Skylark (5 page)

And my father never took me up onto the roof again.

I tried once to see it on my own—the comfort and the wonder of the magical glow of the Institute—but I saw only a faint smear of light against the domed Wall, like grease clouding dirty dishwater.

To see those same lights directly above my head now, however, washing me in their steady golden glow, was another matter entirely. They lacked the flicker of our home oil lamps and produced no warmth. And yet, my skin tingled as though some heat touched it. I could hear a faint hum, like the sound of pixie mechanisms, above the muffled sound of my footsteps. The sound wasn’t as grating as the dawn, but it showed no signs of fading either. It rested at the base of my skull, a steady pounding.

The corridor had a polished, reflective stone floor, forming the illusion that I was walking down a tunnel of light. My heart pounded in time with the magical pulse of the lights, but I’d made my choice—even if I turned around now, Emila would be long gone. I was already lost, and this could be my one chance. I would be caught, and punished, but if it meant I had a chance of knowing Basil’s fate, it would be worth it.

The long hallway ended in a sleek wooden door, which I edged open a crack. I could hear nothing on the other side, and so I eased it open the rest of the way.

Ahead of me lay an immense gallery, lined on either side with fantastical sculptures. I closed the door behind me and paused at the first, a huge monstrous creature I didn’t recognize. It was covered in brown, shaggy fur, standing on its hind legs with its clawed forepaws upraised. Its jaws were parted in a soundless roar, teeth glistening. With a jolt I realized it was no sculpture at all, but the remains of an actual creature, skinned and stuffed. Horrified and fascinated, I bent my head to the inscription on the plaque at its feet.

“
Ursus arctos horribilis
,” I read.
Horribilis
, indeed, I thought, taking a step back from the glare of its glassy, dead eyes.

My steps echoed as I made my way along. Overhead, longextinct birds hung motionless from wires, wings outstretched in a parody of flight. There were flying creatures ranging from tiny things I could barely see to one mighty creature with a wingspan larger than I was tall. All along the sides of the gallery, examples of creatures gone extinct during the wars stared back at me, haunted and blank.

There were mechanimals in the gallery as well, clockwork simulacrums of the creatures themselves, dormant without magic to power them.
Canis lupus familiaris
, I read at one such exhibit.

A glass case toward the end of the gallery caught my eye. I headed over to peer down at its contents—and started back. Inside was a pixie, as real and clear as the one I had annihilated.

My heart pounded against my ribcage, but the pixie was dormant. It couldn’t see me—or else it would be halfway to the Administrator by now, to inform her that a harvestee was not where she was supposed to be. I swallowed and forced myself to look closer. Its squat, copper body was supported on six spindly legs, delicate mesh wings outstretched and poised as if ready to fly. No eyes, only the bulging multifaceted sensors attuned to the Resource, and long delicate antennae for reception of orders.

The plaque beneath the case said it was a prototype, from back when pixies were just amusements for the rich, before the Institute altered them to suit its purposes. It looked just the same, though, as cold and calculating. I backed away from the case, skin crawling.

The next room opened up into a cavernous, dark space broken up by long tables and rows of shelves, and I squinted as my eyes adjusted. Something moved in a pool of light cast by a lamp and I realized with a jolt that there was a person at one of the tables—I darted to the side, ducking behind one of the shelves.

Willing my pounding heart to slow, I peeked around the shelf. At the other end of the room, an ancient architect with a neatly trimmed beard and wild eyebrows sat hunched over a desk piled high with books.

My heart leapt. I’d read the few books in the classroom countless times—never had I realized so many books even still existed. The entire room was full of them, thick with the smell of leather and dust. Even the shelf I was hiding behind was lined with them. An entire world of knowledge locked in here, far exceeding anything I could have imagined. Beyond the architect’s desk was row upon row of shelves stacked with papers and boxes. The records.

The architect hadn’t moved since I first noticed him, and for a wild moment I considered inching around him in the gloom to get at the papers. Before I could move, though, a flare of magic jolted through my brain and a dim musical chime pierced the musty silence.

“All code-red clearance personnel to Administrator’s office, please,” said a pleasant, tinny voice. From my vantage point behind my shelf, I saw the architect’s head lift and then, with a dusty sigh, he rose and made his way toward me. I withdrew behind the bookcase and held my breath until I heard the door open and close.

Now or never. I wove through the bookshelves, aiming for the records at the far end. It would take days just to skim it all, and if “code red” had anything to do with me, I might not have more than a few minutes.

With any luck it’d be alphabetical, and my brother would be filed under our last name. I stood scanning the folders, searching for anything I could recognize. The entire top of the shelf was lined with boxes, and after a few seconds my eyes flicked up to them—and my breath stopped.
Ainsley, Basil
. My eyes darted to the side: another box, labeled the same. I moved slowly down the row of shelves, counting at least a dozen boxes all labeled with my brother’s name. Only the last box bore a different label:
Ainsley, Lark
.

I stood there staring upward, the letters of my own name burning through the gloom, when the sound of the door banging open jerked my attention toward the entrance. A pair of women wearing blue coats came through the door. I fled behind the shelves again.

“Yes, but why would she come here?” The woman’s voice sounded exasperated. I heard the scrape of a chair and a wooden creak, not far away.

