Shadowlark (9 page)

“It’s okay.” I carefully kept my voice soft. “It’s like me and the sky. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and it’ll slowly get easier.”

“It’d be easier if we had any idea of where we were going,” Oren replied, his words clipped. “This Central Processing place could be in any of these buildings. Even if I can put one foot in front of the other, we’re certainly going to be caught before you can search them all.”

I let my hand fall away from his arm and stepped back out into the traffic. “That part’s easy.” I waited until Oren had steeled himself, then led the way to the edge of the walkway that overlooked the lower city.

“This whole city is pointed down. All the paths spiral inward. There.” I pointed.

Oren leaned close to follow the line of sight along my outstretched hand, and I was reminded eerily of a similar moment when he’d pointed out the Iron Wood in the distance. Before I knew that my city had meant for me to find it—before I knew what Oren really was.

“All the paths lead toward that building,” I continued, forcing myself not to look over at him. The building below was the one I’d seen when we first arrived, the one shaped like a semicircle at the very bottom of the city. “That’s where we’re headed.”

From above, the courtyard of the Central Processing building looked as though it was carpeted with big pieces of fabric. When we first started down the winding walkways toward it, my mind turned to Basil. It was like the area was littered with brightly colored squares of paper, all waiting to be turned into animals or shapes or people with a few deft folds and creases. He always said that every piece of paper had a creature waiting inside it.

Tansy’s words, when I’d told her she had to leave her belongings behind, came flooding back to me.
Would you be saying that if it were your pack? If it was Oren’s knife, or your brother’s bird, back there?
I slipped my hand into my pocket, feeling the worn edges and folds of the paper bird Basil had made for me before he disappeared.

Oren’s eyes flicked toward me, noting the movement of my hand, but he said nothing. A cloud of flying machines zipped past, and as though they called to it in some undetectable, irresistible way, Nix launched itself from my shoulder and raced after them. Despite the size of the city, though, the pixie always seemed to find its way back to me. I watched it until I could no longer distinguish the glint of its body from the rest and then turned to keep walking.

When we got closer, I realized that the courtyard of the building was a huge marketplace, with tents and stalls scattered around at random. When we reached the bottom of the city it was like descending into a blizzard, only instead of white snow, colors of every shade swirled around us, and instead of the howling wind, voices surrounded us in a cocoon of sound. Vendors hawked their wares, each trying to out-shout their neighbors, while buyers vied for prime spots at the more popular stalls, elbowing each other out of the way. Children and machines were underfoot everywhere. Despite the haphazard placement of the stalls and tents, there was a strangely rhythmic flow to the crowd.

My eyes had trouble tracking everything. I bumped into a knee-high crawling machine that gave such a humanlike squawk of disapproval that I stepped back, apologizing automatically.

“Newcomers to Lethe?” a loud, cheery voice called right by my ear.

I jumped back, colliding with Oren. He grunted in surprise and pain, hands coming up to grab my shoulders and steady me.

A middle-aged woman was leaning out over the edge of her stall’s counter, watching us. I guessed that she was in her mid-forties by the lines around her eyes and her mouth and the grey that shot through her dark hair. Her eyes were a dark grey-blue, small and bright. Focused. Though her face was smiling and easygoing and her body language relaxed, her gaze was sharp. Assessing.

She was waiting for me to reply, but my mind went blank. In the chaos, I couldn’t even remember what she’d asked. “Excuse me?”

“Lethe. You two new here, yeah?” Her voice had a strange, drawling accent, something I’d never heard before.

Lethe.
The name of the city? I didn’t recognize it, though something about the name seemed familiar. Oren’s hands were still around my shoulders, the flow of magic between us slightly muffled by fabric. His touch was warm, steadying.

In my city, the idea of a newcomer was impossible—in my city, the inside of the Wall was all there was. Not so here? I cleared my throat, ignoring the stabbing of my heart. “Yes.”

“Travelers?” She gave the word an odd weight, like it was a title.

I fought the urge to glance at Oren and nodded. “Yes, travelers.”

She frowned. “If you Travelers, where your rocks?”

“Rocks?” I felt like the ground was slipping away under my feet.

“Yeah, your crystals.”

Of course. In the wilderness, non-Renewable people would have to carry some sort of power source with them if they traveled from place to place. Crystals stored magical energy. If they could be somehow rigged to dispense that energy at regular intervals, they’d keep a regular person whole for a time. Keep them from becoming a shadow.

