Skylark Page 9

  He betrayed you, said a whispery little voice in the back of my mind. You asked him for help, you cried, you trusted him. And he betrayed you. Didn’t he deserve it?

  The only answer I could hear was the sound of his body hitting the ground, over and over again. I somehow found myself at the bottom of the stairs and forced myself to move closer, reached out to touch him—

  He groaned, his hand twitching feebly. I jumped back. Not dead. Not dead. Relief so palpable it was like a torrent of hot water swept over me.

  Sirens. I’d only ever heard them once or twice in my life. If I’d been in my apartment still, I probably would have been high enough up to see the police walkers crawling down the streets, hissing magic and clanking. How badly they must want me, to use the Resource-powered machines to chase me down.

  Of course , said that venomous part of my mind. If they had you, you could power a thousand machines for them before you die.

  I ran. I didn’t know where I was going, except away from the sirens. Down a side street. Another turn and I was on a road little more than an alleyway between two crumbling buildings. My lungs burned. The alley ended in a brick wall; no, wait. It turned to the right. My momentum ricocheted me off the bricks, and I came to a screeching halt.

  The Wall gleamed not two yards away from me, stretching up, up, into its massive curved dome. The sun disc was nearly down, setting somewhere to the right of where I stood, lighting the Wall a violent shade of purple-red. It crackled, the hairs on my arms standing up in response to the surge of energy, and I stepped back.

  End of the road, Lark. My feet were burning. Now that I had stopped, I realized that the soles of my bare feet must be torn to shreds.

  End of the road? End of the world.

  My head buzzed with exhaustion. I tried to think through it, but the sound only grew louder. It was familiar. I had felt something like this before. Felt? No, heard.

  It wasn’t in my head. Something in the distance was humming. The sound surged, drawing closer at an astonishing rate.

  Pixies. Terror swept over me. Of course they had sent the pixies. A wall of screaming metal, a hundred clockwork mechanisms each buzzing with magical power as they thundered toward me. They were at the end of the street but streaming toward me faster than any person could have ever moved.

  I turned.

  There was nothing—nothing except a mass of violet energy pulsing before my eyes. No one had left and lived in hundreds of years. We were the last city, the last of human civilization. The world beyond could be anything.

  Supposedly the Institute harvested crops outside using machines, but I could no longer trust anything they told us. The world outside could be full of flesh-eating mutations, barren of life, burnt to nothing or a frozen wasteland. I thought of my father’s coworker, pounding desperately from the outside until silence. It could be nothing but the vacuum of space.

  It could be beautiful.

  The thought came unbidden, almost as if it were not my own. An image flashed in front of my magic-dazzled eyes of the glowing Renewable in her cage of glass wires.

  The pixies had slowed their pursuit. Now that they had me cornered, they advanced more slowly. I realized they were containing me until the Institute arrived.

  You said you would rather die. I closed my eyes. You said you would rather die.

  Images stirred in my imagination and memory. A paper bird, stretching its wings for the first time. A woman of light, whispering, run.

  Would you rather live?

  I leapt.

  Chapter 11

  I struck cobblestones and rolled, the rock stinging my palms, my chin, my elbows. I had jumped through the barrier with all my strength, expecting . . . what? Resistance, certainly. Bone-shaking agony, maybe. A quick crackling sound and then oblivion. But not this.

  My surroundings looked so like where I had just been that I would have thought I’d misjudged my jump, had I not leapt straight at the shimmering force field.

  I took inventory of my body—nothing broken, nothing burned, nothing sliced off by magic. Only the sting of skinned elbows and chin.

  From the outside, the Wall was a smooth, reflective dome of tarnished silver. I saw myself reflected in a warped monochrome of grays and silvers, the curve of the wall spreading my eyes grotesquely. I crawled toward the Wall. Bracing myself, I touched it and then jerked back in anticipation of—

  Nothing. Just the slick, wet feel of cool metal. On the outside, the Wall was like iron. I dragged myself to my feet, laying one palm then the other against the cold surface. It was as solid as the ground on which I now stood. No turning back.

