Lark Ascending

by Meagan Spooner

  The sand shifted beneath the soles of my feet, pulling away as the waves receded. There was no other feeling in the world like this one—that even the ground beneath me was fluid, changing, always adapting.

  This was home. I slept in the decrepit house up on the cliff, making my bed on the creaky boards in the living room, but this shore, with the cliffs to the north and the aspen grove to the south, was my home. Where I belonged. The house on the hill was too full of ghosts.

  I knew that the sea ought to feel haunted. It’s where my mother died, where she chose to bury her own body after my father became one of the monsters we so feared. For months he crept around the house, trying to find a way in, as we huddled on the floor, listening to the scratching and the howling screams.

  One day the howling simply stopped. And on that day my mother walked into the sea.

  Somehow, though, it didn’t matter that this ocean was a grave. I felt happy here. Comforted. Safe. I could walk into the sea too, if I ever wanted to go away forever. If I ever got tired of being the only one left. Sometimes I did. But standing here, with the sand between my toes, was always close enough for now.

  I turned, shielding my eyes against the diffuse, overcast sunlight. In the distance, the colony of aspen trees shivered in the wind, whispering to me in its shared language. The house on the dunes waited for me, and my stomach rumbled. I had a few more weeks of food there. I’d eat it, and then I’d move on. Onward down the shore, or else into the sea. It didn’t matter much what I chose.

  I freed one foot from its sandy trap, but then froze. The curtains in the house just moved. Before I had time to consider what it meant, a face appeared there. It stayed just long enough that I was sure it had seen me before it vanished.

  I turned to run, gathering up my shoes from the high tide line and making my way to where the sand was firm enough to run on. I’d barely gotten a few steps before a voice called out, “Wait!”

  That, more than the moving curtain, more than the face at the window, froze my heart. Shadows didn’t speak.

  It was a boy about my age, no more than eleven or twelve. He was shorter than me, with big feet and stringy hair that needed washing. His face was badly windburned, and I thought of the storm two nights ago that had broken the roof upstairs.

  “Keep back!” I shouted, whirling and pulling out the little knife that my father had given me. “Who are you?”

  The boy skidded to a halt with a shower of sand. He lifted his hands, showing he was unarmed, and in silent plea. “Don’t hurt me,” he gasped, panting with the effort of sprinting down here. “I’m sorry if I scared you. Is that your house? I was just looking for something to eat.”

  His cheeks were hollow, eyes bright with hunger. I glanced up at the house on the hill. “It used to be,” I said. “How are you—why aren’t you shadows like everyone else?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. My dad was like me, though.”

  “Where is he now?”

  The boy didn’t answer, his face reddening still more under the windburn.

  “Never mind,” I said. “If you’re hungry, you can eat something from the house, but you can’t stay. I don’t have enough food for two.”

  “What will you do when you run out?”

  I glanced at the sea. My mind’s eye summoned an image, dark brown hair spreading out over the waves as my mother’s head vanished there. “I don’t know.”

  “Why not come with me?” said the boy. “It’ll be safer with two of us.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “In the last town we lived in, before the shadows got it, my dad heard a story about a place. With people like us. Renewables.”

  My mom had used that word sometimes when I was growing up. She’d go get supplies from a nearby town where a few Renewables, people like her, had holed up against the shadows. I wondered if that was the town where this boy was from.

  “I don’t want to go chasing after stories. I want to stay here. I’d like to die at home.” I thought of my aspen grove.

  The boy nodded. “I guess that’s your choice. But if I’m going to die, I’d rather die fighting.”

  I tore my gaze away from the sea, frowning at him. He was such a skinny, weird-looking boy, with his big hands and feet and ears, like they were trying to grow to grown-up size before the rest of him could catch up. The idea of him fighting anything was ludicrous. He caught me staring, saw my scowl—and smiled.

