Lark

Sonora's apprentice — a sixteen-year-old runaway learning the cold-reader's trade

Lark is sixteen, or says she is, and she came to the Aurelio show the way half of them do — off a road, out of a town she won’t name, with a bruise she wouldn’t explain. Sonora took her in and started teaching her the reader’s craft: how to watch hands, how to bait a hook, how to build a wall no one can climb. Lark learned fast. She learned, it turns out, faster and further than her teacher meant.

What she wants

Wants: out — a real out, north, a name of her own and a door that locks from the inside. She has been quietly building the fare, and the freedom, one skimmed dime at a time.
The trouble: the show is a family that does not let you leave clean, and the one person who taught her every trick she’d need to run is the one person who could read that she’s running.

Her place in the story

Lark is the foil and the fulcrum — the apprentice who took her teacher’s lessons to a conclusion her teacher never would, and the mirror that finally forces Sonora to see herself. Bright, guarded, quicker than she lets on, and carrying a terror of being sent back that will, one bad night, make everything turn.

Voice

Watchful, clipped, a little too controlled for sixteen; the wall Sonora taught her to build, built well. (Seen through Sonora’s narration.)

Appears in

The Blindfold Act novelette