Shadowlark

by Meagan Spooner

  And then Prometheus saw me, too. His expression went from one filled with icy fury to one of confusion. Then recognition flared all across his features—confusion turned to horror. “No,” he whispered.

  And then I knew who it was. It wasn’t Caesar. Of course not—because that was impossible. Caesar was still at home.

  It was my other brother. It was Basil.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 23

  My brother and I stared at each other. For an interminable moment the rest of the audience chamber ceased to exist, no more than an animated blur outside the tense corridor of space between us.

  Then, abruptly, everything around us came rushing back, and the moment shattered. A pair of Eagles grabbed me, pinning my hands behind my back while Adjutant came between me and Prometheus, wielding another of those talon weapons.

  “Is that how you greet your god?” he hissed for my ears alone, eyes snapping. Gone was the polite, almost considerate man from the interrogation room, replaced by an utter madman. Shaking, he stretched out the device, and I braced myself for another dose of overwhelming magic.

  “Stop!” My brother’s voice was deeper, more resonant than I remembered. And yet I could hear it threatening to crack, held together only by determination. “Stop. Take her—take her away. Put her somewhere.”

  “But sir,” Adjutant said, straightening out of my vision, calm once again. The Eagles were forcing my head down so I couldn’t see my brother. “Sir, this is the girl. The one who can magic iron.” A murmur rippled through the crowd, shock and fear and disbelief. “This is the girl you wanted to use.” Adjutant sounded patient, as if he suspected Prometheus— Basil—simply didn’t understand my significance.

  “I’m aware of that,” said Basil, regaining some control over himself. “And I asked you to take her away. I’ll deal with her later.”

  Adjutant hesitated. Even though my shock and confusion I could tell he was not pleased to have been so ordered— perhaps there was a seed of dissention in Prometheus’s rule. Before I could process the thought, Adjutant gestured to the Eagles restraining me. If I could have spoken through my shock, I would have told them no restraint was necessary. All desire to fight had drained away the moment I recognized my brother’s face. They hoisted me up under my arms and started to make for the door.

  “And Adjutant,” said my brother, “don’t throw her into one of your interrogation rooms. She’s our guest. Make sure she’s treated like one.”

  I didn’t resist as they took me away. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think—the hallways passed in a blur. I had no sense for how far we traveled or for how long, only that my brother was here, my brother was alive. My brother was Prometheus.

  My brother is the madman . . . my brother.

  The world intruded on my horror when the Eagles dropped me unceremoniously on the floor. I hit carpet, the thick plush cushioning my fall.

  I heard Adjutant clear his throat, and I looked up at him blearily.

  “It seems Prometheus has decided to seek your voluntary cooperation,” he said calmly. There was no sign of that fury I’d seen before. Part of me wondered if I’d imagined the way his face transformed earlier—it seemed so impossible, coming from this quiet, controlled man. “It wasn’t what I recommended, but I suggest you consider his offer very, very carefully.”

  And then he was gone with the sound of a door shutting gently behind him.

  Reluctantly I lifted my head, staring numbly around at my new surroundings. It was a small room but richly appointed. A full-sized wooden bed with fluffy white bedclothes stood in the corner, with a matching wooden nightstand and a desk opposite. The desk had an ink blotter, paper, and an array of pens. There were no windows, but landscape paintings on the walls gave the illusion of being aboveground.

  It was the nicest room I’d been in since the dining hall at the Institute, and yet my mouth tasted of ashes.

  How could Basil be Prometheus? Basil was fighting Prometheus. And yet . . .

  The resistance movement had found a journal full of schematics for Prometheus’s machines, Prometheus’s plans. They’d assumed it was the very first resistor, the very first person to go off-grid and study Prometheus. They’d found the journal after Prometheus took power—but that didn’t mean it was written after he took power.

  I imagined my brother living in the walls of a dying city, trying to figure out how to save it. Imagined him walking into the square and talking until people listened, until they agreed with him, decided to help him do what he knew would save the city. My brother had always been good with machines, with magic. That Prometheus, the one who swayed a whole city with his words, who figured out how to save it—that Prometheus, I could believe was my brother.

