Skylark (14 page)

As alarming as those two shoes were, the hope they offered was even stronger:
Is there someone out here like me?

I nearly tore the shoes apart searching them for any clue of who had left them, what Institute trick was concealed somewhere inside them. A tracking device, maybe. A secret poisonous compartment that would incapacitate me on command. And yet, if the shoes were from the Institute, why hadn’t they just grabbed me outright? I had no answers and neither did the shoes.

A careful look at the shoes presented only questions. These were not the flimsy, recycled slip-ons that we received inside the Wall. These shoes felt durable, made of a material from before the wars. And they were absolutely filthy, except that clearly some effort had been made to clean them up. There were swipes where someone had scrubbed away the dark brown grime.

Suppressing everything, I tried them on, slipping my poor, bruised feet inside. I should have been surprised that they fit me more perfectly than any shoes I’d ever owned, but I felt as though I had no more capacity for surprise or shock. If they were a trap, I couldn’t figure out the catch. And I knew I wouldn’t make it much further barefoot—I had little choice. I didn’t know how to tie them properly, and eventually just stuffed the trailing ends of the laces inside the shoes.

I walked southwest, where I believed the automated gardens to be, hoping to find something to sustain me until I could cross the river and “follow the birds.” If there were birds, there would be food. Fruit or grain or something I could eat, I was sure of it. If I could only escape this graveyard of stone and brick, I would be okay.

I’d seen plants before. There were a few growing in the museum in our city, and optimistic weeds would sometimes pop up in the cracks in the streets. Still, nothing I had seen in my life prepared me for what I saw when I rounded the corner of the next block.

A vast garden spread out before me in what had once been a park. Benches and lamp posts were overgrown with pale green vines, while crumbling pavement walkways bordered the patches like gray rivers. All the plants were lined up in rows, with dark rich soil beneath and leaves spread to the gray sky. The garden stretched as far as I could see, following a creek that twisted out of sight in the distance. The plants themselves were heavy with produce. I couldn’t identify everything that grew there, though I saw cucumbers and tomatoes nestled like gemstones in the rows nearest me. I darted forward.

I tore off a tomato and bit into it. Its juice stung the scrape on my chin, but no amount of stinging was going to slow me down. I devoured the fruit, core and all, and grabbed another. It wasn’t until I was halfway through my third tomato that I slowed and shucked my backpack so that I could start stuffing it. I went for the tougher vegetables, the cucumbers and the carrots. When I knew I couldn’t carry any more, I reshouldered the bag, wincing at its weight.

I headed down toward the creek that wound its way through the park and retrieved the cup from my pack, drinking until my stomach sloshed. If only I’d had more time before leaving the city, maybe I could’ve found a bottle or a canteen to take with me.

Munching another tomato, I wandered back through the rows of plants. The earth I crushed underfoot smelled strange and alien, a wet richness that felt soft and springy. As the leaves whispered by against my arms, I let my mind wander.

The Iron Wood
, the Renewable had told me. I had never heard of such a thing, but when she spoke of it I felt as though I could almost see it.
South. The river. Follow the birds.

Many species of animal went extinct during the wars, and some—like honeybees—disappeared even before, like warnings unheeded. Birds had not gone extinct before the wars the way the bees had, but they were certainly some of the hardest hit animals afterward. Some theorized that there were still some birds alive in the world, but there was no evidence. Birds were a legend, like the Renewables themselves.

How, then, was I meant to follow something that didn’t exist, to a place I’d never heard of? If my fearless, brilliant brother hadn’t survived out here, how could I? I pressed my hand against the pocket where my paper bird lay, folded tightly against my thigh.

The faintest of sounds, easily distinguishable in the silence, caught my attention. No, not just a sound—a hum of power. Magic.

I whirled, and as I moved there was a roar of machinery so loud that it sent me sprawling. A huge brass monster loomed over me. Its steps shook the plants around me, quivering as if in sympathy with my own terror.

They’d found me. Somehow the Institute had traced me, sent their brass and copper monsters, located my tiny form in the sea of cold iron, brick, and stone. I hoped it would crush me quickly, rather than drag me back.

Chapter 12

The thing, which was half again as tall as a man, extended tiny, spindly arms with branching fingers, each tipped with glass. The fingers scraped against each other with a delicate metallic whine as they spun and oriented themselves. I counted six arms, three on each side, and covered my face with my hands as they stretched toward me. Frozen in terror, I waited for it to tear me apart.

Time slowed, stretched, and after a while I realized that it hadn’t touched me. I forced my shaking hands down and saw the machine’s arms flashing out and retreating, grasping at the plants and withdrawing again, vanishing into its cavernous body. Each hand cradled a red tomato on its way in, and reemerged empty again. The thing didn’t have any sensors to detect my presence. The hands navigated by feel, the glass tips of the fingers touching leaf and stem and fleshy fruit alike with incredible delicacy. There was a spot for a human driver, but it was empty—the Institute had altered these machines to operate automatically beyond the Wall.

One of the hands came scrabbling across the earth toward me, feeling out the path ahead of it. I felt frozen to the earth. As I watched, the delicate fingers caught the tip of my toe and scrabbled forward, learning the contours of my shoe with a whispering, spidery touch. When it reached my bare ankle there was a sudden jolt between a glass-tipped finger and my skin, and the machine gave a strange lurch, all hands pausing in their jobs. There was a second, stronger jolt, and then the hand tightened in recognition. Glass, a conductor of magic.

