Lark Ascending

by Meagan Spooner

  I fought the urge to remain standing and sank down onto the floor. I instantly felt the chill of the stone, even through the layered rugs there meant to keep out the cold and damp. “Are you okay?”

  Eve smiled at me. “You are so thoughtful. I’m fine. I feel better than ever.”

  Kris was right, then. The power built up inside her to the point where releasing it was a relief. I scanned her features, noting that her skin glowed a little less, her eyes were a little more focused. “If I’d done something like that, I’d be in bed recovering for a week.”

  “I doubt that,” replied Eve, her eyes on mine, a faint hint of amusement there. She so rarely even seemed human to me that I wanted to seize on that little flicker, draw it out.

  “Well, maybe not,” I agreed. The Iron Wood stood as a testament to that. “But I wouldn’t feel great.”

  Eve tilted her head to one side, then the other, testing the muscles in her neck. “Your brother is happy.”

  I swallowed. She knew already what I wanted to talk to her about. “That’s why I’m here. I know that Caesar rescued you, and you’re grateful. I would be too. But—” I hesitated, the idea of telling this woman who was at least forty years my senior what to do leaving my mouth dry. It didn’t help that she looked no older than me. “But don’t leave one kind of slavery just to enter into another.”

  Eve’s gaze never left my face, her eyes flickering over my features, my posture, my clothes; a scrutiny that made the hairs on my arms lift in embarrassment. I braced for the censure I knew was coming. “What do you know of slavery?” she said, finally. Her voice was gentle, though, and if there was any criticism in it, I could not detect it.

  “Nothing to what you know,” I replied instantly. “But my brother is wrong. And I just don’t want you going along with him just because he helped you.”

  Eve was silent for a time, still, calm. I could almost hear the gentle whisper of the surf, as though she was remembering home. Then she rose to her feet with the swift agility of someone my age and crossed the room. She had no belongings, but there hung on the wall a scrap of shattered mirror. I knew my brother had placed it there, trying in some way to make this feel like a home for Eve. She gazed into it, but from my angle on the floor I could not see her face.

  “Why are you here?” she asked finally.

  The question was unexpected. “Because I don’t think war is the answer, even if we could win.”

  Eve kept her back to me. I had trouble sensing her mind, leaving her an expressionless opponent in a dance to which I was rapidly forgetting the steps. “What is the answer, then?”

  I let my breath out in a low sigh. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But there must be one. I think the answer lies in the Institute’s records, if only they’d let me look for it. The people beyond the Wall say that it was a single event that caused the world to be as it is, not the slow deterioration that we were always taught.”

  Too late, I remembered that Eve was one of those people from beyond the Wall. According to our shared memory, she’d been sent by the Iron Wood. She turned her head just enough so that I could see her smile in profile. This time, it didn’t have a calming effect. “It was a single event,” she confirmed. “For a time, before they placed me in the chamber where you found me, they ran a series of tests. What they didn’t know was that I was learning almost as much about them as they were learning about me.”

  I straightened, heart jumping. “Then you know what happened?”

  Watching me out of the corner of her eye, Eve nodded.

  “Tell me!” I cried, rising up onto my knees, unable to restrain my excitement. If I knew what had happened, I could fix it. I could bring a real solution to Caesar, instead of my spineless pleas for peace.

  “They did it.” Eve was as still as stone.

  “They?” I echoed blankly. “I don’t under—”

  A torrent of images flooded my mind, robbing me of my words. I saw myself surrounded by architects, red coats swarming like ants, needles being inserted into my flesh and magical leads attached to my fingertips. I saw their lips moving as they spoke to each other over my prone body. They thought I couldn’t hear.

  “Well, can you see any reason why they’re never born here?” one was saying. A man, I thought. His face blurred in and out, only his mouth clear as it spoke.

  “It has something to do with the accident,” said another. This voice I knew. Gloriette. But I couldn’t see her face either, and I knew it was because these were not my memories. They were Eve’s.

