Skylark (36 page)

“Even Nix,” I whispered. My gaze went from Kris’s face to the pixie. It looked back at me, as emotionless as ever. How had I ever believed it was anything other than a machine?

Then, very slowly, without so much as an extra whir of its mechanisms, one eye winked for the briefest second. I shot my eyes back to Kris, forcing myself to keep looking at him.

“So everything was a lie,” I said, uttering the first words to come to my mind. Keep him talking. “Down to your charm and your interest in the people here. You weren’t interested in them; you were interested in our defenses.”

“Our?” echoed Kris. Something was happening to the pixie, a movement I didn’t dare look at for fear of drawing attention to it. “You’re not an ‘us,’ Lark. You don’t fit here. They aren’t your people.
We
are. And we need you to come home.” He lowered his voice. “I need you to come home.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, feigning indecision. “But all the people here . . .”

“They’ll be fine, I promise.”

“Well,” I said, smiling. “So long as you promise.”

Nix struck with the stinger it had unfolded from somewhere underneath its body. I had assumed it had broken when I first attacked it—I’d certainly never seen it since. Until now.

The copper barb sank deep into Kris’s neck—he gave a shout and swatted the pixie away with his hand. Nix struck the opposite wall and clattered to the floor.

“Son of a bitch!” snarled Kris, rubbing at his neck and inspecting his hand, checking for blood. Nix’s stinger had left behind an angry red welt on his skin. “Stupid bug—I’ll have you decommish—decomm . . .” He swayed, blinking hard and staring at me. “You did this, you . . .” He shook his head and reached out for something I couldn’t see. “All I wanted was to help you, keep you safe. They’ll kill you—they’ll tear you apart....”

His grasping hands found no support, and he slumped to the ground with a thud. I stood breathing hard for a few long seconds, every muscle trembling. Then I darted for the spot where Nix had slammed into the wall.

The wings were bent and twisted, but already the little spindly repair arms were at work.
“Go get Dorian,”
said Nix, its voice shattered and distorted.

I stroked the little bug’s head with a fingertip. “Thanks,” I whispered.

I lurched to my feet and burst into the night. I shouted Dorian awake and had him dropping down the rope ladder in moments. He listened to my frenzied explanation and then— along with a handful of scouts attracted by my racket—made his way to Tansy’s house.

Kris was gone—and so was Nix.

•  •  •

The town was in a frenzy, work abandoned in favor of packing and fortifying. Half of the Wood’s occupants wanted to stay and fight—the others, those who had come from cities and seen what they could do, wanted to scatter across the wilderness and hope to find somewhere new to hide.

I stayed as hidden as I could. No one blamed me for what had happened—at least not to my face—but I felt each glance and whisper as a knife in my ribs. I tried to leave Tansy’s house, saying I would camp outside the village amongst the iron trees, but her parents confiscated my shoes until I promised I’d “stop this nonsense,” as Tansy’s mother called it.

Over the next day, Tansy stayed by me when she wasn’t off with the scouts, although keeping watch took up most of her time.

Though I loved Tansy for her unquestioning friendship, part of me wanted nothing more than to be alone. With a few well-chosen words, Kris had taken everything from me. He’d taken my identity, my sense of power and understanding of my life, even the accomplishment of having made it from the city to the Wood. For what teenager could break out of a heavily guarded cell and escape capture for weeks? How could a girl believe she was surviving in the wilderness when she had never seen the sky?

I was an experiment, a tool. I was what I’d once longed to be: a cog in their mechanism, nothing more. And I had fulfilled my role as efficiently as anyone could have hoped. I was a valuable part of the machine. I wanted to return to the bog and let it swallow me down.

Dorian was the only person in the village who declined to choose a side, whether to stay or go. Some accused him of indecision, while others argued that there had to be some reason that only Dorian understood.

He summoned me to his house some time after sundown, two days after Kris fled. I had known it was coming, had been braced to face him ever since I’d explained that Kris was an architect come from a city bent on taking the Iron Wood’s residents for its own uses.

He opened the door for me as I lifted a hand to knock, and ushered me inside. I sat in the same chair I’d sat in that first day, feeling more nauseous and uncertain than ever.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Dorian, taking a pot of steaming water from the top of his stove and pouring it into two cups, “about your pixie, as you call it.”

I blinked, caught off-guard by the topic. I had expected a discussion about Kris, or the city, or Gloriette, or my part in it all. “What about it?”

“Well, typically those clockwork type creations need to have magic added to their stores constantly, or they run down. I’ve seen them before. Got to have something to keep the clockwork running.”

“It used me to recharge.”

“That’s just it,” said Dorian, handing me one of the two cups and then sinking down into the chair opposite me. “We can’t do that, you know. Exude magic that way. We have to concentrate to let it out. It doesn’t sit about us like—like a cloud, for anything to be touched by it.”

“So clearly the city’s methods are imperfect,” I said, weary of having my own imperfections, my differences, pointed out to me. I bowed my head, inhaling the fragrant steam. “I was leaking. It’s not a surprise.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Dorian, curling his hands around his mug. “You’re not a Renewable, no, but you’re not ‘normal’ either.”

