Shadowlark

a team anymore. Fine, we’re not. But Tansy’s gone now, and you’ve got no source of power. When you run out, that’s it. I’m a shadow again, and you’re dead.”

I could see the betrayal in his gaze—but why was it such a crime not to want him dead? “You’re afraid,” I retorted. “Because we’re in here, because you don’t like not being under the sky.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “So? That doesn’t change the facts.”

I shook my head, shoving the knife back into its sheath in my waistband. “Panicking won’t help. We’ll figure something out.”

“By standing there sulking about Tansy?” Oren started pacing again, making two circuits of the cell before halting again and turning toward me slowly. “You’ll have to defend yourself.”

I met his gaze, watching as his eyes narrowed and he took a few steps to the side, circling me. “If you change.”

“When I change. So I might as well speed up the process. Make you defend yourself now.”

I could feel my heart starting to race, wondered whether he could hear it, whether any of his shadow-self traits lingered when he was in human form. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

The tension drew out between us as he circled, and I could feel it stretching thin. Without warning he feinted a lunge at me, making me fight to hold my ground.

“You don’t want to hurt me,” I said, forcing my voice to stay even. If Oren decided to take matters into his own hands, I wasn’t sure I could hold my own.

“That’s right,” he burst out. “That’s why—” He let out his breath, dropping out of that deadly hunter’s stance. “That’s why I need you to act. I can’t do it. I’ve tried.”

My blood roared in my ears. “What do you mean?” I whispered.

“I mean I tried. After I found out, after you sent me away.” Oren turned to look through the bars of the cell, so all I could see was his profile, the tension in his body. “Animals don’t kill themselves, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t do it. Every instinct fought against it, and I wasn’t strong enough. I’m not stronger than the thing inside me.”

For a moment my mind tried to picture it, tried to imagine what awful thing Oren tried to do to himself, to rid the world of one more shadow.

“Not killing yourself isn’t weakness,” I said finally. “It’s not cowardice.”

Oren just shook his head, moving forward until he could press his forehead against the bars, a plaintive gesture. His long fingers wound around the iron. “It’s certainly not bravery.”

I had no answer to that. Not when I didn’t know what I was myself—perhaps we were both no more than things, echoes of who we once were. Maybe we both deserved death. The silence thickened the air.

“That girl,” Oren said finally, still gazing out at the darkness beyond our cell. “She was your friend?”

“I thought she was.” The words tasted sour, and I swallowed hard. “I can’t forgive what she did.”

“You thought I was your friend, too, and look where we are now.”

“You only follow me because you can’t help it, the monster can’t let me go. You said yourself that I shine in the darkness.”

With a weary groan, Oren straightened and turned so he could look at me again. He tilted his head back, looking up at the ceiling. “You’re the only thing that keeps me human,” he said after a silence. “But if I woke tomorrow completely cured and whole, I would still follow you anywhere.”

My throat closed. I couldn’t look at Oren, couldn’t listen to his voice, without my mind replaying the night we parted. The sweet softness of his mouth cut by the metallic tang of blood, the wave of longing mixed with revulsion. The hopelessness in his eyes when I told him not to touch me. His bitterness now as I kept him at arm’s length, too confused to know what to do with him.

He was so careful not to come near, to stay away as I’d demanded that night—and yet now he stepped forward and lightly brushed the back of my hand with his knuckles. Just enough so that I could feel the electric sizzle of power passing from me to him, pulled away by the dark void of shadow inside him.

“Sometimes we can’t help the things we do.”

Every impulse in my body wanted to turn toward him, to slide my hand into his and let our fingers wind together. To smell grass and wind all around me, a light in the deep, dank darkness of this prison. Instead I just stood there, remembering the taste of shadow, waiting for something I knew wasn’t coming.

I cleared my throat and sucked in a ragged breath. “I’m not going to just sit here and wait to die.”

Oren stepped back, letting me move around him and head for the door of the cage. I crouched by the lock, running my hand over it, but I knew I didn’t have enough magic left to open it. When I’d freed Oren from his cage in the Iron Wood, I’d been surrounded by Renewables, and though I hadn’t known it then, I’d been able to draw on them all to bend the laws of magic and iron and open the lock with my mind.

Here there was only me. And I couldn’t magic iron on my own.

My eyes fell on Tansy’s pack. It was still lying where the man had dropped it, well out of arm’s reach even when I lay down on my stomach and stretched my arm as far as I could through the bars. Even Oren’s long arms wouldn’t be able to reach it.

There may not have been Renewables around, but that pack was full of machines. And inside them, somewhere, were tiny hearts full of the magic that powered their clockwork mechanisms.

I closed my eyes, trying to reach past the muffling field cast by the iron bars between me and the pack. I tapped into the tiny, dwindling reserve of energy inside myself and concentrated on my arm, still stretched out past the bars. All I needed was a tiny nudge. A spark. One little touch to get one of the copper spheres to roll my way.

I felt the power spark and pop inside me, my head spinning, but I forced myself to keep reaching, keep trying to nudge one of the machines my way. I opened my eyes a fraction, squinting through the haze of golden sparks and threads.

The bag moved, bulging as something inside it shifted. I groaned, head dropping as the magic flowed from my outstretched fingertips.

Something rolled out of the mouth of the pack, and I dropped like a leaden weight, collapsing down onto the stone. I’d thought magic under ordinary circumstances was tiring— working through so much iron was like trying to run uphill wearing a coat lined with rocks.

Blearily, I lifted my head, forcing my dazzled eyes to focus. One of the spheres had rolled toward me, but when I reached out, my hand still fell short. My heart sank.

A tiny whir of clockwork jolted me out of my daze. A panel separated itself from the smooth surface of the sphere, followed by another, a slow unfolding with a groaning protest of gears, like muscles gone stiff from the cold. A tiny flash of sapphire within the depths of the sphere winked back at me.

“Are they gone?”

I gasped, lightheaded and dizzy from the magic, and unwilling to trust my own eyes. “Nix?” I breathed, staring.

Oren came to my side as I spoke, and together we watched as the sphere painstakingly unfolded itself. It had none of the ease of the courier pigeon the man had shown Tansy—I could tell this form was difficult for the shape-shifting pixie. Nix stopped halfway back to bee-form, gears stirring feebly as it lay on the stone floor. I imagined it panting and sweating, trying to catch its breath.

I reached out my hand as far as it would go, and the pixie crawled onto my palm. “How—I thought maybe you’d escaped when we were taken. Did you double back inside the building?”

“I hid in that antechamber where they keep their suits,” the pixie said. “They never even noticed. When they went out to search the area where you were found, they saw the other one’s bag and the machines inside. I flew in when they weren’t looking.” With an obvious effort it finished its transformation back into its favorite bee form and then cast its crystal-blue eyes over the cell. “Where is that other one?”

“Gone.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice, but even I could hear the way it quivered.

The multifaceted sapphires swung toward me. “So she turned on you. Correct me if I am mistaken, but I believe someone tried to warn you about that.”

I closed my eyes. Already part of me regretted what I’d said to Tansy as they dragged her away. I’d probably never see her again. “Not now, Nix. Please.”