Shadowlark (17 page)

Despite the city folk all around, it was the first time I’d been alone—truly alone—since I’d first crossed the Wall, back when I left my home city. That girl would’ve hardly recognized me now. Though my heart was pounding and my every sense on the alert for anyone paying me more attention than they should, my steps felt surer than they had for a long time. There was no turning back. This was my mission, and no one had manipulated me into it.

I did my best to avoid eye contact with anyone in a uniform. There was still a chance someone might recognize me as Oren’s companion.

I picked up my pace, aiming for one of the many ramps leading up into the city stacked on itself. The entrance into the tunnels that I was looking for was, officially, just a drain for runoff from the constant drizzle overhead. I hiked upward until I reached the top of the ramp, following Marco’s instructions, until I heard running water. The source of the sound was a trough running along a corroded metal roof. I followed it, ducking and weaving between the traffic of city dwellers and the ever-present machines, until it gushed out of a drainpipe and into a gutter that led down a different ramp.

The city was like a three-dimensional maze—here and there I had to leave the gutter to follow another path, sometimes heading up in order to ultimately find another path down. It took me the better part of an hour, but finally I ended up splashing into the gutter as it flowed into an alley between two dwellings. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure no one had seen me vanish into the shadows and then dropped to my knees in the rushing water.

The drain was covered by bars, each about a hand’s width apart—too small to fit through. But Marco had prepared me for this, too. I pulled out Oren’s knife and dug at the top of the bars with its tip. The “mortar” there was nothing more than wet clay, high enough out of the water that it wouldn’t get washed away, but damp enough that it could never truly dry. I pulled several of the bars free until there was a gap wide enough to fit my shoulders, and then I wriggled through.

Even as my lungs constricted, an automatic response to the close quarters, the rest of me had to suppress a thrill. This was exactly the kind of thing my brother would’ve done. More than ever, I knew we were on the right track.

Inside the drainpipe there was enough room to get up on my hands and knees, and I took enough time to put the bars back, replacing the clay and wedging them in until I felt confident they’d stay put. Then I crawled forward, my sleeves and trousers soaked from the water. The tunnel branched—Marco had said nothing about this. One tunnel was significantly smaller than the other, but I was used to tight spaces. It was too dark to see anything, but from the way my labored breathing echoed, I could sense a larger space somewhere ahead down the smaller path. I made my way toward it.

Just as I spilled out of the pipe and into what felt like a broad cavern, a pair of hands grabbed me and threw me against the wall. Instantly my senses knew it was a Renewable, but the power signature was so muted and well hidden that it kept slithering out of my grasp. I opened my mouth to shout, hoping that Marco and Parker were close enough to hear me, but before I could get out a sound a hand clamped over my mouth.

“Hush!” It was a woman’s voice, strangely accented. “Don’t scream. I’m going to let you go—slowly—and when I do you’ll tell me your name and what you’re doing here.”

Her grip over the bottom half of my face eased and then pulled away. I could still sense her close, though, ready to silence me if I screamed. Her other hand still pressed me back against the wall.

Her other hand loosened, and a quiet chuckle echoed over the chamber. “Like hell you’re lost,” my captor said. “You’re
almost
exactly where you’re meant to be. My name’s Nina. Marco and Parker are at the other end, where you were supposed to come out.”

I tugged my shirt straight as I got back on my feet again. I squinted in the darkness but could make out no more than a dim outline of someone a few feet away. “You could’ve just asked me without smashing me into the wall,” I pointed out.

“Well, you could’ve actually come out where you were supposed to,” she responded, sounding unfazed.

I heard a tiny trickle of magic, and then a flame flickered to life. It was nestled in the palm of Nina’s hand, and she cupped it to the end of a torch.

“Is that a good idea? Wasting magic?” I spoke to cover the wave of wanting that coursed through my other, darker half at the display.

“The torches are too wet to light any other way.” Sure enough, the torch hissed and popped loudly as the water evaporated—and finally came to life.

