Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  The leftward passage led toward Orren and Senn. It was a direct route—and the direction that many of the footsteps led. Yet Xhea turned away, dismissing her old enemy—hers and Edren’s alike—with little more than a glance.

  The rightward passage, its walls lined with old advertisements, went toward a food court. From there, passages branched out: a path to the nearest subway station, a set of doors that led to part of the main underground mall, and a dead escalator that led to the surface. And the song.

  “This way,” she said, and turned.

  There was a curve in the hall, then five stairs and a wheelchair ramp that led to the food court. She had to get there. She had to hurry.

  Mercks called to her, but it was Shai’s voice that cut through the haze: “Xhea, stop! Don’t you feel it?”

  Xhea reached the ramp and grabbed the rusted railing, yet even as she pulled herself up, some part of her understood Shai’s meaning. For underneath the urgency, there was a feeling that crawled down her spine and settled in the base of her stomach where her magic lay, weak and quiescent. A sense of slow and certain dread.

  But the song …

  “I can hear—” Xhea said, and stumbled to a stop.

  She couldn’t hear anything. There was nothing: no song, no sound, nothing but the echoing silence of these dead and empty passages. Xhea looked down at her palm. It was dark with her blood—and something more. As she watched, a thin wisp of black lifted from her palm, curling up and away. Xhea gasped as the last of the foreign magic fled from her, vanishing into the air.

  Dread. It hit suddenly, like a weight in her stomach, a quiver in her muscles that had nothing to do with fatigue. This was what Shai had meant—this feeling, its weight in hands and heart. Dread that felt every bit as strong as the inexplicable attraction that still drew her forward, step by step.

  There was something here, she knew with a cold and sudden certainty. Something watching. Something waiting. The dust-coated tables seemed undisturbed, as did many of the old counters—but footsteps marked the passage of more than one person across this ground. Yet she saw no movement, nothing to betray what pulled and repelled her in equal measure.

  “What happened?” she whispered. She glanced around, trying to orient herself; the past few minutes felt like a dream from which she struggled to wake.

  This, she thought in echo of Shai, was a very bad idea. The back of her neck crawled as if there was an unseen target painted between her shoulder blades. She was unarmed, unable to run, and had a drugged and semi-incapacitated man at her side. They should have sent a whole group of guards; they should have sent the arena’s best fighters with their spelled weapons and blade-scarred armor; they should have boarded up the stairs, barricaded the entrances, and prepared for whatever disaster was even now bearing down upon them.

  They should never have let her down here.

  Mercks struggled to climb the stairs. “I don’t know, you just—” he started, when an unknown voice interrupted.

  “I called you,” someone said, the voice high and child-like. Xhea looked up as a small figure stepped out from behind a food-court counter.

  Xhea blinked, staring. Not just child-like, but a child. A boy.

  He walked away from the counter that had concealed him and out into the maze of tables bolted to the dusty floor. His hands were loose by his sides. His hair was pale, tousled like it wanted to curl, and a spray of freckles patterned the fair skin of his nose and cheeks. His clothes, Xhea noted, were dirty and mismatched—but beneath the evidence of poor treatment, they were hardly worn. Almost new.

  He looked no more than six years old.

  Like Xhea, he stood here easily, no sweat across his face, no tremor in his hands. His pale eyes were clear and steady, without the glazed look of drugs; he bore no chains or wounds or other evidence of coercion. He showed no pain. When Mercks trained the beam of the flashlight full on his face, he barely flinched from that light—nor did he have a light of his own. Like Xhea, he needed none.

  Xhea opened her mouth, but could not speak; only stared as the implications of what she saw crashed and cascaded through her mind. The attacker—the dark magic caster she had so feared—was a child?

  Mercks showed no such hesitance. Though he had his light trained on the boy, and his weapon still in his hand, he spoke with the gentleness Xhea remembered from her first few nights limping through Edren’s halls.

  “Son?” he said. “What are you doing here? Are you all right?”

