Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  And then, nothing.

  A last breath bubbled from his lips as his body grew still. He seemed to sag as his muscles went slack. A moment, and then his dark eyes, once so cold and hard, were simply empty, open, staring.

  Lorn, Shai realized, was shouting, screaming—and not at the attacker, who had crumpled to the floor near Verrus’s feet, and not at his father, but at her.

  “Do something!” he cried. “Shai! Shai, please, why won’t you do something?”

  But she couldn’t, no matter how much she wanted to, no matter how he yelled or raged or pleaded. And he did all three: Shai stepped back and back again, as if Lorn’s hurt and confusion were a tangible force.

  “I couldn’t,” she said softly. “The knife, it’s the knife …” Knowing he could not hear her. Knowing there was nothing she could have done, no spell she might have wrought—and feeling the weight of guilt regardless.

  Then Emara was there, cut and limping but whole, and she took Lorn’s shoulders in her hands and drew him roughly to her. Her blades, Shai saw, had been laid aside still bloody. Of the two men that she had fought, one was on the floor unmoving, while the other was held by the late-arriving security forces, his hands bound behind his back despite an obviously broken arm.

  I could try to heal him, Shai thought as she looked at the struggling attacker. Heal someone, anyone, if only to try to balance this new failure. But she did not move. Just stood, staring.

  Emara murmured in Lorn’s ear until his shouting ceased. He took a long, shuddering breath, looking from his father’s body to the space of empty air where he felt Shai to be. He looked shocked, too stunned to believe what he saw, never mind cry.

  Shai did not—had not—liked Verrus Edren, not from that very first moment. Something about him, the way he held himself, his cold words and colder expression, had made her feel mouse-like, as if cowering or running away were her only options. She’d liked him even less when he’d refused to rescue Xhea, choosing instead to knowingly attack a rival skyscraper with Xhea’s abduction as feigned justification.

  He was—had been—a hard man; and, from what she’d learned in her years watching her mother work as a key member of Allenai’s council, a bad leader. He’d cared more for his own ideas and commands than reasoned decisions, and had surrounded himself with people more likely to bend to his will than oppose him.

  But he was Lorn’s father, and she had not wanted him to die.

  Security was coming to them now, Lorn and Emara both, trying to take them to safety—wherever that might be. Where in this skyscraper would be safe if not here, outside their own rooms near Edren’s top level? How had attackers possibly reached this far? Lorn waved them away, leaving Emara to give curt instructions for the remaining attacker to be locked up and watched until they were ready to question him.

  Lorn knelt at his father’s side, heedless of the pooling blood, and reached out to close his eyes.

  “Who did this,” he whispered. It wasn’t truly a question.

  Yet Shai knew; and after her hours of practice, she could at last hold her light spell in the shape of a word. She kindled a light, and let it flow between her hands, shaping it into the word she needed.

  Orren.

  Because Orren had taken Xhea’s silver knife and not returned it. Xhea had explained what had happened in the time they’d been apart: her capture by Orren, her imprisonment and escape—and that there was a woman within Orren’s broken walls who had seen and understood Xhea’s dark magic.

  A woman who knew enough, it seemed, to use the slim blade she’d stolen to achieve greater damage than could be wrought by a knife alone. Using the distraction of the conflict with Rown for Orren’s own ends.

  If Lorn or Emara were surprised at the sudden appearance of the glowing word, or that word’s import, neither showed it. Too shocked, Shai supposed; too tense and shaken by the aftereffects of the adrenaline that even now must be burning from their systems. The only sharply drawn breath came from one of the guards behind them, and Shai paid him no heed.

  Lorn simply nodded and looked back to his father’s face.

  “It was revenge,” he said, and shook his head. “I told him, I told him …”

  Emara put her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers, Shai saw, were quivering; that was her only outward sign of her distress.

  Xhea had said that Edren and Orren had been allied for much of the earlier war, though she’d never mentioned how that alliance had ended. Shai thought of what she’d overheard earlier: that Verrus had ordered the slaughter of Orren’s ruling family. Revenge ten years in the making. And if Verrus had killed the entire family, surely whoever in Orren now moved against them would not be appeased by the death of a single man. Lorn was still at risk, and Emara, and anyone else in this skyscraper in line to rule.