“They’re—we, uh, left them at the—”

“They with the rest of your stuff at immigration?”

I nodded wordlessly, grateful that she was all too willing to carry on both sides of the conversation.

The woman’s frown cleared, turning into a broad smile. “Well, why you ain’t said so?” she exclaimed. “Travelers, my bread and butter. You bring anything shiny? Need trade? Give you good price for first pick.”

For a moment I could only stare blankly at her. Then the contents of her booth caught my eye. From the ramshackle wooden frame holding up the lavender fabric hung ropes of chains and pendants, some artistically carved from wood and stone, others fashioned out of bits of old machines. There were stands like miniature trees, branches were coated with rings of all sizes, bearing semiprecious stones and crystals. Carpeting the counter were more pendants, earrings, pins. One pendant fashioned out of old glass circuitry still sparkled faintly with magic to my second sight.

Travelers were some kind of merchant. For a long moment I couldn’t answer, my mind spinning. This meant that there had to be far more cities out there than I’d realized. The woman waited patiently as I struggled to grasp just how wrong about the outside world my city’s architects were. “Shiny,” I echoed. “Um. No. No, we were—”

“Can point you to the right place, tell me what you trade.” The woman was eager. No doubt she’d expect some kind of payment or tip for the information.

“No, we were bringing—” My eyes shifted this way and that, looking for something, anything. Something that wasn’t at one of these stalls. Some place she couldn’t direct us.

Just then Nix flew back in, its flight path wildly erratic from excitement—or alarm.

“Pixies!” I blurted with relief. “We brought pixies, and other machines.” But when Nix drew closer and then dove out of sight into my collar, I realized I’d made a mistake.

“Huh.” The woman grunted her disappointment and straightened. “Been through CeePo?”

“CeePo.” Had I dodged one difficult question only to be caught be another? It was like dancing in the bog, each step pulling me down deeper.

“Central Processing. Everyone goes. Especially when you bring in contraband.”

Ice gripped my heart, sudden and shocking.
Contraband.
But there were machines everywhere! How could bringing them in be against the law? Nix settled on my shoulder, buzzing alarm.

The woman watched me, mild-faced but sharp-eyed. She didn’t smile, but I could see she knew she’d won.

Oren’s fingers tightened, ready to pull me away. It was always fight or flee with him. I could feel his muscles shifting just from the contact of his hands against my shoulders, and my mind conjured a flash of him fighting his way through these people, these soft city people, as he thought of them. The sheer numbers meant we’d never make it, but it’d be a bloodbath before anyone stopped him.

He took a step back—one hand shifted. I felt it slide down my shoulder blade and down my ribs, and I stiffened—but then his knuckles grazed the skin above the waistband of my pants, and I realized what he was doing. That was where I kept his knife sheathed. My body was between him and the stall owner—she couldn’t see him reaching for a weapon.

“We intended no offense to your laws!” I blurted. Oren’s hand froze, and my mind raced. “We brought them as tribute. A tribute for Prometheus. We’ve only just arrived, we’re trying to get to CeePo.”

The woman pursed her lips. She jutted her chin out, scratching at it idly as she watched us. Then, grudgingly, she nodded. “Best hope nobody reports you before you get there.”

It sounded like a dismissal, and yet her expression was expectant, waiting for something.

I knew what she wanted. While I’d never been on the receiving end of it, kids in my district practiced that look all the time for when they got harvested and assigned their jobs. Most of them would become laborers, but some would become carriage drivers whose livelihoods depended on their ability to wheedle tips from their architect customers.

But I had nothing to give.

“Why don’t you take this?” Oren’s voice, low and bitter in my ear, would’ve made me jump again if he didn’t still have one hand on my shoulder.

When I looked, he’d stopped reaching for the knife and was instead holding out one of the courier pigeon machines I’d drained back in the prison. I hadn’t even seen him pick it up.

The women jerked back, giving a quick and furtive shake of her head. “Can’t have that in here. Not without being scrubbed. Could be carrying anything.”

“It’s dead,” Oren replied shortly. He rapped the metal sphere against one of the wooden tent supports to show it had no response. “You want it or not?”

The woman’s eyes flicked back toward me. I shook my head. “We’ve got nothing else.”

She leaned out, looking this way and that, as if she could somehow see through the throng of people whether there was anyone watching us. Then she snatched the pigeon from Oren’s fingers and retreated into the back of her booth, beginning to dismantle the machine with surprising deftness. More raw materials for jewelry, I guessed.