  But how could my brother enslave an entire race of people? Even the Institute only held one Renewable. How many did my brother hold captive in the bowels of Central Processing, their life torn out of them, only to regenerate enough to be harvested again?

  Sick, I recalled the picture of Prometheus in the book, his liver torn out each night, to regrow each day. He took that name when he first took power. He had to have planned it all then.

  I dragged myself to my feet and tried the door. I was unsurprised to find it locked, but surprised when it opened and an Eagle stood there, watching me. “Do you need anything?” he asked politely.

  I swallowed. I needed my brother. My real brother, not this monster in his place.

  “No, thank you.”

  The door closed again. Locked again. I scanned the room again, more closely this time, only to discover that the pixie who had been Nix was there too, perched now on the desk chair.

  “What’re you doing here?” My voice was hoarse, hostile.

  “I have been assigned to watch you,” replied PX-148. “If there is anything you require I will communicate it to Adjutant.”

  Exhausted by grief and revulsion, I sank down onto the carpet. To use the bed felt too much like submission, acceptance.

  “Nix,” I whispered. We were alone for the first time since I’d seen it again, but it hadn’t dropped the act. “Please wake up. Talk to me.”

  “I am PX-148. What do you wish me to say?”

  “Anything. Tell me a story.” I let my head fall to the carpet, my muscles screaming at me from the abuse of the talon. Exhausted, I felt as though I’d been hiking through the wilderness for weeks, only to end up back where I’d started.

  “I am not programmed to entertain. Please issue another command.”

  I closed my eyes. “Never mind. You’re not Nix.” “Correct. I am PX-148.”

  • • •

  Sometime later the door opened with a clang, startling me upright. Adjutant stood in the doorway, looking down at me half-prone on the floor. “Pick yourself up,” he said coolly. “Prometheus will see you now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere for him,” I croaked, dragging myself up onto my knees.

  “Then you’re in luck,” replied Adjutant, his eyes cold. “He has come to you.” This was clearly a source of dismay for Adjutant—he disapproved. But he would never question Prometheus.

  I got slowly to my feet. At least I could face what my brother had become while standing.

  Adjutant nodded after a moment and then straightened. “Prometheus,” he announced, and then stepped to the side to make way for his master.

  My brother walked in.

  “You may go now, Adjutant,” said Basil, his eyes on me.

  Adjutant was good—the shock barely registered on his features. “Sir, you are unarmed. Do you think it’s wise to—”

  “I said go.” His voice was heavy, final.

  Adjutant hesitated only half a second longer and then retreated back out the door, closing it gently behind him.

  Basil was silent, watching me, his expression dropping slowly into one of disbelief and sadness and confusion. He was wearing an impeccably tailored suit of robes, black and red, the uniform of Prometheus. Fire and ash, light and dark. It
made him look taller, grander—nothing like the brother I knew. There were only his eyes, the warm, soft brown that I remembered, to tell me I hadn’t gone mad.

  “It really is you,” he murmured, taking a step toward me. I stayed silent, not trusting myself to speak.

  “When they told me they’d found a girl who could magic iron, I thought—here, at last, someone like me. But I never thought—I never thought . . .” His face changed suddenly, his sadness mingling with horror. “Does that mean—how are you here? Why aren’t you in the city?”

  “They did to me what they did to you,” I said, choking. “I ran away. I reached the Iron Wood, and Dorian told me you had come here. I came to find you. I came to find Basil.”

  He shut his red-rimmed eyes for a moment. “I’m here. I’m so sorry, Lark. I never thought they’d—I thought their experiment ended with me.” He broke off and came towards me, putting his arms around me.

  For a moment he was just Basil again. My eyes burned, my body shaking with the effort of not breaking down. My big brother, the one who always made everything right—I ducked my face against his shoulder, gasping for air.

