Skylark Read online

  I laughed to hide my uneasiness. “Just curious.”

  I expected him to take this dismissal as a hint for silence, but he kept up his chatter the entire way. We turned down another street, and then another, until I lost track of where we were. When we turned a corner to find the Institute stretching out before us, I gasped.

  I’d seen it before, but always from a distance, as if it were a two-dimensional painting instead of a complex large enough to take up a whole quarter of the city, surrounded by an ancient granite wall that must have been fifteen feet high.

  My driver seemed unimpressed, but as he approached the curb outside the gate, he turned to flash a grin at me. “I know, right? Eat some of those fried potato things for me.” The wistfulness in his voice caught me by surprise.

  His chatter the whole way had dispelled a lot of my nervous energy. I didn’t care about his sister or her school project or his dad’s job at the sewage recycling plant or how he was hoping to get a better bicycle in a couple years, but I was trying so hard not to listen that I hadn’t had any time to spare to worry about having broken the law.

  I got out of the carriage when he pulled up to the curb. He smiled at me, all ears and orange hair, and I suddenly found myself wishing I had paid more attention to him. I knew this was where the richer people, the ones who routinely rode on the carriages, would tip a ration chit that could be exchanged for a handful of vegetables or a quarter pound of sugar. I stood there awkwardly shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

  “Well, see you around,” he said, cocking his head and turning back to his carriage. He knew better than to expect a tip from me.

  “Right,” I replied. The squashy packet of ration crackers was an uncomfortable lump in my pocket as I watched the driver—I had never even asked his name—start to pedal away.

  “Wait!” I called, and he stopped, automatically checking the carriage to see if I’d left something.

  “Here,” I said, unwrapping the crackers so he could see them and shoving the packet at him.

  He looked down at it and then back up at me, mouth hanging open. “Whoa, I can’t take this from you.”

  “I won’t need it, I’m going to be feasting in a couple hours.”

  “But—” His eyes were wide, almost as round as his ears, which were turning pink as he gazed at me.

  “Just take it!” I turned away, embarrassed that he thought I was so poor that I couldn’t tip him something.

  As I hurried away, he called, “Thanks, Miss Lark! You ever need a ride, you ask for Tamren! Thank you! Thanks!”

  There was no sign to tell me where to go, no other kids to stand with. As I approached the gate, all my fear came slamming back, making each step forward a torment. There was a guard in the gatehouse, watching my trepidation with some bemusement. When I finally reached the gate and opened my mouth to speak, he anticipated me.

  “Lark Ainsley?” he asked. When I nodded, he got down from his seat and walked over to the gate, unlocking it and pushing it open a fraction for me to enter. The lock on the gate was heavy iron—no amount of magic would free me after it shut behind me. But I had no other choice than to keep going.

  I took a deep breath and stepped inside.

  The building in front of me was a huge, square, white monstrosity with faux columns and a massive pair of iron doors on its front. I could just make out a copper-colored dome above the façade. Carved into the marble over the doors were the words “Vis in magia, in vita vi.” In magic there is power, and in power, life. Latin was the language of the architects, a language forbidden to the rest of us. I only knew the phrase from one of the battered history books I’d read to pass the time in school after I’d outgrown the curriculum.

  Before the wars there had been people able to regenerate their innate power—Renewables, they were called, though they’d been called many things before that: Witches, sorcerers, magicians. Demons. But there hadn’t been any Renewables born in generations, not since the Wall went up, and those left outside destroyed themselves by abusing the Resource.

  A young woman in a blue assistant’s coat came hurrying down the steps toward me. “Sorry!” she called out to me, coming to a halt a few feet away. “Sorry I’m late.”

  She cradled a clipboard against her chest, face peeping at me over its top. She could have been my older sister, with hair a few shades darker than mine, looking almost black in the shade of the building. Her face was round enough to reflect the heavier rations given to the employees of the Institute. With the physical and mental labor expected of those employees, they needed the extra food.

