Lark Ascending

by Meagan Spooner

  One of the Institute’s speakers in their announcement system—the same one that had alerted them to my presence when I snuck in here the first time—had come to life.

  “It’s here,” I whispered.”

  Kris came to my side, lips pressed together as he tipped his head back. “They’re only maintaining the speakers in the part of the building where they are. The circuitry on these is degraded, it’s interfering with the sound.”

  “Give me a boost,” I told him, and then stepped up when he cupped his hands. With my ear close to the speaker I could make out individual words.

  “…detected in…Security…alpha report to… Museum.”

  I gasped, pushing back away from the wall abruptly enough that Kris staggered, half dropping me ungracefully back to the ground.

  “They know we’re here,” I hissed. “That was a security announcement. I think they’re sending guards here, now.”

  “Then I’m up.” Dorian stood a few paces behind us, hands clasped behind his back. For a moment I remembered how he used to seem to me—thoughtful, wise, a leader well respected by his people. If he was afraid, he didn’t show it.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I blurted. “I’ll go. I can handle them.”

  “Lark, we need you here.” Kris stepped up behind me. “We may need your power to undo what the architects did.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Dorian assured me. “Eve survived them for years. If they capture me, then so be it. Perhaps I need to understand what she went through.”

  I felt his magic flare like a beacon. “Make this worth it,” he added before he took off at a jog back down the museum corridor. After a few seconds I could no longer feel his magic, the sensation absorbed by the dampening shield enclosing the Institute.

  “Good luck,” I whispered as he vanished into the darkness. Oren’s arm brushed mine, his hand pushing aside a bit of my hair. His touch, strange though it felt without the shadow inside, was all the reassurance I needed, and the four of us that were left hurried for the archives.

  CHAPTER 30

  The records hall was as dark as the rest of the Institute, and the air was even thicker, dust assaulting my nose as soon as we stepped inside. Kris and Oren manhandled the heavy doors closed while Basil veered off, heading for an iron cabinet inset in the wall. I saw him pry it open, revealing a series of glass spirals, all set in rows. There were labels written beside each in an ancient, curling handwriting that I couldn’t make out. A few of the spirals were fractured, the cracks turning them all opaque.

  “Pixie,” Basil called, prompting Nix to stick its head out through my hair. “Can you come help me? Some of these circuits are fried, but I think I can get around them.”

  Nix hesitated just long enough to make Basil turn around, exasperated, then launched itself from my shoulder to land upon one of the spirals.

  Together they began moving the coils around, Nix’s tiny, needlelike legs prying the broken ones loose while Basil replaced others. His tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated, for an instant so painfully familiar, so like the brother I’d known as a child, that my throat closed. The cabinet was next to a row of lever switches and another box with a speaker on it like those that crackled at us in the museum.

  Basil snapped the last circuit into place, then glanced at Kris, still by the door. “Try it now.”

  Kris reached for a lever the length of his hand inset beside the door and, leaning his shoulder into it, pushed it upward.

  I felt the hum first; then, with a seeming effort, a few of the panels overhead flickered to life. Nix darted back toward my shoulder, performing a quick, almost perfunctory loop before landing, satisfied with itself.

  The records hall was a cavernous space broken up by tables and shelves. At the end was the Archivist’s desk, but unlike the first time I was here, it was empty. It had previously been occupied by an ancient, wispy-haired man. I wondered if he was holed up with the other architects—or if he was still alive at all.

  The lights overhead continued to flicker, but it was enough illumination to navigate the area and scan the documents.

  “Good work,” I said, flashing Kris a smile. The expression felt strange, and I realized I hadn’t really smiled much at all in days. “Any idea where the records we want might be?”

  “I was always more interested in where our technology could go than where it had been,” Kris replied apologetically, turning off his lantern and setting it aside. “Maybe we should split up. Dorian can’t hold them off forever.”

