Shadowlark (13 page)

Olivia blinked at me, surprised. “Is that all? You must have arrived in the morning, Lethe time.”

“Lethe time?”

“As opposed to the time Above, in the ruins outside. When it’s day here, it’s night there. Here, I’ll show you.”

“I don’t mean to keep you up,” I protested. It’d been hours since the halls had gone quiet, and everyone else—I’d assumed—had gone to sleep.

She shook her head, lips curving in something a little sadder than a smile. “It’s okay. I don’t sleep too well these days, anyway. I’m not used to sleeping alone.”

Olivia had mentioned losing a brother, but she hadn’t mentioned losing anyone else. A husband? It was hard to tell how old she was, but she didn’t seem that much older than me. Maybe her boyfriend? But she was already past me, leading the way down the corridor. If she didn’t want to volunteer, I wasn’t going to ask.

I soon lost track of all the turns, but Olivia moved with absolute certainty. She knew this place like the back of her hand. She’d called herself a lifer—I tried to imagine spending all my time inside the walls, always living on the edges of the real city.

If I stay,
I realized,
this will be my life too.

This was how Basil had lived, before he vanished. Before he challenged Prometheus and lost, or before Prometheus found him. I tried to imagine his presence here, the way I always could in the sewer tunnels at home, but I couldn’t.

Eventually Olivia and I reached the end of a particular narrow tunnel that terminated in a metal door. She unlocked it with a twist of its handle. I braced for the shriek of rusty hinges, but this one opened as silently as a sigh. And as soon as it swung open, I realized why.

The door opened onto a wide, slightly rounded platform that was open to the outer city. If the hinges made noise, it’d give away this entrance to the walls. They must keep them carefully oiled.

And Olivia was right—outside, Lethe was shrouded in night.

The sky above, which during the day was lit by thousands of magic lights fractured into rainbows by the mist, was dark. The only hints of light up above were nebulas of pale blue and green, so faint I wasn’t sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. The effect was like nothing I’d ever seen before—nothing like the stars or the moon, or the faint violet sheen of my home city’s Wall when the sun disc set.

Olivia led the way out onto the platform, which I soon realized was the roof of a building. Though the surface was rounded, giving the unsettling impression that I could slide off at any moment, it was actually broad enough that it was as easy to walk on as the flat ground.

She took a seat on the roof, stretching her legs out and leaning back on her hands.

“This is incredible,” I said, staring.

She quickly raised a hand to stop me, then held a finger to her lips. When she spoke, her voice was merely a murmur. “Most people are asleep right now, but on the off chance someone nearby’s awake, we try to keep quiet up here. The door’s pretty well hidden, but we don’t want anyone getting curious about voices coming from up here.”

I bit my lip. But she patted the ground beside her in a clear invitation, so I sat down cross-legged next to her.

“What happened to all the lights?” I whispered.

“They’re still there,” Olivia replied. “They’re just not shining. At night there’s no magic coming through to light them up. That glow is just from the fungus that grows on the cavern ceiling. Phosphorescence, completely natural and magic-free.”

I thought of Oren, my pulse quickening a little. “What about all the people who aren’t Renewables, who can’t survive without the magic?”

“Enough comes through during the day to keep us going at night.” Olivia tilted her head back, eyes on the ceiling. “Those lights are designed that way. They’re imperfect vessels—they leak. The magic comes into the air through the mist formed when the hot air down here hits the colder air up near the surface.”

“Designed? By whom?”

“Prometheus. He saved us.”

“But—I thought you were all fighting him, that he was the bad guy.”

Olivia sighed. “It’s not really that simple. For a long time, since the Renewable wars, this place was a haven. Huge reserves of magic kept the city running, kept its people human despite the chaos above. The idea was always that by keeping one bastion of sanity in the chaos, at whatever cost, people could survive the fallout from the wars and find a way to restore the land.”

“Dorian—that is, a man I met while traveling—mentioned that this place was experimenting with fixing what the Renewables broke.”

Olivia nodded. “The Star—the giant crystal tower, you would’ve seen it in the ruins Above—was one of those experiments. But it was put up so long ago that by the time the energy reserves in the city began to run out, no one was alive who knew how to shut it down. It takes a huge amount of magic to light that Star and keep the land around it saturated with magic. There’s no insulation there, just open air that lets all the power just dissipate out into nothing.”

“So people moved down here.” I remembered the muffling doors and airlocks and rooms lined with iron that we’d passed through in order to enter the city below.

