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  I held my breath, gathering my meager power to strike, as I had done with the pixie in the tunnels below the school in the city. It blinked again, its eyes shifting from blue to an intense red. Then, head tilting gently to one side, it spoke.

  “Hello, gosling.”

  Chapter 16

  The voice that emerged from the squat copper bug was tinny and strange, one I would not have recognized had it not been for the words it spoke. Its eyes glared red, pulsing like Caesar’s talkie.

  “We’ve been so worried about you, duckling. What happened? Did someone frighten you, poor thing?”

  I was so baffled I couldn’t speak. I stared at the pixie, which sat with its wings fanning the morning air lazily, its tiny mouth hanging open.

  “Oh, duck,” said the voice of Administrator Gloriette. “Speechless, you poor dear. It’s over now, we’ll have you home before you know it. Your brother’s been worried sick about you.”

  I found my voice again. “My brother is the one who turned me in,” I croaked. “He betrayed me.”

  The pixie—or, rather, Gloriette’s voice from within the pixie—gasped. “Good heavens, no! Who told you that? Never mind,” it continued, before I could answer. “No, your brother only wanted to help you, poor chick. We’ve all been searching high and low for you. We need our most promising new citizen back.”

  I pressed back against the leg of the machine as far as I could go, my shoulder blades digging into the rusting metal. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Oh, gosling.” The tinny, distorted voice managed to convey sadness well enough. “Who has been filling your head with nonsense? We’ve always done what we could to keep you happy while still helping your city.”

  That was so ludicrous that it snapped me out of my horrified stupor. “You were going to make me a slave!” I cried. “Worse than a slave, you were going to make me a thing. You were going to chain me up like that Renewable and turn me into a nothing!”

  “We certainly were not,” said the Gloriette-pixie, aghast. “Poor gosling, such a silly misunderstanding! She was a creature from the outside, and she tried to infiltrate our city. We would never, ever do that to one of our own! We just want to bring you back and keep you safe.”

  I forced myself to my feet, my stiff muscles protesting the sudden movement. “You’ll have to kill me first,” I said through gritted teeth.

  There was a pause before the Gloriette-pixie replied. When it did, the voice carried a stiffness underneath the artificial crackle of magic. Still saccharine and smooth, but hard as glass. “I don’t know that there’s any call for such theatrics,” it said. “It’s time to stop this nonsense, Miss Ainsley. You cannot survive out there on your own.”

  “I’ve managed so far,” I said, sounding far more confident than I felt. I tried not to think about the mysterious gift of the shoes or the wild boy’s lighter. “You won’t bring me back in one piece, so you might as well stop wasting the energy to find me.”

  “If you come back now, you will face no punishment for disobedience. And you can take up any career you want once you’ve recovered from your ordeal. You can continue living with your mother and father if you like, or we’ll set you up in your very own apartment. But only if you come back now.”

  Now that the shock of hearing the pixie speak had faded, I found to my surprise that laughter was fighting its way out of me. Did they think I was so stupid? They’d waited until I’d spent some time on my own, seen the horror of the sky, learned what it’s like to be truly hungry. They’d given me enough time to get desperate, before offering to let me come back. As if all I wanted was to return to the Institute’s glass cage.

  I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. I ignored the pixie and pushed away from the ancient walker, striding past it.

  “Wait!” snapped the Gloriette-pixie, the word accompanied by a whirring of clockwork as it turned to track me.

  My back to it, I stooped to retrieve my meager supplies. I turned toward the edge of the barrier and took one step.

  “We know where your brother is.”

  I froze.

  “What did you say?” I didn’t turn around, my hands clenched into fists around the makeshift straps of my pack. I knew she wasn’t talking about Caesar anymore.

  “He suffers greatly. You could save him, if only you knew where to look.”

  She was lying. Of course she was lying. Basil had vanished with his entire group of volunteers the day they had set out in search of Resource pockets. Basil had died years ago.

  I closed my eyes.