  I gave her my best cold stare. If it protected me from embarrassment in the face of schoolyard mockery, it might help with my panic, too.

  She only glanced at her clipboard and then smiled, moving close enough to put a hand between my shoulder blades. “So you must be Lark.” She ushered me forward. “My name’s Emila. Sorry it’s just you this time. I know you must be nervous, but I promise you have nothing to worry about. You won’t feel a thing when you’re harvested.”

  She led me through the doors and into a vast hall topped by a breathtaking rotunda—the inside of the dome I’d seen from the steps. Intricate machinery lined the ceiling, a metallic gold replica of our sun disc in miniature, a tribute to the Wall. The clockwork mechanisms purred, a steady whirring punctuated at intervals by the clink of a shifting component of the masterpiece. It was morning inside the rotunda as well, but there were other tracks and gears in the process of dipping below the lip of the dome as the sun rose on the other side, carrying objects I didn’t recognize from the sky of the Wall outside: a crescent of gleaming silver, shapes picked out in precious gems that glinted in the light.

  What must this place look like at night? Emila was hurrying ahead, reading her clipboard and paying no attention to me, and I reluctantly kept moving.

  Shafts of light shone through remote skylights, illuminating the exquisite tile floors in dappled gold. The tiles radiated from the rotunda’s center like a compass, arrows pointing toward doors that led to various wings of the Institute. Bronze plaques declared the destinations of each branching corridor.

  As Emila veered toward one of these doors, the plaque told me she was headed to the Department of Harvest and Reclamation. Below it was a second plaque with arrows pointing right and left, describing the passages further along the rim of the rotunda room. The Biothaumatic Laboratory lay to the right; the Museum and Hall of Records to the left.

  I stopped walking, a shoe squeak echoing through the rotunda. I cringed, but Emila didn’t lift her head.

  We weren’t taught much history in school. We knew that the Institute had saved us from the fallout following the wars over a century ago, and that was enough. The Institute held the details of our history in trust for us, so that nothing would be lost or changed by the retelling of it. The glimpses I had in school of the world before the wars were electrifying and frightening all at once: a world full of Renewable sorcerers and vast machines operated by magic, of mechanimals, of struggles for power unlike anything we had to endure in the peaceful city today.

  “Hall of Records,” I whispered, the final sibilant echoing around the rotunda and returning distorted to my ears. Inside were all the records of the past century—including, surely, those of the only experimental exploration beyond the Wall since its creation. Somewhere in there was a piece of paper with Basil’s name on it. When would I ever have another chance?

  I took one last glance at the now distant, retreating form of Emila as she hurried down the corridor toward the harvest department. I was far enough behind now that I’d have to run to catch up. I could just as easily say I’d gotten separated while admiring the rotunda. It wouldn’t even really be a lie.

  I took a deep breath and ducked down the other corridor.

  Without the skylights in the dome, the hallway was lit by long glowing panels in the ceiling. It was possible to create light by raw Resource alone—it just took a lot of power.
A skilled vitrarius, however, could direct the Resource through tiny glass filaments that would glow with the concentrated energy.

  I had known the Institute was lit this way. From the roof of our apartment building at night, I had seen the whole compound sparkling in the distance, lighting up the dome of the Wall above and behind it. My father used to take me up there after he came home from the recycling plant. We would sit at the edge of the roof with our legs dangling over empty space and watch the lights blink on, one by one, warm and golden, as the sun disc faded into violet darkness.

  After Basil and the other volunteers crossed the Wall in search of power to supplement the Institute’s stores, my father and I went up on the roof every night—almost as if we were hoping for a glimpse of him, even though that was impossible.

  For six long weeks, we had no news of them. Then, abruptly, the Institute issued a citywide notice declaring them permanently missing, presumed dead. An unharvested child with his or her innate Resource stores intact could survive for a time outside the Wall. But no one could survive indefinitely.

