Shadowlark (22 page)

I wasn’t out for long. I came to while still being dragged. Dimly I could see Adjutant ahead of me, leading the way—he’d summoned assistance somehow, because I was being dragged by two faceless Eagles. I still couldn’t move. Every bump and jostle made my nerves scream in protest. My vision was dazzled—everything was surrounded in violet rainbows, like I was staring at the world through refractive crystals. My skin tingled.

I tried to speak and it came out as an inarticulate moan. Adjutant looked over his shoulder at me. I felt the Eagles’ grip falter, and Adjutant said sharply, “She’s still overloaded. She can’t do anything, so stop acting like children.”

Eventually we reached a small room, big enough only for a table and a chair. The room had no windows and only the one door. Suddenly I was reminded of the Machine in the Institute, a room containing only a chair, ringed with darkness.

The Eagles dropped me into the chair, but my muscles still weren’t responding to commands from my brain, and I slid out of the chair and onto the ground. I didn’t even feel pain when I hit, too dazed and dazzled to do so.

“Thank you,” came Adjutant’s voice somewhere above me. “You may go.”

The Eagles withdrew, shutting the door behind them. I half-expected it to be made of iron and clang shut with awful finality, but instead it was just a regular door. But then again, they knew iron wouldn’t stop me. And they knew what would.

With a muffled groan of effort I rolled over enough that I could see Adjutant looking down at me, his face thoughtful. In one hand he was still holding the device that had incapacitated me, tossing it up and down idly.

“What an interesting specimen,” he said quietly. “Prometheus will be fascinated.”

“What—” I croaked, my mouth cramping as I tried to force it to speak despite the odd convulsion my muscles were locked into. “What’d you—”

Adjutant raised an eyebrow. “This?” He held up the device and examined it. It was small, curved, designed to fit into the palm of his hand—a smaller sibling of the devices Prometheus’s enforcers carried. “The Eagles affectionately refer to the process as being ‘zapped.’ The talon overloads the systems with magic. It works against the normals, but it’s particularly effective against Renewables. I’m told it’s exceedingly painful.”

Overloaded with magic? My teeth ground together, muscles still locked down tight. The magic was overcoming my brain’s ability to send signals to my body. The realization was enough that I could begin to fight it, carefully pushing the magic down away from my mind. My vision began to clear a little. I found myself better able to speak.

“Why—me? Haven’t done anything.”

Adjutant tossed the device onto the table with a metallic clang. “Perhaps not,” he agreed. “But you were about to, back there in the corridor, were you not?”

He’d seen me vaporize iron with a single thought, prepared to attack. I swallowed convulsively, finally getting my throat to listen to what I wanted it to do.

“You acted when I mentioned examination.” Adjutant stooped into a crouch, bringing his face closer to mine. “It seems you don’t like the idea of being a subject.”

There was no malice in his expression, no hint that he derived any pleasure from my pain and confusion. There was only detached interest, the regard of someone making observations about some new and interesting phenomenon.

He stretched out his hand and took mine. “If you concentrate, I think you’ll find you can move a little. Unless you prefer the floor?”

I let him pull me up and settle me back into the chair. Both the chair and the table were made of some lightweight, silvery metal. The chair was frigid to the touch but soon began to warm to my body heat.

“Tell me,” said Adjutant, taking up a position on the opposite side of the table. “Have you been held somewhere as a subject before?”

I stared at him, jaw clenched. It was still an effort to speak—and even if it wasn’t, I wasn’t going to answer his questions.

“Never mind,” he replied. He tapped his fingers against the table. “Your body language is all the answer I need.”

My eyes flicked from his drumming fingers to the device lying on the table between us. Could I make my arm, cramped and slow as it was, move quickly enough to grab it before he could stop me?

“We have no plans to mistreat you, young lady,” said Adjutant, leaning back far enough that I’d be able to beat him to the device even if I fumbled with the task. “If you’ll only just answer a few questions and meet with Prometheus, you’ll see that what we’re doing here is important, and that we need your help.”