  “My brother is gone,” I said, my voice trembling through my teeth. “We scattered his ashes.”

  “You burned his belongings and bid farewell without another thought,” said the pixie. The metallic voice grated and cut into my mind. “But it takes years to die from Resource withdrawal. Long, lonely, painful years. He’s alive, but only barely. Even so, it isn’t too late. Come back and you may use whatever resources you want to find him and bring him home.”

  Beneath the voice I heard a faint whir of clockwork, and I turned my head enough to see its source. Something was unfolding slowly from beneath the pixie’s abdomen. A long, wicked-looking needle glinted in the light.

  I wrenched my gaze ahead again.

  “We can bring him back, bring your family together again,” the pixie went on, Gloriette’s voice low and hypnotic. “We can give you everything you’ve ever wanted.”

  I sucked in a deep breath, my voice dead calm. “Go to hell.”

  The Gloriette-pixie screamed, half voice and half clockwork whine, and flew at my face, stinger extended and seeking flesh. I snapped my power up, deflecting the pixie and then crushing it into the earth.

  Fury made me stronger, more accurate. I inspected the ruins of the bug, its gleaming body half-destroyed, making visible the gears inside. A tiny core of magic fluttered and pulsed within its diamond shell, like a heartbeat made erratic from pain or fear. Shimmering the same faint violet as the inside of the Wall, the longer I stared at it, the more lightheaded I grew. Dizzy, like I’d been just before I destroyed the pixie in the sewers. The pixie general said nothing else, and the red-violet eyes were dull and empty.

  As I lifted a foot to crush it, the pixie gave a pitiful groan of gears. Then, with effortless beauty, it trilled in a pitch-perfect imitation of a bird call. I would not have recognized it but for the sound I had heard once before, from a paper bird briefly given life by magic.

  I stopped so abruptly that I nearly knocked myself over, stumbling where I had meant to stamp the machine into bits. The core continued fluttering, pulsing. The eyes flickered blue, struggling, no longer red-violet. I saw no sign of the stinger—had it broken off? Again, it trilled, the exact same sound.

  Follow the birds.

  Where had this thing heard such a call, to be able to recreate it?

  I had seen not a feather, heard not a hint, of any birds since the Renewable had spoken to me. And yet, this pixie had managed to re-create a bird call.

  I couldn’t afford to leave this clue behind. The countryside was vast, so much vaster than this tiny city and its suburbs that the scale of it terrified me if I thought too much about it. How could I hope to find the Iron Wood without help?

  And so I sat, watching the ruined pixie, catching my breath, trying to still the hammering in my chest.

  “Pixie?” My voice emerged as a thin, reedy whisper. Annoyed at my own fear, I swallowed and tried again. “Gloriette?”

  Silence. Not a flicker in the dark, empty eyes. Nothing to signify that pulsing connection, like I’d seen with Caesar’s talkie.

  Still, I had no way of knowing the extent of the Institute’s deception. I leaned closer, resisting my body’s urge to scramble away and run.

  “Gloriette,” I tried again, in a low voice. “I changed my mind.”

  My whole body trembled with the lie. But if there was one thing that would get it to shed its deception if it was only faking destruction, it was this. />
  “I’ll go back with you.”

  The eyes were dark, the machine silent. I stared at it, eyes watering, every sense attuned for the slightest shift, my head spinning and dizzy, ready to slam it again.

  Then again, its eyes had been blue when it sang, not the red of the Institute’s communicator devices. If Gloriette wasn’t behind the birdsong, who—or what—was?

  As I watched the thing, the pulsing knot of power at its core grew more steady. Less like a flame about to flicker out, more like the constant thrum of the overhead lights at the Institute. It had tried several times to move, gears turning and clanking, mismatched and broken. But now, it extended tiny, needlelike appendages. They moved falteringly, each attached to a set of the tiniest, most delicate gearwork I’d ever seen.

  Unable to help myself, I leaned closer, staring.