  “How could it be? It’s been a hundred years. No one’s even alive who was a part of the project.”

  “The fallout is still here. A hundred years, a thousand. It doesn’t matter. The Resource doesn’t forget. We’re never going to see another Renewable born here.” Gloriette’s lips blurred and her hand came into focus instead, reaching for me. “That’s why we need her.” She touched a button by my face, and my body flooded with agony.

  Struggling, I thought hard, Lark. I’m Lark, not Eve. I’m watching her memories. But the deeper she took me, the harder it was to hold on. Bits of myself floated away like fragments of a dream.

  Time had passed. I was in the chamber now. The glass filaments connecting me to their machines bristled in my skin every time I twitched, like spines radiating out from my heart. Gloriette was standing below me on the catwalk, her face upturned and lit by my glow. For an instant the blur sharpened, and I could see streaks glistening on her face.

  She was crying.

  “All they wanted was to get rid of the Renewables,” she was saying, anger and grief roughening her voice. “Without them there’d be no wars. That endless fight for power was destroying lives—the Institute’s mission was just to end that. To get rid of the problem.

  “They had no idea that it would backfire. That it’d destroy the fabric of the Resource, leaving us unable to survive without the thing they were trying to eradicate. We need you, Eve. You have to tell us where your people are. We won’t hurt them, we only want to ask for their help. To fix this.”

  I moaned, unable to form words. I tore my weeping eyes away from her face and gazed upward, watching the play of light from my own body shifting against the chamber ceiling.

  I heard Gloriette drag in a breath, ragged and raw. “Fine. Fine. Live forever in this hell, if that’s what you want. We’ll pull it out of you fragment by fragment. And when we find them, we won’t give them the choice we gave you. We won’t fade quietly into this darkness.”

  Eve screamed, and abruptly I realized it wasn’t a part of the memory. She’d sagged sideways against the wall, knocking the mirror down. It shattered on the floor just as she dropped to her knees, gasping with the impact of the memory.

  I was kneeling too, frozen where I’d been before she touched my mind. I wanted to vomit, my insides roiling and limbs quivering. I braced my hands against the floor, ignoring the fragments of glass digging their way into my palm. Compared to the agony of the glass siphons, the pain was nothing.

  Eve was bleeding too, I saw; but the smear she left behind as she straightened wasn’t red but a gray, faded tar. Even her blood had been altered. Her eyes met mine as her chest heaved, searching for breath.

  I couldn’t process what she’d shown me, and I gasped, “It’s not true. It can’t be. We did this—we did this to the world?”

  Eve’s eyes were burning, no longer the calm shore but a raging storm lashing the cliffs. “Your ancestors,” she replied. “And your Institute knows. They’ve always known, and they kept it from you.”

  I lifted a shaking hand and scrubbed it across my eyes, trying to clear my blurring vision. “They destroyed the world in an attempt to destroy the Renewables.” The ravaged landscape, filled with shadows and pockets of irregular magic, the harsh, brutal reality of life outside, it was all my own city’s fault. Horror swept through me, more visceral and real than any nausea or hunger or pain.

  “You see now why talking to them will never work
.”

  I raised my eyes to meet hers. “You… you wanted this. For revenge.”

  Eve’s gaze hardened. “I am not a vengeful person. In the first year, two years, even five, I would have blown them from the face of the earth if I could have. But I’m not the same creature I was then. Revenge means nothing to me.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because they’re right.”

  I stared at her, lips frozen, unable to speak.

  Eve’s eyes dragged me in, the rage and the pain so exquisite that I couldn’t look away. “There are two kinds of people: the Renewables, and everyone else. This world cannot exist with both. Your city, your architects, they had the right idea in trying to eradicate one. They just chose the wrong side.”

  “Caesar wasn’t manipulating you into being a weapon,” I whispered. “You’re manipulating him.”

  “Your brother saved me from a life of torture, and for that I’m grateful. His rebellion gives me a place to heal, to regenerate, and I’m grateful for that too. But he shares your city’s sins, he’s as much to blame, living here in stolen safety, as anyone.”

