Slowly, Xhea looked up.
The Towers were cast across the smoke-stained sky, seemingly stacked one atop another. Even searching, it took her a moment to find them: Towers—poorer Towers, lower Towers—circling Farrow like crows. Fore-warned of Farrow’s arrival, they waited—and as one Tower moved out of formation, shifting closer to where Farrow would rise, the others seemed to pause, looking for the thing that had caused the change. Just carrion birds, Xhea thought, for all that they looked like long, slender spinning tops, bristling with defensive spires.
“Rown sold them out,” Xhea said, still staring upward. She watched as the Towers moved, circled. A new-birthed Tower would be an easy target for the taking.
Daye paused, followed Xhea’s gaze, and nodded once. It was Torrence who replied: “We know.”
The rooftop door banged open and Ieren stumbled into the sunlight.
“Xhea?” he called. “Xhea, what are you doing?”
Torrence swore and dropped the chains, turning toward Ieren.
Who was watching him? For him to vanish now, right when Farrow would need him most—she could only imagine Ahrent’s reaction. Of course, she knew who was supposed to keep Ieren under control: Torrence.
“Ieren, my boy, listen—”
But Ieren paid him no heed. Instead he stumbled toward Xhea as if she were the only one there. “We need you,” he said. “I’ve been looking—”
He stopped. Stared.
“You’re leaving?” he asked, suddenly bereft. She knew that look, that feeling: the realization that you’ve been left behind. Abandoned. He came toward her—and then his ghost was dragged, struggling, out of the stairwell and into the open air between them.
Xhea could not look at the ghost—but she could not look at anything else. Her whole self reached toward him as if he were the only thing in the world.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no …” But the hands she raised to ward away the ghost and block him from her sight were already dark with magic.
In a moment of perfect clarity, Xhea remembered Daye’s words: If you don’t want to be like Ieren, then don’t be. She couldn’t change what she was, nor what her power demanded—but she could fight both.
Her power surged and for a moment she grabbed control, thinking of her lost silver blade and forcing the magic into its image. She reached out and sliced through the tether that joined the ghost to Ieren.
“Go,” she cried to the ghost, pleading, desperate—while Ieren screamed as if he were dying. “Run!”
Her magic came boiling out of her. Sweat and tears and ink-stained breath, dark magic reached for the ghost like a hundred arms formed of smoke. She could not hold it back, helpless against that sudden, overwhelming need.
But the ghost was not looking at her, nor at Ieren, but at the center of his chest where his tether had once joined. His face was transformed. There was no fear there, no pain or panic; merely a moment of perfect joy. Then he was gone, vanishing into the air as if he had never been there at all.
Xhea’s magic writhed, suddenly denied its target, and she fought to regain her tenuous control. There was no denying: with every passing minute, her magic seemed to grow within her, becoming darker and more powerful even as it sapped her body’s strength. