A key turned in a lock.
“Wait,” I gasped, as hoarse as if my lungs were on fire. “Who are you? What are you going to do with us?”
Two of our three captors kept walking, but one hung back. I realized it was a woman, now that she’d taken off her suit.
“You’ll stay here until he asks for you. If he decides you die, you die. If he has a use for you, you live.”
“He,” I echoed, starting to shiver as shock settled in. “Who?”
“Prometheus.”
CHAPTER 6
They’d left a light on, just enough for us to see by. It glowed a steady white-gold—magic, I thought, but I couldn’t sense it. The iron bars, the iron in the walls and the floors and the ceilings, kept me from sensing anything properly. The air was thick and close, warmer than outside but still clammy and cold.
Though my head still rang with the silence of iron, my other senses were beginning to return and try to compensate. I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten used to being able to feel the magic around me, and how much there was to sense even in a magicless void.
I dropped to my knees where Oren was slumped on the ground, ignoring the way my instincts told me to get as far away from him as possible. “Are you okay?”
He pressed his palms against the stone floor and shoved himself upright. His face was haggard, making him look older. The blue eyes were distant, confused. Though there was no sign of the monster in his gaze, I could still see the ferocity— that belonged to Oren as well. Not just to the beast.
“What’re you doing here, Lark? Why aren’t you—” His gaze swung past the bars, the whites of his eyes showing his panic at being closed in. “Where are we?”
I glanced at Tansy, who was watching us with clenched jaw. She shook her head, and I turned back to Oren. “I don’t know. Underneath the ruins of a city. You were—” I stopped, unable to say it.
Oren swallowed, gazing at my bleeding ear before turning so that he could see Tansy, taking in her injuries as well. “Did I—”“No,” I said quickly, interrupting him. “You saved us.”
He grimaced, brows drawing inward. “That doesn’t sound right,” he muttered, lifting a shaking hand to rub at his eyes.
“Nevertheless.” Steeling myself, I reached out to touch his hand. Despite the insulation all around us I felt a tiny tingle, a buzz where our skin touched. I jerked my hand away and cradled it against my chest.
He looked up, meeting my gaze for the first time as I tried to swallow my fear, my disgust. His eyes sharpened a little, blue even in the dim light. He was searching my face for something, his own expression haunted—but whether he found what he was looking for or not, he pulled away, turning his back, using the bars to drag himself to his feet.
I shouldn’t have touched him. He was a monster—a cannibal. How many people had he killed in his short lifetime? Tansy was right, I should have left him there in that alley. The current that flowed between us was only magic—nothing more. Maybe if I thought it often enough, it would be true. He was a monster.
And yet, he saved us.
I wanted to curl up there on the floor, pull away from the bars as far as I could, and hoard what little magic I had left from what I’d stolen from Tansy.
“They didn’t take my pack away,” I said. “But we’d better try to keep it hidden in case it was a mistake. And I’ve got my knife—maybe we can pick the lock.”
Tansy glanced at me dully. “Just use your magic to do it.” The emphasis was bitter. As if hearing it, and regretting it, she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall.
I understood the bitterness. I could still feel the whitehot agony as the Institute’s machines drained my own magic, replacing it with something false and twisted. How could she ever look at me as anyone other than the person who’d done that to her? I swallowed, trying to ignore the surge of guilt. If I hadn’t taken her magic and broken our fall, we would’ve died. I wasn’t sure we were much better off now, but at least we hadn’t been eaten. Yet. And she’d recover. She was a Renewable. In time, her magic would return.
“I don’t think I can use magic,” I said finally. “There’s so much iron here—I feel like I can barely breathe.”
I searched in my pack, hoping to see a telltale flash of copper, but there was nothing. Nix wasn’t there. I hoped that it had escaped unseen, that it was outside somewhere. The thought of the pixie trapped in these tunnels made me feel sick.
“Tansy, eat the rest of the apples,” I said, fishing the last couple of fruits from the Iron Wood out of the bottom of my bag. They were bruised and a little shriveled, and no doubt mealy-tasting, but still edible. “You need it most. It’ll help you recover.”
She took them dubiously but began to eat anyway. I crossed over to the door, ignoring the way my skin crawled at the proximity of the iron. Despite crouching to get a better look at it, I couldn’t see anything no matter how hard I pressed my face against the bars. I explored it by feel, my arm pressed awkwardly through the bars and wrist twisted back so I could get at the lock. The point of the knife wasn’t quite long enough and narrow enough to reach inside, but I tried anyway, wriggling it around inside the keyhole, hoping to hear the telltale click of tumblers.
After a while, Tansy finished the apples and came to my side, dropping to one knee to ostensibly look at the lock with me. But I could tell she had something to say, the tension radiating from her. I braced myself and kept my attention on what I was doing.
“I’m—sorry,” she said eventually, surprising me.
I lowered the knife and withdrew my arms, letting my hands rest on my thighs. They ached from the awkward angle, showing bands of red where my skin had been pressing so hard against the bars.
“You saved our lives. I can’t—I shouldn’t resent you for that.”
I tried a smile, though it didn’t feel quite right. “It’s okay. It’s awful. Believe me, I know.”
Tansy smiled back, the expression coming more easily to her, though she looked as tired as I felt.
“Can you rest?” I asked Tansy before glancing up at Oren, who had leaned forward and was resting his face against the bars, eyes closed. “I can keep trying for a while if you can sleep.”
“I think I could sleep standing up in the middle of a forest fire right now,” Tansy admitted. “Wake me up in an hour or two, if those guys haven’t come back by then.”
She retreated to the back of the cage, as far from Oren as she could get. She settled down and propped herself up in a corner, then closed her eyes.
I kept at the lock for a while, though I knew how pointless it was. The knife simply wouldn’t reach. Oren stayed silent, motionless. Eventually I conceded that all I was doing was blunting the tip of the knife, and stopped.
“I remember a light.”
Oren’s voice cut through the gloom, soft and quick. There was a tremor in it. I looked up—he still hadn’t moved, forehead pressed against the bars.
“I remember darkness and fog and a terrible hunger. And that I was supposed to be looking for something. And then, suddenly, there was a light. And I knew where to go.”
Tansy’s magic, I realized. In the alley. I kept silent, remembering how good it had felt to strip her magic away from her, take it for my own, let it pool warm and golden inside me. I tried to block out the sound of his voice, fixing my eyes on the lock again.