Lark Ascending

by Meagan Spooner

  “It seemed wise not to bring machines you could harvest.” She’d lost weight since we faced each other in the Iron Wood—I’d been too distraught to notice when she’d been standing over Kris’s body. The rebels weren’t the only ones going hungry. “Besides, how could I respond with violence to such a polite invitation?”

  “We expected Enforcers,” Kris broke in. “Not smart, coming alone.”

  “You can’t touch me,” she replied, her black eyes glittering. I couldn’t read her expression, but I thought I saw a flinch, a tiny chink in the drawling façade. There was fear there, deeply hidden; but very much alive. “Didn’t I kill you?

  “You’re unarmed,” Kris replied, ignoring her barb, though I could see it cost him. “There’s no one else here, and there are four of us.”

  “Five,” spat Nix, its mechanisms trembling.

  “And your friend down below?” asked Gloriette, raising an eyebrow. “What happens to him if something happens to me?”

  “You caught Dorian.” Oren’s voice was low, but tense.

  “Did you really think one Renewable would get the better of all my architects?”

  “We’ve got Lark,” replied Kris, tension singing through his voice. “You want to try your luck against her?”

  “Stop it,” I broke in sharply. “She came alone. It’s a show of good faith.”

  Gloriette’s eyes slid back toward me, hesitating for an instant before her mouth widened into that saccharine smile. Everything in me wanted to leap at her, to tear at her face and eyes, to throttle her with the chain she wore around her neck. She’d ruined my life, turned me into a monster, destroyed my family beyond repair. I wanted to rip away the magic beating in her heart, and see it in her eyes the moment she realized what had happened.

  There was no good faith there. But even a lie could get me where I needed to go.

  “Indeed,” Gloriette replied. “I didn’t come here to kill you or arrest you. Your Renewable friend attacked us.” Though her words were directed at the others, her eyes were on me. “I came to ask for your help.”

  Her words were met with a thick silence, until Basil lurched to his feet, striding forward until he stood at my side. “Why the hell would we help you?” he spat. “You betrayed Lark—you betrayed me. You hid the truth from all of us, you made us think the Renewables destroyed the world, when it was you.”

  “It was our ancestors,” snapped Gloriette. “My parents weren’t even born when the cataclysm occurred.”

  “But you lied to us.” Basil’s hands curled into fists. “Everyone in this city thinks that the world was shattered during the Renewable wars. But you’ve been the enemy all along.”

  Gloriette’s face was hard, her eyes narrowed under her sharp brows. “If this city falls, we fall too, Mr. Ainsley. What good would it do if every citizen knew the truth? How would that change our circumstances?”

  “She’s right,” I said quietly, cutting through the rising swell of angry voices. I didn’t bother to hide the dislike in my voice; there were no illusions here, no pretense at friendship.

  When Gloriette turned back to me, I could see the hatred there in her gaze, reflected at me as in a mirror. Her eyebrows lifted in a show of surprise. “And here I thought I’d have to fend you off with a stick. You used to be such a little savage.”

  “I used to be a lot of things,” I replied softly. “Before you happened.”

  Gloriette made a derisive sound in her throat, but her gaze slid away from mine as though she no longer wished to look at me. She looked instead at the partially assembled diagram at our feet. “I see you already know about the Machine.”

  “And so does Eve.”

  That shattered Gloriette’s façade, her eyes widening. “Eve—Eve’s here?”

  “And she’s not pleased,” said Kris, a little of that dry humor underpinning the tension in his voice.

  Gloriette’s fear shifted, her gaze falling on me. “If you’d just done what you were programmed to do, we’d have brought more Renewables in, and none of this would be happening.”

  “Torturing people in order to power a city is not a sustainable situation,” I replied through gritted teeth.

  “And if we’d brought the entire population of the Iron Wood into our city? With that much magic, it wouldn’t be torture. It’d be an hour or two of discomfort every few weeks. And there’s no argument you can make against that.”

