Lark Ascending (10 page)

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. They 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.

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.

“I know what it is.”
Nix buzzed up and hovered over Oren's shoulder. It must have returned to the room after Kris dropped me off at headquarters to talk to Caesar.
“It's from a police walker. It's a siren.”

For a long moment I froze, too stupid with fear and memories—
They're coming for me, they'll chase me through the Wall again, I'll be all alone
—to move. There was more than one siren—I could hear the slight difference in frequency so clearly that the pitches throbbed in waves against my eardrums. People had begun to flood the corridor, running and shuffling past, a stream of grubby, panicked people blurring in front of my eyes.

Then Oren reached into the stream and plucked one of the fleeing people out by his arm.

“What's going on?” Oren demanded of him. “Where is everyone going?”

“The Hub, like we drill,” gasped the man, out of breath. “You should know this, why don't you—”

“This is some sort of practice?” I cut him off, impatient.

He shook his head, fear quaking through his shoulders. “Not this time. They don't turn them all on unless it's for real.”

“Tell me what the alarm is for,” Oren shouted over the noise, giving his captive a little shake.

“Pixies.” The man gulped. “It means pixies have gotten inside.” He tore himself free of Oren's grip and vanished into the current. Oren and I sheltered in the doorway, letting the others rush past. Nix buzzed in under my hair to rest in the hollow of my collarbone.

“Pixies like Nix?” Oren said, brow furrowed as his eyes flicked toward the machine where it nestled in against my neck. I knew that look—it was the
city people, how weak
look. Yesterday I would have secretly shared in his disdain. But now all I could see was my brother Caesar tugging at his patch as he described the way the Institute's machines had torn his eye from its socket.

I swallowed. “It's different now. Kris was right. They've reprogrammed them.”

“And someone like you cannot fight them,”
added Nix, its multifaceted eyes fixed on Oren. It sounded almost smug.
“We're too quick to fight without magic.”

Oren's jaw clenched visibly. Telling Oren he couldn't fight something was like telling the rain it couldn't fall.

“Let's go,” I cut in before Oren could snap at Nix. “We'll head to the Hub as well—maybe they've got a plan for this. Maybe I can help.”

I should have said
we.
Maybe
we
can help. But the words were already out, and I could see the tension in Oren's stance. But he just nodded. “Let's go.”

We retraced the path Kris had taken when he guided us to our room. The traffic in the corridors had died down, and by the time we reached the Hub, it was packed with people. There were more rebels than I'd realized, far more than I'd seen the day before. Caesar stood on a table at the far end of the room, trying to shout over the cries and demands of the people gathered around him, but making no headway. If my heart wasn't pounding so hard, I would've smiled to see him so disorganized. No wonder Kris believed these people needing someone else to unite them.

I gave Oren's hand a squeeze and then let go, readying myself to start pushing through the crowd toward Caesar. But just as I reached the edge of the chaos, a shudder ran through my body, halting me. My ears rang, and for an instant my second sight clicked over and all I could see was a jumble of heartbeats and the haze of background energy that hung in the air inside the Wall. Then light blinded me.

I staggered back, jerking away. Eve stepped up onto the table behind Caesar, and if I focused hard, I could keep my second sight at bay, watching them with streaming eyes. She'd gotten her glow under control, and though her white skin and hair still gleamed in the lantern light, she no longer shone with her own illumination. At least, not to the ordinary sight.

The noise of the crowd ebbed in waves and gasps, all eyes on her. She was pretty, in an eerie, inhuman way, with striking features and grace—but it was something else that made the crowd fall silent, staring. An air about her, something compelling that even made me want to stop, to drop all my plans to fight the pixies. I tore my eyes away as she began to speak.

“I know I've only just arrived here,” she said, her voice clear, carrying across the room even though she didn't sound like she was raising her voice. “But I want to help. I believe I can keep us safe. But I need all of you to trust me. I need you to believe in me. Can you do that?”

I kept my eyes to the side, not wanting to watch her—her speech was compelling enough as it was, making me long to just let her guide me, too, the way she'd guided me when I escaped from the Institute.
Follow the birds,
she'd told me then. When I'd wanted to bring her with me, she'd also said,
It's too late for me.

What had changed?

Blinking, I realized that my eyes were gazing at a familiar face. There were a handful of people clustered around someone at the edge of the Hub.
Tamren?
There was blood everywhere, and the people gathered around were trying to stop the bleeding.

“Tamren! What happened?” I ran to his side and dropped to my knees.

“Pixies,” he gasped, one of his lips swollen and cracked. His face looked like someone had tried to play tic-tac-toe on it, crisscrossed with scratches. “They came in my entrance.”

One of the scratches on his face was a lot deeper than the others—this was the source of all the blood. One of the medics was trying to stitch it up, and though their movements were deft enough, I knew Tamren would have a scar there the rest of his life.

“Are you okay?” I asked, wishing I could reach out to give his hand a squeeze. But Eve's presence made the shadow lurking inside me hungry, and I didn't trust myself. Tamren had been harvested of most of his magic when he was a child, but there was still the tiny kernel inside him keeping his heart beating. I steadied myself with an effort.

Tamren started to nod, eliciting an irritated sound from the man stitching up his face. “Yeah,” he said instead. “I'll be okay. I don't know how they found us. I don't know what I did wrong.”

The other two medics tending to Tamren had begun to shuffle away toward the crowd. When I looked up, I realized that they'd turned toward the table on which Eve was standing with Caesar—they were listening to her. She was still talking. I could feel her influence in the room like a heavy mist, making it hard to breathe, hard to think. No wonder even the medics, with a job to do, were drifting away.

When the person stitching Tamren's face lifted his head too, I put myself in between him and Eve. “Focus,” I snapped at him.

I didn't have time to analyze the power Eve seemed to have over these people, no matter how much I envied her ability to command a room. If only I had that power myself, I could be exactly the leader Kris seemed to think I was. Instead I was crouching at the back of the room, trying desperately to keep one man's attention long enough for him to stitch up my friend.

“Do you know how many there were?” I asked Tamren, whose own gaze had started to wander—though I couldn't be sure whether that was due to Eve's influence or the blood loss.

“Only one at first—but then there were others. A dozen, two, I don't know. And there were more coming. I managed to get the door shut behind me, but they know it's there now, they'll be breaking through. Maybe they have already. Miss Lark—” He broke off with a gasp as the medic tied off the last stitch with a tug.

I let the medic wander off—the rest of his supplies were scattered on the floor, and I retrieved a pot of salve and some sticking bandages.

Tamren's wide eyes were fixed on my shoulder, and I realized that Nix was still there, peeking at him through my hair.

“It's okay,” I said. “Remember? Nix is our friend. He's not going to hurt you.”

“There were so many of them,” Tamren whispered. He was younger than me, younger even than I was when I first left the city. And he hadn't had my experiences, had never been in a frantic, scrabbling fight for his life. I was amazed he was forming coherent sentences.

“I'm going to stop them,” I told Tamren firmly. “I promise. It wasn't your fault.” I couldn't help but think of the way he'd almost shot me with his crossbow; Tamren wasn't the most competent of people, but it'd do no good to let him think he was responsible for this. Not right now, anyway.

Even Tamren was starting to drift. The pain twisting his features softened a little, eyes wandering past my face to fix on the crowd beyond me. From his prone position on the floor, he wouldn't be able to see Eve on her makeshift dais—and yet he stared in her direction anyway as if he could, as if he could see through the masses of people, flesh and bone and the miasma of panic, and lock his eyes on her.