  I nodded, and we fanned out through the stacks. Oren kept close to me as I headed for the section where I’d once found boxes of records pertaining to my brother, Basil, when I’d thought he’d disappeared forever. There had been one box with my name—now, as I scanned the top of the shelf, there were nine. Kris was right; what I’d done in the Iron Wood had rattled the architects. I wondered what wild theories and explanations the boxes contained, but there wasn’t time to find out, not with Dorian at risk every moment.

  My eyes raked the shelf. Many of the volumes on this shelf were crumbling with age, coated with dust. Old was good—old meant it might be from the time we were looking for. But as I scanned, my eyes fell on something that stood out, and I stared at it for a few moments before I realized what it was. There were tracks in the dust on a shelf at eye level; the record there was brighter than the others, though no newer. It had been read recently.

  I reached out to pull down the thick portfolio, its spine so worn with age that its title was unreadable. I stepped back to move under one of the lights and backed into Oren, who jumped.

  I shot him a wry smile. “You don’t need to be my bodyguard in here,” I said. “Just start looking for something about the cataclysm, the ancient machinery, anything that might give us answers.”

  Oren shifted his weight from one foot to the other, always poised; that was the wilderness in him, making him prepared for anything. “I won’t be of much help in here,” he said quietly. “I’d rather stay close to you.”

  “We need as many—” But I stopped, my mind catching up with my mouth. The wilderness. Oren had grown up in the wild and spent most of his life alone, trying to survive. “You don’t know how to read,” I whispered.

  Oren shrugged. If he was embarrassed, he didn’t show it. “I remember my parents starting to teach me when I was very little. But then we were on the run, and we didn’t have any time for reading. And then it was just me.”

  I shivered. My parents might be happy thinking I’m dead, but at least I knew they were safe. Oren talked about the death of his family as if it had happened to someone else.

  When we get through this, I’ll teach you. The words hovered, faint and warm, at the tip of my tongue. But there they stopped, fading away until all that was left was a sour taste. Because there probably wasn’t going to be a when we get through this.

  Oren gazed back at me, one corner of his mouth lifting a little bit in a smile. He reached out and brushed a finger against my cheek, dislodging some dust that had clung there during my search of the stacks. If he knew what I was thinking, he didn’t speak about it either.

  I cleared my throat, ducking my head to the volume. The cover of the portfolio crackled as I opened it, and Nix crawled curiously down my arm to peer at the pages. The title page was in Latin, the language of the architects; it was unsurprising, but disappointing. I knew only the tiniest bit of Latin, but I made out the word magia—magic, which I knew from the Institute’s motto. I also saw the word machina, which I assumed was the Latin for “machine.”

  My pulse rising, I whispered, “I think this might be something. The title is talking about magic and machines, and it’s old enough, certainly.”

  “I should have been programmed with multilingual capabilities,” complained Nix.

  “In Kris’s defense, it’s not like I was going to stumble across much Latin as I fled across the wilderness, running from you.”

  Nix buzzed indig
nation but didn’t argue with me.

  I started turning pages, my eyes ready to pick out as many of the Latin words I could recognize, but I stopped, squinting. This wasn’t a history—it was a collection of blueprints. Technical diagrams crawled over every page, spiderwebs of circuits and depictions of power flow that made my head spin. With this, I was as useless as Oren was—I might as well be illiterate.

  But we had someone who could speak this language.

  “Basil!” I hissed. He was only a few stacks over, and he appeared around the end of the shelf with dust in his hair and a sour look on his face.

  “This place is a mess,” he complained, hurrying to my side. “What’d you find?”

  “Can you make any sense of these? The writing’s in Latin, but the diagrams…”

  Basil took the portfolio from me, eyes sweeping across the page. “Design schematics,” he murmured, turning the page and scanning the lines on the next.

  “There must be a thousand different machines in there.” Frustration coursed through my voice. It’d take hours to catalogue them all, and Dorian wouldn’t last that long on his own. And we had no way of knowing if any of these machines were going to help us.

