Lark Ascending Page 11

  For a brief second I felt a strange urge to join them, to speak the words that had once so affected me, in the hope of recapturing some of that certainty. But I kept walking. Because this wasn’t the chant of my childhood—the words had changed. They weren’t promising their devotion to the Institute anymore. Who were they pledging to now?

  I resisted the urge to break my stride and listen and made my way over to the ration line. The woman divvying up the food looked about ready to snap, the circles under her eyes making her look twice her age. I’d been heading toward the back of the line, but I paused and redirected my steps toward her.

  “Can I help?” I found myself asking.

  The woman looked up, startled. She had striking eyes, a green so pure it reminded me of the leaves just beginning to bud on the trees outside. Her face was so plain that I found myself staring, taken by surprise by her gaze.

  “Who are you?” she snapped.

  I recognized that hostility. She was waging her own war, here at this table, dividing too few rations among too any people, all of whom would have some reason why they should get more than their share. Each one with a story to break your heart.

  “My name’s Lark,” I said, trying not to respond to the barb in her tone. “I’m—”

  “Caesar’s sister,” the woman interrupted me, surprised. I held my tongue—I would not have defined myself that way—and nodded. Her brow furrowed in confusion. “Why would you want to waste your time here? You’re from beyond the Wall.”

  Word traveled fast, even if Eve was the main headline. I glanced at the line, which had already begun to stretch longer since I’d been talking to this woman. “Because I need something to do,” I confessed. Part of me wanted to explain that I wasn’t from beyond the Wall, that this was my home. But the words stuck in my throat, and I knew it wasn’t entirely true. Not anymore. “I know nothing about machines, I’ve given my tactical thoughts to Caesar already, and you look like you could use a hand.”

  The woman stared a moment longer, but when the old woman at the head of the line cleared her throat loudly, she jumped. “Okay. Yes, thanks. Sit here, use that ladle. Three-quarter scoop of porridge for each bowl, no matter what.” She demonstrated, then passed the bowl out to the impatient lady, who eyed me suspiciously and then carried her bowl off to eat.

  I began filling bowls, trying to focus on the ladle. At first I kept dropping clumps of porridge on the table, earning a sidelong look from the woman each time, but eventually I learned the trick of it. I set the bowls down beside my partner, who handed them on to the hungry rebel masses.

  After a time, the woman spoke again, startling me out of the repetitive trance I’d fallen into. “Talk to me about something. Martin’s coming, and he’s always got a sob story about why he should get more. If we’re talking maybe he’ll just take his food and go.”

  On the spot, I just gaped at her for a few moments. Then, stammering, I managed, “So—what is this stuff? That you’re feeding them?”

  “Grain mash,” said the woman, one eye on the approaching Martin, an old man with thinning gray hair. “Everything goes in. Mostly it’s ground-up ration crackers and the occasional handful of oats. We’ve got plenty of water, so we just add as much as we can to try and fill it out a bit.”

  I swallowed, looking down at the off-white mush I was dishing out. There were darker lumps in it, but I was sure I didn’t want to ask what they were.

  The woman let out a short, quick laugh. “Don’t make faces,” she said. “It’s not as bad as you think. Whenever we get nuts or the occasional bit of dried fruit, we toss that in too. You get sick of it, but it does the job.”

  I watched as she handed Martin’s bowl to him. He looked at it, then at my partner. I knew before he opened his mouth that he was about to protest, and so I blurted, “I bet if you ever managed to waylay some sugar beets, you could make a syrup for it that’d be pretty good.”

  The woman was watching Martin calmly. “The Institute doesn’t send out luxuries anymore, only the bare rations. We make do with what the people above can spare, which isn’t much.”

  Martin grumbled and moved on, glaring down at his meager bowl of mush.

  My partner chuckled and glanced at me. “There, you’ve already made my job ten times easier. My name’s Myrah.”

  I smiled and ladled another bowl of mush. “Lark,” I repeated.

  We continued to serve out rations, sometimes chatting, sometimes sitting through long periods of comfortable silence, for the next two hours. It wasn’t until a familiar voice broke me out of my reverie that I realized how much time had passed.

  “He’s got you working the food line now?”

  I jerked my gaze up to find Kris standing there, smiling that crooked smile at me. He looked tired, but not nearly as bad as he did when we first found him outside.

  “My idea,” I said firmly. “Not Caesar’s. It looked like Myrah needed some help.”

  Kris nodded a thank-you to Myrah as she handed him his bowl. “Can you take a break and come eat with me?”

  I glanced at Myrah, who smiled and made a shooing motion. “Go, we’ve made a big dent in this line. Thank you.” Her face didn’t seem quite so plain when she smiled. She pushed a bowl—three-quarters full—into my hand and then turned back to her task.

  Kris led me to an unoccupied section near the edge of the cavern and sat down on the floor, cross-legged. I joined him, stretching my legs out and balancing my bowl on my knees.

  “Not exactly the glamorous life,” Kris muttered.

  “I’ve spent most of the last year sleeping on dirt and bathing in creeks,” I pointed out. “This isn’t so bad.”

