The elevator doors opened, and Daye led her down the hall without answering. A hall that Xhea almost didn’t recognize. She’d been used to the hall’s quiet, their only company the guard at the far end. The guard was gone now, and the quiet with him; the hall had become a hive of activity. All doors were open, and people rushed from one room to the other with quick strides that spoke of much to do and too few to do it. Xhea pressed herself against one wall to keep from being run down.
Word must have reached them about Ahrent’s order already, for as she watched the casters’ efforts redoubled. The transformation was beginning, he had said—days too early, if she understood truly. Perhaps weeks. Not enough time to finish preparations, not enough magic to birth a Tower’s true heart—or was that only her fear talking, fear and uncertainty and the edge of panic that set her heart to racing?
Farrow offered escape, she knew that: escape from the realities of the Lower City, as well as from the chaos and destruction that even now raged outside. But was she supposed to just go on, binding people to these walls, and pretending that all she knew wasn’t burning to ash somewhere outside? As if she could. Yet how could forcing the transformation be anything but another disaster?
“What about your plan?” Xhea asked. Whatever escape Torrence and Daye had intended, their timetable—like Farrow’s—had just been accelerated.
Daye just gestured her inside one of the rooms at the hall’s end. Xhea expected to find Ieren there with Torrence playing babysitter; instead, the room was empty but for the unconscious people whose weak magic trickled into Farrow’s walls.
“We need to run,” Xhea said. “Now, while we can.”
Daye shut the door behind them and switched on the overhead lights. “Not without Torrence,” she said quietly.
Xhea took a breath and tried to unclench her hands. “But—”
It was only then that Xhea recognized the woman in the bed nearest to her. She paused, turning. Marna’s hair had been shaved since Xhea had last seen her, leaving her scalp pale and shiny. Her face was slack, mouth slightly open, dry lips cracked. Awake, she’d looked she’d looked vibrant; unconscious, with no hair to distract from her sagging flesh or the deep-scored lines in her face, she only looked old.
She was covered now with a thin, stained sheet; yet still Xhea could see the wires that connected to her neck and heart and hands. There were other connections now, too: the IV had multiple bags hung, dripping into the line in her arm; while stained plastic tubing seemed to handle her body’s wastes. Though Marna, unlike the man two beds over, was not connected to a respirator. Perhaps that’s just a matter of time.
Looking down at the woman’s face, beneath her fear and anger and confusion, Xhea felt … what? She didn’t even know. This woman was her grandmother, by marriage if not by birth; yet they had known each other for no more than a span of an hour. She was a stranger who had called Xhea family, but Xhea couldn’t help but wonder what this woman might have meant to her had they known each other—or who she might have been had she been raised in Marna’s care. She wondered, too, what Marna had been going to tell her before Ahrent had interrupted her urgent, whispered message.
Behind her, Daye dragged a chair across the floor until it was directly in front of the door and then sat down, leaned back, and crossed her arms over her chest. She looked at Xhea steadily, intent. Waiting.
Xhea glanced from the now blocked and guarded door back to Marna’s body. “What …?” she started, and let the question trail away. Daye would not answer her, not in words. This, Xhea thought as she looked at Daye’s seemingly impassive expression, was the answer to a question she had not known to ask.
Xhea went to Marna’s IV and fiddled with the controls until she had reduced the drip to all but nothing. Even so, whatever sedative they used would take a while to wear off. Instead of waiting, she leaned her cane against the bedside and reached out with both hands, holding one above Marna’s forehead and the other over her sternum. She shifted the focus of her vision, and the world around her was reborn in light and shadow.
Clear as daylight, clear as fire, she saw the transformation spells running through the walls—stronger now, and growing brighter by the moment. Beneath her hovering hands, she saw the magic that ran through Marna’s body and up into the wires, a thin trickle of light that merged seamlessly into the spells, Marna’s life becoming the skyscraper’s—the Tower’s. There, too, were the bonds that Ieren had woven but two days before, the cobweb-thin lines that joined Marna’s spirit to the wires, dark and gleaming.
