that dominated it.
Parker and Wesley were there, along with a few other people I didn’t know but recognized from yesterday, when I first arrived. Wesley paced to the far end of the room, lifting a hand to rub it over his balding scalp.
“Who blew their cover?” Parker’s voice was quiet, but full of dread. “Spider? Hawk? Oh—not Nina?”
Wesley shook his head. “No, they’re fine. Nina’s fine.” His eyes swiveled toward us, flicking between Oren and me. “Did you figure out if it was true?”
Parker’s gaze followed Wesley’s. “It’s her,” he confirmed. “Lark. The girl in the journal. But she says it’s her brother’s journal, not hers.”
Wesley grimaced, still watching me, his gaze troubled. A sick feeling began to rise in my throat, though I couldn’t have explained what it was. Just some instinct telling me something was wrong.
“And that one?” He turned to Oren.
“He’s normal. Name’s Oren, we were going to take him through registration today.”
Wesley straightened, resting his hands on the back of a chair. “No, you’re not.”
Parker frowned. “But—”
“The Eagle, the one this kid pummeled, didn’t make it. Just died this morning, a little before lights-on.”
It was like a blow to the stomach. I glanced at Oren, who was staring fixedly at the far wall. It was only once Parker replied, saying something I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears, that he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.
I knew why. That man was still alive after Oren was done with him. He’d had a broken nose and probably other, more significant injuries, but he wasn’t in danger of dying from them. But then I tore the life force from him to shield myself and Oren from his partner. I’d ripped the life out of him, and I’d seen the gaping hole in his soul where that magic should have been.
Oren hadn’t killed that man—I had.
“. . . with a warrant out on his head,” Wesley was saying. “They’ve got a picture of him. Don’t know how, one of the spy-wings, maybe.”
Parker turned away to pace, unconsciously echoing Wesley. “Okay. Okay, we can handle it. We’ve dealt with manhunts before. We put Renewables on every door to put up illusions, keep Oren inside at all times. Cut back on our missions, lay low. They didn’t get a picture of Lark, so we can still use her. Use the time to study the journal. She can look for anything useful, any blueprints or insights we missed, any way to decode his maps . . .”
Wesley nodded as Parker and the other people around the table made plans. Though the atmosphere was tense, it wasn’t panicked—this had clearly happened before. As the discussion grew more intense, Wesley’s gaze drifted.
Toward me.
I realized he was watching me again, the grey eyes piercing. When he saw me looking back at him, those eyes narrowed. Thoughtful, calculating.
My heart began to beat harder as I realized—he knew. He knew Oren hadn’t killed the Eagle. I didn’t know how, but I knew it as certain as I knew my own name. Which meant that he knew what I was—and what I could do. Though I could see nothing in his gaze beyond cool, thoughtful speculation, my mind conjured up the image of the Eagle, of his still body, of the ragged remnants of the magic that kept his heart beating.
“I’m going to be sick,” I whispered, bile rising swiftly in my throat. I whirled for the door, pressing my hand to my mouth, and sprinted away. Anywhere but here. Anywhere that didn’t have Wesley’s knowing eyes forcing me face-to-face with what I’d done.
I’d consumed the man’s life. I was no better than a shadow—I was worse. They were hungry, mindlessly desperate because they could never truly consume what they sought, what they needed. They were imperfect monsters. But not me. Because I didn’t just eat his flesh, tear him apart.
I devoured his soul.
I knelt, shivering, on the washroom floor. I tried not to look as the water carried away the mess I’d made, unable to find a bathroom, forced to vomit over a rusty drain in the floor. From the muddy boots and tools and buckets strewn about, I’d guessed this was a room to clean gear worn in tunnels that weren’t as tidy as the ones housing the resistance. At least I hadn’t stumbled into someone’s bedroom.
The sound of the water covered up the harshness of my breathing as I tried to calm myself, tried to find reason and logic amidst my panic. I had thought I’d escaped the Institute, outlasted whatever they’d done to me. But the girl I had been wasn’t a murderer. She wasn’t someone who’d do what I had just done.
The Institute had carved away every last scrap of magic I had and filled the cavity with their synthetic power. Enough to get me to the Iron Wood, lead Nix to a magic-rich haven ripe for the taking. But not enough to keep on living. They’d told me I’d die, but what did they know? Only two people had ever survived the process. Me—and Basil. And he vanished before ever reaching the Iron Wood.
A normal person, left alone in the magicless void outside, would slowly have their life, their soul, drained away. Until they became a shadow, permanently, forever. Magic would turn them back temporarily, cover up the madness of the empty pit inside them. But only for a little while. It wasn’t real.
Maybe I hadn’t escaped after all. Perhaps I was nothing more than a shadow, given the semblance of humanity by the magic the Institute had installed inside me.
Self-defense. Killing that man was self-defense. Just as it had been self-defense when I killed the shadow child attacking Oren, back on the ridge by the summer lake. And Tomas’s death—I’d killed him, but it was a mercy. I’d only ended his pain.
All explainable. Not my fault.
I closed my eyes, shuddering. Even now I could feel the
remnants of that man’s magic, warm and fluttering inside me like bottled sunlight. There was so little of it left—the part of me that didn’t care about anything else just wanted more.“Feeling better now?”
I jumped, stumbling over a bucket and ending up in a sort of crouch. It was Wesley, standing just inside the doorway, hands folded across the expanse of his waistcoat. The green and brown eyelike pattern was muted in the low light, shining here and there.
He saw me looking and grinned. “Peacock feathers,” he explained with pride. “They’re a type of colorful chicken. Some farm off to the west raises them, and traders bring the feathers through once in a while. Coat costs more than some people make in a year.”
I swallowed. My mouth tasted sour, my throat so raw it burned. “Why wear it?” I croaked.
“It’s expected. Prometheus pays his lackeys well.”
Prometheus again. I wondered what would happen if I just walked up to Central Processing and said,
“Oh, for the love of—snap out of it.” Wesley strode forward until he could look down at my face. “So you hurt someone. We’ve all done it. Vee punches me in the face on a regular basis, and she still sleeps at night.”
I gaped at him.
“No, I’m not a mind reader. I just recognize the signs.” Wesley smiled, one corner of his mouth twitching. “Your face is pretty expressive, you know.”
I sucked in a deep breath through my nose. “How come you know what I did? And no one else does?”
“I was there,” he pointed out. “And I’ve got the sharpest Sight of anyone in the city. You’re not exactly subtle when you’re ripping the magic out of someone. It also helps that what you did should’ve been impossible, so it won’t be the first conclusion people jump to.”
I was suddenly glad my stomach was already empty.
“It’s different from what Vee does,” I said, swallowing. “For one thing, you planned it. For another, she didn’t kill you.”
“But she’s killed others,” he replied, to my surprise. I tried to picture Olivia, all golden hair and smiles, murdering someone the way I had, and couldn’t. Wesley shook his head. “Life is short, Lark. Sometimes we die and sometimes they do. It’d be nice if it didn’t have to happen, but life here is just as brutal as life out there in the