We hurried off before she could change her mind. As soon as I could gather my wits, I blurted, “Where’d
that
come from?”

“The prison.” Oren’s words were still clipped, as if spoken with great effort.

“I know that, I mean—how’d you know how to get rid of her?”

“Dominance.” Oren was watching the crowd, eyes darting around, seeking the path of least resistance. “She just wanted to know she’d won, gotten the better of us. Animals do it all the time. A dominant wolf will let a lesser male eat from his kill when he’s done, if the inferior animal shows the proper submissiveness. She didn’t care about letting us go or not, she just wanted to win.”

I stared at him as he moved aside for a cart laden with some kind of textile. My mind raced with questions—
what’s a wolf?
—but I had no breath to ask. He led the way to the edge of the market, where we dodged behind a stall that had been closed down and abandoned.

The to and fro of the shoppers and vendors continued, but Oren had managed to find the one out-of-the-way pocket in the entire place. I leaned against the rusting wall at my back and tried to catch my breath.

Nix crawled back out of my collar.
“I see you have discovered the same information I did.”

“No pixies.”

“No pixies,”
Nix agreed.
“More kinds of machines than exist in the Institute, but it seems pixies are illegal.”

“Well, that won’t be a problem for you.” My eyes were on Oren, who was crouched behind the counter of the stall, searching underneath it for anything the previous tenant might have left. “You can just change shape to look like some other machine.”

“Perhaps.”
The doubt in the machine’s voice dragged my attention away from Oren.
“But the number and variety of machines here suggests a facility and ease with technology above average, beyond even most architects. Anyone with that level of familiarity with machines will recognize me for what I am no matter the form I wear.”

I bit my lip. “When we gave her the pigeon, the woman mentioned ‘scrubbing.’ And it didn’t sound like a simple polish. You’ll have to stay hidden as much as you can.”

Nix clicked its wings irritably but said nothing. I chose to take it as agreement.

“What’re you looking for?”

Oren let the curtain fall where he was searching the under-counter storage of the stall. “Something to eat.” He shrugged and straightened, narrowed eyes fixed on the crowd bustling back and forth.

As if reminded of how meager its last meal had been, my stomach gave a desperate lurch. I ignored it. I’d been hungrier than this before. Tansy and I had eaten well before we’d been caught off guard by the shadow people in the city above. I could go a little while longer before I’d really start to falter.

But what about Oren? Aside from the cheese in the tunnel an hour or two ago, when was the last time he ate? He wouldn’t even know himself. I tried not to think about what his last meal as a shadow might have been.

At least that dulled my appetite a bit.

“We need to go to Central Processing.” My voice sounded more certain than I was, enough to get Oren’s attention, and Nix’s too. The pixie’s mechanisms slowed, quieting so it could listen to me.

“We’ll need to have our stories straight, though,” I continued. “Clearly we can’t say we’re Travelers bringing pixies for trade. And if we say anything else, they’ll want to see our goods. Which we don’t have.”

“You could acquire goods.”

“With what?” Oren broke in, turning away from the crowd to pace restlessly. “We’ve got nothing to trade.”

“That stall owner will be busy for some time dismantling that other machine. I don’t think she’s paying much attention to her wares.”

I stared at the pixie. “You want us to steal? How could we possibly get enough to look like traders in our own right without getting caught?”

“That one is nimble,”
Nix said, the glowing blue eyes swiveling toward Oren. Its voice was calm as ever, despite my agitation.
“You are clever. And I can make a reasonable distraction.”

In the blink of an eye, Nix changed from its bee form into its speedy dragonfly shape, and from there into something like a bird, eyes flashing all the while.

Oren was watching Nix as it changed back into its default pixie form, his gaze thoughtful. Considering. For perhaps the first time ever, he and the machine seemed to be in agreement.

“What? No.” I shook my head, jaw clenching. “It’s far too risky. We’ll be caught. And as soon as they look at us, they’re going to figure out we’re the prisoners who escaped.”

“This is why cities make you weak,” Oren cut in, crouching down next to me and sifting through a handful of the dust and pebbles littering the floor. “Out there, you see an opportunity, you take it. They eat, or you do.”

“You gave me food once upon a time,” I pointed out.

His expression darkened, but he didn’t look up at me. “And you’re saying that wasn’t a mistake?”

I just stood there for a moment, mouth still open. I was so floored that I didn’t notice how the shadows around us changed until Oren lifted his head—and, focusing on something past my shoulder, tensed.