  Kris’s lips twitched, but he was in too solemn a mood to let me coax a true smile from him. “I’m sorry about how this has turned out.” He poked at his mush with his spoon, gazing at it as though it might provide him with whatever he was looking for. “I wasn’t expecting them to get Eve.”

  “You told them she was being moved. You had to know Caesar would try to use that information.”

  “I told them to warn them,” Kris replied drily.

  “Do you know what they were trying to do? Why unplug their power source at a time like this?”

  Kris hesitated, and though his eyes were fixed on his bowl, I detected a hint of a struggle there. “Not entirely. There’s a lot that you don’t know about the Institute, Lark. We’re not all bad.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “I know, but you think—never mind. The only reason to take Eve off the power grid would have been to let her Resource build up to higher levels. When she’s connected, the power flows out. But when she’s on her own, it just continues to regenerate. That’s what they were doing.”

  “To what end? As a weapon?”

  Kris shook his head but otherwise didn’t answer, his expression troubled. He was hiding something from me; but at the same time, if he was truly keeping secrets, he was capable of concealing it better. I had to conclude that he simply wasn’t ready to tell me what he knew. In his heart, he was still an architect. Every moment he lived here with us must feel like torture, a betrayal of his own people.

  “Maybe it’s for the best Eve’s here now,” I said lightly. “Of everyone involved, you were the only one who thought I could lead these people. Eve’s a born leader. It just means I can do the work and let her handle the people here.”

  Kris tipped his head to one side, conceding that much. “I’d bet a week’s rations that you’re the reason we’re not all pixie food right now.”

  “I wouldn’t take that bet,” I responded. “I may have dealt with the pixies—but Eve’s the one who kept this place from erupting into mass hysteria.”

  Kris snorted. “I’d take panicked and alive over calm and dead any day.”

  A laugh fought its way free of my throat, and I found myself grinning at him. “You have a point there.”

  “What exactly did she do?” Kris asked curiously. “To calm everyone?”r />
  “Just talked. She has some kind of influence over people, some way of making them all fixate on her and only her.” I glanced at him. “Weren’t you there?”

  Kris looked down at his bowl. “I left as soon as I saw her getting up on that table.” He shoved a spoonful of mash into his mouth.

  “You knew what was coming,” I breathed. “You knew what she could do.”

  Kris pointed at his mouth, making a show of having to take the time to finish his mouthful before speaking. It bought him a few moments, but even so, he hesitated after swallowing. “Not exactly. But I headed one of the research teams assigned to her when I worked at the Institute.”

  I was struck anew by how much responsibility Kris had had there, despite his young age. He was older than me, but not by more than three or four years, and he was the head of an entire team of architects. Now, he was just a boy sitting cross-legged on a dirty floor, eating soggy ration crackers.

  “What is she?” I asked finally. “She’s no ordinary Renewable.”

  “She used to be.” Kris still wasn’t looking at me, focusing on his lunch. “Until we began our work.”

  He still referred to the Institute as “we.” Maybe that was why Caesar didn’t trust him, thinking that he still considered himself one of the architects. But I knew better. For Kris, it was a constant reminder of his guilt. Of a series of decisions that had led him further and further from himself.

  He set his spoon down and lifted his head, finally looking at me again. “Lark, how much do you remember from your time there?”

  I felt my throat constrict. It would be easier to pretend I’d forgotten. That my mind had simply erased all memory of what had been done to me. Most days I pretended anyway, pushing it far away, as though it had happened to someone else. But it wasn’t true.

  “I remember everything.”

  Kris swallowed, his gaze hollow. “The nuances are difficult to explain, but in essence what we did was fill you with magic, more than your system could handle, over and over again until you had enough to last you through the wilderness to reach the Iron Wood. But I think—I think there may have been side effects.”

  My heart lurched. He knew. He knew about the shadow inside me, that I was a monster no different from Oren, only more deadly, more perfect in the way I hunted and fed. I forced my voice to calm. “What do you mean?”

  “The way you absorbed the magic from all of us and from the machines while you were defending the Iron Wood.” Kris was watching me carefully. “I think that by dosing you repeatedly, we made your body begin to crave magic, become receptive to it. I think we made you what you are, able to absorb magic from things. Have you done it since then?”

  Images flashed before my eyes. Putting an end to Tomas’s pain outside the Iron Wood. Draining Tansy as we fell from the window in the ruins. Nina’s comatose face, unmoving, unchanging, after I had drained her to the point of death. “Yes,” I whispered.

  Kris nodded. “Well, I think that we made Eve what she is, too.”

  I blinked away the sting in my eyes, forcing myself to focus. “How?”

  “The exact opposite of what we did to you. We took her magic again and again, forcing her to regenerate far more often and more quickly than any Renewable normally would. My theory is that her system compensated by producing magic at an alarming rate, and that now she can no longer control it. I think it seeks out voids and tries to fill them.

  “Voids,” I echoed blankly.

  Kris nodded. “We’ve all been harvested. I think what she does is ooze magic into those around her, for a time. Perhaps that was what was so comforting to the people during the pixie attack.”

  I thought of the blank, mindless adoration with which the crowd had regarded her. “It wasn’t just comfort. It was euphoria.”

