Skylark Read online

  I sat up again, running a hand through my hair. “Do you know who that was?”

  “Who?”

  “The boy—man—whoever it was, who brought me these.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t keep relying on him to bring me things when I need them.”

  “No.” The pixie’s sedate agreement infuriated me.

  “We need to find some food I can take with me.”

  “We are close to where you want to go.”

  “Close?” My hands tightened around the moss underneath me. “How close? A couple days? One day? Less?”

  “Less than one day.” Finally its wings settled into stillness as it finished grooming the dew from its mechanisms.

  I hesitated. A search for food might take us farther from the source of the sound the pixie had replicated. And if there were birds where we were going, they had to be eating something—hopefully something I could eat, too.

  The pixie’s path would take us deeper into the forest, further from the plain that I thought would be my best hope for finding food growing wild. Further from the city, further from home. But then, it wasn’t my home, was it? Not anymore. I slung my pack up onto my shoulders and we set out, disappearing from the sunlit clearing back into the dark, empty forest.

  Chapter 18

  The pixie’s pace was much less harsh than the headlong flight the night before, but I still felt like a blind follower. With the thick ceiling of leaves overhead, it was impossible to tell time or to guess what direction we were heading. More than once, the uneasy pit in my stomach lurched, reminding me that I couldn’t know if I could trust the thing.

  Only the memory of Kris’s voice— keep Lark alive— kept me from smashing the machine and searching for food on my own. Kris was the only reason I hadn’t become the city’s human power source. I wouldn’t have taken a step outside my cell if he hadn’t brought me the key. If Kris had programmed this pixie, then I had to believe it would help me.

  The pixie and I talked now and then as we moved. I was always the first to break the silence, but the pixie answered readily enough. Its vocabulary was growing.

  The conversation was scattered, inconsequential. Nonsensical things, mostly. I spoke to hear the sound of my voice. I had never been a friendly person—and yet, out here, stretched thin to breaking, I discovered that I was lonely.

  “Pixie.” The pounding of my feet and the ache of my stomach had grown too strong. “Break?” I was too winded to form complete sentences.

  The bug slowed and then turned in a wide circle back toward me. I braced myself for its reproach, but the command to keep moving never came. The pixie settled onto a fallen log and folded its wings demurely.

  “I don’t like that,” it said eventually, gears whirring. I had come to recognize the rapid buzzing of its mechanisms as a warning signal, heralding conversations in which the pixie had to be particularly clever about piecing together its stolen vocabulary to say what it wished to say.

  “Don’t like what?” I dropped onto the log as well. The rotting wood gave a little under my weight. It smelled of earth and green, and I closed my eyes.

  “‘Pixie’.”

  My eyes flew open again. “What? You don’t like me calling you pixie?”

  “I am different.”

  “Clearly. The other pixies never would have given me this kind of trouble. It’s what you are, why shouldn’t I call you that?”

  “Should I call you Human?” It had pulled that word out of my terrified questions the previous night, when I’d seen the shadow people and asked what they were. My own voice as it named my species sounded disgusted.

  “My name is Lark,” I said.

  “Then I, too, need a name.”

  “You’re a machine.” I ignored the way the bug buzzed and hummed in response. “Machines don’t get names, just labels and model numbers.”

  “I have a sense of self-preservation. I can make decisions. I have speech. I have will.” The pixie’s blank sapphire eyes gazed up at me. “Do I not deserve a name?”

  My head spun, and not only from the exhaustion and hunger tugging at me after our few hours’ travel. “Fine, then. What do you want me to call you?”

  “No creature can choose its own name.”

  “So I have to name you?” I would have stalked off had I the energy, but I wasn’t sure the muscles of my legs would support me if I tried to stand. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  The pixie said nothing in reply. After a few seconds, it shook its wings and launched itself off the log again. It waited a few feet away, expectant. Break time was over.

