Carefully, Shai expanded the aura of her magic to encompass him, bathing him in her radiant glow. With her free hand Shai lit another light, that he might know she was beside him, however long or slow his journey might be.
“It’s okay,” Shai murmured to him, knowing he could not hear her and speaking nonetheless. “We’ll go together.”
Water hit Xhea’s face: drip, drip, drip.
She flinched, squeezing her eyes tight against the drops, and tried to turn away. Her neck felt weak, her head too light and swollen like a balloon, and she ended up only thrashing ineffectually against the pillow.
“Hey,” a voice said. A weight settled across her chest. Again came the water: drip, drip, drip, against her closed eyes and the bridge of her nose and in the exact center of her forehead. “Come on, wake up.”
Xhea blinked and looked up into the pale face that hovered above her own, blurry and indistinct. Again she blinked, water running like tears down her cheeks, and her vision cleared. For a moment she stared at the boy above her: pale skin with a smattering of freckles across his nose, a tangle of poorly cut hair falling into gray eyes that she guessed were blue. He leaned across her body, his right forearm and most of his weight resting on her collarbones, his left hand raised and dripping.
It’s the boy, she thought in sudden recognition. The dark magic child, eater of ghosts—the one who had stolen her away. She remembered that power washing over her.
He met her gaze, smiled, and flicked water from his dripping fingers across her face. Laughed.
“Enough sleeping,” he said. “Come on, get up.”
She remembered Shai’s tether snapping.
Xhea flailed, pushing the boy roughly aside and placing her splayed-fingered hand across her upper chest, reopening the wound on her hand. Beneath the layers of her shirt and jacket, she felt only the hard bone of her sternum, her collarbone, the arches of her ribs. No tether.
“Shai?” she said aloud, trying and failing to hide her growing panic. “Shai?”
No answer. The boy just frowned as he sat back, his hand poised over a glass of water as he considered whether to splash her again.
If Shai wasn’t here, if her tether was gone, then she—
Then the boy—
No.
“What did you do?” Xhea hissed. “What did you do to Shai?”
“Who?”
Xhea reached out to grab him, heedless of her bloody palm, but he scrambled away, eyes wide. The glass he had been holding slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor, spraying water across the small room.
“The ghost! The one bound to me.”
“She wasn’t bound, you said so yourself,” he protested. At her look, he raised his hands in innocence. “I didn’t do anything. Bright magic broke the tether.”
“Bright magic …?”
The boy misunderstood. “I know, right? Weird. Don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t me, I swear.”
Shai’s okay, Xhea reassured herself. She had to be. If she had somehow used her power to cut the tether that joined them, then she had escaped the boy and whatever it was he had attempted with that sudden surge of dark magic. Shai wasn’t like other ghosts, who simply vanished from the world when their tethers were cut; she had been untethered before.
Despite her mental reassurances, Xhea felt sick. Xhea had been the reason for Shai’s death, no matter that it had seemed a kindness; she couldn’t imagine if her carelessness had banished Shai from the living world entirely.
She’s all right, Xhea thought again. Just smart enough to stay far away from this boy.
Carefully, she looked around as she pressed a bit of her sleeve to the cut in her hand. Small room with stained breezeblock walls, the narrow bed on which she lay pushed into one corner, with another bed against the opposite wall. Thick, plump pillows beneath her head; a warm, fuzzy blanket pulled over her legs and chest—the bedding wholly at odds with the room’s signs of neglect.
It was only then that Xhea realized that the boy had not just known a ghost had been tethered to her, but had been sitting beside her. Leaning on her. Splashing her in the face with his bare hand.
He’d come closer again, peering down at the glass and the puddle of water on the floor.
“I’m not cleaning that, you know. It’s your fault.”
Xhea grabbed him by the wrist. He was tinier than she had expected; even her small hand could close around his arm with ease.
“Hey,” he protested, startled. He tried to pull away.
