Shadowlark

I struggled to speak, my voice shaking. I had to keep my eyes on the motionless pixie, not trusting myself to look at my brother. “I looked so hard for you. Everything I’ve done, I’ve been looking for you. There was no one on this earth I wanted to find more than you, to be with. And when I thought you were dead, I would have killed Prometheus for you.” Swallowing, I forced myself to look at him. Basil. Prometheus. Someone entirely different, who I didn’t know anymore. “But now I wish you had been dead. At least then I’d still have the memory of Basil, my brother. Not this—this monster.”

Prometheus inhaled shakily, as close to tears as I was. “Lark, you’re still my sister. I still—”

“No.” I cut him off. “No, I’m not.” I dug into my pocket abruptly, my hands closing around the pair of paper birds: one half scorched and crumpled, telling the story of Basil’s journey, the other yellowed with water and exposure, squished flat and carefully reconstructed, revealing everything I’d been through. I threw them both at him, watching them ricochet off his face and neck—he flinched, eyes falling on them where they hit the carpet.

“You’re not my brother,” I said shortly. “I don’t know you.”

He gazed at me and I stared back, unwilling to crumble first. This world had broken my brother, but I wouldn’t let it break me. Basil—Prometheus—swallowed and then, very carefully, knelt and gathered up the paper birds, breaking eye contact. I closed my eyes and kept them closed, even when I heard the door open with a screech and then clang shut again.

It was only after he left that I let myself go, sinking to the floor where I’d stood, too shell-shocked to cry.

“Nix.” My own voice sounded alien, as if it belonged to a stranger. “What do I do?”

But the pixie wasn’t programmed to deal with such a vague question. It couldn’t answer me.

CHAPTER 24

It was impossible to track the passage of time. There were no windows in my room, but even if there had been, I had the nagging suspicion that we were so far underground that it wouldn’t have mattered. Underground, I thought dully. I’d been underground from the moment I arrived in Lethe— when had I started to think of Lethe itself as the world, rather than underground itself?

I kept replaying what I’d seen in my brother’s journal— the drawings of machines, the schematics for altering the flow of magic. My face, here and there. Always on his mind.

How could Basil have fallen so far in the past few years to think that this was what I wanted? That peace and safety, even in this wilderness, was worth these monstrosities?

This landscape twisted things. Took good things and made them something dark.

I sat up, unable to sit still any longer. I tried asking the pixie what time it was, but it didn’t understand the question.

“Is it day? Night?”

“The position of the sun is irrelevant here.”

“Yes, but is it . . . are people sleeping now? Awake?”

The pixie gave no sign of thinking, none of Nix’s little ticks and tells that showed it was considering the question. Kris told me that they’d programmed Nix to appear more human—to think, to learn, to be sympathetic. Without those little touches, this creature was just a machine. “Without concrete data, it is plausible that some will be awake and some asleep.”

I gave up. I crossed the room and spread both palms against the door’s cold, metal alloy surface. Grimacing at the chill against my face, I pressed my ear to it. I could hear sound, but warped through the metal it sounded only like clinking and clanking. It could be pipes—it could be footsteps. I had no way of knowing whether there were still guards outside my door, but it seemed likely. And surely Prometheus would be smart enough to post Renewable guards, capable of sensing if I used too much magic.

In all the confusion, they still hadn’t searched me thoroughly. I still had Oren’s knife in its sheath in my boot. I also still had the blackout device—but after what the talon had done to me, I wasn’t quite willing to try it. If it knocked me out the way Parker had theorized, I’d be worse off than before.

Closing my eyes, I let my awareness trickle out through the door. Although it wasn’t solid iron, the particular alloy made it difficult to sense what lay beyond it. I could, however, sense the lock. It was risky, if there were guards outside who could sense me, but I had no choice. I refused to sit here quietly, waiting for Prometheus to come back and try some other way of winning my understanding. Besides, somewhere out there was Oren— and Wesley—and they might need my help. Not to mention Olivia and her crew, who had surely been captured by now.

Carefully, I gathered up a thin tendril of magic and sent it through the surface of the door toward the lock. It buzzed in response, making my heart jump—it was responding to the magic. I could do this. Fraction by fraction, quietly.

And then something landed on my shoulder, whirring. I jerked back, flinching away. The pixie, dislodged as I lurched backward, hovered in the air a few inches away. Its eyes were still blank. It said nothing.

“What are you doing?” I gasped, clasping a hand to my chest, willing my heart to stop pounding. “Are you trying to stop me?”

“I am programmed to see to your needs,” it replied in that jarring female voice.

“I need you to leave me alone.” I tried to shoo it away, but it dodged my hand in a smooth dip to the side.

“Do not attempt to open the lock.”

I ground my teeth. “So you are programmed to keep me from leaving.”

“No.”

“But—”

The pixie made an odd sound, a high-pitched whine of gears that I’d never heard before. Then, after a pause, it said, “The lock.”

I stared at it. Although it gave no impression of emotion or effort, it seemed as though it was trying to say something. “What about the lock?”

“Do you wish to ask me about the locking mechanisms in CeePo?” The pixie spoke swiftly.

“Yes. Yes, tell me.”

“The locks here are wired with explosive energy, rigged to detonate when tampered with.”

A chill ran down my spine. The lock had buzzed when I touched it with magic—but I’d thought it was just responsive. What would’ve happened if I’d pushed harder, tried to open it?

“Why help me?” I asked, searching the blank eyes for some hint of Nix, anything. “You may have saved my life. Did they program you to do that?”

“No.”

The pixie just hovered there, motionless but for the blur of its wings through the air, blank eyes fixed on me. I thought of Nix’s very first command, given to it by its programmer, Kris: Keep Lark alive. If that command was still active, what else was still in there?

“Nix?” I whispered.

“My name is PX-148.”

Tears blurred my eyes, and I blinked them away angrily. “Go away. Just—go away!”

Before the pixie could respond to my order, a clunk from the door sent me backing away. Someone was opening the lock. I gathered up my magic. I wasn’t sure I could attack my own brother—but if it was a guard, then so help him. I was getting out of here, one way or another.

The door swung open, the entryway filled for a moment by a guard in Eagle uniform. Then I heard a grunt of pain and a crackle of magic, and the guard sagged to the floor. A man stepped over him into the room, head turned to look behind him. He slipped something small and mechanical and crackling with energy into his pocket— then turned to face me.

“Basil!” I stared, hardly recognizing him out of his Prometheus clothes. He was wearing plain pants and a