  In that moment, all I wanted to do was let myself go, sob into my brother’s shoulder, let him comfort me the way he had always done. I’d found him, finally. We were together.

  He squeezed, his own voice choked when he spoke.

  “I would never hurt you,” my brother said fiercely. “Never, you hear? Ignore Adjutant, ignore everyone.”

  A sick feeling twisted inside me. No, not my brother, I corrected myself. My brother was someone who would never, ever become this. My brother was dead. This was Prometheus.

  I pulled away, stepping back. “But you’d hurt others?”

  Prometheus slowly lowered his arms. “Lark,” he said slowly. “You don’t understand. It’s so much more complex than you—this city needs me. It needed me when I first got here, and it needs me now.”

  “Why do any of this?” My eyes were still burning. Out of my peripheral vision I could see PX-148, motionless, the white eyes staring straight ahead.

  “Because of you,” Prometheus whispered.

  I stopped short, jerking my eyes from the pixie to look at the leader of Lethe. “Me?”

  “All of it was for you,” he said, closing his eyes. “I wanted a place that would be safe for you. I was going to come back and get you when this was all ready. Before the architects could do to you what they did to me.”

  I felt as though the floor was sliding away from me, making me struggle just to keep my balance. “I never asked for this,” I said, horrified.

  Prometheus shook his head, standing there just inside the door to my richly decorated cell, looking so much older than I remembered. “It was only supposed to be for a little while. I was going to fix the city and then once it was safe, return for you.”

  “And they’d just accept their beloved Prometheus living among them with his kid sister?”

  He shook his head again, taking a step toward me. “They see the office, Lark. They don’t see the man. They recognize the uniform and the power and the command, but they don’t know me. Only the people who’ve been with me from the beginning know me at all. Adjutant, a few of my advisors. If I left and came back in ordinary clothes, as an ordinary citizen, no one would ever know it was me. You and I could live normal lives here. Safe lives, away from the Institute, away from the Empty Ones.”

  “So why didn’t you come for me?” I couldn’t help but spit the question, anger overcoming my shock. This betrayal, more than any other, burned me to my core. “Why didn’t you do what you set out to do?”

  “It wasn’t that easy,” he said softly. “There was always something more to do. It was never quite enough. Every time I thought things were under control something else would fail—Adjutant would report something else needing power I didn’t have, that the city didn’t have. It never ends. I’m never done.”

  His eyes were haunted, tired, riddled with guilt. I had to fight the urge to go to his side, try to comfort this stranger who had once been my brother. But in my mind’s eye I saw Tansy, I saw the Institute’s enslaved Renewable. I imagined Olivia’s brother, and everyone who’d ever fallen to Prometheus.

  “All those Renewables,” I whispered. “You’re no better than the Institute. How could you?”

  “So few Renewables actually come through here, and the cost to keep all these people safe is so high. I offer them the chance to help—it’s only the ones who refuse, Lark. It’s only the people who won’t do their part.”

  He was actually pleading with me, begging me to understand. I shook my head. “You should have found another way.”

  “There is no other way,” he snapped before closing his eyes, rubbing at his face with both hands. “You don’t think I’ve tried? We’d need three, four times the Renewables we have, all cooperating, all willing to contribute. We’d need an army of them. I’ve done the calculations a thousand times, Lark. There’s no way I can make it sustainable without using them. And it’s only a few people, a very small number. A small sacrifice for the good of the entire city.”

  “A small sacrifice,” I echoed. Nina’s face, right before I took her power to save all our lives, flashed in my mind’s eye.

  Emotions warred inside me—I wanted him to hug me again, I wanted him to tell me stories, I wanted him to tell me what to do next, that everything would be fine. And I wanted to hit him, tear into him, hurt him the way he’d hurt so many people—destroy him for what he’d done.

  “Lark—please.” He came toward me, hands outstretched. But when I backed away, he stopped short, as though he’d run into an invisible barrier.

