Skylark Page 14

  It said little when I spoke to it, unless I pressed for answers. At some point in the one-sided conversation, I had uttered the phrase, “I’m not certain,” and it had become the pixie’s favorite way of dodging my questions. The pixie couldn’t lie—or, at least, it certainly seemed that way—but it could avoid answering truthfully.

  “Was it a recording of a bird?” I trudged along, trying to keep up despite the way my feet ached. The pixie kept to a faster pace than I would have done on my own, forcing me to move quickly or lose sight of it.

  “I’m not certain.”

  “A phonograph, inside one of the pockets?”

  “I’m not certain.”

  “A bird that’s not a bird,” I muttered. I had run out of

  ideas, and fell silent.

  By the time the sun dipped down toward the hills to the west, we had covered more ground than I ever would have done on my own. The ruins gave way to a broad sea of waisthigh grass, spotted with trees and skirted on either side by dense woods. The pixie turned abruptly west, leading the way into a much thicker forest, something that had clearly been forest long before the wars. An old forest—a hungry forest. I hung back.

  “No forests.” I searched each tree for the telltale lines of mouths, the unnatural shiver of leaves. “Let’s stop here for the night.”

  The pixie paused, hovering. “No,” said the pixie. My own voice, echoed back to me, sounded far more firm and confident than it ever did coming out of my own mouth. “To keep Lark alive. Let’s stop for the night. Forests.”

  I groaned. “Of course you would say that. Are you trying to imply that it’s more dangerous out here than in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why?”

  “I’m not certain.”

  “How much further until the bird?”

  “I’m not certain.”

  “Well, are there more machines from the Institute coming after me?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Never mind.” Empty as my pack was, my weary shoulders felt its slight weight as if it were full of rocks. “Look, I don’t like forests, okay?”

  “Okay.” The pixie darted around and sped off, vanishing into the gloom.

  “Hey!” I shoved aside my exhaustion to jump after it. It occurred to me again that this could be an elaborate trap, but I chased it anyway.

  I couldn’t help but remember the last time I had run through the forest. Although these trees gave no sign of being animate, there were still plenty of roots to trip me and branches to claw at my face. I ducked underneath them and kept on, listening for the thrum of magic that told me where the pixie had gone.

  And then, abruptly, it was there, hovering a few feet away. Still. Calm.

  “You’re not allowed to do that anymore,” I gasped, slipping in the leaf mould as I skidded to a stop. “You hear me?”

  “Okay,” said the pixie. Then: “Look.”

  The pixie drifted past me, crystalline eyes directed back the way we had come.

  I turned, wondering again if I’d made a horrible miscalculation in allowing the pixie to live. No, not live. Exist. It wasn’t alive.

  I could still see a good portion of the field across which we’d been walking. At first I saw nothing, and started to say as much, when the pixie buzzed impatiently, interrupting me.

  Then, all at once, I saw them.

  A chain of six figures, low to the ground, moving fast. Heading north. There were no details in the gathering dusk. They were darker than the oncoming night, no more than shadows slipping between the tall grasses, silhouetted by the setting sun. Another day I might have marveled at the sunset, the first I’d seen out in the open, but I was too fixated upon the shadows in the grass.

  While I watched, the one in front straightened, becoming a silhouette so familiar I nearly darted out of hiding. A human.

  The pixie hummed low, gears growling and grinding. A warning. I kept back, wondering how it had sensed my eagerness. Not counting the wild boy, and the ghosts in the townhouse, when was the last time I’d seen another human face?

  The silhouette dropped back down, and some of my exultation dimmed. I’d never seen anyone move with quite that strange, low gait. No human moved like that—did they? They kept to a loose formation, fanning out behind the leader, and moving fast.

  I took a step back, wishing the tree I hid behind had a broader trunk. I let my eyes drift ahead of the shadows, trying to figure out where they were headed. And then I saw it: a seventh figure, similar in shape. Not moving so quickly, but with the same low, sinuous motion. Smooth, but for a slight hitch. It was limping.