I didn’t waste any more time. I flung my arm forward, struggling to make it work the way I wanted. My hand fell short of the device and I wrenched it forward again, eyes watering with effort. My clumsy fingers scrabbled against it for a moment before closing around it, drawing it back to myself.

I dragged my eyes up to find Adjutant unmoving, watching me, one corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile.

“These smaller versions are only good for one discharge,” he said calmly. “Then they need to be recharged again. Don’t worry. I have others fully charged and ready.” He patted his pocket gently.

My fist was still wrapped around the device, its metal edges digging into my skin. After working so hard to get my hand to cooperate, I couldn’t get it to uncurl again.

“What is your name?” asked Adjutant.

I swallowed. “Margaret.” I said the first name that popped into my mind—the name of one of my classmates back in the city where I was born.

“And your place of origin?”

“All over the place,” I replied promptly, surprising myself with how easily the lies came. “My parents were Travelers. They were killed by Empty Ones a few years ago.”

“How tragic,” said Adjutant. “And what is the boy’s connection with you?”

“I met him in the ruins above right before the Eagles found us. I’d never met him before that night, I don’t even know his name.”

“Hmm.” Though the Adjutant made no physical notes, I could almost see him mentally filing away my answers, trying to build a picture of who I was. I had no idea if he believed anything I was saying, but I was surprising myself with how easily the lies came. “Were your parents Renewables as well?”

“Yes.”

“And the boy?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Can’t you tell for sure?”

“I don’t have the Sight as strong as others do.”

“I see. And how long have you been able to magic iron?”

The question caught me off guard, coming so quickly after the others. I had no ready answer for this one, hadn’t rehearsed it beforehand in the planning stages of this operation.

But when I opened my mouth, some instinct took over. “I didn’t know I could,” I said, widening my eyes, letting fear and confusion into my expression. “That was the first time. I just got so angry.”

Adjutant paused, watching me. “I see,” he repeated. “I’ll leave you now for a little while. The door will be guarded by Eagles, all of whom will be armed.” He retrieved the device from my now-lax fist and slipped it into his pocket. “I’ll return soon enough, but in the meantime, please consider your story again and think about whether it’s the one you wish to present to Prometheus himself.”

Even after Adjutant left, it took me a long time to recover from being “zapped,” as he called it. Though the worst of the muscle cramps had passed, I was still seeing strange halos around everything, and my skin buzzed. The sensation was hauntingly familiar, but it wasn’t until I closed my eyes against the violet double images that I realized why.

The last time I’d felt like this was when I’d stripped all the magic from the Renewables in the Iron Wood.

Overloaded with magic, Adjutant had said. For a regular Renewable, who couldn’t absorb the power like I could, it must simply interfere with their abilities, incapacitate them. But me . . . ? I got to my feet carefully, still not quite trusting my legs. But the more time passed, the better I felt. Buzzing with power. Drunk with magic. Insanely, I felt like laughing—without realizing it, they’d given me all the power I could digest.

But those devices could still take me out for a while, knock me flat. If I wanted to get out of here I was going to have to be careful.

Before I could formulate any plan, however, the door opened again, and Adjutant stepped back through. Hovering above his shoulder was a machine, half-concealed as Adjutant turned to close the door behind him.

“Prometheus is most excited to meet you,” Adjutant said. “If you will come with me, we won’t waste any more time.”

He turned again, and this time I got a good look at the machine. It was a pixie, larger than usual.

Adjutant saw me staring and glanced at the machine hovering next to his face. “Ah, yes. Pixies are not exactly welcome in Prometheus’s city, but we keep a few around for specific purposes. There aren’t any machines better suited for detecting magic, for example. If you seem to be regaining control over your power more quickly than expected, this device will alert us.”

Something dark twisted in my stomach, but it wasn’t until the pixie opened its eyes that I figured it out. The eyes glowed white, not blue, and the pixie was staying in one shape, but I knew it well. I knew it better than I knew most people.

Nix.

It hovered there, its blank white eyes on me, unseeing. “Where did you find this one?” I asked, unable to keep my voice from shaking.

