Skylark (21 page)

“Will we be safe in here?” I asked, catching myself before I stumbled to my knees again into a thorn bush. I shivered in the now-freezing dark.

“Maybe,”
said the pixie.

“Will those shadow men come into the woods?”
“Shadow men,”
repeated the pixie. For the briefest second,

I imagined I had detected amusement in its voice. Which was impossible, of course. It was only repeating my own tones.
“Not the shadow men,”
it answered, finally.

“But something else might?” I pressed.

“I’m not certain.”

I was too weary to protest, and from then on walked in silence that was broken only by the crashing of leaves and twigs as I blundered my way through the forest. It had grown so dark that I began to spend more time on my hands and knees than on my feet, and when I had crashed into a bush for what felt like the fiftieth time, the pixie came to a halt.

“Let’s stop for the night.”

I dropped to my knees where I was standing, one tiny part of my brain grateful for the moss underfoot that could have easily been rocks or more thorns. It didn’t even matter, for the moment, that I was being ruled so completely by a machine. All that mattered was rest.

The pixie made a wide circle and buzzed back toward me. It didn’t speak, but instead bumped insistently against the pack slung across my shoulders.

“What, you want food? You don’t eat.” Uncertainty tickled at my mind. “Do you?”

“You eat,”
said the pixie.
“I don’t.”

“Such concern,” I said, making no effort to keep the chill out of my voice. I leaned forward, shrugging out of the bag and loosening the drawstring. Despite having stopped midday to eat my last piece of bread, I was still ravenously hungry from having used magic to smash the pixie.

All that came from the pack into my groping hands were two carrots and half of a cucumber. I swallowed the saliva that came rushing to my mouth, and took up the cucumber. The broken end of it was dry and wrinkly from exposure to the air, but I ate it anyway, too hungry to care about its rubbery, chalky texture. It was gone all too soon, leaving me holding the two carrots. I willed my stomach to settle.

“Eat,”
repeated the pixie, invisible in the gloom.

“If I eat them now I won’t have anything to eat in the morning.” My voice sounded hollow even to my own ears.

“You will look in the morning.”

“For more food?” My hands tightened around the carrots. “Out here?”

“Yes. I will help you.”

“And lead me straight to something poisonous.” I gritted my teeth. I knew I shouldn’t eat the carrots. But the stabbing in my gut was too strong to ignore.

The carrots, sweet and only a little soft, were gone as quickly as the cucumber.

Now that I was still, the cold had begun to creep in around me. I had been so preoccupied with my hunger that I hadn’t noticed it. The aching emptiness was only slightly lessened by the vegetables, but it was enough that I could focus on the lighter the wild boy had given me.

The pixie sat some distance away as I gathered a little pile of leaf litter. Striking the wheel with my thumb without being able to see it was harder than I had expected. By the time I was able to coax a spark out of it, I was shivering so violently my vision blurred.

By sheer good fortune, the spark fell full upon the little pile of leaf litter—and smoldered there, uselessly, until it winked out. Echoes of its brightness danced in my fuzzy vision as I stared into the darkness where it had been.

Only the pixie kept me from throwing the lighter across the clearing. I would not admit defeat in front of a machine.

Wait—the pixie
had
been there, humming faintly some yards away. It was no longer. There was only the quiet and the cold and the utter darkness closing in around me.

All the day’s suspicions crashed in on me. To have trusted one of the Institute’s machines, believed that I had rendered it harmless, with one lucky blow? I deserved to be caught. I cradled the lighter, warm from my futile attempts to make it work, against my chest.

I heard the pixie’s return long before it spoke, and so when it buzzed into the clearing and said,
“Here,”
I managed not to jump.

Something soft and light dropped down onto my lap as the pixie buzzed past my face. I groped, and my fingertips discovered a loose ball of dead moss. Dry, thin, airy—the perfect kindling. I looked up, but the pixie was invisible in the dark. I swallowed a “thank you” and bent my head once more to the fire.

I coaxed sparks out of the lighter much more easily this time, but they seemed only to fly up, out—everywhere but onto the little ball of moss. My fingers were stiff with cold now, throbbing with every movement.

When a spark finally caught in the moss, I held my breath as it smoldered, one tiny filament glowing in the darkness. The glow spread to another. And then another. And then, as I exhaled over the smoldering moss so gently that it barely stirred at my breath, the flame caught.

I groped around, cursing that I had not gathered twigs and sticks beforehand. Luckily the spot the pixie had chosen to stop for the night was full of them, and I found enough fuel to turn the wisp of flame into a tiny little fire that shed enough light for me to see my surroundings.

I was in a clearing. The trees around me stood tall and straight, but for one that had fallen, uprooted at its base. It had to have been recent; the dirt still clung to the roots.

The pixie settled onto a dead branch of the fallen tree, rustling and settling its wings in an odd parody of grooming. The hum of its magic was discordant, but rapidly becoming as familiar to me as the sun disc inside the Wall had been. Now that I was growing warmer, my body began reporting various aches and pains I hadn’t noticed before. Somewhere, between the sound of the pixie and the faint aching of my body, I let exhaustion take over and fell asleep.

Once I thought I woke in the night to see a face at the edge of the firelight. It was a face I was coming to know. It was softer by firelight, the orange glow smoothing his dirty cheeks and highlighting the hair. His features were younger than I had first guessed. I should have been frightened, but the lethargy of sleep kept me quiet, calm.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

The wild boy looked at me, crouched in the moss and leaves, one hand on the ground to steady himself. “Nobody,” he whispered back, his voice raw and young and startling. I had not believed he would answer me. “Go back to sleep.”

