Skylark

by Meagan Spooner

  I had no time to argue. With his customary silence and ease of movement, Oren appeared again on the far side of the clearing. He had found water somewhere and washed himself. Even with his face clean, he was no less inscrutable. Though his hair was still damp, it proved to be a sandy brown when clean. He glanced from me to the pixie, which had fallen silent again, and then crossed toward us to dump the now heavy pack at my side.

  “I’ll get you as far as the edge of the meadow,” he said, turning his back on me to kick dirt over the last glowing coals of the night’s fire. “Then you’re on your own.”

  I listened for any hint of the emotion in his voice I had heard last night. There was none. He tossed me the canteen, which he had refilled, and told me to put it in my pack. He could get another.

  “You sleep too late,” he told me shortly. “The sun’s well up, you should get moving. It’ll take about three days—no, for you it’ll be four or five—to reach the Iron Wood.”

  A flicker of yesterday’s anger stirred. How could he expect me to move as quickly as he did, with less than a week’s experience living under the sky? I felt how heavy my pack was with food, though, and bit my tongue.

  He led the way back through the wood. I longed to stop and bid farewell to the meadow, the sea of flowers shining violet-white in the filtered light, but Oren was pushing harder than he had the day before and I had no strength to catch up again if I stopped.

  When we stepped back outside the barrier, it was raining again. The sky was monochrome above the slow, steady deluge. The last of the fire’s warmth left my bones, and I shivered miserably as I trudged in Oren’s wake. Where was the boy I’d seen last night, all longing and intensity? All I saw now was a dim shape through the downpour, staying far enough ahead of me that I could read nothing from his body language.

  Oren led me along a creek through to the edge of the wood, until I could see the hills stretching away toward the blue mountains. A broken, gray-green line cut through them, unnaturally straight. “Follow the train tracks southwest through the hills until they cross the river,” he said, lifting an arm in that direction. His hand was steady, his voice flat. “It cuts a pass through the mountains; it’ll be chilly but doable if you follow the riverbank. When you reach the falls, cut due west.

  “Dig your fire pits low, and try to keep them in the woods where they won’t be seen at a distance. Keep small, keep quiet. You’re in their territory now. If you see them in the distance, don’t stop, just run as quietly and as quickly as you can. Try to cross some water to break up your trail. If you see them up close—” He gave a strange shrug, and let his arm fall again. “Don’t get up close.”

  I shivered. “Okay,” I whispered. I wanted to shout, Don’t leave me alone.

  “You’ve got enough food for maybe five days if you’re careful. And you should be careful. Will you be okay in the rain?”

  The sky was an even gray, a two-dimensional expanse not unlike the Wall at home. The rain dripped steadily, a reminder of the empty sea above. I took a deep breath and nodded. His face was so blank that I wanted to scream at him to look at me, to see how unprepared for this I was, and to stay at my side. If I knew how to summon that ferocity of mixed desires he’d displayed the night before, I would have in a heartbeat.

  “All right.” Oren glanced at me once and brushed past me, heading back toward the forest. This time he moved so silently that I realized the minute noises of movement he made in the camp were for my benefit alone. I watched him go, not realizing until the shadows of the forest began to swallow him that he was leaving for good.

  “Wait!” He stopped. He didn’t speak, just stood there tense and waiting for me to go on.

  “You’re really just going to leave me?”

  “Yes.” His voice was as dispassionate as his face usually was.

  But I need you. I only got as far as the first word before it stuck in my throat, strangled. “But—”

  He made an abrupt slashing motion with his hand, cutting me off without a word. “I can’t afford to need you,” he said harshly. “I can’t afford to need anyone.” He started moving again through the shadows.

  For a moment I was too shocked to do anything but watch him go. Need me? I remember better when you’re around, came his voice, last night’s memory searing hot through the cold. He wasn’t leaving because I needed him. It was the opposite.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me not to go?” I whispered.

  He stopped, shoulders slightly stooped as his head bowed. “Would you listen?”