  The appendages—fingerlike wisps of copper—set about straightening gears, setting them back on their correct axles, fitting the teeth of one into the spaces of another. Though filament-thin, the fingers were strong enough to bend the pixie’s body back into shape. It folded up the copper-plating covering its glowing heart, but not before I saw it flare with power.

  The pixie was healing itself.

  The fingers scrabbled on the ground, and for a wild moment I thought it was trying to crawl toward me. Then I saw a tiny cube of copper a few inches past the tips of its fingers, something that had clearly broken from its body when I smashed it. I stooped and picked it up.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” I said, heart hammering away in my chest. At least I could keep it from being fully operational. Maybe.

  “Don’t,” said the pixie, a bizarre echo that caught me short.

  Startled, I took a step back. Its eyes still glowed the soft, clear blue. Maybe I had been wrong in guessing that red meant connection to the Institute, to Gloriette. But then, it hadn’t spoken in her voice.

  It had spoken in mine.

  “Don’t,” it said again, and giving a little shake, it lifted off the ground, wings a blur. It flew at me, and before I could dodge, collided blindly with my arm. I shook it off and stepped back, cornered against the ruins.

  “What the—stop that!”

  “Stop that!” The pixie dropped and buzzed against my fist, the one holding the piece I’d taken from it. Hearing my own voice changed and mutated by the pixie’s metallic body made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  “You’re repeating me,” I said, darting past the creature, walking backward so I could keep it in my sights.

  “Repeating you.” It buzzed toward me, but when I started to back away again, it stopped, hovering a few feet away.

  “But that’s not a repetition,” I accused, as some part of my brain screamed at me that I was going mad, talking to a machine as if it could understand me.

  “Ohnoyoudon’twhatthestopthatyou’rerepeatingmebutthat’snota repetition,” it said.

  The words were all in my voice, exactly as I had said them, a perfect replica, strung together without the natural pauses and cadence of human speech.

  “You need my voice to create sound,” I whispered, staring. “You don’t have a vocabulary of your own.”

  “Create sound, your voice.” The pixie darted to the right, and then the left. It was an oddly impatient gesture.

  “But you spoke earlier in Administrator Gloriette’s voice.” I was still poised to flee. “You couldn’t have had it all recorded; she wouldn’t have known what I was going to say. When was that vocabulary created?”

  “Gloriette,” said the pixie. “Not created. Not recorded.”

  “Can she hear me now? Are you still connected to her?”

  The pixie bobbed in place, hovering uncertainly. I could hear the turning of its gears, the hum of its wings, and under it, the now-steady thrum of magic in its heart.

  I realized what was causing its hesitation. “Oh! Yes or no?” “No,” said the pixie, instantly.

  “How come you can’t use the words you heard from Gloriette to talk to me?”

  More turning gears. “Create your voice,” it said. “Create create. Not Gloriette. Not recorded.”

  “Guess you don’t have the words to explain it. And I certainly can’t give them to you if I don’t know what they are.”

  The pixie continued to hover, waiting, quiet.

  “You only answer direct questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does the Institute know where I am?”

  “No. Yes. No.”

  “They think they know?”

  “No.”

  “They know the general location?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you supposed to report the specific spot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you need this thing to make it back?” I opened my fingers and held up the little copper cube on the palm of my hand. It had tiny lines and patterns engraved on it, so minuscule I couldn’t see the details of them. Intricate pathways that must have been etched with the thinnest possible needle.

  The pixie gave a desperate whine and lurched forward. I closed the cube in my fist again and the pixie stopped. “Uh uh,” I said, shaking my head. “Answer the question.”

  “Yes,” it said. Always the same syllable, the same way. No hint of emotion but that which I had given it when I spoke.

  “What is it?”

  “Specific spot. Location. Where I am? Answer.”

  I had no idea what that meant. “Um. A map?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “But you can’t find your way back without it?”

  “Can’t,” it agreed.

  “I should just smash you,” I said, my fist tightening around the cube. “To be safe.”