I jerked away, wrenching my ankle as I scrambled to my feet. Dropping my half-eaten tomato, I bolted.

The hum and whir of the machinery grew fainter until I had to pause for breath, and I looked over my shoulder. The machine was still where I’d left it, its hands all sagging, scrabbling in the dirt. Searching for me, and that familiar jolt of magic. I slowed to a rapid walk, trying desperately to calm the terrified gallop of my heartbeat. I limped on my twisted ankle until I could no longer hear the machine behind me, and came out of the garden onto a city block once more.

This, however, was like no part of the city I’d ever seen. It lay in ruins, no building standing higher than a few stories. Hollowed out, tarnished, most of them barely more than rubble, I felt as though I had stepped forward a thousand years into the future. Humans were little more than memory.

This must be the part we abandoned during the wars
, I realized. It had been only a hundred years. How had it gone so quickly?

Large portions of the street were caved in, and whole buildings had fallen into the sinkholes. The soil here was a thick, red, soggy clay that looked like it couldn’t possibly support life—and yet, plants had clearly taken hold of the city.

Thick undergrowth had pushed through the cracked streets. There was no way around it, so I tried to find a path over the portions of the street that were most intact and still preventing the brush from growing. I passed what had once been a storefront of some kind, some of its glass window still improbably intact. Through it I could see part of a tree trunk, far larger than the spindly things we got inside the Wall. I tilted my head back and saw a canopy of leafy green spreading beyond where the roof of the building had once been. Suddenly it wasn’t a shop with a tree growing inside—it was a tree with the remains of a building still clinging to it.

Here and there ancient walkers still stood, frozen, overgrown with vines and moss. I began to notice other abandoned machines, carriages and street cleaners, even the occasional mechanimal. I scraped away the overgrown vines on one lump to see the copper-sculpted, expressive face of a cat peering out of the undergrowth. I’d only seen pictures in books before. It was still crouched, tail erect, as though about to pounce on an invisible toy.

The sky overhead was growing mottled, gray-on-gray patterns becoming visible. I thought perhaps that meant the clouds were clearing. I could more easily see the bright spot of the sun, bright enough that I couldn’t look at it for more than a minute. It was well past the zenith now, and I tried to imagine the sun disc’s perfectly measured gradations to tell the time. Perhaps one, two o’ clock? But past midnight, in the city. Exhaustion dragged at my feet.

The river was not far away, and between the buildings I caught glimpses of an old bridge and knew it was my way across. When I reached it, though, I found that it was a lot less intact than it had looked from a distance. It had once conveyed the Resource-powered carriages and cycles across the river but now I wasn’t sure it would hold me. The metal skeleton of it was still standing, and chunks of its rotting stone body still clung to it, but there were large, gaping holes. Marking the beginning of it were two massive bronze statues, so corroded and overgrown I could not identify them. One outstretched limb resembled a hoof—perhaps they had been horses, once.

Trying not to think about how firmly the remaining pieces were attached, I set out across the bridge. I had never learned to swim. No one in the city could; why bother? I tried not to look down, when my path took me close enough to the gaps that the water was visible below. It was a wide, sluggish river, but no less deadly. If I fell, I would drown. That is, if the fall itself didn’t kill me.

Stone and concrete crumbled into the water as I stepped. The river was too far away for me to hear the splash. I had still not grown accustomed to the quiet. My ears yearned for any familiar sound. The clamor of the hateful artificial sunrise would have been welcome.

The far side of the river was lined with trees, and I could see them stretching away to the south before the horizon was lost in the mist. This must be the forest the Renewable had mentioned. I was to continue south through it until I found birds. I tried to imagine the sight of a bird, something I’d only ever seen in pictures, but couldn’t give the image life. My birds stayed flat, two-dimensional in my mind. Like paper.

I reached the other side of the crumbling bridge, distracted by my imagination enough that it took me a few moments to register the faint hum of magic.

I could hear no clockwork, and usually the gears and mechanisms were louder than the magic that powered them. I shifted my pack and moved as quietly as I could toward the sound.

As I rounded a massive pile of plant-covered debris that had once been a building, I found the source of the sound. It was like a miniature version of the Wall, only instead of tarnished pewter, it had the same violet sheen of energy that characterized the Wall from the inside. I drew back and stared.

Though I stayed for what felt like the better part of an hour, nothing came in or out of the bubble. The Institute had theorized that when the remnants of magic settled after the wars, they did so unevenly. They told us that while the vast majority of the landscape was barren of magic, there were little clumps of highly concentrated power, far more concentrated than the uniform fabric of magic had been before the wars.

This was what they’d sent my brother to find. I couldn’t help but wonder if Basil had made it this far.

I crept closer, my skin prickling, alert. All was still, but for the hum of the magic and the flicker of energy across the intangible surface of the dome. I estimated it to be no more than two hundred yards in diameter.

I reached for it, stopping with my palm about half an inch from its surface. The hairs stood up along my arms as if a static charge was about to go off. I stooped and plucked a blade of grass, and then dipped the tip of it into the gently twisting pool of energy. Back home, the Wall was one-way. You could poke things out of it, but when you tried to pull them back in, it would shave off whatever was left outside.

I withdrew the blade of grass. Completely intact. The piece of grass wasn’t even warm to the touch.