I fell helplessly into oblivion, the face swimming back into darkness. I tried to call out, “Wait!” But he was gone, and I knew nothing else until dawn.

•  •  •

I woke to the dappled sunrise, narrow shafts of light making their way through the treetops. I had almost forgotten the sound of the sun disc, the sound that had woken me every morning for sixteen years. Instead, I heard the pixie’s faint whirring and the tiny hiss of the embers of my fire.

I had slept more deeply and more soundly that night than I had since that first night in the Institute. I remembered a face and an electrifying
human
voice whispering, “Sleep. . . .”

The pixie had not yet woken, or started up, or whatever it needed to do to snap out of its hibernation. I chose to stay where I was, curled up by the fire, savoring the extra rest.

As I dozed, my mind turned over something that had been bothering me since the pixie first spoke. It was such a tiny creature, its diamond heart so small that it couldn’t possibly carry much power. In the city, all machines—pixies included—returned often to the Institute to be recharged. How, then, was this one still going, days away from the city? How had it regained power after I had damaged it to the point where its heart had been barely flickering?

My stomach began to roar for food. I remembered, with a sinking heart, that I had eaten the last of my rations the night before. This was no natural hunger, either; this was the price of having used magic. I could feel it gnawing away at me, exploding in my brain with the power of a migraine.

As if awakened by my digestive system, the pixie gave a sharp click and then whirred into life.

“Sleep well?” I had no way of knowing if it could detect sarcasm; it was probably just as well if it couldn’t.

“Yes,”
it said, giving its wings a flutter and a shake, sending a spray of tiny droplets of dew shimmering into the air.
“Thank you.”

My stomach roiled and lurched. Had I taught it that phrase?

“You should eat,”
it went on, continuing to rustle and shiver its wings as if grooming them.

“Eat what?” I shut my eyes against the painful emptiness in my body. “You convinced me to eat all I had last night, remember?”

“Look,”
said the pixie.

When I sat up I saw it across the blackened remains of my fire. Nestled on a leaf, in a neat conical stack, was a pile of little purple berries.

My throat seized with confusion, as my stomach gave a painful lurch. “Where did those come from? Did you—”

“No,”
said the pixie, before I’d managed to finish the question.

“Then who?”

“You don’t know?”

The image of a face, dimly seen through the flames, swam into my mind’s eye. But that had been a dream.

Hadn’t it?

“I have no way of knowing if they’re safe to eat.” I was unable to tear my eyes away from the berries. For a blind, aching moment I didn’t care if eating them would kill me—I wanted to fill my empty stomach. My head swam from hunger.

“They’re safe,”
echoed the pixie.

I stared at it. “How would you know? You’ve spent your life—existence—whatever, behind the Wall.”

The pixie fluttered its wings again, lifting a delicate copper leg to scratch at its abdomen.
“As did you.”

“I know!” Hunger twisted my mind. I wanted to smash the bug. “And that’s why I don’t know if they’re safe!”

“I know.”
Its voice was firm.

I had little choice.

My fingers trembled as I reached for one of the berries. “Just one,” I whispered. “Even if they’re poisonous, surely one won’t kill me.” The berry was slightly warm from the fire, and gave under my fingers like flesh. I shuddered and popped it into my mouth.

It was so tart that my mouth felt as though it was shriveling up. I gasped as the acidic juices touched cracked lips, and swallowed. Now to wait, to try to ignore the overwhelming urge to stuff my face.

And yet, why would the wild boy have left them, if I wasn’t meant to eat them? If he wanted me dead, he could have killed me in my sleep a dozen times over by now.

Even before I had followed the thought to its conclusion, my fingers were reaching for more berries. They stained my fingers purple-red as I ate, but I didn’t care. Their tartness was unbelievably satisfying. Before I could stop myself, I’d eaten every last one.

I threw myself onto my back, staring up at the treetops above me, waiting for my stomach to process the news that I had fed it. I was by no means sated, but I would at least live a little longer. I wondered how long it took to starve to death.

How long does it take to die from poisonous berries?

My stomach was roiling a bit, having trouble with the acid of the berries, but nothing more dramatic than that.

Berries. Berries meant a flowering bush. And a flowering bush meant pollinators. At the Institute, they had developed strains of berry fruiting shrubs that could self-pollinate. But in the wild? Was there a place, then, that bees or butterflies still existed? My heart skipped a beat. Or birds?

I sat up again, running a hand through my hair. “Do you know who that was?”

“Who?”

“The boy—man—whoever it was, who brought me these.”

“No.”

“I can’t keep relying on him to bring me things when I need them.”

“No.”
The pixie’s sedate agreement infuriated me.

“We need to find some food I can take with me.”

“We are close to where you want to go.”

“Close?” My hands tightened around the moss underneath me. “How close? A couple days? One day? Less?”

“Less than one day.”
Finally its wings settled into stillness as it finished grooming the dew from its mechanisms.

I hesitated. A search for food might take us farther from the source of the sound the pixie had replicated. And if there were birds where we were going, they had to be eating something—hopefully something I could eat, too.

The pixie’s path would take us deeper into the forest, further from the plain that I thought would be my best hope for finding food growing wild. Further from the city, further from home. But then, it wasn’t my home, was it? Not anymore. I slung my pack up onto my shoulders and we set out, disappearing from the sunlit clearing back into the dark, empty forest.