As she stared, Xhea realized that she could almost see the woman’s ghost itself, like a doubled image of her body, one lying atop the other. But though Marna’s body was still, no movement but for the steady rise and fall of her breath, her spirit within was not nearly so calm. Held tight within the confines of her body—and bound tighter now by Ieren’s dark spells—Marna’s spirit thrashed.
Xhea did not move but still she reached, magic flowing at her command—slowly, gently, as Ieren had shown her the day before. Just a little bit of magic; just enough to loosen the tension upon the bindings without undoing them entirely. Then, not knowing if it would work, Xhea grasped the woman’s spirit with her magic and moved her, bringing her ghost into alignment with her body.
Marna gasped for breath, shuddering beneath the sheet. A moment, then she opened her eyes.
Xhea drew back, watching as the woman coughed and shivered as she came back to herself, clearly fighting the drugs’ effects. So, too, would the spells’ pull on her magic have weakened her; even now, Xhea could see Marna struggle against magic shock.
Marna turned, and her gaze fixed upon Xhea’s face. A moment of hesitation, then recognition.
“Enjeia,” she whispered, slurring the name. “Xhea.”
“Uh … hello.” Now that Marna was awake, Xhea didn’t know what to say.
“Is it over?” she asked slowly, clumsily—but oh, the yearning in that voice. “Tell me he failed, tell me …”
Marna lifted an unsteady hand and felt the bare expanse of her scalp—touched the wires bound to her at hand and neck and heart. Only then did she seem to see where she was, and what surrounded her: still bodies kept in poor comfort; a bare, echoing room; only a respirator’s wheeze to break the silence.
“Oh,” she said in a tone of defeat. She closed her eyes and shivered.
“Marna,” Xhea said haltingly. “There was something … something you were going to say, before …”
Again the woman forced open her eyes, blinking once, twice, in an attempt to focus. “He has you working for him,” she said slowly. She swallowed. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“It does,” Xhea said. “Tell me…. Please.”
Marna nodded, but it was a long time before she said, “Your mother, Nerra … she bound you. The last days of her life, those spells were all she worked on. Binding your magic. Keeping it down before your power truly developed.” She licked her cracked and bleeding lips with a dry tongue. Belatedly, Xhea wished she’d had some water to offer. “I was supposed to tell you, if I could, that the only way to preserve the binding and extend your life was to use your power as little as possible. Too much pressure on the spells, and the binding will break.”
Xhea stared at her, speechless.
Marna blinked again, and rubbed her eyes with the back of one shaking, wire-bound hand. “It already has,” she said then. “It’s already broken.” It wasn’t, in the end, a question.
Xhea nodded, because she remembered lying on the glass floor in Eridian, the Tower’s living heart flaring beneath her, and pulling on her magic with all her strength. She remembered, too, the feeling of something cracking deep within her. She had come to believe that what she felt must have only been the glass floor upon which she lay cracking beneath the onslaught.
But every day since, she’d been weak and trembling, sometimes barely able to think for the fevers, never mind speak or laugh or walk. Magic shock. Too much magic for her body
to handle, too much used too fast—blunted only, it seemed, by her bond to Shai. What was the word that Ieren had used? Her bondling.
Gone now, binding and tether both. Only her magic remained, and it was growing ever stronger. Even now, her stomach cramped in hunger—reaction to the dark magic that flowed through her.
“I’m sorry, child,” Marna whispered. “We’re both dying, you and I, aren’t we? It’s all just a matter of time. And neither of us gets the death we’d choose.”
It took a moment for understanding to sink in. “Ahrent said you volunteered.” Xhea realized she was all but pleading, wanting this woman to dispel her sudden fear. “He said you chose this.”
Marna only laughed, a sad and defeated sound. “Of course he did. And you believed him.” She shook her head, looking forlorn. “I’m sorry,” she said, as if somehow this was all her fault.
