Shadowlark (8 page)

I took quick, shallow, steadying breaths, every nerve alive, every muscle tensed. I felt Oren’s hands grow rigid on my shoulders as they approached.

They walked straight past us without even looking.

I stared ahead at the spot where they’d been, too shocked to even turn and track their progress away from us, down the corridor we’d come from.

“. . . not like we can tend them ourselves,” the man was saying, voices echoing back to us through the tunnel. “Or grow anything down here.”

“True, but self-sufficiency is the first rule. Prometheus insists on it. How can we justify—” And they turned a corner, voices fading into unintelligible murmuring.

Oren let out a long breath, the air stirring my hair. I shivered, pulling away abruptly. He just shrugged, looking as confused as I felt.

Nix peeked out from my collar.
“They don’t recognize you as escaped prisoners,”
he noted.

“But surely they know we’re strangers? That we don’t belong here?”

Nix considered this, emerging the rest of the way from my collar and dropping into the air so that he could look us over.
“Unless there are so many of them living here that they don’t all know each other.”

We kept walking, silent, shaken. Just how many people could be down here? I wished that I could see the outside, see what time of day it was. Were these people about to turn into ravenous shadows at any moment as well?

It was then that I realized Oren was siphoning less power from me than he had been. What had been a steady stream was now a trickle. Either he was somehow needing less magic to sustain his human form, or—

My eyes caught a glimmer of violet light as we turned a corner, and it hit me. No wonder I’d been feeling better, stronger, brighter. There was magic in the air. Iron all around, still, but it was containing the magic, holding it in. Like the Wall in my home city.

We stopped long enough to share a meal, dividing up the last of the cheese from my pack. It would’ve been a meager meal for one—between the two of us, it barely seemed like anything at all. My ear had stopped bleeding, and I rubbed the dried blood off my neck. I couldn’t do anything about the stain on my shirt, but at least I could minimize how warlike and battered I must look.

When we started moving again, a few more people passed us by, none of them giving us so much as a second glance. This time we knew to act as though we belonged there, but nevertheless my skin prickled. I instinctively reached for my power every time, ready to fight.

It was Oren’s idea to follow the people.

“When you’re hungry and snares aren’t working,” he said, keeping his eyes down, trying not to look at the stone ceiling and walls surrounding us, “you follow animals to find their dens. You can follow a bird back to its nest for the eggs.”

The people had to be going to and from something, he pointed out. There had to be a base somewhere. Storage for supplies or weapons. Places to sleep and eat.

So the next time we heard the sound of footsteps, we went towards them, ending up at a T-junction. As a trio of tunneldwellers approached, we fell into step behind them, trailing enough that they wouldn’t try to talk to us, but close enough that we could see where they were headed.

Eventually we ended up in a hallway that was rectangular instead of the round, squat tunnels we’d been in since the prison cell. At the end of it was a huge iron door. Oren put a hand out, touching my elbow, and we slowed, watching the trio carefully. I knew what he was warning me about—if the base was behind that door, then the people who had captured us could very well be on the other side of it. And they would surely recognize us, even if the others didn’t.

One of the tunnel-dwellers, a man with thick salt-andpepper stubble spreading across his jaw, reached out for a leverlike handle and hauled back on it. The doors slid open to either side, vanishing into the walls. Inside was a grate, which he slid open as well. He and the other two stepped into what appeared to be an empty room and turned around as one. It looked hauntingly familiar. The man who’d opened the doors reached out as if to close them and then spotted Oren and me.

“Well?” he said, one hand on the grate.

“E-Excuse me?” I stammered.

“Are you going down?”

Oren’s hand tightened on my elbow as he took a step back. Suddenly, my memory clicked into place. I knew what this was—I’d been in one before.

“Yes,” I blurted, reaching out for Oren’s hand and then heading for the box. For the elevator.

I could hear Oren gasp a quick, anguished breath as we squeezed into the elevator. For someone who didn’t like being underground, this must be torture. I wound my fingers through his, putting my body between him and the elevator’s other occupants. Though my mind recoiled at his touch, knowing what he really was under the veneer of humanity, the rest of me tingled, goose bumps rising along my arms despite the warm air. I turned my head away, not looking at Oren’s face.

The grate screeched as the man with the stubble slammed it closed behind us. Then he opened the lid of a box that stood on a post in one corner and banged his fist into a round, flat button. The elevator gave a lurch—Oren’s fingers went rigid in mine—and then with a surge of magic that sang through my head, the whole thing went dropping down.

I was glad it had been so long since the last time I’d eaten a proper meal. My stomach felt like it climbed into my throat, and my feet tingled, desperate to make it known that they were still in contact with the floor.

