I turned to Basil, who had walked back toward the door and then stopped. He was watching me, his face calm, his eyes sad. For a long moment we just stood there, at either end of the row of occupied cells, looking at each other.
Then he said quietly, “She’ll be in the harvesting room. I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER 27
Now that we were prepared for the guards, with an army of half a dozen Renewables at our backs, we encountered surprisingly few of them. It turned out one of the freed captives, a resistance member who called himself Curio, was especially adept at using his magic on the human consciousness. Whenever we encountered more than one at a time, Nix dived into the fray, using the venomous stinger the Institute had equipped him with to knock the second Eagle out. We left the few guards we did encounter sleeping peacefully in the hallways behind us.
Basil and I talked quickly as we moved, our voices low. “When this is over,” he whispered, “you and I will have to slip out.”“What are you talking about?”
My brother grimaced. He looked so tired, so much older than I would have ever guessed. “Without the Renewables, there’s no way to keep Lethe going. Better to get out before it falls.”
“The resistance,” I whispered. “If they all came forward, volunteered to be harvested—”
“Unless there are fifty, sixty of them hidden away, it won’t help. No one would volunteer to spend their lives in that kind of torment.”
“You want us to run.” I couldn’t imagine my brother, my brave, kind older brother, so ready to abandon these people to the darkness. But then, he didn’t know about Nina—he’d never believe me capable of making these choices, either.
“You want to stay?” he asked, incredulous.
“You said yourself that Lethe will fall without them.” I gestured at the Renewables ranged out behind us, all watching for guards. “I’m the reason they’re going free. I have to stay and figure out a way to fix the city. No matter what.”
Basil fixed his eyes on the ground ahead of us. “You know that’s how I got started, too?”
“I know.”
His hand brushed mine, then turned and wrapped around my fingers, the way it used to when I was a child. “You were right to let them go,” he said softly. “It’s easy to justify a monstrosity in light of the greater good. I don’t know whether—I don’t know what the answer is. But it was wrong to keep them there.”
Before, I would’ve pulled my hand from his, angry, hurt that he was no longer the brother I knew. But now, listening to the marching footsteps of the freed Renewables, of our tiny, dedicated army, I didn’t. It was easy to say what he’d done was wrong when speaking required no answer, no action. Still, the words meant something. And I let him keep hold of my hand.
The harvesting room was not far from the chambers where the Renewables were held. Basil explained that his workshop and the other experimental laboratories were all branches off of the harvesting room, for easy access to the machines when it came to making adjustments.
I tried not to imagine my brother calmly and casually making notes and turning dials and controls while a captive Renewable hung suspended, screaming silently as his power was torn away. I tried not to imagine him using that stolen power in his work.
But as we walked, hand in hand, I knew that Basil and I would never be as we were. We’d never be big brother and little sister, it would never be simple and trusting again. I didn’t know if I could ever love him again.
No, that wasn’t true. I still loved him. In spite of everything, despite what I’d said and the things he’d done, he was my brother. And I loved him. I just didn’t know if I’d ever trust him again.
Nix thrummed against my neck, nestled close. Trust was hard to come by in this world beyond the Wall, but it could be found, if you looked hard enough. I had Nix; I had Oren. Most of all, I had myself. That was enough.
Basil didn’t know where Oren was being kept when I asked, but thought that maybe he’d be with the regular prisoners, the people detained for not having the proper papers or for starting brawls in the streets. I still hadn’t told anyone the truth about what Oren was—I was hoping no one had found out, that he was merely being kept with the drunks and the petty thieves. Basil promised to take me to find him once we freed Tansy.
When we reached the harvesting room, we stopped some distance back in the corridor to hold a whispered conference.
“There’ll be guards outside,” Basil said as the rest of us crowded around. “Probably two, but maybe four. If this is the door,” and he drew his finger across the ground, pushing out just enough magic to leave a dimly glowing trail behind, “then the two guards will be here and here. If there are four, the other two will be posted on the opposite wall of the hallway, here and here.” The floor was marked now with glowing X’s.
“Inside, the Renewable—Tansy—will most likely be in the harvesting column.” Basil drew a large oval on the other side of the door he’d drawn earlier, to indicate the room beyond, then etched a series of lines radiating out from a circle in the oval’s center. “The column is here,” he said, pointing at the circle. “These are catwalks. The entire thing is suspended over the machinery that powers the harvester, drawing the energy up to—to Prometheus’s chair.”
“How do you know so much?” Curio was staring at Basil, brows drawn inward suspiciously.
Basil opened his mouth, but Wesley got there first. “This is Basil Ainsley,” he said swiftly, watching my brother. “He’s the one who wrote the journal. And this is his sister, the girl whose picture is in it. He knows everything there is to know about Prometheus.”
Curio’s eyebrows lifted, lips parting as his mistrust shifted to awe. He and the others took Wesley’s words at face value, but I wasn’t so sure. I watched him, trying to find any sign that he’d recognized Basil as the man he’d pretended to serve for the past two years. But Wesley just gazed back, steady and unflinching.
Basil dropped his eyes. “When we get inside there may be some of Prometheus’s researchers working there. Let’s avoid killing them if we can. And let
“Right,” I said, lifting my eyes to scan the faces of the Renewables around me. “Are we ready?”
There were only two guards. Curio was able to handle them both, but he was starting to sweat and shake and clearly didn’t have much left. I hoped that the other Renewables were half as adept at incapacitating enemies.
The entrance to the harvesting chamber itself had a complicated locking mechanism, but Basil pressed a series of brass knobs with incomprehensible symbols on them, then paused and looked at me. I nodded, and he pressed the last button.
The door hissed open, and we spilled into the room, down the catwalk.
The first thing I saw was a column of pale gold light and a human body suspended in it. The head was thrown back, muscles tense with pain, fingers bent into claws and toes curled in agony. Her features were obscured by the light and the angle, but I knew who it was—I recognized her hair, her height, the clothes she was wearing.
The second thing I saw was a series of machines arranged around the perimeter of the room, banks of levers and knobs and displays, many of them with exposed wires darting this way and that. Staircases led up to a second level and then a third, where there were more machines. Beyond the banks of machinery were sheets of darkened glass, no doubt opening onto individual experiment bays, but closed off when not in use. Chairs were arranged at each station, but they were all empty. No researchers. One station on the ground level was