  Above me the sky was gray and thick. Clouds. The word was unfamiliar but the effect was not. I could’ve just as easily been inside the Wall. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed; I had imagined the sky to be something unimaginably beautiful. Instead it was like an ugly version of what I’d seen overhead my whole life.

  The sky was darker out here, but the clouds were deceptive. Inside the Wall it had been dusk. Here, though, the diffuse light was coming from the east. Dawn. That seemed somehow appropriate.

  My heart hammered as I stared at the sky. Even a cloudy sky was vaster, heavier, deeper than anything I’d ever seen in my life. My knees buckled without warning, and I shut my eyes. I could still sense gray vastness overhead, but so long as I didn’t look, I was all right.

  There was a crackling above and to the right, and my head jerked up in time for me to see a pixie shoot out of the dome, sending ripples across its surface. I leapt back. The clockwork bug spiraled sideways and flew back against the metal surface of the Wall. It ricocheted off with a clang and then fell to the ground. The pixie buzzed around in a circle on the cobbles and then stopped, wings fanning feebly for a while before going still.

  Two more shot out and suffered the same fate. I nudged one of the dead pixies with my bare foot. If I needed proof of how harsh the world outside the Wall was, I had it. The Institute maintained that the world outside the Wall was stripped of magic in some places and ravaged by supercharged storms in others, that the wars had irrevocably damaged the delicate balance of background energy. That balance was necessary, we were taught, to sustain life, and the magical imbalance would drain anything unshielded— like the pixies. I knew I had some resistance to the vacuum because I generated my own magic—but did I generate it quickly enough to avoid being sucked dry?

  And what would happen if I didn’t?

  Regardless, I couldn’t stay here. They wouldn’t stop chasing me just because I’d left the city. I was too valuable. They had machines capable of functioning outside the Wall; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to harvest the crops out here. They could probably reconfigure the pixies, too. If my time was limited, I had to spend it finding the Iron Wood. The Renewable’s instructions echoed in my mind.

  I took a last look at the cold metal dome that had protected me for sixteen years, and then I set off down the deserted street.

  •  •  •

  The city had contracted over the years, as our energy reserves grew smaller and our population dwindled. The Wall had to be moved, the perimeter contracting every decade or so. I was standing in what appeared to have been a part of the city that was inside the Wall only recently. The cobbled street was lined with row houses and apartment buildings that seemed only slightly shabbier than mine.

  I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting to find outside the Wall. I thought of the forests I’d seen in history books, deserts and lakes and fields of snow. I had expected the world to be transformed into something out of a fantasy. Instead it was exactly like the world I had known, but for its silence.

  And oh, the silence. I had never in my life heard such quiet. It shook me to my bones, made my head throb with every minute touch of my foot to stone. Each tiny noise of my passing was a crashing alarm.

  Go south across the river, and then follow the birds . Within the Wall, directions were based on the sun disc—its track traveled east to west
. Was it the same outside? From the maps we had studied in school, I knew there was only the one river nearby, the one that divided the city from the suburbs. I also knew that the automated gardens were nearby, and I decided I would head there first for supplies and then cut due south to the river. Or what I hoped was south.

  I passed a pothole in the street and stopped short. I could see my reflection in the water pooled there. Though I knew I shouldn’t waste the time, I knelt down, shrugging off my makeshift backpack—I’d have to find a better way of carrying supplies—and began to scrub at my face and hair with the water. When the worst of the dirt and blood was gone, I straightened and kept walking.

  A skin-crawling sensation of being watched washed over me gradually, my skin tingling at what felt like searching eyes. The gloomy daylight revealed nothing that I could see, but the feeling persisted. As I stared into the darkened alleyways, the shadows seemed to dance and slink after me.

  Somewhere ahead of me I heard a sound. Very quiet, little more than a soft cough. Nevertheless, in the silence, it sounded like a crash. I darted into a doorway, trembling all over.

