Shadowlark

Overloaded with magic, Adjutant had said. For a regular Renewable, who couldn’t absorb the power like I could, it must simply interfere with their abilities, incapacitate them. But me . . . ? I got to my feet carefully, still not quite trusting my legs. But the more time passed, the better I felt. Buzzing with power. Drunk with magic. Insanely, I felt like laughing—without realizing it, they’d given me all the power I could digest.

But those devices could still take me out for a while, knock me flat. If I wanted to get out of here I was going to have to be careful.

Before I could formulate any plan, however, the door opened again, and Adjutant stepped back through. Hovering above his shoulder was a machine, half-concealed as Adjutant turned to close the door behind him.

“Prometheus is most excited to meet you,” Adjutant said. “If you will come with me, we won’t waste any more time.”

He turned again, and this time I got a good look at the machine. It was a pixie, larger than usual.

Adjutant saw me staring and glanced at the machine hovering next to his face. “Ah, yes. Pixies are not exactly welcome in Prometheus’s city, but we keep a few around for specific purposes. There aren’t any machines better suited for detecting magic, for example. If you seem to be regaining control over your power more quickly than expected, this device will alert us.”

Something dark twisted in my stomach, but it wasn’t until the pixie opened its eyes that I figured it out. The eyes glowed white, not blue, and the pixie was staying in one shape, but I knew it well. I knew it better than I knew most people.

Nix.

It hovered there, its blank white eyes on me, unseeing. “Where did you find this one?” I asked, unable to keep my voice from shaking.

Adjutant was watching me carefully—I wonder if he knew this was the pixie that had come with me. If he did, he gave no indication. “Machines occasionally find their way here on their own, attracted by the magic here in Lethe. Sometimes they’re brought in illegally by Travelers and confiscated. I believe this one was found on its own, trying to camouflage itself in a scrap heap.”

The pixie spoke. “I am PX-148,” it said in a shockingly female voice. “My purpose is to assist Prometheus and his servants in any way asked of me.” The voice was unrecognizable, bewildering—nothing like Nix’s voice. Nix’s voice was neither male nor female, a familiar amalgam of other voices: me and Oren, Kris and Tansy, sprinkled with hints of everyone it had ever interacted with.

Nix, wake up. I willed it to shift, to wink at me as it had once, to give me some sign of my unlikely friend. Nix, help me—please, wake up.

“Don’t be alarmed,” continued Adjutant, misreading my distress. “Although we often find these machines malfunctioning and dangerous, we always scrub them well before employing them here.”

“Scrub?”

Adjutant opened the door again, gesturing for me to precede him. “Erased,” he explained. “Wiped. The only way to ensure no lingering, well-hidden program remains hidden inside is to completely destroy its memory and replace it with entirely new programming.”

I let Adjutant propel me down the hallway, too sick with confusion and grief to resist. My eyes blurred, and this time the only halos I saw were from the tears fighting to escape.

It was just a machine, I told myself angrily, trying to pull myself together. What does it matter? It had no feelings. No soul to destroy. It served its purpose.

But it didn’t help. Every time I glanced up, the thing that had once been Nix was flying steadily, its white eyes staring straight ahead, its wings a monotonous blur. There was no joy in its flight. No curiosity, no engagement. All it did was what it was told to do.

I longed to reach out and touch it, see if somehow giving it a jolt of my power would jar it back to life. But I knew it didn’t work like that. Everything that had been Nix was gone—all that was left was its shell, formatted with new orders. But even though it didn’t have the brilliant blue eyes, the tendency to shapeshift when startled, the expressive buzzing and clicking of its wings when irritated—it was hard not to see it as my Nix.

And yet—why hadn’t it alerted Adjutant to the fact that I had possession of my full faculties? I felt certain that if I wanted to, I could have swatted it out of the sky with a second thought. Perhaps it couldn’t sense me the way it sensed ordinary Renewables?

Perhaps it had chosen not to alert Adjutant.

I closed my eyes for half a second. Wishful thinking, I knew. Nix is gone, I told myself. Stay focused. We were going to see Prometheus. I was supposed to be there with Oren and Wesley to back me up, but I had no chance of finding them now, even if I could overpower Adjutant and Nix. The pixie, I corrected myself, struggling to change the way I saw it.

So I would have to face Prometheus on my own. Maybe it was better that way. If I ended up needing power and leveling the entire room, then at least Wesley would be spared. I hoped that, wherever they were, they weren’t being mistreated. Especially Wesley—if they’d discovered his treachery, there was no telling what might be happening to him.

And if they discovered Oren’s secret? There was nothing to stop them from killing him as soon as they found out what he was.

I clenched my jaw. Focus. The only way I could help them now was to take out Prometheus himself. If I could manage that much, then someone would be able to rescue them when the resistance took over CeePo. And they’d find Basil too, if he’d defied the odds and managed to survive in Prometheus’s holding cells for this long.

I tried to imagine seeing him, but I couldn’t think past the confrontation with Prometheus. Surely the instant the Eagles realized I’d done something to their leader, they would kill me. In my mind there was no time after that. Just him, and me, and the confrontation . . . and then nothing.

I tried not to think about what that meant for me. I paid only enough attention to walking as I needed to avoid falling on my face. The rest of my focus I turned inward, running through Wesley’s meditation exercises in fits and starts, trying to calm the too-fast beating of my heart. I needed control. I needed deliberation.

Dimly I was aware of riding in the elevator again, although I couldn’t tell whether we were going up or down. Adjutant spoke now and then, but didn’t press me when I said nothing in reply. More hallways. Always more hallways—whether it was here, or the Institute, or even the world in the walls that had adopted me. It was always corridor after twisted corridor, never the straightest path.

Eventually we reached a pair of intricately carved bronze doors that were swung outwards, framing an archway. Through it was a large cavern with throngs of people inside. The crowd wasn’t as dense as the one outside, and it was comprised of much more richly dressed citizens. My dazed eyes picked out Eagles here and there, monitoring the crowd.

The crowd parted as Adjutant half-pushed, half-dragged me forward. Conversations everywhere began to die as heads turned toward us. As the people drew back, giving us more space, I was able to see the room more clearly. It was some sort of audience chamber, culminating in a series of chairs on a raised dais at the far end. Most were simple, but one—the one in the center—stood out like a throne. Although it was not significantly larger or more ornate than the others, it was clearly Prometheus’s chair. Made of blown glass and copper, it shone like a beacon.

The moment I saw the glass chair I grew lightheaded, dizzy. There was magic here, more than I had even after the experience with Adjutant’s talon.

A number of men stood at the far end of the room, and I turned my dazzled eyes toward them. Although he was facing away from me, I recognized him instantly. All the others arranged around him in a semicircle deferred to him with their body language.

And when I looked at him with the Sight, I nearly lost my balance. He wasn’t a Renewable, and he wasn’t a shadow. But he wasn’t an ordinary human either. I could see a dazzling tracery of violet and gold magic mottling his skin, surging and roiling as though some fiery disease was consuming him.

I stopped short a few yards away, surprising Adjutant into releasing me. His voice buzzed in my ear, but I paid no attention to him. Here was the man I’d come for, standing within easy reach.

I had no way of knowing whether Olivia was carrying out her end of the plan. What if, after everything that had happened with Nina, she decided she’d rather see me captured and killed here? She wouldn’t be the first