“It really is you,” he murmured, taking a step toward me. I stayed silent, not trusting myself to speak.
“When they told me they’d found a girl who could magic iron, I thought—here, at last, someone like me. But I never thought—I never thought . . .” His face changed suddenly, his sadness mingling with horror. “Does that mean—how are you here? Why aren’t you in the city?”
“They did to me what they did to you,” I said, choking. “I ran away. I reached the Iron Wood, and Dorian told me you had come here. I came to find you. I came to find Basil.”
He shut his red-rimmed eyes for a moment. “I’m here. I’m so sorry, Lark. I never thought they’d—I thought their experiment ended with me.” He broke off and came towards me, putting his arms around me.
For a moment he was just Basil again. My eyes burned, my body shaking with the effort of not breaking down. My big brother, the one who always made everything right—I ducked my face against his shoulder, gasping for air.
In that moment, all I wanted to do was let myself go, sob into my brother’s shoulder, let him comfort me the way he had always done. I’d found him, finally. We were together.
He squeezed, his own voice choked when he spoke.
“I would never hurt you,” my brother said fiercely. “Never, you hear? Ignore Adjutant, ignore everyone.”
A sick feeling twisted inside me. No, not my brother, I corrected myself. My brother was someone who would never, ever become this. My brother was dead. This was Prometheus.
I pulled away, stepping back. “But you’d hurt others?”
Prometheus slowly lowered his arms. “Lark,” he said slowly. “You don’t understand. It’s so much more complex than you—this city needs me. It needed me when I first got here, and it needs me now.”
“Why do any of this?” My eyes were still burning. Out of my peripheral vision I could see PX-148, motionless, the white eyes staring straight ahead.
“Because of you,” Prometheus whispered.
I stopped short, jerking my eyes from the pixie to look at the leader of Lethe. “Me?”
“All of it was for you,” he said, closing his eyes. “I wanted a place that would be safe for you. I was going to come back and get you when this was all ready. Before the architects could do to you what they did to me.”
I felt as though the floor was sliding away from me, making me struggle just to keep my balance. “I never asked for this,” I said, horrified.
Prometheus shook his head, standing there just inside the door to my richly decorated cell, looking so much older than I remembered. “It was only supposed to be for a little while. I was going to fix the city and then once it was safe, return for you.”
“And they’d just accept their beloved Prometheus living among them with his kid sister?”
He shook his head again, taking a step toward me. “They see the office, Lark. They don’t see the man. They recognize the uniform and the power and the command, but they don’t know me. Only the people who’ve been with me from the beginning know me at all. Adjutant, a few of my advisors. If I left and came back in ordinary clothes, as an ordinary citizen, no one would ever know it was me. You and I could live normal lives here. Safe lives, away from the Institute, away from the Empty Ones.”
“So why didn’t you come for me?” I couldn’t help but spit the question, anger overcoming my shock. This betrayal, more than any other, burned me to my core. “Why didn’t you do what you set out to do?”
“It wasn’t that easy,” he said softly. “There was always something more to do. It was never quite enough. Every time I thought things were under control something else would fail—Adjutant would report something else needing power I didn’t have, that the city didn’t have. It never ends. I’m never done.”
His eyes were haunted, tired, riddled with guilt. I had to fight the urge to go to his side, try to comfort this stranger who had once been my brother. But in my mind’s eye I saw Tansy, I saw the Institute’s enslaved Renewable. I imagined Olivia’s brother, and everyone who’d ever fallen to Prometheus.
“All those Renewables,” I whispered. “You’re no better than the Institute. How could you?”
“So few Renewables actually come through here, and the cost to keep all these people safe is so high. I offer them the chance to help—it’s only the ones who refuse, Lark. It’s only the people who won’t do their part.”
He was actually pleading with me, begging me to understand. I shook my head. “You should have found another way.”
“There is no other way,” he snapped before closing his eyes, rubbing at his face with both hands. “You don’t think I’ve tried? We’d need three, four times the Renewables we have, all cooperating, all willing to contribute. We’d need an army of them. I’ve done the calculations a thousand times, Lark. There’s no way I can make it sustainable without using them. And it’s only a few people, a very small number. A small sacrifice for the good of the entire city.”
“A small sacrifice,” I echoed. Nina’s face, right before I took her power to save all our lives, flashed in my mind’s eye.
Emotions warred inside me—I wanted him to hug me again, I wanted him to tell me stories, I wanted him to tell me what to do next, that everything would be fine. And I wanted to hit him, tear into him, hurt him the way he’d hurt so many people—destroy him for what he’d done.
“Lark—please.” He came toward me, hands outstretched. But when I backed away, he stopped short, as though he’d run into an invisible barrier.
I struggled to speak, my voice shaking. I had to keep my eyes on the motionless pixie, not trusting myself to look at my brother. “I looked so hard for you. Everything I’ve done, I’ve been looking for you. There was no one on this earth I wanted to find more than you, to be with. And when I thought you were dead, I would have killed Prometheus for you.” Swallowing, I forced myself to look at him. Basil. Prometheus. Someone entirely different, who I didn’t know anymore. “But now I wish you had been dead. At least then I’d still have the memory of Basil, my brother. Not this—this monster.”
Prometheus inhaled shakily, as close to tears as I was. “Lark, you’re still my sister. I still—”
“No.” I cut him off. “No, I’m not.” I dug into my pocket abruptly, my hands closing around the pair of paper birds: one half scorched and crumpled, telling the story of Basil’s journey, the other yellowed with water and exposure, squished flat and carefully reconstructed, revealing everything I’d been through. I threw them both at him, watching them ricochet off his face and neck—he flinched, eyes falling on them where they hit the carpet.
“You’re not my brother,” I said shortly. “I don’t know you.”
He gazed at me and I stared back, unwilling to crumble first. This world had broken my brother, but I wouldn’t let it break me. Basil—Prometheus—swallowed and then, very carefully, knelt and gathered up the paper birds, breaking eye contact. I closed my eyes and kept them closed, even when I heard the door open with a screech and then clang shut again.
It was only after he left that I let myself go, sinking to the floor where I’d stood, too shell-shocked to cry.
“Nix.” My own voice sounded alien, as if it belonged to a stranger. “What do I do?”
But the pixie wasn’t programmed to deal with such a vague question. It couldn’t answer me.
CHAPTER 24
It was impossible to track the passage of time. There were no windows in my room, but even if there had been, I had the nagging suspicion that we were so far underground that it wouldn’t have mattered. Underground, I thought dully. I’d been underground from the moment I arrived in Lethe— when had I started to think of Lethe itself as the world, rather than underground itself?