Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “Citizenship, Xhea. I’m offering to renew your full citizenship in Farrow—and that’s just to start.”

  “Renew?” Xhea scoffed. “I never lived in Farrow.” She’d never even been a citizen of Orren, for all that she’d lived within Orren’s crooked walls and still had their indenture contract hanging over her head.

  “You did,” Ahrent said simply. “You were born a citizen of Farrow. You lived here with your family until you were taken from us.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Xhea’s voice was cold and hard and flat. “I never lived here. I don’t have a family. I never did.”

  “You did. And I can prove it.”

  His opening words came back to her, echoing through her mind as if from somewhere impossibly far away: Welcome home.

  She wanted to speak some hard, flat denial. She wanted to roll her eyes, and push back in her chair, and wave her hand dismissively as if to knock his words from the air like flies.

  But all she could do was stare. Her whole body had become strangely light, as if she were but a ghost barely tethered to her ailing flesh. All her words, all her thoughts, had drained from her, leaving her empty and echoing.

  When at last she could speak, all she said was, “Show me.”

  It took a very long time to walk to their destination, some ten stories and two very long hallways away. They went in silence, and even Xhea did not complain at the pace.

  She had been on her feet too long, and even longer without painkillers. She wanted to walk tall, strong, confident. Yet no amount of will was enough to straighten her shoulders or lift her head; and her feet, as she walked, all but dragged along the worn carpet. Every movement hurt.

  Even so, she felt the weight of Daye’s attention upon her, as if the bounty hunter expected her to suddenly run. No flight risk here, Xhea thought irritably.

  At last, Ahrent unlocked an apartment door and gestured her inside. Xhea stepped cautiously into the shadowed space.

  There was a sagging couch in one corner and a knotted rug spread across the floor. A single low table made from bricks and a warped board stood in the center of the room, upon which rested a chipped teacup. The next room was a kitchen, which even had a few cupboards left; and there was a narrow hall, down which Xhea could catch a glimpse of two more doors.

  No beds on the floor; no sign of small personal spaces claimed in corners. One person lived here, or two. In Orren, a space like this would have held ten people or more; only the skyscraper’s most powerful families had anything like this kind of personal room.

  It was nice—beyond nice. Never mind her tunnel corners or the back room in Edren with its rusting cot; this was luxury. Yet as she looked around, Xhea felt a kind of empty disappointment.

  “It’s nice and all,” she said with a shrug, “but I don’t really see …”

  “Here.” Ahrent crossed the room and pulled a photo from the wall. He handed it to her.

  She saw the back first. Ennaline and Enjeia, age 4, said the hand-written words.

  “This isn’t me,” Xhea said as she turned it over. “That’s not my—”

  Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe.

  It was not her name, no—at least not any name she remembered—nor was the child in the picture in any way familiar: a small girl with dark, tangled hair, dusky skin and a slight upward tilt to her eyes. It might have been her. Then again, it might have been any number of young girls who roamed the Lower City streets, then or now.

  But the woman in the picture …

  If asked, Xhea would have said that she remembered almost nothing of her life before Abelane found her on the streets. She had only snatches of memory, incomplete fragments with edges so sharp she had little desire to handle them. The cold. The thick, wet mud that clung to her bare feet like heavy shoes. Hiding curled in an alley behind piled refuse, shaking and shivering and staring at the Towers above so she would not have to see whether the man who had tried to grab her had found her dead-end hiding spot.

  Nothing good. Nothing, in the end, worth remembering.

  Except when she saw the photo, she felt a pang go through her so sharp it might have been Daye’s blade. The picture blurred and wavered before her, and only then did Xhea realize she was fighting back tears.

  In the image, an older woman held a small child on her lap, wrapped in patchwork blankets. The woman had dark skin that creased into well-worn lines around her eyes and mouth, and her face was framed by a round halo of cloud-white hair. The child stared at the viewer, dark eyes wide and serious; but the woman was laughing, her smile wide as she looked at the girl in her arms as if she were the most precious thing in the world.

