Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Plenty. She hadn’t understood the concept, even though it was arrayed all around her in countless ways like a diamond’s glittering facets. Hadn’t understood that the poverty and lack that she’d witnessed above had, in truth, no claim to the words.

  She hadn’t understood at all.

  Despite her illness, despite her death and all the pain and hardship that had come with dying, in so many ways her life had been easy. She saw that now in a way that she never could have before. Once, she’d wept for the fate she’d been born to; with time she’d committed to the necessary sacrifice. Now, with distance and years and her eyes opened to lives that were previously beyond fathoming, she knew that she’d been blessed. It wasn’t just that she’d lived in a Tower; it wasn’t about the things she’d had, or the places she’d been, or her countless experiences. It wasn’t, in the end, about magic at all.

  It was about choices. She’d had so very many; and if illness had closed some doors for her—if death had taken them all away—it did not change that those options had been hers to pursue or to squander, to take or to ignore.

  At last, Shai drew close enough to Farrow to see what was happening at the skyscraper’s base—the movement that she’d only glimpsed the day before. They were digging.

  She had thought that the people of the Lower City did not often build or destroy, only tried desperately to maintain the crumbling infrastructure of the ancient city that had come before. Yet there was no word for what now surrounded Farrow but destruction: a trench dug around the skyscraper, close to its foundations. The sidewalk had been torn up and cast aside, dirt piled high nearby. Even a rare, sickly tree had been uprooted.

  As she drew nearer, Shai could see dirt and rocks and chunks of concrete being lifted in buckets from the trench and carried to one of the nearby piles. The trench continued in a great ring around the whole of the skyscraper. In spite of herself, she was curious. A defense? If so, she couldn’t imagine what would require such drastic measures.

  Nor was the trench the only defense. Watchtowers were arrayed around the skyscraper, armed men and women inside. Guards, she thought—but not like Edren’s black-clad security force, nor the teams that even now must be closing on Rown. There was something harder in their faces, something stronger in their stances; and Shai, who knew nothing of weapons or war, halted at the sight of their armaments. She saw the hilts of blades and the grips of guns, some holstered at belts while others were large enough to be strapped to a leg or crossed across a back. She saw something that looked like a whip, and a handle that trailed a long chain, and a row of spikes across one man’s fingers that jutted like claws.

  Had the attack force been carrying weapons like these? She could not turn toward Rown, dared not know more.

  The weapons themselves only gave her pause; it was the magic that made Shai stop dead and stare. For each blade and chain-link and gun-barrel gleamed with spells—some brighter, even, that the magic of their wielders. They were crude spells, yes, broadly written with little grace. Crude, but effective.

  She read the spells’ lines of intent at a glance. A spell to silence sound, a spell to guide a projectile truly—these, at least, were no surprise. But the rest? She saw a spell for pain and a spell for fear, spells to tear flesh and speed bleeding, spells to pull magic from the victim’s body in a single brutal swipe. There were more; Shai had to look aside.

  She did not think it was possible for her to truly feel sick anymore, all too aware that she had no true stomach to rebel—and yet she had no other name for the feeling that churned through her but nausea. To see magic used that way—to see the light of life and living twisted into something so … so …

  She could not finish the thought.

  She knew that magic could be used to hurt, to attack and to defend; after all, she’d never seen a night that had not been lit with Towerlight—defensive and offensive spells alike, and spell exhaust set alight. She’d watched, too, as Towers joined in planned mergers and hostile takeovers—though neither process was exactly gentle.

  Those were different. They were more civilized, more refined.

  Or was it only that the violence she knew was a conceptual thing of position and politics and great powers moving, while these spells, these soldiers, promised something far more personal? Their glittering spells spoke of blood and pain—as did the blades upon which they shone and the scarred-knuckled hands that held them. It was easy to imagine the screams.

  Shuddering, Shai turned away.

  Ready though they were to attack or defend, they had no protection against a ghost. None noticed her as she slipped past the heavily reinforced doors and into the building beyond.

