Red, Xhea guessed, from the energy it exuded. She rather appreciated the contrast.
What was their story, she wondered. Too young to be his wife, unless his tastes ran to the illegal; too calm and familiar to be the victim of a hit and run or the unlucky bystander in a spell gone awry. His daughter, maybe. How touching.
Was it disease that had taken her? Suicide? Perhaps her father had killed her.
Xhea exhaled a long breath of smoke as the man again approached. Come to my temple, she thought to him mockingly. Four walls of concrete and one of rain; a cloud of tobacco for incense. Come pray for your ghost.
He stood for a long moment, staring at her. “You’re too young to be smoking,” he said at last.
“And she’s too young to be dead,” Xhea replied, nodding towards the ghost that once again hovered above his head. The coins in her hair clinked together at the movement.
She had to give him this: he started, but nothing more. Most of those who came to her searched wildly about themselves when she revealed the location of their hauntings, though they had told her that the ghosts were there themselves.
“So tell me,” Xhea said, “this help you’ve come to me for—do you want her gone, your pale ghost? Or is it something you need to say to her? Maybe something you think she has to say to you?”
The man watched her in an angry, uncomfortable silence.
“Ah.” Xhea sighed. “You don’t know. Just came to see what the freak girl could offer.”
It was only then that Xhea realized how thin his umbrella of magic had become, and how dark the circles beneath his eyes looked. She squelched what little sympathy she felt. Even if he had lost everything, if everyone he loved had died, he still had a bright magical signature, a gift of nature and blood. Doors opened to his touch; vendors could sell him food; the City acknowledged he existed. He was, in a word, normal.
Unlike herself. There was no brightness in her, only a dark stillness that she could only think of as absence.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said at last. “I’ll take your ghost for a day, maybe two, give you a little break. If that turns out okay, we can discuss something . . . more permanent.”
“How much?” he said brusquely.
“A week’s worth of food chits,” she said, “and five hundred unshaped renai.”
“Five hundred!”
“You’d use less to get a taxi across the City.”
“But unshaped?” he asked, confused that she didn’t want the renai, the magical equivalent of the old-world currency, to be spelled to her own unique signature, but raw. “Gods—why?”
“I didn’t ask you how you got a ghost,” she said. “Don’t ask what I’ll do with the payment.”
His protective umbrella flickered and failed, and the rain poured down on his unprotected head. Xhea watched as, to her eyes, his hair and clothing changed from mottled grays to tones of charcoal and black, the fabric slicking itself to his middle-aged body. Water dribbled in his eyes and trickled from his nose.
“You are a freak,” he said at last in a voice she would have called dangerous had not the frustration in the words revealed his helplessness. “A monstrosity. Your mother should have drowned you at birth.”
Xhea ground her cigarette against the wet concrete, watching the bright ember at the end sizzle and dull to black. A line of smoke rose upwards, vanishing.
“You’re the one standing in the rain,” she said.
Fourteen years old and Xhea knew how to fight with a knife, how to scream like someone dying, how to steal food from children and business people distracted on long-distance calls—and yes, how to get the best of a sad and sorry man in mourning.
A deal was struck. The rest was only negotiation.
Changing the anchor of a ghost’s tether was not an easy thing, but it was something that Xhea knew how to do and do well: a bit of magic that she could perform without failure and one that had given her a reputation in the lower levels of the City. Throughout known history, ghosts were said to remain in the living world because of unfinished business—something they couldn’t leave behind. What few knew was that ghosts were literally bound to that unfinished business.
Unless, of course, one had a really sharp knife.
Xhea’s knife was a small silver blade that folded into a handle inlaid with mother of pearl. The man, soaked to the bone, stood rigidly as Xhea climbed onto an overturned fruit crate, knife extended, and began to examine the tether above his head.
“Don’t cut me,” he said.
“Don’t complain,” she replied.