  I had barely time to realize this before the pack of six had caught up to the lone figure, speeding up as they caught sight of him. A guttural cry went up, echoing eerily across the plain, reverberating within the forest. Something—the seventh figure—screamed.

  And then they were upon it, and I could hear the sounds of their slaughter as far away as I was. I stared, unable to look away, as all six people—but they could not be people, they could not be people—fell upon the wounded one. The clearing echoed with the sounds of tearing flesh and cracking bones interspersed with whoops and gurgles of delight.

  The sunset blazed behind them on the plain. I saw one of the six rip an arm off of the corpse, the motion silhouetted against the bloody setting sun. I retched and covered my mouth with both hands.

  Two of the figures lifted their heads. I couldn’t tell, in the deceptive light, whether they were looking in my direction. The pixie hummed another warning, but I didn’t need it this time. I held my breath until the two heads dropped back down, the monsters returning to their feast.

  I tore my gaze from the sight and turned away, spine pressing against the tree at my back. The pixie drifted on into the gloom of the forest, and when it spoke, the sound was so slight as to be barely distinguishable over the continued sounds of carnage behind us.

  “Let’s go. Keep Lark alive.”

  Chapter 17

  The next hour was a miserable haze of fear and exhaustion. My spine tingled constantly, expecting the monstrous creatures to leap at me at any moment. The pixie kept me marching through the darkening wood, staying just far enough ahead that I could still see and follow it.

  The forest could not have been more different than the one in the pocket. There were old trees, yes, but in the deep of this forest, the trees stood tall and lean, with nary a branch between the canopy and the floor. Here, where the trees were thickest, the undergrowth was stunted and low, made up of tangled briar patches and broad-leafed iv y.

  “Will we be safe in here?” I asked, catching myself before I stumbled to my knees again into a thorn bush. I shivered in the now-freezing dark.

  “Maybe,” said the pixie.

  “Will those shadow men come into the woods?” “Shadow men,” repeated the pixie. For the briefest second,

  I imagined I had detected amusement in its voice. Which was impossible, of course. It was only repeating my own tones. “Not the shadow men,” it answered, finally.

  “But something else might?” I pressed.

  “I’m not certain.”

  I was too weary to protest, and from then on walked in silence that was broken only by the crashing of leaves and twigs as I blundered my way through the forest. It had grown so dark that I began to spend more time on my hands and knees than on my feet, and when I had crashed into a bush for what felt like the fiftieth time, the pixie came to a halt.

  “Let’s stop for the night.”

  I dropped to my knees where I was standing, one tiny part of my brain grateful for the moss underfoot that could have easily been rocks or more thorns. It didn’t even matter, for the moment, that I was being ruled so completely by a machine. All that mattered was rest.

  The pixie made a wide circle and buzzed back toward me. It didn’t speak, but instead bumped insistently against the pack slung across my shoulders.

  “What, you wa
nt food? You don’t eat.” Uncertainty tickled at my mind. “Do you?”

  “You eat,” said the pixie. “I don’t.”

  “Such concern,” I said, making no effort to keep the chill out of my voice. I leaned forward, shrugging out of the bag and loosening the drawstring. Despite having stopped midday to eat my last piece of bread, I was still ravenously hungry from having used magic to smash the pixie.

  All that came from the pack into my groping hands were two carrots and half of a cucumber. I swallowed the saliva that came rushing to my mouth, and took up the cucumber. The broken end of it was dry and wrinkly from exposure to the air, but I ate it anyway, too hungry to care about its rubbery, chalky texture. It was gone all too soon, leaving me holding the two carrots. I willed my stomach to settle.

  “Eat,” repeated the pixie, invisible in the gloom.

  “If I eat them now I won’t have anything to eat in the morning.” My voice sounded hollow even to my own ears.

  “You will look in the morning.”

  “For more food?” My hands tightened around the carrots. “Out here?”

  “Yes. I will help you.”