  She looked around the entrance hall, blinking in the sudden dim. Beyond the bank of elevators before her, two halls stretched in either direction. She could hear voices from one, talking and laughing; the loud sounds of a busy kitchen from the other.

  She paused, suddenly unsure what it was she should search for. Xhea’s body, perhaps, or a conveniently overheard conversation. As if you’re going to find something just laying out, waiting for you. Maybe a nice stack of papers labeled Useful Evidence, opened to the relevant pages.

  Shai frowned and tried to ignore her doubt.

  “It’s better than doing nothing at all,” she whispered. If only for her own sanity.

  Maybe she wouldn’t know what she was searching for until she found it.

  After more than thirty stories of fruitless searching, Shai wanted to give up in despair—until she reached the thirty-fourth floor. After floor after floor of homes and offices and tiny stores, the silence of the thirty-fourth came as a surprise. No background chatter here, no doors opening and closing, no children running, no loud arguments little shielded by dusty drywall. Just stillness, broken only by soft beeps and a rush of air that sounded almost like breathing.

  Familiar sounds, all. A hospital.

  But when she peeked inside a room, something looked wrong. Felt wrong. Though people lay in hospital beds, magic glimmering in the wires joined to their bodies, she saw no attendants, no doctors or nurses—no sign, even, of what ailments might have felled so many. For there was room after room of patients, every one asleep and unmoving.

  Farther down the hall, a guard sat outside a locked door. Shai couldn’t help it: her heart leapt in sudden hope, and she rushed forward. Xhea? she thought, in spite of everything.

  The guard, alone in the silence, seemed anything but relaxed. Three locks bound the door, at top, bottom, and middle, and the guard looked as if she expected them to open at any minute.

  Shai slipped through the door.

  Inside, all was dark. She found herself in a small room that seemed to have once been a person’s entire living space. There was a narrow mattress heaped high with blankets, a battered portable stove with a single plate, fork and knife waiting nearby, and a bucket in the corner.

  Strange things to leave with a prisoner.

  “Xhea?” Shai whispered. The shadows shifted as she moved, the light of her magic flickering across the dented walls.

  The pile of blankets moved.

  “Xhea,” she started—only to fall abruptly silent.

  It was not her friend who now rose from the blankets, but a man. He looked starved and wasted: his cheeks were gaunt hollows, his lips dry and flaking, his bloodshot eyes wide. He pushed himself up with hands that seemed to be little more than skin wrapped over the ruins of his bones. Then he lifted his head, turned, and looked directly at Shai.

  He could see her.

  Worse, she knew that inhuman movement, slow and steady and deliberate. Knew, too, the way his head swung toward her on his unsteady neck, eyes wide as his pupils dilated in response to the light of her magic.

  A night walker, she thought. Here. Within Farrow’s walls.

  Hard on the heels of that thought came another: I know him.

  For as he stared into the light her magic cast, she recognized his face. Not her father—and thank absent gods fo
r that—but a young man with dark hair and a sharp nose. She recognized his clothes, too: loose white cloth, like one might wear in a hospital—though so stained now, little of the fabric’s original shade remained.

  This was the man whose spirit had come to Xhea ranting and screaming around his mouthful of fingers—the ghost they’d seen pulled through the barrier and, she thought, half-devoured. There was no sign of that spirit now: no light in his eyes, no recognition, no surprise or thought or anger. The only sound in the small room was his slow and steady breathing.

  “Oh,” she whispered. “What happened to you?”

  He was too weak to stand, she saw; too weak to do more than prop himself against the wall and stare at her. She looked around, thought of the locks and the guard and finally understood. They were starving him to death.

  Shai, more than anyone in the Lower City, had seen the walkers. She’d watched them, night after night, as they came in from the ruins and roamed the deserted streets. Looking for prey, she’d thought; looking for anyone left exposed or unguarded. The idea that someone had lured him here, up to Farrow’s thirty-fourth floor, only to lock him in a random room and starve him to death seemed ridiculous—and beyond dangerous. The only alternative—that he’d been transformed into a night walker here in this room—hardly seemed more credible.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured at last. Because whoever he was, whatever he had done, he did not deserve this. No one did. “I’m so sorry.”