  I stood, shivering lightly in the morning rain. I wanted to say yes—I could learn to live out here like him. I could forget about my magic, learn to avoid the monsters, learn which pockets were full of food and which were deadly. Surely one friendly—or at least not dangerous—face now was better than a place so frightening even Oren was afraid.

  The pixie’s mechanism surged briefly as it stirred its wings from its perch on my shoulder.

  The Institute would still be coming for me. For all the resources it took to find me, the promise of a Renewable chained to them for life was worth it. They would never stop hunting me until I was safe with my own kind.

  Perhaps Oren, so skilled at tracking and hunting, read my answer in my face when he turned around to look at me. Or perhaps my silence was eloquent enough for him. He watched me for a long moment, the unlikely pale blue of his eyes stark in the shadows. Around me the rain roared, sweeping me up into its current, drowning me. I closed my eyes, gasping for breath and inhaling air and water both, and when I looked again Oren was gone.

  •  •  •

  Though the morning was cold and damp, I set a brisk enough pace that I soon warmed a little. It was faster than I would have moved before, but Oren’s warnings kept me going. The sunburn on my face was healing, and the mist of rain soothed the itching skin.

  I reached the train tracks he’d mentioned not long after I left the forest. Overgrown and broken, I wouldn’t have recognized them for what they were: highways for the huge magic engines that at one point had carried people and goods from one side of the continent to the other. Grass and trees, and time, had ripped the tracks apart, but left enough of a recognizable trail for me to follow.

  Nix and I talked, growing its vocabulary. Its voice wasn’t Oren’s and wasn’t mine—wasn’t Gloriette’s voice and wasn’t Kris’s. It had acquired a voice that was all of them, and none of them, and something all its own.

  Oren rarely spoke when we were walking, and in the silence now I imagined him just ahead, his shape visible now and then through the rain. I could almost see him, impatient, pushing faster. I quickened my pace, and tried to drive him from my mind.

  The tracks cut a neat path through the hills, saving me some climbing. Though they had appeared to be little more than gentle swells at a distance, up close my legs ached at the mere thought of having to climb them.

  My stomach informed me it was lunchtime when I reached the river, and I stopped at the broken and crumbling bridge that had once carried the trains over the water. I sat on an outcropping of rotting stone and mortar, letting my aching feet dangle weightlessly over space.

  I opened the pack, hoping to find the nuts he’d toasted last night, though my memory told me I had eaten them all. There was a little empty space at the top of the pack, where the supplies had settled—tucked into it was a cone of grubby paper.

  I pulled it out, the paper crinkling under my fingers. The rain spattered it, first one drop and then two and then a dozen, loud and shocking in the quiet. It was real paper, unrecycled paper. Old paper. Where had Oren found it? Had he any idea the rations you could get for such a treasure, back in the city?

  I turned it over in my hands and caught a flash of white. Nestled inside the cone, protected by it, was a handful of the tiny white flowers from the meadow.

  There was such beauty here, in the world beyond the Wall.

  A wave of loneliness swept over me. Three hours, and I wanted him back. Th
e sound of another human voice, the sight of another human face. No, not just another human face. Oren’s face. I put the flowers back in my pack, tucking them carefully where they wouldn’t be crushed against my body when I moved out again.

  I made a meager lunch of roasted tubers and strawberries. As I ate, I felt a familiar trickle down the back of my spine that I couldn’t blame on the rain.

  Someone was watching me.

  I immediately thought of Oren—perhaps he was still following, making sure I didn’t lose it the moment he left me alone? And yet as soon as the thought came to me, I abandoned it. Why would Oren cause such a cold shudder to run down my spine?

  “Nix,” I said softly. “Can you see anything? Hear anything?”

  The pixie buzzed off of my shoulder, and flitted up some yards above my head, darting here and there as it surveyed the landscape.

  “Nothing,” it reported as it swooped back down. “Why?”

  I shook my head. “I’m imagining things now that I’m alone, that’s all.”