  It was strange talking to another person after months of isolation. I felt as though my heart were one of the dried husks of seaweed at high tide, slowly coming back to life as the water returned. “How far is this place?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But it’s west of here. You’d have to leave the sea.”

  “Does this place even have a name?”

  “My dad said it’s called the Iron Wood.”

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of my dress. “What does that even mean?”

  “Dunno.” The boy shrugged. “My name’s Dorian, by the way.”

  I hesitated. “Eve. I’m Eve.”

  • • •

  I woke expecting to hear the roar of the waves. I brushed at my face, trying to dislodge the sand I knew was stuck there, only to find nothing but the imprint of the floorboards on my cheek. I stared around the dark apartment groggily, trying to reorient myself. Only then did I feel the little thread of power coming up from below, the connection Eve and I always shared. Dream, memory—it didn’t seem to matter. I rubbed at my eyes, trying to shake it away. I didn’t want to feel closer to the woman I’d chained to the floor in the basement. I couldn’t afford to.

  There was no way to tell how much time had passed. It was as dark outside as it had been when I fell asleep, and it would be dark forever. Unless the Wall was powered again, the sun disc would never light our city. And no sun from outside could penetrate our leaden sky. I could only tell by how stiff my arms and legs were that I’d been lying on the floor for hours, at least. So I stood, stretching as best I could, and made for the door.

  I nearly tripped over someone lying on the floor outside. I stumbled, catching myself before I could crash noisily to the floor. Bending low, I made out Kris’s features in the dark. My breath caught painfully in my chest. He stirred but didn’t wake. He wasn’t Oren, someone who’d jump to his feet out of a dead slumber at the slightest noise. But he also hadn’t left me alone.

  I retrieved one of the ratty blankets from the apartment and draped it over him before I stepped silently down the hall to the staircase, retrieving a lantern and giving it a crank as I went. I hesitated when I reached the basement door, but only for a moment. I knew Eve was awake. She’d awoken the instant I had.

  The door opened silently when I gave it a nudge. This place was too recently inhabited to have gathered much rust yet. I almost thought it’d be easier to see my home falling apart, as though it had been abandoned generations ago—rather than just the way I’d left it, only empty and still.

  Eve sat cross-legged where we’d left her chained to the hot water generator. Of course, there was no power running through it now, and no heat—but it was bolted to the floor and impossible to budge. Eve didn’t lift her head when I entered; her eyes were downcast, fixed on my brother, who lay with his head cradled in her lap.

  I jerked to a halt at seeing this, struck by the image. My oldest brother seemed so small.

  “We can speak,” Eve said softly. “He’s dreaming.”

  I swallowed, inching into the room but giving the pair of them a wide berth. “How do you know?”

  Eve just smiled, her fingers running slowly through the hair at my brother’s temples. I hadn’t noticed before, but there were threads of silver there among the brown. “I can taste it in the air. Your brother has the kindest dreams.”

  That I doubted. But maybe dreams were the way to reach her. “You knew Dorian,” I whispered, letting the door close behind me. Eve was glowing again,
but with a gentle, warm light—not the burning glare she’d given off on the roof. Just enough to light the room and illuminate her face.

  “Dorian,” she echoed, finally lifting her eyes to meet mine. Her brow furrowed, lips repeating the shape of the name again and again, as though it might taste different if she tried it one more time.

  “The boy who brought you to the Iron Wood. The man who sent you here to find out about the Institute.”

  Eve shook her head abruptly, the force of her movement causing my brother to stir uneasily. “No. I’ve always been here.”

  I looked at her face again. She met my gaze, pupils barely more than pinpricks in her white irises. “You came here years ago,” I said slowly. “You don’t remember that anymore?”

  “I’m like the sea. I’ve always been and will always be.”

  “How would you know anything about the sea if you’ve always been here?” I challenged.

  Eve hesitated, lips curling. “What do you want?”

  “I want to help you.” I pinched the bridge of my nose with my fingers, trying to stave off the headache that inevitably assailed me when I was around Eve for too long. “I don’t want to keep you here like this.”