  Basil didn’t answer immediately, shifting the portfolio so that the flickering lights overhead illuminated the paper more fully. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I think this is all a schematic for one machine. One very large, very complex machine.”

  The portfolio was easily four inches thick, and the pages were hair-thin; there were thousands of them. I stared at Basil. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know, but look.” He indicated the edge of one page with his thumbnail. “That symbol there, it’s repeated here. He flipped back several pages until he pointed out the symbol again, on the opposite side of the page. I think that means the pages are meant to join together there.”

  If it was a schematic for the device Eve mentioned, then it wouldn’t be easy to hide. We had to know what we were looking for.

  “Come on,” said Basil, snapping the portfolio shut. “We need more space.”

  We headed for an area full of tables, no doubt meant for research, though they stood dusty and empty now. We shoved the tables and chairs back against the stacks, clearing a space on the floor, and got to work. Kris abandoned his own search to help, and though Oren couldn’t read, there was nothing wrong with his eyesight. Of all of us he was the quickest to match the patterns, lining up the pages like a giant puzzle. Even Nix helped, its unblinking crystal eyes scanning every page and committing them to memory.

  I pulled another handful of pages from the portfolio and started handing them out, scanning for anything familiar. Basil was scanning the portion we’d assembled, barely more than a fraction of the whole thing, with a frown on his face.

  “This thing would be massive, if I’m understanding it all correctly.” He stabbed downward at a line with tick marks crisscrossing it. “If this scale is right, it’d be nearly as big as this entire building. Bigger, even; the Institute’s not that tall.”

  “Does any of this look familiar to you, Kris?” I glanced at Kris, still wearing the grubby remains of his red architect’s coat.

  But Kris was shaking his head. “I’ve never seen this design before. But I was always in theory, research and development. Like I said, I wasn’t studying historical machinery.”

  Basil squinted, leaning close to the page. “This goes way beyond me,” he said slowly. “Lark, I’m good with machines, but I’m no architect. It’d take me days just to figure out one of these pages.”

  “Maybe this is a waste of time,” said Kris, sighing. “They’d never be able to hide something this massive. Perhaps Eve was lying about it from the beginning; should we get out of here? Lark?”

  But I was staring the sheet of paper in my hand, my voice lost. The nuances of the technical schematics were lost on me—I’d never been interested in circuitry and use of the Resource like Basil. But I recognized what was sketched on the page before me. It showed a series of long glass filaments, straight as arrows. Next to them was a symbol and an explanation in Latin—again I saw the word magia—and then the filaments again, but this time they were curved, sinuous, curling as though beckoning me into the page.

  I’d seen those undulating glass tendrils before. I saw them still in my dreams, my nightmares. It didn’t even matter whether they were my dreams or Eve’s—they drew the same nameless horror from us both.

  “I think they did hide it,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “This is the design for the Machine.”

  “What machine?” asked Basil.

  “The Machine,” I said, lifting my gaze, trying to banish the memory of those glass shards and how they sought out my magic and Eve’s. “The one they used to change me, the one they used to harvest the kids. The one they used to hold Eve all these years. It’s all the same Machine.”

  “But Lark, it would have to be the size of a small city—”

  “The Institute!” I blurted, willing them to see it. “The Institute is the Machine. It’s hidden here, beneath our feet—it’s been here all along. The machinery is threaded through the whole place, like underground rivers. Like veins.”

  For a long moment, all I could hear was the pounding of my heart as the others stared at me. If the Machine was the ancient device Eve was talking about, then we’d have to retrace my route down into the bowels of the Institute. We’d have to pass through the sections still occupied by architects, and we’d have to do it without Dorian’s help. Eve had been here hours already; we couldn’t afford to waste time sneaking.

  I rose to my feet, my sudden movement stirring the pages and sending half of them skittering back into the stacks.