I looked up and saw that Oren’s eyes were closed and his face almost serene, far calmer than I’d ever seen him. Only the tightness of his grip and the glint of sweat in the hair at his temples betrayed his terror. Here he was no monster—he was just a boy trying to trust that I knew what I was doing. I leaned against him and felt the tension in his body relax just a fraction.

For a moment, it was like none of the past few weeks had happened. It was just me and Oren—there was no sickening tang of blood in the air or hunger inside me. The walls between us vanished for a few precious seconds.

Then the box stopped with a shudder and a screech of protesting gears, and I stepped away. I took a deep, quiet breath. We had to act like we made this trip all the time. I kept an eye on the man with the stubble, watching everything he did in case we needed to get back up the same way we’d come down. All we needed was to figure out the quickest way out of this place.

The man shut the lid on the box with the button and then reached for the grate, shoving it aside. I tensed, waiting to see what was on the other side of the outer doors. A base, holding the people who’d captured us; more tunnels, as endless and confusing as the last; even the outdoors. I was so turned around that I couldn’t dismiss that as a possibility, though it was now so warm that I could feel sweat starting to form between my shoulder blades.

The stubble man jerked at the handle, sending the outer doors sliding open with a rusty screech. He and the others got out, and Oren went stumbling after them, eager to leave the confines of the box. His hand was still clenched around mine, and he tugged me with him. I staggered, trying to catch my feet, eyes on the ground. We were on some sort of ledge overlooking a space so vast I could feel it sucking at me.

Then I looked up, and stared.

This was no base—it was a city.

Metal buildings of every imaginable shape and design grew out of the rock like mushrooms, roofed with rustyred iron and corroded copper green. Some were polished, gleaming turrets and towers. Others were rough and pockmarked by time and abuse, looking no better than debris from the ruined city above. Even here there were signs of the wars, as though people simply grabbed what they could and went underground. The buildings were connected by an insane network of stairs and walkways, cobbled together from pieces of salvage—I saw the leg of a giant mechanical walker stretched between two balconies and bolted into place, and just below us, a roof made out of a series of overlapping gears hammered thin and broad.

High above, fog shrouded the ceiling where the warm, moist underground air hit the cold stone overhead. Water dripped in a constant but sparse drizzle. The cavern was so large that there was even a breeze, fitful and changeable, stirred by the convection of the hot air below and the cold above. Overall the air was thick and humid, vastly different from the wintry cold outside.

Above the fog, the ceiling was studded with a series of what looked like the same glass and crystal lights we’d seen in the corridors, but on a far grander scale. They scattered the white-gold light of magic through the fog, which caught it and sent it dancing into a thousand colors that lit the city. It was as though the sky was paved with rainbows.

We stood on a ledge overlooking most of the city, although some of the walkways led upward to buildings higher than us. These were smaller, less rusted, clearly newer. At the very bottom of the huge cavern, on the floor, was a building in the shape of a semicircle, parabolic. In the courtyard before it were multicolored squares of fabric and a throng of people moving around and beneath them.

The size of the place was staggering. There were people everywhere—hundreds, thousands more inside the buildings maybe, more than I could count or guess. In circumference the cavern was not much bigger than my own city, but it went down and down and down, enough to fit my city many times over, stacked on top of itself. The far side was lost in the haze of distance, fitful rain, and fog.

Hope sputtered to life inside me. Perhaps my brother had made it here after all. Maybe they’d captured him the way they’d captured us. Maybe even now this Prometheus was using him the way he—or she, for that matter—was using Tansy.

A memory of the Machine the Institute had used to experiment on me bubbled up in my mind, and I tried to push it away. Tansy made her choice.

“We should go,” Oren whispered, although there was no one around and the cavern was alive with the sounds of people and machines, a distant roar of life and chaos. “Try our luck with the tunnels.”

“But someone here might be able to tell us how to get out.”

“And how would we ask them without giving away that we’re outsiders? I’d rather be lost in the tunnels than back in that cage.”

“We’ll find a way. We could wander in those tunnels up there for a week and never find our way out.” I looked at him, his squared jaw and fierce scowl, and added gently, “We don’t have that long.”

Oren sucked in a deep breath through his nose. I could see him trying to scent the fitful breeze, make sense of it, orient himself in the chaos of light and sound and people. His blue eyes darted this way and that, tracking a dozen different movements, the muscles in his jaw working. Out of his element, he was every inch the animal I’d thought he was when we first met. Cornered. Anxious. Poised to fight or flee.

He turned away from me, but I knew him well enough to sense his fear. Fear of losing himself, fear of hurting me. Fear of dying underground, away from the sun, breathing recycled air.

