left his post by the cage wall and went to her side, offering her his hand. She stared at it for a few moments, gaze flicking from his outstretched hand to his face, and then gingerly let him help her up into a seated position.
“Thank you,” he said simply.
I heard Tansy swallow, audible in the muffled quiet of our prison. Her brows drew in, lips pressing together. “Yeah,” she replied. “Well, I wasn’t doing it for you.”
He let go of her hand and retreated again, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew Tansy enough to know that a week ago she wouldn’t have offered what she’d just offered. She wouldn’t have even accepted his hand to help her up.
The bands of tension around my heart eased a little, my mind clearing a fraction as though a fog was starting to thin. Maybe our situation wasn’t so hopeless after all. If I could get Tansy and Oren working together, trusting each other as they had each once trusted me, maybe we could get out of this mess.
I started to suggest that we make another pass at the lock but was interrupted by the outer door banging open without warning.
Two men entered, one shutting the door behind them while the other came forward, his hands full. The light was behind him, so it took me a moment to recognize the long, curved shape slung over his shoulder.
Tansy, however, recognized it right away. She sat bolt upright, her eyes on his shoulder. I could sense her tension as though it were my own.
“So we traced you back to where you’d been squatting.” The man’s lip curled a little, as though we’d been living in a rat-infested dump. “Living with the Empty Ones,” he said, and spat through the bars onto the stone floor.
With a start, I realized what he was holding—Tansy’s pack. And her bow and quiver, slung over his shoulder. I glanced at her, but she didn’t look at me, her wide eyes fixed on the man.
“We were planning on giving this back to you if Prometheus gave the okay,” he said, hefting the pack in one hand, squinting at us through the bars. He wasn’t very tall, no taller than Tansy, but he was a burly man, strong. “Which one of you does this belong to?”
I expected Tansy to leap at the opportunity to get her pack back, after her panic in the alley at having lost it. But she remained silent, lips pressed together, muscles tense. I stared at her, confused—and the man saw me looking.
“Ahh,” he said. “The rest of you, back against the wall. You—” and he crooked a finger at Tansy, “come here.”
Tansy got to her feet, jaw squared, breathing in and out through her nose. She crossed toward the door of the cage, standing just out of arm’s reach of the man with her pack.
“We expected the usual stuff, dried fruit, knife, feathers for arrows.” The man tossed a couple things out of the pack, whatever had been on top, and then dug his hand back into the bottom of the bag. “Imagine our surprise when we found it was full of these.”
His hand emerged, holding a small copper sphere. I’d never seen anything like it before, but I saw Tansy flinch. She certainly recognized it. Her eyes flicked toward me, hidden and guilty. Something tickled at the back of my mind, some instinct that blared alarm.
“Courier pigeons. Now, what reason would an innocent traveler like yourself have for carting a bag full of pigeons around? They’re Renewable messengers. And you’re not a Renewable, are you?”
Tansy didn’t answer, jaw squared.
The man thrust out his hand through the bars, bringing the sphere close to Tansy’s face. Her head jerked back, but she stood her ground. So near to her, the sphere unfolded, its surface rippling, extending wings and a faint glow that responded to the aura of magic surrounding her.
A machine.
The man laughed unpleasantly, withdrawing his hand. The sphere shut up tight again, and he dropped it back into the pack. “So what messages were you sending back to your leader, hmm? The location of our city? The number of people here? Our defenses?”
Tansy said nothing. This time she didn’t look at me, but I knew. A burning cold spread through my body, an icy weight settling in the pit of my stomach.
The man tossed the bag aside and reached for a key on his belt, unlocking the door. “Prometheus wants a word with you. We’ve got a great many uses for someone with your . . . talents.”
As he grabbed for Tansy’s arm, she jerked it away, whirling to look at me. Her eyes were anguished, hot with guilt.
“Lark, please—please, it’s not what you think.”
I could only stand there, pinned to the stone with shock. “You were—spying on me.” The bag of messenger machines lay forgotten on the floor behind the men. Suddenly I remembered her scouting forays, how she’d race through her meals so she could go off alone. To signal Dorian our location. Now I understood her desperation when her pack was lost.
“No!” She struggled as the man grabbed her more firmly this time and dragged her back. “The barrier you made, it’s starting to fall apart, and Dorian asked me to—I can’t refuse him, no one can refuse him. I really was worried about you.”
I swallowed, trying to push the bile back down where it was threatening to rise in my throat. Dorian was no better than Gloriette or the other architects in my city. All anyone saw in me was something unique to be studied. To be used.
“Lark, I’m sorry. Please.” The man was dragging her away—the cell door slammed shut, and she wound her fingers in the bars, trying to stay long enough to make me understand. “I never would’ve let him do anything, he only wanted to know where you were going.”
Her eyes met mine. I felt sick, nauseous, barely able to stand. Her fingers were white-knuckled, clutching at the bars. I didn’t know who Prometheus was or what these people wanted with Tansy, but the only uses I knew for a Renewable were tantamount to torture. I thought of the captive Renewable powering my own city, in perpetual agony, constantly harvested of her magic, again and again.
Tansy was crying. “Lark, forgive me.”
All I could think of was her bitterness in the alley at having been fooled by the shadow family, the anger I recognized now for shame. I said the only words I could think of. “There’s no forgiveness for betrayal.”
CHAPTER 7
When the outer door slammed closed, it was all I could do not to drop to the ground like a stone. I couldn’t think through the roaring in my ears, couldn’t begin to pull myself together with my stomach knotting itself over and over.
Kris, Dorian, Tansy, Nix, even Oren himself—I was tired of the people around me taking advantage of this awful power I didn’t even want. Tired of them taking advantage of
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Oren stalking from one edge of the cell to the other, long strides eating up the distance and pale gaze sweeping the shadows beyond the bars. More than ever he reminded me of an animal, some untamed beast raging at its captivity. For a long time there was no sound but the scrape of his shoes on the stone and his harsh breathing.
Then he abruptly whirled toward me with a snarl. “We’re running out of time, Lark. You have to do it.” There was a faint sheen of sweat on his brow.“Do what?”
“Kill me.” He indicated the knife in my hand with a jerk of his chin.
I took a step back, staring. “What?”
“You couldn’t do it at the Iron Wood, fine. You could shove me off into the wilderness and forget me. Here you don’t have that luxury. It’s now, or it’s later when I come at you in your sleep.”
I gritted my teeth. “It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t trying to forget anything.”
“But you wouldn’t have to watch me fall,” he hissed. “You said to me—before, you told me that we weren’t