The pockets of her jacket were full with food chits, little plastic tabs imprinted with just enough renai to buy her a single serving at a time. They were designed for children too young to be trusted to share their own magical energy safely or wisely, more likely to buy heaps of candy or be drained by a predator than to purchase a balanced meal. Though she looked younger than her age, even with her eyes darkened with black eyeliner and nails painted some shade of dark, Xhea knew she looked far too old to be using chits. She couldn’t bring herself to care.
It was that, steal, or starve.
The other half of the man’s payment he had spelled to be transferred to her upon completion of their bargain. The little light of the uncompleted transfer hovered about Xhea’s face like her own shining ghost, awaiting its time to leap into her body.
When Xhea took hold of the tether, the ghost of the girl jerked. Xhea watched her carefully as she adjusted her hand, trying to get a better grip on a section of energized air that felt as if it had been oiled.
“Hurry,” the man said. “Please, just . . . hurry.”
Xhea’s knife flashed down. The ghost’s eyes flew open and she recoiled, springing back to the end of the tether that Xhea refused to release. The ghost opened her mouth as if to scream, her once-perfect calm gone, but she only watched in silence as Xhea took the sliced end of the tether and pressed it to her own chest. It sank in like the rain into a storm sewer, vanishing completely.
“That’s it?”
“You want to pay more?”
“I—”
“Then that’s it.”
The rain had slowed to a drizzle; he stepped back, away from her concrete shelter and into the center of the street. He stood for a moment, watching her with a confused and unnerved look on his face, then turned and walked away without another word.
Xhea’s payment—a mere five hundred renai of pure magic—brightened for a moment, then sped forward and slammed into the exact center of her forehead. Xhea stumbled back, falling from the crate to her knees, a sound like the ocean roaring in her ears. In the back of her throat she tasted bile as her stomach attempted to return what little food she’d eaten that day. Head in her hands, she focused on not throwing up.
“Breathe,” she whispered. Her head spun. She reached out to grab at the concrete wall as a sudden rush of vertigo seemed to flip the world on its side and tilt it back again. Xhea gagged and clutched at her stomach. “Breathe . . . breathe . . .”
It was in these moments, with the raw magic coursing through her body, that she always swore she would never ask for renai in payment ever again. For someone with so little talent, such a strange magic as she had, it was a waste, a rush of energy without use or end. She would stick to food chits and pity.
Then the vertigo began to subside, her dizziness to fade, the terrible churning in her stomach settling like the wind after a storm. She could hear the rain again, pattering down on the wet concrete, and the wind as it sighed through the City’s towering corridors of mirror and steel. She felt . . . she almost had to struggle for the word . . . alive. For as long as the bright magic coursed within her, the dark stillness that always seemed to fill her body was absent. Like sun burning away heavy fog, the magic banished the darkness: she was light, empty, on fire.
She ignored the thought that murmured in the back of her mind, as it always did, that this was strange, foreign, wrong; this, she replied, is wh
at normal people must feel every day.
Slowly, Xhea opened her eyes. Instead of black and white, a world of unending grays, she saw color. No matter how many times she did this, the sudden brilliance of the world around her made her want to gasp, unsure if she should stare or cover her eyes.
The ghost hovered above her, legs again curled in a meditative pose, though it was Xhea’s sprawled body that now held her attention rather than the flowing dreams of her death. She was blonde, Xhea noted, and her eyes were a pale electric blue, but her dress wasn’t red but a deep plum. It reminded Xhea of new spring blossoms—something she so rarely saw, trapped as she was at the concrete base of the City.
“That looked like it hurt,” the ghost said, her voice tentative.
“A good observation.”
Xhea felt that she had but to lift her arms to float up beside the ghost-girl, untethered by weight or the world. Reality had other ideas. Xhea struggled to her feet, holding the wall of her little alcove until she was certain that her unsteady legs could hold her.