He was right to say we should go. Part of me knew it. But my feet wouldn’t move, rooted to the stone beneath them. My eyes followed the people going about their business below, oblivious to the two strangers watching it all from above.

How could we hope to infiltrate this city as complete outsiders without being caught? And all just to ask for directions?

I sucked in a deep breath, for in that moment I realized that wasn’t why I had to stay.

Somehow, as it often did, Nix knew what I was going to say before I said it.
“Don’t,”
it buzzed softly, for my ears only.
“She betrayed you.”

I shook my head and then lifted Oren’s hand, pressing it between both of mine. “I’ll come with you back to the tunnels, keep you human as long as I can, until we reach the surface.”

He looked up, eyes fixing on mine, but the relief that flashed through his features vanished the moment he saw my face.

“But then I’ll be coming back alone. I have to find Tansy.”

Oren turned his head, showing me his profile as his eyes scanned the city before us. His face was as sharply sculpted as ever, the dirty sandy hair falling over his brow, jaw clenched. He’d seen mountains and oceans, and yet I could still see him struggling with the scale of this underground city, with its iron and copper palaces, so large it had wind and clouds and rain.

We still hadn’t talked about what happened the night he fled the Iron Wood. How he’d asked me to come with him— how I’d refused. The warmth of his arms. Of his lips. My revulsion at the taste of blood.

It was like an iron forest stood between us, and I couldn’t sense his heart any better than I had been able to sense the world beyond the iron bars of our prison cell. Even with our hands still locked together, he was worlds away.

His face didn’t change, no intake of breath—my only warning that he was about to speak was that he pulled his hand from mine abruptly.

“Where do we start looking?”

In the city where I was born, everything ran like clockwork. Workers left their homes at the same time every day, fulfilled their jobs adequately and no more, and returned home again, satisfied by their contribution. The streets were broad, and the mechanized carriages ran without congestion or delay. Children learned and grew, and then were harvested of their magic and sent into adulthood. Anyone who failed to live up to expectations or felt no joy in fitting into the larger machine was Adjusted. Escorted beyond the Wall by friends and family, removed from the machine, left to rust alone. Even the sun crossed the sky in a clockwork track, regular and comforting. Orderly. Neat.

This place could not have been more different. What had seemed a pleasant jumble of people and machines from above was deafening, blinding chaos once we descended the path from the elevator to the main streets and walkways.

I’d been worried we’d stand out for our clothes, the grime of travel. I had only the clothes in which I’d left the Iron Wood, and they were dirty and travel-stained, worn and torn in places during my struggle with the shadow family. Oren was in a far worse state, his multicolored patched pants dirty and full of holes, his once-white shirt grey with age and grime, his hands a full shade darker than the rest of him with ingrained dirt.

But men and women of every shade, shape, and attire walked the paths. Some were dressed far more richly than anyone I’d seen—wealth, in my city, was for the architects alone. Here, people wearing heavy, embroidered fabrics and elaborate hairstyles walked side by side with others wearing whatever they could cobble together. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no hierarchy or division apparent between the classes.

We headed into the thick of it, listening for anything helpful in the snatches of conversation we could hear. My ears strained for the sound of Tansy’s name, for news of captives, for any reference to a Renewable. But the noise and tumult of the crowd was too baffling, too chaotic, to get any sense of a pattern. Never had I so longed for the quiet calm of my own city, everyone doing exactly as instructed, living their lives by the quiet rhythm of the sun disc slipping second by meticulous second across the dome of the Wall.

There were machines here, too, far more than existed in my city or in the Iron Wood. Nix had overcome its misgivings and was now darting around my head as we walked, zipping here and there to investigate other machines but always returning to touch down on my shoulder, briefly, regrouping for its next foray. Oren stayed half a step behind me, tense. I imagined that descending into this chaos was like being surrounded by iron for me—in the noise and jumble he was as blind and deaf as I had been.

The muggy air was smothering, and I could feel sweat rolling down the small of my back even after I took off my coat and tied it around my waist. I knew we were going to need a place to rest—sleep was a distant memory for me, and neither of us were used to such an overwhelming riot of color and movement. We needed to pause, to regroup. None of this was what we’d expected.

We turned onto a bridge made of ropes and planks, the whole thing creaking damply under our feet. My hands shook as I moved along the bridge, gripping the handrails. Our steps were far too slow—we hadn’t gotten halfway across before someone behind us cleared his throat loudly.