  We walked in silence after that, which proved to be far more exhausting than scattered conversation. I had no distraction from my fatigue. I was cold; I was hungry; I was exhausted and weak. I was sunburned and blistered, dizzy from exposure. More than anything I was thirsty, something I only realized now that I wasn’t speaking. The only water here, though, was lying in stagnant pools that even I knew I shouldn’t drink.

  We were, with every step, moving further from the last place I’d seen something to eat or drink. I was, perhaps, walking placidly to my death. At least, I thought to myself with grim satisfaction, my use to the Institute will die with me.

  The forest had descended into a low-lying marsh, with swollen ridges crisscrossing its surface and offering safe places to step. The pixie slowed its pace so I could watch where I was placing my feet. The water all around was still and dark, spotted with vegetation and rotting tree stumps.

  Lost in thought, I stepped too close to the edge of a ridge. My foot rolled painfully on the curve, and I staggered sideways. I tried to grab something to keep myself from falling, but my fingers closed on leaves that tore as I fell. Terror flooded my mind as I crashed into the swamp, flinging both hands in front of me as if to catch myself.

  I hit the water—which was only a few feet deep—facefirst, both arms sinking up to the elbows into the mud at its bottom. Relief at how shallow the water was turned to panic as I tried to pull my arms free of the muck. It felt light, smooth to the touch, but it sucked at my limbs with a cruel tenacity. I struggled, heaving my arms free in one panicked jolt, giving me enough room to throw my head out of the water and gulp a breath of air. The movement forced my legs deeper into the mud.

  I shrieked for help, though I didn’t know who I expected to help me. The pixie, so tiny, could do nothing. It was a glimmer in the darkness, hovering, watching as the swamp sucked my legs deeper and deeper.

  As I watched, the pixie changed. Its body shifted, elongating. It sprouted a second set of wings from nowhere. Its torso unrolled, the squat body lengthening into something slim and elegant. I blinked my eyes, which were streaming tears and swamp water, certain I was hallucinating. And then, without a word, the pixie vanished into the wood.

  I choked, coughing up the water I’d swallowed. I grasped for the ridge, but I was facing away from it and the mud had such a hold on me that I could not turn. I twisted my body, trying to reach for anything I could use to pull myself out, but my struggles only drove me deeper.

  The water was above my shoulders now. I could feel the weight of it pressing on my lungs, making it harder to breathe. Air came in and out in frenzied gasps. I had no magic in my core to save myself with; I was too hungry, too weak.

  I gasped for breath again, the sound of it echoing in a terrified sob. The water closed over my lips and I tipped my head back, trying to keep my nose above the surface of the water.

  Not like this. Somewhere from deep in my gut rose an unfamiliar longing to see the sky again. What had once been such a terror for me was now all I wanted to see. Overhead there were only leaves. In the distance I heard the crashing of footsteps through undergrowth, inhuman noises. Shadows.

  I gave a last desperate jerk, kicking with all my strength so that pain lanced through the muscles of my legs. My body lurched upward. But it was not enough. I rose a few inches, enough to open my mouth and gasp one complete breath— and then the weigh
t of my body dragged me back down, and the water closed over my head.

  The light danced and rippled above my eyes, the surface of the water shining like the Wall. I clamped my lips, holding my breath. The exertion made spots dance in front of my gaze, that last lungful lasting all too briefly. I could still see the leaves, a wavering green mass that sparkled and shone, broken and torn by the bubbles that escaped me despite my attempts to hold onto that last breath of air. My body burned as the swamp swallowed me down into its cold belly.

  Shadows flew across the surface of the water above me, unfamiliar sounds coming distorted to my ears. Too late, I thought, watching the shadows dance and rage above. I’m already dead, and you can’t eat me. At any moment I expected the howls I had heard the previous night, when the shadow people had attacked. My lungs gave way, and the last of my air left in a rush of bubbles. I gasped for more, chasing the bubbles, but they were dancing up, away. The swamp rushed in, cold and burning and final.