We were in a stone room, different from the tunnels the rebels inhabited, which were formed by alleys and forgotten buildings. This must’ve been part of the original city that now lay in ruins overhead. A sewer system, perhaps, not unlike the one my brother and I explored beneath our home city.

Nina was about my height but several years older. The torchlight revealed the barest hint of crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes, but she didn’t look more than twenty-five. She had dark hair and skin, though in the tricky firelight it was hard to tell exactly what shade. She smiled, her teeth white, and jerked her head toward a corridor that led off away from the drainpipe.

“We’ll grab Marco and Parker, and then it’ll be up to you to take us where we’re going.”

When we reached the others, Parker greeted me warmly while Marco stood off to the side, arms crossed over his chest, his every movement radiating dubiousness as he watched me. We were in an intersection of tunnels, three paths in addition to the one we’d arrived through.

Parker had brought the journal, after a long debate about whether it was worth risking such a priceless artifact. But both Parker and I had argued that there might be clues in the journal that wouldn’t translate into a copy, and because we were going on the mission, we ultimately won out. He pulled the journal out of his coat lining and handed it to me.

“As best I can tell, this here is the cistern where Nina was waiting,” Parker said, stabbing his finger at a rounded star shape at one edge of Basil’s diagram. “It’s the only thing I know that’s shaped like that, and it’s the only distinctive mark on this map.”

“If it even is a map,” Marco interjected.

“Oh, shut up, Marco.” Nina dismissed him with a roll of her eyes. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Nice to see you too,” Marco muttered in reply. Despite the banter, there was an obvious affection between them, and I wondered how long Nina usually went undercover without direct contact with her fellow rebels. Her life must be an exceedingly lonely one.

I took the journal from Parker, my eyes on the mark for the cistern. A series of crosshatches led in different directions, but I could see a rectangle leading off from the cistern—Basil’s symbol for a pipe—and I knew which way we must have come. I traced the path to an intersection—the symbol was like an asterisk, but with five branches. I looked up, scanning the other tunnels. There were only four in total.

Where was the fifth?

I handed the journal back to Parker absently and headed for the far wall, where the fifth branch would’ve been. It was stable, even—the stones looked undisturbed, no sign that there had been a rockfall or a recent change to brick up the tunnel. I frowned, running my hands over the stones.

“What’s she doing?” Marco’s voice echoed.

“Shush,” said Nina. “Let her work.” She lifted the torch, giving me more light to see by.

I could feel their eyes on me, all expecting me to pull some kind of miracle out of the shadows. How badly they must need this exit, to allow this wild goose chase on the word of a girl they barely knew. Forcing them to the back of my mind, I concentrated on the stones.

I could see nothing out of place, but my fingertips felt something different, a ridge where there shouldn’t be one. I dropped to my knees until I was eye-level with the stone. It was covered in algae and mildew, and I scraped my fingernails along it, clearing some of the gunk away. There was a design scratched into the stone, the barest of indentations. It was shaped a little like a V, only the lines were curved.

“Did you find something?” Nina came to kneel next to me, the torch flickering.

“I’ve seen this somewhere before,” I murmured. “Parker, can I see the journal?”

He handed it to me, still open to the page with the map. But that wasn’t what I was interested in. I flipped back toward the beginning until I found one of Basil’s sketches of the landscape. I scanned it, then stabbed my finger at a cluster of markings over one of the mountains.

“There.”

When I’d first seen the drawing, which was subtly and artistically done, I hadn’t even noticed what was there that shouldn’t have been: birds. They were distant in the picture, lacking detail—nothing more than lines, curved V’s to give the impression of flight. But there were no birds out there; at least, none that I’d seen outside of the Iron Wood. And I noticed, now that I stared at them, that the shade of ink they were drawn in was subtly different. As though they’d been added to the picture much later.

“Shit, she’s right.” That was Marco, who’d given up being doubtful and was leaning in over my shoulder.

I handed the journal back and reached for the stone, giving it a sharp shove. It was loose, and it gave a little with a teeth-aching screech of stone on stone. I pushed again, and this time it slid all the way through, clattering down onto the stone on the other side.