  No death, no Adjustment—nothing final, nothing to hold on to. He was just gone. We were compensated for our loss with extra ration chits and a few days off from school and work to mourn, but we were never told anything more. My oldest brother Caesar barely reacted, throwing himself into his job as a Regulator, finding comfort in ensuring the city ran as smoothly as the finest prewar clockwork. My father, though, became obsessed with trying to find out what had happened, pressing until he began speaking out against the Institute and the way it hoarded information. He was summoned before the Regulatory Board for his disruptive behavior. Even Caesar couldn’t predict whether Dad would come home, or if the next time we saw him it would be for his Adjustment. The father I remembered never did return. But a quiet, tight-faced drone eventually came home in his place. He barely spoke to me or my mother, who compensated by doting on Caesar, cooking him dinner and packing him lunches even though he technically lived across town.

  And my father never took me up onto the roof again.

  I tried once to see it on my own—the comfort and the wonder of the magical glow of the Institute—but I saw only a faint smear of light against the domed Wall, like grease clouding dirty dishwater.

  To see those same lights directly above my head now, however, washing me in their steady golden glow, was another matter entirely. They lacked the flicker of our home oil lamps and produced no warmth. And yet, my skin tingled as though some heat touched it. I could hear a faint hum, like the sound of pixie mechanisms, above the muffled sound of my footsteps. The sound wasn’t as grating as the dawn, but it showed no signs of fading either. It rested at the base of my skull, a steady pounding.

  The corridor had a polished, reflective stone floor, forming the illusion that I was walking down a tunnel of light. My heart pounded in time with the magical pulse of the lights, but I’d made my choice—even if I turned around now, Emila would be long gone. I was already lost, and this could be my one chance. I would be caught, and punished, but if it meant I had a chance of knowing Basil’s fate, it would be worth it.

  The long hallway ended in a sleek wooden door, which I edged open a crack. I could hear nothing on the other side, and so I eased it open the rest of the way.

  Ahead of me lay an immense gallery, lined on either side with fantastical sculptures. I closed the door behind me and paused at the first, a huge monstrous creature I didn’t recognize. It was covered in brown, shaggy fur, standing on its hind legs with its clawed forepaws upraised. Its jaws were parted in a soundless roar, teeth glistening. With a jolt I realized it was no sculpture at all, but the remains of an actual creature, skinned and stuffed. Horrified and fascinated, I bent my head to the inscription on the plaque at its feet.

  “Ursus arctos horribilis,” I read. Horribilis, indeed, I thought, taking a step back from the glare of its glassy, dead eyes.

  My steps echoed as I made my way along. Overhead, longextinct birds hung motionless from wires, wings outstretched in a parody of flight. There were flying creatures ranging from tiny things I could barely see to one mighty creature with a wingspan larger than I was tall. All along the sides of the gallery, examples of creatures gone extinct during the wars stared back at me, haunted and blank.

  There were mechanimals in the gallery as well, clockwork simulacrums of the creatures themselves, dormant without magic to power them. Canis lupus familiaris, I read at one such exhibit.

  A glass case toward the end of the gallery caught my eye. I headed over to peer down at its contents—and started back. Inside was a pixie, as real and clear as the one I had annihilated.

  My heart pounded against my ribcage, but the pixie was dormant. It couldn’t see me—or else it would be halfway to the Administrator by now, to inform her that a harvestee was not where she was supposed to be. I swallowed and forced myself to look closer. Its squat, copper body was supported on six spindly legs, delicate mesh wings outstretched and poised as if ready to fly. No eyes, only the bulging multifaceted sensors attuned to the Resource, and long delicate antennae for reception of orders.

  The plaque beneath the case said it was a prototype, from back when pixies were just amusements for the rich, before the Institute altered them to suit its purposes. It looked just the same, though, as cold and calculating. I backed away from the case, skin crawling.

  The next room opened up into a cavernous, dark space broken up by long tables and rows of shelves, and I squinted as my eyes adjusted. Something moved in a pool of light cast by a lamp and I realized with a jolt that there was a person at one of the tables—I darted to the side, ducking behind one of the shelves.

