Lark Ascending Page 7

  Oren dropped down from the pipe he was dangling from, surprised—then he grinned at me, the fleeting expression as startling as ever. The rarity of Oren’s smiles made them all the more devastating. “I think you’d have an unfair advantage.”

  “What, because you couldn’t bring yourself to hit me?”

  Oren arched his back in a stretch, lifting both eyebrows at me. “No, because you could knock me flat with a thought.”

  “Well, true.” It wasn’t the most romantic of reasons, though.

  Oren’s smile was still lurking around the corners of his mouth, making it hard for me to look away. He crossed toward me and tugged me to my feet. His body was warm, flushed from his workout, and he smelled like sweat and nervous energy, but I leaned close anyway. Even down here there was something about him, a smell or an aura, that reminded me of the wilderness. When I closed my eyes, he kissed me, and for a moment he tasted of rain before the surge of magic between us overrode my senses, sending me lurching backward again.

  Then Kris knocked at the door. “You guys up?” he called.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mumbled, tearing my eyes from Oren’s mouth to look at the door.

  “I could kill him,” Oren offered.

  I stepped away from Oren reluctantly and opened the door. Kris stood there with Nix on his shoulder. I wondered if the pixie had spent the night curled up on his pillow, and had to suppress the strangest surge of jealousy. Nix stared back at me evenly, flicking its wings.

  “What time is it?” I asked. “I’m all turned around.”

  “A little after dawn,” Kris replied. “Caesar wants to see you.”

  Oren came up behind me. “Do we have time to eat first?”

  Kris’s eyes lifted to look at him over my shoulder. “You’ve got whatever time you need. He just wants Lark.”

  My heart sank. When Oren was with me, and Kris and Nix, and we were surrounded by the other rebels, it was easier to look at my brother’s face and not want to explode with rage. But alone, I wasn’t sure I could face him.

  I felt Oren tense, the tingle of magic between us shifting subtly.

  “It’s fine,” I said before Oren could protest. I sounded more certain than I felt.

  Oren wasn’t pleased, but he knew better than to argue. I glanced over my shoulder to find him standing in the doorway, watching Kris lead me away. The light Kris carried drew further and further from him until he faded into the shadows.

  The rebels hadn’t done much to make the sewers habitable. From what Kris had told me, the rebellion had been going on for some time, but there weren’t many resources to go around. Aside from some battered furniture that had been moved down from the apartments above, and a few pieces of valuable scrap hammered into place to make doors, there was little to dispel the pervading sense of dark, damp misery. I’d imagined something more like what Basil had unwittingly started in Lethe when he discovered the spaces in the walls, and I found myself longing for their wired lighting system and liberated air circulators.

  Kris brought me to a door no different from the one at the room I’d just left, but when he opened it the space beyond was vastly different. “Headquarters,” he said quietly as I gazed around.

  Everything was still makeshift. But the shelf made from part of a police walker was laden with books, and the packing crate tables were covered with papers and schematics. Here there were overhead lights, though they cast the same unsteady glow that the handheld lanterns did. I assumed they had to be wound by hand as well.

  Caesar was standing over one of these packing crate tables, frowning at whatever he was reading. The same habitual trepidation I’d always felt around him leaped back into my throat so abruptly that when Kris stepped back to leave, I almost turned and begged him to stay. Instead, I surprised myself by finding a smile. “Thanks, Kris.”

  The door clanged shut, leaving me alone with my oldest brother. He didn’t look up right away, and I felt a flicker of annoyance at having been summoned—then ignored. So I headed for the shelf to look through the books there. They must have been stolen from the Institute, for there was nowhere else in the city that held these precious objects. They covered a random jumble of topics, none of which seemed particularly helpful to a group of rebels hiding in a sewer. I had started to reach for one called The Life Cycle and Social Patterns of the Asiatic Elephant when my brother’s voice halted my hand.

