Skylark (29 page)

“No,” I whispered.

His lips curved, and my heart slammed against my ribcage. “Good.” He slipped through the barrier and its shimmering curtain of water.

Chapter 23

I stayed only moments. Nix thrummed by my ear, insistent as an alarm, reminding me of the shadow creatures not far behind us. Reaching up to shield the machine from the water, I ducked through it.

Warmth enveloped me. Inside, the surface of the water was an unimaginable shade of violet-blue, reflecting the inside of the dome. Surrounding the lake, the plants were in full summer foliage, leafy green ferns and patches of moss spreading everywhere. Where outside the leaves were fading to dull gold and brown, here everything was vibrant and lush.

By the lakeshore, Oren was stripping off his clothes. He pulled his shirt off, moving gingerly. I had a glimpse of bruises blossoming across his shoulders before I looked away.

“What’re you doing?” I asked, staring resolutely in the other direction. “Won’t they be here in a few minutes?”

“It’ll take them a while to get up the nerve to come inside,” Oren said confidently. “They’re afraid of the barriers. It won’t stop them if they know there’s food inside, but it’ll slow them down.”

I heard a splashing behind me, and without thinking I turned to look. I saw only a rapidly expanding circle of ripples where Oren had dived into the water. After a few moments, his head bobbed back up. Treading water, he reached up to scrub at his face, washing the dried blood from it.

“Well?” he said, slicking his hair back away from his face. “It’s the summer lake. Always warm here. Coming?”

The absurdity of it, a boy asking me to swim in a lake with a pair of monsters only minutes away, made me stare at him. Eventually, I managed, “I—don’t know how to swim.”

Oren only shrugged, the movement causing more ripples, and then ducked his head under again.

I walked to the water’s edge while he swam and bathed. Leaning over its surface, at first I didn’t recognize my own reflection. Tangled hair so dirty it looked black rather than brown; thin, hollow cheeks; skin stained with blood. I remembered the hot spray over my face when Oren had been fighting, and scrambled to splash water onto my skin to wash it away. I looked as animal and as warlike as Oren.

Pulling off my shoes, I rolled up the legs of my pants and stepped into the lake’s edge. The throbbing of my feet, still unused to so much walking after two weeks of it, eased in the cool water.

For a moment, I forgot where we were. That is, until I heard a voice behind me.

“Mummy,” it said, piping and tiny.

I splashed noisily in my haste to turn around.

A woman stood there with a child, who could be no more than five or six. I couldn’t tell how old the woman was, her face was so lined with dirt and weather. Their clothes were more tattered than Oren’s, their hair and fingernails broken and caked with dirt. They were, however, quite human.

“Mummy,” the child said again, half-hidden behind its mother’s leg. “Lookit the mmbows.” The child was speaking half-nonsense, muffled by the woman’s body.

The woman didn’t reply, gazing around with clear confusion, eyes wide and staring. The child—it looked like a girl, but I could not be certain—tugged at her leg.

I stared at them, unable to speak for shock. Behind me, Oren resurfaced with a splash. I glanced over in time to see a glimpse of bare, muscled skin, and a ragged red wound on his thigh before I wrenched my gaze back to the newcomers. The roar of the falls, muted though it was falling through the barrier, covered the sounds of his getting dressed again.

The woman hardly spared us a glance. She stared at the water, gripping the child by the shoulders, knuckles white. The child squirmed in her grip, making noises of protest.

“Are you okay?” My voice was hoarse with shock.

The woman’s gaze snapped to me, so intense and desperate that I took a step back. There was a wildness there that reminded me of Oren. Perhaps all people living out here developed that same bestial desperation. Perhaps I would, too.

“Need—” she said, licking cracked lips. “Hungry,” she said. “Food for the child.”

I took another step backward, and found that Oren had crept up behind me without a word. I glanced at him, and saw his knife clenched in his hand. “What’re you doing?” I hissed, taking hold of his arm. Even through the worn cloth of his shirt I felt a dull echo of the same electric tingle that always leapt between us when we touched. Muffled by fabric, it was not quite as intensely unpleasant as it had been.

“Don’t talk to them,” he said, without taking his eyes off the pair.

“They’re hungry,” I protested. “And confused. We can surely spare—”

“Nothing.” Moving slowly, he stepped around me, pulling his arm from my grasp easily. When he had placed himself between me and the pair of newcomers, he stopped.

“Remain still,” he said in a low voice, enunciating every word as though he were speaking to a child. “We have nothing for you.”

The mother rolled her eyes at him, confusion and fear plain in them. Oren waited a moment and then moved toward them cautiously. It wasn’t until he shifted his grip on his knife, flipping it blade-down—I’d seen him hold it that way before, after all—that realization dawned on me.

“Oren!” I cried. “No!”

He stopped, every line of muscle telling of his irritation. He didn’t take his eyes away from them to look at me. “They’re monsters, Lark.”

The child’s face peeped from behind its mother to stare first at Oren and then at me. The mother stood wringing her hands and mumbling, too low for me to hear. But their skin, if dirty, was pink and fair, and their eyes a deep brown. They stood upright, walked without crouching. Their teeth, what I could see of them, were as flat and unthreatening as my own.