  She reversed step by careful step, slipped through the wall, and was gone.

  For a time, Shai stared at the locked door, the guard restless behind her, unsure what to do next. Pieces to a puzzle, she thought, and knew not the picture she was trying to form. Nothing to do but keep looking.

  Except even as she turned to continue her search, she felt something on the edge of her senses. She hesitated, frowning—and recognized the feeling. A crawling shiver down the back of her neck; a vice-like feeling in her throat that made her breath go short and her imagined heart hammer in her ears. Dread.

  The dark magic boy was coming nearer.

  “I can’t …” she said, but already she had stumbled back an involuntary step.

  Her thoughts tumbled over themselves: the walker, and the ghost of the man he’d been before, and the kid coming for them in the underground, and his dark spells, and—

  “Your turn,” he said, and she recognized his high voice. She would recognize him anywhere. “Come on.”

  Run, came the thought, echoing through her head like the memory of Xhea’s voice. She could not let him see her, could not let him touch her. No matter what logic her mind might conjure, her very soul knew the truth: to let him near would be her end.

  Surrendering to instinct, Shai fled.

  When morning came, it was only the light streaming through the apartment’s windows that woke her. Xhea cringed and hid her face; sunlight, she thought, had no place in her morning routine. Stretched out on the couch in Marna and Ennaline’s apartment—her apartment, not that she believed it—she had slept; and if the sleep had been full of confusing, frantic dreams that she could not remember on waking, it was nonetheless her longest sleep in months.

  If only it had made her feel better. It wasn’t just her knee that hurt this morning, Xhea found, but the muscles all down her leg. Muscles, too, in her arms and hand—from where she’d supported herself with her walking stick, she realized at last; and muscles in her back, pulled when she’d fallen. It took a long time to push herself up and out of the couch’s embrace; longer still to bathe and dress. She did not weep, but that was only a matter of will.

  She’d thought, for a brief and glorious time, that Shai had healed her knee—that she was, if not wholly better, then well on her way. Would that it were that easy. Her knee was better than it had been; yet the pain was still enough to shorten her breath and make sweat bead her forehead, and it wasn’t only her slowly rising magic that made her stomach ache and churn.

  It’s okay, she told herself. Even though her magic was returning, Shai could still help her. If Xhea could endure the daily pain of movement, surely she could endure the brief agony of magical healing. She just had to manage a little bit longer, and then …

  What? As if life as she’d known it could resume.

  Xhea looked around the apartment, her eyes skittering from the photos and drawings. If she were to help Ahrent achieve his goal—Farrow’s goal—all of this would be going with her, or she would going with it, she knew not which. This would be her home. A skyscraper. A Tower.

  And Shai? If Shai chose, she could join her, stay Xhea’s friend—but why would the ghost want to return to the fate she’d so barely escaped? Was there an existence for an unbound Radiant, anything but countless twisting paths that all led back to the same destination?

  Xhea took a long, shuddering breath. What was she doing? Oh, sweetness and blight, what was she thinking?

  The payment Ahrent offered was beyond anything she’d imagined, all her heart’s secret wants laid bare. Home. Family. A place, a purpose. As if such things could be bought or given.

  For all that she cringed, it seemed daylight brought clarity, shining down on her in all her aching folly. Ahrent had said that she wasn’t his prisoner, that he wouldn’t try to keep her here. It was time to test the truth of his words.

  As she stood, Xhea looked one last time toward that first photo, pinned once more to the wall. She stopped. Stared. She hadn’t let herself look at the picture again, nor the myriad others that surrounded it, just tumbled onto the couch and into sleep. Now, looking at the pictures and the strange, familiar faces that looked out at her, she could not move.

