shoulders, I stepped out past our muddy campsite in the shelter of a ruined restaurant and into the freshly fallen snow. I could see the remnants of Tansy’s tracks, half-covered, leading away toward the city. She was always going off on her own, impatient—old habits died hard, she said, and she was used to scouting.
I took a deep breath, trying to shake the uneasiness that lingered in the wake of my dream. There was no reason not to trust Tansy’s motives for following me. It was only my subconscious reacting to one too many betrayals, looking for the next blow before it landed.
Something was wrong. My instincts caught on before I did, and I turned in a slow circle, keeping myself from shivering in the cold with a monumental effort. There was something in the air, still though it was. My nose picked up leather. Wind. And, impossible over the snow, the green tang of grass.
I knew that scent.
No. NO.
The snow had almost completely covered the tracks we’d
made last night. Searching the ground outside our shelter, I found half-filled hollows to indicate Tansy’s footprints and mine, the area I’d trampled looking for firewood, a somewhat more recent path to some trees where Tansy must have relieved herself in the middle of the night. I tried to calm my breathing—it sounded harsh and alarm-loud in the still dawn air.
It was my imagination. I’d thought of him, and my mind was producing whatever evidence it could to make it seem like he was here. He’d have to be a shadow again by now—if he’d found us he would have attacked.
As I turned back toward the shelter and the warmth of my blanket, something caught my eye. I would’ve missed it except that the light to the east was growing, and the snow was beginning to shine as well with an eerie, violet-orange glow.
Footprints.
Not mine or Tansy’s—too large. And too widely spaced. My heart in my throat, I followed them as silently as I could. They led to the ground floor of the structure, to the part of the floor that served as roof to our cellar campsite. There the tracks vanished into noise, as though someone had paced back and forth, churning up the snow. The tracks were fresh— fresher than Tansy’s leaving to scout the city.
Though I searched, I could not find tracks leading away— and yet there was no one there and no place to hide.
By the time Tansy returned I had erased the tracks, tramping through the snow and disturbing it to the point where it was impossible to tell anyone but me had passed there. She found me kicking and kicking at the snow, my breath steaming the air, soaked to the knee.
Firewood, I told her, showing her a few branches I’d picked up just before she crested our ridge. To make a hot breakfast. To warm us before we set out for the day.
But despite the hot mash of water and grains, and the roar of the flames, and Nix’s fire-heated metal body nestled in the hollow of my neck, I couldn’t stop shivering.
I had no proof it was him, and yet I knew. It was as though I could feel him out there, somewhere, as though our time spent sharing the same magic, the same sustaining power, had linked us.
Oren. The boy who taught me how to live out here, who saved my life, whose life I saved. The boy who told me he’d follow me anywhere no matter how he tried to stop himself.
The boy I’d learned was a monster.
And I hadn’t forgotten what I’d promised him before he left.
I’d thought my home city was big. When I lived there, it was the only city in the world, as far as most inside the Wall knew. It held the last remnants of humanity. The Wall was the edge of the world.
But it was nothing compared to the sprawling monster that filled the valley. The snow had stopped, and from the ridge we could see all the way to the sea, little more than a grey expanse in the distance. My mind half- dismissed the sight of it, unable to digest how big the ocean must be in comparison—instead it focused on the city, something it could almost comprehend.
The city lay in ruins. Even from a distance we could see that the buildings were crumbling, asymmetrical, falling apart. The tallest structures were metal skeletons of buildings that must have once been so tall they would’ve dwarfed the Institute in my city. Where my city was laid out artistically, aesthetically, with broad streets and well-designed blocks, this city was crowded and sprawling and slapdash, like it had just grown together over the years, and people had just kept adding taller and taller buildings to make more room. I couldn’t even imagine how many people must’ve lived in it before the wars. The tallest spire at the center of the city had something gleaming, reflective, at its top—blinding to look at even from this distance.
As we drew nearer, though, we could see just how dilapidated the buildings were. I fought down a surge of disappointment. Maybe I’d expected a Wall keeping it safe, like the Wall around my own city. Without that shielding against the magicless void in this wasteland, how was anyone but a Renewable meant to survive? Surely the city had to be abandoned—and to judge from the state of the ruins, it would’ve had to have been abandoned for decades, if not more.
Which meant that there were no experiments going on to do with restoring magic to the wasteland—and no experiments concerning curing my brother and me of what the Institute had done to us. Which meant that there was no reason for my brother to still be here.Tansy kept up a running commentary as we headed down from the ridge toward the crumbling buildings.
“There are definitely people down there,” she continued. “But not many, and they keep themselves hidden pretty well. There’s nothing that I can see that stops the shadows from coming in—no Wall like in your city, no scouts like in mine. So maybe the people just stay inside as much as they can.”
“We have to find someone willing to talk to us.” I scanned the long street ahead of us, littered with debris and heaps of garbage made unidentifiable by age. “Dorian said Basil was headed here. I can’t imagine he stayed —this isn’t what he was looking for, that’s for certain. This place looks like it fell decades ago.”
Tansy readjusted the bow on her shoulder, fingering the string idly. “Maybe, if he talked to anyone here, they might know where he headed next.”
I didn’t answer. The thought of having to make yet another weeks-long journey, this time through even more snow and bitter cold, with my dwindling supplies, was intolerable. Basil was supposed to be here. He was the only other person who survived what the Institute had done to me—he was the only person who would know how to deal with it. I just had to find him before I lost control with Tansy, and everything would be okay.
Even now, despite the dry air, I could sense her power just a few steps in front of me. And I wanted it. Now that I knew I could absorb the innate magic of other people, I could barely restrain myself. It was like my actions in the Iron Wood had opened a floodgate that I didn’t have the strength to close.
I kept my eyes on the street. Even though I could still feel Tansy’s magic, at least I didn’t have to see it with my second sight, glittering and glinting every now and then, as if shining in invisible sunlight.
Nix alighted on my shoulder, the whirring of its mechanisms oddly comforting in the quiet. Despite my desire to travel alone, I was glad for Nix’s company—and for Tansy’s too. Though when Tansy was near and chattering away, Nix was always silent. I sensed that the machine had something to say, and so I slowed my steps a little, let Tansy get out ahead of me.
Eventually, the pixie ruffled its wings and spoke.
Ice trickled down my spine, and the pixie’s words in my dream came back to me, clear as day.
“Don’t be absurd,” I replied. “Tansy’s a friend. She’s here to look out for me.”
The machine had no reason to lie. In fact, it had proven more than once that it was incapable of lying. I watched Tansy’s ponytail bobbing with each step and gritted my teeth. I didn’t want to be someone who could only trust a pile of magical circuitry, and never another human, flesh and blood like me.