“I—”
“We all have debts, child. Ahrent offered us a way to pay them off—a way that wouldn’t see our loved ones on the streets when Farrow begins to rise.”
“But, if they’re citizens …”
Marna’s voice was hard enough, dark enough, that Xhea finally began to believe their kinship. “As if Lower City citizenship can’t be taken away at will. No, the deal was simple: if you could not pay the price of citizenship, you were out—unless someone was willing to give their life to pay on your behalf. All it took was one person’s magic to pay the price for their family. A good deal, we were told.”
Xhea looked around, thinking of the rooms around her filled with unconscious people. Not volunteers; this was a debtor’s prison, the only escape from which was death.
The next thought came slower, because it was dark and heavy with a weight of stone. “And you?” Xhea asked, thinking of Ahrent whispering, All debts between us are clear. “Your family is dead. No one left to rise.”
But she already knew the answer. Because hadn’t there been more pictures on the apartment walls, newer children’s drawings than the ones she might have drawn?
“My son,” Marna whispered, “and his three children. I was old, but Ahrent accepted my sacrifice—so long as I helped you to understand Farrow’s cause. He asked that I wouldn’t tell you the truth when I could have.”
Citizenship bought with life—with death—and silence. What could she say to that? She should be angry, she knew, if not at Marna then at herself. Family, she thought. She had no family but the one she chose—and her family in Farrow had abandoned her, once, twice, and again. There were reasons she had chosen to be alone.
“Put me back,” Marna said at last. “Let me go, child. It won’t be long now.”
Only then did Xhea realize that it was not a reduction in the drugs that kept Marna awake, nor the conversation, but Xhea’s magic. It was nothing more than a trickle, but still it flowed, holding the woman’s ghost in alignment with her body. Pulling back against the bindings dug deep into her spirit.
She looked closer at the spells Ieren had woven—the spells he had taught her the day before and that she’d practiced, time after painstaking time, until she’d begun to get it right. There in the tangled lines of intent, she saw the truth: this was no temporary binding, no spell she might break with the ease with which it had been made, but one that dug deep into the woman’s soul and grew stronger the longer it existed.
You saved Shai from this. The spells and fate to which they had been tied. You saved her, and then you … and then these people …
She didn’t know what to say—all her words were gone, leaving only a terrible, echoing emptiness in her wake—and so she said nothing, merely opened her hands, released her magic and stepped back. Marna sagged into the bed’s hard embrace, her eyes fluttering closed. They did not open again.
Xhea stared. She hadn’t said goodbye. Hadn’t let Marna—
But that’s life, isn’t it? came the thought, hard and angry. As if any emotion might overcome the guilt that swelled until it choked her. Even so, Xhea had to turn away; she couldn’t bear to see Marna’s face gone slack and empty once more.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered, her eyes squeezed closed.
Daye replied, just as softly, “Why didn’t you ask?”
“Then it’s true? Their debts. Their families.” That this was the way a person bought citizenship to Tower Farrow for their children.
“Why,” Daye said—quietly, so quietly—“did you think they volunteered?”
Xhea swallowed.
“There are more, aren’t there? More floors like this. More … people.” Because she knew Shai’s power. How many ordinary people did it take, how much magic, to equal one Radiant?
As if the thought were a cue, suddenly she could feel them—she could even almost see them, without wishing to. Not just the people in the room, and the ones in the rooms beyond that, but more. Xhea felt the pressure of the volunteers’ magic, taken and gathered and sent flowing through these walls, like an ache above her, around her. Saw the light of their magic, long though she had pushed that glow away. Not just storage coils, not just spells, but floor after floor of bound people—people for whom today’s forced transformation would surely mean their lives.
“Yes,” Daye said.
Silence settled between them.
“I think I liked it better when you didn’t say anything,” Xhea managed at last, and then had to stop speaking lest she break down and cry. She grabbed her cane and clung to it as if it were the only stable thing left in the world.
