Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Xhea blinked. No, the tether wasn’t just pulling; it was somehow drawing away his very essence like milk through a straw. His hands were vanishing, as were his feet. He seemed now to float a few inches in the air, his blunt-ending ankles pointing toward the unmarred dust of the floor.

  “Sweetness and blight,” Xhea whispered. “What’s on the other end of that line?”

  Deep within her, something dark stirred and shifted. Xhea inhaled sharply in surprise, for she knew that sensation—her magic, dormant now these past two months, again coming to life within her. Quickly, she reached for the ghost’s upraised arm, thinking to grasp him with hand and magic both.

  Too late.

  For a moment the ghost’s gray eyes met hers, and again she saw that terrible lucidity, a focus so intense that it seemed to have a physical impact.

  “Run,” he whispered. With a terrible jerk, the tether yanked him through the barricade, and he was gone.

  For a long moment, there was only silence.

  Xhea stared at the barricade’s uneven surface where the ghost had been pulled through—the heavy blocks of concrete, the jumble of rusted rebar, the scrap metal sloppily welded together—as if by looking long enough she might make the ghost return. Yet there was nothing but that silence and stillness, even the dust undisturbed in wake of the ghost’s passage.

  “That was …” Shai whispered before stuttering to a stop.

  “I know.” Xhea’s desire to laugh had long since vanished. She pressed her free hand to her stomach, feeling the faintest whisper of magic curling and coiling within, twin to her fear. She should have been relieved to find her power hadn’t been entirely burned from her, and yet could only think: Too little, too late.

  Still she stared, trying to peer though the gaps in the piled barricade and out into the empty hallway beyond. There was no movement there, no sound, no sign of life or light.

  And yet …

  Xhea frowned, stepping cautiously closer, and raised her free hand toward the barricade. Her fingers hovered but a breath away from the closest concrete block.

  There’s something, she thought. Something …

  She did not know what. Only felt the sudden, rising desire to walk forward, touch the barrier—or pass through it entirely, as if her flesh and bone were as insubstantial as a ghost’s. She shook her head, coins chiming, trying to dispel the strange feeling with the movement.

  “What could have done that to him?” Shai said from beside her, voice unsteady.

  “I don’t know.” And she didn’t. Xhea had seen ghosts freed and ghosts banished, ghosts so old and weary that they had begun to fade—but never before had she seen anything like this ghost, frantic and confused in turn, disappearing in pieces. She thought of his tether, stretched beyond all thought or reason—and his anchor, hidden somewhere down here in the dark and cold—and shook her head.

  “I felt like we were watching something … eat him.”

  Xhea shrugged uncomfortably; she didn’t disagree. “But what could eat a ghost?”

  Shai shivered. “Nothing I want to meet.”

  That, right there, was the reason Xhea couldn’t ask Shai to walk through the barricade—little barrier though it was to one who could pass unhindered through solid walls. There’s something out there, she thought. She saw no movement through the barrier’s small gaps; heard no breath or scuff of shoes against the dirty floor. No one there, logic said. Nothing.

  Instinct disagreed.

  For there was something or someone to which the ghost was bound—something close. Something that called to her, urging her forward. She wanted—

  Xhea shook her head. She did not know what it was that she wanted so suddenly, so urgently, only knew that it was on the other side of Edren’s barricade in the tunnels beyond. Again Xhea made to step forward, and only will and pain kept her from moving.

  Instead she whispered, “Do you feel that?”

  Beside her, Shai looked at the barricade and shuddered, wrapping her arms around her chest as if to ward off a sudden chill. “Yes,” she said. “It’s awful. Xhea, we should go.”

  Xhea glanced at her in surprise. Strange and unfamiliar, yes—but awful?

  Yet Shai was right; the ghost was beyond her help now, and whatever called to Xhea—whatever made Shai want to turn and run—was nothing they could reach. Time to make her slow way back upstairs and face the consequences that surely waited there; time to sag back into her small cot and stare at the ceiling in hope that sleep might still come before morning.