I’d been expecting some sort of secret panel to open and tried to conceal the stab of nervous disappointment as I leaned down to put my eye to the hole. There was nothing to see there except darkness, and the hole was too narrow to fit the torch through.

“Now what?” Nina asked.

I couldn’t afford to look like I was as lost as they were—they were counting on me to know my brother, to think the way he thought. I dropped down onto my side and put my hand through the hole.

“Lark—wait!” Parker’s voice rang out. “Don’t just stick your arm in there, you don’t know what’s . . . it could be a trap, you could hurt yourself.”

I shook my head. “Basil wouldn’t put a trap here. He left this trail to be followed.” I hoped I sounded more sure than I felt.

I kept easing my arm through until I was shoulder-deep in the hole. It was a little wider than my arm was—which made sense, because Basil’s arm would’ve been thicker than mine. I groped around blind, my hands encountering slimy stone and little else. My skin crawled as my hand passed through a cobweb and something large and skittery dropped onto my hand—I stifled a gasp and gave my arm an abrupt shake, and whatever it was flew off.

Nina must’ve noticed my flinching, and she silently put a hand on my arm. Her touch was warm, steadying. She was not a large woman, and not strong like Olivia, but there was strength in her reassurance regardless. I took a deep breath and kept feeling around for some clue to what to do next.

It wasn’t until I bent my elbow up and started groping at the wall itself that my scrabbling fingers encountered something different. Metal, not stone. A long, rough spar about as big around as my finger. I wrapped my fingers around it, ignoring the way rust flaked off at my touch, and gave it a downward yank.

For a long, heart-pounding moment, nothing happened. Then there was a solid
thunk
, and then the clanking of an invisible gear somewhere under the stone floor. The wall itself shifted with a shower of dust and mortar, making me choke. A pair of hands dragged me backward abruptly, and I was grateful for the leather jacket—my arm would’ve been shredded without it. Nina hauled me to my feet as the wall—the entire wall—swung a foot inward.

Marco thumped me on the back while I stood there hacking and coughing up dust and then strode cheerfully past me. “Now that’s more like it.”

• • •

We pressed on, into the dark. Every now and then we could hear voices and knew we were passing within earshot of the known tunnels honeycombing the underground. We kept mostly silent, whispering only when we hit intersections and other doors, searching for the telltale marks that would lead the way. The further we got, the more my heart sang—it really was my brother’s passageway. I could almost feel him here, like I could feel his ghost in the unused sewer system of my own city. It was as close as I was ever going to get to him again.

I was almost disappointed when Parker pointed out that we were heading upward, suggesting that we really were heading for the surface. The tunnel floor was set at a barely imperceptible slant—so mild that it was only the slow burning in our calves that alerted us to the fact that we were walking uphill.

The air grew fresher as we walked, and drier—and colder. The leather jacket was good protection against cuts and scrapes, but it didn’t offer much warmth. We picked up our pace, as much to warm ourselves as to hurry toward the destination.

Eventually we reached another of Basil’s hidden doors, but when Nina knelt down beside me to offer more light, the torch flickered abruptly, the flames licking backward.

“There’s air coming through here,” she murmured, nudging me aside so she could press her cheek to the nearly invisible seam in the stone. “Dry air. Outside air.”

The surface.

Our eyes met briefly, and then she jerked her head to the side and moved away so I could get at the latch to open the door. This time when the door swung open, it opened on the cold night air of the outside. A rush of wind howled past, throwing our hair back and plastering our clothes to our bodies.

“You’ve done it,” shouted Parker over the air, stepping forward and gripping my shoulder.

“We should shut the door again,” I shouted back. “This air is going somewhere—if it starts howling out of the pipe, someone’s going to notice and come looking for this exit.”

“Let’s go,” Marco said, pushing past us.

“Wait—we don’t know what’s up there—”

He put his face close to mine so I could hear better. “We’ve got to know where this comes out before we send people up here. We’ve got to scout.”