Even weak and disoriented, Xhea was far stronger. She stared at her hand closed around his wrist, touching skin to skin. No shock in that touch. No discomfort. For all the reaction—his or hers—she might have been touching her own flesh.
Nor did he have any reaction to being underground—and they were underground, she knew. She did not know this place or these walls, but she knew the smell of air rarely stirred, of dust and damp and closed-in spaces. She knew this type of silence, echoing halls where no other footsteps fell. She knew, too, the way that being underground seemed to lift a previously unfelt weight from her shoulders and loosen the invisible bands that constricted her breathing.
And here the boy sat, his wrist in her hand, showing no more discomfort than she did.
Xhea opened her fingers, letting him slip away, and struggled to sit. It was dark in this room, no light nor distant glow from beneath the closed door. Yet he looked at her, he met her eyes.
“What are you?” she asked.
He shrugged, the movement so much like her habitual gesture that for a moment Xhea could but stare. The boy crossed the room to the bed that stood against the other wall, twin to her own. He flopped down on the sheets and stared at the bare concrete of the ceiling.
“Bored,” he said at last, as if that were a reasonable response. “Hungry.”
Sitting, the world seemed to swing and sway around her, but that was familiar enough. Xhea breathed slowly until the dizziness passed, then maneuvered her legs out from beneath the blanket, grateful her knee brace hadn’t been removed while she was unconscious. A moment longer and she was able to push herself carefully to her feet. With no stick to support her, and muscles vehemently protesting their recent overuse, walking was a slow process—but that, too, was familiar.
She reached the door and tried the handle. It turned, but when she went to pull the door open, it only rattled. The sound, she thought, of a padlock on the door’s other side.
“They locked it,” he said, as if that should have been obvious. “They always do.”
“They?” Xhea asked. Her abductors had been from skyscraper Rown, that much she knew without question—but had they been acting on behalf of their skyscraper, or only hired to do another’s job? This room, clean and neat for all that it was underground, didn’t look much like the decaying, half-flooded tunnels that she knew near Rown; but who knew what the foundations of the skyscraper itself looked like?
Again she rattled the door, harder this time, until it shook on its hinges. She wanted, suddenly, to scream or pound her fists against the door’s surface. Weak magic stirred in her stomach; she wished for power enough to destroy the door and handle both, leave them nothing but dust and ash.
“I used to have a room up high,” the boy said, ignoring her question. “Nicer than this, I guess, though everything here’s pretty crooked. No locks on that door.”
He looked at her then, face so open, almost eager, just waiting for her to ask him why he’d been moved, why he was kept now behind locked doors. He sighed dramatically when she remained silent, and continued anyway. “I’d used up my bondling, see, and no one understood that I really needed a replacement, and so I just,”—again, that shrug—“took one. He’s gone now, too, and the people here are almost empty.” He said this as if it were proof of some great trial.
Xhea glared at the door before limping back to the bed on which she’d woken. Glared at the boy, too, which he appeared not to notice. Gone was the dread she’d felt in
the hallway, once and again, at his presence. Gone, too, was that strange pull, as if she were nothing but iron drawn toward a magnet.
Except …
Xhea frowned, considering. Even when she turned her back to the boy she could feel his presence, almost as if he were a ghost. Almost—but not quite. For all the familiarity of the sensation, that awareness of someone, something, outside herself, she would never have mistaken him for a bodiless spirit.
He felt somehow darker, colder—as if her touch against his skin would find not warm flesh, nor a ghost’s subtle chill, but something sharp like ice. Was this, she wondered, the sensation that others complained of when they touched her?
She was not the only one with dark magic; it should have been a revelation. As it was, Xhea found herself wishing she could throttle the kid, if only it would stop his incessant sighing and eye rolling and the grating irritation of his superior tone.
Carefully, she limped back to her bed and sat, trying to catch her breath.
“What do you mean, ‘bondling’?” Xhea asked at last.
The boy gave her an exasperated look. “I know what you are,” he said.
“What I am?”