  Xhea couldn’t speak; didn’t know what words she would shape even if her pressed-tight lips allowed the attempt. She knew this woman. Knew her in a way that bypassed all thought or memory.

  “Ennaline was your grandmother,” Ahrent said quietly.

  “Was?” Xhea choked out.

  “Yes. I’m afraid she died just a little over a year ago.”

  A year. A year ago, Xhea had been but streets away from this place. She had passed the skyscraper as she went about her business, sat in the shade that Farrow cast, and never once had she thought—never once had she imagined—

  “I didn’t …” Her thoughts tumbled over themselves, twisting, tangling. “I never knew my family,” she managed.

  Didn’t, in truth, believe that she’d ever had a family. She’d been born to someone, and had been orphaned or cast aside, it mattered little which. Even that word—family—didn’t feel right in her mouth, as if she had no claim to it.

  She’d only ever had Abelane, only ever had Shai—the family that she’d found and chose and clung to desperately with both hands.

  But this—a grandmother. A woman who had held her through blankets’ protective swaddling; a woman who had smiled at her, laughed with her. Loved her. It was more than she knew how to process.

  She needed, quite suddenly, to sit down. Xhea stumbled to the couch and all but fell into its worn cushions. For a long moment, she struggled to breathe as darkness seeped in around the edges of her vision. When the dizziness faded, she carefully looked around: there were more pictures pinned to the wall, photos and drawings and images in small, handcrafted frames of sheet metal and wood. A child’s clumsy drawings. Photos and hand-drawn images of a little girl’s face.

  Enjeia.

  Xhea had to look away. Her gaze caught on the cup on the table before her—a cup that still held a splash of a deep gray liquid that she thought to be tea.

  “Someone lives here,” she said quietly.

  “Yes. Marna—your grandmother’s partner—still lives here, though she wants to leave the place to you. If you want it.” Ahrent Altaigh walked toward the couch and, when Xhea did not protest his presence, sat carefully on the far end, a meaningful gap between them.

  “Why would she … I mean, but she …” No matter what she did, the words would not piece together, nor her thoughts.

  Get it together, Xhea. She took a steadying breath.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she asked. Xhea turned, met his eye. “Showing me this. Telling me this. Even if it’s true, you can’t pretend it’s for my benefit. You’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “No, of course not.” At least he didn’t bother to lie; for that much, at least, Xhea was grateful. “But I needed you to understand some small element of what I’m offering you in all seriousness so that you understand the importance of what I’m doing.”

  An apartment would have been an unthinkable payment, as would citizenship and all the privileges that came with—especially given that she had no bright magic to contribute to the skyscraper, nor skills that would improve Farrow’s wellbeing.

  And the rest? Home. Family. They were hooks, nothing more; hooks she knew had become embedded deep in her flesh, despite everything. Caution, wariness; they might as well have been nothing, so much sand and ash. For Xhea looked again at the pi
cture in her hand, that woman smiling outward, that small, cherished girl, and something in her broke and was mended at the same time.

  “I knew of no one alive in the Lower City who had your talent. But when I heard a rumor of what happened to Allenai and Eridian—when I heard the stories—I understood. I knew I had to find you.”

  “Ah,” Xhea said. She leaned back and briefly closed her eyes. The anger drained from her, and the hope. “It’s not even me you want, is it? It’s Shai.” At his confused look, she clarified; “The Radiant ghost.”

  If that’s why she was here, so he could take Shai from her and bind her to Farrow, there was nothing he could offer her that would make her agree. Not even this.

  Ahrent Altaigh took a long breath and let it out slowly. “A Radiant? You truly …” He rubbed a hand across his face. “I’d thought that rumor exaggeration or lies, no matter how much Edren started swinging around their newfound wealth. So few people here even understand what a Radiant is, I never …” Again, that breath. “But no, Xhea. As much as I’d dearly love a Radiant’s support, it’s you that I’m after. You that Farrow needs.”

  He laughed softly at her expression. “You don’t know how valuable you are, do you? Worth more than a Radiant a hundred times over.”

