Skylark (40 page)

He was waiting for me when I arrived. At some point during my circuit around the square, the change had occurred and he was himself again. He was watching me much the way he had been before, though the manner of his stare had changed, softened. Less animal.

He sat leaning against the bars at his back, feet crossed at the ankles and his hands loosely draped over his knees. He looked for all the world as though he was sitting comfortably by a campfire, though the confines of the cage would hardly let him assume any other position.

We stared at each other through the bars of the cage. Finally, I licked my lips and managed to whisper, “Hi.”

He scarcely acknowledged the greeting, blinking once, the gleam of moonlight reflected in his eyes cutting out and then returning. After a time, he lifted his head a fraction and said quietly, “I’m one of them, aren’t I?”

“One of—” My voice caught in my throat.

“The dark ones.” There was little to be seen in his face, as impassive as ever. If anything his voice was flatter, emptier than I’d ever heard it before.

“How did you—”

“There are moments in the dark times,” he said, “when I almost know myself. And I’m still in this cage. I get confused. Not stupid.”

I gazed at him and he gazed back. There wasn’t an ounce of self-pity in his face. If it had been me I would have been howling my innocence, begging to be released. He sat and looked at me, hands resting loosely on his knees.

“What do they have planned?” he asked eventually, breaking the silence.

“They gave me this night,” I whispered. “A little time. And then they’ll—” My jaw clenched so tightly I almost couldn’t bring myself to speak. “I won’t let them. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m not afraid,” he said, pale eyes darkening, intensifying. He leaned forward, the fierce angles of his face bisected in the middle by an iron bar that cast a sharp shadow against his cheekbone. “If this is what I am, then I
should
die.” I’d heard that kind of single-minded bloodlust in his voice before, at the summer lake. When he’d told me that it didn’t matter that the shadow woman and her child were human inside the magic. When he’d told me they all deserved to die.

“No,” I said fiercely, before I remembered to keep my voice low. “You’re not a monster. They can’t see you for what you are.”

“I’m only different because of the time I’ve spent with you,” said Oren. He had yet to raise his voice at all, keeping it pitched low. He didn’t whisper, but spoke with a quiet grace that made me want to tear through the bars of his cage to get him out. “It’s easy to see it, looking back. The longer I stayed with you the clearer the world became. I just thought it was—” He shook his head sharply. This time, though, I recognized that flash of irritation for the intimacy it was. He certainly didn’t let anyone else see his emotions. “I just thought it was
you
.”

I leaned forward and wrapped my hands around the bars, as though my touch might melt them away. “If I bring you to Dorian you can tell him that you’re not a monster, and he’ll stop them from hurting you. I know we can make him see it. I’ll stay by you and keep you—keep you human. Keep you safe.” I bowed my head, pressing my forehead against the iron.

Oren reached out, brushing the backs of my fingers with his. “I don’t want to be
kept
,” he said softly, prompting me to lift my head again.

My face must have been a wreck with withheld tears and sleep deprivation, but he didn’t flinch away, the corner of his mouth lifting. I pulled my hands away from the bars and went to the door of his cage. If Dorian believed I was powerful enough to wipe out an army, then surely I was strong enough for this.

“It’s locked,” Oren said, turning to watch me.

“I don’t need a key,” I muttered.

“Lark,” he said. “It’s iron. Even I know by now that you can’t magic iron.”

“The trees were turned to iron with magic. Iron is just a thing in the world,” I said, lifting the iron padlock in one hand. It sat in my palm, heavy and cold. “Like any other.” I closed my eyes, searching for that tiny grain of energy I had left.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” warned Oren. “Remember the last magic you did? I had to carry you back to the summer lake. You were so light I thought you might break.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I know how to do it now.” It was only partly a lie. Dorian’s words—about channeling, amplifying power—had struck something in me that made more sense than I would have admitted to him. He had told me, after all, that I had an ability to manipulate magic, to amplify it, that anyone would have envied.

I found that knot inside me, the tiny last vestiges of power that were left to me from the Institute. I understood now why it had always been so painful, using that power, the way it had snapped out of me like the shattering of a bone. They’d put it there, some alien force synthesized in their laboratory. No wonder it felt as though I was breaking.

The lock grew warmer as I concentrated—but warming to the heat of my hand, or to the power I was trying to access, I could not tell.

“Lark!” Oren said sharply, reaching through the bars and grabbing my wrist. “Snap out of it! I’m not leaving this cage if you open the lock. Lark,
I need to be put down
. If I’m free I
will
kill people.”

“No!” My eyes snapped open, vision blurring with weary tears. “They intend to execute you in the morning and I will
not
stand by and let them kill you, not when I can do something about it. I don’t care about what you’ve done and I don’t care about what you might do; I only care about what you are to me, and if you don’t sit down and let me do this I will drug you senseless and drag you into the woods and leave you there.”

I blinked the moisture away from my eyes and saw that he was staring at me in silence, all expression gone again from his face. I cleared my throat and whispered, “If it were me, would you sit here and let me die?”

I longed for him to speak, but all he did was sit there and gaze at me with that infuriatingly impassive stare. Then, slowly, finger by finger, he let go of my wrist.

I turned my attention back to the lock, grateful to have something to focus on other than the boy in the cage. My stomach was surging so that I scarcely noticed the fog descending in my head, the dizziness overtaking me. As I closed my eyes again the metal grew hot in my hand.

The blood roared in my ears as I willed that power to snap out of me. There wasn’t much left. It was as though being told I was losing it had created my awareness of it. Now I could sense all too clearly that the power was almost gone.