  Oh why, Shai thought suddenly, hopelessly, can’t they just have elections like everyone else? So much brutality—and for what?

  “Sir?” a man said, coming up behind them. Not a guard; not anyone Shai recognized. Behind them, the bodies of the slain attackers were being searched, quickly and efficiently.

  “Sir,” the man said again, more insistent this time.

  “What is it?” Lorn said at last. He did not sound himself. His voice, still deep and resonant, sounded somehow thin, empty. A shocked and desolate wasteland in those few words.

  “Sir, with Mr. Edren—ah, that is, with your father … deceased, you are in charge. Sir.”

  Still Lorn looked at his father, until at last he seemed to see his own hands before him, resting on his father’s chest. Saw the blood that patterned them, and their myriad seeping cuts; saw the blood and sweat on his arms. Lorn looked down at his bare, bleeding chest. There was a wound that scored a line across his pectoral muscle, and the tattoo written over his heart. Addis. The cut ran beneath the name as if in emphasis.

  Lorn laughed then, and it was a sad, exhausted sound. He held his bleeding hand to his chest, seemingly pressing against that wound—but it was the name that he wished to cover, Shai thought. His trembling fingers pressed against those dark-inked letters as if he might push them through his skin to his heart.

  Addis, once heir to Edren, raised and trained by his father to lead. Addis, dead these passing years—dead but living in a body not his own.

  Lorn took a long, slow breath and moved his other hand from his father’s chest. Looked away. He stood slowly and straightened his shoulders—took one of Emara’s hands in his own and squeezed. Something came over his face, then, in a slow and subtle transformation.

  “Yes,” he said, once and again. “Okay.”

  He took a deep breath and stepped forward, leaving his father’s body behind.

  Xhea quivered as she woke. She felt if she were rising not from sleep nor unconsciousness, but a deep pool of water, still and cold. She gasped as she surfaced.

  She could not force her eyes open—exhaustion felt like an anchor, pulling her down—but she could feel the blanket on top of her. Not thin like she was used to, but thick and fluffy and warm. Pillow beneath her head, the couch on which she lay. A rasping sound nearby like stone on metal.

  The morning before she’d thought her discomfort due only to overexertion and the lingering aftereffects of her injuries. Now, shivering beneath the blankets, she wasn’t so sure. The magic, she thought, and did not know how to continue. For all the destructive force of her power, she did not know why she would only feel this way now.

  And she was hungry, so very hungry, though the thought of food was enough to turn her stomach.

  She opened her eyes. She was in her grandmother’s apartment. She did not remember returning that afternoon, nor whether she had made it here unaided; she did not, in truth, remember falling asleep. Yet it was night now: full dark outside the distant window, Towerlight flickering overhead, and dim inside the apartment itself. Though she did not need the light, a candle burned on the table.

  On a nearby chair, Torrence hunched over a bucket, a whetstone in on
e hand and Daye’s long knife in the other. Carefully he sharpened the blade, his hands moving in slow and steady circles, water dripping to stain the floor around him. Closer sat Daye, arms crossed and eyes closed as she leaned back in her chair next to the door, the metal-topped cane that she’d given to Xhea against the wall nearby.

  Seemingly casual, both of them. Xhea knew better. She could see their tension, that coiled readiness that no slumped posture or easy expression could belie.

  Torrence looked up as Xhea moved, then dipped the whetstone back in the bucket with a splash. “Well, hey,” he said. “You’re not dead after all. Here I was starting to wonder.”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Xhea managed, barely getting the words past her chattering teeth. “What are you doing here?” She didn’t bother to hide her hostility.

  “Doing our charitable duty and visiting the sick, of course.” He held up the knife and examined it in the candlelight with an easy, practiced eye.