  “Hey!” cried Basil, trying in vain to grab at the delicate sheets.

  “Leave them,” I snapped. “We don’t need them anymore. Kris, can you make this intercom work?” I jabbed my finger at the speaker-box next to the light switches.

  Kris rose slowly to his feet, glancing from me to the others. “What? I think so, but—”

  “Do it. Hurry.”

  Kris pried the casing loose, exposing a number of wires and glass filaments turned flexible with magic. It took him only a few moments to shove the panel back into place. “It should work now, but you’ll only hear anything if—”

  “I don’t need to hear anything.” I moved past Kris, headed for the intercom, and pressed the switch to talk. Kris and Basil both leaped for me; even Nix screeched alarm.

  “Gloriette!” I shouted into the intercom, holding up my hand to forestall my friends. “I know you’re here. And I know you’re looking for me.”

  “What are you doing?” hissed Basil, eyes wide with alarm. Only Oren, strangely enough, seemed unperturbed; when I met his eye he gave me a small, grim smile. I trust you.

  There was no reply from the intercom, so I pressed the switch again. “Well, I’m here. I’m in the archives. And I know about your Machine.” I could hear my own voice echoing from far away, down the empty corridors, through the abandoned rotunda and the dark, dusty museum.

  “This is not a good plan,” Nix whispered in my ear, its voice jangling with perturbation. “We must run, now.”

  I swallowed hard and leaned in toward the speaker. “Come find me.”

  CHAPTER 31

  “Have you lost your mind?” Kris exclaimed, trying without much success to keep his voice down. “We have to go now.” He reached for my arm, clearly intending to drag me bodily from the room if need be.

  Oren stepped in, putting himself between Kris and me. “All this way, you claim to trust her, and now you think she’s failed you?”

  “We have to stop hiding,” I said quietly, my voice carrying with it the eerie sense of calm I felt, waiting for the Institute’s forces to organize and find us. “It could take us weeks to figure out the Machine from those schematics, and we don’t have that kind of time. Eve is here, somewhere, and she’s stronger
than I am. Gloriette will come, and we’ll make her bring us to the Machine.”

  “If she doesn’t just take us to the nearest cell,” Kris hissed. “And that’s if we’re lucky. Or maybe you forgot, these people already tried to kill me once.”

  I looked up, meeting his eyes; the fear there was bright and hot, pleading. “You can run,” I said softly. “I won’t think less of you, Kris. They’re after me—they won’t stop you if you try to leave. I choose to believe that you were right all along; that the Institute is only trying to find a way to save this city, just as we are. I have to believe it.”

  Kris swore, turning away to pace, though he made no movement toward the exit. Basil was quieter but didn’t look any more pleased than Kris, his expression grim. Oren stood just beside me, and when I glanced at him, he was as collected as ever; but then, he’d learned to control that wildness in his nature. It didn’t mean he was any less prepared to fight.

  I lifted my hand to my shoulder, and Nix crawled out from under my hair in order to bump its metallic head against my knuckle. “What about you?” I whispered. “Not too late for you to fly away.”

  Nix gave a tiny sniff. “I dislike extended effort,” it said. “I’ll remain here for now.”

  I grinned, but before I could reply, the door leading from the archives shifted, clanged, and then swung open.

  I turned, the noise jolting me from my calm; I expected to see a dozen armed Enforcers and a dozen more architects standing there, waiting to arrest me. But instead my eyes found just one architect. Gloriette.

  “Well, gosling,” she said slowly, her eyes sweeping from me to my friends, lingering on Basil with some surprise. “That was unexpected.”

  I’d forgotten the effect her voice had on me. Unprepared, the sweep of hatred through my body left me unbalanced. “Hello, Administrator,” I said through gritted teeth. There was only one of her, and yet she stood there like she had an army at her back. There had to be some trick, some reason she felt sure we couldn’t overpower her. “No army this time?”