  “And lead me straight to something poisonous.” I gritted my teeth. I knew I shouldn’t eat the carrots. But the stabbing in my gut was too strong to ignore.

  The carrots, sweet and only a little soft, were gone as quickly as the cucumber.

  Now that I was still, the cold had begun to creep in around me. I had been so preoccupied with my hunger that I hadn’t noticed it. The aching emptiness was only slightly lessened by the vegetables, but it was enough that I could focus on the lighter the wild boy had given me.

  The pixie sat some distance away as I gathered a little pile of leaf litter. Striking the wheel with my thumb without being able to see it was harder than I had expected. By the time I was able to coax a spark out of it, I was shivering so violently my vision blurred.

  By sheer good fortune, the spark fell full upon the little pile of leaf litter—and smoldered there, uselessly, until it winked out. Echoes of its brightness danced in my fuzzy vision as I stared into the darkness where it had been.

  Only the pixie kept me from throwing the lighter across the clearing. I would not admit defeat in front of a machine.

  Wait—the pixie had been there, humming faintly some yards away. It was no longer. There was only the quiet and the cold and the utter darkness closing in around me.

  All the day’s suspicions crashed in on me. To have trusted one of the Institute’s machines, believed that I had rendered it harmless, with one lucky blow? I deserved to be caught. I cradled the lighter, warm from my futile attempts to make it work, against my chest.

  I heard the pixie’s return long before it spoke, and so when it buzzed into the clearing and said, “Here,” I managed not to jump.

  Something soft and light dropped down onto my lap as the pixie buzzed past my face. I groped, and my fingertips discovered a loose ball of dead moss. Dry, thin, airy—the perfect kindling. I looked up, but the pixie was invisible in the dark. I swallowed a “thank you” and bent my head once more to the fire.

  I coaxed sparks out of the lighter much more easily this time, but they seemed only to fly up, out—everywhere but onto the little ball of moss. My fingers were stiff with cold now, throbbing with every movement.

  When a spark finally caught in the moss, I held my breath as it smoldered, one tiny filament glowing in the darkness. The glow spread to another. And then another. And then, as I exhaled over the smoldering moss so gently that it barely stirred at my breath, the flame caught.

  I groped around, cursing that I had not gathered twigs and sticks beforehand. Luckily the spot the pixie had chosen to stop for the night was full of them, and I found enough fuel to turn the wisp of flame into a tiny little fire that shed enough light for me to see my surroundings.

  I was in a clearing. The trees around me stood tall and straight, but for one that had fallen, uprooted at its base. It had to have been recent; the dirt still clung to the roots.

  The pixie settled onto a dead branch of the fallen tree, rustling and settling its wings in an odd parody of grooming. The hum of its magic was discordant, but rapidly becoming as familiar to me as the sun disc inside the Wall had been. Now that I was growing warmer, my body began reporting various aches and pains I hadn’t noticed before. Somewhere, between the sound of the pixie and the faint aching of my body, I let exhaustion take over and fell asleep.

  Once I thought I woke in the night to see a face at the edge of the firelight. It was a face I was coming to know. It was softer by firelight, the orange glow smoothing his dirty cheeks and highlighting the hair. His features were younger than I had first guessed. I should have been frightened, but the lethargy of sleep kept me quiet, calm.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  The wild boy looked at me, crouched in the moss and leaves, one hand on the ground to steady himself. “Nobody,” he whispered back, his voice raw and young and startling. I had not believed he would answer me. “Go back to sleep.”

  I fell helplessly into oblivion, the face swimming back into darkness. I tried to call out, “Wait!” But he was gone, and I knew nothing else until dawn.

  •  •  •

  I woke to the dappled sunrise, narrow shafts of light making their way through the treetops. I had almost forgotten the sound of the sun disc, the sound that had woken me every morning for sixteen years. Instead, I heard the pixie’s faint whirring and the tiny hiss of the embers of my fire.