  Of course. Because everyone made secret charitable visits in the middle of the night, especially opportunistic bounty hunters. She glared at Torrence and the knife he held, not knowing whether that blade was meant as threat or warning. Not that she posed much danger to anyone at the moment.

  “Why’s it so cold?” she asked.

  “It’s not. We’ve got it hot in here as we can make it. You, darlin’, are just suffering from the worst case of magic shock I’ve seen in a long time.”

  Xhea blinked, realizing that Daye was down to her undershirt, sweat gleaming from her muscled arms and from the ends of her short hair. Even Torrence looked mussed, and had his sleeves rolled up as high as they could go. Midsummer heat, and them running a heater.

  It was hard to think; harder still to force her quivering lips to form words. “But,” Xhea said, “but … I didn’t even …”

  “Didn’t use much magic?” Torrence lifted the knife, dripping water, and tested its edge. “Tsk, tsk—it doesn’t take much, you know that.”

  Except it didn’t feel like it was overuse of magic that weakened her, but the hunger that had transformed her stomach into a painful, aching pit. Xhea knew hunger—and yet this hurt like nothing she’d ever known. It felt as if the shape of her magic were not that cold, dark lake she’d so long imagined, but an empty hole, black and endless.

  A dark mouth, opening wide.

  She could not stop shivering. The piled blankets, the heat in the air, were nothing to her; the cold had entered her bones. She’d felt warmer standing outside for hours in midwinter, with the wind biting through her clothes and the snow stinging as it drove into her face.

  “Do I have a fever?”

  “Oh, probably.” Torrence tested the knife’s edge again. “I think it’s done,” he said to Daye, offering her the knife hilt-first.

  Daye didn’t even open her eyes. “It’s not,” she replied.

  Torrence sighed and looked to Xhea. “I’m telling you, don’t ever lose a bet with this woman.” He bent again, whetstone whirring against the blade.

  In spite of everything, the comment almost made her smile. Torrence lost bets to Daye all the time, everything from card games to where they’d find the best salvage to how long they’d wait for their mark to come out into the alley to pee. The alley, of course, where they had been waiting with a black bag to cover his head and a startling unwillingness to take to bribes. Xhea’s part in that job had been long since finished, yet she’d stayed, high on her payment and laughing at Torrence’s increasingly ridiculous one-sided banter.

  She missed that life sometimes, strange though it was to admit it. Not the lack of food nor the chill nor the fight for paying work; not the loneliness nor the times when the nights felt endless. But the rest. It hadn’t always been a good life, nor an easy one, but it had been hers. Staring at her hand and seeing the shadow that lay beneath her skin, watching her fingers tremble, she thought, It’s gone for good.

  So, too, was that easy camaraderie with these two, no matter that she remembered better times. It would avail her little to forget what they’d done.

  Even so, she couldn’t help but ask: “What’d you bet on?”

  Torrence snorted. “You.”

  “Glad that you lost, then.” Xhea rubbed her eyes. “What happened, anyway?”

  “Seems the magic got the best of you. Out cold for—what?—six hours now. Couldn’t wake you if we tried. Which we did. Occasionally.”

  “How did I even get here?”

  “That … ah. That was Daye.”

  Daye didn’t move so much as a muscle, yet it was very plain what she thought of Torrence telling that part of the story. He would have more than a few more knives to sharpen in his future, Xhea bet.

  It was hard to envision: Daye lifting her up, cradling her, carrying her all the way here. Even protected by the layers of their clothing—even though Daye and Torrence both had never reacted as strongly to Xhea’s touch as some others did—she could only imagine her discomfort. And for what? Ahrent’s instructions seemed to be for Daye to watch and guard Xhea, not care for her. Xhea couldn’t imagine why she’d bothered.

  Torrence rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. “Well, then, if you’re not going to up and die on us, we might all have a chance of getting out of this alive. Best news I’ve had all day.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re not having fun.”

  “Fun’s when it’s a challenge, fun’s when it’s all on the line. Here …” He shrugged. “Here it’s just a matter of time.” He held out the knife once more. “There, look at this. Sharp as my wit.”

