Shadowlark

CHAPTER 23

My brother and I stared at each other. For an interminable moment the rest of the audience chamber ceased to exist, no more than an animated blur outside the tense corridor of space between us.

Then, abruptly, everything around us came rushing back, and the moment shattered. A pair of Eagles grabbed me, pinning my hands behind my back while Adjutant came between me and Prometheus, wielding another of those talon weapons.

“Is that how you greet your god?” he hissed for my ears alone, eyes snapping. Gone was the polite, almost considerate man from the interrogation room, replaced by an utter madman. Shaking, he stretched out the device, and I braced myself for another dose of overwhelming magic.

“Stop!” My brother’s voice was deeper, more resonant than I remembered. And yet I could hear it threatening to crack, held together only by determination. “Stop. Take her—take her away. Put her somewhere.”

“But sir,” Adjutant said, straightening out of my vision, calm once again. The Eagles were forcing my head down so I couldn’t see my brother. “Sir, this is the girl. The one who can magic iron.” A murmur rippled through the crowd, shock and fear and disbelief. “This is the girl you wanted to use.” Adjutant sounded patient, as if he suspected Prometheus— Basil—simply didn’t understand my significance.

“I’m aware of that,” said Basil, regaining some control over himself. “And I asked you to take her away. I’ll deal with her later.”

Adjutant hesitated. Even though my shock and confusion I could tell he was not pleased to have been so ordered— perhaps there was a seed of dissention in Prometheus’s rule. Before I could process the thought, Adjutant gestured to the Eagles restraining me. If I could have spoken through my shock, I would have told them no restraint was necessary. All desire to fight had drained away the moment I recognized my brother’s face. They hoisted me up under my arms and started to make for the door.

“And Adjutant,” said my brother, “don’t throw her into one of your interrogation rooms. She’s our guest. Make sure she’s treated like one.”

I didn’t resist as they took me away. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think—the hallways passed in a blur. I had no sense for how far we traveled or for how long, only that my brother was here, my brother was alive. My brother was Prometheus.

My brother is the madman . . . my brother.

The world intruded on my horror when the Eagles dropped me unceremoniously on the floor. I hit carpet, the thick plush cushioning my fall.

I heard Adjutant clear his throat, and I looked up at him blearily.

“It seems Prometheus has decided to seek your voluntary cooperation,” he said calmly. There was no sign of that fury I’d seen before. Part of me wondered if I’d imagined the way his face transformed earlier—it seemed so impossible, coming from this quiet, controlled man. “It wasn’t what I recommended, but I suggest you consider his offer very, very carefully.”

And then he was gone with the sound of a door shutting gently behind him.

Reluctantly I lifted my head, staring numbly around at my new surroundings. It was a small room but richly appointed. A full-sized wooden bed with fluffy white bedclothes stood in the corner, with a matching wooden nightstand and a desk opposite. The desk had an ink blotter, paper, and an array of pens. There were no windows, but landscape paintings on the walls gave the illusion of being aboveground.

It was the nicest room I’d been in since the dining hall at the Institute, and yet my mouth tasted of ashes.

How could Basil be Prometheus? Basil was fighting Prometheus. And yet . . .

The resistance movement had found a journal full of schematics for Prometheus’s machines, Prometheus’s plans. They’d assumed it was the very first resistor, the very first person to go off-grid and study Prometheus. They’d found the journal after Prometheus took power—but that didn’t mean it was written after he took power.

I imagined my brother living in the walls of a dying city, trying to figure out how to save it. Imagined him walking into the square and talking until people listened, until they agreed with him, decided to help him do what he knew would save the city. My brother had always been good with machines, with magic. That Prometheus, the one who swayed a whole city with his words, who figured out how to save it—that Prometheus, I could believe was my brother.

But how could my brother enslave an entire race of people? Even the Institute only held one Renewable. How many did my brother hold captive in the bowels of Central Processing, their life torn out of them, only to regenerate enough to be harvested again?

Sick, I recalled the picture of Prometheus in the book, his liver torn out each night, to regrow each day. He took that name when he first took power. He had to have planned it all then.

I dragged myself to my feet and tried the door. I was unsurprised to find it locked, but surprised when it opened and an Eagle stood there, watching me. “Do you need anything?” he asked politely.

I swallowed. I needed my brother. My real brother, not this monster in his place.

“No, thank you.”

The door closed again. Locked again. I scanned the room again, more closely this time, only to discover that the pixie who had been Nix was there too, perched now on the desk chair.

“What’re you doing here?” My voice was hoarse, hostile.

“I have been assigned to watch you,” replied PX-148. “If there is anything you require I will communicate it to Adjutant.”

Exhausted by grief and revulsion, I sank down onto the carpet. To use the bed felt too much like submission, acceptance.

“Nix,” I whispered. We were alone for the first time since I’d seen it again, but it hadn’t dropped the act. “Please wake up. Talk to me.”

“I am PX-148. What do you wish me to say?”

“Anything. Tell me a story.” I let my head fall to the carpet, my muscles screaming at me from the abuse of the talon. Exhausted, I felt as though I’d been hiking through the wilderness for weeks, only to end up back where I’d started.

“I am not programmed to entertain. Please issue another command.”

I closed my eyes. “Never mind. You’re not Nix.” “Correct. I am PX-148.”

Sometime later the door opened with a clang, startling me upright. Adjutant stood in the doorway, looking down at me half-prone on the floor. “Pick yourself up,” he said coolly. “Prometheus will see you now.”

“I’m not going anywhere for him,” I croaked, dragging myself up onto my knees.

“Then you’re in luck,” replied Adjutant, his eyes cold. “He has come to you.” This was clearly a source of dismay for Adjutant—he disapproved. But he would never question Prometheus.

I got slowly to my feet. At least I could face what my brother had become while standing.

Adjutant nodded after a moment and then straightened. “Prometheus,” he announced, and then stepped to the side to make way for his master.

My brother walked in.

“You may go now, Adjutant,” said Basil, his eyes on me.

Adjutant was good—the shock barely registered on his features. “Sir, you are unarmed. Do you think it’s wise to—”

“I said go.” His voice was heavy, final.

Adjutant hesitated only half a second longer and then retreated back out the door, closing it gently behind him.

Basil was silent, watching me, his expression dropping slowly into one of disbelief and sadness and confusion. He was wearing an impeccably tailored suit of robes, black and red, the uniform of Prometheus. Fire and ash, light and dark. It made him look taller, grander—nothing like the brother I knew. There were only his eyes, the warm, soft brown that I remembered, to tell me I hadn’t gone mad.

“It really is you,” he murmured, taking a step toward me. I stayed silent, not trusting myself to speak.

“When they told me they’d found a girl who could magic iron, I thought—here, at last, someone like me. But I never thought—I never thought . . .” His face changed suddenly, his sadness mingling with horror. “Does that mean—how are you here? Why aren’t you in the city?”

“They did to me what they did to you,” I said, choking. “I ran away. I reached the Iron Wood, and Dorian told me you had come here. I came to find you. I came to find Basil.”

He shut his red-rimmed eyes for a moment. “I’m here. I’m so sorry, Lark. I never thought they’d—I thought their experiment ended with me.” He broke off and came towards me, putting his arms around me.

For a moment he was just Basil again. My eyes burned, my body shaking with the effort of not breaking down. My big brother, the one who always made everything right—I ducked my face against his shoulder, gasping for air.

In that moment, all I wanted to do was let myself go, sob into my brother’s shoulder, let him comfort me the way he had always done. I’d found him, finally. We were together.

He squeezed, his own voice choked when he spoke.

“I would never hurt you,” my brother said fiercely. “Never, you hear? Ignore Adjutant, ignore everyone.”

A sick feeling twisted inside me. No, not my brother, I corrected myself. My brother was someone who would never, ever become this. My brother was dead. This was Prometheus.

I pulled away, stepping back. “But you’d hurt others?”

Prometheus slowly lowered his arms. “Lark,” he said slowly. “You don’t understand. It’s so much more complex than you—this city needs me. It needed me when I first got here, and it needs me now.”

“Why do any of this?” My eyes were still burning. Out of my peripheral vision I could see PX-148, motionless, the white eyes staring straight ahead.

“Because of you,” Prometheus whispered.

I stopped short, jerking my eyes from the pixie to look at the leader of Lethe. “Me?”

“All of it was for you,” he said, closing his eyes. “I wanted a place that would be safe for you. I was going to come back and get you when this was all ready. Before the architects could do to you what they did to me.”

I felt as though the floor was sliding away from me, making me struggle just to keep my balance. “I never asked for this,” I said, horrified.

Prometheus shook his head, standing there just inside the door to my richly decorated cell, looking so much older than I remembered. “It was only supposed to be for a little while. I was going to fix the city and then once it was safe, return for you.”

“And they’d just accept their beloved Prometheus living among them with his kid sister?”

He shook his head again, taking a step toward me. “They see the office, Lark. They don’t see the man. They recognize the uniform and the power and the command, but they don’t know me. Only the people who’ve been with me from the beginning know me at all. Adjutant, a few of my advisors. If I left and came back in ordinary clothes, as an ordinary citizen, no one would ever know it was me. You and I could live normal lives here. Safe lives, away from the Institute, away from the Empty Ones.”

“So why didn’t you come for me?” I couldn’t help but spit the question, anger overcoming my shock. This betrayal, more than any other, burned me to my core. “Why didn’t you do what you set out to do?”

“It wasn’t that easy,” he said softly. “There was always something more to do. It was never quite enough. Every time I thought things were under control something else would fail—Adjutant would report something else needing power I didn’t have, that the city didn’t have. It never ends. I’m never done.”

His eyes were haunted, tired, riddled with guilt. I had to fight the urge to go to his side, try to comfort this stranger who had once been my brother. But in my mind’s eye I saw Tansy, I saw the Institute’s enslaved Renewable. I imagined Olivia’s brother, and everyone who’d ever fallen to Prometheus.

“All those Renewables,” I whispered. “You’re no better than the Institute. How could you?”

“So few Renewables actually come through here, and the cost to keep all these people safe is so high. I offer them the chance to help—it’s only the ones who refuse, Lark. It’s only the people who won’t do their part.”

He was actually pleading with me, begging me to understand. I shook my head. “You should have found another way.”

“There is no other way,” he snapped before closing his eyes, rubbing at his face with both hands. “You don’t think I’ve tried? We’d need three, four times the Renewables we have, all cooperating, all willing to contribute. We’d need an army of them. I’ve done the calculations a thousand times, Lark. There’s no way I can make it sustainable without using them. And it’s only a few people, a very small number. A small sacrifice for the good of the entire city.”

“A small sacrifice,” I echoed. Nina’s face, right before I took her power to save all our lives, flashed in my mind’s eye.

Emotions warred inside me—I wanted him to hug me again, I wanted him to tell me stories, I wanted him to tell me what to do next, that everything would be fine. And I wanted to hit him, tear into him, hurt him the way he’d hurt so many people—destroy him for what he’d done.

“Lark—please.” He came toward me, hands outstretched. But when I backed away, he stopped short, as though he’d run into an invisible barrier.

I struggled to speak, my voice shaking. I had to keep my eyes on the motionless pixie, not trusting myself to look at my brother. “I looked so hard for you. Everything I’ve done, I’ve been looking for you. There was no one on this earth I wanted to find more than you, to be with. And when I thought you were dead, I would have killed Prometheus for you.” Swallowing, I forced myself to look at him. Basil. Prometheus. Someone entirely different, who I didn’t know anymore. “But now I wish you had been dead. At least then I’d still have the memory of Basil, my brother. Not this—this monster.”