  “No.” The pixie did not beg; the word was as calm as when I had spoken it.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth? You’re just one of their machines, and all they ever did was lie to me. You’re no different from them, just programmed to hunt me down.”

  “Machines. Don’t. Lie.”

  I bit my lip, rattling the tiny cube around in my hand, the little piece that was, apparently, all that stood in the way of this pixie telling the Institute exactly where I was. “Just as I was about to step on you, you made a sound,” I found myself saying. “How did you make that sound, if you can only repeat sounds you’ve heard?”

  “What sound?”

  “It sounded like a bird.”

  “Bird. No bird.”

  “But I heard it!”

  “No bird,” it repeated.

  Stalemate. It was unlikely anyway that it could lead me to the Iron Wood. If the Institute knew such a place existed, they would have found it and harvested all the people long ago. I tucked the metal cube into my pocket. Hearing the pixie speaking my own voice—however warped—made it hard to decide to destroy it, but I had little choice. I couldn’t trust it. I gathered up my power, trying to ignore the ravenous, gnawing pit of hunger in my stomach caused by the first blow.

  “Stop that!” cried the pixie, in my voice. “Don’t.”

  “Quit talking to me,” I said, frowning. “You’re making it harder. You’re just a thing, it’s not like pixies have a sense of self-preservation.”

  “I have,” said the pixie. “Not a thing. Programmed me different.”

  The gathered power faltered and slipped, and I lost some of it around the edges of my concentration. It was true that I had never seen a pixie like this, with eyes, with speech. “There’s no reason for me to keep you alive.” As I said it, I cursed myself. The thing wasn’t alive. Just a collection of gears and magical programming.

  “Bird,” it said.

  “You said it wasn’t a bird. If it’s not a bird call then you can’t help me.”

  “Wasn’t a bird,” it agreed. But then, infuriatingly, added, “Bird. Location. Answer.”

  Suddenly, I understood. “You can take me to where you heard that sound?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know where the Ins
titute is, but you know where you heard the bird call?”

  “Bird sound alive, different. Can’t sense the Institute.”

  “You can track living things, if they’re close enough.” Could it sense my excitement? “Why would you help me?”

  “To keep me alive.” Its speech was getting better, more complete, with every sentence I spoke.

  “If you could, would you turn me in?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can’t as long as I have that cube?” I put a protective hand over my pocket.

  “Yes.” The thrum of its wings sped and slowed again. Irritation? From a machine?

  I could destroy the pixie, here, now, with a moment of concentration. But then I would be stuck drifting aimlessly across an unfamiliar world. As long as I kept the cube in my pocket, I was safe.

  “How do I know you’re not leading me off a cliff or straight into a forest of carnivorous trees or any one of a thousand dangers I haven’t discovered yet?”

  The color left the pixie’s eyes, leaving them glowing an empty white, and its mouth opened wide. The voice that emerged was not mine—and not Gloriette’s. A man’s voice. “First directive: Keep Lark alive.” Its mouth closed again, and the blue of its eyes returned.

  I recognized that voice. Even tinny, warped, miles away from the source, it made my heart pound painfully. “Kris.” I was seized with such a sudden, intense longing to see him that it nearly brought me to my knees.

  “Kris,” it repeated. “Keep Lark alive.”

  “So as long as I don’t let you figure out how to get back, you’re harmless. Right?”

  The pixie did not respond at first, hovering calmly in front of my face.

  “Are you safe?” I pressed.

  The pixie blinked slowly, lazily. “What is safe?”

  I swallowed. The thing couldn’t form its own words, but it could equivocate. I tried to ignore the shiver that crept down my spine. “But you can take me to the bird sound.”

  “Take you to the bird sound?” it said, and paused. All I could hear was the mad turning of its gears. “Yes.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  •  •  •

  I had expected the pixie to lead me back the way I had come. Either it would betray me and lead me toward the Institute, or it would be retracing its steps to where it had heard the bird. Instead, the pixie headed away, toward the wilderness.