  The boy turned to Mercks, and Mercks stopped speaking mid-word. There was a long moment of silence, and then Mercks began again to shiver. Lightly at first, then harder, his muscles spasming as if he were not experiencing a simple reaction to pain and cold, but heading toward a seizure. The beam of his flashlight slipped from the boy’s face to dance across the dirty floor; the point of his weapon, brought to bear, dipped as his shaking fingers attempted to keep their grip.

  “Mercks?” Xhea asked. She reached a hesitant hand toward him, but would not—could not—touch him. Not unless she could somehow help; otherwise, she’d only make his reaction worse.

  The boy just looked at him, watching as Mercks stumbled on the top step and fell to his knees, gasping for air. A cloud of dust swirled at the impact. Xhea turned to Shai for help, and only then did she realize Shai wasn’t with her. She reached with mental hands, following the tether that joined them, and could feel the ghost just out of sight beyond the hall’s curve. Xhea glanced back, but even Shai’s light was dim; only the faintest glow betrayed her presence.

  She had heeded the warning, that feeling of dread—a warning that Mercks hadn’t felt at all, and Xhea had ignored. The boy was small and skinny, and something in his careful movements made her think of someone afflicted by long illness; surely he was no threat. Still some instinct told her to flee from him, as fast and as far as she could.

  “Why’d you bring him down here?” the boy asked. “It’s hurting him.” He looked up and met Xhea’s eyes, his head tilting in sudden question. “He is yours, right?”

  “Mine?” Xhea blinked. “What, I—no. He’s not mine.”

  At that the boy seemed to perk up. “Oh! Can I have him?”

  “For what?” she asked incredulously.

  “I’m hungry.”

  Xhea stared.

  Even from twenty feet away, Xhea did not disbelieve him; there was something in his expression that spoke of hunger. Yet despite his skinny frame and the hollows of his cheeks, she knew he was not starving. She had seen starving in the Lower City streets. She had felt starving, the way that hunger turned to pain and then only to absence, a lack so great that it stole sleep and thought and strength.

  No, what was writ large on those young features was wanting. But there was no food here, only a man collapsed on the dust-coated tile—and it was that man, weak and shivering, that held the boy’s gaze. Xhea watched as the boy lifted a hand toward Mercks as if, even so far away, he was a bit of fruit on a plate, unwatched and ripe for the taking.

  As he reached out, Xhea saw tangled in his fingers the finest thread of a tether. She squinted, following the near-invisible line to its end between the shoulder blades of a ghost. Or, she thought, what had once been a ghost.

  Ghosts, to her, had always looked like people: if not always as strong or intense as the living, then every bit as real. This figure, pulled in the boy’s wake, was nearly as invisible as the tether that bound them—a shape more felt than seen.

  Xhea could just make out the rough outline of features: a tangle of hair, a slash of a mouth, two darker shadows in place of eyes. Still, she knew him; knew that slumped posture, the defeat of his pose. His hands were no longer in his mouth—for his hands, she saw, weren’t there at all. Nor were his legs. He was but an impression of a person, his limbs—his very self—vanishing into nothingness.

  Gone, she thought. No movement in the figure now, neither that frantic energy nor the confused wandering that she had seen the night before, nothing m
ore than a gentle sway like fabric caught in a sluggish breeze. No words, whispered or screamed or otherwise. No face.

  Xhea looked again to the boy. Eater of ghosts, she thought in shock, and shuddered.

  Her shudder caught his eye. Again, the boy looked at her—then his expression changed. He took a step toward her, and another, his face suddenly alight.

  “You don’t have a bondling?” he asked.

  Xhea shook her head, not understanding. “What do you mean?”

  Closer he walked, his steps mere whispers against the ground. “You have no binding. You’ve claimed no one?”

  “No,” she said, confused. “I—”

  He reached for her.

  No, she thought in sudden understanding—not for her, but for the tether that joined her to Shai. Xhea stumbled back and back again, her stick clutched like an awkward weapon, her hand raised as if magic might pour from her fingers at her desperate call.

  She had thought her power gone. Not gone, she realized now as she felt the magic curl in the depths of her fear-clenched stomach; never gone, but exhausted. Dark magic, she thought. Death magic. A power of ash and endings.