  “I don’t really know what to do with you,” he said. I looked up to find him watching me, though he was still hunched over the table, hands pressed flat against its surface.

  “I’m not sure it’s your job to do anything with me. I’m here to help the resistance.” I turned my back on the books. “Not you.”

  His mouth twisted in a grimace. “You’re angry.”

  It wasn’t phrased or spoken like a question, so I said nothing. I found myself remembering the tactics I’d used to alienate people before I fled the city—if I just stared long enough, most people were too unsettled to make fun of the fact that I was too old not to have been harvested. So I stared at him, letting some of the fury I kept bottled up slip free.

  But if my stare unsettled him, he didn’t show it. He gazed back for a few seconds and then straightened, emerging from behind the desk-like stack of packing crates to drop down into a faded, ripped armchair. “Fair enough,” he said shortly. “I just want to make sure you’re not going to be a problem.”

  “Me?” I burst out. “What about—Caesar, what are you even doing here? Why aren’t you with the other Enforcers, fighting for the Institute?”

  He gave a quick, sour bark of a laugh. “I haven’t been an Enforcer for a long time, little sister.”

  I wasn’t ready for the chill that shot down my spine at those words. Through the weeks and months since it had happened, I’d kept replaying the instant of my brother’s betrayal the day I fled my home for the wilderness. I’d pulled apart the only hint of an excuse he gave for it until it had lost all meaning for me.

  We are who we are, little sister.

  All at once I found myself wanting to run again. Even Kris couldn’t expect me to work with Caesar. I found my voice with an effort. “I don’t know what your game is. But I’m not going to wait to find a knife between my shoulder blades. I don’t need you. I can fight the Institute on my own.”

  It had been my plan, after all, before Kris had found us and derailed me into thinking I needed to lead a rebellion instead. I turned to leave.

  “I couldn’t care less.” Caesar’s voice, sharp and weary, halted me. “I’m not the one who wants you to stay.”

  I didn’t turn, finding it easier to speak when I wasn’t looking at his face. “You didn’t even send anyone to go rescue Kris when you thought he’d been exposed. Why should his opinion matter so much?”

  “Kris?” Caesar snorted. “He’s clever, but tactics aren’t his strong point.”

  “So? Who then?”

  “Eve.”

  I froze. Her name alone was enough to make my skin prickle. She was a reminder of everything I’d left behind in the Institute, the weeks of torture. Except that, for her, it had been years.

  “How did you free her?” I asked quietly.

  “I’m no stranger to the Institute’s research facilities.”

  Something in Caesar’s voice made me turn back around. His expression hadn’t changed, but it was hard to see much of it between the patch covering one eye and the beard he’d let take over the lower half of his face. I wondered if that was why he’d done it. The droop of his mustache had always given him away before.

  He gestured to the chairs opposite him. “Will you sit?” Though his voice was gruff, at least this time it was a question and not a command.

  The other chairs in the room were all faded and dusty and smelled of damp and mildew, but I sank down onto one of them anyway. Its frame creaked under my slight weight.

  I wanted to ask him what he meant, how a lowly Enforcer could be familiar with the top-secret
facility in the depths of the Institute where I, and Eve, had been held captive and tortured. If he had information I didn’t, then I needed to know it. Even if I couldn’t work with him, I could still use what he knew.

  But when I opened my mouth, something else came out. “Why did you turn me in, Caesar?” I choked. “How could your promotion have been so important to you, if you abandoned it to become a rebel?” The words made my eyes burn, and I fought to keep from blinking away tears. I needed to know—and I wanted to flee. Indecision kept me rooted to the moldy chair.

  Caesar rubbed a hand across his mouth, rough skin scraping his coarse facial hair like sandpaper. “It wasn’t the promotion.” His voice was flat, clipped. “I told myself it was, and it was probably part of it.”

  “What, then?” My jaw ached with the effort of keeping it clenched, of not saying the words I wanted so badly to say. I know you never liked me, but you were my brother and you were supposed to love me.

