Lark Ascending (19 page)

A trio of Enforcers came running out of the gatehouse as Kris approached, weapons in their hands. That was new. The Enforcers had always carried batons before, but never any kind of projectile weapon. But these were unmistakable, the way they pointed them at Kris. They reminded me of the magical talons that the Eagles carried in Lethe, but there was no telling what these might do. But Kris stood his ground, lifting his hands to show that he was unarmed.

They were too far away for me to hear what they were saying, and too far for me to have any hope of reading their lips. But I could see their body language as hostility gave way to confusion and uncertainty. Two of the Enforcers remained guarding Kris while the third went into the gatehouse again. After a time, the gate opened and a pair of architects in red coats appeared on the steps. They, too, exchanged words with Kris and then waited. After a long, heart-pounding moment, one more person appeared on the steps. And this one I recognized instantly.

She looked the same as she had the last time I'd seen her, when she was smiling her cold smile down at me and telling me there was no cure for what they'd done to me, and that I—along with the Iron Wood I was protecting—was doomed. Gloriette's black hair was cropped short around her face, with no effort to soften it. Despite her round, fleshy form, she was all hard lines and malice. My throat constricted as I watched her approach Kris.

I was struck by how much older she was than she'd been in Eve's memory. I hadn't ever thought about how old Eve was or how long she'd been in the Institute. I'd thought it was no more than a year before I met her there. But when she'd met Gloriette, Gloriette had been at least twenty years younger than she was now. My stomach roiled unhappily. I couldn't begin to imagine twenty years of agony and torture, physical and mental.

It's a miracle she isn't insane.

I thought of her empty, white eyes and suddenly wasn't so sure.

Gloriette finally lifted a hand, gesturing to the Enforcers to stand down, and I let out my breath in a long sigh of relief. The other two architects accompanied Kris, leading him up the steps and through the big copper doors adorning the front of the main building.

Gloriette remained behind, scanning the ghost town laid out before her. I was too far out from behind my corner, but I couldn't risk withdrawing now, or she might see the movement. I watched her, certain at any moment that her cold, narrow eyes would fix on mine, that she'd smile that slow, saccharine smile of triumph.

But she didn't. Fingers toying with the sharp point on her architect's compass, she turned to make her way back up the steps. The gates swung closed behind her, slamming with a bone-rattling, metallic clang, and then all was still again.

I picked my way through the streets carefully. Though there was no one living here anymore, I occasionally stumbled across a patrol of pixies or Enforcers on their way to a more troubled—and more populated—part of the city. I was ready for them and could always duck inside a building or down an alley, but it meant I had to pay attention. I couldn't let my thoughts wander, either to Oren and his arms around me and his pale eyes on mine, or to Kris and what might be happening to him at this moment inside the Institute's marble halls.

I scanned the streets with second sight now and then, but so far I could sense nothing. Certainly not the concentration of magic that would tell of a closely guarded food warehouse, or even a stockpile of war machines, my secondary goal. I kept walking around the perimeter of the Institute, watching for a change in the currents of magic, anything to signify a greater-than-usual tangle of the Resource. I was nearly at the northern gate—I should have found something by now, according to Caesar's intelligence.

I stopped when the northern gate came into view. There was nowhere to hide beyond this point, and I'd be easily visible from the gatehouse. I must have missed something.

I'd just turned back to begin retracing my steps when something flashed at the edges of my senses. I found myself turning blindly toward the east, searching for the source even though there was nothing to be seen except the expanse of granite wall surrounding the Institute. It had felt familiar, almost like…

Then came a blast of magic that knocked me to the ground, blinding me. The earth trembled, and a moment later the sound rushed after it. A physical explosion as well as a magical one. In an instant, I knew what it was. Eve. I could feel her magic in it, the too-bright, too-harsh glare of her hyperactive power. She was unstable, Kris had said.

I took off back the way I'd come. When I rounded the corner I could see smoke rising in the distance, an ugly blue-black plume that hit the Wall overhead and pooled there, spreading like oil on water. It was nowhere near the rebel base. It was right up against the eastern perimeter of the Institute. So close, in fact, that it might even look like an attack.

My heart stopped.
Kris. They'll think we've attacked them. And now they'll have a hostage.

I broke into a sprint, heading for the gates of the Institute as fast as I could. I had to get there before they took the price of this attack out on Kris. He was so sure they were his family, that no matter what they'd accept him back. But I didn't share his certainty. I knew Gloriette. I knew her heart, through my memories and Eve's.

The gates were swinging open as I arrived. I half expected to see an army of Enforcers marching out to go investigate the explosion. Instead there were only two, and they were dragging something between them. Gloriette walked not five paces behind them, but I had no attention for her right now—my focus was on the thing the Enforcers were carrying. A body.

At a command from Gloriette they dropped their burden, which rolled down the broad marble steps with a sickening sound until it came to a halt at the bottom. It was Kris. He lay motionless, eyes gazing upward, unblinking. I could sense nothing from him, not even the little magic that kept a person's heart beating.

My mind froze. I forgot Gloriette, forgot the Enforcers standing all around. I ran for the steps with an inarticulate cry and threw myself down between them and Kris, ignoring everything but the boy lying motionless on the steps. Let them take me, if they dared.

I tilted Kris's head toward me, bending low. I felt no breath stirring against my ear, and my fumbling fingers could find no pulse. There was no sign of what had done this to him, except that there wasn't a scrap of magic in his body. They'd taken it all, harvested the tiny flicker remaining that kept him alive. Now he was lifeless, a machine with no spark.

