CHAPTER 19
“We’ve been following your trail for weeks.” Dorian leaned against the wall, his face looking worn and drawn in the flickering torchlight. “For a while we were following—” He broke off, guilt flashing in his eyes.
“You were following messages from Tansy,” I finished for him.
Dorian cleared his throat. “Yes. But the messages stopped abruptly, and we were afraid that you’d either discovered she was sending them and had left her behind, or that something had happened to the both of you. Where is Tansy?”
My eyes fell. “She’s gone. Captured. Probably powering Prometheus’s machines as we speak.” I swallowed, sick to my stomach.
“I see.” There was pain, genuine pain, in Dorian’s voice. “Lark, I’m sorry for how this has happened.”
I turned away from him, unable to look at him any longer. Instead my eyes fell on Nina’s motionless form, half-propped up on Marco’s lap. She was still breathing but showed no signs of regaining consciousness. Parker was with them—they kept their distance from the Renewables from the Iron Wood. They kept their distance from me. While I watched, Parker glanced up. His eyes met mine, and in them there was no sign of the gentle affection, the warm assurance I’d come to value so much from him. There was nothing of my father there. There was mistrust, and fear, and betrayal—the hurt was so tangible that my throat closed and I sank down to the ground, averting my gaze from him as well.
We had to get Nina back to the resistance hideout, to healers who might be able to help her. This pause was only to light enough torches for everyone, to wrap up our injured, to get ready to make the trek through the tunnels, going the long way back to the other side of the city. There would be no cutting through the open city undetected this time—not bloody and carrying an unconscious body. Not with a dozen Renewables who’d never had to learn to shield themselves from detection.
As Marco and Parker picked up Nina’s unconscious body and led the way, Dorian fell into step beside me. I wanted nothing more than for him to leave, to let me think, to make sense of what was happening. My two worlds, my two havens, colliding—the Iron Wood and the rebel fighters of Lethe.
But he spoke, scrambling my thoughts. “Don’t you want to know why we had Tansy follow you?”
“I know why,” I spat back. “Because you wanted to make sure you knew where I was, in case you ever wanted to use me as a weapon again.”
“That’s not—” He paused, ducking under a low, protruding stone. “That’s not entirely true. Yes, we wanted to know where you are. But only because the barrier you created, the one that kept us safe from the machines and the soldiers your city sent—it’s failing.”
Torn between Kris’s demands that I join with the architects of the Institute again, help to plunder the Iron Wood’s power in exchange for my freedom, and Dorian’s plans to use me as a weapon to destroy my city’s forces, I’d chosen a third option—I’d created a barrier preventing anyone from destroying anyone else. I knew what would happen if that barrier fell. The architects, led by Gloriette herself, would help themselves to the Renewables in the Iron Wood, enslaving them to power their machines.
I clenched my jaw, hardening my heart against the image of the Renewables there cowering behind a faltering shield. “That’s not my problem.”
“We need your help,” he pleaded. “They keep sending scouts every few days to test the barrier. The second it falls, the Iron Wood will be lost. You have to do what you did again—you have to find a way to get rid of your city’s people permanently.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” I replied, my voice tight.
“Your people are getting desperate.” Dorian reached for my arm, dragging me back as the others went on ahead. “The Renewable they have in your city isn’t going to last much longer. It’s a miracle she’s lasted as long as she has.”
My footsteps ground to a halt. The air felt thick, hard to breathe. Hard to think. “How do you know how long she’s been there?” I whispered.
He gazed back at me, haggard features twitching.
I felt cold, far colder than I’d been while standing in the snow outside. “Gloriette, when she was after me—she told me that they’d captured the Renewable they have powering the city. She claimed someone had sent her to spy on the city, and that justified the way the architects treated her.”
Grief aged Dorian’s features, his eyes closing, the corners of his mouth drawing in. “Would anything justify what they’ve done to her?”
I could still see the image of the Renewable’s face, her silent, eternal scream, the way her white eyes stared as though seeking something, anything, that looked like salvation.
Dorian ran a hand over his features as though he could wipe his grief away. I wondered if he knew the woman who now lived in agony in the bowels of the Institute. I wondered if he’d sent her. “Your city,” he said slowly, “is the only one that survived. The Iron Wood, we came there later, after the world burned and the magic twisted it. This place—you saw what the city above looked like. That’s what the rest of the world looks like now. Only your city survived. Only they had a barrier up.”
“I don’t—”
“They had to know it was coming, Lark.” He let go of my arm. “They were ready for the cataclysm before it ever happened. These are the people after us. I can’t protect my people from them without you.”
My head spun with exhaustion—I just wanted to curl up in the muck coating the floor of the tunnel and let Dorian, and Nina, and Wesley and everyone just drift on past.
“I have to do this first.” My voice was hoarse, tired. “The resistance movement here will keep you safe for now, especially if you’re willing to help them.”
“But—”
“Maybe if you help them,” I said firmly, “they might be able to help you. They need more Renewables to help fight Prometheus. Talk to me after we’ve gotten rid of him, Dorian. I’m not doing anything for you until then.”
I barely had enough energy to see Nina, still unconscious, safely into the rebels’ crude infirmary and under the care of their healers. News of her condition spread quickly, and as I limped back out of the room, I heard a voice scream her name, sobbing. The voice was familiar, but in its rawness I couldn’t tell who it was. I didn’t want to know—I was the reason Nina was half-dead, and I couldn’t face it, not now. Wesley took charge of the new Renewables, and after a quick nod at me— good job, his eyes said—he left me to stagger down to my room.
I thought of Oren and knew he’d be at my side as soon as he heard that I was back. Olivia or no, he still cared about my fate. Still, the moment I hit the mattress in my quarters, I was asleep.
When I woke I had no way of telling how much time had passed, except that I was clear-headed enough to sit up and actually notice my surroundings. I’d slept for hours, at least. And there was no sign of Oren—I was alone, and if he’d come while I slept, he hadn’t woken me.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, my muscles stiff and aching. My shoulder throbbed where I’d been bitten, and when I pulled the edge of my shirt away, I saw that it had been bandaged neatly while I slept. I moved it experimentally and found that the injury wasn’t that bad. It ached, but the healers here knew what they were doing. Out on my own, a wound like the one I’d received in the fight would’ve taken weeks to get better.