  Caesar inhaled audibly before letting his breath out slowly. “They really did tell us you were sick. That you’d snapped during your Harvest and they were trying to help you.”

  “And you believed that?” I felt my hands curl so tightly around the arms of the chair that my nails ground against the upholstery.

  Caesar’s one good eye lifted to meet mine for a moment. “All I knew was that you were running. And there’s nowhere in this city that they couldn’t find you.”

  “What about here?” I cried. “You’re hiding now—you’re hiding all these people from them and you have been for months. Why couldn’t you have hid me?”

  “The world has changed, little sister.” His voice rose, a fraction louder than mine. “It wasn’t like this then. Then, there was nowhere for you to go but out.”

  “You made me leave, you could have—you should have—”

  “I lost my little brother to the world beyond the Wall.” Caesar’s voice cracked like a whip, making my face burn as though he’d slapped me. “I wasn’t going to lose my little sister too.”

  “What a hero.” My blood pounded in my veins, making me dizzy. The shadow in me sensed my fury and wanted prey—but there was none to be found. Caesar, and everyone else in the city, had been harvested of their magic as a child. I could devour the tiny scraps that were left, all that was keeping his heart beating—but even I didn’t want to murder him. Even now.

  “I never said that. Only an idiot claims to be a hero. But leaving the city is a death sentence, Lark.”

  “And yet here I am.”

  “How could I have known you’d survive where Basil couldn’t?”

  I hesitated only for a second. Some sign, some deadly instinct, told me that the truth would hurt him far more than my silence would. “Basil is alive.”

  Caesar’s eye widened, and he sagged back in his chair, clutching at its arms. “Basil’s—alive? How?”

  I watched the memories of pain and sorrow and confusion dance across my oldest brother’s features and felt no remorse. “Maybe we’re both of us tougher than you thought.”

  Caesar found his balance after a few long moments of struggle. “Where is he?” he asked softly.

  I stared at him. “I’m not telling you that. God, Caesar—why would I tell you that? I have no reason to trust you. I’ll never have good reason to trust you ever again. I’d trust Kris with my life a thousand times over before I’d trust you.”

  “Kris isn’t family,” Caesar pointed out, his face grim.

  “What does family even mean, now?” I had to stop to catch my breath, fury and hurt robbing me of oxygen. “Where are Mom and Dad? Why aren’t they here, fighting with us?”

  Caesar’s face flickered for an instant; then he shrugged. “Somewhere in the architect-controlled districts.”

  “You mean—” I struggled to understand. “You mean they’re not rebels? They sided with the architects?”

  “They didn’t side with anyone, Lark. Most people don’t want any part of this thing. They just want to live their lives. To them, the architects are still their leaders. Our parents moved there shortly after the barricades went up.”

  “But now I’m back—if I went, and I explained things to them—”

  “You can’t.” Caesar interrupted me swiftly, his voice icy cold. “You have to understand, most people in this city think you’re a traitor. All they know is that you were a Renewable, able to save us all, and you ran away. Our parents think you’re dead, and it’s better that they go on thinking that. Better for them, and better for you.”

  He might as well have punched me in the stomach; my eyes watered so that I almost wished he had. “You should have explained to them—”

  “I thought you were a traitor, too.”

  “You were supposed to protect me,” I choked. “You were my brother.”

  He swallowed. “I still am.”

  “By blood, maybe,” I whispered. “But I’ll still never be able to trust you.”

  Caesar was silent for a time as the pounding of my heart slowed, the roaring in my ears subsiding to a dizzying thump. My ebbing fury left me dizzy, exhausted, sick with adrenaline and grief.

  “Blood,” he echoed finally, bowing his head and letting his hands dangle where they rested against his knees. “That’s what they found so fascinating too.”

  “Who?” I asked dully.

  “The architects.” He pushed down against his knees and lurched to his feet, too restless to sit. “Kris told me what happened at the Iron Wood, what you did. The architects would kill to have that kind of power at their disposal. If they could recreate you, they would. But only two people have ever survived what they did to you: you, and—”

  “Basil,” I finished for him.