  I glanced at Basil; I couldn’t help it. Because that’s exactly what we’d done to save Lethe, bringing the Renewables there to volunteer to have their magic siphoned off to run the city.

  Gloriette turned away, pacing back toward the shelves, her eyes on the sputtering lights overhead. “It’s not worth fighting about now; the Renewables are gone, except for that one we’ve got in the chamber down below. That option is gone.”

  “Eve told me that the original architects used the Machine, and that’s what tore the Resource apart.” I tried to keep my tone even. “Let us try to reverse it.”

  “Reversing it is impossible,” Gloriette snapped. “Don’t you think we tried that?”

  “Then why come to me asking for help?” It was becoming harder and harder not to let the fury win. Talking in circles was making my jaw ache with tension.

  “We can’t reverse the process—but with Eve’s power, or with yours, we can try to finish what they started.”

  “Finish—” My voice broke and I stopped, staring at her in confusion. “I don’t understand. The founders were trying to destroy all Renewables. Why would I ever help you do that?”

  Gloriette’s head dropped for an instant before she turned back, hands clasped in front of her. “They weren’t trying to destroy the Renewables, you stupid girl. You think everything’s so easy, that morals are black and white, that some actions are good and the rest are bad. You think we’re monsters.”

  “You are,” I whispered, feeling the shadow inside me stir in response to my anger. “Desperation has made us all into monsters.”

  “We’re the reason you’re alive today,” Gloriette replied, her voice shaking with effort—effort to speak calmly, I assumed. This time, when I met her gaze, I saw the loathing there. She hated me as much as I hated her. “We’re the reason you were even born—the reason everyone in this city has a home.”

  “Pardon me if I don’t fall on my knees to thank you.” I felt Nix buzzing against my neck, the comforting weight of its body lending me a little strength.

  Gloriette shook her head. “It’s easy to preach moral superiority when you aren’t the one who has to come up with an alternate plan.” She gazed at me with her sunken eyes, glittering black in the sagging flesh on her face. “It’s easy to be good.”

  “Poor you,” I said, coldly, holding onto that anger. It was all too easy to let those words stab into me, echoing the same thoughts that had been following me ever since I fled the Iron Wood. Because it was easier. When there was nothing riding on it but my own beliefs, it was easy to call the architects monsters. But had I ever come up with another way to save my people? I cleared my throat. “You still haven’t told me why I’m going to help you commit genocide against the Renewables.”

  “It was never going to kill the Renewables,” said Gloriette briskly, shrugging off that loathing for the time being. “Well, it might have killed a few, the very old and the very young, those without defenses. But it wasn’t designed to kill them, it was designed to—”

  “Harvest them,” I interrupted, staring. “The Machine. The part that you use to harvest children, it’s the same principle.”

  Gloriette nodded. “Originally the Machine was designed to operate on a global scale. It’s tied into the fabric of the Resource itself. The Machine was supposed to remove the power from those too selfish not to abuse it and place it in the hands of those who’d act responsibly and judiciously.”

  “The founding architects.”

  “Indeed. But it failed partway through the procedure. Instead of gathering the fabric of th
e Resource, the Machine fractured it, stripping the land and leaving it as it is now.”

  “And you think completing the process will heal the land and place the power back in your hands, where you think it should be.”

  Gloriette hesitated. “We don’t know what it’ll do, but that’s our hope, yes.”

  “So why not just do it? Why do you need me?”

  “We don’t know how it works.”

  I stopped short, blinking. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “The technology is over a hundred years old. The people who built it and operated it are long dead. We’ve held onto a few things—the ability to harvest individuals, for one. And we’ve been able to keep the Wall running, until now. And we figured out how install Eve.”

  Install, like she was no more than a component in a machine. Which, from their perspective, she was.

  “Miss Ainsley,” said Gloriette, her voice sharpening a little. “We didn’t run all those tests on you all those months ago for fun. We wanted to know why only you, and your brother, survived the process. Being stripped, then refilled, and stripped again. Because you’re the key. You and Basil, and Caesar too. Some twist of genetics, some mutation just now coming to light generations after the cataclysm. The world has been stripped of magic, and we’re trying to put it back.”