“How would I know? Do you really want to be the one to question the Administrator?”

The first woman gave a nervous laugh, punctuated by the sound of fingernails tapping on the tabletop. “Good point. Still, if I were a kid loose in the Institute, this would be the last place I’d aim for.”

“Well, this one’s not exactly a kid anymore.”

There was a door not far away on the back wall. I might be able to make it undetected, but . . . From where I hid I could just see the edge of one of the boxes bearing my brother’s name.

“I suppose we just wait here until they find her,” sighed one of the assistants. “They’re setting the pixies loose, so at least it’ll go quickly.”

A jolt ran through me. I took one last look at the box overhead and then tore myself away, heading toward the unmarked door on the back wall. I slipped through, shutting it silently behind me.

I stood with eyes closed in the corridor, willing my racing pulse to calm and my aching head to ease. I pressed the palm of my hand against the door I’d come through, as if somehow I could summon the answers through it. I’d been so close. I had no idea why they had an entire shelf of boxes devoted to my brother. The sum of information they’d given my family after his death would have fit on half a sheet of paper.

And why would they have any records at all about me?

It was only a matter of time before the pixies found me, and I couldn’t be found here. It was clear I wasn’t supposed to know about those files high on the shelf.

Ahead of me stretched a much more utilitarian corridor than the other I’d passed through, the lights overhead stark white, the floor dull gray. The hall branched into three a few paces away, but only two of the paths had plaques. The righthand path pointed the way to the Biothaumatic Laboratory while the left read ROTUNDA. All I had to do was follow that corridor. I could say I’d just gotten distracted by how astonishing the rotunda itself was, and ended up separated from Emila.

I turned to head down the hallway when a flicker caught my eye. The third path was unlabeled, nothing to indicate where it led. I stared down the corridor, head throbbing with the magic hum of the lights, willing whatever I’d seen out of the corner of my eye to return.

It had a barely perceptible curve, making it impossible to see what lay at the end of it. As I watched, a section of the lights flickered and went dark for a brief second. Just a malfunction of some kind. I started to turn away again when the panels overhead went dead with a sudden, blessed cessation of the awful buzzing of the lights. Before my eyes could adjust, they came on again with a blaze of painful magical backlash, leaving me gasping. It was dark now a few steps down the path, and I staggered into it to escape the sound of buzzing Resource slicing into my brain. The lights went out just ahead of me again. A ripple of darkness continued on down, lights going out and coming on one by one, around the curve and out of sight.

I took another step, and the patch shifted one bar of lights. It was responding to my movements. It was
leading
me.

I hesitated. I knew I had to head back to the rotunda, pretend I’d seen nothing I wasn’t supposed to see. I shouldn’t draw any more attention to myself than I already had. I should forget everything I’d seen.

Slipping my hand into my pocket and curling my fingers around Basil’s paper bird, I followed the lights.

The corridor stretched for what felt like miles. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to have a slight slope as well as a curve, a gradual downward spiral. In the distance, a door came into view at the end of the corridor. I stopped dead for a second and the lights went still. As I stood there, they shifted once in the direction I’d been going, then ceased again.

“Okay, okay,” I said, glancing up at the dark lightbulbs overhead.

The door swung open soundlessly at my touch.

The space behind the door lay shrouded in darkness at its edges, although the impression was of a huge spherical cavern of a room. At its center hung a blindingly bright mass, with streamers of light connecting it to the most complex machinery I’d ever seen, hanging above and around it. The noises of meshing gears were only rivaled by the sound of magic mated with machine twanging in my mind.

On the other side of the door began a metal walkway that spiraled down toward the light. My feet took me down of their own accord.

As I got closer, the light powering the machines became more distinct. It was long and slender, with the faintest suggestion at the top of something like a head. . . .

It was a person. Though it wore no clothing, the light was too bright at this distance to make out any features or its gender. Glass filaments seemed to plug directly into its skin, stretching up into the mechanisms overhead and carrying the Resource away from it. Just as iron was an insulator of magic, glass was the best conductor of all.

The room vibrated. Although I had never felt the Resource in such quantities, there was an undertone to it that I recognized from Basil, from my own ill-advised experiment. Barely detectable beneath the harshness of the harnessed energy rang the pure, sweet notes of raw magic. Light dazzled my eyes.

I stopped walking and leaned closer over the railing of the catwalk, gazing at the creature. My breath stopped, and I stood transfixed, horrified.

There was no doubt it was a living person. I could see the face more clearly now, my eyes accustomed to the light. White skin, closed eyes, wasted, delicate features, lips set in a strange, hollow
O
.

While I stared, the eyes opened. I shrieked and fell backward, banging hard into the opposite railing.

The pain brought me to my senses. I could still feel that overpowering need to run, but there was a part of me that was detached, freed from it. With a shocking clarity I realized that the need to flee was
not
coming from me.

Sucking in a deep breath, I got to my feet and turned toward the gleaming-white creature suspended by glass. She—I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I was certain now it was a woman—was looking directly at me. Her irises were as white as the rest of her, the black pinpoints of her pupils fixing on mine.She opened her mouth, lips cracking. A viscous, brownish-gray liquid spilled onto her chin.

“Run,” she gasped.

Chapter 4