Breathe, she reminded herself, and after a moment the rush of dizziness and nausea again subsided. Xhea stepped down onto the long-deserted roadway, tilting her head upwards to feel the rain wash down her face. There was a sensation of tugging against her ribcage as the ghost’s tether tightened and stretched, then the ghost was dragged inevitably after her.
“Why . . .” the ghost started, “why . . . why am I here?”
“That was the bargain,” Xhea replied, glancing over her shoulder. The world spun about her as she turned. “Nothing personal, I assure you.”
Everything was so bright—the ghost-girl’s dress, the mirrored surfaces of the City buildings, the magical glow of aircars shimmering across the sky high above her. Color stabbed at her eyes, strange and vivid, and somewhere in the back of her head Xhea felt the faint beginnings of pain. There was too much, too bright, but she wanted it all.
“Bargain? I was just sleeping. And now . . .” The ghost looked down, apparently only just realizing that she inhabited a space without gravity, hovering about five feet from the ground and skimming forward without walking.
“Oh,” said Xhea. “That. You’re dead.”
“I can’t be,” the ghost whispered, peering over her crossed legs and watching the pavement speed by. “No. I was just asleep.”
Great, Xhea thought. A talker. She had seemed so quiet at first, so serene; Xhea had thought that she might dream away her death until the City crumbled to dust and the sun burned away the sky. It would have made things so much easier. Perhaps this was why the man had wanted to get rid of her—a sense that an unseen speaker was doing her best to talk his ear off.
Well, she had only committed to a day, perhaps two, and then she could let the tether go. The girl would catapult back to her original anchor and would be out of Xhea’s hair unless the man wanted to pay her significantly more.
“I was asleep,” the ghost insisted, “only asleep.”
“Then this must be a very bad dream.”
On any day the ground level of the City was sparsely populated, the magic-weak bottom dwellers hidden away in their homes, but with the rain coming down the streets were all but deserted. Buildings’ doorways and elevators, usually oblivious to her presence, flickered now as she went past, registering the renai burning in her body. For these brief moments, she had but to touch the keypad to have doors open for her. As always, she was tempted to get inside an elevator and ride it to the top, never mind how she would get down again with the bright magic gone from her system. Whatever magic gave her the ability to see and speak to ghosts, the magic that tainted her vision and seemed to pool inside her like a black and silent lake, was not enough for the City’s systems. She could only wonder what the world would look like from so high.
The ground level was a terrible place, rough and edged or falling apart entirely, old foundations crumbling away and the bases of magically-reinforced buildings standing in their stead. But even the ground level was too much for Xhea, filled with magic and its relentless brightness. Still dragging the ghost behind her, she came at last to the entrance to her home: a heavy metal grate pushed aside to reveal a dark hole and the rusted rungs of a ladder leading down.
Squinting already with a magic-induced headache, Xhea lowered herself into the darkness.
Once, Xhea knew, the City had been different, delving downwards instead of relentlessly up, up, up. But with magic came a craving for all things growing, for light and life and open air, and much of the old infrastructure was discarded. All that was left now of the old City were tunnels, some filled with broken roadways or rusting train tracks, others flooded or boarded up or too dangerous to explore. Xhea knew them all.
Her normal sight needed little light; shades of gray were easier to tell apart than the startling array of colors that magical sight brought—and, worse, the unnerving absence that accompanied darkness. She kept a flashlight in a jacket pocket for just such an occasion.
She shone the beam down the tunnel and began to pick her way forward, stepping over rusted nails and dried refuse with confidence borne of long practice. The ghost made a low noise, almost a whimper; Xhea glanced back to see the ghost-girl grimace, her eyes closed, one hand over her mouth in disgust. Even dead, few City-dwellers had the nerve to travel the roads and passageways in which she lived.
Xhea’s home was a small room, once maintenance space, up a small set of stairs that led off a train tunnel. The door creaked open at her touch and she shone the flashlight around the room, checking that everything was safe before entering.