“Exactly. It lets us keep the magic in. But even that wasn’t enough. The city was dying, bit by bit. They shut down all the machines except the ones that bring us air and water. People were leaving in droves. That was when Prometheus showed up.”

“Who was he? Where did he come from?”

Olivia shrugged. “No one knows. He just walked into the courtyard one day and started talking, and people listened. He laid out an entire framework for how to save the city. He recruited teams to help him, and together they built the crystal lights on the cavern ceiling. So by day Above, the Star keeps the shadows there human. But by night, Prometheus’s inventions siphon the Star’s magic into the lights, and we have our daytime down here. And we have enough magic to live by.”

“He stole fire from the gods,” I murmured, staring at the ceiling, where the crystals lay dormant, waiting for magic.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. Something I read.” I swallowed. “So why not funnel all the magic down here? Aren’t you still losing a lot of power by letting the Star shine during the day?”

“If you haven’t noticed,” Olivia said wryly, “there’s not a lot of room down here to grow crops. We need the Empty Ones above to work the farms.”

Horror crept over me. “You—keep them human long enough to grow you food? And let them turn into monsters at night?”

Olivia didn’t look at me, gazing out toward the far wall of the cavern, lost in the darkness. “They only think they’re human,” she said softly. “It’s an illusion brought by the presence of magic. Without them, we’d all starve. Would you rather they stay Empty all the time, without even the echo of the people they once were?”

I had no answer for that. But I felt sure Oren would.

“Not everyone agrees with Prometheus. But after he saved us, he became the uncontested leader of the city. Renamed it Lethe, citing something about a new start.” Olivia eased back until she was lying on the roof, her blonde curls splayed out against the rusty surface. “Most of us have lived here long enough to know what life was like before Prometheus showed up five years ago. We know we’d all be dead without him, later if not sooner.”

“It sounds like he’s a savior,” I said bitterly, trying not to think of Basil. “Why fight him? Why the resistance?”

Olivia hesitated. “Because in some things, he’s wrong. We know he’s wrong.”

“Like locking up Renewables.”

She nodded. “They’re given a choice. They can volunteer to help Prometheus, or they can be forced. Sometimes the Renewables who volunteer seem to be totally fine. Sometimes they just vanish. But whenever he finds an unregistered Renewable, someone who didn’t volunteer—” Her voice gave out for a moment before she got herself under control again. “They’re gone forever.”

Like Basil. Like Olivia’s brother, too.

I pressed my palms against the roof under me. They were sweaty, and the metal was cool and smooth against them.

“So that’s why you took me?”

Olivia’s head turned toward me. “What do you mean?”

“You think I have the answers, somehow. That I can decode my brother’s journal, figure out what he was planning for Prometheus. How to take Prometheus down, or at least force him to treat Renewables fairly without sacrificing the city itself.”

“That’s the hope.” But her voice was anything but hopeful.

“Everywhere I go.” My whisper is barely more than a breath.

Olivia sat up, face turned toward me in the darkness. “Lark?”

I shook my head. “Everywhere I go people want me for things. They arrest me, take me captive, pull me this way or that.”

Olivia paused, then reached out to cover my hand with hers. It was strange to touch someone again who was neither shadow nor Renewable—to not sense the shadowy pit that was Oren or feel the bright warmth that was Tansy.

I could still sense the life force in her, the barest magic that even non-Renewables had. The memory of what I’d done to the Eagle still lingered in my mind, but despite the prickle of fear, I didn’t pull away. I could control this.

Olivia took a deep breath. “You’re not a captive here, Lark. Yes, we want your help, but we’re not going to force you to help us. We’d be no better than Prometheus. If you wanted to leave right now, this second, I’d show you the way to the surface myself. Well, if I knew how.”

“If you knew?”

Olivia tilted her head back, eyes on the ceiling. “We don’t have a way out,” she said softly. “There are a few known routes to the surface, but Prometheus’s Eagles patrol them all. We’d have to fight our way out, and even if we made it out alive, there’d be nowhere for the non-Renewables among us to go. We can’t even get to the surface to gather food, or to patrol for other Renewable survivors that might be out there.”

“You’re trapped here.”

Olivia nodded. “Most of us wouldn’t want to leave, but we don’t even have that choice. Those among us who are Renewables live every day in fear that they’ll be discovered. And that’s nothing to what our undercover operatives face— Renewables living in plain sight, hiding what they are.”

