Lark Ascending

by Meagan Spooner

  “So Tamren could still be on his way to Lethe,” I whispered, trying to ignore the sick pit in my chest. “Wait, Dorian’s here?” I straightened, trying to cast out with my thoughts. Unlike the Renewables in Lethe, the Renewables from the Iron Wood weren’t good at shielding themselves. After a moment I found him, a few blocks away, feeling his way through the darkness like Basil had.

  “I couldn’t go alone, without someone to give me magic. Dorian volunteered. He said he had unfinished business here, though he refused to explain what.”

  I swallowed hard. “Eve.”

  “Who’s Eve?”

  “That’s the name of the Renewable the Institute’s been using for the past decade or two. She was originally from the Iron Wood. Dorian is the one who sent her here.”

  “You mean—the Renewables in the Wood are the ones who started all of this?”

  I nodded. Even the peaceful residents of the Iron Wood, content to live in rustic simplicity in the middle of a frozen orchard, abused this magic. “I thought you couldn’t absorb magic except through machines,” I pointed out. “That you and I were different.”

  Basil grinned and lifted his hand, revealing a simpler, smaller version of the glove he’d used as Prometheus. Wires and circuits wrapped around his fingers, crystal pads on each fingertip, conductors for the transfer of power. “Piece of cake for me, little bird.”

  I tried not to react, tried to remember that he recreated this machine so he could come help me. But all I could see was the way Adjutant had used it to rip the magic from Tansy, killing her brutally in front of me.

  “How did you get inside?” I asked instead. “Even I struggled to get through the iron.”

  Basil blinked at me, then looked more closely at my face. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Some kind of realization was dawning on his face. “You think… you think the Wall is shut down. Dead.”

  “It is,” I said, gesturing at the sky. “Just look up.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not. It’s inside out. We were waiting outside, trying to figure out a way in, when suddenly the iron turned to magic. We thought it was you.”

  I shook my head, my throat tight. “And when you came through…”

  “Then we realized we were trapped. The Wall we know is on the other side now.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck lifted. “You mean anyone—anything—from outside can just walk into the city?”

  Basil nodded, his expression grim. “I thought you knew. But there’s magic in here yet, I can feel it. Any shadows who come in will revert to their human selves.”

  “For now,” I murmured.

  Before Basil could ask what I meant, Dorian caught up with us. Basil told him what I’d said, but Dorian was watching me, his gaze difficult to read, but haunted nonetheless, his eyes shadowed.

  When Basil had finished, Dorian swallowed. “It’s good to see you again, Lark.”

  “You too,” I replied. I knew what he wanted to ask, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. From one perspective, he was the one who had set all of this in motion, by sending a spy to infiltrate our city all those years ago.

  “The Renewable,” he began. “The one you said helped you find the Iron Wood. Is she—”

  “She’s not really Eve anymore,” I said gently. “You had to know that.”

  He flinched, but didn’t retreat. “But she’s alive? She’s here?”

  “I’ll bring you to her.”

  I turned to lead the way back into the building, my thoughts surging. Until now, Eve had been the only Renewable we had access to. I hated myself for thinking of Dorian as a weapon in our arsenal, but given how wildly out of control Eve was, his arrival changed everything. He’d be able to help us infiltrate the Institute; he’d give us a fighting chance.

  And maybe all hope wasn’t lost for Eve. In the earliest memories I’d shared with her, before she became the Institute’s captive, she’d thought of Dorian often. I’d felt the wistfulness of those thoughts, how deeply she cared for him. At one time, Eve had loved this man, when they were young together in the Iron Wood. That young girl had left her home and volunteered for his mission because she cared for him so.

  I had to hope there was some part of that girl still somewhere inside the glowing, mad creature chained in our basement. I had to hope Dorian could reach her.

  I let the lantern die a little as we picked our way across the lobby. It was definitely closer to morning; the light made the sleeping bodies stir, and a few sat up behind us as we went. I hurried on, not wanting to have to pause to explain these two new faces.