There was something comforting about concrete, Xhea thought. Even with her sight burning with magic, it was still gray. In one corner were the bits and pieces of the past that she’d found in one tunnel or another, shoes and coins and books, dirty and mildewed but still intriguing. Against the far wall she had created a bed from a pile of blankets.
It was on this pile that she dropped without even thinking of first changing her wet clothes. She closed her eyes, opened them, and let the magic take her over. The pain at the back of her head was still there, as was that lingering sense of wrongness, but Xhea couldn’t bring herself to care. With this magic inside her she could leap, spin, dance, fly.
“I don’t think . . .” the ghost began quietly.
“Not now,” Xhea said.
“It’s just that . . . well, I—”
“Not. Now.”
Later she would have time to talk to the ghost, discover what held her to this life and see what she could do about it—if the right payment was offered. But the days were long and the magic stayed with her for such a short time. She just wanted to lay still and feel the possibilities before it all burned away.
Xhea woke, drained of bright magic, to discover that the ghost was gone. She opened her eyes, touching her chest; the tether was still there, slippery and elusive beneath her fingers, but within an arm’s length it vanished. As if she had cut her lead and fled, the ghost was nowhere to be seen.
But it was not this that had woken her.
Where the magic had shone inside her there now lay blackness, as if that dark pool of calm that she always felt lay hidden in the depths of her self had risen to fill her entirely. It was the opposite of everything she had felt with the renai of payment burning through her system: a magic slow and dark. Xhea suddenly felt cold.
As she watched, the darkness began to overflow. Like a fog, soft as breath, it poured from her body, falling not down but gently up, through the concrete ceiling and beyond. She could feel it even as it left her sight: an extension of herself questing outwards.
It was the ghost, Xhea thought desperately. What had she done?
Before the ghost had come to her, she’d always been able to keep the darkness in check, burn it away with snatches of bright magic or hold it down by sheer force of will. But now it coiled out from the depths of Xhea’s self, a seeping magic that followed the broken line of the tether. Try as she did, this time Xhea c
ouldn’t hold it back; it was drawn to the ghost.
What was her name? Xhea was sure that in the past hours, as the bright magic and its colors slipped from her body and vision, the ghost had tried to introduce herself.
“Shai?” Xhea called, and the name felt right in her mouth. Her voice echoed around the bare walls. “Shai?”
Later, Xhea was never sure if it was the darkness, the tether or the sound of her name that called her back, but Shai returned to the room with an audible crack, then hung in the air by the door at the end of her tether. Her shoulders were hunched, her arms pulled in tight to her chest, her blonde hair—gray now to Xhea’s vision—all but covering her face. There was a noise, too, like the distant sound of leaves pushed across pavement: she was whispering.
Xhea climbed on top of a salvaged chair, balancing carefully as she raised herself up on tiptoe, head tilted as she strained to hear the ghost’s quiet litany.
“It doesn’t end,” Shai said, eyes closed, lips barely moving. The words seemed to slip from her mouth like a soft exhalation. “It doesn’t end, it doesn’t end, it doesn’t end.”
As Xhea watched, the ghost of the girl slowly began to straighten, uncurling from her hunched position, her head rising like a flower seeking the sun. Though she couldn’t harm her, Xhea took a step back to avoid Shai’s leg as it swung forward and folded beneath her, the smooth length of skin vanishing beneath the folds of her dress. The whispering ceased and Shai became as Xhea had first seen her: calm and serene, a picture of ghostly stillness.
“Shai?” Xhea said again, and the ghost opened her eyes.
“I’m only dreaming,” she said. She sounded heartbroken, too sad to cry.
Xhea opened her mouth to reply, easy denials coming to her lips—and stopped. For there was something different about Shai, something that set her apart from every ghost Xhea had yet known. Only in black and white could she see it, made plain by the shifting grays of her vision and the intensity of the attention that she had not paid to the ghost-girl before: at her core, deep within herself, Shai sparkled with bright magic.
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