It was a short, stocky man with thinning hair and a brilliant blue waistcoat covered in some kind of iridescent green-brown eye pattern. He stared at me for a moment, eyes meeting mine and narrowing. But before I could react, he raised his alarmingly bushy eyebrows at us, and I realized he was waiting for us to keep moving. There was only room on the bridge for people to proceed single file. Oren and I hurried across, trying to ignore the swaying of the bridge, and got out of the man’s way.

He brushed past us without another glance, vanishing into the crowd. I could feel Oren bristling, annoyance at the man’s behavior combining with his general unease at being underground, and I took his arm. My arm tingled, but I kept hold of him, ready to march him past the group before he could do anything rash. Something about the man’s gaze had unsettled me, and I wanted to find some alley or corner to wedge ourselves into and find our bearings.

I spotted a gap in the crowd, but before I could change course, a voice rang over the tumult.

“Stop! By order of Prometheus, on suspicion of Renewable activity, you are commanded to surrender.”

I froze. Oren’s arm went rigid under my hand, and I could imagine his already overwhelmed senses jangling. There were too many people between us and the alleyway I’d spotted, and even if we could make it there, I had no way of knowing where it led, or if it was a dead end.

I turned slowly, expecting to see the looming face of one of the guards who’d captured us. Instead, I realized that the crowd had formed a circle around someone some distance away.

A woman’s voice split the air in a desperate cry. Through the press of bodies, I could only tell that some sort of scuffle was taking place. I hesitated, then let go of Oren’s arm. “Stay here,” I whispered. Dragging him into the thick of the crowd would not have been particularly wise.

I carefully wormed my way through the crowd, mumbling apologies here and curses there when appropriate, until I could see what was going on. A pair of men stood there wearing matching charcoal-and-red uniforms. Copper badges emblazoned with some kind of bird of prey adorned their chests. Though they looked nothing like the Regulators in my home city, I recognized them nonetheless. Cops. They were standing over the prone body of a woman, holding weapons—curved, wicked machines I couldn’t identify, but clearly aimed with menace.

“You’re wrong,” the woman sobbed, curled around something. “He’s no Renewable—he’s not, he’s not.” Something moved in the circle of her arms, and a white face appeared over her shoulder. She was shielding someone, a child.

“Resisting an Eagle’s order is a punishable offense,” one of the two guards said, voice harsh. “Harboring a Renewable is another. You’ll get banished for that one. Turn him over, ma’am, before we’re forced to take action.”

But the woman kept repeating, over and over, that the boy was no Renewable. With a sick kind of certainty, I knew that there was no way out of the standoff that didn’t involve the weapons.

Then a commotion on the other side of the circle drew my attention, and after a moment someone else entered the circle, pushing through the onlookers. It was the man in the blue-and-green coat.

“The hell is going on here?” he snapped. “It’s my day off, don’t make me get involved.” Though he wore no uniform, the two guards—Eagles, one of them had called himself— snapped to attention.

“We’ve had reports that the boy’s a Renewable, sir.”

The man in the coat glanced down at the huddled woman, gaze dismissive. “So? Take him down to Central Processing.”

The Eagle shifted uncomfortably. “His mother won’t give him up.”

The man in the coat gave a long-suffering sigh. “So shoot her,” he retorted with exasperation. “You’ve got talons, use them.” But before either Eagle could act, he crouched down at the woman’s side.

“Ma’am,” he said gently. “Ma’am, you’re going to have to let them take your son in.”

“He’s not a Renewable,” she whimpered. It was as if being a Renewable was the worst possible crime. The way they spoke the word, they might as well have been saying “murderer.”

“If he’s not, then he’ll be back before the end of the day.” The man in the coat reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “You have my word.”

As he continued to murmur to her, I scanned the faces of the onlookers. They were silent now, pale. Afraid. When the woman straightened a little, I could see that the boy in question was no more than eleven or twelve. But when he lifted his head, at least half the spectators drew back, a murmur running through the crowd.

These people were terrified by the mere thought that he could be a Renewable.

I felt a dull anger flicker through me. I’d been that kid before. The dud, the strange one. Any excuse to make someone different, to keep them from fitting in. Even here, a hundred miles away from the city where I was born. Even if they let him go, he’d never be the same again.

The man in the coat was slowly easing the woman away from her child. “We can’t take the chance that it’s true, Marsa—you did say Marsa, right? Marsa, it was Renewables that caused the cataclysm, forced us to live down here like this. We can’t let that happen again—where would we run to now?”

The woman choked back another sob, but before she could speak, the boy interrupted. “I’ll go,” he said, his voice shaking. “Leave my mother alone. I’ll go.”

“No!” The mother jerked away from the man in the coat.