I couldn't take my eyes from the boy in my arms. The
dead
boy. My eyes burned, vision blurring helplessly as rage and grief mixed together. My anger made me hyperaware of everything around me, and I felt one of the Enforcers shift, raising one of those weapons they'd been carrying. I snapped a shield into place a split second before he fired, not bothering to look up.

“Hold your fire,” snapped Gloriette, her voice crawling into my ears and skittering to awaken long-suppressed memories. The voice of my nightmares.

I lifted my head to see Gloriette watching us. For a moment her eyes were wide with shock, then transformed by the briefest flicker of something bright and hot.
Triumph.
Then it was gone, and she only watched, her thin lips pressed together, her gaze almost amused. I felt my magic building with my rage. I could kill her now, where she stood, with a single thought. I could stop her heart the way they'd stopped Kris's.

My tongue was thick and heavy in my mouth, no words emerging. She didn't speak either, and for a split second we froze in that tableau. Then she raised an eyebrow in a sickening, mocking challenge.

You thought you could save him?

I tore my gaze away from Gloriette's and laid Kris back down against the stone. Throwing a silent thank-you to Wesley for showing me how to do this, I folded my hands together over Kris's heart and thumped once, twice, three times—again and again, with the rhythm of my own heartbeat.

Once my body had the cadence of it, I let my concentration go to the store of magic hoarded by the shadow within me. Coaxing a tendril free, I let it drift down through my arms, past my clasped fingers, and into the motionless body in front of me. Kris's face was wet with tears, my tears, and each time I bent to breathe for him, I had a hard time gathering the strength. I was growing lightheaded, dizzy. I should stop and take a proper breath myself. But I couldn't. Not while Kris lay there like—like a dead man.

No magic. No pulse. No breath.

It was supposed to be me.

All my fury and helplessness erupted as I slammed my clenched hand against Kris's body where I'd been trying to restart his heart. I felt the magic explode, too, a dark blast of chaotic energy. All at once Kris sucked in a ragged breath and then rolled over onto his side, coughing and gasping.

I fell backward heavily. “Kris,” I gasped. Abruptly I could feel my own body again, my breathlessness, my lips swollen from breathing for him, my hands sore from trying to jump-start his heart. I crawled back to his side and slid my arm under his shoulders to help lift him into a position where it'd be easier for him to breathe.

He groaned something that sounded like my name, focusing on my face with some difficulty. It was a long moment before he spoke. “What're you doing here?”

I wanted to laugh, feeling the hysteria bubbling somewhere just below the surface. Instead I lifted my gaze again. The steps were empty—Gloriette was gone.

I managed to get Kris a few streets away from the Institute gates before we had to stop. I needed the rest almost as much as he did. We fell in a heap, searching for breath and dragging ourselves back away from the door of the building we were sheltering in. Kris pulled his legs up and let his head drop between his knees. His face was white, so pale it seemed to reflect the purple Wall overhead and looked almost blue in the dusk.

“Thank you,” he said, sounding as though he'd swallowed sand. “What happened?”

“I think it was Eve.” I watched him closely, hunting for signs that he wasn't improving. Any sign that moments before, he'd been dead. “I don't know what she was doing near the Institute, but I felt it, I know it was her. It was like a bomb going off, and I think the Institute took it as an attack.”

Kris was quiet, listening without much reaction. “That would explain their questions. I think they thought I was a decoy.”

I swallowed, my heart still hammering with fear and regret. “I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have let you go in there.”

“It wasn't your decision,” Kris said softly, his eyes still on the ground. There was no hint of a smile, no sign of the charm he always carried in a cloud around himself. “It was my call. They could have just as easily tried to kill you.”

I hesitated uneasily. They could have captured me while I was trying to revive Kris. They
should
have captured me. Why didn't they?

“What did they do to you?” I whispered instead.

“What they've been doing to everyone else,” Kris replied. His voice was detached, as though being fed through Nix's recording device rather than his own lips. “That's where everyone in the sections near the Institute went. They're all dead. The architects killed them.”

The bottom fell out of my stomach. Through the roaring in my ears, I murmured, “No. Even they wouldn't—why? Why would they just kill everyone?”

“Because they're running out of magic, and we're the closest source of power.”

“But everyone's already been harvested.” But as soon as I said the words, I understood. Yes, we'd all been harvested by the Institute. But we were all left just enough of our innate magic to survive. Just enough to keep our hearts beating. Now the Institute was taking even that.

Kris reached down and traced a circle in the gravel underneath us. I thought for a moment that he was drawing me a diagram, about to launch into one of his barely comprehensible lectures on machinery and magic. Instead he just traced the same circle, over and over, his dusty finger etching a deeper groove each time.

“Are you okay?” My voice was almost as hoarse as his. “They took your last magic, wouldn't that make you—” My lips couldn't take that last step and form the word, but my imagination felt no such restraint. My mind's eye painted over Kris's form with brutal detail, draining his brown eyes to white, turning his veins black and his skin clammy gray. I could see teeth. I shook my head in a shiver that traveled all the way down my body.

“No,” said Kris, interrupting my waking nightmare. “It takes exposure to the void to pass that final threshold into—into what you call the shadow men. But it doesn't matter.”

I gaped. “How can you say that?”

Finally he lifted his head and met my eyes. His eyes raked over me, hollow and burning; grief-stricken, he could barely hold my gaze. “Don't you understand, Lark? We're
all
shadows waiting to happen.”