Prometheus inhaled shakily, as close to tears as I was. “Lark, you’re still my sister. I still—”

“No.” I cut him off. “No, I’m not.” I dug into my pocket abruptly, my hands closing around the pair of paper birds: one half scorched and crumpled, telling the story of Basil’s journey, the other yellowed with water and exposure, squished flat and carefully reconstructed, revealing everything I’d been through. I threw them both at him, watching them ricochet off his face and neck—he flinched, eyes falling on them where they hit the carpet.

“You’re not my brother,” I said shortly. “I don’t know you.”

He gazed at me and I stared back, unwilling to crumble first. This world had broken my brother, but I wouldn’t let it break me. Basil—Prometheus—swallowed and then, very carefully, knelt and gathered up the paper birds, breaking eye contact. I closed my eyes and kept them closed, even when I heard the door open with a screech and then clang shut again.

It was only after he left that I let myself go, sinking to the floor where I’d stood, too shell-shocked to cry.

“Nix.” My own voice sounded alien, as if it belonged to a stranger. “What do I do?”

But the pixie wasn’t programmed to deal with such a vague question. It couldn’t answer me.

CHAPTER 24

It was impossible to track the passage of time. There were no windows in my room, but even if there had been, I had the nagging suspicion that we were so far underground that it wouldn’t have mattered. Underground, I thought dully. I’d been underground from the moment I arrived in Lethe— when had I started to think of Lethe itself as the world, rather than underground itself?

I kept replaying what I’d seen in my brother’s journal— the drawings of machines, the schematics for altering the flow of magic. My face, here and there. Always on his mind.

How could Basil have fallen so far in the past few years to think that this was what I wanted? That peace and safety, even in this wilderness, was worth these monstrosities?

This landscape twisted things. Took good things and made them something dark.

I sat up, unable to sit still any longer. I tried asking the pixie what time it was, but it didn’t understand the question.

“Is it day? Night?”

“The position of the sun is irrelevant here.”

“Yes, but is it . . . are people sleeping now? Awake?”

The pixie gave no sign of thinking, none of Nix’s little ticks and tells that showed it was considering the question. Kris told me that they’d programmed Nix to appear more human—to think, to learn, to be sympathetic. Without those little touches, this creature was just a machine. “Without concrete data, it is plausible that some will be awake and some asleep.”

I gave up. I crossed the room and spread both palms against the door’s cold, metal alloy surface. Grimacing at the chill against my face, I pressed my ear to it. I could hear sound, but warped through the metal it sounded only like clinking and clanking. It could be pipes—it could be footsteps. I had no way of knowing whether there were still guards outside my door, but it seemed likely. And surely Prometheus would be smart enough to post Renewable guards, capable of sensing if I used too much magic.

In all the confusion, they still hadn’t searched me thoroughly. I still had Oren’s knife in its sheath in my boot. I also still had the blackout device—but after what the talon had done to me, I wasn’t quite willing to try it. If it knocked me out the way Parker had theorized, I’d be worse off than before.

Closing my eyes, I let my awareness trickle out through the door. Although it wasn’t solid iron, the particular alloy made it difficult to sense what lay beyond it. I could, however, sense the lock. It was risky, if there were guards outside who could sense me, but I had no choice. I refused to sit here quietly, waiting for Prometheus to come back and try some other way of winning my understanding. Besides, somewhere out there was Oren—and Wesley—and they might need my help. Not to mention Olivia and her crew, who had surely been captured by now.

Carefully, I gathered up a thin tendril of magic and sent it through the surface of the door toward the lock. It buzzed in response, making my heart jump—it was responding to the magic. I could do this. Fraction by fraction, quietly.

And then something landed on my shoulder, whirring. I jerked back, flinching away. The pixie, dislodged as I lurched backward, hovered in the air a few inches away. Its eyes were still blank. It said nothing.

“What are you doing?” I gasped, clasping a hand to my chest, willing my heart to stop pounding. “Are you trying to stop me?”

“I am programmed to see to your needs,” it replied in that jarring female voice.

“I need you to leave me alone.” I tried to shoo it away, but it dodged my hand in a smooth dip to the side.

“Do not attempt to open the lock.”

I ground my teeth. “So you are programmed to keep me from leaving.”

“No.”

“But—”

The pixie made an odd sound, a high-pitched whine of gears that I’d never heard before. Then, after a pause, it said, “The lock.”

I stared at it. Although it gave no impression of emotion or effort, it seemed as though it was trying to say something. “What about the lock?”

“Do you wish to ask me about the locking mechanisms in CeePo?” The pixie spoke swiftly.

“Yes. Yes, tell me.”

“The locks here are wired with explosive energy, rigged to detonate when tampered with.”

A chill ran down my spine. The lock had buzzed when I touched it with magic—but I’d thought it was just responsive. What would’ve happened if I’d pushed harder, tried to open it?

“Why help me?” I asked, searching the blank eyes for some hint of Nix, anything. “You may have saved my life. Did they program you to do that?”

“No.”

The pixie just hovered there, motionless but for the blur of its wings through the air, blank eyes fixed on me. I thought of Nix’s very first command, given to it by its programmer, Kris: Keep Lark alive. If that command was still active, what else was still in there?

“Nix?” I whispered.

“My name is PX-148.”

Tears blurred my eyes, and I blinked them away angrily. “Go away. Just—go away!”

Before the pixie could respond to my order, a clunk from the door sent me backing away. Someone was opening the lock. I gathered up my magic. I wasn’t sure I could attack my own brother—but if it was a guard, then so help him. I was getting out of here, one way or another.

The door swung open, the entryway filled for a moment by a guard in Eagle uniform. Then I heard a grunt of pain and a crackle of magic, and the guard sagged to the floor. A man stepped over him into the room, head turned to look behind him. He slipped something small and mechanical and crackling with energy into his pocket—then turned to face me.

“Basil!” I stared, hardly recognizing him out of his Prometheus clothes. He was wearing plain pants and a shirt with a hood, pulled over his head to help conceal his features.

“There’s a battle raging in the city,” he whispered. “I take it that’s courtesy of your friends?”

Olivia.

I drew in a shaky breath, trying not to get carried away by the little spark of warmth I felt at that news. “What’re you doing here?” I whispered back.

“I’m here for you. Let’s go.”

“Go?”

His face tightened. “I’m getting you out of here. We’re leaving.”

I hung back. How could I trust him now? “Why not just order them to let me go?” I asked bitterly. “These people would do anything for you.”

He gazed at me from the shadow of the hood. “They’d do anything for Prometheus,” he said quietly. “The man who’ll stop at nothing to save them. And what do we need more than someone with your abilities? If I let you go—that’d be the end of Prometheus anyway.” He shook his head. “Come on.”

Basil crossed swiftly to the doorway and stuck his head out, scanning the hall in both directions. He then stepped through, gesturing for me to follow. I hesitated—but what better way to escape than with Prometheus himself helping me? Just because I accepted his help didn’t mean I’d have to side with him.

And so I went after him—and the pixie came after me.

Basil’s face locked down as soon as he saw it. He pulled the mechanical device out of his pocket and stretched out his hand. I felt him gathering magic and in that instant realized what he meant to do.

“No!” I shoved at his arm, knocking it away and breaking his concentration. “Don’t. I think there’s still something of Nix in there.”

“Nix?” Basil stared at it. “Lark—is that your tracker pixie? From the Institute? Are you insane?”

“Yes.” I glanced at it, still hovering emotionlessly in the air. “You don’t understand—it’s changed. It learns, and it can make its own decisions. Maybe yours was different, or you destroyed it too quickly, but this one—this one is my friend.”

His gaze had swiveled toward me, eyebrows drawn in. I could almost see him wondering if his little sister had experienced some complete mental breakdown.

“Your people scrubbed it,” I continued, swallowing. “It doesn’t recognize me anymore, except—I think there’s something there still.”

He shook his head. “These models can’t be scrubbed. Believe me, I tried—their memories are buried too deeply in their programming. That’s why I destroyed mine.”

“They did something to it,” I insisted, trying to ignore the thread of hope flaring up inside me. Maybe Nix really was in there somewhere. “And I won’t leave it here.”

“Maybe they just put some sort of programming in on top of the old, bypassing it.” Basil glanced at it again. “Fine. Fine, bring it with us. But I’ll kill it the second it tries anything.”

Basil led the way out into the hall and down the corridor. He was still holding that thing in his hand—I couldn’t get a good look at it, but he clutched it in his fist as though it was all that stood between us and certain death.

“Basil,” I whispered as we turned a corner. “I can’t leave without my friends. I came here with others—I can’t leave them here to be tortured or killed by your people.”

He stopped, retreating into the alcove of a doorway. “Lark—you’re in no position to make requests. I’ve got to get you out. You don’t know what they’ll do to you—what I’ll be forced to do to you. We don’t have time to make stops for others.”

I inhaled slowly. This wasn’t the brother I knew. The Basil I knew would’ve stopped at nothing to rescue innocent people. “Then you’ll have to watch them torture me, because I’m not leaving without them.”

He stared at me, anger and fear clouding his features. I realized that he wasn’t used to anybody arguing with him anymore—no one ever debated Prometheus. He leaned back, staring down the corridor again, then turned back to me. Struggling with himself, he shut his eyes, teeth grinding against each other. “Fine. Fine. Okay—we’ll find your friends, then we’ll go.”

“And the rest of the Renewables too.”

He took a step back, staring at me. For a moment he was speechless, mouth opening with no sound coming out—then he shook his head. “You don’t understand. Those Renewables go free, this city falls within the week. And then everyone will die, or become Empty Ones. I can get your friends out, but we can’t let them all go. Lark, we can’t.”

You can, I wanted to scream at him. But for the first time, the tiniest tendrils of doubt came snaking into my thoughts. Could I really demand they all go free, knowing that it was a death sentence for everyone else? Which counted for more, the lives of a handful of Renewables, or the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people?

I thought of Nina, lying prone in an infirmary bed. One life for dozens—Marco, Parker, Dorian, and all the Renewables with him were alive because I took that power from her. In the heat of it, I’d made the same decision my brother had.

“Let’s go,” I said tightly, shoving the question aside—I would deal with it later. I’d have to make my decision when it came to it. I could always free them myself once Basil led me to where they kept the Renewables. “Wesley’s a Renewable, I’m assuming he’s wherever the rest of them are. Oren’s— Oren’s not. But I’m hoping he’s there too.”

“Wesley?” Basil had begun to step out of the alcove but stopped short, eyes widening. “Wesley—no, he was the one who arrested you and the murderer.”

I stared back at him. “You didn’t know? Adjutant came and ordered him and Oren taken away. I thought . . . I thought you had ordered it.”

“Why would I?” Basil was still standing, stricken. “Wesley’s one of my closest . . . ”

“He’s one of us,” I said simply. “A member of the resistance. You really didn’t know?”

Basil swallowed, his eyes sliding down to the floor. “I didn’t know,” he confirmed, his gaze troubled. “Adjutant has a certain amount of autonomy—he has to, or else he’d never get anything done. But I thought . . . I thought he’d just arrested you two.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could speak, sparks exploded from the archway over Basil’s head. He ducked, cursing. Without thinking, I took a step out and looked down the hallway. A pair of Eagles stood there, holding out the same magical weapons that the Eagles in the square had—the same weapon Adjutant had. Talons.

And they didn’t even recognize their leader.

CHAPTER 25

The second guard fired as I looked out around the corner. For a moment I could only stand there, frozen, my eyes blinded by the wave of magic flowing toward me. I couldn’t think what would happen if it struck—I was already full to capacity after the first time I was zapped.

And then the wave exploded inches from my face. My dazzled eyes barely made out the tiny, metallic form of the pixie dropping to the ground from where it had flown between me and the weapon’s bolt. Without thinking I reached out and pulled, dragging enough magic away from the two guards to send them twitching to the floor. Wesley’s training stopped me short of taking all they had—but only just.