  And oh, what use was that power against one so much more skilled at its wielding? For already she could see dark power twining around his fingers—and not the drifting, aimless smoke with which she was so familiar, but a coil of dark that moved with purpose and intent.

  It wasn’t the boy she needed to fear, but the sound that his movement—the sounds that her own ragged breath, and Mercks’s—had concealed. Shai cried a warning from her hiding place.

  Too late.

  Xhea turned to see two men clad in dark, mismatched clothes come around the corner, goggles over their eyes to let them see in the dark. Mercks struggled to his feet, gasping and trembling, to face them. The shorter one kicked the flashlight from his hand, sending it spinning across the floor, while the taller one wrenched the weapon from Mercks’s hand with a single, wicked twist. Even so, Mercks stood, trying to put his body between the attackers and Xhea.

  The taller one grabbed Mercks, twisted him around, and pulled him close to his chest. “Sorry, friend,” he murmured into Mercks’s ear. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  Xhea only saw the blade in the shorter man’s hand as it plunged into Mercks’s side. Mercks did not scream, only groaned as he curled in on himself, folding over the wound. The taller one released him and Mercks sagged, sliding off the blade as he tumbled to the floor and down the stairs.

  His hands shook as he pressed them to the wound, sliding, fumbling. To Xhea’s eyes, his hands were already black with blood.

  “No,” she whispered. She moved toward him—only to have the attackers turn their attention to her. Their goggles obscured their faces, but she knew that voice, she knew those hands. They were Rown hunters, and one of them was female.

  Leaving Mercks on the floor they came at Xhea, one on either side of her, blocking her escape as they reached for her. They grabbed her by the arms, their heavy gloves enough to make them no more than flinch at her touch. Her walking stick clattered to the ground.

  “Well, well,” the man said. Xhea could hear the smile in his voice. “Would you look who it is? Imagine seeing you down here.”

  The other said nothing at all, just wiped her bloody knife on the sleeve of her coat.

  “Hold her still,” the boy said, coming closer, and reached once more for the tether.

  “Stay back,” Xhea cried—not to the hunters, nor the boy, but to her friend. “Shai—run!”

  Xhea felt the moment the boy’s hand closed around the tether. There was a sudden, wrenching jerk, as if the tether itself had come alive and tried to force the boy’s hand away—to no avail. There came a wave of cold, and a sense of invasion so strong that Xhea could do nothing but cry out.

  Again she tried to call her magic, but the boy was stronger. His magic—dark magic, death magic—rose around her in a cloud. She opened her mouth to scream but the magic just poured into her, mouth and nose, eyes and ears, and suddenly all she knew was darkness. She felt herself stumbling, sagging, as unconsciousness came to claim her.

  “Shai,” she tried to say, once, desperately.

  The tether binding them snapped.

  In the darkness, Shai listened.

  She told herself that it was caution that slowed her steps in Xhea’s wake; caution that bid her pause out of sight of whomever or whatever she could feel waiting beyond the hall’s curve. Only caution that made her draw her power to her and damp it down tightly, restricting her magic and its ever-present glow until its pressure within her felt akin to pain.

  Caution sounded so much better than fear.

  But caution did not make one’s hands shake or breath become short—physical habits both that even death hadn’t broken. Caution did not make one cower in the darkness or want to flee, leaving everyone else behind.

  Fear did that. Fear and cowardice and the terrible weight of helplessness.

  Why aren’t you doing anything? she thought as she hid and cringed away. Knowing that there was nothing, nothing she could do to stop what she heard happening.

  Shai covered her mouth with her hand, fingers shaking. Her life had been short; her time in the Lower City shorter still. Even so, she recognized the sound of a knife being drawn; knew what pain sounded like, and the sound of a grown man falling to the floor. Shai knew, too, what Xhea sounded like when she was afraid: that edge to her words—and, between them, that low, almost inaudible sound that not even her clenched jaw could hold back. A whimper that the girl refused to voice.

