Skylark (16 page)

The sound swelled and fell again, sometimes a tired whistling and sometimes a full roar that sounded like a chorus of a thousand voices. As far as I could tell it was not moving, either closer or farther away. It sounded like it was coming from directly outside my building.

I forced myself to my feet. It was much lighter outside than it had been the previous night. A faint sheen of pearly white filtered through the trees. A clearing stood not far ahead, where for whatever reason the trees had failed to reclaim the concrete.

There was nothing there, but the trees thrashed and shuddered as if an army of pixies inhabited their branches. I tried not to think of the last cluster of trees I’d seen thrashing. I was outside the magical pocket now. They were only trees.
Just trees
.

The thrashing and the howling rose and fell together. As I leaned forward to get a better look, a gust tossed my hair back from my face, startling me so that I jerked back.

Wind
. Relief and wonder made my knees weak. I thought I had known wind. I’d felt it on my face while riding in the carriage. But nothing, none of it, nothing in my life had prepared me for this.

I stepped out into the clearing, which was half-lit with that pale silver light. The air rushed around me and threw back my hair, plastering my clothes to my body. The air’s movement was fitful and gusty, inconsistent at best and startling. There was a strange wildness to its smell. I walked through the whispering, knee-high grass in the clearing, listening to the wind sigh and scream through the trees and the rubble. It robbed me of breath, stole my soul. Wind.

The shadows writhed and swayed, and my skin prickled with the sense that my every movement was being observed. I looked around but could track nothing for more than a breath. Only the shadows cast by the strange silver light. Then I looked up.

And saw the sky.

The wind had blown the day’s thick cloud cover away, and a bottomless blackness yawned above, pockmarked with stars. A sliver of moon cast the sickly, color-leaching hint of light across the ruined city. There was no end to the sky, nothing holding me down on the ground. I felt it reach down to me, threaten to swallow me. I seemed to fall upward, and threw myself down to stop it, knocking the breath out of my lungs.

Digging my stubby fingernails against the dirt, I clung to it and clenched my eyes shut so tightly I saw spots, inverted echoes of the stars above. I pressed my forehead against the ground hard enough to make it throb. At that moment, I would have welcomed the sound of the pixies.

I could still feel the sky above me, waiting. The hideous gaping sky glittered with stars like shards of glass, like rows of teeth. The trees seemed like a child’s nightmare compared to this . . . emptiness. Terror more complete than any I had felt since leaving the Institute crippled me. Gravity could not possibly be enough to keep me from falling up into that pit of blackness.

Though my heart hammered, I focused on breathing, sucking in huge lungfuls of air. With oxygen came a glimmer of reason. I uncurled my fingers from the grass below me. I shifted as far as I dared and then grasped for the ground again, focused on the other hand. Moving my feet was harder, but the desire to get the roof of my rubble shelter between me and the sky was stronger than my fear of movement.

Inch by tortured inch, I dragged myself back toward the ruined building. Though I had taken only a few steps outside it, getting back took far longer, at the pace I was forced to move. My breath came in ragged pants, and cold sweat dripped down my face.

A groan escaped my lips as I pulled myself into the barely defined line of shadow marking the doorway. After another few inches, I let my body fall, my muscles trembling with fear and effort.

How could I ever have thought the sky would be beautiful?

Chapter 14

Sunlight woke me. I lay there in the patch of sun with my eyes closed. It was still cold from the night, and so warmth was welcome on my cheek. The temperature difference was tangible in a way the sun disc within the Wall never was.

Hunger eventually forced me to move. I sat up, and my stomach cramped so sharply that my eyes watered. This was clearly the price for that uncontrolled burst of power to destroy the tree. It had saved my life, but at what cost? So that I could die slowly of this accelerated starvation?

I opened my pack with shaking hands, my eyes blurring with my need. Two pieces of bread left, one of the fruits from the forest, a couple of cucumbers and a handful of carrots. I tore one of the pieces of bread apart and stuffed half of it in my mouth, telling myself I needed to eat it slowly. Still, the bread was gone in seconds, and I stared at the second piece, trembling. No. I had to ration.

But I lasted only seconds before I reached for the fruit, a compromise. It, too, was gone in moments. I tossed away the bag and temptation, and I leaned against the wall. My eyes shut. I waited for the intense, cavernous hunger to die away, and in time it did, a little. Not enough.

Hunger blunted, I took stock. My face was covered in tiny scratches from the branches during my flight the previous night, but nothing serious. My muscles screamed in protest when I tried to stretch them out, but I knew they would loosen when I began walking.

My feet were bruised but whole, and again I whispered a tiny word of thanks for whatever—whoever—had brought the shoes to me. They had not failed me yet, nor given any indication that they were a trick. If I had been barefoot last night, I would not have been able to escape that pocket of magic.

There was a strange smell in the air, a musky tang that I could not identify. It made my stomach twist with uneasiness. I slipped on my pack and turned to leave my rubble shelter.

Lying not two feet inside the empty doorway was the corpse of an animal. Headless, disemboweled, lying in a pool of its own blood. I lurched back against the wall, suddenly wishing I hadn’t eaten. Squeezing my eyes shut, I willed the grotesque vision to vanish. But when I opened them again, the sight remained.

I could not have missed such a thing the night before. I had dragged myself over that very spot.

Something brought this thing to the door while I slept.