Her voice was quiet, her face tight and hard. I think of her brother, and that only makes me think of my own. I keep trying to imagine him in this place. Had he ever sat here on this roof, looking up at the ceiling, figuring out what Prometheus had done to the Star? Had he struggled with his conscience, trying to figure out if the city’s safety was worth the mistreatment of a few people unlucky enough to be born Renewables?

“I’d like to stay.”

I heard Olivia’s breath catch—her surprise was almost as tangible as my own. Until I’d spoken the words, I hadn’t known what I wanted.

“My brother died for this,” I continue. “I don’t know anywhere near as much about engineering or magic as he does, but if there’s anything I can do, anything I can read in his journal that you can’t, I’ll do it.”

Olivia’s fingers closed around mine, squeezing tight.

“Good,” she said. “Because we’ve got nothing else.”

In the morning, I discovered that someone had left a fresh set of clothes on the chest for me. It was so like the moment when I discovered the architects had left me clothes at the Institute that I hesitated. Olivia’s words came back to me:
You’re not a captive here.
Somehow, by the artificial light of day, they seemed less reassuring. Still, I couldn’t turn down clothes that didn’t smell like weeks of travel, so I changed gingerly. I poked my head into the room next door, but Oren was gone. His room looked untouched, all his clothes tucked away, the bed neatly made. It seemed his fastidiousness in erasing his campsites in the wild extended to sleeping in civilization, too.

I followed the distant sounds of conversation until I wound up in what had once been a building. The place was half-crushed by the weight of the newer buildings constructed on top, but someone had shored up the walls with metal beams. A motley assortment of mismatched tables and chairs occupied the floor space, the seats about half-full of resistance members. A door to one side was propped open, allowing the smells of something spicy and sweet to float through.

I’d located breakfast. And to judge from the sudden wave of hunger that swept through me, it was just in time. I scanned the room and saw Oren sitting across from Parker, the man who’d recognized me from the journal.

“Wesley’s our highest operative,” Parker was saying to Oren as I moved across the join them. “But even he hasn’t seen all of CeePo.”

Oren looked up as I approached and slid down to make room for me on the bench beside him. That was all the greeting I got, though, because he turned his attention back to his bowl, which contained some sort of porridge.

“Good morning, Miss Ainsley,” said Parker. He had a quiet, kind voice. He reminded me, oddly, of my father. I swallowed the pang of homesickness and sat.

“Lark,” I corrected him. “Please. The only people who call me Miss Ainsley want something.”

He smiled, rueful. “Well, if what Vee tells us is true, you’re well aware that we want something from you.” He raised his gaze a moment, signaling to someone behind me who brought me a bowl of the porridge.

I lifted a spoonful, giving it a cautious sniff. Some kind of grain, sweetened and spiced with something I’d never smelled before.

“If your cause was good enough for my brother, then it is for me too,” I replied, lowering the spoon again.

Parker took a deep breath, looking relieved. “Then Vee was right. You are staying.”

“At least for now.” I tried a bite of the porridge, pleasantly surprised to find that the spicy smell made it taste strangely fragrant, the sweetener counteracting the slight bitterness of the spice. “What were you saying about CeePo?”

Parker glanced at Oren. “Your friend was asking about the complex, and I was explaining that we don’t actually know too much about it. Prometheus is careful. No one except him gets full access everywhere. Wesley—you met him yesterday—is one of the deployment officers and has free rein in the Eagles’ dormitories, training facilities, and so forth. But he’s not allowed, for example, into the records room, or into the machine workshops. And whatever else is down there.”

“Down?” The building covered a large area, but it had only looked two or three stories tall at the most.

“The building goes on down, underground. We don’t know how far. Which is why we don’t know how much there is that we don’t know about.”

I glanced at Oren, who was staring at the remains of his porridge, moving clumps of it around with his spoon. I took another bite of my breakfast, willing my stomach to register that I was feeding it and stop grumbling. It had been long enough since I’d stolen the Eagle’s magic that I was beginning to feel another type of hunger altogether. I could see, scattered here and there throughout the meal room, glints and glimmers of shielded Renewables.

I dropped my gaze and ignored the fact that I could still feel them, like little flames radiating heat.

“You, at least, we can register with CeePo,” Parker continued, looking at Oren. “And we can get that done today. You’re not a Renewable, so there’s no risk that they’ll catch you. If you’re a registered citizen, you’ll have a lot more freedom of movement. And be a lot more useful to us.”