  Dorian’s magic, natural and untwisted, was like a gentle balm after the raw, raging storm inside Eve. I wanted to stop and bask in it, but I settled for letting my shadow taste its edges as I made my way down the stairs. I should have been paying attention to what I wasn’t sensing. We reached the basement floor, and I lifted my lantern high, expecting to see Caesar still sprawled out in Eve’s lap. But instead all my light illuminated was a set of rusty chains wrapped around the boiler, empty.

  She was gone.

  CHAPTER 27

  I could hear footsteps and confused shouts as I pounded back up the stairs and through the lobby, but I didn’t dare stop to explain. I could still feel Eve’s magic, and though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where she was, my senses drew me toward her. I burst out of the doors into the thick darkness and flew down the stoop into the street. There was nowhere in this city that she could hide, not from my senses, but if she found a way to break through the shell of the Wall, she’d be lost forever, and her power with her. I had to get to her before that happened.

  And insane or not, we needed her.

  I closed my eyes, which were useless in this darkness anyway. I let my senses take over, using what Eve had taught me through her memories. Casting magic around me I could feel the reverberations off buildings, curbs, parked carriages. I vaulted over a barricade, lungs burning and soles skidding as I turned down an alley. I was getting closer. Maybe Caesar was slowing her down—for he had to have helped her escape. I wondered why she didn’t just leave him and flee.

  A few blocks more—

  A blinding light swooped in front of my face, dazzling my second sight and sending me reeling back. I fell, landing with a jarring pain on my tailbone. The thing swooped again, and I opened my eyes, crying out. A pixie. It was dark—I’d forgotten that night was the time the pixie patrols ruled the streets. I threw up my arms, trying in vain to gather my scattered senses.

  “What are you doing? You’ll run straight into the Institute’s patrols.”

  I gasped for air, dazzled eyes searching until I made out two tiny pinpricks of blue. “Nix!” I breathed.

  “If it wasn’t me, you probably wouldn’t have a face anymore.”

  My breath sounded like a sob, not the laugh of relief that bubbled out of me. “I’m glad to see you, but I have to—”

  Nix waited patiently for me to finish, but there was nothing to say. The hints of Eve’s magic were gone. I looked up, but there was no shift in the iron shell around our city, nothing to indicate that she’d blasted her way through it. She was still here, somewhere. But somehow, against all I’d come to understand, she was hidden from me.

  It ought to be impossible. I could feel her even when I was out in the wilderness beyond the Wall. And yet it was as though that connection had never existed.

  I closed my eyes, trying to make my pounding heart calm. I’d grown so used to feeling Eve in my mind that her absence was unsettling. “Nix, where have you been?”

  “Investigating.” Nix landed on my shoulder, tunneling in under my hair. “The dead woman these people found right before the attack scattered us.”

  My eyes flew open as I started, remembering the rebel woman’s so-called suicide with a guilty pang. I’d nearly forgotten about her. “Did you find anything?”

  “No evidence of a spy,” Nix replied. “I thought it wis
e to check, to prevent it happening to someone more important.”

  “Everyone’s important, Nix,” I interrupted, my tone sharp. Nix sounded like Eve. “But it’s good we don’t have a mole amongst us.”

  But the pixie merely hummed indifference, its legs busy plucking sweaty strands of hair away from my neck with distaste. “I do not believe she drowned, however.”

  I pulled myself upright onto my knees, still trying to catch my breath. “What do you mean?”

  “Her body was torn to shreds. And not by the currents and the stones, as they assumed.”

  My heart shriveled, stomach turning over with dread. “Torn apart like—like by a shadow?”

  Nix was quiet, body tucked close against my throat, cold metal warming to my own temperature. “How long was that other one missing after you spent the night at the reservoir?”

  I shook my head, swallowing hard. “It wasn’t Oren,” I hissed. “It couldn’t have been. He was fighting it—I saw him fighting it.”

