Skylark (11 page)

The scars there were clean, pink, shiny—no new gashes. And a slight thrum of power fluttered at the edge of my mind. The magic of the door lock, perhaps. Fainter than that of the lights, which were off, but I could hear it. Which meant my magic was still intact.

In a panic I reached out for the door with my mind, stomach convulsing with the effort. Nothing. I still couldn’t budge the lock. I was trapped.

And tomorrow would start the rest of my life.

There was a tray of food by the door. I still felt nauseous, but something caught my eye.

In addition to the usual rations of dry bread and soy protein paste, there were two round cakes on the corner of the tray.

Kris
.

A treat on my last day. I wanted to feel something: gratitude or grief, maybe. Instead I stared at the cakes numbly.

There was a tiny point of gray-white sticking out from the edge of the cake. When I lifted the cake, whatever was beneath it stuck to the bottom. I peeled it away, and then sat cupping the thing in my hands.

How long I sat there, gazing at the paper lark my brother had made for me, I couldn’t say. Tears came and went, and my nausea subsided. I tucked the little bird into the palm of my hand and held it against my heart, reaching for the other cake.

As I lifted it, something else peeled away from the bottom of the cake where it too had stuck. It fell with a metallic clatter against the tray.

A key.

Chapter 9

I lurched to my feet. How much time had I wasted? There was no way of knowing how long I had until they were at my door, ready to take me to the Renewable’s chamber. To put me into that glass cage forever.

I dug a pair of the drawstring pants from the chest at the foot of my bed. Tying the legs together, I loaded my makeshift bag with my untouched bread rations and the rolls I’d hoarded. I drained cup after cup of water. When I could hold no more, I threw the cup in the bag with the rations.

It was an awkward backpack, but it would hold for now. I tried not to think about what I would do when I got home. What would my parents do? What
could
they do? Sucking in a deep breath, I shoved the key into the keyhole and twisted.

There was a click, and the door swung outward at my touch. The corridor stretched away on either side. I could hear movement to the left and so I went right. I passed door after door—the rooms that had been occupied by other children. They were all unlocked, giving me easy places to hide whenever architects passed.

My mind remained oddly detached. As though subconscious memory was leading me, impulse told me without hesitation which direction to go whenever I reached an intersection of hallways.

I came to a door at the end of the hallway that was built more solidly than the others, designed to swing outward rather than slide open. I saw a strip of light below it. I couldn’t know what was on the other side of the door. A room full of architects, a corridor lined with guards, or alarms sounding throughout the building—but I couldn’t wander the halls forever. I placed both palms against the door, willing myself to go through with it.

A sound, behind me. A clatter of a door opening, voices exclaiming. Footsteps, running. Someone had realized I wasn’t in my cell. It didn’t matter now whether I set off an alarm or not.

I threw my body against the bar on the door and daylight exploded against my eyes as I staggered over the threshold— and onto empty space.

My momentum turned me in midair, giving me a glimpse of the open door above me. There would have once been a fire escape there, but no longer, only a long drop from several stories off the ground.

My mind worked clearly, efficiently; it seemed I fell for hours. I had time to picture the oddly comforting image of my broken body once it hit the ground. I had said I would rather die than be their magical slave. So be it.

The air rushed past me, and the wind whispered,
Just like you, Lark.
An imaginary shoulder jostled mine, a broad palm cradled a little bird made of paper. A rustle of wings, a breath, and then stillness.

NO
. Something flew from me with such force that it sent me tumbling sideways in midair. I collided heavily with the wall opposite, striking my head so hard that my vision spotted with black. I hit something else, something yielding and buzzing with power, and then bounced onto the cobblestones.

•  •  •

I lay there stunned and gasping. My body tingled and roared. I rolled over and the motion sent a ripple of pain and dizziness that triggered a spasm of nausea. I fought the impulse to retch—I couldn’t afford to waste the food.

My hands were resting on something sticky and warm. I lifted one, staring without recognition at the aggressively bright red color coating it. It wasn’t until I saw something drip past my vision and into the crimson puddle that I clapped my hand to my head. A wave of dizziness swept over me, and this time I did vomit, a thin stream of acidic, vile liquid.
Head wounds bleed
, I reminded myself, trying not to panic.
It looks worse than it is
.

With a groan I hauled myself up against the wall. I aimed my steps toward the mouth of the alley. I was still within the Institute complex, but at least I was outside the building.

By the time I emerged from the alley, I felt a bit better. Now I could see that the sun disc hung low in the west, just past the four-o’clock tick mark on its track. The Institute was on the eastern edge of the city, and since I knew I couldn’t leave on its east side—and go through the Wall—I went west.

The lane ended in another doorway. With no other choice, I pushed through it, slipping down the hallway beyond. My head throbbed in time with the buzzing lights overhead, and my mind slipped into a waking doze. Again I had the strange sense that I was being led.