Oren set his spoon down. “Registered?” His expression was wary.

“You have to be registered before you can do business here or get a job. If you’ve got any special skills, aptitudes for science or organization, you might even be able to work in the CeePo complex.”

I stared at Parker, uncertain whether to be horrified or amused. The idea of Oren working behind a desk in the government building, or doing scientific experiments, was absolutely ludicrous. But then, Parker know where Oren had come from.

I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Oren. But instead of snarling his disgust at the small-minded pettiness of city life, he just sat there, face set in a thoughtful scowl, hand clenched around the spoon. Like he was actually considering it.

A commotion outside the mess hall saved me from having to speak. Raised voices caused heads to turn all across the room. Suddenly, a man in a familiar blue waistcoat burst into the mess hall, trailed by a couple of rebels I didn’t recognize.

“You two!” Wesley, sporting the most magnificent black eye I’d ever seen, jabbed a finger at me and Oren. “Come with me. Parker, you too.”

Parker was on his feet before Wesley had finished turning and walking out. It took me a moment to scramble to my feet without getting tangled up in the bench. Wesley didn’t sound angry so much as agitated.

With Oren following silently half a step behind me, I headed after Parker and Wesley. We ended up in the War Room again, and though I’m not sure I could have found it on my own, the corridors were already starting to look more familiar. I was good at finding my way underground.

Thank you, Basil,
I thought as I slipped inside the room, skirting the large table that dominated it.

Parker and Wesley were there, along with a few other people I didn’t know but recognized from yesterday, when I first arrived. Wesley paced to the far end of the room, lifting a hand to rub it over his balding scalp.

“Who blew their cover?” Parker’s voice was quiet, but full of dread. “Spider? Hawk? Oh—not Nina?”

Wesley shook his head. “No, they’re fine. Nina’s fine.” His eyes swiveled toward us, flicking between Oren and me. “Did you figure out if it was true?”

Parker’s gaze followed Wesley’s. “It’s her,” he confirmed. “Lark. The girl in the journal. But she says it’s her brother’s journal, not hers.”

Wesley grimaced, still watching me, his gaze troubled. A sick feeling began to rise in my throat, though I couldn’t have explained what it was. Just some instinct telling me something was wrong.

“And that one?” He turned to Oren.

“He’s normal. Name’s Oren, we were going to take him through registration today.”

Wesley straightened, resting his hands on the back of a chair. “No, you’re not.”

Parker frowned. “But—”

“The Eagle, the one this kid pummeled, didn’t make it. Just died this morning, a little before lights-on.”

It was like a blow to the stomach. I glanced at Oren, who was staring fixedly at the far wall. It was only once Parker replied, saying something I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears, that he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.

I knew why. That man was still alive after Oren was done with him. He’d had a broken nose and probably other, more significant injuries, but he wasn’t in danger of dying from them. But then I tore the life force from him to shield myself and Oren from his partner. I’d ripped the life out of him, and I’d seen the gaping hole in his soul where that magic should have been.

Oren hadn’t killed that man—I had.

“. . . with a warrant out on his head,” Wesley was saying. “They’ve got a picture of him. Don’t know how, one of the spy-wings, maybe.”

Parker turned away to pace, unconsciously echoing Wesley. “Okay. Okay, we can handle it. We’ve dealt with manhunts before. We put Renewables on every door to put up illusions, keep Oren inside at all times. Cut back on our missions, lay low. They didn’t get a picture of Lark, so we can still use her. Use the time to study the journal. She can look for anything useful, any blueprints or insights we missed, any way to decode his maps . . .”

Wesley nodded as Parker and the other people around the table made plans. Though the atmosphere was tense, it wasn’t panicked—this had clearly happened before. As the discussion grew more intense, Wesley’s gaze drifted.

Toward me.

I realized he was watching me again, the grey eyes piercing. When he saw me looking back at him, those eyes narrowed. Thoughtful, calculating.

My heart began to beat harder as I realized—he knew. He knew Oren hadn’t killed the Eagle. I didn’t know how, but I knew it as certain as I knew my own name. Which meant that he knew what I was—and what I could do. Though I could see nothing in his gaze beyond cool, thoughtful speculation, my mind conjured up the image of the Eagle, of his still body, of the ragged remnants of the magic that kept his heart beating.