It felt as though my entire body had turned to mist—I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet or hear anything going on around me. With their magic added to what I’d already been given, my head was spinning so much I could barely stand. And still, even now, part of me wanted more. I could see the last bits of power lurking inside the guards, the vestiges that kept the machinery of their bodies working—and I wanted it.This was all a dream . . . who would I be hurting? I reached out dreamily.

Hands wrapped around my shoulders and shook hard, and my second sight fell away. My vision returned, Basil’s features wavering in front of my face.

“Snap out of it!” he was hissing, still shaking me. “What did you do?”

“I—took their magic,” I said with an effort. “You have the same power. It’s what the Institute did to us.”

He was staring at me like he no longer recognized me. “No,” he murmured. “I can’t do any of that, Lark. I can pull power from machines, from crystals—anywhere the magic’s been removed already and put somewhere else. And I have to be touching them. I can’t . . .” He trailed off, eyes slipping past me down the hall to where the guards lay unconscious.

I struggled to focus despite the insane urge to laugh through my grief, despite the giddiness coursing through me. “But—we’re the same.”

Basil just stared at me, eyes tracking me as I sagged to my knees, reaching for the motionless form of the pixie. “I don’t know if it’s something intrinsically different about us or if they changed the process since they did it to me,” he said slowly. “But we’re not the same. I can’t do what you just did.”

I swallowed, pushing away the flickers of despair that kept trying to edge in. All this time I’d thought that if I could just find Basil, he’d know what was wrong with us. He’d know how to fix me. “That’s why the glass chair, up in the throne room,” I whispered. “It’s connected to Renewables on the other end, so you can pull the life out of them.”

I kept my gaze on the pixie, trying to force my eyes to work right. I willed the extraneous magic to flow from me to it, the way it did when it was Nix. I couldn’t see Basil, but I heard him shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“To the reserves taken from them, yes.” His voice was strained, quiet. “I’m the only one who can do it. Work magic and machine that way. That’s why it has to be me, little bird.”

“Don’t call me that.” I took a deep breath. “Just don’t. You could’ve found another way. You were brilliant, Basil. You were—you could have done it.”

“I tried. I’m trying. I’ve been designing a machine that’ll let an ordinary person do what I do, manipulate this power, but it doesn’t work. It’s too unstable, it’s dangerous for the Renewable and for the user. I’ve tried everything.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t even look at him. Part of me wanted to just get up and walk away, because who could stop me? Not Basil. Not his Eagles. Not Adjutant. Walk away into the wasteland above and never come back.

But Oren was here, and Wesley, who risked everything for us.

“Let’s go.” My voice sounded cold even to me. I got to my feet, my back to my brother.

“Wait.” Basil touched my shoulder, but I felt nothing, no tingle, no pull of shadow, nothing but the weight of his hand. “Let me see.” He reached for the lifeless pixie cradled in my hands.

I felt my fingers curl around its body, protective. “It saved me,” I mumbled. “Even though it didn’t remember me, it flew in front of the blast.”

“Lark,” Basil said softly in the same voice he’d used when I was a child, when I’d wake from a nightmare. “I’m good with machines. Let me look, please.”

What could it hurt? Nix was gone twice over—first its thoughts and memories, now its very life. I let my brother take it gently from my palm.

We made a strange picture, huddling over a tiny machine in a pool of flickering light. The corridor stretched away on both sides, silent and still. The Eagles hadn’t even had time to call for assistance. We had time—but how much?

Basil turned the machine over in his hands, inspecting it carefully, lifting it to his ear to listen for any signs of life. Though my ears strained, I heard nothing—and I could tell from Basil’s lack of reaction that he didn’t either.

Then he reached into his pocket and took out sheath of soft brown leather, which he unrolled on the floor to reveal a set of tiny, delicate tools. Architect’s tools. Was this something the Institute gave him before he went, or did he have them made for him here? I didn’t ask, gritting my teeth as Basil opened up Nix’s tiny body, gazing down at it through a tiny magnifying glass that fit between his brow bone and the top of his cheek when he squinted.

Nix’s inner workings were made up of hair-thin wires and pins, and gears so small I couldn’t even see their teeth. Behind all of it, nestled amidst the incomprehensible clockwork, was its tiny crystal heart. When I’d half-destroyed Nix when I first encountered it, its heart had pulsed blue as it repaired itself. Now it was quiet, still. Dead.

I leaned away, pressing my back to the wall and forcing myself to breathe. Even when Nix vanished without a trace, I’d never truly believed anything had happened to it. I always assumed it was holed up somewhere, hiding. I always, always thought I’d simply wake up one morning and find it perched on my bedpost, watching me with its unblinking stare and criticizing my laziness. But now it was here, dead, the man I used to call brother poking around in its corpse.

I was about to tell Basil to stop, to close it up, let it be, when my brother let out a soft “Hmm,” voice registering surprise. I felt, rather than saw, Basil reach out with his own magic to feel around inside the pixie.

“That explains how they got around its programming,” he said, fascinated. “There’s some kind of override here. The blast must have overloaded it.”

“Override?”

“The Institute built this model like a tank—the programming is so well shielded even I can’t get to it. But this—Adjutant must have had them put something here that supersedes that programming, takes over before the incoming data even reaches it.”

In spite of myself I felt a flare of familiarity, listening to my brother speaking gibberish as he tinkered with some machine or other. While I sat with him on the couch, in our home. How could he be so like him, and so unlike him, all at the same time? More and more I didn’t know how to feel, how to react. There’s no one I loved more than my big brother, and yet—and yet.

“I didn’t even know we had anyone who could do this,” he continued softly, fascination shifting to confusion. “Adjutant handles recruiting, and he never . . .”

“Maybe you let him run too much of your city.” My voice was soft too, but bitter. “Maybe it’s all getting away from you.”

Basil looked up, the magnifying glass falling from his eye into his lap. “Adjutant is absolutely devoted,” he replied, a flare of anger in his voice. “He’s my oldest supporter, my oldest friend. He’s been with me since the beginning—without him, none of this would be here.”

“You mean the enslaved Renewables? The all-powerful uniformed guard everywhere? The people forced to live in secret and fight for their freedom? None of that would be here?”

Basil’s jaw clenched. “This city wouldn’t be here.”

Just then, footsteps echoed down the corridor. Basil tore his gaze from mine, glancing down the hall behind me. Then, silently, he pulled me into the alcove of a doorway, pressing me back against the wall and then pulling as far into the corner as he could. We each held our breath as a pair of guards approached the intersection behind us.

If they happened to look to the right, down our hallway, and saw the two bodies lying at its far end, then we’d have to add two more bodies to our count.

We waited, ears straining. But the footsteps soon faded again, the two guards continuing on their patrol, not even noticing that two of their fellow Eagles lay unmoving at the other end of the corridor.

Basil let out his breath. He glanced at me, his brown eyes meeting mine for a brief moment. Then he looked back down at the pixie in his hand and closed his eyes.

“What are you doing now?” I whispered.

“Seeing if I can remove the override.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know how it was done.”

“I said I didn’t think anyone else did.” Basil sent tendrils of magic out, making the air taste of copper and silk. “I never said I couldn’t. Its original programming may well be intact underneath.”

I closed my eyes as well, the better to watch as he explored the pixie. His movements were so subtle I could barely follow what he was doing. When I acted using magic it was like swinging a battle-ax. Basil wielded it like a scalpel.

Trying not to hope, I reminded myself that even if he could remove the programming, the pixie was still dead.

I itched for action—the magic buzzing through me demanded an outlet, and I couldn’t sit still while I knew that Oren was here somewhere, in danger. I started tapping my fingers against the floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Long moments stretched in which I strained to listen for the sound of footsteps or an alarm that would mean they’d discovered I was missing. I wondered if it was nighttime here, if everyone was asleep except for the Eagles on patrol.

And then there was a sound. A tiny screech of metal on metal jerked my eyes back down to the ground where Basil was working on Nix. As I stared, the empty crystal heart flickered once as though it contained a tiny bolt of lightning. Then, like a star winking into existence, the blue glow swelled.

“What did you do?” I gasped, afraid to move for fear of dashing the illusion.

“Removed the override,” Basil said, leaning back with a grin. “It was fried by the blast, clogging up its systems. Remove it, and it’s back to normal.”

As I watched, Nix’s spindly little legs came shooting out, busily putting itself back together where Basil had taken it apart. It made a spluttery sound of indignation, as if protesting the state in which it had found itself.

“Nix?” I whispered, my heart pounding.

Its dull eyes flickered a few times and then lit with the same blue glow as its heart. “That was unpleasant.”

A sound that was half-shriek, half-sob escaped a second before I clapped both hands tightly over my mouth. Nix righted itself, extra repair arms folding away. Buzzing its wings experimentally, it made a click of satisfaction. Then it looked at me, the blue eyes unblinking and so familiar. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” My smile forced its way through despite my hands pressed to my mouth. “Nothing.” I tore my eyes away from Nix to look at my brother, who was watching, bemused, as the pixie began to groom itself furiously, as though it had been rolled in the mud since the last time it tidied up.

“Thank you,” I said softly.

Basil looked up at me, startled. Beads of sweat dotted his brow, his face weary. Still, hesitantly, the corners of his mouth twitched up in a smile. He nodded. It was only fleeting, gone again in moments, replaced by that same desperate sadness. He folded away his tools and shoved them back under his belt, then got to his feet and offered me a hand. “Let’s go find your friends,” he said quietly.

Nix zipped up onto my shoulder after Basil pulled me to my feet. As my brother led the way down the corridor, Nix flicked its wings in irritation. “Not another one,” it murmured in my ear. “And we only just got rid of the other ones.”

I hid my smile as best I could and followed my brother.

CHAPTER 26

Basil led me down a dizzying maze of corridors and staircases. He avoided the elevators for fear of running into somebody who might ask who we were or what we were doing. We were taking the roundabout way down, he said. Longer, but safer.

I had no option but to trust him. And although my mind knew he was Prometheus, knew he’d done horrible, monstrous things to get to where he was, it was growing harder and harder to keep him away. I wanted to forget everything and just let him be my brother again. He was helping me, after all. He would help me rescue Oren and Wesley. He’d brought Nix back to me.

And he was no better than the architects at the Institute, with their secret, dying Renewable.

We paused at the bottom of a stairwell while Basil fiddled with the lock on the door. “What are you going to do when we get there?” I stood behind him, speaking in a low voice. Basil’s hands paused for a few seconds, then resumed their work until the lock opened with a soft click. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“You’d better figure it out.”

We slipped through the door. Moving more quietly now, Basil led me past patrols and through side corridors to avoid more guards. Nix rode on my shoulder, its weight so familiar, comforting in a way I hadn’t noticed before it was gone. Eventually we reached a hall that ended in a thick iron door flanked by guards. We paused around a corner, peeking out at them.

“They’ll let me through,” Basil said tightly. “I’m their god.”

“But you left your costume behind,” I pointed out.

“I believe I can be of assistance,” Nix said, rustling its wings.

“Oh no you don’t.” I craned my neck to the side so I could eyeball the pixie. “Last time you made a diversion you were captured, brainwashed, and then killed.”

“Brainwashed is perhaps not the right word.”

“Let me handle this.”

I closed my eyes and started searching for the hungry void inside me, but Basil reached out and touched my arm, interrupting me. “These are loyal men,” Basil hissed. “They’ve done nothing wrong.”

Except be complicit in slavery and torture. But I just took a deep breath. “I’m not going to hurt them. Just trust me.”

He hesitated, then let his arm fall. I breathed deeply, in through my nose, then blew the air out through my pursed lips, letting it focus me. The reservoir for magic inside me was overfull already. Still, I reached out with my thoughts until I could sense the tiny currents of magic running through the guards’ systems.