  “You want me to say I love these people like my own. Like you do.”

  “You don’t have to love them,” I argued. I wasn’t so sure she was right about me loving them. “You just have to not want them all to die.”

  “You think death is the worst end for souls like these,” Eve whispered. Her eyes burned with memory; I could still picture her memory of her mother’s suicide. “If they knew what was coming for them they would choose it. Isn’t choice the freedom you keep trying to push on me?”

  “Maybe they would,” I allowed, heart pounding. “But that isn’t your choice to make.”

  “Isn’t it? If I’m the one with the power to save them?”

  “Your idea of saving them isn’t the same as mine.” I took a long, slow breath, trying to keep hold of my calm. Even now her pull was irresistible; even knowing what she did to Oren, what she wanted to do to my people. “Eve, tell me why the architects disconnected you from the power grid in the Institute.”

  She blinked at me, a languid dip of translucent white lashes. “Why do you think I know?”

  “You delight in reminding me that we’re connected,” I pointed out. “I may not have your experience, but it goes both ways. I know there’s more here than you’ve told anyone. What were they going to do to you?”

  “Kill me,” she replied evenly. Her fingers combed through my brother’s hair, a disturbingly tender gesture. “They wanted to kill all of us.”

  “I can’t believe that,” I snap. “The people in there aren’t evil, Eve. They’re not murderers by choice, they wouldn’t come this far only to decide to wipe out everyone in the city.”

  “Not them.” Eve’s voice sharpened, a spray of irritation mottling her tone. “Not the normals. They wanted to kill the Renewables—to finish what their ancestors started.”

  My pulse quickened; I had to fight the surge of excitement, keep it restrained where Eve couldn’t sense it in my thoughts. “Finish it? How?”

  Eve narrowed her eyes, inspecting my features for a long moment. “They have a device. The one your city’s founders used. They believed I had grown strong enough to trigger the process again. They did not get a chance to test their theory.”

  Before Caesar broke her out.

  Mind racing, I tried to piece together the truth from Eve’s fragmented, paranoid memories. The architects wouldn’t have tried to destroy all the Renewables now, not when their magic was the only thing that could power the Wall and all their machines. There had to be something else, some other factor that Eve was unable—or unwilling—to understand. If it was possible to complete the founding architects’ plan, perhaps it was possible to reverse it—to reverse the damage to the world. There were answers somewhere behind those high granite walls, if only I could reach them.

  I swallowed heavily, trying to rid my throat of the lump lodged there. “Eve, why not help me? Together we could get into the Institute and find a solution. One that doesn’t involve genocide.”

  Eve’s eyes had wandered, but when I spoke they snapped back, the pinprick pupils darting this way and that over my face. “Return to that place and to their device? I will not hand my enemy the power they need to destroy me.”

  “But what if we could use their device against them? Maybe we could change things.”

  Eve’s fingers were still idly stroking my brother’s hair; I couldn’t tell if she was even aware of the movement. She was silent for a long time, and when she finally spoke, I wasn’t even sure if she’d heard me. “Sometimes I think about your brother, and his death. I wonder if he would still love me in that moment.”

  It was pointless. She’d lost what little sanity she had left, up on that roof. I fought the urge to shout at my brother, to wake him and drag him bodily from the room if I had to. “It’s not love,” I retorted. “He’s under your magic. No more.”

  “Of course he is.” Eve dropped her hand, fingers stroking along Caesar’s knuckles, where he’d fallen asleep with his fingers wound in the hem of Eve’s dress. “How is your pet any different?”

  “My—” I started to ask, but it took one look at Eve’s face, the tiny smile there, to understand. “You don’t get to talk about Oren,” I breathed. “Ever.”

  Eve shrugged. “I gave him what he wanted,” she whispered.

  “He wanted a cure!” I had to dig my nails into my palms to keep from shouting.

