Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Warmer clothes, she thought, than she needed in the summer heat. Yet something in her eased as the jacket’s weight settled across her shoulders. Shai had told her that the oversized jacket made her look smaller and younger than she was, but Xhea didn’t care; it was hers.

  Dressed in her old clothes, Xhea took a deep breath, sat up straighter, and smiled.

  “Welcome back,” Shai said softly.

  Xhea looked toward the ghost, who hovered now on the small room’s far side, complex patterns of magic flickering between her upraised hands like pyrotechnic fireflies. She did not pretend to misunderstand.

  “Was I really so bad?” Xhea looked at her walking stick, turning it over and over in her hands.

  “Well,” Shai said, “never so bad that I actually murdered you. Though I came close, once or twice.”

  “Abelane used to tell me that I was an insufferable patient.”

  “Nothing’s really changed.” But Shai laughed as she said it.

  The summons arrived shortly thereafter. “Could be worse,” Xhea said when she’d read the note. “We’re to go to an office on the twelfth floor at our earliest convenience.”

  “We? It mentions me?” Shai asked incredulously. She dropped her hands and the magic she’d held flickered as it faded to nothing.

  “Yes, actually.” Xhea tightened her brace, grabbed her stick, and stood. She winced as she steadied herself; her legs ached, and her arms—and not just from the new bruises from when the barricade had come down. No, she felt the ache of overworked muscles. Soft and lazy, she mocked herself in silence, and knew her taunts were nothing but the truth. Well, no more.

  She looked up to meet Shai’s surprised expression.

  “Come on,” she said, “it’s not as if they don’t know you’re here. You’re practically fueling the whole skyscraper.” Fueling it without thought or intent. There were no spells that bound Shai to Edren, as there had been to her home Tower, Allenai; no attempt had been made to capture her for her power, as rival Tower Eridian had tried when it had abducted Shai’s spirit. Yet even the faintest brush of her power against Edren’s collecting spells—a pause by a magical storage coil, a walk by spelled wires—poured more magic into the skyscraper than Edren’s citizens could ever provide.

  “Knowing and acknowledging are different,” Shai said shortly. “The summons was from Lorn, then?”

  “No.” Lorn Edren was the only person to have introduced himself to Shai that Xhea had witnessed. Yet despite seeing to Xhea’s care and comfort—providing, even at its most basic, a level of security that she had never before known—her sometime-ally had been notably absent. She’d tried not to take that absence personally. She just hadn’t tried very hard.

  “Not Lorn,” she said. “His wife.”

  Xhea made her slow way through Edren’s back halls, past the main kitchen toward what had once been the rear service elevator. The halls were busier than she was used to, citizens scurrying about on tasks that she couldn’t begin to fathom; yet to a one, they stepped aside to let her pass.

  “I think my reputation precedes me,” Xhea murmured. But then, she was used to people shying away from her as if she were poison. She kept her shoulders square and stared straight ahead, allowing the passers-by to continue on their way without feeling the need to meet her eyes.

  “I think they’re just trying not to knock over the tiny limping girl with the cane,” Shai replied.

  The service elevator was Edren’s only elevator that ran entirely on mechanical parts. Her magic was no more than a whisper of dark, but even so, Xhea didn’t trust herself not to short out something vital in the other lifts’ workings. She could imagine many horrible things, but few beat the visceral terror of falling to her death in a magic-glitched elevator cage.

  Yet when she turned the corner, it was to find the elevator cordoned off, its doors open to an empty shaft, and the sound of someone working in the darkness below. Xhea shouted over the sound of metal clanging.

  “Take the stairs!” a voice called back. “Not going to be done for hours.”

  “Of course,” Xhea muttered and made her way to the fire exit stairs. No dramatic sweeping staircase, these: they were bare concrete with a cold metal railing so often peeled and repainted that its surface rippled.

  “Twelve floors. That’s not so bad, right?”

  Shai wisely stayed silent.

  By the second flight, Shai began to ask questions—mostly, Xhea thought, to stop Xhea’s incessant swearing.

