I nodded, and she tilted her head to the side. A silent summons.
When I settled down beside her, she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. “I always come up here the night before a mission. I don’t know why, but it helps.”
The ground was a dizzying distance below us, but Olivia seemed unconcerned. I tried to ignore the drop, focusing instead on the city and the phosphorescent glow of the fungus on the cavern walls. For a while we sat in silence, me staring upward and Olivia looking down at her feet as she swung them gently side to side.
I wanted to speak, but I had nothing to say. At least, nothing I could put into words. She was the closest thing I’d made to a friend here, but now it was like we didn’t even know each other. Maybe I was just torturing myself, sitting beside this walking, talking reminder of what I’d done to Nina, the people I’d hurt by hurting her.
Because the truth was that I liked Olivia. No matter how much I wished I could hate her for how close she’d grown to Oren, she hadn’t done anything wrong. She was helping him, giving him training—and friendship—he desperately needed.
I found myself saying, “Tell me about your brother.”
Her head snapped up, and I hurried to add, “I’m sorry— you don’t have to answer. Oren mentioned him, and I thought—it’s fine.”
“No,” she said slowly. “No, I don’t mind. You’ve lost a brother too. Maybe talking about it would help.”
She sucked in a long breath through her nose, letting it out in an audible sigh. “We were . . . close. That seems like such an inadequate way to say it. We were twins. Two halves of a whole. From childhood we were like opposites—he had black hair, I had blonde. He was quiet and thoughtful and I was anything but. He was born a Renewable, and I definitely wasn’t. But we worked that way.
“Things weren’t great for Renewables even before Prometheus. People fear them, hate them, because of what they did all those years ago, causing the cataclysm. Causing all of this. Bran—that was his name, Bran—he’d get teased a lot, bullied by the other kids. I’d beg him to use his magic on them, but he always refused, said it’d just prove them right. That’s when I started to learn to fight. If he wouldn’t defend himself, then I would.”
The thought of Olivia as a child beating up the other kids made me smile. She already looked angelic, sweet, incapable of violence—she must’ve been an even more improbable warrior as a cherubic little girl.
“Once Prometheus took over, things got worse. Bran moved into the walls early on, while I stayed on the outside as long as I could. I’d do odd jobs for Parker and Wesley, the occasional jaunt inside CeePo. Until one day I was caught. And my brother, my stupid, stupid brother, came to rescue me. I made it out. He didn’t.”
I waited, but she didn’t speak again, her jaw tight as she looked down at the city below us, her eyes resting on the shadowy, semicircular building that housed Prometheus and his government.
“What does Prometheus do to Renewables when he catches them?” I asked softly. It clearly still hurt Olivia to talk about her brother, but whatever happened to Bran might’ve also happened to Basil.
“They die,” she said shortly. But then, before I could absorb it, she added, “Eventually.”
Unbidden, the image of the Institute’s Machine rose in my mind. I hadn’t thought of it in what felt like forever, but as soon as I saw the low, squat chair, I could almost feel the glass shards slicing into my skin and draining away my magic.
Olivia saw the horror on my face. “This is why we fight him, Lark,” she said in a low voice. “He’s done amazing things for this city, but it all comes at a price we’re not willing to pay anymore. Just remember this is why we’re doing it. This is why they’re carrying out your plan, even though—” She paused. “Even though everything.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“Usually, the Renewables he does this to die not long after. Bran was in the middle—he lasted a few months before he finally gave up.” Olivia was dry-eyed, but the sadness in her voice was overwhelming.
“Olivia,” I said, my voice sounding strange, “what’s the longest any of Prometheus’s Renewables have survived being repeatedly harvested?”
Olivia tilted her head to the side. “I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that there are a few that predate Wesley. And he’s been there for two years now.”
Years. There were Renewables who’d been down there for years. And it’d only been four years since the resistance fighters moved in and found my brother’s journal. There was a chance, however slim, that if Basil was like me, he could’ve leeched power from the other captives and survived Prometheus’s harvest each time.
I’d assumed Basil was dead. But maybe I was wrong.
We sat in silence for a time, each lost in our own separate thoughts. I could feel Olivia’s tension—her easy manner was gone, despite her willingness to talk to me. She had a part to play in tomorrow’s mission, too, just as important as mine. She was going to be the distraction, drawing away Prometheus’s Eagles to give Oren and me a chance to get close to him. Though she was usually so open, it was impossible to read Olivia now. There was still grief and anger there, and part of me wondered, if Oren weren’t going to be there, if she’d let me run in blind, without the distraction, and get caught.
“Make sure you have no regrets,” she murmured, interrupting my increasingly dark thoughts.
“What?”
Her feet had stopped swinging, and she sat motionless, gazing into the middle distance ahead of her. “That’s how you go on these missions time after time. You make sure you have no regrets. Just in case.”
Something in her voice chilled my heart, and I shivered.
She went on. “You talk to the people you care about, and you make sure there’s nothing you wished you’d said.”
For a moment, I thought she was talking about me, about the ruins of our seedling friendship. Then I recognized the quiet desperation in her voice, and I realized.
“Have you spoken to Oren yet?” I whispered.
Olivia hesitated, but then I saw her nod out of the corner of my eye. “We spoke a little after we finished training this afternoon. I told him what I’m telling you now.”
No regrets. I couldn’t argue with Olivia on it, because it made sense. Make sure that you leave things as well as you can, so that you can face what’s coming with a clear head.
“I’m glad he found you,” I said quietly, quickly, as though my mind might interfere and stop me once it realized what I was saying. “He’s had a very lonely life. A terrible one, sometimes. But here, with you—he seems happy. I think my one regret would be leaving him alone, but he won’t be alone. And that’s a good thing.”
Olivia didn’t answer, and when I turned to look at her, she was staring at me, her face unreadable. “You think I love him, don’t you?”
My heart seized for half a beat, and I fought to catch my breath. “No—I mean, maybe. I know he cares for you. You spend so much time together.”
She laughed, but it wasn’t a comforting sound. “I promise you, Lark, I don’t have the slightest interest in Oren. Not the way you’re imagining.”
“But—”
“I have somebody,” she said simply, dropping her chin onto her knees. “And I haven’t given up on her yet.”
My thoughts ground to a halt. Her?
Then it all clicked. She and Nina are close, Oren had told me. Nina took care of her when she lost her brother. Suddenly my heart froze altogether. I’d nearly killed the woman she loved. I might well have killed her yet, if she never woke up.