  Before Nix could answer, someone came skidding around the corner, carrying a lantern. It was Basil, and his face fell as he saw me on the ground. “Lark! Are you—”

  “Fine,” I interrupted, getting wearily to my feet and trying to ignore the ache in my bruised tailbone. “I was trying to follow Eve, but she’s gone.”

  “Gone? She left the city?”

  “I don’t think so,” I answered slowly, head tipping back even though there was nothing to see overhead but empty darkness. “I think I would’ve felt it if she used enough magic to punch through iron. But I’ve always been able to sense her before.”

  “Let’s get back,” Basil said. “You scared everyone to death, sprinting out of there like that. Better show them you haven’t lost your mind. From what you’ve said, I don’t think they could deal with losing both Eve and you in the same night.”

  • • •

  Kris was awake by the time Basil and I made it back to the lobby of our building. When I walked in, he was asking agitated questions of Dorian, voice raised.

  “And what, it’s a coincidence that she took off when you showed up?” Kris stabbed a finger angrily into Dorian’s chest, and I remembered abruptly that they’d met—that Kris had lived in the Iron Wood for some time before he was uncovered as a spy for the Institute.

  “Stop!” I interrupted as Dorian opened his mouth to respond. “She didn’t know Dorian was here. He had nothing to do with it.”

  Kris whirled, mouth falling open for a split second before he recovered. “I wasn’t talking about Eve,” he muttered, moving toward me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I was trying to follow Eve.” My gaze swept the lobby; all the survivors we’d led out of the tunnels were awake now, clustered around the edges of the room. Their numbers greatly reduced after scattering in the wake of the Institute’s attack, they didn’t seem so much fighters as refugees. There was something hauntingly familiar about the droop in their shoulders, the emptiness of their eyes.

  I shivered and turned back to Kris. “We shouldn’t talk here. You, you, and you—come with me.” I tilted my head at Dorian and Basil, summoning them and Kris to follow me back upstairs to the apartment I’d once called home.

  I waited for them to precede me, focusing on the comforting weight of Nix on my shoulder once more. I let my eyes drift back to the refugees, watching us go, and an image flashed into my mind.

  I realized where I’d seen that look before. What felt like years ago, standing by the shore of the summer lake, a shadow woman searching for her lost child had looked at me like that. Empty and hopeless, one step away from darkness.

  I shut the door on the lobby and followed the others upstairs.

  • • •

  “We should make a list of the places she could hide.” Dorian was intent, hunched over the makeshift map of the city Kris and Basil had sketched out in chalk on the floor of the apartment.

  “That’s the problem,” Kris said, impatient. “She shouldn’t be able to hide from Lark. They’re linked. Lark can feel her anywhere.”

  I glanced at Basil, who was standing by the window. He’d been quiet since we entered the apartment, which he was seeing for the first time since he’d left the city so many years ago. Looted and trashed by rebels searching for supplies, it bore little resemblance to the place where we grew up. I didn’t have to warn him not to look outside; any twitch in the curtains might alert pixies or Enforcers to our position. I’d already put us all at risk during my headlong flight in pursuit of Eve; if I’d run into an enemy patrol, we could all have been on our way to the Institute’s machines.

  “Forget about Eve,” I said, breaking into the debate between Kris and Dorian. “Even if we got her back, what could we do? I couldn’t stop her from exploding before. It’ll only be a matter of time before it happens again, and next time there won’t be a Wall to absorb the blow.”

  Kris leaned forward, his gaze intent on my face. “Then you’re just giving up?”

  I wished I could. I wished I’d just stayed in Lethe, or even the Iron Wood. I wished—But I shook my head slowly, taking in a steadying breath. “No. But since we can’t stop Eve, our only hope is to stop the Institute before she explodes again. We have to fix this city—we have to fix everything, or all of this will continue until we’re dead.”

  Basil left the window, returning to the tiny circle of lantern light that was all we could risk. “How? Even you don’t have that kind of power, Lark.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But I think the answer lies inside the Institute.”