“I won’t be anything once the power runs out.” I could hear the bitterness in my voice. I regretted it, but could not quite control it.

“Are you so sure it will?”

I blinked again. “Well—no. But what reason would they have to lie?”

“At what point have they ever told you the truth? The thing is, I can’t figure out why they would have sent that young man here to collect you.”

“I guess because they wanted to tie up loose ends?”

“That’s possible. But he risked a lot, coming in here to get you—”

“Don’t try to convince me that he
cares
about me,” I protested.

“No, I wouldn’t dream of it.” There was a faint smile on Dorian’s face. For the briefest of mad moments I wanted to shout at him for it. I restrained myself. “I was going to say that to take such a big risk, there must have been promise of a big payoff. I’m not so sure you’re as useless as you think you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. But whether it’s the quality that allowed you to survive their process in the first place, or whether the process changed something within you, you’re different now, Lark. You’re not one of us, but you’re not one of them either. I’m not certain
what
you are, or what you can do—except that to come so far, on such tiny reserves of power, you must have an ability to manipulate power that any one of us would envy.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I burst out. “The only thing I’ve managed to do is flail out with it, and sometimes it hasn’t even worked.”

“You told me you threw a creature off a cliff, and lifted yourself and another person up in the air,” replied Dorian, both brows lifting. “And after your resources were nearly depleted. Did you think magic was easy? There’s a reason we don’t have everything floating around by magic here, Lark. To lift even the smallest of things takes incredible concentration and effort and strength. It’s much easier to just use our hands. I’m not saying you’re skilled. You have about as much finesse as a toddler throwing a tantrum. But you have an ability to take the tiniest grain of power and magnify it tenfold. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and I’ve seen as much as anyone in the world, I’d wager.”

“But what does that mean? Am I not going to die?”

Dorian lifted his cup and took a slow, careful sip of the hot tea. “I can’t say for sure,” he said. “I won’t lie to you. If it was one of us, the act of having our magic torn away from us for good probably would kill us. It’s probably why your city does it when its citizens are children, and flexible. But you? After what they did to you? I don’t know. For now, just try not to use your power. It does seem like they were telling the truth about the power in you ebbing, at least. You did say it had been getting harder.”

I nodded, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. “What are you going to do? About the Institute? They’ll be here any day.”

The smile on his face faded, and he shook his head. “That I can’t say,” he said, his expression troubled. “It’s an impossible situation. Part of me would like nothing better than to erect a wall not unlike the one you passed through to come here, in order to keep them out. But we don’t have that kind of power and finesse. And we might as well scatter to the corners of the continent; because no one in the future will be able to come here seeking asylum the way you did.”

I was silent for a while, staring into the depths of my tea at the dark leaves lurking at its bottom. “How do you know I didn’t lead them here?” I whispered.

“Oh, Lark. You did lead them here.”

My gaze snapped up—but he was smiling again.

“But you didn’t do it on purpose. If you had, then you would have left with Kris. We have scouts after him. We will find him. But you can hardly be held responsible for the fact that the leadership of your city is slightly ahead of the curve of the other cities’. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.”

“But it
was
me,” I blurted angrily. “There were signs everywhere, I was just too stupid to see them. How could I have ever thought I was capable of doing all of that, over the past few weeks?”

Dorian listened, not a hair out of place, not a sign that he had any reaction to my angry outburst. “And yet,” he said, after a few moments, “here you are. So you clearly
are
capable.”

“I was
sent
.”

“
You
made a choice,” he said firmly. “And you saw it through.”

I got out of my chair. Clutching my mug, still almost too hot for my fingers, I paced around the perimeter of the oneroom house. I stopped at the bureau full of trinkets, eyes raking across each one of them.

“You could have left with him and been safe, but you chose to remain with us.” Dorian’s calm unsettled me, so different from Oren’s blank expressions—Oren’s were hiding something fierce and raging underneath the surface, but Dorian gave the impression of calm all the way through. With the Institute a matter of days, if not hours, away, I could not comprehend his serenity. Nonetheless, that calm reached me, soothing me despite my agitation.

I stood looking at the rows of curios for some time before I realized what I was seeing. When I did, I snatched up the paper cat I’d seen my first day, and whirled around.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, extending my hand.

Dorian’s eyebrows lifted again. “A boy made it for me. He came through some years ago, from a city as well.”

I nearly dropped my mug. “Kris said that my brother might still be alive. He made figures like this. The boy—what was his name?”

“He was here only for a day or two before setting off again. I can’t quite remember. Something strange, like—Rue? Sage?”

“Basil,” I whispered.

Chapter 27

Dorian said nothing in reply, but I could see the memory in his gaze. I could hear raised voices in the distance outside but I ignored them, my eyes locked on Dorian’s face.

“Where did he go?” I croaked, my voice cracking horribly. “Did he say?”

“He said he was looking for answers. I gave him the location of a city far to the north—here.” Dorian rose from his chair and crossed to the map, jabbing his finger at it. “This is us, here. This is your city, to the east—see it? And this is where I sent your brother.” His finger moved up the map, tracing a thick black line marked The Great Northern Road up to a blue pin to the north.