I’d never tried to harvest magic from two people at once, not since I’d leveled the army sent from my city to enslave the Iron Wood. Then, it had nearly killed me. But I didn’t have the same training then, the same awareness of what made my power work—and what made it kill. Silently thanking Wesley for his insistence on learning control, I eased open a channel between myself and the two Eagles at the end of the hall.

For a long moment, nothing happened. I dragged at whatever scraps of magic I could get, and then finally, little by little, the shadow in me stirred and woke. As much power as there was already buzzing through my veins, it still wanted more—and once it caught the scent of the men down the hall, it was all I could do to hold it back.

The guard on the left fell first, dropping so fast that my own heart stuttered as if in sympathy. Dimly, as though from half a mile away, I felt Basil grab my arm. I couldn’t pay any attention to him, though, not with the other guard stumbling forward, trying to reach his partner’s side. He fell to his knees, clutching at his chest, and then slumped to the floor.

I couldn’t move, locked in a struggle against myself. I wanted to finish the job. I wanted to feast. It wasn’t until Basil gave my arm a jerk and started hurrying me toward the door that I was jarred free, sending the beast snarling back into my subconscious. Dazed, I watched as Basil stooped to check the two men for signs of life. He said nothing, just glanced at me with his lips pressed together. I knew they were alive, though—if they’d died, I would’ve felt it. It was always those last scraps of magic that tasted sweetest. And I’d cut myself off before going that far.

Basil wasted no more time, turning his attention to the door. It was locked with one of the same turning wheels that were on some of the forgotten doors inside the walls, and he turned it with a grunt of effort and a sigh of oiled bearings.

We slipped through the door and eased it shut behind us. Then we turned.

Behind the door lay the prison complex for Prometheus’s enslaved Renewables. The corridor stretched on into what seemed like infinity, lined on either side by heavy doors. I took a few steps into the room, skin crawling at the presence of so much iron, more than I’d felt in one place since the tunnels between Lethe and the world above. Each door seemed to be made of solid iron, with only a grate maybe a foot square for the prisoners to look out of—or for the guards to look in. There were lights over the doors closest to us, barely more than dim red spots. There were only six of them. Did that mean the rest of the cells stretching onward were empty?

Basil’s jaw was tight, his eyes cold, shut down. He didn’t look at the cell doors but instead kept his eyes on the endless hallway, standing by the door. “Go look for them,” he said shortly.

Nix launched itself from my shoulder to explore as I walked forward, skin crawling with more than iron now. It was as though I could feel the eyes of the Renewables on me as I passed. No wonder Basil didn’t like to come here—guilt roiled inside me simply for being free while they were captive. What must it be like to come here when you were actually their captor?

I cleared my throat and called softly, “Wesley? Oren?”

For a moment all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. Then, so rattly and tired that my chest tightened, came Wesley’s voice. “About time,” he called, his voice coming from the end of the row of lights.

I hurried down and peered in through the grating. He was there, waiting for me. His face didn’t show any signs of mistreatment, but I knew the damage would be deeper, harder to see. He smiled at me, though, when my face came into view.

“Does this mean you got him? Got Prometheus?”

I glanced back at my brother, who was still standing just inside the doorway, not looking at us or at anything else.

“We can talk later,” I said finally. “Let’s get you out of here. Which one is Oren’s cell?”

“Which one?” Wesley stuck a hand through the grating, wrapping his fingers around a bar. “Open all of them, get us all out of here.”

I closed my eyes, feeling sick. “I can’t,” I whispered. “For now I can only get you and Oren. Where is he?”

Wesley gazed at me, confusion quickly shifting to wariness in his features. “He’s not here,” he said quietly. “They’re keeping him somewhere else.”

My heart sank. For a moment I just wanted to scream at Wesley for letting Oren out of his sight, at Basil for allowing any of this to happen, at myself for not realizing that they wouldn’t be keeping a seemingly normal person with the Renewables, even if he came with one. Instead I drew in a shaky breath and said, “Basil, open the door.”

“Basil?” Wesley’s eyes grew round. “Your brother—the one—”

But he was interrupted by a mechanical whine and a heavy clunk in his door. I grabbed for the indented handle and pulled, and Wesley stepped out into the hallway. His eyes went past me to Basil, whose hand was still on the heavy switch that controlled the lock.

“The boy who wrote the journal,” Wesley breathed, staring at Basil the way that Adjutant had stared at Prometheus.

Basil’s gaze shifted toward me, but I had no answer either. How to tell Wesley that the journal was written by none other than Prometheus himself, before he came to power? That the one saving him now was the one who’d ordered him captured in the first place? It didn’t matter that Adjutant had taken it upon himself to arrest Wesley—he was acting in Prometheus’s name.

I turned back toward the cells and called tensely, “Tansy? Tansy, are you in here?”

No answer. My heart pounded in the silence, and I walked up the row of cells, trying to feel for her familiar power signature. But aside from Wesley, the golden Renewable glows here were faint, flickering and weak. These people had been drained.

“Is someone there?” The voice was tired, weak—and unfamiliar. I turned to see hands curling around the bars in the door, all that could be seen of the prisoner behind it.

Basil took a step backward, away from the panel of door release switches, swallowing hard. He looked sick, even as he squared his jaw. “Let’s go,” he called softly.

“No.” I planted my feet, gazing at him across the prison block. “We take them all, or I stay here and wait for Adjutant. I’m not leaving without them.”

Basil’s hands curled into fists. “Lark, I can’t have this fight with you, not here. We have to go. We have to just—we have to get out of here.”

“And then what?” I hissed back. “We just run away and find some new place to live? Some new place to turn into your idea of a utopia?”

“I never said this place was perfect!” Basil fired back. “If you hadn’t noticed, the world out there is far from perfect. This is the best we can do. We go, we disappear, we try to live our lives as best we can with what we’ve got. That’s all there is, Lark!”

“Maybe that’s true,” I whispered, my voice echoing in the chamber. I knew Wesley might overhear, might figure it all out—but I didn’t care. “Whether it is or not, I’m not leaving while these people are still enslaved. So you can make your choice.”

My brother stared at me across the gulf of space between us, his muscles tense, his gaze unreadable. He looked sad— sadder than he did the day he left me, volunteering for the Institute’s top secret mission. He looked tired.

And then he turned and flipped every switch on the wall, causing a cascade of metallic thuds all down the corridor as every door swung open.

Half a dozen captive Renewables streamed out into the hallway, exclaiming, murmuring relief. Wesley hurried toward them, recognizing some as members of the resistance who’d been captured. I didn’t care about what he was doing, though—I could only look at my brother. It was like there was a line between us, connecting us again, and even though people crossed through it again and again as they reunited with each other, it stayed unbroken.

I whispered, “What are you going to do?” If Basil was right, then without the Renewables, Lethe would fall.

He was too far away for the sound to carry over the sounds of relief and celebration, but somehow he heard me anyway. “I don’t know,” his lips said back, the words carrying directly to my heart.

“All right,” Wesley said, cutting through the rapidly rising wave of sound from the newly freed Renewables. “We’re not free yet. We’re going to go find Prometheus and end this once and for all—and Lark’s going to need our help.”

My eyes were still on Basil’s. He shook his head slightly— don’t interrupt. If they knew Basil was Prometheus, they’d turn on him right here and now. We’d never find Tansy. And Wesley was right, I was going to be grateful for the help once we reached the harvesting room.

“If any of you are too weak or injured,” Wesley continued, “then raise your hands and we’ll arrange one group to go back. You two, I don’t recognize you—you’re welcome to join us in the walls. We live free of Prometheus’s grip.”

But not a single person raised their hands, not even the man with pale, brittle-looking skin and purple bruises around each eye—the man who had clearly just been harvested.

“Very well,” said Wesley. It was a relief to have him back— to have someone else making the decisions again. I felt wrung out, too many horrors and revelations in one day. “Then we all go.” But then he turned to me—and waited.

I stared back at him, uncomprehending.

“This is your party,” he said, smiling that irritatingly selfassured smile. This time, however, there was a glint of sympathy in his face.

For a long moment I struggled not to beg him to take over, to finish this mission. Take the decisions out of my hands, handle everything. But then Basil stepped up beside me, and I found myself nodding.

“We have to find Tansy. She would’ve been about my age, taller than me, strong—”

“I know the girl you’re talking about,” Wesley interrupted. “She’s gone. She’s not here.”

“What do you mean she’s not here?”

“They took her.” Wesley’s face was thin, drawn. Afraid. There was a faint dull gleam of perspiration on his thinning scalp. “They brought one of the men across the way back, empty, and took her. I think she’s the one they’re draining now.”

I remembered the Renewable in the Institute, the one they held captive in secret, in eternal torment as they drained her power away and let it regrow in a never-ending cycle. I remembered the agony of the Machine as they tore my natural magic away and replaced it with dark, twisted city magic.

I turned to Basil, who had walked back toward the door and then stopped. He was watching me, his face calm, his eyes sad. For a long moment we just stood there, at either end of the row of occupied cells, looking at each other.

Then he said quietly, “She’ll be in the harvesting room. I’ll show you.”

CHAPTER 27

Now that we were prepared for the guards, with an army of half a dozen Renewables at our backs, we encountered surprisingly few of them. It turned out one of the freed captives, a resistance member who called himself Curio, was especially adept at using his magic on the human consciousness. Whenever we encountered more than one at a time, Nix dived into the fray, using the venomous stinger the Institute had equipped him with to knock the second Eagle out. We left the few guards we did encounter sleeping peacefully in the hallways behind us.

Basil and I talked quickly as we moved, our voices low. “When this is over,” he whispered, “you and I will have to slip out.”“What are you talking about?”

My brother grimaced. He looked so tired, so much older than I would have ever guessed. “Without the Renewables, there’s no way to keep Lethe going. Better to get out before it falls.”

“The resistance,” I whispered. “If they all came forward, volunteered to be harvested—”

“Unless there are fifty, sixty of them hidden away, it won’t help. No one would volunteer to spend their lives in that kind of torment.”

“You want us to run.” I couldn’t imagine my brother, my brave, kind older brother, so ready to abandon these people to the darkness. But then, he didn’t know about Nina—he’d never believe me capable of making these choices, either.

“You want to stay?” he asked, incredulous.

“You said yourself that Lethe will fall without them.” I gestured at the Renewables ranged out behind us, all watching for guards. “I’m the reason they’re going free. I have to stay and figure out a way to fix the city. No matter what.”

Basil fixed his eyes on the ground ahead of us. “You know that’s how I got started, too?”

“I know.”

His hand brushed mine, then turned and wrapped around my fingers, the way it used to when I was a child. “You were right to let them go,” he said softly. “It’s easy to justify a monstrosity in light of the greater good. I don’t know whether—I don’t know what the answer is. But it was wrong to keep them there.”

Before, I would’ve pulled my hand from his, angry, hurt that he was no longer the brother I knew. But now, listening to the marching footsteps of the freed Renewables, of our tiny, dedicated army, I didn’t. It was easy to say what he’d done was wrong when speaking required no answer, no action. Still, the words meant something. And I let him keep hold of my hand.

The harvesting room was not far from the chambers where the Renewables were held. Basil explained that his workshop and the other experimental laboratories were all branches off of the harvesting room, for easy access to the machines when it came to making adjustments.

I tried not to imagine my brother calmly and casually making notes and turning dials and controls while a captive Renewable hung suspended, screaming silently as his power was torn away. I tried not to imagine him using that stolen power in his work.

But as we walked, hand in hand, I knew that Basil and I would never be as we were. We’d never be big brother and little sister, it would never be simple and trusting again. I didn’t know if I could ever love him again.

No, that wasn’t true. I still loved him. In spite of everything, despite what I’d said and the things he’d done, he was my brother. And I loved him. I just didn’t know if I’d ever trust him again.