  There was another picture of the young girl, Enjeia. There was her grandmother and Marna, arms over each other’s shoulders, laughing. There, a far younger picture of her grandmother with a different small girl swaddled on her lap. My mother? Dark eyes and skin and hair in two puffy, braided pigtails. Nerra.

  Xhea turned away, leaving all the pictures behind. These people were dead, or as good as dead; their love as much fiction as the life she’d imagined among them. They had abandoned her as a child, willing or no; abandoned her again by dying before she could find them, before she knew even to look. No, of everyone, Shai was the only one she could trust.

  But if Shai won’t abandon me, why isn’t she here?

  Oh, traitorous thought. Yet all the night had passed, Ieren far away, and there was no sign of Shai.

  There came a knock, and Xhea limped toward the door. Daye stood on the other side, a gift in hand.

  “What’s this?” Xhea asked, clinging to the doorframe.

  Daye looked at her flatly and held out a cane.

  Unlike the one the medic had provided shortly after her surgery, this cane was perfectly fitted to Xhea’s slight size; unlike her lost walking stick, it seemed almost elegant. It was a simple length of twisted wood, like a tree’s root, roughly polished and stained dark, and topped with a heavy metal knob.

  No words: Xhea reached out slowly and took the cane, surprised at its weight, its stability. She leaned upon it gratefully.

  No words: Daye did not so much as blink, only waited, as if the cane had always been in Xhea’s hand, as if it had nothing at all to do with her.

  Xhea followed her out into the hall.

  “I need to see Ahrent Altaigh,” she said.

  Daye shrugged and led her onward, the sound of Xhea’s new cane tapping against the carpet. They made their way through Farrow’s halls—busier now, and far more alive—before returning to the silent floor she’d seen the day before. A new guard was posted outside the padlocked door, similarly armed, who spared them no more than a glance.

  Daye opened one of the doors and held it for Xhea. Ahrent was not inside; only Ieren and the ghost of the young boy bound to him.

  “You’re here!” Ieren cried, as if he found her presence an unexpected delight. He rushed forward and grabbed her free hand, and it was all Xhea could do not to recoil
and yank her hand away. Ieren’s skin was soft and warm; it was a sharp contrast to her own chilled palm and fading calluses. To feel another’s skin—to have him hold to her hand with his small fingers—

  She did not know what to do, whether to hold tight or draw back in surprise and disgust, and in her moment of indecision Ieren clung tighter and pulled her across the room.

  “Look,” he said, tugging her to the side of another wheeled bed, another unconscious body.

  Unlike Marna, this one had been prepared long in advance of Xhea’s arrival. He was an older man with a shaved head, paler skin marking where his hair had been. The wires had already been attached—more, even, than Marna had borne. Wrists and neck and heart, yes, but also all across his scalp and in the center of his forehead.

  Again she made to draw away; then Ieren said, “Ahrent said I should teach you. We’ll go really slow today, okay?”

  “Teach me?”

  “To use your magic. To control it, like I do.” His voice radiated pride—enough, almost, to hide the condescension in the words. He was better than her, and he knew it.

  Xhea hesitated, biting back an angry retort. She should drop Ieren’s hand and turn away, just go—like she should have the day before. Yet she knew the damage her magic had wrought, the pains and fevers and the way it kept her knee from healing. Your magic will kill you if you let it, Marna had said, and Xhea did not doubt her. If death were the inevitable consequence of its use, she had no reason to learn more. But if she learned not just spells, but control …?

  She’d seen Ieren work his magic, those dark threads of power spinning out from his fingertips and woven together with ease. Knew, too, that she would find no other offers of training. She didn’t have to stay long, didn’t have to agree to Farrow’s plan. But perhaps, if she learned just a little, it would be enough that her knee might heal.

  Xhea swallowed. “What do we have to do?”

  Daye left the room and closed the door behind her. Her footsteps had not been loud, nor did the door slam in her wake, and yet Xhea heard her disapproval nonetheless. Like she’s one to talk.