Lark Ascending (9 page)

So did I, for that matter. Despite the way every inch of me responded to the familiarity of being home, in the tunnels I once knew so well, my mind still rebelled. I'd been under the empty sky for less than a year, and already I craved it, missed it like I'd miss my own arm.

Eventually Oren vented his nervous energy by dropping into a strength-training routine that Olivia must have taught him in Lethe. It was impressive how much he could find to do in the confines of our tiny, cell-like room. Pull-ups on a sturdier section of overhead pipe, push-ups on the driest patch of floor, sitting chair-like on nothing, back against the wall, until his legs started to quiver with the effort.

If it were anyone but Oren, I'd accuse him of showing off for my benefit. But he wasn't even paying attention to me, focusing on his exertions so much so that he didn't even look up when I abandoned my pretense at sleep and sat up.

“Maybe you should teach me to fight, so you've got someone to pummel,” I suggested, running a hand through my hair.

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.
”