Nix thrummed against my neck, nestled close. Trust was hard to come by in this world beyond the Wall, but it could be found, if you looked hard enough. I had Nix; I had Oren. Most of all, I had myself. That was enough.

Basil didn’t know where Oren was being kept when I asked, but thought that maybe he’d be with the regular prisoners, the people detained for not having the proper papers or for starting brawls in the streets. I still hadn’t told anyone the truth about what Oren was—I was hoping no one had found out, that he was merely being kept with the drunks and the petty thieves. Basil promised to take me to find him once we freed Tansy.

When we reached the harvesting room, we stopped some distance back in the corridor to hold a whispered conference.

“There’ll be guards outside,” Basil said as the rest of us crowded around. “Probably two, but maybe four. If this is the door,” and he drew his finger across the ground, pushing out just enough magic to leave a dimly glowing trail behind, “then the two guards will be here and here. If there are four, the other two will be posted on the opposite wall of the hallway, here and here.” The floor was marked now with glowing X’s.

“Inside, the Renewable—Tansy—will most likely be in the harvesting column.” Basil drew a large oval on the other side of the door he’d drawn earlier, to indicate the room beyond, then etched a series of lines radiating out from a circle in the oval’s center. “The column is here,” he said, pointing at the circle. “These are catwalks. The entire thing is suspended over the machinery that powers the harvester, drawing the energy up to—to Prometheus’s chair.”

“How do you know so much?” Curio was staring at Basil, brows drawn inward suspiciously.

Basil opened his mouth, but Wesley got there first. “This is Basil Ainsley,” he said swiftly, watching my brother. “He’s the one who wrote the journal. And this is his sister, the girl whose picture is in it. He knows everything there is to know about Prometheus.”

Curio’s eyebrows lifted, lips parting as his mistrust shifted to awe. He and the others took Wesley’s words at face value, but I wasn’t so sure. I watched him, trying to find any sign that he’d recognized Basil as the man he’d pretended to serve for the past two years. But Wesley just gazed back, steady and unflinching.

Basil dropped his eyes. “When we get inside there may be some of Prometheus’s researchers working there. Let’s avoid killing them if we can. And let me get Tansy out. Tearing her out of the machinery would be more dangerous than just leaving her in there. The machines are designed to stop before the Renewables are in any danger of dying. It’ll hurt her to stay in it, but it won’t kill her.”

“Right,” I said, lifting my eyes to scan the faces of the Renewables around me. “Are we ready?”

There were only two guards. Curio was able to handle them both, but he was starting to sweat and shake and clearly didn’t have much left. I hoped that the other Renewables were half as adept at incapacitating enemies.

The entrance to the harvesting chamber itself had a complicated locking mechanism, but Basil pressed a series of brass knobs with incomprehensible symbols on them, then paused and looked at me. I nodded, and he pressed the last button.

The door hissed open, and we spilled into the room, down the catwalk.

The first thing I saw was a column of pale gold light and a human body suspended in it. The head was thrown back, muscles tense with pain, fingers bent into claws and toes curled in agony. Her features were obscured by the light and the angle, but I knew who it was—I recognized her hair, her height, the clothes she was wearing.

Tansy.

The second thing I saw was a series of machines arranged around the perimeter of the room, banks of levers and knobs and displays, many of them with exposed wires darting this way and that. Staircases led up to a second level and then a third, where there were more machines. Beyond the banks of machinery were sheets of darkened glass, no doubt opening onto individual experiment bays, but closed off when not in use. Chairs were arranged at each station, but they were all empty. No researchers. One station on the ground level was recognizable as Prometheus’s—his robes were draped over the back of the chair, somehow duller and smaller now that they weren’t being worn.

And the third thing I saw was Adjutant.

I froze, and Basil came to a halt beside me. The entry catwalk wasn’t wide enough for more than two, and the other Renewables were forced to stop behind us.

Adjutant strolled toward us, halting beside the column where Tansy hung suspended. “Miss Ainsley,” he said, as calm and polite as ever. “I thought as soon as I learned that the Renewables had escaped that you would be coming here. I’m gratified to find I was right.”

Seeing my face, he smiled. “Of course I know who you are,” he added. “Your brother spoke of you incessantly for the first year he lived here.”

Basil stepped forward, fists clenched. “You should have told me, Adjutant,” he spat, his voice taut with fury.

Adjutant inclined his torso in a slight bow, spreading one hand in a conciliatory gesture. There was some sort of machine on it, bands of metal around each finger, spreading over the back of his hand like an exoskeleton. “I live to serve you, Prometheus,” he said reverently. “My life and my actions have always only been to protect you.”

“Prometheus?” It was Curio, his face transformed by confusion and, slowly, loathing. I glanced at Wesley, but instead of seeming surprised, he only stood there, expression unreadable, his gaze on mine. Wesley worked in CeePo every day— perhaps it was stupid of me to have thought that he wouldn’t have recognized Prometheus, even out of uniform. The other Renewables behind us were murmuring bewilderment and anger, trying to understand what was happening.

“The rabble are turning on you, Lord.” Adjutant lifted his hand, stretching the other out toward the column containing Tansy. “Allow me.” That hand had a similar machine on it—as he turned towards the Renewables, I could see that the devices on each hand ran up over his shoulders and connected in a knot of copper and glass at the nape of his neck.

Before I could figure out what he was doing, a jolt of magic flowed from Tansy, into the device, and then out through his other hand. Basil knocked me to the metal catwalk with a clang, his body on top of mine—I felt the heat of the blast through my hair as I fell.

A man screamed—I jerked my head up in time to see the Renewables fall, every last one of them, writhing on the ground. By the time I shoved Basil off of me and dragged myself to my feet, all of them lay still. I could see flickers of magic there—they weren’t dead—but they were all incapacitated. Nix was no longer on my shoulder, but I couldn’t see it anywhere—whether it was in the pile of bodies or hiding somewhere else, I couldn’t tell.

“What did you do?” I screamed, turning back toward Adjutant, who was staring at his hand as though seeing it for the first time.

Basil got to his feet and pulled me back, ignoring my attempts to claw my way past him.

“He’s like us,” I gasped, holding onto the catwalk railing.

“No.” Basil was staring at Adjutant. “The device—the one I made to let others take over where I left off.”

“It’s perfect,” breathed Adjutant, still gazing at the hand that had delivered the blast. “You truly are more than human, Lord.”

“It’s not ready,” Basil said through gritted teeth. I could feel the fury behind his voice—I wondered why he didn’t just lash out, didn’t just try to get the machine away from Adjutant. “There are still flaws—it’s unstable, Adjutant. Dangerous for you; dangerous for her.” He jerked his chin toward Tansy, whose mouth I could see opened in a silent scream.

Adjutant lifted his eyes finally, gaze going from me to Basil. “Lord, I never wanted you to find out that Lark Ainsley was here.”

“That wasn’t your decision to make.”

“But it was.” Adjutant sounded surprised, slightly wounded. “It’s my calling to keep you safe, Prometheus. To keep you from the hard decisions. I thought by presenting her to you after we’d learned the extent of her abilities you’d have no choice but to—”

“To use her?” Basil stepped forward, shoulders tense and eyes hard. “Like we’ve been using these others?”

Adjutant’s eyes widened, and for a moment I could see a hint of the madness he’d showed in the audience chamber. When he’d told me to show respect for my god. “It has always been in the name of the greater good, Lord.”

Basil shook his head. “It may have started that way, but it’s not that way anymore. It’s not about just saving ourselves—we have to be worthy of salvation.”

There was silence for a moment while Adjutant struggled to digest this. My mind raced, trying to go over the options. I still had Oren’s knife, but there was no chance I’d get close enough to Adjutant to use it. And while Oren might have been able to throw it, my aim was nowhere good enough.

But that wasn’t the only weapon I had. The blackout device. In a place like this, the blast would disrupt every machine in the entire room. The one Adjutant was using to imitate Basil’s powers—and the ones holding Tansy captive.

I slipped my hand into my pocket. All I had to do was throw it hard enough at the floor for the impact to set it off. But I remembered what Basil had said—jerking Tansy out of this machinery could kill her. Surely cutting power abruptly would do the same.

Adjutant’s gaze swung over to me, burning. “This is just proof of what I’ve known for a long time,” he said quietly, his voice low and tight. “You’re too soft. Too trusting. Even I can’t protect you from every tough decision—and when I try, you . . . disappoint me. You’re letting this girl ruin in one night everything we’ve worked together for years to create.”

“She’s my sister.”

“And I am your Adjutant!” A fleck of spittle lingered on Adjutant’s lips as he breathed heavily, struggling with himself. Then he straightened, in control once more. “I didn’t want to do this, but you must be shown the truth. Your innocent, kindhearted sister consorts with monsters—her lover is one of the Empty Ones.”

Adjutant gestured toward one of the experiment bays across the room, the one I’d guessed was Prometheus’s station, and on cue its dark glass cleared and the cell lit up from within.

Oren.

He lifted his head—he hadn’t been able to see out either, and evidently the windows were soundproof as well. Shock staggered him backward a pace as he saw me—then he threw himself against the wall of his prison, pounding his fists against the glass. I saw him screaming soundlessly, shouting to be let out, to be allowed to go to my side. His lips formed my name as he met my gaze, and then he launched himself forward. A sound tore its way out of my throat as he threw his entire body against the glass and fell to the ground.

My heart was tearing itself in two as I watched him dragging himself upright again, dazed and bruised, but I’d seen the madness in Adjutant’s face. I didn’t know what he’d do if I moved from where I stood.

“You see,” Adjutant said, moving over toward the banks of machines in front of the glass box that held Oren, “he’s a savage even when he’s human. There’s no room in our new world for monsters like him.”

“Let him go,” Basil said coldly. “I trust Lark.” But I could see the confusion in Basil’s face. First I’d asked him to trust a pixie—now he was being asked to trust this.

“You don’t understand,” said Adjutant. “Let me show you.” He reached out and pulled a lever. My head rang with magic as something shifted, sucking the power out of the cell. Then Oren was gone, and in his place was the shadow.

It snarled soundlessly and threw itself against the glass with ten times the force Oren himself had been able to muster.

I couldn’t look at Basil. I couldn’t look at Adjutant, either. I could only watch as the thing that had been Oren threw itself at the glass over and over and over, mindless, full of rage and savagery and hunger. All I could hear was the dull thud of Oren’s body hitting the glass, his muffled snarls. My eyes burned.

“You see,” said Adjutant. “You see what she is. These are the creatures she pities. She wants to see them take over. She wants to ruin everything we’ve done.”

“No,” said Basil. I lifted my head with an effort, my eyes streaming. “What we’ve been doing, you and I, is wrong.”

Adjutant let the lever slide back into place, and I felt the ambient magic sliding back into place with it. The Orenmonster dropped to the floor of his cell, sides heaving. “Lord, allow me to remove this girl from your presence. Please, she’s infected your—”

“She’s done nothing!” shouted Basil. This was the voice of Prometheus, the voice of Adjutant’s god. “It has nothing to do with her—or this creature. We’re the monsters, Adjutant. Look around—this isn’t the new world. This isn’t right. This isn’t what we set out to do.”

Adjutant gazed at Basil. Beyond him I could see Oren, himself again, but too dazed and injured by his shadow self’s attempts to escape to do more than lie there, gasping.

“You’ve lost your way, Lord,” Adjutant said softly, his hand falling on the robes laid over the chair. “Lost sight of the utopia we’re creating here.”

“You’re the one who’s lost his way,” Basil replied, fists clenched. I could see tears standing in his eyes and realized that this was costing him as much as it had cost me to stand up to him. Adjutant has been with me since the beginning, he’d said.

His oldest—his only—friend.

“I wish you could understand the pain and the sorrow that I feel.” Adjutant’s voice was soft, sad. “To lose you this way. You were my mentor, my friend, my savior. My beacon. My god.”