  But still she stared, one hand outstretched before her. For, deep within the barricade, she saw a spot of perfect black.

  It was not the dark of light blocked, not here where no light fell; neither was she seeing something black waiting behind. It was the dark of absence, the dark of nothing at all. And it, like something in the space beyond, pulled at her.

  Xhea knew with sudden certainty what would happen if she touched the barricade.

  Go upstairs, she told herself. Tell Lorn, tell Mercks, tell—somebody, anybody. But she did not move. Couldn’t. For all that getting here had felt like it had taken all of her energy, she suddenly could not imagine a force great enough to draw her away.

  Here, the barricade seemed to say to her. Here, here, here.

  As if in a dream, Xhea touched the block of concrete before her. It was just a gentle touch—and yet where her fingers brushed the cold concrete, the block began to fall in on itself. Within seconds the heavy chunk had all but crumbled to nothing, as if the shape she’d seen had been nothing more than an empty façade made of sugar and sand. Nothing inside it anymore, only a hollow semblance, collapsing.

  She opened her mouth to speak—but only breath came out, thin and shaking. Before her, the reaction to her touch spread like a cigarette burn widening across a sheet of dry paper, faster and faster, leaving only dust and black ash in its wake. Behind, where she had thought to see only more rubble or even the hall beyond, there was only that span of perfect black—widening, now, like a great mouth opening to swallow her down.

  Xhea stumbled back and back again as the destruction spread, faster and faster—until it suddenly cascaded. She cried out as the barricade fell in a rush of sound and dust and rubble, raising her hands in a futile attempt to protect her face from the flying debris. The movement was too quick for her precarious balance. She lost her stick and tumbled to the floor.

  Shai cast her hands before her and magic rushed out like a wave of sunlight. There was no shape to it, no spell, only pure magic strong enough to keep back the worst of the debris as the dust cloud rushed over them both, fast and stinging.

  Curled and cringing on the floor, Xhea tried to scream—but everything was suddenly darkness and dust. Grit tried to force its way beneath her squeezed-tight eyelids. Every breath was dust and ash, her mouth thick with the taste, her ears roaring with the sound, and she choked and gasped.

  She could not breathe—oh sweetness, she could not breathe.

  Then the dust cloud passed and began to settle, small bits of debris hitting the ground around her like spring hail. Xhea coughed and coughed again, choking up dirt as her eyes streamed tears. For a moment, as her ears rang, she thought she could hear screams—the groan of asphalt and the creak of buckling supports—the rattle of dislodged bricks falling to the broken ground.

  Memory. Only memory.

  But in that instant, she was nine years old again and outside her apartment on the edge of the ruins, caught in the collapse of the Red Line subway tunnel.

  She shook her head, trying to push away the memories and the adrenaline alike; tried to take a breath without choking and slow her heart’s frantic beat. Yet it was not only the dust that made her tears flow.

  “Xhea,” Shai was saying, “Xhea, are you okay? Answer me!”

  Xhea wiped her eyes and struggled to sit. Shai hovered before her, attempting to kneel, and fell silent only when Xhea moved. The ghost paused then, clearly caught between hope and despair; she reac
hed out with one shining hand and touched Xhea’s cheek as if she might wipe away the tears.

  “I’m okay,” Xhea murmured. It wasn’t strictly true, but true enough; despite the shock and the adrenaline that even now coursed through her, she had added only minor scrapes and bruises to her tally of injuries.

  Then she saw the barricade.

  It had not, as she’d feared, entirely fallen. Looking at what was left, she almost wished it had.

  Where she’d touched—where, so briefly, she’d seen that span of perfect black—there was now a hole bored straight the way through the barricade, taller than a man was high and wider than she could stretch her arms. And not a ragged hole, as one would expect from a tangled pile of junk, but a tunnel straight and neat as if it had been built that way.

