Skylark (42 page)

Pixies swarmed past me, never once registering my presence. The cold autumn air tore at my lungs until spots swam in front of my eyes. One of the pixies buzzed so closely by my face that its copper wing drew a tiny line of fire across my cheek.

When I burst back into the square, expecting to see scenes of battle and carnage and pixies screaming madly through the air, I skidded to a halt. All was silent. For one bright moment I thought I might have beaten them to the village, until I caught a glimpse of copper flitting from one of the windows.

The pixies were slipping in and out of each house, delivering whatever soporific venom they carried. The scouts posted around the square, who had been stirring and coming awake as I left, were now still and silent.

The fight for the Iron Wood was over before it had even begun.

As I stood, I saw the lines of power all around me waver and flicker again the way they had when I was trying to open the lock.

I’m not certain what you are
, Dorian had told me.
But you have an ability to manipulate power that any one of us would envy.

Without thinking, I searched for that emptiness inside me and opened it to the flickering power all around. As I reached out for them, the lines snapped to me like arcs of lightning, filling me with energy. I gasped and opened my eyes. Something in my gut tingled. Maybe it didn’t matter what I was.

Maybe it only mattered what I was going to do.

From somewhere in the Wood came a crashing and groaning that made the uncertain hope in my heart plummet again. Something was tearing through the trees. I turned my back on the village, facing the sounds of destruction and planting my feet as though my body might convince my mind not to run.

I had never heard so many machines at once before. Together they made the ground shake with vibrations from countless clockwork whispers. Overhead, the iron leaves trembled.

As the sound grew deafening, I began to see glimpses of daylight through the trees. When the machines burst out of the thickest part of the Wood, I only barely managed to hold my ground.

They had cut a swath through the Wood, iron and all, with machines that bore blades and white-blue fire. Spreading across the valley of destruction before me was an army like none I could have imagined. Machines I couldn’t name, had never seen before, could not have dreamed of, all rolling and floating and crawling toward the forest and the iron world it hid. There were harvesters and planters and police walkers, and mechanimal dogs baying and screeching as they leapt forward, and everywhere the seething, darting flocks of pixies. The sound of the clockwork was one whispering roar, like thunder past the horizon, only it never subsided—only swelled and swelled.

Here and there a splash of red told of the architects marching with them, some on foot, others in the police walkers. Kris must have come in such a vehicle. I wondered if he was there somewhere, lost in the sea of seething red and copper. When I gazed across the new valley cut through the Wood with the strange second sight I’d discovered while trying to open the lock, the machines glowed with the power sustaining their mechanisms.

Still uncertain what I meant to do, I walked out of the shadow of the forest and toward the approaching army. Overhead the sky was streaked with spun-sugar clouds, set aglow by the sunrise. As those at the front of the horde saw me, a ripple spread outward and, with an unimaginable racket of clockwork, the machines came to a halt.

From the middle of the army a harvester detached itself from a fleet of other machines and came hurtling toward the front on its six jointed legs. Unlike the empty, automated one I had encountered in the city gardens, this one had a driver. I knew who was inside before it had stopped and its occupant stepped out.

“Hello, gosling,” said Administrator Gloriette, clasping her hands in front of her stomach—undiminished by her apparently easy journey from the city. “We’ve been
so
worried about you, poor thing. How are you?” Her voice dripped with sickening deceit. Beside her, the needle-tipped fingers of the harvester stirred idly, waiting for orders.

“I’ve been better,” I said, watching her closely. She seemed different somehow. Flatter, as though she was a character in a storybook, painted onto the glorious morning spreading across the valley. Behind her another figure came into view, sitting in the carriage of the machine and watching.

Kris.

His face was locked down, so blank I almost didn’t recognize him. His teeth were clenched so tightly that the muscles stood out along his jaw.

“You’ve done so marvelously well,” Gloriette went on. Her eyes were hard and edged like razors, despite the saccharine voice that oozed from her mouth. She was watching me as carefully as I was her. “But I always knew you’d manage it.”

Something moved just at the edge of my vision—a shadow darted from one heap of mangled iron tree to another. The breath went out of me for a moment, until I realized that it wasn’t Oren.

One of the scouts had escaped the pixies’ advance, slipped through somehow. With a monumental effort, I kept my eyes on Gloriette.
Keep her talking
.

I lifted my chin. “When you spoke to me through the pixie, you said that you knew where Basil was,” I said. “And that you would tell me how to find him if I came back with you without a fight. Kris said that if I went back with you now, you could undo what you did to me. And help me find my brother.”

A flicker ran through Kris’s expression as he shifted his gaze from me to Gloriette, and back to me again. The tiniest flash—of hope. Maybe he thought I was considering returning with them after all.

“Yes,” said Gloriette, one perfectly shaped eyebrow lifting in query.

The scout crept closer, keeping piles of debris between him and the machines. With a jolt, I recognized Tomas. I wanted to scream at him to get back—what could he possibly do against an army of machines?

But if I warned him away, I’d betray his position. The architects would spot him.

I swallowed, meeting Gloriette’s gaze. “If I come back with you now, and you leave this place alone, does that offer still stand?”

Her lips pursed in a simper. “I hardly think you’re in any position to be negotiating, duck. If Kris is correct, then you have barely any power left with which to fight. And certainly not enough to be of use to us. Besides,” she added as she surveyed the village, “we’re about to take possession of enough Renewables to preserve the Wall for generations.”

“Does the offer still stand?” I repeated, my jaw clenching.

Gloriette watched me for a few long seconds and then shrugged, turning her back. “No,” she said. “There is no cure for you. But we had to tell our boy something to get him on board, didn’t we?”