  I had slept more deeply and more soundly that night than I had since that first night in the Institute. I remembered a face and an electrifying human voice whispering, “Sleep. . . .”

  The pixie had not yet woken, or started up, or whatever it needed to do to snap out of its hibernation. I chose to stay where I was, curled up by the fire, savoring the extra rest.

  As I dozed, my mind turned over something that had been bothering me since the pixie first spoke. It was such a tiny creature, its diamond heart so small that it couldn’t possibly carry much power. In the city, all machines—pixies included—returned often to the Institute to be recharged. How, then, was this one still going, days away from the city? How had it regained power after I had damaged it to the point where its heart had been barely flickering?

  My stomach began to roar for food. I remembered, with a sinking heart, that I had eaten the last of my rations the night before. This was no natural hunger, either; this was the price of having used magic. I could feel it gnawing away at me, exploding in my brain with the power of a migraine.

  As if awakened by my digestive system, the pixie gave a sharp click and then whirred into life.

  “Sleep well?” I had no way of knowing if it could detect sarcasm; it was probably just as well if it couldn’t.

  “Yes,” it said, giving its wings a flutter and a shake, sending a spray of tiny droplets of dew shimmering into the air. “Thank you.”

  My stomach roiled and lurched. Had I taught it that phrase?

  “You should eat,” it went on, continuing to rustle and shiver its wings as if grooming them.

  “Eat what?” I shut my eyes against the painful emptiness in my body. “You convinced me to eat all I had last night, remember?”

  “Look,” said the pixie.

  When I sat up I saw it across the blackened remains of my fire. Nestled on a leaf, in a neat conical stack, was a pile of little purple berries.

  My throat seized with confusion, as my stomach gave a painful lurch. “Where did those come from? Did you—”

  “No,” said the pixie, before I’d managed to finish the question.

  “Then who?”

  “You don’t know?”

  The image of a face, dimly seen through the flames, swam into my mind’s eye. But that had been a dream.

  Hadn’t it?

  “I have no way of knowing if they’re safe to eat.” I was unable to tear my eyes away from the berries. For a blind, aching moment I didn�
�t care if eating them would kill me—I wanted to fill my empty stomach. My head swam from hunger.

  “They’re safe,” echoed the pixie.

  I stared at it. “How would you know? You’ve spent your life—existence—whatever, behind the Wall.”

  The pixie fluttered its wings again, lifting a delicate copper leg to scratch at its abdomen. “As did you.”

  “I know!” Hunger twisted my mind. I wanted to smash the bug. “And that’s why I don’t know if they’re safe!”

  “I know.” Its voice was firm.

  I had little choice.

  My fingers trembled as I reached for one of the berries. “Just one,” I whispered. “Even if they’re poisonous, surely one won’t kill me.” The berry was slightly warm from the fire, and gave under my fingers like flesh. I shuddered and popped it into my mouth.

  It was so tart that my mouth felt as though it was shriveling up. I gasped as the acidic juices touched cracked lips, and swallowed. Now to wait, to try to ignore the overwhelming urge to stuff my face.

  And yet, why would the wild boy have left them, if I wasn’t meant to eat them? If he wanted me dead, he could have killed me in my sleep a dozen times over by now.

  Even before I had followed the thought to its conclusion, my fingers were reaching for more berries. They stained my fingers purple-red as I ate, but I didn’t care. Their tartness was unbelievably satisfying. Before I could stop myself, I’d eaten every last one.

  I threw myself onto my back, staring up at the treetops above me, waiting for my stomach to process the news that I had fed it. I was by no means sated, but I would at least live a little longer. I wondered how long it took to starve to death.

  How long does it take to die from poisonous berries?

  My stomach was roiling a bit, having trouble with the acid of the berries, but nothing more dramatic than that.

  Berries. Berries meant a flowering bush. And a flowering bush meant pollinators. At the Institute, they had developed strains of berry fruiting shrubs that could self-pollinate. But in the wild? Was there a place, then, that bees or butterflies still existed? My heart skipped a beat. Or birds?