  Something warm wrapped around my shoulder. Fingerlike claws dug into my armpit. I struggled as the trees overhead began to fade, the light to go dark. I would not become some monster’s meal. My head snapped back as I was jerked upward, and as soon as I got one foot on solid ground I twisted, throwing my elbow back hard against the thing that held me.

  I heard a grunt of pain, but the hand at my shoulder only tightened in response. I twisted again, jerking my shoulder away so hard it wrenched painfully.

  The hand let go, but not without shoving me hard enough to send me sprawling onto the ground. I started to scramble up again but my feet slipped on the muddy ground and I fell onto my hip. I looked up, gasping for breath, expecting to see teeth aiming for my throat.

  The wild boy stared back at me, half-crouched, feral. Time stopped for a moment as I tried to blink swamp water from my streaming eyes enough to focus on his face. Then he lifted a hand and rubbed gingerly at his ribcage, where I’d elbowed him.

  For a fleeting moment, his eyes were so cold I thought he was about to throw me back into the deadly muck. Then he gave a quick jerk of his head, an unmistakable command to follow him, and turned to lead the way through the swamp.

  •  •  •

  The wild boy led me through the darkening wood. If I’d thought the pixie had set a grueling pace, it was nothing like what this boy expected. He didn’t turn around once to check I was following, moving so fluidly he was more like a shadow zipping through the trees than a human being.

  My progress was a constant struggle to stay upright despite my shaking legs and burning lungs. Eventually exhaustion won, and I went sprawling face-first into the undergrowth. The air jolted out of me and for a moment I was too focused on trying to breathe again to care whether my rescuer stopped or not.

  By the time I picked myself up, he was standing only a few feet away, motionless and silent, and staring at me. I could feel bits of leaf and dirt sticking to the mud caking my face. The wild boy saw that I was trying to sit up and came to crouch right in front of me, eyes flicking back and forth between each of mine. Too close.

  I scrambled back.

  His eyes, a shocking ice-blue amidst the general grime coating his face, narrowed.

  “Who are you?” I tried to ask. It emerged only as a croak, my throat so hoarse that it burned as badly as my lungs.

  He retrieved a canteen from where it hung across his chest and rolled it toward me. The movement was so precise that the canteen stopped inches from the tips of my fingers. He said nothing, only watched as I picked up the canteen, heavy with water, and took a drink. The water scorched my throat, but I began to feel better. As I drank he straightened up again and stepped past me, looking back the way we’d come.

  “Are there shadow men coming?” I asked, screwing the cap back onto the canteen.

  The boy held up a hand sharply without looking at me. The line of his shoulders was tense, the corded muscle visible beneath his T-shirt, which was worn so thin it was nearly transparent. They were a man’s shoulders, and yet, when he turned to face me again, a boy’s wary curiosity stared back at me. He held a finger to his lips, flashing me a look so intense that all my questions died instantly. Then he returned to scrutinizing the rapidly darkening wood.

  I tried again, in a whisper this time. “My name’s Lark. Thank you for—” There was too much to name. “Everything,” I finished lamely.

  He ignored me, turning back and reaching instead for the canteen, to replace it over his shoulder. His clothes had been city-made, but they were so old I didn’t recognize the fashion. His shirt had once been white, and the pants had been patched so much that I could not tell what color they’d been. A number of small fur pelts hung from his belt, and I shuddered.

  Without another glance at me, he started off again, through the trees. This time there was even more urgency to his step, his gait low to the ground, quick.

  “Wait—” I called breathlessly. “I need food; I haven’t eaten in . . .” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had food.

  He dug a hand into his pocket and pulled out a strip of something, tossing it back to me without looking to see if I caught it. It fell in the dirt, but I was too hungry to care. I gave it a sniff as I staggered along in the wild boy’s wake. It was stringy, a dark brown that smelled like charcoal. Something smoked over a fire. My stomach lurched uncontrollably, and I bit into whatever it was.