  I turned my gaze on Kris, who lifted his head to meet my eyes. His jaw clenched, a muscle in his cheek twitching as Basil and Dorian followed my gaze. “You know?”

  I thought of Eve’s memory, the one where Gloriette had let slip that it was the Institute who shattered this world all those years ago. I nodded, trying not to let Kris’s confirmation hit me like the blow it was. Until now, I could believe Eve’s memory was somehow faulty.

  “Know what?” demanded Basil, glancing from me and Kris.

  “Eve showed me in a memory that the architects have been hiding the truth from us,” I said, looking up from Kris’s stricken face. “They’re the ones who caused this.”

  “This war?”

  “No—they’re the ones that caused the world to be what it is now. A century ago they decided to end the Renewable Wars by destroying the Renewables themselves. Only, their plan backfired, and it unleashed this hell. They’re the ones who destroyed the world.”

  Basil sat back on his heels, staring silently at me. I couldn’t be sure in the low light, but I thought his face had paled; I knew he was feeling as sick as I was. Despite everything the Institute had done to us, we’d both been raised to believe they were the saviors of this city—not its executioners.

  Dorian, on the other hand, leaned forward, eyes glowing in the lantern light. “I knew it,” he hissed. “I was right to send Eve here.”

  I stared at him. “You were right?” I could barely control my voice, the tremor in it vibrating through my skull. “Right to send a girl to be captured and tortured for years, turned into an insane monster, robbed of her freedom and her soul?”

  Dorian swallowed and didn’t answer me.

  “Kris,” I said, unable to look at Dorian any longer. “Eve told me that the founding architects used a device to shatter the world; that the architects today still have it. Why haven’t they just reversed the damage already?”

  “We’ve tried,” Kris replied helplessly. “You have to understand, the architects who did this all died a hundred years ago. We don’t have that technology anymore. But even if we did, we don’t have access to the kind of power they had back then. All we had was Eve.”

  “And that’s why they removed her from the power grid,” I finished, glancing at Dorian. “To let her recharge, hoping she’d grown powerful enough to use with this device.”

  Kris shook his head. “I told them it would never work. When the original attem
pt to destroy the Renewables failed, it tore the fabric of the Resource apart. We’re not dealing with the same laws of nature anymore; it’s impossible.”

  Nix thrummed against my neck; it was being quiet during this meeting, but its presence was a comfort. Without Oren, it was the only thing keeping me from feeling utterly alone. I jerked my thoughts away from him with an effort. If I let myself think about him, about where he was, the pain he was in, his struggle to stay human—I’d fall apart.

  “Don’t talk to me about impossible,” I said, remembering what the pixie had told me once. “The Institute did this. The answers are in there somewhere, and we’ve got two of the best minds the world has to offer.” I glanced from Kris to Basil and back again.

  Kris shifted uncomfortably. “And you want to—what? Walk up and knock on the Institute’s gates and say ‘Hey, we’d like to come in and root around in your ancient machinery’? They’d kill us.”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “Maybe they’re searching as hard as we are for answers. Regardless, I think we have to get inside. We find their records, figure out how they did this—and maybe we can find a way to put an end to it.”

  Basil was nodding slowly, his gaze distant and thoughtful. “There are sewer tunnels threading the ground beneath this entire city, including the Institute. Maybe we could get inside unnoticed that way.”

  I nodded, finding a bit of a smile for that—Basil was the one who showed me those tunnels. And even if we didn’t exactly break into the Institute through them, it was doable. “That’s how Eve got in, all those years ago when Dorian sent her.”

  “Those tunnels were sealed,” protested Kris.” The entrances were blocked off.”

  “With what—iron?” Dorian raised his eyebrows, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Because that’s no problem for Lark.”

  Kris paused, his gaze thoughtful. “True.”

  “They might be prepared for resistance fighters to try a break-in,” I said, trying to think through my exhaustion. “They might even be prepared for me. But they’re not prepared for Dorian. He’s the first Renewable they’ve seen since Eve.”