“No,” said Ahrent Altaigh, and showed her.
The next room was not empty.
There was no outside light here: the windows were bricked over—freshly so, from the smell of mortar. Beneath that were other, familiar smells: bleach and disinfectant and something that reminded her of the cheap, industrial soap so common in the Lower City.
Even before Ahrent turned on the harsh overhead lights—despite the quiet beeps and flashes from medical machines held together with tape and glue; despite the beds and the soft, rhythmic sound of breath—Xhea knew this was no medic’s ward. Perhaps it had been, once. Perhaps the beds, pushed now to the far walls, had once been used for care; perhaps the machines had helped ease and tend and heal. Not now. Not, she thought, ever again.
For rising from each of the six beds and the figures that lay so still upon them were wires. Wires were bound to those bodies’ hands and feet and hearts; wires were joined to electrodes glued to shaved heads, and they rose in a tangle toward the ceiling. Toward Farrow’s walls and the great spells that lay within them.
She could feel them, those spells, now that she knew to look. Bright magic spells far greater, vaster, than the spells needed to run the skyscraper itself. A blink, and she could see them, glowing dimly within the walls and ceiling and floor. A steady stream of magic trickled through them like water. Farther, she could feel more magic, stronger magic—massive magical storage coils that lay somewhere nearby.
So much magic and power and wealth that was not being used—was not caring for Farrow’s people nor running the skyscraper’s core systems—but stored or funneled toward the transformation spells. More and more and more; the wealth of years. All that accumulated magic was nothing compared to a Tower’s heart; and yet, even from another room, another hall, so much bright magic made her bones ache.
Xhea shifted her focus further, seeing only magic—and finally began to understand what it was that Farrow had wrought. She could see the light of magic rising from each of the six bodies, up and into the skyscraper, the myriad wires gleaming. She could see the spells beyond. And then, as she stared, the world fell away and she could see farther, through the barrier of the wall and beyond.
The room beside them was also filled with unconscious people wired into Farrow. And the room beyond that, and the one beyond that still. This whole hall, perhaps; this whole floor. She could see them, now; she could feel them, all those bright glimmers of light rising from their inert bodies like dust motes dancing in sunlight.
We have been preparing for this for years, Ahrent had told her. It was only here, with the weight of that magic pressing down, that she finally believed it. Finally understood.
“You don’t have a Radiant,” Xhea said. The words were simple, unadorned, and no less harsh for their quiet. Only fact.
“No,” Ahrent said.
“But you have people.”
He nodded. “And people, too, make magic.”
So little, here—oh, so very little. But here they lay, hooked up to machines that fed them, that took their wastes, that perhaps even kept them breathing past the time when their bodies would have surrendered. This was nothing like the Radiants’ glass coffins she’d seen in Eridian; she could only hope that these limp bodies that had once been people were turned and changed, their bodies washed and eyes cleared of the crust of tears.
Yet it was the same.
Magic stored and poured into Farrow itself, through its systems and wires and walls. Enough, maybe, to create a Tower’s heart; enough, maybe, for Farrow to wake.
“Ieren can teach you,” Ahrent said. “He tells me it would not be hard, even as weak as you are, for you to learn.”
As if controlling her magic might ever be easy. Yet Ieren hadn’t struggled or fought for control, only used his power with perfect ease and simplicity.
No more floods of magic, she thought. No more accidental death or destruction.
No need to be afraid of her magic anymore.
Xhea looked again at the people comatose on the beds. “They chose this,” she said. “They came here willingly, like Marna.” It wasn’t in the end, a question—but she needed to hear the answer aloud to know it for truth.
“They did.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
Did that make it better?
No, came the thought. Willing death was still death—and enslavement? Was she supposed to feel okay, knowing that each of these people had willingly bowed their heads and held out their hands to accept the chains?
Another part of her disagreed. For each person made their own choice, and that some of the consequences were ugly did not undo that choice’s validity, nor the benefits of sacrifice. Each of these people wanted to earn a better life, not for themselves but for their children, their descendants, their people, their friends. Their only coin—their only worth—was magic, thin and weak though it was. Who was she to judge that choice, that sacrifice, as unworthy?
Because there was a time when she would have done anything, anything to have a life in a Tower. Here, in the Towers’ shadows, there was no other dream.
No way out but up.
“If we believe what those above say about us,” Ahrent said softly, “the Lower City is all that we deserve. For too long we’ve lived by their rules and been grateful for their leavings.”
He looked at each of the people who lay around them—and he seemed proud. His smile was edged: the smile of an unexpected victor, raising his blade to the crowd.
“The City creates the rules, and we choose now to defy them.”
True citizenship—and not just for one person, or two, but thousands, now and in all the years to come. Xhea reeled at the implications. She wanted to flee from this place, these walls, and the terrible things done in the name of freedom. She wanted, too, to see them succeed.
Because for the first time she imagined it: that Ahrent might be right. She saw not the magic nor the spells but the transformation they would bring about. She closed her eyes and imagined an earth-bound skyscraper lifting slowly into the air.
