Skylark (4 page)

The carriage driver was a skinny boy a few years younger than I with too large ears and hair a shocking orange. He swung a leg over his cycle, lines of muscle standing out on his skinny calves. The hitch between carriage and cycle creaked as he let his weight down onto the seat.

I wanted to run—but where would I go? There was no place in the city where the pixies wouldn’t find me.

I looked over my shoulder at Caesar, hoping for some lastminute reprieve. I wanted to tell him I was in trouble, but my tongue was thick and heavy. Caesar had turned his attention to the hand-held talkie device that kept him in touch with the other cops, and didn’t so much as glance at me.

The driver kicked at the starter, magic coursing through the gears of the bicycle. We pulled away slowly, the kid straining at the pedals. The pedals, like much of the rest of the carriage, were rusty and worn. The only thing in good repair was the gleaming mechanism nestled in the chains that turned magic into motion. The warm glow of copper seemed out of place within its case of rusted, ancient machinery.

I tried to imagine what it must be like to live in the Institute as the architects did, using machines like this every day. Ages ago people used horse-drawn carriages to get around. After the Wall went up, horses took up too much space and ate too much food. And so the Institute had developed these crude carriages, powered by bicycle, mechanical advantage—and a conservative dose of the Resource.

It took more power to move something directly by raw magic than it took to use magic to operate something mechanical. Clockwork was the best, with delicate gears, pendulums, and jewels that moved smoothly and efficiently, so long as something—magic—provided the impetus.

There was a time, before the wars, when the whole world was rife with technology. Most was gone now, but for the art of binding the Resource to clockwork. Without it, no one would have survived the cataclysmic events that ended the wars, destroying the countryside. We were the last city on earth. Only our architects, and the Wall they constructed, kept us safe. And they continued to do so, forming the Institute of Magic and Natural Philosophy, to preserve the remaining technologies that keep us alive. And to harvest the power they needed to do so.

Another time, I would have enjoyed a carriage ride. Carriages were free on Harvest Day for kids called to the Institute, but at all other times they cost too much for most people.

“Aren’t you kinda old?”

The driver’s voice yanked me back to the present. I was used to this question by now, and I ignored him. My experience in school had taught me that silence usually bred silence, and that by ignoring people I could usually make them stop talking to me.

Not so with the driver. “Your name’s Lark, right? My sis just got harvested last year and she’s only like nine,” he said, puffing between sentences as he pedaled. “But she’s cool. She’s real old for her age, and smart, too. Gonna be an architect’s assistant someday.”

Basil had been told on more than one occasion that he could’ve been an architect if he’d had different parents. As it was, he had set his sights on the glass forge, and dreamed of the day he’d get picked as a vitrarius, one of the specialized glassworkers in the Institute. It would’ve meant that his future children, if they’d tested well enough, could’ve been architects, if they were lucky. So, the idea that the sister of a carriage driver had aspirations of working in the Institute was ludicrous, but I didn’t say this aloud. Instead, I found myself asking, “What was your harvest like?”

The boy slowed in order to turn down a different street, and waited to answer until he’d picked up speed again. “It was spec. You’re so lucky. You wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff they got there. All the fruit you can eat, and syrup and these fried potato slices and—” He had to stop for breath.

“No, I meant the harvest itself, not the feast. What was it like when they stripped you?”

“Oh.” No answer for a while, which I chalked up to the slight hill we were climbing. “I don’t really remember much about it, I guess. The food was much more interesting. What, do you believe those kids who say it’s like cutting off a hand or something?”

I laughed to hide my uneasiness. “Just curious.”

I expected him to take this dismissal as a hint for silence, but he kept up his chatter the entire way. We turned down another street, and then another, until I lost track of where we were. When we turned a corner to find the Institute stretching out before us, I gasped.

I’d seen it before, but always from a distance, as if it were a two-dimensional painting instead of a complex large enough to take up a whole quarter of the city, surrounded by an ancient granite wall that must have been fifteen feet high.

