room, fingers tracing the curves of the blackout device in my pocket. What do you do when it might be your last night alive?
I waited in the muggy heat of my shut-in room, letting the hours tick by, until the sounds of feet moving past and machines being used and switched off again faded. I’d come to know the rhythms of this place, and I could tell as the world grew quieter that the rebels were all settling down to sleep, that they weren’t plagued by the same restlessness as I was, the night before we faced Prometheus.
I pressed my cheek to the door. Oren hadn’t locked it on his way out. If it were anyone else, I would think they had simply forgotten, but Oren didn’t miss details like that. He left it unlocked on purpose, giving me the option to escape. He was worried about me.
Beyond the door, I could sense the telltale glow of the guard’s energy. A Renewable—they weren’t taking any chances with me. I didn’t recognize the signature, but whoever it was, I didn’t want him or her tagging along when I went to find Olivia. I didn’t even know what I was going to say to her, but I knew I didn’t want an audience.
Burying the thread of guilt warning me against what I was doing, I reached out with agonizing slowness until I could just tap into the edge of the man’s aura. I didn’t need to take a lot of his power, just enough to make him drowsy. The darkness inside me stirred sluggishly, and I fought to keep it down. If I let it wake, there was no telling what it might do.
But I kept at it, knowing that if I paced inside my room all night, I’d go mad. Gradually, I could feel the man’s consciousness waning, his power flickering and dulling all around him. I eased the door open as silently as I could and found him leaning back against the wall. He twitched as one of the door hinges squealed, but didn’t wake.
I slipped down the hallway in the opposite direction from the guard, my senses buzzing and tingling with the extra magic in my system. The air was only slightly cooler out here than in my tiny room. Though there were giant air-circulation vents all over the place, the air was still close and warm. It made me long for wind, the same wind that had so frightened me the first time I’d heard it howling through the ruins. Still, the farther I got from my tiny room, the better I felt.
I’d been to the infirmary only once, right after the mission. But I remembered where it was, and my feet brought me there without hesitation. There were no guards on that door—after all, they believed the monster was contained, safe in her room. I let my mind trickle out carefully, enough to sense one presence in the room. Nina? Had they left her alone?
But when I eased the door open a fraction, I saw a healer sitting at the foot of one of the beds, head drooping onto his chest. His was the life force I’d sensed. There was a form in the bed, but I felt nothing from it. My throat closed. Nina’s body was as inert to my senses as the bed she rested in.
They had connected her to a number of machines, one of which I could tell from here was trying to artificially restore her magic. I could hear their mechanisms whirring and clicking, a gentle cacophony echoing through the silent night. Though the healer seemed to be asleep, I stayed where I was. I told myself that it was because I couldn’t risk waking the healer watching over Nina, but I knew the truth. From here, I could just glimpse Nina’s face, ashy and drawn. I didn’t want to see more.
I stood there on the threshold for what felt like an hour, unable to enter, unable to leave. My handiwork, lying there at the edge of life.
When I finally turned away, I knew where I was going. I had a good idea of where Olivia would be if she wasn’t in the infirmary with her friend. I headed for the roof, pausing at the door that opened up onto the nighttime Lethe air. I couldn’t sense anything beyond it, but Olivia wasn’t a Renewable. She had the same magic all normal people did, untapped—but it was quiet and hard to detect this far away. I took a deep breath and swung the door silently outward.
She was there, sitting on the edge of the roof, legs dangling over empty space. She didn’t look back as I entered, but I saw her stiffen and I knew she’d guessed it was me. I hesitated, hanging onto the edge of the door, unwilling to let it swing closed. Now that I was here, I had no idea what I wanted to say. I wanted to confess, but she already knew what I’d done. I wanted to take it back somehow, but it was impossible.
“Olivia—” I began, my voice emerging as a whisper. “I’m so sorr—”
“Don’t.” Her voice was quiet but sharp, cutting through mine like a knife. No bubbly enthusiasm, no friendly warmth. She sounded tired. Angry. “If what Oren tells me is true, then you didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and you have nothing to apologize for. And if he’s wrong, and you did it on purpose— then I don’t want to hear you lie about feeling regret.”
I took a step back, half-intending to leave her alone. But before I could act on the impulse, she turned, glancing over her shoulder me. “You’re thinking about tomorrow, aren’t you?” she asked. “About the fact that you might not come back.”
I nodded, and she tilted her head to the side. A silent summons.
When I settled down beside her, she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. “I always come up here the night before a mission. I don’t know why, but it helps.”
The ground was a dizzying distance below us, but Olivia seemed unconcerned. I tried to ignore the drop, focusing instead on the city and the phosphorescent glow of the fungus on the cavern walls. For a while we sat in silence, me staring upward and Olivia looking down at her feet as she swung them gently side to side.
I wanted to speak, but I had nothing to say. At least, nothing I could put into words. She was the closest thing I’d made to a friend here, but now it was like we didn’t even know each other. Maybe I was just torturing myself, sitting beside this walking, talking reminder of what I’d done to Nina, the people I’d hurt by hurting her.
Because the truth was that I liked Olivia. No matter how much I wished I could hate her for how close she’d grown to Oren, she hadn’t done anything wrong. She was helping him, giving him training—and friendship—he desperately needed.
I found myself saying, “Tell me about your brother.”
Her head snapped up, and I hurried to add, “I’m sorry— you don’t have to answer. Oren mentioned him, and I thought—it’s fine.”
“No,” she said slowly. “No, I don’t mind. You’ve lost a brother too. Maybe talking about it would help.”
She sucked in a long breath through her nose, letting it out in an audible sigh. “We were . . . close. That seems like such an inadequate way to say it. We were twins. Two halves of a whole. From childhood we were like opposites—he had black hair, I had blonde. He was quiet and thoughtful and I was anything but. He was born a Renewable, and I definitely wasn’t. But we worked that way.
“Things weren’t great for Renewables even before Prometheus. People fear them, hate them, because of what they did all those years ago, causing the cataclysm. Causing all of this. Bran—that was his name, Bran—he’d get teased a lot, bullied by the other kids. I’d beg him to use his magic on them, but he always refused, said it’d just prove them right. That’s when I started to learn to fight. If he wouldn’t defend himself, then I would.”
The thought of Olivia as a child beating up the other kids made me smile. She already looked angelic, sweet, incapable of violence—she must’ve been an even more improbable warrior as a cherubic little girl.
“Once Prometheus took over, things got worse. Bran moved into the walls early on, while I stayed on the outside as long as I could. I’d do odd jobs for Parker and Wesley, the occasional jaunt inside CeePo. Until one day I was caught. And my brother, my stupid, stupid brother, came to rescue me. I made it out. He didn’t.”
I waited, but she didn’t speak again, her jaw tight as she looked down at the city below us, her eyes resting on the shadowy, semicircular building that housed Prometheus and his government.
“What does Prometheus do to Renewables when he catches them?” I asked softly. It clearly still hurt Olivia to talk about her brother, but whatever happened to Bran might’ve also happened to Basil.
“They die,” she said shortly. But then, before I could absorb it, she added, “Eventually.”
Unbidden, the image of the Institute’s Machine rose in my mind. I hadn’t thought of it in what felt like forever, but as soon as I saw the low, squat chair, I could almost feel the glass shards slicing into my skin and draining away my magic.
Olivia saw the horror on my face. “This is why we fight him, Lark,” she said in a low voice. “He’s done