Basil stood silently, opening and closing his fists, unable to speak.

“But the people must have direction.” Adjutant’s wide, staring eyes fixed on the wall above us. He reached for the robes on the chair, picking them up slowly, caressing them like something precious and beautiful. “If their god falters, then a new one must rise and take his place.”

I stared, drawn in by the insanity in his gaze, the way his eyes were fixed on something none of the rest of us could see—some vision of the twisted paradise he sought.

“Prometheus is dead.” Adjutant slowly swung the robes up and settled them over his shoulders. “Long live Prometheus.”

And then he reached out for Tansy again, thrusting his hand out toward Basil. A beam of violent purple light shot forth, hitting my brother square in the chest and throwing him back against the far wall with the force of the blast.

“NO!” The word tore from my throat as I lunged for him, but it was too late. The beam stopped, but crackling energy pinned Basil against the wall, several feet off the ground. He struggled, but the magic containing him was so thick I couldn’t even sense him behind it.

Adjutant turned to me. I threw up a barrier a millisecond before he turned the same blast on me. The force of it drove me backward until I hit the handrail of the catwalk, and I braced myself against it, throwing everything I had into my shield.

Oren was pressed against the glass, staring, his eyes anguished. Basil was still pinned, unable to speak or move. Adjutant laughed, shoving his other arm deeper into Tansy’s aura of magic.

“No wonder he didn’t share this with me,” he said, his wild grin only a flash of white teeth behind the violet beam spilling off my shield. “It’s glorious. Dare I say it, divine. I’d hoard it for myself as well.”

I had no strength to answer, every fiber of my being thrown into the shields. I didn’t have enough to do anything but block his attack—no way to enact a countermeasure. And I wasn’t going to last much longer.

And then Nix zoomed out of nowhere, its mechanisms screaming bloody murder. It flew directly at Adjutant, stinger extended. Adjutant swept it aside with a flick of his head, and Nix went tumbling through the air, disoriented. Righting itself, Nix hovered for a moment, indecisive. Then, so fast I couldn’t track it through the tears of pain and effort streaming from my eyes, it flew over to the bank of machines in front of Oren’s cell. It started throwing itself at every button it could find, frantic.

Adjutant laughed again, turning his gaze back on me. “I see you found your way past our reprogramming. Shame, I was hoping we’d be able to use that device. I’ll see to it that it’s destroyed as soon as we’re done here.”

He didn’t seem to be tiring at all—in fact, he seemed stronger and more insane with every passing second, his very skin alive with magic, crackling. But behind him a series of red lights began to flash.

The machines are designed to cut off before the Renewable runs out of power and dies, Basil had said. I glanced at Tansy, squinting. I couldn’t see her well through the layers of magic between us, my second sight interfering with my regular vision. She was rising in the column, arms and legs splayed, eyes turned toward the ceiling. Up to the second tier of machines, and on, and on . . .

A dull pounding grabbed my attention and dragged it back to Nix. Oren was banging on the glass—Nix heard and looked up. Oren gestured frantically, miming, pointing toward some particular dial or button that I couldn’t see. Nix launched itself straight down, slamming into the button—and the door of Oren’s cage slid open.

Adjutant turned, leveling his arm this time at Oren. Without the force of the beam on my shields I stumbled forward and fell, crying out a ragged warning. But Oren was fast—as fast as Olivia. Faster. He dodged easily, sprinting around to the other side of the circle. Nix went the other way. There were too many targets—Adjutant roared frustration. I started to gather my own power, ready to end this once and for all.

And then he looked at me, teeth bared, his eyes burning violet and gold, magic leaking from his ears and nose and dribbling out of his mouth like flames. “I will not let you destroy paradise,” he said in a voice that was no longer his own, hissing and crackling with power.

In one surge he jerked the remaining magic from the harvester—and it exploded, throwing us all outward. My head struck the wall and I slumped to the ground, dazed. I dragged myself up by the handrail, dizzy and nauseous. I looked up in time to see Tansy thrown from the column as it vanished, her body striking the wall and landing on the catwalk three stories up.

Adjutant was stirring feebly, smoke and steam rising from his body as he pulled himself up. I ignored him, sprinting for the nearest staircase. Nix, flight path wobbly and slow as it repaired itself at the same time, cut past me, headed straight for Tansy.

My muscles and lungs burned as though my struggle against Adjutant’s magic had been a physical one, but I ignored them. I just had to get to her—give her enough power to keep her heart beating. Repay the gift she’d given me—give her magic back.

I reached the top of the second flight of stairs and ricocheted off the wall as I lurched forward. I threw myself down beside her, ignoring the pain as the metal catwalk stripped several layers of skin from my knees. I pressed both hands to her body, willing my magic to go forth.

Tansy was still moving—her eyes turned toward me as I touched her. But I could see she was empty, that there was nothing left inside her. She was as black and hollow as the man I’d killed in the square. She was bleeding from a number of abrasions from striking the wall, but the blood was seeping gently, slowly. Her heart wasn’t beating.

“No, nonono—Tansy, stay with me. Look at me. It’s Lark, I’m here, you’re going to be fine.” I shoved harder, trying to force my magic into the black chasm of her heart.

Her staring gaze fixed on mine. For just a moment, it seemed as though she recognized me—her eyes widened. Her lips moved—they twitched into the tiniest smile as she gazed at my face.

Then she died.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. There was just Tansy’s face, her eyes gazing up at me, gazing through me, blood still seeping sluggishly from the gashes on her arms, on her cheek. There was no longer a black emptiness inside her—there wasn’t anything. There was no hole where her life used to be because everything that made her Tansy was gone. The thing I was touching, cradling, was a husk and nothing more.

Breath returned to me with a jerk, as violently as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. It sobbed in and out of me as I got shakily to my feet, staggering to the handrail and looking down.

Adjutant stood there, looking up at me. Burns covered his body in patches, his once-handsome face distorted in a snarl. Sections of his hair were gone, the rest of it sticking out in patches. The robes of Prometheus were charred and sootstained, unrecognizable. But he still wore Basil’s device—and despite the explosion, it was intact.

His eyes on me, he reached out and threw his hand against the banks of machines. Tiny explosions and sparks jumped up everywhere, landing on his skin, on his clothes, but he didn’t even flinch. Painfully he dragged the magic out of the machines and into himself, gathering for another strike.

Tansy’s death wasn’t enough for him.

When it came, I didn’t have time to throw up my shields. The blast hit me off-center, in the arm, throwing one shoulder back. Something cracked, sending pain shooting up my arm as it fell to dangle uselessly at my side.

I don’t need hands to kill you. I gritted my teeth, sucking air through my nose, trying to focus on Wesley’s meditation exercises. Pain is nothing. Pain’s just in my mind. But as I started to get some focus together another blast came, this one knocking me back against the wall, hitting me squarely in the stomach and dropping me to my knees.

Where were Oren, Nix, Basil? I couldn’t see—through the grating, on my hands and knees, I could only see bodies everywhere. The smell of burning flesh and hair and chemicals singed my nostrils, and something dripped down my back—sweat or blood, I couldn’t tell.

I was alone. And I had only one more trick to try.

I pulled myself up with my one good arm, choking back a groan of pain as a wave of nausea rolled over me. I tried to reach into my pocket but found that my fingers were burned, too swollen to fit inside it. I couldn’t get at the device. Another bolt came at me, hitting the railing of the catwalk instead and blasting it into in a million white-hot shards that stung me all over my face and throat.

I stood up, and my eyes found Oren. He was lying facedown, but as I watched he picked himself up on his arms, his gaze sweeping the catwalk and then resting on me. For a moment I just looked at him, thinking of all the things I should have said before we left.

No regrets, Olivia had said to me. I gazed at Oren, willing him to understand. I took a deep breath.

Somehow Oren sensed what I was about to do a fraction of a second before I moved.

“Lark—NO!”

But I was already running, aiming for the gap in the railing—I jumped—and then I was falling.

One good impact will set it off.

My instincts tried to kick in, tried to form the same sort of magical cushion that had saved me twice before. I fought them tooth and nail, trying desperately to override my body’s natural desire to save itself.

And then I hit.

The world exploded. Adjutant screamed, and for a moment there was only a column of fire burning purple and gold, and his screams turned hoarse and raspy and then melted away into silence—and then everything was gone.

CHAPTER 28

“Don’t move her—don’t touch her!”

“Oh god, is she—please—”

“I don’t know. Move back, I said!”

“It’s coming this way—I don’t think Curio can hold it.” Snarling, screaming, flashes of light and dark. “You’ve got to get her up—I can’t do it, I have to be touching things and if I get close enough it’ll tear me apart.”

“Lark.” A voice breathed into my ear. “Lark you have to wake up.”

No. Leave me alone. I’m dead, let me stay that way.

“Oren’s going to kill us all, or we’re going to have to kill him. You have to stop him.”

Oren? But Oren was safe. Oren was human.

“I know it hurts. I know it hurts more than anything’s ever hurt before. But Lark, I know you’re in there, and you have to open your eyes.”

Suddenly everything did hurt. And with that pain came the realization that I wasn’t dead—but I wished I was. Agony split me starting from my arm, which I couldn’t move, and radiating throughout my body. I couldn’t feel my toes, my legs wouldn’t respond to my commands. My eyes opened to darkness broken only by flashes of magic. I screamed.

“There’s my girl.” It was Wesley. “Breathe. Just breathe.” His voice was tense with something I couldn’t recognize, but his hands were gentle, one resting against my cheek, the other against the shoulder less torn with agony than the other.

“Oren,” I groaned. “Oren?”

“The blackout device turned him,” said Wesley. “They’re trying to hold him off, but he’s too fast. The device stripped the magic out of the air and out of everyone else—we need you to stop him.”

I tried to find the magic within myself but there was nothing. The blackout device, Parker said, attacked unnatural magic. Magic stolen, magic installed—magic given. That’s why Oren had turned into a shadow. That’s why everything I had was gone.

“No—can’t.” I tried to move and screamed again, the sound tearing itself out of me before my overloaded mind could even register the pain. “Nothing left.”

As if my scream had summoned him, the monster that was Oren burst free of the Renewables trying to fight him and came at us, snarling. I couldn’t even scramble back, my body too broken to listen to my mind’s commands. The Orenshadow snapped its jaws a few inches from my face, hungry and desperate.

I closed my eyes. My only regret was that when this was over, they’d know what he was. They’d make him leave this place that had become home. He’d be alone. I waited for the blow, hoping that he’d kill me quickly, without more pain.

But it never came. I opened my eyes to find the monster inches away, the white eyes locked on mine, teeth bared in a snarl. It growled with each breath in and out as it stared at me, motionless. My good arm twitched and the monster growled—I fell still. No sudden movements.

The only other time I’d been so close to the creature was in the alleyway in the ruins Above, where the monster hesitated. But that was because my magic was working on it, turning it back into Oren. I had no magic now, nothing to bring Oren back into himself.

And yet, I was still alive. And he was still a shadow.

“Take my power.” Wesley shifted slowly, achingly slowly, so that both of his hands were touching my skin, one on my face and one on my neck. “Do it. Now.”

I wanted to protest, but the dark thing inside me had sensed his magic. It wanted him, the hunger rising so swiftly and violently that it shoved everything else aside, all conscience, all pain. I was the shadow, I was the darkness. And here was my salvation.

I pulled at the magic with all my strength, hungry, feasting. The Oren-monster howled, and I wanted to howl with him—the magic was life and death and everything in between, and it was mine.

Dimly I heard Wesley screaming, trying to pull his hands away, but I held him motionless with a single thought. The air stank of fear, and the shadow inside delighted. I felt his heartbeat slow as the magic left him, felt his lungs struggle to rise just one more time. I watched with my true eyesight as the reserve of warm, heady magic inside him dwindled and faded, leaving an increasingly empty, black void.