My driver seemed unimpressed, but as he approached the curb outside the gate, he turned to flash a grin at me. “I know, right? Eat some of those fried potato things for me.” The wistfulness in his voice caught me by surprise.

His chatter the whole way had dispelled a lot of my nervous energy. I didn’t care about his sister or her school project or his dad’s job at the sewage recycling plant or how he was hoping to get a better bicycle in a couple years, but I was trying so hard not to listen that I hadn’t had any time to spare to worry about having broken the law.

I got out of the carriage when he pulled up to the curb. He smiled at me, all ears and orange hair, and I suddenly found myself wishing I had paid more attention to him. I knew this was where the richer people, the ones who routinely rode on the carriages, would tip a ration chit that could be exchanged for a handful of vegetables or a quarter pound of sugar. I stood there awkwardly shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

“Well, see you around,” he said, cocking his head and turning back to his carriage. He knew better than to expect a tip from me.

“Right,” I replied. The squashy packet of ration crackers was an uncomfortable lump in my pocket as I watched the driver—I had never even asked his name—start to pedal away.

“Wait!” I called, and he stopped, automatically checking the carriage to see if I’d left something.

“Here,” I said, unwrapping the crackers so he could see them and shoving the packet at him.

He looked down at it and then back up at me, mouth hanging open. “Whoa, I can’t take this from you.”

“I won’t need it, I’m going to be feasting in a couple hours.”

“But—” His eyes were wide, almost as round as his ears, which were turning pink as he gazed at me.

“Just take it!” I turned away, embarrassed that he thought I was so poor that I couldn’t tip him something.

As I hurried away, he called, “Thanks, Miss Lark! You ever need a ride, you ask for Tamren! Thank you! Thanks!”

There was no sign to tell me where to go, no other kids to stand with. As I approached the gate, all my fear came slamming back, making each step forward a torment. There was a guard in the gatehouse, watching my trepidation with some bemusement. When I finally reached the gate and opened my mouth to speak, he anticipated me.

“Lark Ainsley?” he asked. When I nodded, he got down from his seat and walked over to the gate, unlocking it and pushing it open a fraction for me to enter. The lock on the gate was heavy iron—no amount of magic would free me after it shut behind me. But I had no other choice than to keep going.

I took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The building in front of me was a huge, square, white monstrosity with faux columns and a massive pair of iron doors on its front. I could just make out a copper-colored dome above the façade. Carved into the marble over the doors were the words “
Vis in magia, in vita vi.
” In magic there is power, and in power, life. Latin was the language of the architects, a language forbidden to the rest of us. I only knew the phrase from one of the battered history books I’d read to pass the time in school after I’d outgrown the curriculum.

Before the wars there had been people able to regenerate their innate power—Renewables, they were called, though they’d been called many things before that: Witches, sorcerers, magicians. Demons. But there hadn’t been any Renewables born in generations, not since the Wall went up, and those left outside destroyed themselves by abusing the Resource.

A young woman in a blue assistant’s coat came hurrying down the steps toward me. “Sorry!” she called out to me, coming to a halt a few feet away. “Sorry I’m late.”

She cradled a clipboard against her chest, face peeping at me over its top. She could have been my older sister, with hair a few shades darker than mine, looking almost black in the shade of the building. Her face was round enough to reflect the heavier rations given to the employees of the Institute. With the physical and mental labor expected of those employees, they needed the extra food.

I gave her my best cold stare. If it protected me from embarrassment in the face of schoolyard mockery, it might help with my panic, too.

She only glanced at her clipboard and then smiled, moving close enough to put a hand between my shoulder blades. “So you must be Lark.” She ushered me forward. “My name’s Emila. Sorry it’s just you this time. I know you must be nervous, but I promise you have nothing to worry about. You won’t feel a thing when you’re harvested.”