  “Lorn’s wife—that’s the woman from last night? The tall one?”

  Xhea made a noise that was part laugh, part gasp as she hauled herself to the next landing. “The one and only.”

  “It seemed like you …” Shai hesitated, paused, and tried again. “It seemed like she knew you.”

  Xhea smiled—a pained, unhappy smile—because that right there was the heart of it.

  “She visited you twice, you know,” Shai said.

  “When was this?” Xhea asked in surprise.

  “Right after your surgery, when you were drugged. She didn’t say anything to you, either. Just … watched.”

  Probably wanted to stab me in the neck. It was a thought best kept behind closed lips.

  “This is not my first time in Edren,” she said at last. She grabbed the railing and hauled herself upward. One step. Another.

  “You don’t mean when Lorn sheltered you during the night. Before that.”

  Xhea nodded, and Shai’s brows drew down as she considered, attempting to find the words and meaning that Xhea couldn’t quite say. Explaining was going to be hard, Xhea realized. She glanced around, seeing only painted breezeblock walls and bare concrete steps, and wishing she were in the tunnels nonetheless. Somewhere truly safe, with no possible risk of being overheard.

  But while Shai could say whatever she wanted, Xhea had no way to make her words inaudible. She never used to worry about others’ reactions when she spoke to ghosts. Truth be told, she’d rarely been around anyone long enough for them to hear more than a random sentence or two—when she’d bothered to speak to the ghosts in her care at all. Shai had changed that; Shai, and being stuck and largely immobile in a skyscraper, with the same people around her in the same halls.

  And there were things that she had sworn never to speak aloud.

  “You said that Edren owed you a favor, one from before I met you,” Shai said at last. “You never told me how you earned that favor.”

  Xhea grinned. “Got it in one.”

  “A secret,” Shai said slowly, considering. “And it had to involve a ghost, or why would Lorn have called you?”

  Except it hadn’t been Lorn at all.

  “Oh, everyone knows that story,” Xhea said, seemingly in response to a question that Shai hadn’t actually asked. She leaned against the railing on the landing for balance and tried to catch her breath. Four floors—only eight to go. It seemed a small impossibility.

  “The Edren family had two sons: Lorn and his elder brother Addis.” Even saying the name felt strange now, so long had she kept it behind her teeth. “Lorn was wilder, then. He made a name for himself in the arena.” She laughed, and gripped the railing again. “Made a name for himself in the streets, too: a man who celebrated as hard as he fought.”

  “That … doesn’t sound much like the Lorn I met.”

  “Indeed.” Xhea forced herself to keep climbing. “Addis was the quiet one. Smart, studious, good with magic—and first in line to inherit Edren’s rule. Addis was as different from his brother as it was possible to be. He even had a wife: Emara Pol, arena champion and daughter of Edren’s famous wartime general.”

  “Emara was Addis’s wife?” Shai asked sharply. “But you said—”

  Xhea continued as if there had been no interruption, hauling herself up another step. “One day, Lorn was injured in the arena—a deep cut to the leg with a blade spelled to speed bleeding. Illegal as hell, of course, but he wasn’t in any shape to argue. Within hours, he
fell unconscious and couldn’t be woken.

  “The same day, Addis became ill and was given a sickbed beside his brother. Rumor has it that he fell into some kind of coma.”

  Xhea rested again on a landing, breath hissing through her teeth. Her knee felt like a living thing inside its brace, grown large against the bars of its cage and beating fruitlessly to be free. Even her good leg ached, protesting such treatment. She spoke past the pain, forcing a casual tone: “Addis died of his illness, and of course Lorn awoke. To know more, I guess you would have had to be there.”

  Shai frowned in thought.

  Xhea looked at the next flight of stairs, while every part of her screamed to stay still and never move again. “Of course,” she added, “the experience changed Lorn. He left the arena behind, and the parties, and started training to rule the skyscraper. Trying, some say, to be more like his brother.”

  He’s quieter now, she thought. More studious. He even has a wife. Willing Shai to make the connection that Xhea could not speak aloud.

  “And you were there,” Shai said. “So which one of them was a ghost?”

