other side of the city knew who I was. I just got older and older, watching kids three, four, five years my junior march off to their harvest ceremonies.

“Was that you screaming bloody murder down there in the tunnels?” The first boy sounded on the verge of laughter.

They’d heard me. When I believed I was trapped, possibly doomed to waste away in a tunnel below the city—they’d heard me screaming for help. And no one had come.

“Yeah,” I muttered, my fingers curling into fists.

One of the other kids giggled, and I gritted my teeth. The first boy said, “Well? Did you see the list?”

I breathed in. “No,” I said calmly. “I didn’t. But you’d better hurry if you want to see it before anyone comes.”

And without waiting for a reply, I dropped down through the hatch and let my weight pull it closed. I dangled from the hatch for a moment before swinging my legs over onto the ladder. I reached back up for the lock, shaking fingers closing over the red handle.

Just do it
, I told myself, head beginning to ache from clenching my jaw so tightly.
They would’ve done the same to you.

And lock them in with a pixie. My stomach roiled at the thought, a shudder of remembered terror running through me. I stared up at the hatch for a few long moments and then groaned, dropping back down to the floor, the hatch unlocked.

My heart still pounding, I set off down the larger tunnel, avoiding the one where I’d gotten stuck. My nerves were jangling, and I had to try not to think of how close I’d come to being caught. The punishments for sneaking into the school were dire—minimum rations, isolation, even giving you a lower status apprenticeship when you were harvested and made an adult. Plus there was pride. In all these years, I’d never been caught. My thoughts were lost in imagining the punishments, fear mixed with relief still ruling my mind as I hurried home.

I should have noticed something was wrong. Even though the cleaner chamber was receding further and further behind me, the sound of machinery remained. The humming grew louder as I walked, but I was so relieved at my escape that I didn’t give it a second’s thought.

And so when I reached an intersection of the tunnels and rounded the corner to come face to face with a pixie, I could do nothing but stare stupidly.

It had no eyes, no mouth, only a featureless, round head no bigger than my pinky fingernail. Delicate copper wings were a blur of motion as it hovered, its segmented body giving it an insectlike appearance. They were the smallest of the mechanimals invented in the extravagant decades before the wars, requiring so little of the Resource to run that they were the only ones the Institute still used. They were nothing more than curiosities then, but now they were the Institute’s eyes in the city, able to detect instantly any illegal use of the Resource. Children weren’t expected to report malfunctions and submit to Adjustment—children, after all, can’t be expected to act responsibly. They need to be watched.

For a moment we were still, me staring at the pixie and it watching me sightlessly in return. The only sounds I could hear were the buzzing of its wings, the whirring of its gears, and the jarring, discordant twang of the Resource twisted to its mechanism.

Then it gave a malevolent whine of triumph and launched itself toward my face, so fast I almost didn’t see it move. Without thinking, I threw up my hands, all of the panic, relief, despair, and fury of the past half hour exploding with no time to count to ten, no time to think of iron.