She led me through the doors and into a vast hall topped by a breathtaking rotunda—the inside of the dome I’d seen from the steps. Intricate machinery lined the ceiling, a metallic gold replica of our sun disc in miniature, a tribute to the Wall. The clockwork mechanisms purred, a steady whirring punctuated at intervals by the clink of a shifting component of the masterpiece. It was morning inside the rotunda as well, but there were other tracks and gears in the process of dipping below the lip of the dome as the sun rose on the other side, carrying objects I didn’t recognize from the sky of the Wall outside: a crescent of gleaming silver, shapes picked out in precious gems that glinted in the light.

What must this place look like at night? Emila was hurrying ahead, reading her clipboard and paying no attention to me, and I reluctantly kept moving.

Shafts of light shone through remote skylights, illuminating the exquisite tile floors in dappled gold. The tiles radiated from the rotunda’s center like a compass, arrows pointing toward doors that led to various wings of the Institute. Bronze plaques declared the destinations of each branching corridor.

As Emila veered toward one of these doors, the plaque told me she was headed to the Department of Harvest and Reclamation. Below it was a second plaque with arrows pointing right and left, describing the passages further along the rim of the rotunda room. The Biothaumatic Laboratory lay to the right; the Museum and Hall of Records to the left.

I stopped walking, a shoe squeak echoing through the rotunda. I cringed, but Emila didn’t lift her head.

We weren’t taught much history in school. We knew that the Institute had saved us from the fallout following the wars over a century ago, and that was enough. The Institute held the details of our history in trust for us, so that nothing would be lost or changed by the retelling of it. The glimpses I had in school of the world before the wars were electrifying and frightening all at once: a world full of Renewable sorcerers and vast machines operated by magic, of mechanimals, of struggles for power unlike anything we had to endure in the peaceful city today.

“Hall of Records,” I whispered, the final sibilant echoing around the rotunda and returning distorted to my ears. Inside were all the records of the past century—including, surely, those of the only experimental exploration beyond the Wall since its creation. Somewhere in there was a piece of paper with Basil’s name on it. When would I ever have another chance?

I took one last glance at the now distant, retreating form of Emila as she hurried down the corridor toward the harvest department. I was far enough behind now that I’d have to run to catch up. I could just as easily say I’d gotten separated while admiring the rotunda. It wouldn’t even really be a lie.

I took a deep breath and ducked down the other corridor.

Without the skylights in the dome, the hallway was lit by long glowing panels in the ceiling. It was possible to create light by raw Resource alone—it just took a lot of power. A skilled vitrarius, however, could direct the Resource through tiny glass filaments that would glow with the concentrated energy.

I had known the Institute was lit this way. From the roof of our apartment building at night, I had seen the whole compound sparkling in the distance, lighting up the dome of the Wall above and behind it. My father used to take me up there after he came home from the recycling plant. We would sit at the edge of the roof with our legs dangling over empty space and watch the lights blink on, one by one, warm and golden, as the sun disc faded into violet darkness.

After Basil and the other volunteers crossed the Wall in search of power to supplement the Institute’s stores, my father and I went up on the roof every night—almost as if we were hoping for a glimpse of him, even though that was impossible.

For six long weeks, we had no news of them. Then, abruptly, the Institute issued a citywide notice declaring them permanently missing, presumed dead. An unharvested child with his or her innate Resource stores intact could survive for a time outside the Wall. But no one could survive indefinitely.

No death, no Adjustment—nothing final, nothing to hold on to. He was just gone. We were compensated for our loss with extra ration chits and a few days off from school and work to mourn, but we were never told anything more. My oldest brother Caesar barely reacted, throwing himself into his job as a Regulator, finding comfort in ensuring the city ran as smoothly as the finest prewar clockwork. My father, though, became obsessed with trying to find out what had happened, pressing until he began speaking out against the Institute and the way it hoarded information. He was summoned before the Regulatory Board for his disruptive behavior. Even Caesar couldn’t predict whether Dad would come home, or if the next time we saw him it would be for his Adjustment. The father I remembered never did return. But a quiet, tight-faced drone eventually came home in his place. He barely spoke to me or my mother, who compensated by doting on Caesar, cooking him dinner and packing him lunches even though he technically lived across town.