I summoned up—for the last time?—the image of my brother’s paper bird, the ringing sensation of that first magic. It had been before the Institute had done anything to me. That first time, the power had been all mine. I tried to find that reserve and instead found emptiness.

When I opened my eyes again my vision clicked and changed. I could see Oren next to me, a power sink, each tendril of energy I raised sucked away into him. He was a dark pit of nothing, whereas I could see shining tangles of energy all around that were the sleeping scouts, the families in their houses beyond, and those on watch for the Institute. It was like the flashes of iridescence I’d seen in the pockets, only they were flashes no more. Gleaming, glittering, I could see it all— the power everywhere, waiting to be tapped.

Shaking with effort, I poured all of myself into the padlock. The images of the shining people all around the square wavered, lines of their power snapping to me like lightning to a tower. My stomach wrenched so hard I was sure it could no longer be connected to the rest of me. I gasped and dropped the lock. It fell open, swung once with the momentum, and rocked off the door. The metal blade tucked into my pants burned hot against my skin.

I stood staring at the lock as Oren pushed open the door. I felt empty and hollow. What had I just done?

Oren had climbed out of his cage and had taken hold of my shoulders, was saying something urgently. He gave me the tiniest of shakes. I swam back to the present and looked up, startled.

“—need to sit down?”

“I’m—fine,” I gasped. I realized as soon as I spoke that the words weren’t a lie. I hadn’t felt so whole since Harvest Day. The magic was gone—and all that was left was me.

Oren gazed hard at me. It was as though he was searching for something in my face, and I was glad I had not had to lie. I felt certain he would have known. That gaze was so forceful—such a mix of human concern and animal ferocity—that I had to close my eyes and block him out. I expected him to insist I sit down, rest, eat something, that my closing my eyes would make him think I was on the verge of collapse.

“You said ‘what you are to me,’” he said instead. There was something strange and unfamiliar in his voice that prompted me to open my eyes and look at him, startled. It was very faint, but I had come to know that face and its subtleties, and I saw it for what it was: surprise.

“Yes.”

“You know that I’m a monster.”

What good was arguing with him now? I swallowed and whispered, “Yes.”

He closed his eyes and then dropped his head. When he looked up again, the moment of surprise was gone and he was as quiet and unreadable as ever. My legs felt weak, felt like the weight of his hands might drive me to my knees.

As if he could detect my weakness, he let his hands fall to his sides. “We should get moving,” he said, his voice rough. “Dawn is coming.”

“We,” I repeated. I had meant it as a question but my voice emerged so softly that it was only an echo.

He took a step back, looking at me. I had not realized how close we’d been standing. “We,” he said firmly. “You didn’t free me and expect me to leave you here alone?”

“I can’t go with you,” I whispered. The hollowness in my stomach was a yawning pit, threatening to swallow me from the inside out. Was this what people felt like in the city when they had been harvested?

“You have to,” said Oren. “I need you. To stay human.”

I shook my head. The pace and a half between us gaped like a canyon, and I stared across the gulf at him. “I’m not a Renewable,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own—it was as if someone had taken over to explain the situation to him. I let the voice continue, too fearful to take control back and soften the blow. “I’m an experiment. The Institute created me, gave me the power, everything. I have nothing left. I used the rest of it opening that lock. If we leave here together then it will be only a matter of time before . . .”

It was as if I’d managed to steal the years from him. His shoulders sagged like an old man’s, the sharply angled face suddenly hollow-cheeked and weary. “Before I turn, and I kill you,” he finished for me.

I nodded.

“You should have let them kill me,” he said quietly. “You let me think that if I could suffer to be kept, if you stayed by me, I’d stay whole.” His face had changed, the eyes cold and glittering. “You let me think I’d stay myself.”

“I couldn’t let them kill you,” I said. I felt like the phonograph. I repeated the words over and over and every time they seemed to hold less. “I couldn’t,” I said again.

“Why would you think I’d want to live if—” His lips pressed together. I wished he’d look away, be unable to look at me, turn his sudden anger onto some other target. But he only stared, and I burned and twisted but couldn’t look away.

“Because even being a monster is better than being dead.”

He stood staring at me, cold and tense. My eyes began to water with the effort of gazing back at him, and I blinked the tears away and dropped my eyes. “You should go,” I said tightly. “If dawn is so close, you need to be moving before daylight to avoid being seen.”

Oren said nothing, jaw still clenched.

“Cut north from here,” I said. “That’s where the grove is. There are apples there—you can bring some with you for supplies. Keep north when you leave; that’s where the scouts are thinnest.”

“Lark,” he said, trying to interrupt me.

“If you move quickly, maybe you can make the nearest pocket of magic before you—before you change.”

“Lark!”

“Be safe,” I said, staring at his threadbare T-shirt, unable to lift my head and meet his eye. “Please, Oren, be saf—”

He took a step forward and covered my mouth with his hand. He smelled of blood and grass and the wild wind. “Be
still
,” he said fiercely. “Do you never stop talking?”

He curled his fingers into the hair at the nape of my neck. He touched his lips to mine. The lips of a monster. I must have made some small sound, for he drew back abruptly. He scanned my face. I was too stupid with the ringing in my ears and burning of my lips to know what he saw in my expression.

Whatever he found there changed him. He stepped forward, closing the gap between us again. This time there was an urgency to his kiss that broke my heart. I could taste him— the metallic tang of his mouth. The taste of blood.

A monster. A murderer. A cannibal.

I shoved him away, gasping for air. “Don’t,” I panted. “Don’t touch me.” I shuddered, revulsion coursing through me.