Like Tansy.

I jerked, shoving Wesley away. The pain as I tried to move my shattered arm knocked me back into myself. I gasped, tasting blood. The lights had gone out while I drained Wesley—but I knew the Oren-monster was still there, snapping at me when I forced myself to sit up. His teeth closed on empty space—it was a warning, not an attack. I reached out with my other sight, feeling for the dark, empty pit in front of me that would be Oren. I eased out with my magic, trying to force it into the air faster. Willing him to change.

Abruptly the snarling stopped. Something moaned in the darkness—Wesley or Oren, I didn’t know. And then, silence.

I lay there, gasping, eyesight sparking, trying to make sense of the blackness. I was afraid to look around with my other sight again, for fear the temptation to attack the Renewables would be too strong.

Eventually a dim glow appeared overhead, visible first as a glowing red filament of glass, then brightening until I had to look away. Basil stood by one of the dark, lifeless banks of machines, one hand spread against the controls as he slowly fed power back into the lights. He was bruised, the side of his face swelling where he’d struck the wall, and his clothes were scorched, but he seemed otherwise unharmed. The Renewables were ranged on the opposite side of the room, looking around, finding each other. One was on the ground, bleeding heavily from his shoulder where Oren had scored a hit.

Wesley was half-propped against the monitors, arms wrapped around himself, white-faced and sunken-eyed. I expected him to look away in fear and loathing, but instead he met my eyes. He was shaking, his muscles tight and noncompliant, but with an effort he nodded just a little.

Well done.

One of the Renewables—Curio—helped me lean against the bottom of the catwalk railing. He had a row of parallel scratches across his chest, torn right through his clothing, but they were shallow. He seemed otherwise unscathed. When I looked away from him, trying to ignore the allure of his magic as the newly awakened monster inside me stirred, he retreated.

I closed my eyes. All I wanted was to sleep, to go somewhere my arm wasn’t on fire, where I hadn’t almost killed Wesley. I heard a buzz of wings, and a small weight landed on my good shoulder. Nix said nothing, but its tiny metal body was warm from the friction of its mechanisms, and it huddled close against the hollow of my throat.

Then a commotion jerked me awake again.

“Where is she? What did I—oh god, is she—”

Oren was back. They must’ve dragged his unconscious form away from me, because his voice came from some distance away. I opened my eyes in time to see him shove one of the Renewables aside hard enough for him to bounce off the railing, stunned. He saw me and came sprinting over, his long legs eating up the distance between us hungrily.

He threw himself down at my side, making me wince for the fate of his knees on the metal catwalk. Nix buzzed at him, irritated, and Oren snarled back, knocking the pixie off my shoulder. But he did it gently, I noticed—and the pixie gave an annoyed click of its wings and retreated to the railing, watching.

“Are you okay?” His voice was hoarse. There was blood on his face, on his clothes. When he reached out to touch my face, his fingers were tacky and warm.

“I think my arm is broken,” I whispered. “But I’m okay.”

“Did I—I remember you, in the darkness, I remember wanting to—” His voice broke, and he felt at my face, at my throat, checking me for injuries.

“You didn’t.” I wanted to reach for his hand, but my arm wouldn’t move right. “You could have, and you stopped yourself.”

He stared at me. “How?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. All your training. You controlled it, all on your own.”

Oren swallowed, brushing my hair out of my eyes with his fingertips. “When I saw you up there—I knew you were going to jump. How could you be so—” I could tell he wanted to grab me, touch me somehow, demonstrate his frustration with my foolhardiness, but he was afraid to hurt me. Instead he just gazed at me helplessly.

“I didn’t realize it would affect you. I’m so sorry, Oren, I didn’t—”

“You idiot!” he interrupted. “I meant, how could you be so stupid as to jump off a three-story catwalk? You could have broken your neck.”

“I had to stop Adjutant. He would’ve killed us all. I knew the impact would set off the blackout device and—”

Oren’s fingers were exploring my face, and as they reached my lips, my voice stuttered to a halt. I wondered what I must look like—bruised, battered, bleeding in various places. But alive. Alive.

“Just don’t ever do that again. Not when you’re too far away for me to save you.”

“I’ll try,” I whispered back.

Oren leaned down, brushing my hair aside, his lips touching my forehead for an instant before he broke away with a jerk. As if he’d forgotten himself, overcome—and now, remembering he wasn’t supposed to touch me.

It hurt, muscles all over my body screaming a protest, but I leaned up anyway, brushing my lips against his. It wasn’t much of a kiss, my arm radiating agony, his weariness evident in his every movement. But when I fell back again, hissing for my broken arm, he gazed at me, the pale blue eyes unreadable except for the surprise there.

“You’re bleeding,” he whispered, reaching out to trace his finger along my lip, where I’d bitten it in my agony.

I had to laugh, even though it was more of a groan than a laugh. “Now you know what it’s like to kiss someone who tastes like blood.”

Oren stared at me for a breath, and then, against all odds, he smiled—just for a moment, but it was there, and it was all for me.

CHAPTER 29

There are worse ways to recover from bone-shattering injuries than in a warm room, attended by an entire horde of resistance fighters who think you’re a hero. I got so much attention I had to start forcing people to leave me alone just so that I could get some sleep. Olivia came to see me, and while her face was solemn and tired, I knew now that she didn’t blame me for what happened to Nina, who’d been showing signs of regaining consciousness. Maybe the budding friendship was gone, but at least she didn’t hate me.

There was still fear among the rebels—I was pretty sure none of them would ever fully trust me again. I was, in their eyes, something uncontrollable and dangerous. But I’d faced Prometheus and won. They were free. And every one of them wanted to come and see the girl who’d made it happen. Even when I got everyone else to leave, Nix stayed, perched on the bedframe, watching over me, criticizing me for staying in bed, chastising me when I tried to sit up.

But the healers among the rebels knew what they were doing. The healing sessions were agonizingly painful as they encouraged the bones of my arm, broken in two places, to knit together. But after only a few days I could get up on my own, move around, go to the bathroom by myself. This was of particular relief to Olivia, who was on Lark-can’t-take-careof-herself duty. As she put it, “If I never have to stand there awkwardly while someone pees again, I’ll die a happy girl.”

With Prometheus “dead” and CeePo under Wesley’s interim command, the resistance fighters in deep undercover had come out of the woodwork. Only those of us who’d fought Adjutant knew the truth about what had happened there, about who Basil was. Wesley and the others had decided it would be best if the city knew only that Prometheus had gone mad with power and died. There was no identifying Adjutant’s body—it was little more than ash and bone, only the scorched copper emblem of a flame to say that he’d been wearing Prometheus’s robes.

Eventually I was able to come out of my room for good, learning to dress myself one-handed, operate doors with my left hand. The splints made moving awkward, but they kept my arm still, which the healers said was critical to my recovery if I wanted to ever have full use of my arm again. The idea of being one-handed like this forever was enough to make me listen.

Four days after the battle for Lethe, as it was coming to be known, the ache in my arm woke me from a nap and sent me restlessly down the corridor. The rest of my injuries had all but healed, the gashes and scrapes treated with bandages and, in a few places, stitches. My splint itched, but I ignored it, channeling the restlessness into movement.

I was looking for Wesley and the others in the War Room, but when I got there, I found only Basil, sitting alone. He’d visited me during my recovery, but only for short periods. And never to speak about anything real—about what he’d done as Prometheus, about what he’d do next, about the bond between us and whether it could be repaired.

I hovered in the doorway, watching him. He was flipping the pages of the journal—his journal. His brow was furrowed, gaze distant. Every so often he’d shift his hand, tracing his fingertips over the lines of a drawing.

When I stepped inside, he spoke without lifting his head. “I really did it all for you,” he said softly. “I wanted a place we could be safe.”

“I believe you,” I said, making my way to one of the chairs so I could sit and rest my splinted arm on the tabletop.

“When you look at it a day at a time, you don’t see what’s happening. One day you siphon power away from a prisoner wanted for murder, because they’ll be banished anyway. Then it’s only those people convicted of treason.” He turned a page of the journal, eyes falling on the last page, the one with my face on it. “Then it’s anyone who opposes you.”

My splint itched, but my heart ached more, and I leaned forward. “It’s done now.”

“And so is Lethe.” He closed the journal with a slam, lifting his head and looking at me. His eyes grew even sadder— even four days after the battle, I knew I looked half a step away from death, covered in scratches and bruises. “Everyone’s celebrating out there because Prometheus is gone and the Renewables are free, but it’s only because they don’t realize yet what it means for Lethe. Without the magic from the Renewables, it’s over.”

“You’ll find a way,” I told him firmly. “You’re brilliant. You’ve always been brilliant. If anyone can save Lethe, it’s you.”

He shook his head, expression grim. “No, we’re leaving. You and me, as soon as you’re well enough to travel. It’s over here. It was over the moment I knew I couldn’t hurt you even to save Prometheus. Adjutant was right, I can’t make those kinds of decisions. I never could.”

My pulse quickened, and I fought to keep my voice even. “Basil, you can’t leave. This is your city. These are your people now.”

“But they don’t know that,” he snapped, fierce. Desperate. Afraid. Where was my brave, confident big brother? “They’ll figure out that I was Prometheus, sooner or later. They’ll all figure it out. But until then I’m just Basil Ainsley, and I don’t owe anyone anything. You and I can go. We can find some other place, some safer place.”

For a moment it was easy to imagine. Me and my big brother, on the road, striking out for territories unknown. We could leave all this uncertainty behind, all the guilt. I’d never see Nina or Olivia again, Basil wouldn’t have to watch the long, painful recoveries of the Renewables kept captive in CeePo.

I closed my eyes. “You chose to make Lethe what it is,” I said slowly. “That was the hard decision you made. You just didn’t know, at the time, how hard it’d turn out to be. Believe me, Basil. I know what it feels like to run away. And you can’t do it, not now. You’re not going to find a safer place out there.”

He dropped his head into his hands, fingers tangling through his thick hair. His face was worn, so much older than I remembered. Even though it had been years, in my mind’s eye Basil was always still a child, still the age he was when he left the city. But the man sitting across from me was barely more than a stranger.

“Lethe is doomed,” he murmured. “You’re saying that you and I have to go down with it?”

“Maybe it’s not doomed.” My mind hunted for a path out of the mess, some way of solving this problem without more bloodshed and torture. Basil was always the problem solver, not me. I sucked in a deep breath. “Talk to Dorian.”

“I saw he was here.” Basil lifted his head, watching me. “You think he’ll have ideas?”

“There are a hundred Renewables in the Iron Wood, at least.” I spoke slowly, turning it over in my mind. “The city— our city, the architects—know where they are. They need a safe place. You need Renewables to keep this place safe. Maybe there’s common ground there.”

Basil sat up, brow furrowed. He didn’t reply right away, but I could see him working it over in his thoughts, the same cautious excitement spreading over his features that he always had when designing a new fantastic machine in his sketchbook at home. “With that many, we wouldn’t need full-time donors. They could go in shifts. Donating a little magic at a time. It would be hard—but not unbearable. They could volunteer.”

I leaned back, grimacing as the movement triggered a new ache in my arm. Breaking it had been the easy part. This slow healing, clawing myself back bit by bit to fighting form—this was the hard part.

Basil’s eyes flicked up, meeting mine. “And you say I’m the brilliant one.”

I shook my head. “You spend enough time trying to outrun this darkness, you get better at finding alternatives.”

Basil reached across the table for my good hand, cupping it in his. “I’m glad you’re here, Lark. I can stay if you’re with me. Maybe you’re what I needed all along.”

I fell silent. A few weeks ago all I’d wanted was to have my big brother hold my hand and tell me I could spend the rest of my life at his side. Now, though . . . now it was different.