“Mom, it’s fine.” The kid’s face was white, but he nodded reassuringly at her. His voice hadn’t changed yet, and it sounded high and scared. “I’ll be fine.”

The man in the coat gave the woman’s arm a dismissive pat, then straightened to usher the boy into the Eagles’ custody. “Good lad,” he said with false cheer. They all turned, passing close to me as the crowd parted to let them through.

“Throw him with the others,” said the man in the coat in a low voice to the Eagles. “And put together a compensation package for the mother. If he’s a Renewable, we’ll have to act quickly.”

The Eagles led the kid away, after he shot one last look over his shoulder at his mother, still huddled on the walkway. The man in the coat watched them go, then turned to the crowd. “Well?” he boomed, voice projecting easily over the stunned silence. “We’re done here.”

As the crowd dispersed, the man’s eyes fell on me again— and stayed there. My throat constricted, and I whirled to push back through the crowd. Oren was waiting for me, agitated, asking questions—but I wanted to put as much distance as I could between myself and the man in the blue-and-green coat.

Eventually I spotted an opening and darted out of the flow of traffic into an alcove, evidently disused due to the way the constant drizzle from the rainbow ceiling pooled and collected there.

“What was that?” Oren hissed. “I couldn’t see.”

“They arrested a kid for being a suspected Renewable,” I replied, my breathing harsh and unsteady from our headlong dash.

“So?”

“They were afraid of him—like he was some kind of monster.”

Oren gave a small, bitter laugh. “Better him than us.”

I shook my head, replaying the scene, trying to understand. “I don’t know. It doesn’t match up with what we were always taught.”

“Taught where?”

I swallowed, trying to catch my breath while keeping an eye on the mouth of the alley. I halfway expected the man in the coat to appear, but all I could see was the ebb and flow of foot traffic returning to normal.

“In my city, the Institute taught us that a huge war destroyed the land beyond the Wall. Here, they mentioned a cataclysm, some event caused by the Renewables.”

“You’ve seen the ruins, what the world was like before. Something had to happen to change all of that.”

“But the stories don’t line up.” I could tell that Oren didn’t understand my fixation. The Institute had lied to me about so many things, but for some reason I’d never questioned what little they told us of history. That was fact, something inviolate, as permanent and unchanging as the Wall itself.

“We can’t stay here,” Oren said finally. “We still don’t know where to look for your friend.” He kept his eyes on the traffic, both man and machine, bustling by in both directions. His expression still had that pinched, tense look to it—he wasn’t finding the crowds any easier to adjust to than I had found the sky.

“They mentioned something called Central Processing, where they were taking that boy. Maybe that’s a place to start.”

“You think it’s some sort of prison?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “but I know the tone of voice they used. That’s exactly the way people spoke about the Institute in my city. Whatever Central Processing is, it’s important, and there’ll be someone there who knows where Tansy is. Maybe even this Prometheus himself.”

Oren’s jaw clenched, his eyes narrowing as one passerby came alarmingly close to us in order to give way to a large, spiderlike machine skittering urgently down the walkway. “I’ll never understand the need you people have to be governed. You all flock to these cities, to places like the Iron Wood, just so someone can tell you what to do.”

I looked past him toward the great expanse of hodgepodge buildings, at the streets lined with people, young and old alike. “When people come together like this, they become stronger. They don’t have to live in fear the way you do outside. We allow ourselves to be governed because it keeps us safe.”

Oren’s lip curled a little. Then he ducked his head, hiding his expression until he had it under control again. “If the shadows breached these defenses, if the government fell—if anything at all went wrong, most of these people would be helpless. They’ve all forgotten how to survive.”

For a long moment, I didn’t have an answer for him. He was right. I’d been helpless when I left my city. The image of the red-coated architects in the Institute fending for themselves in the woods was ludicrous.

“I guess,” I said slowly, “that surviving isn’t the same thing as living.”

A group of guys about my age came running up the pathway, laughing and shouting, and Oren jumped back, his nerve breaking. His hand flew to his boot, but he no longer had his knife there. So his fist curled around nothing as the boys continued past. He closed his eyes, nostrils flaring as he tried to take a deep breath.

I wondered when he had last truly slept, aside from dozing in the corner of our cell. Did the shadows sleep? Did he ever close those white eyes when the monster inside him came out? He looked so weary, so close to the ragged edge.

But then, so was I. I hadn’t slept well since Tansy joined me—and we hadn’t slept last night at all.

I couldn’t afford to feel sorry for him. All I had to do was keep him moving. I reached out and laid a hand on Oren’s arm, ignoring the way he flinched at my touch. Energy buzzed between us, and the hunger coiling in the pit of my being reared up, protesting the slow drain on my reserves.