  “Just like you did to us.” My head spun as I glanced at Basil beside me, who was staring grim-faced at the red-coated architect in front of us.

  “Come with me,” Gloriette said quietly. “You want to get to the Machine? I’ll take you there myself.”

  My mouth tasted like ashes. I’d expected to confront Gloriette and force her to take us to the Machine; I’d expected her to fight me every step of the way. The mere thought of working with Gloriette, the figure who dominated my nightmares, who had planted this darkness inside me—it made my eyes burn, my thoughts scream protest. But isn’t this what I’d wanted? To talk to the Institute, not to fight them?

  “Give me a moment,” I said, my voice emerging with no more human inflection than Nix’s. Empty, wrung dry. “Let me talk to my friends.”

  Gloriette hesitated, her eyes flickering from me to Kris and Oren. Then she nodded and turned away. I watched her as she walked back toward the door and then stopped there, waiting. Her eyes were on the metal panel containing the glass fuses, which Basil hadn’t bothered to close.

  “You can’t possibly be thinking of doing this,” Oren broke in first, agitation drawing a few inky filaments of shadow to his cheeks, like a colorless flush. “After everything they’ve done to you, how can you trust them?”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Kris said slowly, eyes downcast. His mouth drooped, making him look older; almost as tired as I felt. “Gloriette is a manipulator, you know that. There’s a reason she came alone, even though you have every reason to want her dead.”

  I glanced at Basil, who was still silent. For just a moment, I wanted my big brother back. I wanted him to make the decision and tell me what to do. I wanted him to hug me and whisper, Don’t panic. Instead he met my eyes for a long moment without speaking. Then he just lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I trust you,” he said simply. “You haven’t led us wrong yet. This is your call.”

  I let my breath out, the air heavy in my lungs. Two votes against, one abstention. I glanced down at my shoulder, craning my neck. “What about you?”

  “I believe she is offering to take us to the heart of the Machine that caused all of this,” said Nix, its voice so quiet I wasn’t sure the others could hear it. “Whether we do as she asks or not, we will be where we wish to go.”

  I glanced at Kris, who was watching Nix on my shoulder with a frown. When he saw me looking, he sighed. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t programmed it to think for itself.”

  I grinned, taking that moment to breathe again fully for the first time since the Administrator had walked into the archives. Straightening, I raised my voice. “All right, Gloriette. Take us down.”

  CHAPTER 32

  The path Gloriette took mirrored the one I’d used when I was wandering the Institute, half lost, before my harvest. If she was doing it on purpose to set my mind at ease, it wasn’t working. The memories of that day were screaming through my mind, calling alarm and danger, warning me away. It was discovering Eve at the Machine’s heart that sent me fleeing for the Iron Wood. Maybe if I’d never come here, I’d be home now, with my parents, living a blissfully dull life.

  At first the corridors were dark, still part of the abandoned section of the Institute. We had only Kris’s lantern for light, making me wonder if Gloriette had come to find us in the dark. The corridor was narrow enough that we walked single file, which felt eerily as though we were marching to our own executions. Nix stirred now and then, whispering remarks in my ear to remind me I wasn’t alone, even though I couldn’t see my friends behind me.

  Then Gloriette opened a door at the end of the corridor, and light flooded in. These lights were more stable than the ones we’d hijacked for the records hall, though even they had a telltale jolt every now and then. Gloriette paused, eyeing Kris.

  “You can leave that here,” she informed him.

  Kris didn’t reply; though he turned the lantern off, he didn’t set it down, clutching it stubbornly. I didn’t blame him. If Gloriette was trying to play us, at least we wouldn’t be left in darkness.

  When we started moving again, I recognized the corridor. It was a long, slow spiral, the barely perceptible curve playing tricks on my eyes. Though I hadn’t known it at the time, Eve had led me down this very hall, using the lights to goad me farther and farther. This time there was nothing to guide me but Gloriette’s form ahead of me.