  I struggled to speak, my voice shaking. I had to keep my eyes on the motionless pixie, not trusting myself to look at my brother. “I looked so hard for you. Everything I’ve done, I’ve been looking for you. There was no one on this earth I wanted to find more than you, to be with. And when I thought you were dead, I would have killed Prometheus for you.” Swallowing, I forced myself to look at him. Basil. Prometheus. Someone entirely different, who I didn’t know anymore. “But now I wish you had been dead. At least then I’d still have the memory of Basil, my brother. Not this—this monster.”

  Prometheus inhaled shakily, as close to tears as I was. “Lark, you’re still my sister. I still—”

  “No.” I cut him off. “No, I’m not.” I dug into my pocket abruptly, my hands closing around the pair of paper birds: one half scorched and crumpled, telling the story of Basil’s journey, the other yellowed with water and exposure, squished flat and carefully reconstructed, revealing everything I’d been through. I threw them both at him, watching them ricochet off his face and neck—he flinched, eyes falling on them where they hit the carpet.

  “You’re not my brother,” I said shortly. “I don’t know you.”

  He gazed at me and I stared back, unwilling to crumble first. This world had broken my brother, but I wouldn’t let it break me. Basil—Prometheus—swallowed and then, very carefully, knelt and gathered up the paper birds, breaking eye contact. I closed my eyes and kept them closed, even when I heard the door open with a screech and then clang shut again.

  It was only after he left that I let myself go, sinking to the floor where I’d stood, too shell-shocked to cry.

  “Nix.” My own voice sounded alien, as if it belonged to a stranger. “What do I do?”

  But the pixie wasn’t programmed to deal with such a vague question. It couldn’t answer me.

  CHAPTER 24

  It was impossible to track the passage of time. There were no windows in my room, but even if there had been, I had the nagging suspicion that we were so far underground that it wouldn’t have mattered. Underground, I thought dully. I’d been underground from the moment I arrived in Lethe— when had I started to think of Lethe itself as the world, rather than underground itself?

  I kept replaying what I’d seen in my brother’s journal— the drawings of machines, the schematics
for altering the flow of magic. My face, here and there. Always on his mind.

  How could Basil have fallen so far in the past few years to think that this was what I wanted? That peace and safety, even in this wilderness, was worth these monstrosities?

  This landscape twisted things. Took good things and made them something dark.

  I sat up, unable to sit still any longer. I tried asking the pixie what time it was, but it didn’t understand the question.

  “Is it day? Night?”

  “The position of the sun is irrelevant here.”

  “Yes, but is it . . . are people sleeping now? Awake?”

  The pixie gave no sign of thinking, none of Nix’s little ticks and tells that showed it was considering the question. Kris told me that they’d programmed Nix to appear more human—to think, to learn, to be sympathetic. Without those little touches, this creature was just a machine. “Without concrete data, it is plausible that some will be awake and some asleep.”

  I gave up. I crossed the room and spread both palms against the door’s cold, metal alloy surface. Grimacing at the chill against my face, I pressed my ear to it. I could hear sound, but warped through the metal it sounded only like clinking and clanking. It could be pipes—it could be footsteps. I had no way of knowing whether there were still guards outside my door, but it seemed likely. And surely Prometheus would be smart enough to post Renewable guards, capable of sensing if I used too much magic.

  In all the confusion, they still hadn’t searched me thoroughly. I still had Oren’s knife in its sheath in my boot. I also still had the blackout device—but after what the talon had done to me, I wasn’t quite willing to try it. If it knocked me out the way Parker had theorized, I’d be worse off than before.

  Closing my eyes, I let my awareness trickle out through the door. Although it wasn’t solid iron, the particular alloy made it difficult to sense what lay beyond it. I could, however, sense the lock. It was risky, if there were guards outside who could sense me, but I had no choice. I refused to sit here quietly, waiting for Prometheus to come back and try some other way of winning my understanding. Besides, somewhere out there was Oren—and Wesley—and they might need my help. Not to mention Olivia and her crew, who had surely been captured by now.