Adjutant was watching me carefully—I wonder if he knew this was the pixie that had come with me. If he did, he gave no indication. “Machines occasionally find their way here on their own, attracted by the magic here in Lethe. Sometimes they’re brought in illegally by Travelers and confiscated. I believe this one was found on its own, trying to camouflage itself in a scrap heap.”

The pixie spoke. “I am PX-148,” it said in a shockingly female voice. “My purpose is to assist Prometheus and his servants in any way asked of me.” The voice was unrecognizable, bewildering—nothing like Nix’s voice. Nix’s voice was neither male nor female, a familiar amalgam of other voices: me and Oren, Kris and Tansy, sprinkled with hints of everyone it had ever interacted with.

Nix, wake up.
I willed it to shift, to wink at me as it had once, to give me some sign of my unlikely friend.
Nix, help me—please, wake up.

“Don’t be alarmed,” continued Adjutant, misreading my distress. “Although we often find these machines malfunctioning and dangerous, we always scrub them well before employing them here.”

“Scrub?”

Adjutant opened the door again, gesturing for me to precede him. “Erased,” he explained. “Wiped. The only way to ensure no lingering, well-hidden program remains hidden inside is to completely destroy its memory and replace it with entirely new programming.”

I let Adjutant propel me down the hallway, too sick with confusion and grief to resist. My eyes blurred, and this time the only halos I saw were from the tears fighting to escape.

It was just a machine,
I told myself angrily, trying to pull myself together.
What does it matter? It had no feelings. No soul to destroy. It served its purpose.

But it didn’t help. Every time I glanced up, the thing that had once been Nix was flying steadily, its white eyes staring straight ahead, its wings a monotonous blur. There was no joy in its flight. No curiosity, no engagement. All it did was what it was told to do.

I longed to reach out and touch it, see if somehow giving it a jolt of my power would jar it back to life. But I knew it didn’t work like that. Everything that had been Nix was gone—all that was left was its shell, formatted with new orders. But even though it didn’t have the brilliant blue eyes, the tendency to shapeshift when startled, the expressive buzzing and clicking of its wings when irritated—it was hard not to see it as
my
Nix.

And yet—why hadn’t it alerted Adjutant to the fact that I had possession of my full faculties? I felt certain that if I wanted to, I could have swatted it out of the sky with a second thought. Perhaps it couldn’t sense me the way it sensed ordinary Renewables?

Perhaps it had chosen not to alert Adjutant.

I closed my eyes for half a second. Wishful thinking, I knew.
Nix is gone,
I told myself.
Stay focused.
We were going to see Prometheus. I was supposed to be there with Oren and Wesley to back me up, but I had no chance of finding them now, even if I could overpower Adjutant and Nix.
The pixie,
I corrected myself, struggling to change the way I saw it.

So I would have to face Prometheus on my own. Maybe it was better that way. If I ended up needing power and leveling the entire room, then at least Wesley would be spared. I hoped that, wherever they were, they weren’t being mistreated. Especially Wesley—if they’d discovered his treachery, there was no telling what might be happening to him.

And if they discovered Oren’s secret? There was nothing to stop them from killing him as soon as they found out what he was.

I clenched my jaw.
Focus.
The only way I could help them now was to take out Prometheus himself. If I could manage that much, then someone would be able to rescue them when the resistance took over CeePo. And they’d find Basil too, if he’d defied the odds and managed to survive in Prometheus’s holding cells for this long.

I tried to imagine seeing him, but I couldn’t think past the confrontation with Prometheus. Surely the instant the Eagles realized I’d done something to their leader, they would kill me. In my mind there was no time after that. Just him, and me, and the confrontation . . . and then nothing.

I tried not to think about what that meant for me. I paid only enough attention to walking as I needed to avoid falling on my face. The rest of my focus I turned inward, running through Wesley’s meditation exercises in fits and starts, trying to calm the too-fast beating of my heart. I needed control. I needed deliberation.

Dimly I was aware of riding in the elevator again, although I couldn’t tell whether we were going up or down. Adjutant spoke now and then, but didn’t press me when I said nothing in reply. More hallways. Always more hallways—whether it was here, or the Institute, or even the world in the walls that had adopted me. It was always corridor after twisted corridor, never the straightest path.