  Xhea blinked at that, then shook her head. His words made no sense.

  “What do you want?” she asked instead. “You … have a ghost?” What other use had anyone ever had for her?

  “No,” he said. “I have a plan. A brave and crazy plan to save thousands of people in the Lower City, and give them the life we never had—and I need you to help me make it real.”

  He had to be mocking her, yet she saw no amusement in his face, no mirth. But there was a light in his eye as he spoke; a spark, like fire, that told of some burning passion.

  “Tell me.”

  He smiled then and said, “I’m going to transform Farrow into a Tower.”

  “You’re insane,” Xhea whispered. The words just slipped out; spoken, they seemed to hang in the air between them.

  Ahrent Altaigh inclined his head. “Perhaps,” he admitted. “Ambitious, at least, beyond anything the Lower City has known these past years. So many petty fights and squabbles down here in the dirt—and for what? Just more of the same. It’s time, I think, to change that.”

  Xhea looked from Ahrent to Daye, who stood just inside the apartment’s closed door. She didn’t know what she expected: disbelief, incredulity twin to her own—or even passion, that fire and light that seemed even now to burn from Ahrent, filling his words and face and every gesture. Yet Daye just watched, still as stone, her face impassive.

  Xhea turned back to Ahrent.

  “Have you never wondered where the Towers came from?” He met her eyes; he seemed, Xhea thought, genuinely curious.

  Xhea’s mind felt so full of words, of thoughts, of shocks and absence, that she could not keep them all straight. So many that their weight felt like silence. Even so, it was not hard to consider his question. Where had the Towers come from? Where had the sky come from, or the clouds, or the ground beneath their feet? From whence had the sun been birthed, and what filled the darkness between the stars?

  Useless questions, all. Of course she’d never wondered. Mutely, she shook her head.

  “Few do,” he said simply. “But think, they didn’t just appear in the sky. They were created. Farrow will be the first wholly new Tower in more than a hundred years.”

  “You can’t,” Xhea protested. “Towers aren’t just made, they’re—” She stopped. Frowned.

  She had been about to say that Towers were born, though that couldn’t be right. In all her years looking skyward, she’d seen Towers merge and change shapes, seen them rise and fall, but never once had she seen a Tower born.

  Yet the Towers were alive. She’d always known it, but it was only in Allenai’s forced takeover of Eridian two months before that she’d experienced that truth. She’d seen the walls and floors and everything around her move and quiver like the inside of some great beast; she’d seen the power of the Towers’ magic, the beat of their flaring hearts. She’d heard the Towers singing.

  “Skyscrapers are just metal,” she said instead. “Concrete and iron, glass and rebar … dead things. Heavy things.” She shook her head at the thought of Farrow leaping aloft. “It’s impossible.”

  “Maybe. But I’m going to try. We’re going to try. Once, the Towers were buildings—real structures here on the ground, anchored to earth. Have you never wondered why there are only five tall buildings left here? Of all the buildings of the city that came before, only five not cut down to within mere stories of the ground.”

  Oh, the things she could tell him to do with his “have you never wondered” nonsense. She’d wondered about plenty, most of it involving where she was going to find food and shelter, how she was going to live through the winter, how to find or make a new water catch-basin after some fool stole one of hers for the thousandth blighted time. In comparison, the greater workings of the City held little interest.

  Again, she shook her head. She knew what he wanted her to think: Towers. They became Towers.

  “Here.” Ahrent drew an object from his pocket and held it flat on his palm. “With your magic, you may not want to touch it. But look.”

  Xhea leaned forward, steadying herself on the couch cushions as she peered at the object. It was a small sculpture made from gray metal in the shape of a long, thin animal. The creature was curled into a circle, head resting on its clawed front legs, with bat-like wings folded across its back. There was an indentation where the lizard-thing’s eye should have been where once a bead or jewel might have rested.