  Xhea climbed in silence for a time.

  “I was thinking,” she said. “Given the choice, would I rather walk again without this blighted brace, or banish all stairs forever?” Xhea hit her stick against a banister and listened to the metallic reverberation echo down the stairwell. “I think I’d say both.”

  A hesitation, then Shai asked softly, “Both?”

  “Both.”

  Shai’s next question was one that Xhea didn’t expect: “When did Emara marry Lorn?”

  “Within a year.” It was a well-known scandal, though anyone smart would never mention it within Emara’s earshot. Her disdain of the hard partying, lustful natures, and violent tendencies so often seen in other arena fighters was notorious and sharp enough to cut. But then she married Lorn. “Most figure she wanted to maintain her power within the skyscraper. If not one brother, then the other.”

  The last few words were difficult to speak past her panting breaths. Sweat rolled freely down Xhea’s cheeks and back, her hands shook, and her dry throat felt raw. She clutched the railing, leaned heavily against her stick, and hauled herself up. One step. Another. Another and another until she died.

  And oh, she had no desire to meet the woman waiting at the other end of this journey.

  “Lorn is Addis, isn’t he?” Shai said. “That’s what you’re trying to tell me. Lorn is Addis’s ghost in Lorn’s body.”

  “Yes.”

  Shai stopped and stared at her from above. For a moment the light of her magic, that steady warm glow, seemed to flicker; shadows danced around them, as uncertain as the look on Shai’s face.

  “But he’s … normal,” Shai whispered. “How is that even possible?”

  It was true: Lorn was not incapacitated, like the resurrected Radiants used to fuel the Towers above; not trapped and helpless within a foreign shell of flesh. But there was no gossip Xhea could tell, no hints or words that she could share that would guide Shai to understand that part of the story—and so Xhea only shook her head.

  Shai was silent the rest of the climb.

  “I am officially over stairs,” Xhea announced to the young man guarding Emara’s office door.

  He blinked. “If you say so.” He ushered her into the room and closed the door behind her.

  Emara’s office was small, with an attached bathroom—about what Xhea expected given the skyscraper’s origins. A curtained window in the far wall let in daylight and provided a glimpse of the City above, the floating Towers, and the cloudless sky beyond. Emara herself sat at a desk that was nearly invisible beneath a weight of paper and boxes, a cobbled-together monitor flickering on the desk’s far edge. Her dark hair, streaked with gray, was in thick braids that wrapped around her head like a victor’s crown. A frizzy crown, now: escaping wisps formed an uneven halo about her face.

  No crossed blades on the wall. No mounted knives; no trophies; no pictures of a younger Emara in the arena, arms raised, triumphant. But then weapons hardly went with the peeling floral wallpaper.

  Emara looked up. She had her father’s sharp features and dusky skin, with fine freckles spotting her nose and cheekbones like an afterthought. Her eyes, shadowed by short lashes, seemed to see everything and reveal nothing. It was uncomfortable to stand beneath that gaze, Xhea thought, as Emara’s attention came to rest upon her. But what was a little more discomfort, a little more pain?

  Emara looked Xhea up and down, clearly taking in the changes in her attire. “Well,” she said, “perhaps this won’t be quite as difficult as I thought.”

  Xhea shrugged and reached for the nearest chair without invitation, dragging it toward her and collapsing against the hard seat. She was still trying to slow her breathing.

  “For you or for me?”

  Instead of answering, Emara turned away and half closed her eyes as she reached one hand before her. A moment and she turned, face slightly upraised as if seeking the sun; another moment and she turned again.

  “Ah,” Emara murmured. Her eyes snapped open and she stared in Shai’s general direction. “There you are. Hello.”

  Shai blinked. “She can’t see me, can she?”

  “No,” Xhea said.

  “No,” Emara echoed. “I can’t see you, if that’s what you’re asking. But I can feel you there, just a little. Thank you for coming.”

  “I, well—tell her you’re welcome, I guess,” Shai said, flustered. Xhea passed along the message.