  My skin crawled. “You’re the one who wanted to attack, not Caesar. You’re—you’re trying to get everyone killed.”

  Eve crawled forward a pace, ignoring the glass crunching under her hands. Her gaze, burning and turbulent, held mine. “Listen to what I’m saying,” she hissed. “Really think about it. A world with no normals. If only Renewables lived in this world, there would be no struggle for magic. No war, no walls, no fear of what they don’t understand. The world outside wouldn’t matter, we’d carry everything with us always.” She leaned forward. “Isn’t that the kind of world you wish you lived in?”

  “But murdering all these people—”

  “Don’t think,” Eve interrupted me. “Just answer. Isn’t that the world you wish was yours?”

  In my mind was the sea I’d never seen, with every color of blue and green and gray, dancing against the shoreline. Every detail was crystallized in this stolen memory. It was something I’d probably never see in this lifetime.

  “Yes,” I whispered, hating myself.

  Eve rested back on her knees, watching me with such sympathy that my heart wanted to reach out. “We’re two sides of the same coin, Lark. I know this fight inside you; I had years to fight it inside my own heart. You have had only days, only moments. We’re the same.”

  I gritted my teeth, though I could not look away. The rage in her eyes was hypnotic, engrossing. Like a fire rushing through the forest toward where I stood. A fire—or a storm at sea. “We’ll never be the same.”

  “The same coin,” she echoed. “One of us fell one way, and the other fell another. You escaped; I didn’t. You’ve seen the world out there; I’ve seen this one. You believe that people can change, can learn; I don’t.” She lifted a hand, stained with her dark, unnatural blood, toward me. “You believe these people can be saved.”

  “And you don’t,” I whispered. Something in her gaze compelled me, made me long to reach out and let her take my hand in hers. I wanted to throw all of Kris’s caution to the wind. It would be so easy. Let her cure me as she’d cured Oren—even if it destroyed us both.

  Instead I backed away, dragging myself as though I was chained to the ground. I didn’t have to speak for Eve to know my answer. She could read it in my face, sense it through our connection. The rage flared in her eyes, and in that instant I recognized it for what it was.

  Madness.

  “You know my solution, Lark.” She released me from that compulsion, closing her eyes. My skin felt raw, as if I’d been scorched to the edge of burning and then let go. “What’s yours?”

  CHAPTER 20

  Nix found me as I stumbled away from Eve’s room, shattered and shaken. “I think I’m going to be sick,” I whispered to it as it buzzed past my face.

  “I have said from the beginning that she is dangerous.” It landed on a loose brick that stuck out a little from the wall.

  “You and Kris both,” I managed, leaning with one hand against the wall. Part of it was just being around Eve—Kris had explained that we were opposites, that being together was unhealthy and dangerous. But after listening to Eve speak I wanted to erase my memory of it, to scrub out the inside of my mind and never think of it again.

  Nix gave an abrupt whine of its mechanisms and swarmed over my hand. “You are damaged,” it exclaimed, indignation infusing every word.

  I looked down at my hand, embedded all over with tiny shards of glass and throbbing with my pulse. “It looks worse than it is,” I assured the machine. “I almost didn’t notice; Eve is distracting.”

  Nix began crawling all over my palm, using its spindly legs to pry the shards out of my hand, one by one. “She is powerful, though.”

  “But a last resort,” I said firmly, wincing as Nix dislodged a particularly deep bit of glass. Most of the shards were barely more than splinters, but a few had struck nerves. “What happened today was a fluke. Next time she goes off like that, she could destroy the entire city.”

  “Then we should leave,” Nix said firmly, tsking to itself as it inspected my hand.

  “I’ve done that once.” I shoved away from the wall, sending Nix buzzing into the air. Even Nix had to see me strong, not on the verge of falling apart. “Not this time. We need help. We need power, if we’re going to finish this before Eve grows strong enough to do what she’s planning to do.”