“They’re
people!
” I hissed. “How can you—”

“In here they are,” Oren said quietly. The pair gave no sign that they heard us, much less understood us. “You call these places magical—well, inside, they change. Turn back into shadows of what they used to be. Confused, senseless shadows. But make no mistake, the second they set foot back outside, they’ll hunt you until you’re dead.”

His grip on his knife was white-knuckled, his jaw clenched around each word he spoke.

I shifted my gaze back to the child. I saw the filth around its mouth. I had taken it for dirt, but the more I looked, the more I realized it was a familiar, brownish-red color, caked on with little dribbles down the chin—

I shut my eyes, stomach rebelling. “Why?”

“The magical void did this to them,”
said Nix, stirring on my shoulder. It was the first time I’d heard it speak in Oren’s presence.
“It makes sense that a magical surplus would turn them back, however temporarily.”

“So—so those creatures you killed last night,” I managed, gazing at Oren’s back, “were people? All it would have taken was a bit of magic to cure them?”

Oren shook his head. “They’re not cured. They’re still monsters. That one,” and he gestured with the point of his knife at the child, “would kill you in a heartbeat outside. And then come back without the slightest hint of a memory of what it had done. All the magic does is disarm them for a time.”

“You can’t kill them,” I said, gritting my teeth.

“But—”

“No!”

Oren was silent for a moment, and then turned to face me, finally taking his eyes off the bedraggled pair. “If we leave them, they’ll just pick up our trail again.” He looked so suddenly weary that I had to restrain the impulse to go to him, knife and all. “With any luck they’ll stay here for as long as a day, but they
will
leave, and when they do, they
will
come after us. And they can move twice as quickly as we can, and they don’t have to stop to rest.”

“It’s a child and a mother, Oren,” I said, unmoving.

He watched me, the pale, fierce eyes so blank I had no hope of reading what took place behind them. Instead of answering me, he turned around and spoke to the woman. “You,” he said, gesturing with the point of his knife, “go over there. If you come near us, I’ll kill you. And if you leave, I’ll kill you. Understand?”

The woman rolled her eyes at him, the whites showing in the violet half-light of the dome. She nodded, cradling the child in against her legs as she shuffled over to the spot he’d indicated.

Oren headed back over toward his pack of supplies. I watched the mother and child go, my heart thrumming, and then turned to follow Oren. He set about unpacking food for dinner, although it was still only mid-afternoon. His movements were jerky and quick.

I wanted to speak but could think of nothing I hadn’t already said.

“I’ve lived out here for years on my own,” he said finally, his voice low and urgent. “This is how you do it. This is how you survive.”

There was a rawness to his voice that cut me more than any anger would have. “I know,” I said, keeping my gaze ahead of me, on the fractured surface of the water. “I’m sorry.”

There was a gritty, metallic sound; in my mind’s eye I saw him stab his knife into the earth, as he’d done countless times in the past. This time there was an undeniable frustration in the sound. “You can’t come crashing into the wilderness, halfstarved and wholly incompetent, and imply I’m some kind of monster for keeping your skin intact.”

“I wasn’t,” I insisted. My voice shook, despite my conviction. “I wasn’t,” I repeated, more steadily.

“You were.” The crunch of sand and dirt and pebbles told me he had gotten to his feet again. “There’s food here. Stay put and try not to drown while I’m gone.”

By the time I turned around, he was halfway to the edge of the barrier, and left without another word. He’d left his knife, standing blade-down in the sand not three feet from me. I wanted to run after him and give him the knife—he needed it out there, surely.

But then, the monsters weren’t out there, were they? They were inside. Here. With me.

The mother and child sat a fair distance around the edge of the lake. The child sat between its mother’s knees, and she had both arms wrapped loosely around it. I heard snatches of melody over the roar of the falls, carried over the water to me. She was singing to it.

“He’s certainly a joy,”
said Nix, the words fairly dripping sarcasm. The dry tone interrupted my contemplation.

“I hurt him,” I said, rubbing a hand across my eyes. “And I have no idea why. He’s only ever helped me.”

“By being a murderer,”
reminded the pixie, flitting from my shoulder to the lake, dipping low and flirting with the water’s surface.

The very word was enough to make me dizzy, want to curl up away from it all. He wasn’t a murderer, he was trying to survive. Trying to keep me safe. There hadn’t been a murder in the city since the Wall went up over a hundred years before—to murder a fellow citizen was to break part of the machine. It only hurt ourselves.

But for Oren, out here—did he even have a choice?

“I should go after him.” I didn’t sound convinced even to my own ears. I wasn’t sure I wanted to venture out into the world where the shadow people existed again.

“Better let him alone for a while. Rest up, have some food.”
Nix landed on a boulder, tipping its head up at me.
“Such an emotional boy.”

At that, I laughed. “He’s the least emotional person I’ve ever met.
You
have more emotions than he does.”

Nix rubbed a leg over one eye, its azure surface blinking briefly. It was so like a wink that I found myself staring at the creature in confusion.
“If you say so.”

I decided to take the pixie’s advice and nibbled at the food Oren had left. Though I was hungry, I had managed to grow so tired of nuts and roots that it was increasingly difficult to eat them. I reminded myself that days ago I’d been on the verge of starvation and forced myself to eat.

The rocks by the falls were warm, as if heated by the sun, and I curled up there, trailing my fingers through the water, making patterns with the ripples. Lulled by the white noise of the water, my interrupted, sleepless night caught up to me. I drifted off.