“Maybe you can hide it from the rest of these people,” at this he gestured about the empty room dismissively, “but not me. Weak as you are, I still know.”
“Weak?” she asked quietly, dangerously. Throttling him seemed more appealing by the minute.
Again, that look. “Well, you can’t exactly be very strong, can you? You’re older than me, that’s for sure. Older by far.”
Xhea snorted. “And how old are you?”
“Eight,” he said proudly. She blinked at that; he looked smaller, younger. Even Lower City street kids looked older than he did, scrawny and underfed as they were. But when Xhea didn’t reply, his shoulders slumped and his gaze dropped to the floor between them. “Okay, fine. I’m ten.”
As if those two extra years were a source of shame.
After a pause, he said, “This is my last job, this lifting. A few weeks, maybe a month or two, and then …” He shrugged and closed his eyes. “Maybe faster if all the ghosts down here are so insubstantial. How do you do it? Live like this?”
Xhea didn’t answer; something in the finality of those words had caught her attention. She looked at him then, truly looked, ignoring the mask of his expression, the veil of his tousled hair. She remembered her thought when she’d first seen him, that he had been wasted by some long illness. Now, he rested on the bed as if his burst of energy had been exhausted; his face glistened with sweat. His skin was not just pale, she realized, but sallow, and his breath came short and fast.
“You are ill,” Xhea said.
The boy just looked at her, his expression something that she could not read, before he nodded. Xhea made to speak—but whatever she was going to say went unvoiced, for from the hall came the sound of footsteps. She tensed and eyed the door, listening.
Two sets of footsteps, a rattle in the lock, and then the door swung wide to reveal two dark-clad figures, each with a flashlight in hand. The two who had grabbed her in the corridor beyond Edren’s barrier, and dragged her here. Except their goggles were off now, and their gloves.
“Oh, good,” the taller one said to the boy. “You didn’t kill her. That’s a pleasant surprise.”
Xhea was on her feet before she thought, and not even the sharp pain in her knee stopped her from flying across the room and grabbing the taller figure by the arm. She wrapped both her hands around his wrist, one atop the other, and squeezed hard so that he could not easily shake her off. Magic rose with her anger, and thin and weak though it was, it flowed fast through her hands to her kidnapper’s skin. He’d only flinched when she touched him—but now, her magic soaking into him, he cried out in true pain.
But it was the boy who moved, leaping forward to pull her away. She clung for a moment, appreciating the sound of the man’s cry and its echoes, before releasing her hold, leaving a bloody handprint in her wake. Even now, she thought, with dark magic swirling about her fingers, the boy did not flinch from her touch, did not recoil.
“What are you doing?” he cried, incredulous. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
Xhea just shook her head and hands both, flicking away the smoke-like whispers of black that trailed from her fingers.
“Hello, Torrence,” she said, low and vicious as she glared at the pair in the doorway. “Hello, Daye. How nice to see you again.”
That’s for abducting me, she thought to them, staring daggers. That’s for Mercks. And, if she had her way, it was only the beginning of her retribution.
Torrence stared, holding his arm. Beneath the bloody smear, Xhea could see the white imprint of her hands against his tanned skin. Not dead flesh, she thought, not after so slight a contact—though she realized some part of her would not have cared if he lost the hand. It would have served him right.
Sometimes pawns fight back.
Despite everything, Torrence looked at her, looked at his arm, and laughed. It was not a mean laugh, not mocking, but Xhea still stiffened in response.
“It seems our darling girl has teeth after all,” he said, and smiled his broad, white smile as if nothing in the world were wrong. He rubbed the whitened skin on his arm once more, then pulled down his sleeve.
From behind him, his partner, Daye, made a sound that was very much like a snort, pushed past Torrence, and slammed the door shut in their wake. Where Torrence was tall and blond, handsome and always wearing his carefully crafted façade of friendliness, Daye was short and firmly muscled, with a stern mouth that never smiled and a hard face framed by short, dark hair.