  Willing my pounding heart to slow, I peeked around the shelf. At the other end of the room, an ancient architect with a neatly trimmed beard and wild eyebrows sat hunched over a desk piled high with books.

  My heart leapt. I’d read the few books in the classroom countless times—never had I realized so many books even still existed. The entire room was full of them, thick with the smell of leather and dust. Even the shelf I was hiding behind was lined with them. An entire world of knowledge locked in here, far exceeding anything I could have imagined. Beyond the architect’s desk was row upon row of shelves stacked with papers and boxes. The records.

  The architect hadn’t moved since I first noticed him, and for a wild moment I considered inching around him in the gloom to get at the papers. Before I could move, though, a flare of magic jolted through my brain and a dim musical chime pierced the musty silence.

  “All code-red clearance personnel to Administrator’s office, please,” said a pleasant, tinny voice. From my vantage point behind my shelf, I saw the architect’s head lift and then, with a dusty sigh, he rose and made his way toward me. I withdrew behind the bookcase and held my breath until I heard the door open and close.

  Now or never. I wove through the bookshelves, aiming for the records at the far end. It would take days just to skim it all, and if “code red” had anything to do with me, I might not have more than a few minutes.

  With any luck it’d be alphabetical, and my brother would be filed under our last name. I stood scanning the folders, searching for anything I could recognize. The entire top of the shelf was lined with boxes, and after a few seconds my eyes flicked up to them—and my breath stopped. Ainsley, Basil. My eyes darted to the side: another box, labeled the same. I moved slowly down the row of shelves, counting at least a dozen boxes all labeled with my brother’s name. Only the last box bore a different label: Ainsley, Lark.

  I stood there staring upward, the letters of my own name burning through the gloom, when the sound of the door banging open jerked my attention toward the entrance. A pair of women wearing blue coats came through the door. I fled behind the shelves again.

  “Yes, but why would she come here?” The woman’s voice sounded exasperated. I heard the scrape of a chair and a wooden creak, not far away.

  “How would I know? Do you really want to
be the one to question the Administrator?”

  The first woman gave a nervous laugh, punctuated by the sound of fingernails tapping on the tabletop. “Good point. Still, if I were a kid loose in the Institute, this would be the last place I’d aim for.”

  “Well, this one’s not exactly a kid anymore.”

  There was a door not far away on the back wall. I might be able to make it undetected, but . . . From where I hid I could just see the edge of one of the boxes bearing my brother’s name.

  “I suppose we just wait here until they find her,” sighed one of the assistants. “They’re setting the pixies loose, so at least it’ll go quickly.”

  A jolt ran through me. I took one last look at the box overhead and then tore myself away, heading toward the unmarked door on the back wall. I slipped through, shutting it silently behind me.

  I stood with eyes closed in the corridor, willing my racing pulse to calm and my aching head to ease. I pressed the palm of my hand against the door I’d come through, as if somehow I could summon the answers through it. I’d been so close. I had no idea why they had an entire shelf of boxes devoted to my brother. The sum of information they’d given my family after his death would have fit on half a sheet of paper.

  And why would they have any records at all about me?

  It was only a matter of time before the pixies found me, and I couldn’t be found here. It was clear I wasn’t supposed to know about those files high on the shelf.

  Ahead of me stretched a much more utilitarian corridor than the other I’d passed through, the lights overhead stark white, the floor dull gray. The hall branched into three a few paces away, but only two of the paths had plaques. The righthand path pointed the way to the Biothaumatic Laboratory while the left read ROTUNDA. All I had to do was follow that corridor. I could say I’d just gotten distracted by how astonishing the rotunda itself was, and ended up separated from Emila.

  I turned to head down the hallway when a flicker caught my eye. The third path was unlabeled, nothing to indicate where it led. I stared down the corridor, head throbbing with the magic hum of the lights, willing whatever I’d seen out of the corner of my eye to return.