She turned, her bulk briefly concealing Kris. I saw a flash of his face as Gloriette climbed back into the carriage. His eyes were stricken, raw—he scrambled forward, trying to shove past Gloriette to get to me.

“Lark—!”

The door slammed. Tomas chose that moment to strike, launching himself out of hiding and at the harvester. Without even blinking Gloriette passed her hand over one of the controls, and one of the heavy metal legs shot out and slammed into Tomas’s body, smashing him to the ground.

He started to crawl away but the harvester shifted its weight, one leg coming down and pinning Tomas’s knee beneath it. His scream rang through the metal forest.

I stood frozen, horror turning my limbs to ice. Tomas’s hands clawed at the earth, trying to pull himself away. Through the machine’s carriage window, Gloriette just looked down at him, studying him like an insect, one hand toying with the architect’s compass around her neck. At another twitch from her other hand, the machine shifted again. The cracking of bone was audible even over the sound of a thousand clockwork mechanisms thrumming, and Tomas’s agonized scream.

I saw Tomas’s power fluctuating wildly, and finally found my voice. “Stop it!” I screamed, throwing myself forward. “I said I’d go back with you! That’s what you want, isn’t it? Just take me and leave these people alone.”

Gloriette leaned back, looking down at me with a smile. “My dear,” she said lightly, “What would give you the idea that we would even want you? Your part in all of this is finished.”

She inclined her head, signaling to the machines around her to carry on. All across the valley the army roared to life and began to pick up speed again.

Gloriette’s harvester moved forward. The leg crushing Tomas’s knee lifted, only to come down again on his shoulder. I ran to him as the machines swarmed around us, parting like the sea around a stone on the shore.

He was still alive. I couldn’t tell if he saw me at all through his pain—his eyes were fixed somewhere past my face, his mouth moving as though he wanted to speak. The second blow had crushed part of his ribcage—the flattened grass around him was rapidly becoming soaked with his blood. Too much blood—too much damage. My mind was blank, panicked—there was nothing I could do except watch him suffer.

Helplessly I reached out and touched his face with my fingertips, and saw the halo of energy around him snap to my hand, electric and raw. Tomas’s breath rattled painfully in the one side of his chest still trying to rise.

I bent my head and placed both my hands against him, palms flat, and felt the power surge into me. The lines of pain etched into Tomas’s face eased a little, his eyes widening. The suffering seemed to ease. I closed my eyes and kept pulling, letting the energy trickle into the empty void that had once held my own magic.

It wasn’t until I felt the last trickle of power leave him that I opened my eyes. His face was calm, relaxed, eyes still fixed on the sky beyond my face. His chest was still, his labored breathing ceased. I swallowed and closed his eyes, my hand shaking.

I stood slowly and watched the machines as they passed me. My new second sight showed them as different than the people in the Wood—mutated and dark. Synthesized and false, torn from the Renewable’s body and injected into clockwork hearts. It twisted and flapped as if loose in a breeze. It snapped as the mechanisms turned over—snapped like the breaking of bones.

You fight for the people you love
, came Tansy’s voice. I saw her form lying unconscious on the ground, and something within me snapped.

I touched the hollowness in my stomach, the hole where their synthetic power had once nestled. Tomas’s energy nestled there, a tiny spark in the emptiness. Suddenly I realized what Dorian had sensed in me. I let the tension drain from my body and
opened
, pulling with every ounce of strength I had.

Behind me, I heard the sound of a thousand needle-fingered hands clicking and extending, and then the screaming of iron and earth. The machines were tearing the rest of the path for the army through the forest.

Though the touch of it sickened me I cast my net wide and caught at the threads of power flapping free from the hearts of the machines. The threads snagged and caught the pull of the void, and with snaps and jagged floods came shooting to me.

The subtle roar of a thousand clockwork hearts faltered. As the noise dimmed it broke from a single thrum into a thousand different beats, and as one by one they began to fail, the cries of the red coats became audible over the din. Curses at first, a hundred people blaming a hundred different people. Then confusion and disbelief, as walkers toppled to the ground and harvesters halted mid-destruction. Then terror, slow and subtle at first and building to a wave that swept over the army like a fire.

The power was not enough. Soon they would be upon the village, and the helpless unconscious people within it. I needed more.

I opened the pit inside me as wide as I could manage, and with a silent flash, bolts of the villagers’ energy arced toward me. The void began to fill. The power rushed to me like lightning, with all the magic around me flying to me in a fraction of a second.

Then came a distant sound—cries and groans of pain from the Wood. The pain of being harvested—a pain I knew all too well, strong enough to rouse them from their artificial sleep. Somewhere I heard a child scream, and in my mind’s eye I saw a tiny, dirty face falling into the shadows after I threw it from a cliff.

I tried to stop, cut off the flow of energy, but it was like trying to stop a river with my fingers. It came rushing in from everything around me—the people, the machines, the ground beneath my feet. The more I took the more I hungered—the pull grew stronger and stronger until even the trees around me, iron, unmovable, gave up their magic with a dull screech of metal.

A flash of a memory came to me—a woman wreathed in white, power flowing from her veins, carried away by glass wires. If I let the memory blur, I couldn’t tell whether the power was flowing away or flooding into her. I opened my eyes and saw white, the power around me shining so hotly that the air was burning.

Dimly I heard Gloriette’s shrill voice commanding that someone stop me, crush me, kill me. The few machines still standing came at me, only to crumple to the ground as they, too, surrendered their magic to me. Pixies flew at me, stingers extending, screaming—only to drop to the ground, still and dead. The sick and twisted stolen energy of the machines flowed into the white flood from the people of Iron Wood and was changed, stripped of its impurities, intensified into something greater.