Skylark (9 page)

I cried out and tripped as I turned to run—and then found myself on my hands and knees in a different room altogether. Warm, familiar hands helped me up. Kris. I reached for him, but my hands slid past him. He stepped aside, and the dream fell away in tatters.

They had brought me once again to the Machine. And with sudden cold clarity, I remembered everything. My illegal Resource use, my panic, the trip to the Institute. Emila, my paper bird torn from me, wandering the maze of corridors alone. The tortured creature of light in the huge spherical room. “
Run
.”

The Machine
.

The chair was in front of me, long and squat and black. Lined with the glass panels that would turn into the shards and pierce my back. And there, pulsing, the field of magic that would hold me to it.

I turned to run and hit Kris square in the chest. His hands came out to take hold of my arms and I found I had no strength. He led me, sobbing, to the chair. I remembered the pain so clearly now that it was as though I was feeling it again, already.

“No,” I gasped. “Please, no. No. I’ve been harvested already. There’s been a mistake.”

Kris squeezed my arms and pushed me down into the chair. “Please try to relax, Miss Ainsley,” he told me loudly. “It’ll be over soon, and then you can see your family.” He bent low over my face, lip caught between his teeth and brow furrowed. Pretending to make sure I was settled, he said in a voice barely louder than a breath, “Just hang in there for now. I’m going to get you out of here, Lark. I promise.”

And then he was gone, the room went black, and I was screaming before the vibrations reached my skull.

•  •  •

Out of the burning darkness, a voice.

?

No, not a voice. A touch. Questing, curious, wild. My body kept screaming under the torture of the Machine, but my mind seized that touch like it was a hand outstretched.

!

The touch, recoiling at my desperation, struggled and withdrew. With nothing now to feel except the knives sliding through my skin, nothing to hear but the screams, my mind surrendered and I slipped into unconsciousness.

•  •  •

I awoke once more in my room. This time I remembered everything. Apparently, they no longer bothered to toy with my memories. I rolled over on the bed, and the pain of movement was so violent that I retched, sending the last liquid remains of last night’s dinner splashing onto the floor.

I fell, narrowly avoiding the vomit on the floor, and caught myself on my knees and elbows. The shock of my impact sent jolts of pain through my spine. With sparkling afterimages dancing in front of my eyes, I dragged myself to my feet.

I staggered to the shower unit and pressed the button for water. Someone had undressed me at some point; I scarcely noticed.

When the jet hit my back it exploded with pain, and I bit my tongue to avoid shrieking. Wiping water out of my eyes, I craned my neck to try to look at my back. What little bit of it I could see was red, covered with puffy, shiny lines.

I tasted blood from where I’d bitten my tongue and spat, sending watermelon-colored tendrils swirling down the shower drain.

The first time they harvested me, I had recovered in no time at all. This second time, it was clearly taking much longer. How long would it take if they did it a third time?

Despite the jet of warm water full in my face, a trickle of ice ran down my spine as the significance of that thought sank in. A third time. To have harvested me twice was unheard of. How was such a thing even possible? The machinery must have failed in some way the first time around. The only other possibility was that they had successfully stripped me of my Resource—but somehow, impossibly, I had regained some measure of magic in the days since my harvest.

The last Renewables had destroyed themselves in the wars. They were barely myth now. No more real than the wolf-men living outside the Wall.

I turned off the water and stood in the shower, shaking. The nausea had passed and the water had helped with my back, but nothing eased the knot of panic in my belly.

If they sent me home, then I would know it was only a malfunction of their machinery. With any luck they would make me forget everything again. The thought of losing the memory of the Machine again was blissful.

•  •  •

The days passed in silence, my world shrinking down to the inside of my cell and the trays of tasteless rations they slid under the door for me. Shortly after I woke up on the third or fourth day, the skin on the back of my neck began to prickle uncomfortably as I picked at my breakfast. When I looked up at the Resource-lit panels overhead, the sensation flared into a dull throb at the base of my skull. I pushed it away, dropping my eyes, unwilling to believe.

That night I slept with the pillow over my head, pressed against my ears, trying to drown out the impossible hum I knew I shouldn’t be able to hear.

No one regenerates. No one.

By the time they brought me out and took me to the Machine again, I couldn’t even summon surprise. There was only a dull ache, the numbness of trying to understand impossible things. This time when they forced me into the chair, I didn’t scream. I had to bite my tongue so hard that my mouth filled with blood, but I didn’t scream for them. I pulled until my bones shook and my muscles burned but I couldn’t escape the chair.

Just as the edges of the world began to fade, the voice— the touch—the presence—whatever it was—came to me again. A frightened, wild blow against my mind, nonsensical with pain that felt strangely familiar, similar to mine. It spoke to me—not in words, but in something far more primitive, screaming directly to my gut and my heart and my bones— and I listened.

You
, it said.
You are like me
.

And then a roaring surged in my ears and I fell away.

•  •  •

My mind wandered when it could. Memories long buried came bubbling up to the surface, painfully vivid. Everything then was clean, orderly, the peaceful world of my city spinning around me in its precise dance. I knew the rules. I knew my place in it all.

When I was little, no more than four or five, a friend of my father’s at the recycling plant required Adjustment. He was unhappy in his job, my father explained, and unfit for any other. His work was slow and inconsistent—he wobbled from task to task without purpose and without regularity. His meeting with the Regulatory Board was quick, a formality only.