  He nodded. “Siblings. Something about our blood, some accident of the way our parents’ traits combined, made you and Basil unique. But they believed Basil was dead, and you were too powerful to be controlled anymore.” He rapped his knuckles against the packing crate desk. “Fortunately for them, there was a third Ainsley child.”

  My eyes flew to him, but his back was turned, revealing even less than his bearded face would.

  “Of course, I was harvested over a decade ago. They couldn’t do to me what they did to you and Basil, they can’t reverse engineer something that was already gone. But that didn’t stop them from trying to figure out what was special about you and Basil by running their experiments on the only source of your blood that they had access to.”

  I had only dim memories of the things they’d done to me in the Institute. Flashes of strange rooms and strange people, tests run with knives and needles and conductive pads that flooded my system with magic so potent every nerve screamed for it to be over.

  “How long did they keep you?” I whispered.

  “Three months,” he said shortly. From his voice, he could’ve been talking about the time of day. But I saw the truth of it in the tension in his frame, the shudder in his hand as he lifted it from the desktop. His fingers quivered like those of an old man, feeble and uncertain.

  “How did you escape?”

  “They got sloppy. They left the door unlocked one night, I guess thinking that I was in too much pain to flee. They were wrong.”

  It all sounded so familiar—the convenient escape route, left just when things seemed darkest. It had to have been Kris; everything about it screamed of his involvement.

  Caesar continued. “I made it as far as the tunnels before the pixies caught up to me. At that time the rebellion had started, and they’d started altering the pixies’ programming to harm humans.”

  My stomach twisted as my eyes raked over his features—the ruined eye concealed beneath the patch, the beard that, now I looked more closely, had sparser patches, as though the hair struggled to grow evenly through the scarred tissue underneath. “They did—that?”

  Caesar slipped a finger under the band of his eye patch, rubbing at the skin underneath like someone chafing at a too-tight collar. “There were too many of them. Th
ey held me down, swarmed over me, tore into my skin. One of them ripped out my eye—I could see it happening.”

  I wanted to vomit. I imagined Nix’s needlelike appendages, the ones that appeared when it needed to repair itself, reprogrammed to seek human targets. The damage those machines could do. The pain they could cause. And from something so tiny it could fit through a drain, slip through the crack under the door, hide in your bed until you were asleep.

  “And your leg—” I began, voice shaking.

  “Ah, that.” Caesar let his hand fall to rest on his thigh. “That came before. That’s what ended my career as an Enforcer. A present from my little sister.”

  My stomach dropped. I’d replayed that moment in my mind over and over, when I’d knocked him over the railing of our fire escape and then left him broken and bloody on the pavement. I had nothing I could say, but Caesar didn’t seem to be waiting for me to speak. He straightened and turned until he could lean back against the wall behind the desk. “I wouldn’t ask you to trust me,” he said evenly. “In fact, I wouldn’t expect you to care if I lived or died. That bridge between us is burned. But Eve wants you here, and I believe her. I believe in her. I don’t need you, but she does. And that’s enough for me.”

  Before I could answer, he shoved away from the wall and headed for the exit, the limp making his gait uneven. The door opened with enough force to swing wide and slam against the wall, ricocheting back. By the time I’d gathered my wits enough to go to the doorway, the hall was empty.

  CHAPTER 10

  I was reaching for the door to our musty room when an earsplitting sound, brassy and piercing, ripped through the air. My hands clamped over my ears, thoughts scattering before the shrillness of the noise. My heart was still in the wilderness, and my brain refused to understand, trying to figure out what could make such a racket.

  The door flew open to reveal Oren there, alert and urgent; his eyes darted this way and that. “What’s going on?” he hissed, tense and ready. His voice was like a boulder, a life raft. I grabbed his arm as much to ground myself as to hold him back from doing anything rash.