Oh, she could not say yes to this, she could not possibly agree. And yet her “no” caught behind her teeth and stayed there, refusing to be spoken.
Whatever Ahrent saw in her expression, he seemed to understand. “You don’t have to decide now,” he said. “This is a lot to understand—too much—and it’s grown late. Past sunset.”
Night. She wouldn’t be able to easily get back to Edren now even if she wanted to.
“Why don’t you think about it, and sleep, and let me know how you feel tomorrow.”
A long moment, then Xhea nodded. Everything would make sense in the morning.
In the hour before dawn, Shai sat in silence at Mercks’s bedside, watching the wounded man sleep. It was quiet in his small room—no family, no sound of others’ breaths, only the faint whispers of air through the vents and voices speaking someplace distant.
She should go, she knew; Mercks deserved his privacy, and his rest. He was healed—or healing. She didn’t even know him. Yet she stayed, watching the slow rise and fall of his breathing, the twitch of his eyes beneath the veils of his lids.
“I …” she started, and fell silent. No use in speaking, for all that the words crowded on her tongue.
Shai ran a weary hand over her face. She wanted to curl up and lay her head on the mattress; wanted to have a soft sheet cover her, like Mercks did. She wanted to close her eyes and fall into sleep, or some quiet oblivion, if only for a while.
Anything to silence her thoughts or the chaos they left in their wake.
She’d thought using her magic was only a matter of practice. In life, Shai had avoided learning anything but the most basic of spells; there had been no need for her to do anything more. Yet in trying to work even the simple spells that children learned alongside the alphabet, she failed and failed again. It seemed she was years and millions of renai too late for simple.
Whatever instinct had enab
led her to heal Mercks was likewise absent. It was only as she thought of the song she’d hummed without meaning to, and the memories the melody had conjured, that she made some small progress.
It wasn’t the singing that helped, she found through experimentation, but the feelings behind the song. When she thought of warmth—of lying curled in her bed, pillows and blankets like clouds all around her, morning sunlight on her face—she could create a spell that generated heat. Not the most useful, given the stifling summer; but a similar memory, of sipping iced tea as beads of condensation rolled down the glass, could conjure a cool breeze from within her cupped hands.
It wasn’t enough. Even those few successes had been clumsy and inefficient, the spells working only because of the sheer force of power that she’d pumped through them.
Shai looked down at Mercks’s sleeping face, as if she might find comfort within the lines and shapes that living had etched on his skin, the patterns of a life well lived. Here, in the rise and fall of his breathing, was the evidence she wanted. His healed skin, the flow of blood within his body. If she could only work one true spell, at least it had been this one.
Her magic was dying.
That thought—that knowledge—had been echoing through her head for hours now, no matter that she’d tried to ignore it or push it aside. When her magic had failed in the underground, she’d thought its brief absence akin to magic shock—that she’d used too much power too quickly and had paid the price, improbable though it seemed. If she’d been living, magic shock might have given her a headache or made her feel sick; she might have ached, or become dizzy, or fallen unconscious. If she were poor, she might even have died.
What was a mere moment of confusion in comparison? What was a little tiredness? Perspective, she reminded herself. It didn’t help.
Because her magic hadn’t failed only that once, but again and again. Practicing on Edren’s rooftop, spells had flickered and unravelled within her hands before completion; spells had faded like so much mist. Sometimes her power itself had vanished entirely for seconds or minutes at a time, leaving her bereft.
She’d always known that the Towers bound a Radiant’s ghost to a living body to keep their magic flowing. Unbound, their power faded to nothing—but she’d thought it would leave her slowly, over the span of years. No, in truth, she had tried not to think of it at all, as if denial might save her.
No more.
Magic had defined her life as it defined her death; she’d only refused to let it define her. Or had tried. She’d always wanted—through blind optimism and determination alone, if need be—to be something more than her power. To be Shai, and not just a Radiant.
Now, facing the idea of an existence without magic, she could barely breathe. She shook her head, her blond hair falling forward like a veil. To just be Shai? I don’t know who that is any more.
“Shai?” Mercks asked softly, and opened his eyes. Shai drew back, surprised. “That is your name, isn’t it?” Mercks looked around his darkened room and laughed softly. “Still can’t see you, but I … think I can feel you there, just a little.”
Again his eyes closed. For a moment Shai thought sleep had reclaimed him.
“Thank you,” he said. The word was the barest whisper, and this time his eyes stayed closed. “Thank you for the spell and for saving my life, but also for staying with me down there in the dark.” He tried to say more, but it was as if the words stuck in his throat. Shai realized that he couldn’t say more without crying, and he refused to let the tears flow.
It was a long moment until he could speak again, and then he said only, “Thank you.”
It was the gratitude in his voice that broke her, let her cry the tears that he would not shed. So many tears: once she started, it seemed like it would be impossible to stop. Tears for Xhea and for her father, each absence a wound so large that she knew they would never heal. Helpless tears for herself, and her failures, and her inability to stop the attack planned for morning.
Tears to say all the things for which she had no words.