  I heard another sound, this time the softest of scrapings. A footstep on the street.

  I held absolutely still, struggling to see through the shadows of the alley half a block ahead. Imagined light and movement danced across my straining eyes like an afterimage. Each illusive twitch set my heart racing, so much so that when I actually did see movement, I almost didn’t recognize it.

  Something dark and low to the ground slid out of the alley. A dog, I told myself. Dogs had once been ubiquitous among people, but they were carnivores unable to live off of what we grew, and when people retreated behind the Wall, dogs stayed behind.

  But would a dog make a sound like that? It had sounded like a step. Like a human step.

  The shadow paused just inside the mouth of the alley, keeping to the gloom. I saw it lift its head, stretching up, sniffing the air. I still could not see it in the half-light well enough to tell what it was, and yet it didn’t have a dog’s profile—and it was the size of a man. As I watched, it made a quiet, chuffing sound and then let out a heart-wrenching cry.

  I froze. The scream was abrupt, loud, desperate. Inhuman.

  It dropped its head again and slunk back into the alley, rejoining the shadows and vanishing.

  I stayed in the doorway, shaking, long after I was sure the thing was gone. It wasn’t until I heard the cry again, far in the distance, that I forced my body to peel away from my hiding place and keep moving.

  I wasn’t alone out here. There are stories, I thought to myself, of what lies beyond the Wall. . . .

  The sky was getting lighter. I could see a brighter spot in the clouds above the Wall in the distance. The sun. It felt less powerful even than our sun disc, and I reminded myself that it was behind the clouds, concealed. Still, I could not help but feel another surge of disappointment.

  I kept walking, forcing myself to move my bruised and battered feet.

  In the city, night would be falling. My weariness made my knees buckle. But I couldn’t risk staying so close to the Wall. And it wouldn’t be enough to hide out of sight. Out here, in this magical desert, my power would shine like a beacon.

  I’d been walking for half an hour when something caught my eye in the street ahead of me. I drew up short, taking half a step back—but whatever it was lay still. I crept closer until I could see—and then froze.

  Sitting neatly, side by side, and squarely in the middle of the street where I could not possibly miss them, was a pair of shoes.

  I stared at them stupidly for several long seconds. Then my lungs constricted. They could not have been left from the time when this part of the city was abandoned. It was easily ten years ago that the Wall was rezoned, and even the mortar of the streets was crumbling. There was no way a pair of shoes could still be sitting here neatly after all that time. And that shoes were the one thing I needed most? I could not believe that coincidence.

  As alarming as those two shoes were, the hope they offered was even stronger: Is there someone out here like me?

  I nearly tore the shoes apart searching them for any clue of who had left them, what Institute trick was concealed somewhere inside them. A tracking device, maybe. A secret poisonous compartment that would incapacitate me on command. And yet, if the shoes were from the Institute, why hadn’t they just grabbed me outright? I had no answers and neither did the shoes.

  A careful look at the shoes presented only questions. These were not the flimsy, recycled slip-ons that we received inside the Wall. These shoes felt durable, made of a material from before the wars. And they were absolutely filthy, except that clearly some effort had been made to clean them up. There were swipes where someone had scrubbed away the dark brown grime.

  Suppressing everything, I tried them on, slipping my poor, bruised feet inside. I should have been surprised that they fit me more perfectly than any shoes I’d ever owned, but I felt as though I had no more capacity for surprise or shock. If they were a trap, I couldn’t figure out the catch. And I knew I wouldn’t make it much further barefoot—I had little choice. I didn’t know how to tie them properly, and eventually just stuffed the trailing ends of the laces inside the shoes.

  I walked southwest, where I believed the automated gardens to be, hoping to find something to sustain me until I could cross the river and “follow the birds.” If there were birds, there would be food. Fruit or grain or something I could eat, I was sure of it. If I could only escape this graveyard of stone and brick, I would be okay.

  I’d seen plants before. There were a few growing in the museum in our city, and optimistic weeds would sometimes pop up in the cracks in the streets. Still, nothing I had seen in my life prepared me for what I saw when I rounded the corner of the next block.