  “Not alone,” Nix argued, landing back on my shoulder. “And you’ve been out here for some time now. Perhaps you should trust your instincts.”

  I shivered again, repacking my bag, careful now that I knew the flowers were there. The stone was cold beneath me—I wasted no time moving on.

  The feeling of being watched persisted. I waded through every stream that met the larger river, though the water soaked through my shoes and drove cold needles into my feet. If it would confuse my scent, it was worth numb toes.

  I couldn’t convince myself that the feeling of being watched was my imagination. After all, I’d felt something similar—if less frightening—when Oren was following me.

  “Have you ever heard of magic giving people other powers?” I asked the pixie, which was flitting on ahead and back, scouting the trail up ahead.

  “Other powers?”

  “Other than what we know about, being able to move objects and things.”

  “I suppose anything is possible,” it replied. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I said, glancing over my shoulder, half-expecting to see shadows out of the corner of my eye. “Just making conversation.”

  Perhaps it was possible that some extrasensory perception came hand in hand with the magic. Though no one in the city had ever mentioned such a thing, would they know? Everyone in the city had their magic taken away from them as children. Maybe I really was sensing something. It felt like a darkness, a strange, hungry pit somewhere at the edge of my senses. It was like the flashes of iridescence I sometimes saw out of the corner of my eye inside the barriers—but instead of light, this was dark. Empty. Void.

  Or maybe my fears and imagination were conspiring against me. I picked up my pace.

  By mid-afternoon the rain stopped, and by sunset the clouds were thinning. The sun glowed fiery against the overcast clouds as it sank, a sliver of it showing above the horizon to the southwest. I had begun to climb from the foot of the mountains. With visions of falling off a cliff in the dark, I found a copse of trees by the riverbank and made camp.

  Weariness soon took over, and I barely had energy to clear away the leaf litter, much less dig a pit. Still, fear outweighed exhaustion and I found a stone to use as a shovel. The pixie joined in, shifting forms and tunneling like some grounddwelling insect, stirring up the dirt.

  I scooped away the loose earth and lay down some kindling, starting the fire more easily than ever. Thank you, Oren, I thought, shoving the lighter back into my pocket. I was still shivering by the time I could sit back and let the fire grow on its own. My clothes were damp from the day’s rain, and a cold wind swept down from the mountains at my back.

  Though I felt too tired to eat, I forced down a handful of nuts and immediately fell into a doze, lulled by the crackle of the fire and the distant howling of the wind in the mountains.

  When I awoke, the fire was nearly dead. The sky was pitch-black, and through the treetops I caught glimpses of stars, the cloud cover having completely vanished. I sat bolt upright, breathing hard, straining to hear again the sound that had woken me.

  I could hear only the low hiss of the dying fire, the river, the howling wind.

  I stared at the fire, listening hard, trying to figure out what was bothering me so—then, with a jolt, I realized. The flames on the fire weren’t flickering. There was no wind.

  I froze, listening to the howls. They weren’t so distant now as the wind had been earlier. They carried no triumph, as they had when they’d devoured one of their own, only hunger and desolation and, increasingly, excitement. They were hunting.

  Dimly I saw the cobalt blue of Nix’s eyes appear in the firelight. “Lark,” it said, the word barely more than a hum.

  “I hear them,” I replied. My breath sounded louder than any shout. I rolled over and kicked dirt onto the fire as I’d seen Oren do. The flames went out with a sluggish hiss of protest.

  As my eyes blossomed with blue-white afterimages, the howls changed. Whoops and shouts, and with it—in the distance—the rattling of pebbles high above. They’d been watching my fire. They knew I was awake.

  I scrambled to my feet. Run quickly, run quietly. Cross water. Don’t let them get close. I left the pack of supplies. It would only slow me down. Later—if there was a later—I could come back for it.

  I heard Nix following me, a dim buzz in the background of the roaring in my ears. Something laughed in the distance, high and hysterical. I tripped and fell, and my hands splashed down into frigid water when I hit. I scrambled across the stream, every splash and gasp and step ringing like an alarm. So much for running quietly. I sucked in a breath of air and hurried low through the strip of woods, praying it was large enough to keep me hidden. I tried to remember what it had looked like in the daylight, and the only image that came to mind was agonizingly small.