“I’m going to be sick,” I whispered, bile rising swiftly in my throat. I whirled for the door, pressing my hand to my mouth, and sprinted away. Anywhere but here. Anywhere that didn’t have Wesley’s knowing eyes forcing me face-to-face with what I’d done.

I’d consumed the man’s life. I was no better than a shadow—I was worse. They were hungry, mindlessly desperate because they could never truly consume what they sought, what they needed. They were imperfect monsters. But not me. Because I didn’t just eat his flesh, tear him apart.

I devoured his soul.

• • •

I knelt, shivering, on the washroom floor. I tried not to look as the water carried away the mess I’d made, unable to find a bathroom, forced to vomit over a rusty drain in the floor. From the muddy boots and tools and buckets strewn about, I’d guessed this was a room to clean gear worn in tunnels that weren’t as tidy as the ones housing the resistance. At least I hadn’t stumbled into someone’s bedroom.

The sound of the water covered up the harshness of my breathing as I tried to calm myself, tried to find reason and logic amidst my panic. I had thought I’d escaped the Institute, outlasted whatever they’d done to me. But the girl I had been wasn’t a murderer. She wasn’t someone who’d do what I had just done.

The Institute had carved away every last scrap of magic I had and filled the cavity with their synthetic power. Enough to get me to the Iron Wood, lead Nix to a magic-rich haven ripe for the taking. But not enough to keep on living. They’d told me I’d die, but what did they know? Only two people had ever survived the process. Me—and Basil. And he vanished before ever reaching the Iron Wood.

A normal person, left alone in the magicless void outside, would slowly have their life, their soul, drained away. Until they became a shadow, permanently, forever. Magic would turn them back temporarily, cover up the madness of the empty pit inside them. But only for a little while. It wasn’t real.

Maybe I hadn’t escaped after all. Perhaps I was nothing more than a shadow, given the semblance of humanity by the magic the Institute had installed inside me.

Self-defense. Killing that man was self-defense. Just as it had been self-defense when I killed the shadow child attacking Oren, back on the ridge by the summer lake. And Tomas’s death—I’d killed him, but it was a mercy. I’d only ended his pain.

All explainable. Not my fault.

Except I enjoyed it.

I closed my eyes, shuddering. Even now I could feel the

remnants of that man’s magic, warm and fluttering inside me like bottled sunlight. There was so little of it left—the part of me that didn’t care about anything else just wanted more.

I jumped, stumbling over a bucket and ending up in a sort of crouch. It was Wesley, standing just inside the doorway, hands folded across the expanse of his waistcoat. The green and brown eyelike pattern was muted in the low light, shining here and there.

He saw me looking and grinned. “Peacock feathers,” he explained with pride. “They’re a type of colorful chicken. Some farm off to the west raises them, and traders bring the feathers through once in a while. Coat costs more than some people make in a year.”

I swallowed. My mouth tasted sour, my throat so raw it burned. “Why wear it?” I croaked.

“It’s expected. Prometheus pays his lackeys well.”

Prometheus again. I wondered what would happen if I just walked up to Central Processing and said,
Here I am. I’m a monster. Lock me up.
Maybe they’d experiment on me, like the Institute. Maybe they’d just toss me up to work on the farms like the shadows Above. Maybe at least I’d find out what happened to my brother.

“Oh, for the love of—snap out of it.” Wesley strode forward until he could look down at my face. “So you hurt someone. We’ve all done it. Vee punches me in the face on a regular basis, and she still sleeps at night.”

I gaped at him.

“No, I’m not a mind reader. I just recognize the signs.” Wesley smiled, one corner of his mouth twitching. “Your face is pretty expressive, you know.”

I sucked in a deep breath through my nose. “How come you know what I did? And no one else does?”

“I was there,” he pointed out. “And I’ve got the sharpest Sight of anyone in the city. You’re not exactly subtle when you’re ripping the magic out of someone. It also helps that what you did should’ve been impossible, so it won’t be the first conclusion people jump to.”

I was suddenly glad my stomach was already empty.

“It’s different from what Vee does,” I said, swallowing. “For one thing, you planned it. For another, she didn’t kill you.”

“But she’s killed others,” he replied, to my surprise. I tried to picture Olivia, all golden hair and smiles, murdering someone the way I had, and couldn’t. Wesley shook his head. “Life is short, Lark. Sometimes we die and sometimes they do. It’d be nice if it didn’t have to happen, but life here is just as brutal as life out there in the wilderness.”

“And that makes it okay?”