  Chewy, extremely tough—my jaw popped as I tore off a bite-sized piece. It certainly resembled nothing we ate in the city, oddly rich and flavorful. I was about to ask what it was when my eyes fell on the pelts dangling from his belt.

  Meat.

  I gagged and threw the rest away, spitting out my mouthful and trying not to retch. Leaning against a tree for support, I spat again, trying to rid my mouth of the rich, meaty texture. Animal flesh, stripped and cooked—I shuddered and summoned every inch of willpower to prevent myself from throwing up.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the wild boy crouch to retrieve the strip of meat and sniff at it himself.

  “I can’t,” I managed, shaking my head violently. “It’s—it’s awful.”

  He was eyeing me flatly when the sound of magic, dizzying and light, pulled my attention away. The Institute.

  Before I could panic, the pixie general came whirring out of the forest, making straight for me. It was aiming for my shoulder—I swatted it away, and it instead alighted on a fallen log, wings buzzing madly.

  “Where have you been?” My throat was working better after having had some water.

  The pixie shuffled its wings, turning its head on one side. “I got help,” it said after a long silence, as if it had been hunting for the proper vocabulary.

  I knew my own voice had never possessed such a quiet dignity as that. “You can’t mean you brought him here,” I said, glancing at the wild boy, who had dropped into a half-crouch, ready to flee—or strike. “You and I are going to have to have a serious talk about what you did back there,” I added. “I didn’t know you could change shapes.”

  “Neither did I,” it said, and began its habitual meticulous grooming routine.

  The wild boy made a disgusted sound and turned away to leave.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I murmured, trying to summon the strength to leave the solid support of the tree I was leaning against and follow him. All the rescuing in the world did no good if I collapsed from exhaustion while hiking through the forest.

  The pixie flew from the log to hover not far from my face. There was urgency in the buzz of its wings, the same urgency shown by the wild boy as he started making his way back through the woods. Uneasily, I remembered the shadows flickering across the surface of the water as I sank in the bog. Were they coming after us?

  “Follow him,” the pixie said. “This is what you were looking for.”

  “What?” I felt the anger rise in me; anger that I was the last to understand everything, anger that I had required rescuing again, anger at my own inability to put all the pi
eces together. “Have you been leading me nowhere this whole time?”

  The pixie flew after the boy as he left, then returned to me, every movement betraying impatience. “This is your bird sound.”

  I stared at it stupidly.

  With an exasperated grinding of mechanisms, the pixie let out a piercing version of the bird call it sang to stop me from destroying it.

  The wild boy stopped, going still. Then, slowly, he turned and moved back toward me, his eyes on the pixie, glinting gold in the last of the sun as it set.

  All this time, the pixie had been lying to me. Leading me to this boy, instead of to the birds I was supposed to find. How could I have trusted it? For all I knew, this boy was working for the Institute as well, ready to lead me right back to the cold glass arms of my cage.

  Just as I felt tears sting at my eyes, the wild boy cupped his hands around his mouth. I thought for a moment he was about to shout, but then, instead, the most unimaginable trill emerged. Birdsong.

  Silence stretched for long moments as I tried to understand. “What are you?” I gasped.

  “You ask too many questions,” he hissed. “You should be quiet. It isn’t safe.” The boy licked his lips, gazing at me with his animal eyes. “My name is Oren.”

  Chapter 19

  His voice was quiet and a little rough, but very human. How long since I’d heard another person speak, who wasn’t a machine or a ghost or a dream?

  Oren—it could have been the name of any of my classmates back in the city. And yet it took only one look at him, the finely muscled shoulders, the wild eyes, the ill-kempt hair and dirty skin, to know he could never be mistaken for one of them.

  “You said it isn’t safe,” I managed. “Is it the shadow people?”

  “If you must talk,” he said in a low voice, “talk while you’re moving.”