  I burst out of the copse and into a world transformed by moonlight. Every blade of grass was edged in silver, and my shadow stood ahead of me so solidly that I nearly shrieked at the sight of it. I stopped for a heartbeat, trying to figure out which direction to go. Ahead rose the mountains—but I had heard the sound of feet on rocky slopes, hadn’t I? That must be where they were coming from.

  I turned to head out over the grassy hills. I had taken no more than a step before I saw them. Moving quickly, impossibly quickly, three shadows raced low to the ground, the grasses whipping around them. They were still some distance away, but closing fast. I turned so quickly my feet slipped in the still-muddy earth. I caught myself on my hands and then scrambled into a run.

  My eyes sought a hiding place. A cave, a ledge, some corridor in the hills in which I could lose myself. My muscles screamed in protest, but I ignored them, sprinting as hard as I could.

  Something black loomed up in front of me, and my head whipped up. Not a shadow—a shack, falling to pieces. Not great, but better than being run down on an open hillside.

  I could no longer hear Nix. I had no time to look around for it, no energy to turn my head to see how close the shadow people were. I aimed for the black doorway of the shack, closing in on it.

  I was only a few strides away when shadows melted out of the landscape, emerging from behind rocks, trees, out of the darkness itself. They were so close I could see their faces lit by the moonlight, their white eyes staring, mouths open and pointed teeth bared in hideous, ravenous grins.

  Chapter 22

  They had once been human. What other creature, after all, could have set such a trap? Herding me like a frightened rabbit into such a dead end? They had arms and legs and feet like any person, and most wore clothes, torn and unidentifiably filthy. Their hair hung in clumps turned black with dirt.

  I screamed and hurled myself at the shack. A hand closed over my ankle and yanked, throwing me down. My chin hit packed earth, and I tasted blood as I bit my tongue. As if they could sense that first blood, the air around me exploded into whoops and screams. I kicked back hard and felt my foot connect
with something that crunched audibly. The hand let go, accompanied by a howl of protest and rage.

  I scrambled for the doorway again only to feel multiple hands grab my legs and drag me out. Sharp nails dug into my skin, piercing through my pants, as my own fingers scrabbled at the dirt, trying to find anything to pull myself away.

  They flung me over, giving me a glimpse of the faces crowding over me. Skin blanched of all color, ash-gray in the moonlight but for the darker gray veins spreading across cheeks and throats. Pointed teeth and bright, wet lips snapped at me, long-nailed fingers tore at my clothes and skin.

  One of the creatures lunged for me, teeth closing over the fleshy part of my upper arm, sinking in. I waited for the agony of tearing flesh and muscle, but it never came. Instead there was a meaty, wet sound and the beast released me, flung away into the chaos.

  The howling sounds took on another tone, and they abandoned me for something else. I tried to drag myself toward the ruined shack, but the bitten arm throbbed, and I couldn’t gather the strength to move myself.

  The beasts were now a roiling cluster of shadows and torn clothing, their attention turned inward on something I couldn’t see for the mass of bodies. One flew at me and I rolled out of the way. It missed me by inches, spraying a fountain of something wet and hot over my face before hitting the ground and lying still.

  The struggling form in the center of the cluster swept two of the monsters away with a low kick, and then dove for me. I saw only a pair of white eyes in the darkness, staring into me. I shrieked and tried to kick it away. My foot connected with a solid thud, and my assailant grunted with pain but didn’t let go.

  “Lark!” it shouted, brushing my flailing foot aside. “Lark, it’s me!”

  The eyes weren’t white—they were palest blue. His hand wrapped around mine and he jerked me to my feet, shoving me back into the shack. It was barely more than a tool shed, and so full of rubble that there wasn’t enough room for the two of us. Oren whirled, putting his back to me, to face the pack regrouping around us.