  “What do you propose?”

  I closed my eyes, weary now after struggling against Eve’s power, and her ideas. My thoughts still went to Basil whenever I felt I was backed into a corner. In the tunnels, he’d tell me to retrace my steps until I was certain again. But now… He wasn’t the same man I remembered. But then, I wasn’t the same girl, either. I lifted my head, eyeing the pixie hovering in front of my face.

  “Nix, how long can you last beyond the Wall?”

  “As long as you can,” it replied promptly as it settled again onto a loose brick.

  “No—I mean alone. Without me.”

  Nix was silent, its multifaceted blue eyes fixed on my face. It had no facial expressions, but somehow I could read its distress there in its stare. “Without you?” echoed Nix.

  “I need to send a message to my brother. To Basil.”

  Nix finally moved a little, lifting one leg to scrub it over one eye, gears whirring a little more quickly as it thought. “You want the Renewables in Lethe to come help you fight.”

  “I don’t know what else to do. We don’t have the ability to fight them, not like this.”

  “Why would they come help you? They’re safe where they are.”

  “Maybe.” I tried not to think of Basil, tried not to wonder if he’d come simply because I was his sister and I’d asked him to. “But if the Institute wins, the architects will find Lethe eventually. Either they’ll torture the information out of me, or they’ll find some new way of tracking them, or they’ll con some new girl into running away to find Lethe and this will all start over again. They’re not safe. They’ll never be safe, not until the Institute is destroyed.”

  “And you want me to go.”

  “You’re fast, you know the way, and Basil knows you.” I swallowed, my voice betraying how dry my throat was. I didn’t want to be without Nix, the only real ally I had left, the only thing in this entire city I was certain of. “And I trust you.”

  Nix gave a dismissive clicking of mechanisms, but I could see its wings flutter and sensory antennae flick with energy and pleasure. A machine, susceptible to flattery. I fought the insane urge to smile. “I would go. But I won’t last long enough without you to recharge me.”

  My heart sank. “There has to be a way. When Kris went to find the Iron Wood, both times, he brought stored magic with him—”

  “I cannot carry enough weight for that. I would not be able to move, weighed down by a crystal large enough to see me that far. I wasn’t designed for it.”

  My mind whirle
d, trying to find a solution. I could go myself, except that there’d be no one here with even a hope of dealing with Eve if she lost control again. I didn’t trust her to keep my city safe—all she wanted was vengeance and destruction.

  Can you blame her?

  I shoved that thought aside as ruthlessly as I could. “Kris has been outside before, but he’ll be too weak to travel for days at least, and we’ll need any intelligence he has on the Institute anyway.”

  “What about that other one?”

  Despite its vague words, I recognized Nix’s tone. It always had the faint aura of smug distrust when it spoke of Oren, though it never referred to him by name. It wasn’t a stupid idea. If we could rig up some kind of magical storage unit for him like Kris had used, he’d stand the best chance of surviving out there. Nevertheless, some danger nagged at the back of my mind, something I couldn’t name. But I’d grown to trust my instincts.

  “It’s too soon after what Eve did to him,” I said slowly, trying not to think too hard about my motivations for keeping Oren close to me. “And he’s still struggling with it.”

  “You could send your brother to find your brother.”

  That made me laugh, albeit a little wearily. “I trust Caesar about as far as I could throw him. I’m certainly not giving him the location of Basil’s new home.”

  “You think he’s still working for the Institute?”

  “No,” I admitted. Because that much was true. If nothing else, Caesar had proven his hatred of the architects. “But I don’t think he really thinks we can win this war. And I don’t think he’d relish the idea of outsiders coming to rescue us.”

  “Neither do you.”

  I cast a sharp glance at the pixie. I’d been carefully regulating my tone, trying not to show my own distaste for this plan. The machine was far more perceptive than it had any right to be. It went beyond programming, beyond magic. “No, I don’t. But we don’t have any choice.”

  “I believe you know who to send.”