  Absent gods, Shai thought. Please, please …

  “Stay back,” Xhea cried. “Shai—run!”

  Yet Shai stood frozen, quivering, as if her incorporeal self had become part of the wall; as if her tether bound her not to Xhea, but to this place, this moment, this sick dread and terror.

  Something grabbed her tether. Shai gasped, recoiling—but the tether held her tight.

  It was not Xhea; that Shai knew in an instant. Dark though her power was, Xhea’s touch never felt so sharp or so cold—nor would Xhea force her to act against her will. But Shai could feel the tether now attempting to do just that, commanding her to step forward when she wanted to pull away, and she fought it for all she was worth.

  Since her death, the tether had felt as much a part of Shai as her hands or legs; yet at her resistance, it writhed and twisted like some wild creature, turning against her. It slowly, slowly, dragged her forward. She struggled against it, frantically, desperately; she grabbed for the wall to hold herself in place and her hand passed through without stopping. There was nothing she could reach, nothing she could hold, yet still she fought for purchase, flailing against the empty air.

  Dark magic rushed through the tether and washed over her, through her, sharp and cold. Everything around her went black.

  “No!” she cried as that chilling black stole the world from her. She screamed and screamed and could not hear her own voice. She reached with desperate hands to grab something, anything—but suddenly she could not see her own self, nor could she feel anything against her hands or skin—

  No ground beneath her feet, no light of her magic—

  No heat nor chill, no sight of anything at all—

  Only a howling black nothing, and that nothing yawned wide to swallow her whole. She was dissolving, unraveling, and she screamed and screamed in silence.

  In her terror, her magic flared. Light shone from her, brilliant as sunlight, pushing back the darkness that dug into her like claws—and, somewhere distant, a spark flared in echo. Shai saw the light, and reached for it, clutched at it—held tight with her whole being, all her fear and wanting and the desperate need to exist, and pulled. For a moment, she was caught between life and that chill hunger, being torn into a thousand pieces to be scattered wide.

  There came a rush of emotion, a surge of pain and anger and regret—emotions not her own. Emotions that suddenly stopped, that torrent repla
ced only by echoing silence. Still Shai pulled against the darkness that dug into her, fighting desperately to be free.

  The tether connecting her to Xhea snapped.

  Shai flew, fell—she did not know, only gasped as reality crashed upon her in a wave of light, sound, and sensation. She collapsed, limp and exhausted, unable even to open her eyes. She was in the underground once more, sprawled on the chill and dusty hall floor, and for a moment she could do nothing but quiver.

  “What was that?” she whispered at last, dazed and hurting. It felt as if those dark claws had begun pulling her apart in truth; her body, her very existence, felt as tenuous and scattered as her thoughts. The words, as she spoke them, felt like an anchor: something real to cling to, their sound echoing in her ears. “Oh, absent gods, what was that?”

  Not death—true death—nor what might wait beyond, no matter her fears that she was but skirting the edge of oblivion. No, not death, but something real and vast and hungry.

  It was the boy, she thought in sudden realization. The child she’d heard—she’d felt—waiting for them in the underground, the boy whose presence alone had made her flee. In spite of everything, he had nearly caught her.

  And Xhea—

  It was only then that Shai understood what she had felt but moments before, caught between that darkness and the light she’d used to haul herself back into the living world, screaming in pain. Understood that snapping recoil against her sternum, the shock that even now echoed through her.

  Understood the ache of sudden absence.

  Xhea. Beyond, Shai could hear voices, scuffing feet, the sound of Xhea’s stick rolling across the floor. Footsteps walking away. No sound of Xhea’s voice; no one walking, or limping, towards Edren.

  Shai forced her eyes open. There was no sign of the spark of light that she’d used to return to the living world, only a wall before her. She blinked as she realized it was Edren’s foundation near the damaged barricade, a full hall’s length from where she’d been standing. Even now she held tight to Edren—and not just with her spectral hands, fingers splayed against the dirty wall, but with her magic, her whole self. Power flowed from her unthinkingly, bathing the wall, the ground at her feet, the dusty air around her in a soft, golden light.