Too late, I recognized my surroundings. My concussed mind hadn’t grasped that I was walking down a spiral. I had been led down this path once before. I froze, and then spun around to retrace my steps, and found instead a door I didn’t remember coming through. I shoved it open and staggered inside. The blinding column blazed in the room’s center. Filaments of glass traced outward, stretching toward the spherical walls and disappearing into them. Crystals lined the edges of the walls, storing the magic emanating from the creature.

Gripping the railings in each hand, I made my way toward the being in the center column. Her face was still split by that silent agony, and she gave no sign or expression that she was aware of me.

The vacant suffering in her gaze made me stare. She was naked, the features of her body easily visible. I had balked at the idea of undressing in a dark room, alone. Now this was my future, hanging suspended and laid bare for all to see. The violence of her existence hit me like a blow. She was tense with agony, skin twitching now and then as the glass filaments plugged into her skin pulsed.

I shivered and forced my eyes toward her face. Her hair and her vacant eyes were as white as her skin. Each eyelash glowed white-hot, searing against the darkness around her. Her pale lips were cracked and caked with a substance like blood drained of its color. Her skin was strangely mottled, tiny specks that blocked out the light shining from her every pore.

She had freckles. We didn’t get freckles in the city, with no sunlight to cause them. Suddenly she stopped being “the creature” and became a person, a woman, once a girl not unlike me. And she was from beyond the Wall.

In that moment I realized that I had no more strength. Nauseous, dizzy, exhausted beyond the point where my mind could function, I collapsed, slumping against the railing.

And this was my future. Hours of trying to escape, and I walked right back to the chamber that would be my tomb.

“Lark.” It was scarcely a whisper, but in the eerie cavern, silent but for the hum of magic and machinery, it was electrifying. My head jerked up.

The woman’s eyes had not moved, still gazing out into the middle distance, fixed on blackness. But as I watched, her lips moved, shaped the single syllable of my name again.

Something moved near her waist. A filament withdrew, shining in the glow of raw magic, and moved toward me. I scrambled back as far as the railings on the opposite side of the walkway would let me.

“Lark,” came the whisper again. The movement of her lips cracked the skin, causing a fresh flow of grayish-brown blood. The glass wire twisted once, twice. Beckoning.

“No.” Speaking took more energy than I thought I had left. “I won’t. I won’t.”

The tendril of glass curved low, moving slowly, as a person might approach a frightened child.

The woman groaned, as if making a massive effort. Then: “Trust.”

I stared at her, and at once I saw that what I had taken for agony in her gaze was desperation. She could only speak to me as she had before when we were connected—she to her cage, I to the Machine. Networked through the web of glass that was the Institute’s heart.

The wire beckoned again, and the woman’s body shuddered, sending the glass filaments dancing and shimmering in the glow from her skin. I forced myself away from the railing. I pushed back the sleeve of my tunic, and held out my shaking arm.

The wire twitched once and then plunged into my wrist. I felt nothing at first, staring as the filament slid under my skin, forming a transparent bulge surrounded by the blue of my veins.

There was a moment of silence as the woman’s eyes closed, her chest falling as she exhaled a soundless sigh.

My arm exploded into fire. I screamed and screamed and saw the harsh metal catwalk surging up to meet me as I fell.

I thrashed and kicked, my skin burning and every hair stiff. I screamed for her to let me die.

My wild gaze fell upon my arm as I tried to tear the glass wire from it, but the slightest touch multiplied the pain. I stared at it for some time in anguish and terror before I realized what I was seeing.

Both times I had seen this creature of light, the glass wires had been carrying that energy away from her body, sucking it free, draining her. But as I watched, the light came
into
me through the filament, in fitful starts and stops. The memory of her assistance while I was in the Machine came crashing back, and I yanked my mind away from my body’s pain.

I knew my body was lying crumpled on the catwalk, but that knowledge didn’t lessen the wave of bliss that washed over me at the sudden cessation of pain. I had only time to gasp for air before a wall of light, sound, and feeling collided with me.

With her magic came her memory. Bright flashes of meaning, inextricable from my own thoughts, and yet incomprehensible parts of an incomplete whole. I felt the edges of her insanity crowding in upon me.

There was a city, somewhere beyond our Wall. No, not a city. I could see something like buildings, but not—massive and delicate and strange. There were people living in them, around them. People I had never seen before, each one alive and humming with power.
Adults
who had magic.

You must find them
, said a voice that had become familiar to me over the past weeks.

Who? I was struggling to breathe the thick air.

The others
, she said.
The others like us
.

Where can I go? There’s nothing beyond the Wall.

Find the Iron Wood. You will know now where to go. Follow the birds.

The images were hazy now, nothing more than a strangely muddled memory, viewed from behind warped glass.

And you? Will you come?

They will come for me when it is time.

I could feel the agony rushing back at me, and I tried to force it away. Anything was better than returning to that tortured body lying in a heap on the corrugated metal walkway.

Please! I don’t even know where to go!

Go south,
she said.
Across the river. Then follow the birds.

And then the wire was whipping out of my arm. As it retracted, it flailed up and struck my head with a flash, and she glowed so brilliantly that I felt that my eyes must be burning, blinded. Then it was all gone.