“I can’t stay,” I whispered.

“What?” His hand tightened. “No. No, don’t even joke about that.”

“Something isn’t right. Everything they told us in the city, about the wars, about how the world came to be what it is; it doesn’t make sense.”

“What could that possibly matter to you now?”

“Everyone here—they believed the Renewables caused the world to be what it was, because that was convenient for you. If they feared the Renewables, then it’d be harder for them to hide. Easier for you to find and use them.” I ran the fingers of my good hand through my hair, wishing I could straighten out my thoughts so easily. “Back home, we believed it was from a war, because it helped keep us in line, all working to run the city.”

Basil shook his head. “And to find the truth you’re willing to go back to a place where they torture children to power their lights?”

I thought of Oren and his secret, and of how we’d both wished we could unlearn it. The truth was never comfortable or easy. “The architects know something that no one else does. And if they know how this cursed world came to be, maybe they know how to heal it. At the very least, I have to know.”

“But why you?” Basil’s voice was fierce. “You’ve done enough. Stay with me, rebuild this place. Why does it have to be you that goes?”

Even as it all solidified into certainty, I felt a flicker of fear for what I knew I had to do. “I ran away, Basil.” I swallowed. “I turned my back on our home the way you wanted to turn your back on Lethe. Our people are desperate, more desperate than you or Adjutant or anyone here in Lethe. I was the only hope they had, and I ran away from them.”

He shook his head wordlessly, his eyes on mine.

“I have to go back.”

I ate a quiet dinner in my room, alone but for Nix’s company. At least this time my isolation was by choice—though the others didn’t quite know what to do with me, they wouldn’t have turned me away. Hero, villain—the lines blurred, and for now I was content to let the line stay blurry. Part of me knew that I ought to go out anyway, enjoy the company. I was never a social person back in my city, but my time alone in the wilderness had proven to me that even I got lonely. I felt almost as though I ought to store it up, like water collecting in a rainstorm, to last me through the drought to come. But I didn’t want a drawn-out farewell.

I had my pack all set out. Basil knew I was leaving, and we’d made our farewells. When he realized he couldn’t change my mind, he settled for telling me that we’d see each other again, when Lethe was safe. When our city was safe, too. There was my paper bird, crumpled, rescued from the depths of CeePo where I’d thrown it in Basil’s face. Oren’s knife in its sheath. Some cheese, some of the rebel-made grain bars that lasted for weeks, a packet of crackers. A water canteen. My running shoes, and my leather jacket with the tear in the shoulder neatly stitched up.

And the newest addition: a little metal flask of a clear, odorless liquid. Basil had given it to me, saying it was the way back through the Wall enclosing my city. When the Institute had sent him out, they did so intending him to come back and report on the location of the Iron Wood—it was Basil’s defection from the plan that made them try again, lying this time, with me. I was never intended to return, but Basil—Basil had a way of getting back inside. When I asked him how he’d managed to keep track of it for all these years, he was quiet, and I realized the answer: he kept it because he’d always intended to come back for me.“You’re sure you want to go back there?” Nix was not a fan of my decision and told me so at every possible juncture.

“I have to go,” I said with a sigh. “I’m not trying to sacrifice myself or be a hero or something. But they’re dying there, sooner or later. The Renewable they have will die, and then the city will have nothing.”

“But they’re the ones who did this to you.”

“It was only a small group of people who did this to me. Gloriette. The other architects. Kris.” My thoughts tangled as the image of the tousle-haired, handsome architect flashed before my eyes. “And even they were acting because they thought it was the only way to save the city.”

“Trying to talk sense into you is like trying to fly into a headwind.”

I tried to hide my smile. “And you love it. You’re coming, after all, aren’t you?”

Nix made an irritated grinding sound with its wings and then took off, headed for the ventilation shaft it used to go from room to room. I grinned, shaking my head. The little bug might be annoying and full of itself, but it was good company. And it was loyal.

I surveyed my supplies, trying to think if I’d missed anything. The people here would do just fine without me. They had Basil and Dorian, and Wesley too. If I slipped out in the night, there’d be no fuss, no pleas and no demands made.

There was just one problem: Oren.

I’d follow you anywhere, he’d told me in the Eagles’ prison cell, back before everything had happened here. I didn’t want to force him to put that promise to the test now that he’d found a home. He was different here, and even he had to realize that. He was quieter, calmer. Still just as strong and fierce as ever, but he was in control of himself. He was even in control of his shadow self—if only barely.

I couldn’t ask him to leave, but if I told him I was going, I knew he’d follow. My only other option was to leave without telling him, and I couldn’t bring myself to do that either. It was a betrayal nearly as bad as forcing him to leave this new home.

There was a tap on my door, and I jumped. “Oren?”

“Sorry to disappoint.” It was Wesley, the door opening half a moment later so that he could slip inside. “I noticed you weren’t at dinner and wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I’m fine,” I said quickly. I was standing in front of my bed, which was covered in supplies, but I couldn’t be concealing much. “Just want to be alone tonight.”

Wesley’s eyes raked over everything arrayed on top of the blanket, then fell back on me. “Running away again,” he said quietly, though there was no judgment in his voice. Just a mild comment on what he saw.

“Running back,” I corrected him.

Wesley made a noncommittal sound. I waited for him to speak, to explain why he’d come to find me. Instead he just stood there, watching me, his expression difficult to read.

“Wesley,” I found myself saying, “back in CeePo, when Adjutant called Basil Prometheus. You weren’t surprised.”

He inclined his head, conceding the point. “The possibility had crossed my mind.”

“That the author of the journal was Prometheus himself?” He nodded, and I struggled to understand. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Wesley ran a hand across his scalp, not replying immediately. “Because when you’re fighting an impossible enemy, your best weapon is hope.”

“I thought I was your best weapon,” I said dryly.

“Indeed,” he said, although his tone was serious, not echoing the humor in my voice.

I swallowed, scanning Wesley’s face. He was still a little haggard, dark circles under his eyes. He looked wan in contrast with the brightness of his peacock coat, which no one had dared suggest he get rid of even though he was no longer posing as one of Prometheus’s highest lackeys.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said softly.

He gazed back at me for a long moment, reminding me of the teachers I’d had back in my home city, pinning me to my chair and making me want to squirm. Then he nodded. “I know you are. But I knew what I was offering. And I did offer.”

“I could’ve killed you.”

Wesley smiled. “But you didn’t.”

“But I could have.”

Wesley laughed. “We could be at this all night, Lark. Life is full of coulds and shoulds. Those things have no bearing on reality. You do what you do, you make the choices you make. I respect your choices. You should do the same.”

When I had no answer for him he straightened, reaching for the handle of the door. “Goodbye, Lark. Be well.”

I was left staring after him as the door swung loosely closed, thinking of all the exercises he’d made me do, learning how to recognize the point of death, how to automatically stop myself before I passed it.

Did he know? Could he have somehow suspected, all along, that it would come down to that moment—him offering his magic to me, me having no choice but to take it?

Before I could consider that idea any further, the door squeaked open again, shattering my thoughts. Oren was there, one palm pressed against the door, his expression locked down. His eyes were on the supplies strewn over my bed, and for a wild moment I considered using my reserves of magic to slam the door in his face and pray he hadn’t seen.

But it was too late. I could see the betrayal in his gaze, the way they flicked from object to object, avoiding my face. With a tiny whir, Nix darted out from behind Oren’s head, and hovered over his shoulder.

“Told you she was leaving.” Though it was impossible, I could have sworn it sounded smug and petulant.

Traitor, I thought. When I turned my furious gaze on the pixie, it gave a startled screech and fled. So much for loyalty.

And so much for getting out of here without telling Oren.

“What is this?” he asked, stepping into the room and letting the door bang closed behind him.

“Oren, I wasn’t going to—”

“No, you tell me now. What is this? Are you planning another scouting mission somewhere?”

He knew I wasn’t. He was giving me a chance to lie, so we could both pretend. I lifted my chin. “I’ve been headed back there ever since I left, I just didn’t realize it. I’ve got to go back. I’m done running away.”

He closed the gap between us so he could speak in a low voice. “You’re still healing. Your arm—”

“Is fine. The splint will stay on another week or two, and it’ll be good as new. The healers have done what they can, now it’s just time. There’s no reason I can’t travel.”

“And the people here?” Oren’s pale eyes were icy hot, jaw clenched. “You’re just going to up and vanish on them?”

“They’ve got Basil and Dorian. They’ll be fine.”

Oren took a breath in and then let it out audibly—it was shaking. “And me? Were you going to leave without telling me?”

I stared at him, trying to catch my breath. “I don’t know.”

His throat moved convulsively as he swallowed. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Oren, you’re happy here!” I burst out, suddenly angry— angry that he wouldn’t just let me do this for him, angry that this wasn’t just my choice to make. “You have friends here, you can do some good here. You’re in control. You’re living an actual life. You’re safe here. How can I ask you to leave home behind?”

Oren was breathing hard, as though he’d just sprinted up a hill—as if standing in front of me now was some monumental feat of strength. “You think it’s this place that’s done all that?”

“Of course it is.” I gazed back at him, the fury draining away.

“You still talk too much,” he said wearily, taking another step forward so he could reach up, fingers tracing the line of a healing gash along my cheekbone. “And you don’t pay any attention to what’s really going on.”

I wanted to shake my head and deny what he was saying, but his fingers were like fire tracing down from my cheek, across my jaw, down my neck.

“It’s because of you, you stupid girl.” Oren’s brow was furrowed, his eyes not quite meeting mine—scanning my face. “This place is just a place. It’s the place where you are. If I’m in control it’s because I fought for it, to make sure I never lost it and hurt you. If I’m happy here, it’s because I’ve gotten to see you become this warrior. It’s you, Lark. It has nothing to do with where we are, except that it’s the place where you are.”

We were standing so close that I could smell his scent— here in civilization he was clean, with no traces of dirt or blood or sweat, but I could smell him all the same. Some fiery hint of the wilderness about him, that quality I could smell in the rain and the wind in the world outside.

“I should’ve told you before,” he mumbled, wrapping an arm around my waist. “Before everything, before it could’ve been too late. But I meant it when I said I’d follow you anywhere, Lark.”

“And if I’m going back to where this all started?” I asked.

“Then I’m going with you.” He paused, breath catching. “That is, if you want me. If you can see past what I am.”

“You’re Oren,” I replied, dizzy. “That’s all I care about.”

“I’m a monster,” he said gently, firmly.

“So am I.” It came out in a whisper.

His mouth twitched again in that little smile, helpless, exhaling half of a laugh. Then, as if he couldn’t stand it anymore, his mouth was on mine, and for the first time it was real, normal. He still had his darkness and I still had mine, and we were going to have to find a way to deal with them both. But for now it was just him and me, and our monsters would have to wait.

He learned harder against me—my good arm wrapped around him, pulling him close—I stumbled back a step until I hit the end of the bed. He gasped for a breath, then ducked his head, burying his face against my neck, lips finding my pulse.

Then something clanked, a whir of mechanisms interrupting us. We flew apart, Oren’s preternatural reflexes sending him halfway across the room before Nix even popped out of the ventilation shaft.

“Are you done yet? Can we go?” The pixie affected boredom, sounding impatient. And, perhaps, just the tiniest bit smug.

I looked back up, meeting Oren’s eyes. He inched back toward me, reaching for my hands again. His gaze was steady, calm, certain. And behind that all, I thought I caught a glimpse of excitement.

And I knew why, because I could feel it rising in myself. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had missed this. The journey, the danger, the sky overhead. Wind and stars and sunlight, and not knowing what lay over the next hill. A world so vast we could walk forever and never see everything there was to see.

Oren squeezed my hands.

“When do we leave?”