  “He wanted freedom from you.”

  My stomach seized as though I’d been punched in the gut, and I nearly staggered. She was wrong, I knew she was wrong. Oren cared for me—he’d always told me that he’d follow me whether he needed my magic or not.

  And now he didn’t—Eve had made it so his shifts to shadow and back weren’t affected by magic. Now that he didn’t need me… where was he?

  Eve rested her hand on Caesar’s cheek, watching me. “When you change your mind about these people, I’ll be here. I’ll let you help me.” Something flickered in my mind, the slick tingle of deceit. I was growing more deft at reading her thoughts the way she read mine.

  Sick, I turned my back on her and left, pausing on the other side of the door to rub at my eyes and my face, trying to scrub her presence away. There was no saving her anymore. The magic was poison—without the Institute leeching it away, it was destroying what little was left of her mind. Killing an entire city so that only Renewables would be left was a madness I couldn’t even understand.

  Except that part of you knows she makes sense.

  I hurried away, taking the stairs two at a time in a futile attempt to leave the touch of her mind behind.

  CHAPTER 26

  The lobby of my apartment building was full of refugees from the sewers, no more than lumps of blanket and clothing scraps littered around the floor. A few of them stirred as I passed, the dim lantern light brushing their faces, but none woke.

  I slipped outside, dropping the lantern and sinking into a crouch as I tried to force the remnants of Eve’s mind from mine. Being around her was like walking through cobwebs, leaving traces of invisible, creeping thread all throughout my thoughts. It seemed colder than I was used to, but I knew I was imagining things. Even if the environmental controls went offline when the Wall did, it would take more than one night for the temperature to start dropping.

  I rose to my feet and stumbled down the steps into the street. If the sun disc had been working, it’d be dawn. As it was, the street was shrouded in midnight. Not even the lamps were lit. As I left the stoop of my building, and my lantern, behind, the darkness swallowed me.

  “Oren,” I whispered, eyes searching the darkness. “Come back to me.”

  Instinct made me search for him with my second sight, reaching for the well of shadow that had always been beside me. But that was gone now, after what Eve did to him. There was no
more division between his darkness and his light; there was only him, and I couldn’t find him in this impenetrable midnight.

  But then my straining eyes did pick something out; a shadow slipping from behind a corner into the shelter of a doorway. My heart skipped, and I moved toward it. “Oren?” I whispered, knowing it was foolish, and not caring. If it was one of the Institute’s Enforcers, so be it. They’d find us anyway, if they were this close.

  The shadow froze, and for a pounding moment there was only silence. Then came a voice. “Lark?”

  My feet went numb, and I stood rooted to the ground. “Basil?”

  The figure bolted from the doorway and came at me. I could barely see his face in the dark, but as soon as his arms went around me, I knew I’d been right in recognizing his voice. “You’re here! You’re alive!”

  For a moment it didn’t matter that my brother wasn’t the hero I remembered; it didn’t matter that he’d been just as corrupted by magic as everyone it touched. I buried my face against his shoulder and clung to him.

  We stood there in the false midnight, mumbling reassurances to each other, like children afraid of the dark. Eventually I pulled away, reaching out to touch his face and remind myself that he was really there. I took his hand and pulled him back toward the stoop and my fading lantern. I let go of him long enough to give the lantern a few more cranks, then turned back.

  “How did you get here so fast?” I gasped, still breathless with relief. “Where’s Tamren?”

  Basil’s face, now that I could see it in the light, was worn and ragged. He’d been on the road, and it clearly hadn’t been an easy journey. “Tamren?” he echoed, brows drawing inward. “Who’s Tamren?”

  My relief vanished, the bottom dropping out of my stomach. “You mean he didn’t find you?”

  Basil shook his head slowly. “I left on my own, with Dorian. He’s a street or two back. We came to help you. I didn’t know where you’d be, I thought I’d try home…” His eyes lifted to the battered façade of where we’d once lived together as a family.