I closed my eyes, trying to summon the awareness that had been so infuriatingly fleeting during the morning’s meditation exercises. I tried to see how the magic flowed through me, but I could only sense it pooled within me. There was no connection to my heart, to my brain. But then, my magic wasn’t mine. It was the Eagle’s.
“I didn’t show you this so you could get in touch with your own life force.” Wesley’s voice interrupted me. “Although that’s exactly how a Renewable would begin her studies, too. But you’re not like them.”
“Then why?”
He didn’t answer, but instead turned and began to lead the way toward the exit. The room was quickly emptying, and I realized with a pang that Oren and Olivia were nowhere to be seen. I turned to follow him, suddenly realizing, now that the children were gone, that I was ravenous.
But Wesley wasn’t done yet.
“I showed you,” he said as I trailed after him, “because now you know exactly what you did to that man who died. You know how you killed him.”
I stopped short. He kept walking, the eyes on his feathered coat watching me with a hundred unblinking stares.
“And now you know how to keep yourself from doing it again.”
I saw very little of Oren over the next several days. Wesley moved my training into a private room, citing secrecy, but I knew it was at least in part because I couldn’t focus when Oren and Olivia spent half the time I was trying to concentrate rolling around on a sparring mat. Whenever I did see him, at mealtimes, he’d be sitting with her. They’d always ask me to join them when they saw me—but sometimes they didn’t even notice when I came in.
In the mornings I trained with Wesley, and in the afternoons I learned about magical theory from Parker. I struggled to get along with Wesley most days, rubbed raw by his unfailingly blunt attitude. But Parker was different. He was quiet, thoughtful, hugely knowledgeable. Though my father knew nothing about magic theory, Parker still reminded me of him. Something about the comfortable silences and insightful questions, maybe. The golden glow of his Renewable power was gentle, warm. It was easier to control the shadowy hunger within me around him.
I learned that the very first people to make a science out of studying magic were the Hellenes, the same people whose myths had inspired Prometheus. They existed thousands of years ago in a land across the ocean. It all boiled down to what their philosophers poetically called the music of the machine. In their eyes, all of nature was a machine, from the vastness of the world, with its weather and intricate ecosystems, down to the tiniest plant. A seedling machine needed magic to draw water up through its roots, just as the human machine needed it to have a heartbeat. There was magic in everything, and therefore everything could be manipulated by magic.
And it was the Hellenes who first used magic to power a manmade machine, though their attempts, while aesthetically impressive, were so inefficient as to be useless.
Parker clearly loved studying these people, his gaze lighting up when he spoke of them. He had a habit of wandering from the subject, branching off onto tangents that I could barely even follow, much less apply to my own experiences.
“Many scholars think that the music of the machines theory was fundamentally flawed, as no one has been able to reconcile the concept that magic is in everything, to a lesser or greater extent, with the truth that iron repels magic. The Hellenes had no scientific explanation for this, but I believe it’s simply because we don’t understand it yet. The theory is so simple, so elegant, that to abandon it for one loophole seems ludicrous.”
I remained silent, letting him continue. Wesley had stayed true to his word and not shared my secret with anyone—and even he didn’t know that I had magicked iron, first on the lock on Oren’s cage, and then again on a huge scale, turning the Iron Wood into a living forest again.
Parker—and the Hellenes—were right. There was magic in everything, even in iron, because I’d tapped into it.
Though I was exhausted by the end of each day, I still felt the nagging, irritating desire for action. Somewhere out there, Nix needed my help. The pixie was linked to me and could find me anywhere, and the fact that it hadn’t returned yet had to mean it was in trouble. And of course there was Tansy. Being forced to sit there meditating and learning about archaic theories made me want to scream. But even if we could manage to get inside and rescue her without being caught or killed, where could we go?
There was no way out.
In the evenings, after I’d forced myself to eat dinner and dragged myself back to my tiny room, I read Basil’s journal. My brother was not skilled at writing—none of us were, really. There was no reason for us to learn to express ourselves that way, living behind the Wall. Still, I found myself dragged into the brief glimpses of his journey marked down on the pages. I combed the entire thing, searching for mentions of alternate routes to the surface, anything that might help these people, but found nothing.
I kept hoping—and dreading—to see my name somewhere, to see him write that he missed me. But he wrote nothing of his feelings, noting only observations of the world around him.
The evidence that he missed me was in the way my face peeped out of the margins every few pages. The drawings were the real window into Basil’s heart.
I paused, sitting up on my bed. Of course. It was late on the fourth day since we’d arrived at the underground city, the fourth day of training and studying. I’d been so focused on trying to find clues in Basil’s ramblings that I’d been ignoring the pictures, most of which were sketches of faces or plants, or else technical diagrams of half-imagined machines. Most— but not all.
Flipping the pages back, I found what I was looking for. To the casual observer, the page was filled with a nonsensical pattern of little lines, some slashing through others, some ending in meaningless symbols. But they weren’t meaningless—I knew what they were. The memory was distant, but not gone. Now that I knew what the rebels here needed so badly, the memory came flooding back.
When we were children, Basil would sometimes let me come with him when he snuck into the school and other architect-run buildings by navigating the long-unused sewers. He knew every turn and hatch, but I—I was little and knew nothing about it, and I didn’t know my way. Afraid of getting separated and leaving his little sister alone in the tunnels beneath the city, Basil had made me diagrams of the tunnels that I had to memorize so I could always find my way home, no matter where I was. He’d come up with a code, so that anyone who stumbled across our maps wouldn’t realize what they were and give away our escapades.
I stared down at the page in the journal, my fingers smoothing over ink and paper. This wasn’t nonsense. This was a map. It was a way out of Lethe for the Renewables—it was an escape route.
An idea began to form in my mind, and even though it was new and only half-formed, my mind tingled with excitement. But before I could approach anyone about it, I had to ask the one person on whom my plan hinged. It’d be dangerous—too dangerous, if I let myself think about it.
So don’t think, for once. Just go.