Basil held my hand while we stood among the other families who knew this man, whose name my memory failed to recall. The ceremony was outside, not far from where we all lived, where one of the broad streets vanished beyond the Wall. The energy of the Wall sang in the background as everyone crowded around the man; the adults couldn’t hear it, but the un-harvested children twitched and swayed to its music, the discordant, hypnotic strains. My hand tingled in Basil’s.

The man kissed his wife on the cheek, ruffled his son’s hair. Said good-bye to his friends at the plant, shook my father’s hand. There were no Regulators there, only his friends, his family, the people who cared for him. I remember everyone smiling.

When there was no one left to thank for coming to his Adjustment, the man turned to face the Wall.

“What’s he doing?” I whispered urgently to Basil. It was the first rule we learned as children.
Never go near the Wall.
One wrong move, one slip, and you’re gone forever.

“Watch,” my brother replied. I’d never heard that voice from him before. He was only a few years older than me but he sounded like an adult. He sounded tired.

The man lifted his head, and without looking back at the friends and family who had gathered to see him off, he strode forward through the Wall.

The violet film of energy in front of us rippled with his passage, sending cascades of light and color racing away, out of sight. I saw the man’s wife put an arm around her son’s shoulders, a gentle squeeze.

Shock kept me silent, staring. There were always stories of what lay beyond the Wall. Monsters, ghosts, a barren world, all that remained from the warring Renewables. Caesar in particular liked to give me nightmares describing carnivorous stones and shadows that bled.

But never had I actually thought of a person going beyond the Wall. I couldn’t stop shivering despite Basil’s hand warm around mine, squeezing tight. All around me the crowd stood still and quiet. Almost as though they were waiting for something.

Then, without warning, a dull thud. The whole crowd flinched in unison as the Wall rippled with the sound. The sound came again, a muffled pounding. The energy was too opaque to see anything on the other side, but with each thud the light shimmered from the force of the blow.

Basil’s hand around mine was so tight it hurt, but I didn’t pull away. We stood there, silent, listening to the frantic pounding from outside the Wall. The crowd held vigil as the knocking grew louder, more insistent, hysterical. Pleading. A few people gazed up at a nearby clock tower. I looked at the face of the man’s wife—it was quiet, calm. Gentle.

We listened as the pounding rose to a frantic drum roll. And then, in the space between one breath and the next—it stopped.

Nothing. Silence. Only the ever-present singing of the Wall, now still and gently shining.

That night, the neighborhood’s rooftops were alive with lanterns as everyone honored the man’s sacrifice and celebrated how smoothly the city would run in the morning.

The memory should have been frightening. Now, I felt only the ache of something lost, all the more wrenching because I never knew I wanted it. There would be no Adjustment for me. No family gathered around to see me go, no city lights to mark my passing. I would just vanish, gone forever. Like Basil. Like something too broken to fix.

I thought of my parents, and what the Institute had told them. Perhaps they thought I was to become an architect. Perhaps they had told them I was dead. Perhaps they had told them I had volunteered for a mission the way my brother had. At some point I realized I would never see them again.

My life retreated into a hazy darkness, the dim waking hours between sessions in the Machine haunted by the pain behind me, the pain in front of me. My world became a maze of corridors and unfamiliar faces, masses of red coats crowding around me. I ate the food they gave me because I didn’t have the will to stop eating. I showered when told. I slept when the lights commanded. Kris’s face swam out of the haze sometimes, drawn with concern, his warm hands holding me up, his eyes reflecting my pain.

Help me
, I wanted to cry, but my voice never worked properly. Once he touched my cheek, his hand soft against my skin. His bottom lip was between his teeth, and he stared at me for a long moment before his face twisted and he turned away, retreating back into the haze.

After the third session in the Machine, the fourth, the fifth, I lost track of time utterly. The wounds on my back never healed now, and I slept naked on my stomach with the sores open to the air.

The only times I woke, the only times I came to myself, were when the voice came to me from the Machine. It began to teach me. As though taking me gently by the hand, it led me through the steps of pulling my mind away from the torture my body was undergoing, giving me moments of relief. I would have gone insane had I not learned how to slip away from myself.

Some time after I completely lost count of the days, they led me, shuffling mindlessly after them in the corridor, to the room I had been drawn to on my first day in the Institute. I recognized the clang of the metal catwalk under their shoes before anything else. Though my feet were always bare now, I had been wearing shoes the first time I came here. Memory prompted me to look up.

This time when I saw the woman of light, I recognized her instantly. It was the shape of her mouth, the same fixed
O
that had transfixed me that first day. I saw it now for what it was—a silent scream.

She is like me.

They led me past her and toward a platform, where assistants stripped off my shift and began to measure my body with cold metal tapes. Beyond them I saw some vitrarii, glassworkers even less commonly spotted outside of the Institute than architects. They were shaping glass filaments and cutting them with a concentrated fire-spitting torch. I let my head fall back, gazing up. There was a bundle of glass cables extending from the ceiling, a glass wire spinal cord with nerves branching off in every direction. The nerve endings terminated in nothing. Waiting. Grasping.

I stared again at the creature suspended in space as they hustled me back out of the room again, my measurement complete. She did not look at me—I don’t think she could see anyone. The light was being pumped from her. I could see it trailing away up the wires into the very walls of the Institute itself.

I knew her now for what she was.
Renewable
. The magic they stripped from her would power the Wall, the automatic harvesting machines, the generators that allowed us to breathe. I wondered how much of the Resource that kept us alive came from the kids they so publicly harvested and how much came from this creature. I wondered if the harvest’s sole purpose was to find another like her. If so, they had achieved their aim.