They were not—had never been—Xhea’s friends; yet she had worked with them over the years until they had the sort of easy camaraderie that was the closest Xhea had ever come to friendship. Both were near as magic-poor as Xhea had once assumed herself; both generated so little magic as to barely have a magical signature, never mind the ability to work spells. They, too, had turned that weakness into a strength. With the right preparation, both could travel underground, searching the ruins and underground passages for salvage. When the materials they had been hired to find ran too deep, they’d hired Xhea.
There had been months that she’d eaten only because of that work.
Not that it mattered now. As far as Xhea was concerned, their business relationship had been permanently severed on the day they accepted a contract from Tower Eridian to track and kidnap Xhea by whatever means necessary. Eridian had only wanted Shai and her power, and had seen Xhea as the easiest means to get her. That Torrence and Daye had failed in those attempts at capture two months before did absolutely nothing to endear the pair.
Especially not now that they had at last succeeded.
Xhea looked from Torrence to Daye, seeing in their eyes the too bright gleam that she associated with the drugs they took to numb them to the pain of the underground. Recognized, too, their clothing, that mottled collection of dark. In some places the cloth had been patched and re-sewn; in others, the fabric thinned to mere threads, edges torn and trailing. On that fraying backdrop, Rown’s mark had been stitched.
Xhea felt a wave of tiredness wash over her, leaving her feeling too hot and too cold, and making her knee throb. She hated to look weak in front of the bounty hunters, but there was nothing for it; glaring over her shoulder, Xhea staggered, dizzy, back to her bed. The boy followed in her wake, apparently satisfied that she was not going to attack their guests again.
“What are you here for, anyway?” Xhea asked Torrence and Daye. “I’m here; your job is done. Shouldn’t you be upstairs collecting your renai?”
Torrence ignored her and instead smiled down on the boy. “Ieren, my boy, feeling any better?”
The boy—Ieren—shrugged. “Still hungry.” For a moment Xhea saw something flicker in his eyes, a pale shadow of the craving that she’d seen writ naked across his expression before. Xhea shivered. Just the chill, she told herself
. Just the aftereffects of the magic.
She’d never been good at lying to herself.
“Then I have good news for you, my friend,” Torrence said. “The boss has cleared you to make a little visit to the medic. Sound good?”
At that word, “medic,” Ieren leapt up from his bed and stood swaying, face eager. “Can we go now?” he asked. “I’m so hungry.”
Torrence gestured toward the door, allowing the boy to walk ahead of him. Xhea could just stare. The medic, she thought. He’s going to visit the medic to eat.
And oh, would that she did not understand; would that her anger or her magic or the renewed spinning in her head clouded her thoughts so that she did not see what was about to happen. Though she’d never been to visit a Lower City medic, nor sat as a patient in one of their clinics, no matter how crude, she’d felt what was inside. Or, rather, who.
People who stayed in the living world were bound to their unfinished business, whether that was a place or a person. “Unfinished business” could be great and noble things: love, sacrifice, duty. It could be hard and vicious things, like hatred or the desire for revenge. But just as often, it was something small: the desire to rest, a hope for pain’s ease, a simple denial of the inevitability of death. Places where people died were often thick with ghosts, and unless someone was paying her, Xhea avoided them like the plague.
Eater of ghosts, she thought again, and shuddered.
If Torrence knew why Ieren wished to go to the medic, whole and unwounded as the boy was, he gave no sign.
“Play nice, darlin’,” he said to Xhea, and though he smiled, she saw all too clearly the threat behind his pleasant expression. It was easy to remember to be wary around Daye—the woman’s cold expression, heavily scarred knuckles, and easy access to the knives on her belt guaranteed that—but Torrence? She’d once seen him smile and joke with a man for a good ten minutes, only to bring a brick down on the man’s head the moment his back was turned. He’d cheated them a while back, Torrence had explained; Daye had just shrugged, rummaged through the man’s pockets, and rolled him into a nearby alley without once checking whether he was still breathing.
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