Deciding to redirect the conversation back to Olivia, I asked, “So if you’re not a Renewable, how do you know so much about them? About—us?”
Her reply was quiet. “I’m not a Renewable, but my twin brother was.”
I fell silent.
We reached another door, this one round and squat with a wheel on it. There was a small glass window in the top of the door, but it was so grimy that I could only see that there was light on the other side of it. The door was unlocked—Olivia just reached forward and heaved at the wheel, swinging the door open with a screech of hinges. Beyond it was a low-ceilinged room dominated by a long table covered in papers and halfdismantled machines. A few people stood around it, and heads turned towards us as we followed Olivia inside.
“Hey, guys,” she said as everyone’s eyes fell on me. “This is her. Lark Ainsley.”
I never told her my name. It was like someone had thrown a vat of ice water over me. Beside me, Oren tensed, drawing nearer to me.
Part of me knew I should just run. Wrench away some magic—because more than one of the men around the table was a Renewable—and cast some sort of barrier, and use the confusion to get myself and Oren out of here.
But I was tired of being batted around from prison to prison, from one group of people using me to the next. Enough.
“How do you know who I am?” My voice was tight, stiff—iron-cold.
One of the men around the table straightened, breaking the tableau. He was a tall man in his forties, with well-worn clothing and a thick stubble spreading down his neck. He was staring at me as though looking at a long-lost friend, like someone he’d seen once in a dream.
“You are her,” he murmured. His eyes were wide, wondering.
I braced myself, slipping into my second sight, picking my targets. Part of me recoiled at how easy this was becoming. Where was the girl who’d once had nightmares of a shadow child’s scream as it fell down a cliff face?
“Parker.” Olivia’s voice was low, warning. Though she wasn’t a Renewable, she could clearly tell I was bracing for something. I saw her move, place herself between me and the door.
He swallowed, wrenching himself out of his stupor. “Yes, I see. Lark—Miss Ainsley. Please, stand down. You have to understand what a huge moment this is for us. You’re her— you’re really her.”
“I don’t see it.” That was one of the other men, a younger one, his voice full of skepticism.
Parker shook his head, though he never took his eyes from my face. “Trust me. This is Lark Ainsley. Imagine her five or six years younger—it’s her. The girl in the journal.”
CHAPTER 12
It had been so long since I’d seen my own reflection that at first, the girl in the journal seemed utterly unrecognizable. Familiar, like I’d known her once, long ago—but there was no moment of instant recognition. Until I started flipping pages backward.
They’d given me and Oren each a room to stay in. Though they were barely bigger than closets, they had enough room for a bed. Oren was eating and showering—who knew when he was last clean? But I’d refused to do anything until they brought me the journal.
It was really more of a sketchbook. After the first few pages, which were covered in handwriting, the rest of the pages were filled with drawings and only the occasional caption or paragraph of text. Schematics for machines, mostly, with numeric notations and little else to contextualize them. Some I recognized from the machines I’d seen walking around the city outside, and others were wholly unrecognizable. I couldn’t even tell whether some drawings were of machines or simply geometric patterns, nonsensical.
But here and there, tucked into margins and occasionally dominating half a page, were sketches of a girl.
Me.
At first, early on, the drawings were clumsy, inexpert.
Drawn by someone with the ability to create technical drawings but for whom faces weren’t easy. But the artist had gotten better. Gradually, as the pages went on, the lines smoothed out. The eyes were more confidently placed, the hair following much more graceful lines. The drawings changed from something almost childlike to something admirable.
Even so, it was the early faces that seemed most like me. It was as if the artist had known me long ago and was drawing me from memory—but even as their talent at drawing increased, the specific details of my face had started to slip away. The last entry in the journal was just my face, a pencil sketch. Artistic, sweet. The mouth didn’t seem quite right— the cheeks were too round, the chin a bit too long. But the eyes were mine, and they stared back at me from the page, as though the child I’d once been had caught up to me. Below it was my name, Lark Ainsley.
When I flipped all the way back to the first page, my fingers froze.
Written there, in the neat, perfect lines of machineformed lettering, were the words:
Property of the Institute of Magic and Natural Philosophy
The journal was from my home city. And then, in that instant, I knew whose it was.
I bolted off of my bed and shoved the door open so hard that it slammed into the wall. Retracing my steps wasn’t easy—so many of the corridors looked alike. But after a few wrong turns, my heart slamming in my ribcage, I found the War Room, as Olivia had affectionately called it.
“Whose is this?” I gasped, brandishing the tattered journal.
My eyes scanning startled faces. Olivia wasn’t there anymore, but the man who’d recognized me—Parker—was. He looked from my face to the journal and then back again.
“Lark—” he began slowly.
I knew that tone. It didn’t mean anything good. “Tell me!” I could hear my voice cracking and didn’t care. I was so close. “Where is the man who owns this journal? Tell me, or I swear I’ll walk right out there and find Prometheus and tell him where—”
“If I could tell you, I would!” Parker shouted over me. His voice rasped uncomfortably; he was clearly not a man used to raising his voice. When I had to stop for lack of breath, he spoke more quietly. “We don’t know whose it is. It was here before we were.”
My stomach roiled. The jolt of recognition, of adrenaline as I ran through the corridors, receded, leaving me nauseous. “What do you mean, before you were here?”
“We’ve only been living in the walls for three, four years. It was after Prometheus took over and named our city Lethe. That’s when it became unsafe for Renewables to live openly. The earliest rebels against Prometheus are all gone now; it’s not exactly a healthy life choice to go off-grid. But the story goes that when the very first Renewables went on the run from Prometheus, they only found this place because someone else did first. Someone else made the door, the ladders.”
Someone skilled at moving underground, unseen. Someone at home in the tunnels under the world. My eyes stung, and I willed them to stay dry. I still didn’t know what these people wanted from me—I refused to let them see me weak.
Parker was still watching me, the others in the room silent. “We keep the journal close at hand. To study it. He or she had made it their job to study the machines here, figure out how Prometheus’s walkers and blades and ornithopters operated. And there are machines here Prometheus has never even dreamed of that we’re trying to build, to get the upper hand. It’s our only real weapon against him.”
I shook my head, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “This person—where is he now?”
Parker shook his head. His expression was wary—he hadn’t forgotten how ready I was to use magic against them earlier. But there was a sympathy there too, in his brown eyes, that made me look away. “He was long gone before we found this place. We always assumed . . . ” He hesitated, and I could feel his eyes on my face. “We always assumed that he made a move on Prometheus and failed.”