  Daye snorted, but relented enough to crack open one eye, take the blade, and test its edge with her thumb. She nodded grudgingly. As Torrence turned away, Xhea caught just a hint of Daye’s smile, there and gone so fast that she thought she must have imagined it.

  Torrence dried his hands and pushed the bucket to one side, the plastic scraping against the wet floor. “You ever dream about your perfect job?” he asked. It was a stupid question; there was only one answer. Still, she nodded.

  “This wasn’t our dream job,” Torrence said, “because we never had a dream this big. Renai, fame, all of it—that’s one thing; the ultimate con … oh, that’s another. But this? To do a simple job and be rewarded with citizenship—true citizenship?” He shook his head and Xhea understood; no words could do that idea justice.

  “I didn’t believe it, of course, and Daye walked out on Mr. Altaigh in the middle of a sentence—but he talked us around. Made us believe. Conning a conman—that takes skill.”

  Daye sighed, not seeming to listen to either one of them, then rose and crossed to the apartment’s kitchen. There she turned on a small hotplate and filled a battered pot with water from another bucket off to one side. She stood before it, perfectly still and poised like a hunter, and stared at the water’s surface as if daring it to boil.

  Xhea looked from one to the other, not understanding. “You don’t believe that Farrow can become a Tower?”

  Torrence spread his hands. “I don’t believe that it can now, here, no matter how many people that boy plugs into the wall like lamps. This whole thing is going terribly, terribly wrong—and the head man’s doing everything he can to keep it all together. But you know what? He’s just steering a crashing aircar. Thing’s still going to fall.”

  Xhea had been in a crashing aircar before, and unpleasant though it had been, she’d survived. Maybe this was only another bumpy ride.

  She shook her head. It wasn’t that she didn’t have doubts—but it was only the method of achieving that transformation that made her question. The method and the magic, bright and dark alike; she struggled to believe either would be enough.

  She wanted to believe that Ahrent was right—wanted to see Farrow lift into the air, years of work and countless Lower City citizens rising in defiance of all that the City thought of them and their potential. Even the thought was glorious. But she’d stood in a Tower beneath its living, flaring heart, and for all the sacrifice a
nd power represented in Farrow’s attempt, she did not see how they could possibly compare. As if this, like everything else, could only be a poor Lower City echo of what those in the City took for granted.

  She thought of Ieren, and the young boy’s ghost—

  Thought of those people, as still and helpless as Shai had been when she lay dying—

  Volunteers, she reminded herself. It didn’t make her feel any better.

  “If that’s what you think,” Xhea said at last, suspicious, “why are you still here?”

  Torrence shrugged. “We don’t have a way out.”

  Across the room, Daye poured hot water into a glass bottle and a waiting mug she’d filled with leaves. Returning, Daye gestured for Xhea to sit up, and waited while Xhea first glared, then looked away, then at last relented. With quick, efficient motions, Daye propped another pillow behind Xhea’s back, and wrapped the bottle of hot water in a blanket before nestling it at Xhea’s side. Xhea blinked, wanting to protest the strange, sudden attention—yet immediately she could feel the bottle’s heat, the first glimmer of warmth she’d felt since waking. She shifted it so that it rested directly on her stomach, only realizing belatedly that Daye still waited beside her, mug in hand.

  Did Daye just make me tea? Even unspoken, the idea seemed incredible. A water bottle? That was like wound care, the necessary tending of an injured ally. Tea was something else.

  Hesitantly, Xhea reached out, expecting Daye to just snort and turn away, taking the tea with her. Instead, she pressed the mug into Xhea’s hands, careful not to let their fingers touch. The water, darkening to tea as the leaves circulated, splashed against the sides of the mug but did not spill. The rising steam smelled of mint.

  Daye sat and looked directly at Xhea as if daring her to comment. At Xhea’s continued silence, she turned away, looking bored.

  Xhea tried to drag her thoughts back to the conversation, as if the sudden warmth against her hands and stomach didn’t nearly take up the whole of her attention; as if a small sip of tea, sliding down her throat, didn’t seem like the most important thing there was.