  A vast garden spread out before me in what had once been a park. Benches and lamp posts were overgrown with pale green vines, while crumbling pavement walkways bordered the patches like gray rivers. All the plants were lined up in rows, with dark rich soil beneath and leaves spread to the gray sky. The garden stretched as far as I could see, following a creek that twisted out of sight in the distance. The plants themselves were heavy with produce. I couldn’t identify everything that grew there, though I saw cucumbers and tomatoes nestled like gemstones in the rows nearest me. I darted forward.

  I tore off a tomato and bit into it. Its juice stung the scrape on my chin, but no amount of stinging was going to slow me down. I devoured the fruit, core and all, and grabbed another. It wasn’t until I was halfway through my third tomato that I slowed and shucked my backpack so that I could start stuffing it. I went for the tougher vegetables, the cucumbers and the carrots. When I knew I couldn’t carry any more, I reshouldered the bag, wincing at its weight.

  I headed down toward the creek that wound its way through the park and retrieved the cup from my pack, drinking until my stomach sloshed. If only I’d had more time before leaving the city, maybe I could’ve found a bottle or a canteen to take with me.

  Munching another tomato, I wandered back through the rows of plants. The earth I crushed underfoot smelled strange and alien, a wet richness that felt soft and springy. As the leaves whispered by against my arms, I let my mind wander.

  The Iron Wood, the Renewable had told me. I had never heard of such a thing, but when she spoke of it I felt as though I could almost see it. South. The river. Follow the birds.

  Many species of animal went extinct during the wars, and some—like honeybees—disappeared even before, like warnings unheeded. Birds had not gone extinct before the wars the way the bees had, but they were certainly some of the hardest hit animals afterward. Some theorized that there were still some birds alive in the world, but there was no evidence. Birds were a legend, like the Renewables themselves.

  How, then, was I meant to follow something that didn’t exist, to a place I’d never heard of? If my fearless, brilliant brother hadn’t survived out here, how could I? I
pressed my hand against the pocket where my paper bird lay, folded tightly against my thigh.

  The faintest of sounds, easily distinguishable in the silence, caught my attention. No, not just a sound—a hum of power. Magic.

  I whirled, and as I moved there was a roar of machinery so loud that it sent me sprawling. A huge brass monster loomed over me. Its steps shook the plants around me, quivering as if in sympathy with my own terror.

  They’d found me. Somehow the Institute had traced me, sent their brass and copper monsters, located my tiny form in the sea of cold iron, brick, and stone. I hoped it would crush me quickly, rather than drag me back.

  Chapter 12

  The thing, which was half again as tall as a man, extended tiny, spindly arms with branching fingers, each tipped with glass. The fingers scraped against each other with a delicate metallic whine as they spun and oriented themselves. I counted six arms, three on each side, and covered my face with my hands as they stretched toward me. Frozen in terror, I waited for it to tear me apart.

  Time slowed, stretched, and after a while I realized that it hadn’t touched me. I forced my shaking hands down and saw the machine’s arms flashing out and retreating, grasping at the plants and withdrawing again, vanishing into its cavernous body. Each hand cradled a red tomato on its way in, and reemerged empty again. The thing didn’t have any sensors to detect my presence. The hands navigated by feel, the glass tips of the fingers touching leaf and stem and fleshy fruit alike with incredible delicacy. There was a spot for a human driver, but it was empty—the Institute had altered these machines to operate automatically beyond the Wall.

  One of the hands came scrabbling across the earth toward me, feeling out the path ahead of it. I felt frozen to the earth. As I watched, the delicate fingers caught the tip of my toe and scrabbled forward, learning the contours of my shoe with a whispering, spidery touch. When it reached my bare ankle there was a sudden jolt between a glass-tipped finger and my skin, and the machine gave a strange lurch, all hands pausing in their jobs. There was a second, stronger jolt, and then the hand tightened in recognition. Glass, a conductor of magic.