  We’d gotten about halfway down when something tickled at my mind, barely more than a whisper against my thoughts. I paused, causing Oren to stumble straight into me, though he caught himself an instant later. Gloriette hadn’t stopped, and no one else seemed to notice what I was feeling, not even Basil. It couldn’t be magic, not with the dampening field that shielded the Institute from my senses. I started moving again, but I couldn’t shake the feeling—like there were cobwebs inside my mind.

  The feeling grew stronger as we descended, until my heart was pounding with it. Flares of sensation in my mind, flashes of light across my vision and whispers in my ears. Nix sensed my tension, if not what was causing it, and pressed close against my neck, mechanisms whirring and ready for quick action.

  We were a few yards from the door at the end of the spiral when I stopped, mind spinning. The dampening field made it hard to concentrate, but—

  “It’s Eve,” I gasped, staggering sideways until I hit the wall for support.

  “What?” Kris skidded to a halt next to me.

  “She’s in there. She’s—” But I couldn’t describe what she was doing. Flares of magic lanced at my bones. Eve was losing control.

  Gloriette was staring at me. “She’s inside the Machine?” As I watched, her face drained of color.

  I dragged myself upright again and headed for the end of the corridor at a run. The door flew open when I collided with it, and I spilled out onto a catwalk.

  Though I’d seen this place a thousand times in my nightmares, nothing prepared me for coming face-to-face with the reality again. The doorway opened into a cavern vast enough that it could have held several reservoirs, machinery and circuits and gears lining every inch of the curving walls. Catwalks crisscrossed the space in every direction. The glass wires dripping from the ceiling no longer held the glowing Renewable, but instead writhed as if in response to a sentient mind; sinuous, intent.

  Eve was at the Machine’s heart, shining like a miniature sun. Dozens of architects ran this way and that, some heading toward her and others running away. As I watched, a cluster of glass wires lashed out and knocked one of the fleeing architects over the edge of the catwalk. For an instant, Eve’s glow lit his face so clearly I could see it from across the cavern as he reached futilely for the rail
ing above him. His screams echoed in the spherical Machine long after he’d hit the bottom three hundred feet below.

  “We’re paying for our sins.” I don’t know how I heard Gloriette’s whisper over the echoing shouts and screams in the heart of the Machine, but when I turned to look at her she was clutching at the railing as though it was all that kept her from falling to her death.

  “Stay here!” I screamed, glancing from her to the others. I knew they wouldn’t listen, but maybe they’d hesitate and buy me a little time.

  “She’ll kill you!” screamed Nix, clutching at my collar, refusing to stay. The pixie always knew what I was going to do a second before I did it.

  “Probably,” I panted. “But maybe I can stop her first.”

  I scrambled away, breaking into a sprint. My feet pounding against the metal sent aching shockwaves up my legs, the clanging of my footsteps rising over the screams.

  “Eve!” I shouted when I was close enough for my voice to carry. “Eve, you told me you didn’t want revenge!”

  She was glowing so brightly that she was encased in a ball of light, too blinding for me to make out her features. But the magic didn’t so much as flicker at the sound of my voice, as though she couldn’t even hear me.

  “Don’t let them make you into this!” I drew breath to speak again, but a glass tendril swung my way and I had to throw myself to the catwalk to avoid being brushed into the chasm like a pesky insect.

  I craned my neck, eyes watering as I tried to look through the glare of her light. Beyond her, on a catwalk slightly below mine, was a cluster of architects and a man on his knees. He had a hood over his face, but I knew by the bands of iron locked around his arms and feet who it must be: Dorian.

  I’d have to run past Eve’s position to get to him, but I knew her magic would destroy me before I ever reached her. I ran to the edge of the catwalk, grasping the railing and leaning out as far as I could. I tried to gauge the distance to the next bridge below me, shifting back a few paces until I was lined up.