  Kris grimaced, nodding again. “Sometimes it would hit the architects like that too,” he told me. “Magic can have that effect, on people who are starved for it.”

  I stared at him, recalling all too easily the mind-numbing agony of being pumped full of magic in their Machine.

  “In small doses,” Kris added, seeing my face.

  I wanted to ask him about Oren, and Eve’s promise that she could cure him. But doing so would require that I reveal Oren’s secret, and as much as I had come to believe Kris really was my ally, I wasn’t sure I trusted him to be Oren’s, too. So instead I said, “Is there any chance Eve’s power, giving people magic, could ever be permanent? If there was, say, a void—would she be able to heal it?”

  Kris watched me, his expression solemn and thoughtful. He didn’t answer right away, and for a heart-stopping moment I thought he’d guessed why I was asking. But when he did speak, his words surprised me. “I wouldn’t go near her if I were you, Lark. You and she are opposite forces, and as any architect knows, opposites attract—but often with disastrous consequences. I don’t know what would happen if she tried to use her powers to heal yours.”

  My mind raced. True, Oren and I were different. But we carried the same darkness inside, the same void longing to be filled with magic. But Kris had only confirmed my fears about what Eve had offered Oren. Even if she could cure him, it’d be by destroying the shadow—and who knew how much of the Oren I’d come to love would go with it?

  “Tell me something, Kris.” There was something still nagging at me about what he’d revealed. “If draining Eve just made her stronger and stronger, why send me in search of the Iron Wood? I’d assumed the Renewable was faltering, losing power.”

  Though I couldn’t be certain in the general gloom inhabiting the Hub, I thought I saw something flicker through Kris’s expression. Fear? Guilt? “Her power wasn’t why we were so desperate to find another source for the Resource.”

  But before he could continue, a shadow fell over me and a gruff voice said, “Get up, we’ve got to talk.” Caesar stood there, backlit and looming.

  I finished my bowl of porridge in a hurry—Myrah was right, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded—and got to my feet. “Kris too?” I asked, though I kept my voice firm enough that it wasn’t really a question.

  Caesar glanced down at Kris, then nodded. “We’re talking about infiltrating the Institute, he might as well come.” Then he stumped away, clearly expecting us to follow.

  A chill trickled down my spine as we followed Caesar. He was considering my plan. Now all I had to do was hope it was a good enough plan to work.

  When we reached Caesar’s office there was already a small handful of people there. There were a man and a woman about Caesar’s age, and very clearly related—same dirty blond hair and gray eyes, same mannerisms when they looked up at the sound of the door opening. There was another man, one I recognized from the group that had brought Eve back with Caesar. And then there was Eve.

  I was surprised to see her there; until now she hadn’t been present for any of Caesar’s strategic meetings. I glanced from her to Caesar, hoping for some hint of what was going on, but his face was expressionless.

  “I’ve filled them in on your idea to return to the Institute,” Caesar told me. “This is Asher and Alice,” and he gestured to the brother and sister, “and this is Tek.” The man who’d helped retrieve Eve nodded at me.

  “And?” I asked.

  Caesar shook his head. “It won’t work. They can’t be reasoned with. We can’t risk sending anyone in there.”

  “But I said that I’d go,” I insisted. “You won’t lose any of your people, and given what we stand to gain—”

  Kris interrupted. “What plan is this?”

  “I want to go back to the Institute and try to reason with them, make some kind of deal. I can show them where the pockets of magic are, buy them a little time if they go to harvest it.”

  Kris’s eyes swung from me to Caesar. “And you think this is a bad idea?”

  Caesar grunted. “A stupid idea. You know the Institute will chew her up and spit her out.”

  Kris nodded, and my heart sank. I’d been counting on him to
back me. “True. I’m just surprised you care enough to prevent that.”

  Caesar didn’t even flinch. “Lark’s a resource. Weigh up the variables and we need her.”

  “I agree.” Kris was carefully not looking at Eve, but I could feel her eyes on me.

  “Excuse me,” I interjected, furious at the way they were talking as though I wasn’t even there. “But it’s my choice. I’m not one of your subjects, Caesar.”

  “True,” Caesar agreed. “You can do what you want. You can go throw yourself off a roof if you really want to, though speaking from personal experience, I don’t recommend it.” That jab was meant for me, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of flinching. “But if you want to help these people, then we need you as a soldier, not a spy or a diplomat.”

  But what if I don’t want to be a soldier?

  Asher, the blond brother in the back, spoke up. “That still leaves us without a plan to move forward,” he pointed out.

  “We do what we’d originally planned to do,” Caesar declared. “We have Eve, and she’s agreed to help us power the machines we’ve salvaged and repaired. That gives us weapons. Not many, but enough for a small, calculated strike.”

  “The food stores,” I muttered.

  Caesar nodded, his steely gaze swinging back to me. “If we take out the machines guarding it, we can salvage those too. Grow our little army. Guerilla tactics, striking smaller targets, until we have enough for an all-out assault.”

  Kris rolled his eyes. “You’re never going to have enough for an all-out assault,” he said dryly. “The Institute has weapons you’ve never even seen before. You can’t fight them that way.”