  Something had tunneled through Edren’s barricade, turned it to dust from the inside out and left only the barest façade to cover the damage. Xhea could even see pieces—a sheet of metal, a heavy chair’s ruined frame—that were only half-crumbled. She had the feeling that if she were to touch them, she would find them as strong and stable as the rest of the barrier itself; aged and rusted, yes, but far more resilient than anything a small girl could destroy with a touch.

  Of the rest there was only dust.

  “Can you stand?” Shai asked. Xhea nodded. “Then I think we need to go.”

  From the stairs far behind them came the echo-garbled sound of someone calling Xhea’s name—but it was not that that made Xhea agree, but the feeling that grew the longer she stared at the damaged barricade. Again she felt the desire to step beyond—but now, beneath that desire, there was something else. The hairs on the back of her neck rose.

  There was someone out in the darkness of the underground. Someone watching. Someone waiting.

  The abandoned shopping corridors and subway tunnels that wound beneath the Lower City had always been hers and hers alone. Not anymore. Her magic shifted weakly within her, thin wisps curling and coiling at the thought.

  “Have you seen my stick?” Xhea asked softly.

  “Here.”

  Xhea retrieved it from beneath the heavy covering of debris and made her careful way to her feet. Shai only stared at the barricade and the empty hall beyond, her hands clasped and pressed hard to her stomach, her feet hovering a good six inches from the floor.

  “We really need to leave,” Shai said with growing urgency.

  “Agreed.” Xhea turned her back on the destruction, attempting to ignore the prickle between her shoulder blades. From Edren’s main level the shouting increased, the sound of her name replaced by loud commands that she return.

  Xhea sighed and limped as fast as she was able.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go meet the welcoming party.”

  It was only once they’d left the shopping corridor and returned to the hall that Xhea felt her shoulders loosen. No urge to turn anymore; no desire to walk beyond the barricade’s protection. No feeling of unseen eyes on her.

  A glance at Shai confirmed her suspicions. While the ghost still looked anxious, concern pinching the corners of her mouth, that restless energy was gone now—if not forgotten.

  Shai met her eyes. “You know how I keep telling you to get up and actually do something?”

  “Maybe once or twice, yeah.”

  A hint of a smile touched Shai’s lips, only to vanish as she glanced behind them. “I think I take it back.”

  When at last they could see the base of the two sets of downward sweeping stairs from Edren’s main level—and when the shouting from the top of those stairs had begun to deafen her—Xhea called out.

  “I’m here,” she shouted, then had to pause, coughing. She was going to be spitting dust for days.

  There was a brief pause, then: “Xhea.” The woman who spoke wasn’t loud, but the sound carried nonetheless. Xhea cringed; she recognized the speaker all too well. “Are you injured?”

  “No more than before.”

  “Then would you please join us?” The words were quiet, polite, but there was nothing soft about them.

  “Working on it.” She heard the sullen note that crept into her tone—and hated it.

  Xhea looked up the stairs as they approached, noticing for the first time that a man stood partway down the flight, already closer to the lower level than he was to the top. Mercks. He clutched the railing with one pale-knuckled hand and stared down at her, eyes tight with concentration. As she watched, a rivulet of sweat ran down his temple. Xhea had to crush the sudden urge to apologize; she hadn’t forced him down the stairs.

  “Man,” Xhea said, meeting his eyes and refusing to flinch away, “did you ever pick the short straw.”

  She hit the first stair and began the laborious process of hauling herself up, grabbing the railing with her left hand and her stick with the right. She wanted to just sit and push herself up backward one dirty tread at a time—but there was a crowd at the top of the stairs, and she’d be blighted if she was going to let them watch her crawl.

  After all, it’s only pain.

  Xhea didn’t look up until she reached the ground level, a sweating Mercks at her side, and even then she didn’t speak. Couldn’t. It was all she could do to keep breathing.

  A woman waited at the top of the stairs, a small crowd of security and hastily woken officials spread behind her. She watched Xhea with careful, considering eyes.

  “Sit,” she said at last, gesturing. Xhea sagged onto the stairs leading up to the ballrooms, heedless of the dirt she left on the confetti-strewn carpet.