A message? A warning? A threat? I pressed the back of my head against the wall, eyes closed, but I couldn’t get rid of the sight of its body, stiff and furry and bloody, its tail curled around itself as if it were sleeping.

The carcass lay between me and my exit. I was forced to step over it, averting my eyes. Despite my attempts not to look, I saw that it was mutilated as if by something far bigger and nastier than I cared to imagine.

Though the terror of the sky made me break out into a cold sweat, I wasted no time in leaving that place.

I stepped out into the clearing and the sunlight fell full on my face. My eyes squinted of their own accord. This, then, was sunlight. It could not have been more different from the light of our sun disc. The sun disc was diffuse, gentle, pale. This was harsh and yellow-white, angling sharply through the branches and the ruins and casting hard-edged shadows unlike anything I’d ever seen.

I caught a brief glimpse of a soft, empty blue before I jerked my gaze away and shut my eyes. The jolt I felt wasn’t as bad as the one the nighttime sky had given me, but the huge emptiness was still too monstrous to look at.

The panic that welled up in me would not be quieted by reason. Now, I would have welcomed a claustrophobic pipe. I forced my eyes open, blinking in the impossibly bright light. I felt my nose clench up. I sneezed once, twice. I kept my watering eyes on the ground as I moved out.

Adrenaline and terror swept through me as I walked. My mind was screaming at me to relax, that it was only the sky, that humans had lived under its emptiness for thousands of years. I had worse things to be frightened of. I tried to listen, but the physical terror wouldn’t be stilled.

The forest here was much thinner and younger than the one inside the barrier, for which I was grateful. I made slow progress. Even with frequent breaks, ducking into the ruins to feel a roof—even a broken one—over my head, I tired quickly. I sweated and shook, and every step in the open was a terrified one.

Every now and then, something caught at my peripheral vision. Occasionally it was the copper-gold of a pixie searching for me, but often it was something I couldn’t identify—a deep flicker of a shadow. Even in the high midday sun, when the shadows were at their smallest, I saw darkness darting around the edges of my sight. I recalled the sensation of being watched and followed, before the pixies had even found me.

As afternoon rolled on, the temperature began to drop significantly despite the sun. I guessed that it was approaching autumn, and I wasn’t dressed for it. Inside the Wall, there were no seasons. Inside the Wall, we were never cold.

I could sense another pocket some distance along the road, and I needed to try again to cover my tracks. I’d heard the pixies twice earlier in the day. Once, I’d caught a glimpse of the large, copper-gold of the general. It looked as if it were alone, but even alone it could lead the Institute to me. It was clear they were still on my trail. I was going to have to hide out in the camouflaging magic again, hope to throw them off more completely.

The sun was setting when I reached the pocket. It neatly intersected a row of crumbling buildings—hopefully a sign there would be shelter inside it. It was far smaller than the last one had been; I didn’t know if that meant it would be less dangerous, or more. It was still light out, though the sun was crossing the horizon. Taking a peek inside couldn’t hurt. And if there was the slightest hint of a forest in there, even one spindly little tree, I’d take my chances with the pixies.

The hairs on my arms and legs and neck rose as I stepped through the barrier, the static charge familiar now. I was braced to run, leap back out backward again if I needed to.

I saw to my relief that the only plants were overgrown bushes dragging at the rusted iron railings of the steps leading up to a house. The trees and undergrowth choking the world outside the barrier were gone, leaving the house much more intact than the buildings in the ruined city. Where time had sped up in the last bubble, the forest taking over to the point where the city was unrecognizable, here it was all but stopped in its tracks. The house looked as if only ten years had passed since people had lived there—not one hundred.

The door was locked, but a stiff jerk of the handle freed the rusted hinges from the rotting frame. I leaned the door aside and stepped into the gloom.

The windows were all shattered, blown inward, but the sun was setting and there was little light coming through the barrier outside. The air was thick with ancient dust. Under my feet the stone of the stoop gave way to soft carpet, each footstep releasing puffs of dust and mildew. Paper peeled from the wall of the front hall. I tried to flatten a curling strip of it to see what was pictured. It crumbled at my touch.

There was a stairway to a second floor, and doors all along the hall leading to other rooms. A tarnished mirror stood at the end of the hall, reflecting parts of me back in the dim light. Pushed against the wall was a cabinet with a vase that had clearly once held flowers. Only a tiny pile of dust and unidentifiable shards of decayed matter remained.

I wondered about the people who’d lived here. All their things were still here. Had the backlash from the wars killed them instantly, with no time to move away to safety?

Would I find their bones somewhere within, still locked in the poses in which they’d died?

I shivered. If the Institute knew how the fallout from the wars had killed people, it chose not to share that information—for our own good, I’m sure. There were rumors that the fallout wasn’t always lethal—that there were fates worse than death.

I was only here because I could create magic to sustain myself, so long as I could fuel my body. And I was quickly running out of food.

My vision flickered with that same fleeting sheen I’d noticed in the other pocket of energy, and I paused at a junction in the hall. I stepped through an open doorway that led from the entry hall to a big room, clearly a family space with the kitchen attached. A long, L-shaped couch divided the space, and a rectangular dining table sat in the center, six chairs clustered around it.

I made a slow circuit of the room, inspecting the kitchen with awe and confusion. It was big enough that our entire living room could have fit inside it. There was a broad stone countertop and a large pantry full of cans and boxes so covered with mold and grime that I couldn’t identify them. A clock hung high on the wall, its hands frozen and nearly invisible through the dust coating its face.