  Emara was far too magic-poor to see the light that Shai cast, unless the ghost radiated into the visual spectrum, and none but Xhea could truly see the ghost—Xhea and the night walkers, the mindless, once-human creatures that walked the Lower City’s streets in darkness. Yet most could feel a ghost: a disturbance in the air, a feeling of cold or pressure, the unnerving sense that someone unseen was watching. Most dismissed such feelings as imagination or nerves—until they had been haunted themselves. Even so, most haunted individuals waited weeks, months, sometimes even years before admitting that the strange sensations were anything other than the effects of grief or nerves or flat-out craziness.

  Xhea leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, attempting with practiced nonchalance to hide her discomfort. The chair’s hard wooden rails dug into her shoulder blades.

  “So,” she said, breaking the silence. “I made it here. What new questions do you have for me?”

  Emara smiled thinly. “Actually, this isn’t about your adventures yesterday. I wanted to talk about you—you and Shai both.”

  Xhea raised an eyebrow.

  “First I wanted to discuss your healing process. You’re actually up during the day and properly dressed, which is good to see, though your continued struggles to walk are somewhat concerning. I spoke with your medic. She feels that by now your healing should have advanced to the point where you no longer need the cane.”

  Oh, yes, Xhea could suddenly see where this conversation was going. Emara thought she was faking it—or, at the very least, exaggerating her pain and difficulties far beyond their true boundaries. And why not? Meals and a bed with fresh sheets, access to showers and bathrooms, not to mention the free meds—few could imagine that she’d want anything more. Fewer still would believe that she’d come to like the tunnels, the freedom and the safety that they provided.

  Xhea just shrugged. “Easy for her to say. She hasn’t so much as looked at my knee since the cast came off.”

  “Why should she? Her work is done; the rest is up to you.”

  “I can barely walk!”

  “That doesn’t impress me, Xhea. I’ve seen your injuries—I’ve had injuries like yours.”

  Xhea snorted. “Oh, are we bonding now? Is this where we show each other our scars, and you tell me just how much you understand how it feels to be me?”

  “No,” Emara said, leaning back as she stared steadily at Xhea. “This is where you stop acting like a fool—or so I’d hop
ed. This is where you realize that being helpless and unable to walk is the last thing you need right now.”

  “Do you think I haven’t been trying?” Xhea shouted. Her anger came fast and sudden, and again she felt her magic stir deep with her: a bare whisper, but there.

  “No, I know you’ve been trying. You just haven’t been trying enough.” Before Xhea could speak, Emara leaned forward again onto her desk’s cluttered surface. “The healing spells don’t work well for you, I get that. But I also know that you’ve spent most of your time in your room. You haven’t been doing your exercises, and yes,” she said, speaking over Xhea’s protest, “they hurt. I know. But you can’t tell me that there’s nothing more you could have done—that you’ve given recovery your full effort and attention.”

  Xhea glared.

  “Shai?” Emara looked in the ghost’s direction. “Am I wrong? You would know better than I.”

  “You know she’s not wrong, Xhea,” Shai said softly. Xhea ignored her.

  “Why do you even care?” she asked dismissively. “Let’s not pretend that you’ve suddenly become overwhelmed with concern for my health and well-being.”

  Emara smiled, and something about that thin, tight-lipped expression made Xhea realize how truly exhausted the woman looked.

  “Because we need you.”

  Xhea drew back at that, surprised. She caught herself a moment later. She couldn’t undo the reaction, but she made her face relax, made herself sag back into the chair’s uncomfortable embrace.

  “So? Or better yet, why? If this is another attempt at an indenture contract, I swear—”

  “Stop it.” Only weariness in that voice, now; no command. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what?”

  Emara looked from Xhea to the space where Shai hovered and back again, then sighed and ran a hand across her face. “You tell me,” she said at last. “Have you considered the effects of Shai’s presence here? At the current rate, Shai produces more magic in a day than Edren’s dedicated citizenship does in eight months.”

  “But—but I’m not even tied to Edren,” Shai protested, echoing Xhea’s own thoughts; Xhea repeated the words for them both.