  Xhea had spent enough time combing through the ruins to know an artifact when she saw one. Its edges were rounded, its patterned scales worn almost smooth, while nicks and scratches marked the creature’s folded wings. If she’d found it herself, she might have offered it to Wen, the collector and artifact trader with whom she’d worked most often, though she doubted it would have earned her much renai. Junk, mostly—but it was pretty, too, in a strange way. Maybe she would have kept it.

  “I found it when I was a child, and have kept it in one pocket or another for most of my life.” Not unlike Xhea’s knife, if far less useful. Ahrent continued, “I’m a spellcaster—one of Farrow’s strongest—and that means I use a lot of magic, day in, day out.”

  “But what—?”

  “Keep looking. Truly look.”

  Xhea stared at the little gray thing on his gray hand until she felt her eyes tear and blur—and then her focus shifted, like when she wanted to see spells. Suddenly, the little figurine glowed. She blinked and looked closer.

  It was not alive, Xhea decided, but it was not exactly dead, either. Not just metal, not anymore. Deep within it, magic glowed. It was not a spell; look though she might, she could find no lines of intent, no spell-anchors, no signs even of a former spell’s decay. Yet there was power there, centered at the little sculpture’s core and radiating outwards.

  She reached hesitantly toward the figurine, though stopped short of touching it. Even so, she imagined that she could feel a whisper of magic against her fingertips—or was that power only from Ahrent’s hand, below the creature? Still, Xhea drew back, suddenly wary, as if the little creature might uncurl, stand up on its clawed legs and stretch its long neck, raise and flap its pewter wings. As if that empty eye socket might fix on her and stare unblinking.

  “Enough magic changes a thing,” Ahrent said quietly. “Even little things like this. Magic is the power of life. With enough magic and enough time, things begin to change—to become something more than they were. Eventually, even metal or glass or stone can begin to awaken.”

  Awaken. As if inert things were only dormant, awaiting spring.

  She did not want to believe him; did not think, even staring at the pewter sculpture that he placed in his pocket once more, that what he said could be true. Yet she had seen the Towers for as long
as she could remember; had seen them shift and change, as if the metal and stone of their structures was liquid; had seen them grow, larger and larger, as if each were a great tree, its defensive spires like roots and branches reaching for sun and soil.

  If what he said was false, what explained the Towers themselves? Yet, if enough magic could wake a sky-borne structure, why not a curled figurine of a dragon? Why not this crumbling skyscraper, this ruin from another time?

  If his words were true, she was not fool enough to miss their implications. Enough magic, Ahrent had said. Enough time. Time was plentiful enough to one willing to wait—but magic? Xhea felt cold. Because she knew, as few others did, the true power required to keep a Tower aloft, living and growing and changing. Bound to every Tower, there was a Radiant—perhaps more than one, perhaps many more—whose power fueled the Tower’s daily life. Radiants were more than just the most powerful magic-users in the City; they were a wellspring of magic that knew no end.

  Bright magic was the power of life and growth; but life and growth unchecked led inevitably to mutations, to cancer, and to death. Because they needed every Radiant’s magic, Towers bound their Radiants’ spirits to their ailing bodies—or made those spirits inhabit foreign flesh—just to keep their power flowing. For all their magic, Radiants were trapped, forced to live long past the time when death would be a mercy, helpless in a cage of immovable flesh.

  Radiants like Shai.

  Ahrent Altaigh might be a powerful Lower City spellcaster; he might even be strong enough to be a citizen of a Tower above, had he desired it. But the strength that made him a power here was nothing in comparison to the strength of the City’s best casters—and even their strength paled in comparison to a Radiant’s.

  “You don’t have enough magic,” Xhea said. “For something small, maybe. But a whole skyscraper? No one here has that kind of power to spare.”

  “No,” he said. “But we’ve been working toward this for a very long time. It’s easiest, I think, if I just show you.”

  Xhea shook her head. “And me?” she asked. “Why do you need me?” Again she looked around, seeing not only this room with its wall hangings and pictures, not just the images of a little girl that she struggled to believe might once have been her, but the whole skyscraper. She imagined the structure all around her, a tall and slender building stabbing toward the sky.