  “I assume,” the woman said, “that you went underground with good reason.”

  It was not sarcasm. Xhea looked up and up to meet the woman’s eyes.

  Emara Pol-Edren was tall, easily over six feet, and her whipcord-thin build was hard with muscle. She was dressed simply, casually, as if she’d been awake and working when summoned. And she had been summoned, of that Xhea had no doubt; Emara stood with the unthinking confidence of someone in charge. She managed much of the skyscraper’s internal affairs, and though she wasn’t in security’s chain of command, that didn’t change the way everyone hung on every quiet word she spoke.

  “Yes,” Xhea said. “Or reason enough. What I found was worse.” She rubbed the sweat and dust from her forehead, then held her dirt-caked hand before her like an offering.

  “This is your barricade,” Xhea said, “or what’s left of it.”

  The crowd reacted—cursing, rushing to monitors, turning to each other in dismay. Emara did not. She only stared at Xhea as if their gazes had become locked; Xhea could read the questions there as clearly as if Emara had shouted. She wanted to shout, Xhea saw, though only the tightness in her jaw hinted at the anger that boiled beneath.

  “It wasn’t me,” Xhea said softly—so soft that even Shai, hovering by her left shoulder, could not hear. “I swear to you, this time it wasn’t me.”

  “You will tell me everything,” Emara said.

  Question, command—it was all the same in the end.

  Xhea was allowed a quick bath and brought fresh clothes before being led to a small meeting room and grilled for what felt like forever. Before dawn broke, Xhea had told her story more times than she could count; more times, it seemed, than should have been possible in the dark hours before morning. She understood the need, even as she resented it.

  The ghost and his strange behavior was her problem and Shai’s, if it was anyone’s—but the barricade? Its presence, and now its sudden absence, was critical to all of Edren, if only for what its loss might portend. She knew it, even though the last war in the Lower City was only a story to her told in pieces: in rumor and word of absent friends; in half-spoken tales and remembrances that trailed away to nothing; in decade-old blood feuds that even now led to harsh words, drawn knives, and worse in the Lower City’s streets. Its devastation could still be seen in the scars on the walls of the underground passages—the cracked tile and black scorch marks. It was the reason for the creation o
f the underground barricades that protected the skyscrapers, one from the other.

  The war had seen desperate days, its battles far fiercer than the combats of blade and magic that Edren sponsored within the walls of its arena. No one wanted a return to those days—or so it had been assumed. The hole said otherwise.

  So Xhea told the story again and again—to Edren’s head of security and his note-taking assistant, to first one Edren council member then another—dragging details from her exhausted mind and trying to sound respectful. Failing miserably at the latter, despite her honest attempts. Through it all, Emara Pol-Edren watched, noting details and asking quiet questions about seeming inconsistencies in Xhea’s telling.

  Soon not even Shai’s patient prompting was enough to keep Xhea going; the ghost’s echoes of the interviewers’ questions seemed as indecipherable as the originals. Xhea’s next dose of painkillers was more than welcome—as was the oblivion it brought in the wake of pain’s ease. For the first time in recent memory, she did not have to fight for sleep.

  Xhea woke with a headache, a dry mouth, and Shai standing over her. She blinked, pushing sleep away. For a moment it seemed that she could still hear the dead man’s voice, reverberating from dream or memory.

  Run away.

  “They’ll need you soon.”

  Shivering, Xhea nodded, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and worked on standing. Dressing usually took the longest. She reached for a clean set of the loose cotton clothes—little more than pajamas—that Edren supplied. She’d worn these clothes, or ones so similar as to be nearly identical, since the day Lorn had brought her to the skyscraper on a stretcher, hurt and delirious, a distressed ghost by her side. Today she hesitated. Instead, she reached toward a folded pile of clothes long ignored on the shelf.

  Long, dark pants with pockets down both legs. A light tank top as an undershirt, a heavier long-sleeved shirt on top. And a too large jacket, worn and oft-mended, with pockets on the inside and out, each filled with countless small treasures.