This is what I helped create? The question seemed to echo through the empty reaches of her mind. She had been to the City, knew and understood the truth that lay beneath all the Towers’ wealth and happiness, the foundation on which they’d built that life of ease. It was foolish, then, to believe that anything, even a new Tower, might be born with less pain and strife and hardship.
This is what I’m going to die for? Because her hands were shaking, and her legs, and the world had started spinning around her. She’d used just a little bit of her returning magic, and oh, now there was no pretending that it would be anything but the death of her.
The Lower City was burning, and Farrow was going to rise on the backs of its dead citizens, and the world around her was spinning, spinning, as if nothing would ever again be still or right or whole again.
Farrow shivered.
Even curled, shaking and shuddering, Xhea could not mistake the feeling for anything other than something outside herself. She went still—or tried to; pressed her hands against the cold floor, fingers splayed. Again the skyscraper shivered, a ripple of movement that ran through the floor and the walls and echoed all the way into her bones.
Xhea looked up. Beneath the sound of the ventilators, beyond the closed doors, she could hear voices. Terse, commanding. Beneath that ruthless efficiency: excitement. Somewhere, the sound muffled and faint but nonetheless audible, Ieren laughed.
“It’s beginning.”
Daye nodded.
Xhea could see no difference in the room or walls—yet already something felt different, even if she didn’t know how to name that change. The air seemed almost energized; it vibrated, as if all around her echoed a sound just outside the range of her hearing. Goosebumps rose in response.
A song, she thought—and she knew that sound. It was the song of a Tower’s heart, or the earliest notes of that song, struggling for harmony as the Tower itself struggled toward life.
She shifted her vision again. Before, she had seen the complexity of the spells and the charms running beneath; now, she was all but blinded by their light.
Magic flowed, not in a steady current but in pulses like a heartbeat. Already the main spells were all but incandescent, while the charms carved into Farrow’s ancient walls caught the overflow and flared to life. As she watched, more spells burst into being, and more, layer upon layer until she could not see where one ended and the next began, never mind read their lines of intent.
She looked up and around and saw the whole of t
he skyscraper mapped out in power, the barrier of concrete and iron suddenly less substantial to her sight than mist. Above, she could see all the way to the shining spires of light atop Farrow’s roof. Below, that power faded until there was no magic at all in the skyscraper’s lowest levels. While around her, all around her, the Tower’s heart was forming. It was no shape of pure magic—not yet, not so soon—yet already in the power’s flow she could see the pulsing patterns that she had come to know in one Tower and another. Already she could feel the pressure of so much magic pushing against her like invisible hands, making her skin tingle and go numb.
It was so beautiful, Xhea could barely breathe for looking at it—and that beauty made her angry. Nothing born of death should shine so brightly.
For the magic that shone as it flowed lightning-quick through those patterns flooded in from storage coils, poured in from the hearts of Farrow’s bound citizens. Even if it were not for the people that she and Ieren had joined to this working—even if it were possible for a person to give the whole of their magic without dying—the light she saw was a hundred years of the skyscraper’s riches. A hundred years of magic—magic that could have been money, that could have been food, that could have been warmth in the winter and new clothes for its citizens; magic that could have eased pain or healed illnesses. Magic that had instead been hoarded away and hidden, saved for this very moment.
Xhea had not realized that she wished to place her hands to the wall and destroy it all—not until that desire died within her. Even without the strength of power she’d shown two months before—even if such a wild torrent of power would not cast her to the ground, gasping and shuddering, if not fighting death—she could have destroyed this working. Destroyed, if not the whole of it, then enough to compromise the rest—enough to keep Farrow earthbound, subject to gravity’s dictates like the rest of them.
Destroy the work of countless people, countless years. And how many will you kill in the process?
For Xhea knew the dark spells that bound so many people’s spirits to Farrow’s walls; she had woven them with her own hands. There would be no easy escape, no quick cutting of those bonds—and a flood of dark magic would cascade down through those wires even in the attempt. The dark spells would hold their spirits still, trapped in their bodies, as Xhea’s magic condemned them to oblivion.
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