At last, her sobs eased. In that quiet, she knew one small truth: for all her failures, this man before her would be dead were it not for her. It wasn’t just her magic but her actions that had saved him.
Slowly, Shai reached toward Mercks with a single shining hand until she could almost cup his cheek with her fingers. A gleaming tear fell upon him, and another; and if he did not feel her touch he felt her tears, filled as they were with magic.
“You’re welcome,” Shai said, knowing he could not hear her and speaking anyway.
She rose, slipped through the door, and fled.
On the skyscraper’s main level, Edren’s forces were completing their final preparations for the attack. Armed, armored, and in small groups, they would not wait for true dawn, but slip out as the sky lightened; the few night walkers left in the streets would pose little threat to so many.
They were not soldiers; they did not pretend to be. These, Shai had learned, were men and women trained within the walls of Edren’s arena, their ranks bolstered by a few chosen veterans from the last bloody war in the Lower City streets. They were people trained to fight for the spectacle of spilled blood. She did not stay to see them off. She did not even want to think about what they were about to do.
Outside, the air was thick and humid, lying across the Lower City like a stinking blanket. Shai felt the heat, little though it could affect her. She moved quickly, heading away, away, sweeping past the buildings like an unfelt wind.
These streets, now, were familiar. When she had first begun searching the Lower City in darkness, she had stumbled about in confusion. She’d gotten lost time and again until she’d had to rise above street level to find her bearings once more. At first she’d searched only for the creature that had once been her father, but later she had returned and looked slower, longer, out of a late-birthed curiosity.
Xhea had showed her much of the Lower City, and yet there was so much more, some worth seeing and some very much not, and all so different from the world she had known. The wide and tastefully decorated rooms of her family home seemed impossibly far away; so too were the Towers themselves, for all that she had but to look up to see them.
The streets were poorly named: not so much streets as parts of a labyrinth masquerading as thoroughfares, narrow alleys and makeshift corridors, passages where once there had been buildings and buildings where there had once been passages, with laundry-lines and prayer flags and narrow rope bridges crisscrossing them all. The dirt was everywhere—dirt and refuse, thick gutter sludge and things Shai did not want to even look at never mind name, and all their associated smells.
If only Xhea had lingered behind, a ghost as Shai was. She could imagine them, two ghosts wandering the ruins. No—farther. Untethered, they could go past the ruins, past the badlands, and leave the City behind. There had to be something else out there, something in the world beyond. Dead, maybe they could have been the first ones to find it.
Shai’s smile was fleeting, twisted by sorrow. She kept walking.
Shai told herself she was only wandering, distracting herself from the ever-tightening spiral of her thoughts. That, too, was a lie. For as the sun broke the horizon and the Lower City came to life—people rising, leaving their homes, shouting and laughing and calling to customers—Shai realized where she was headed.
Farrow.
And why not? Edren had turned its back on Xhea, and Lorn had his hands tied. Who else had cared for the small, sharp-edged girl? At least I can find out why she died, came the quiet thought. At least I can try.
For all that Xhea had named Farrow first among the skyscrapers—tallest and strongest and most populous—Shai hadn’t been impressed at her earlier glimpses, even shadowed as they had been. Farrow had once been some shade of pale gray; it was streaked now, roof to ground, by years of soot and rainwater. Many of the glass-fronted balconies and wide windows that showed the vista of the city were gone now: patched or boarded ov
er or replaced entirely. Many of the jutting, crumbling remains of those balconies were edged with rope or warped boards or nothing at all.
Morning treated its façade no kinder.
Yet as she made her way toward it like one of summer’s oft-absent breezes, Shai saw it differently. Nothing had changed; Farrow was no cleaner, no whiter, in no better repair. Still it stood straight and tall, no dangerous tilt or missing floors like Orren; it was alive, busy and bustling, unlike Senn’s tightly shuttered windows and guarded doors. She could see, too, not just what was missing, but what those myriad repairs meant: the skyscraper was not some crumbling hulk, but a place that others cared for.
It was their home.
A quiet voice asked, How much of it will fall?
She did not want this war; did not want even the threat of it. She had not chosen this—not her power, nor its use, nor its many cascading consequences. If she could, she would have discarded her magic and all that came with it like one kicked off an unneeded blanket in a sweltering heat wave: quickly, and without a second thought.
Only …
She hesitated, suddenly unsure. Looking not at the ruin, but at the repairs.
If things could be different—if her magic could be used not to threaten or dominate or control, but to make these lives around her somehow better? Even if her power was fading, and it was—even if she were to become no more than a shadow of her former self, her former radiance—it was more that many here had now.
If there was no war—
If Lorn were in charge of Edren—
If she could just choose how to use her magic instead of dumping it unthinking into unworthy hands, destroying more than she created—
Just think of what she might do. Her power had helped fuel a Tower; even diminished, she could barely imagine the difference she might make here.
Then again, she’d always been a dreamer. She’d dreamed once that her sacrifice—her life and magic and all the things each entailed—would change the lives of those in Allenai. That others would grow up happier, healthier, stronger because of her. That thought had helped her endure the pain. It was a gift, she’d thought, of plenty.
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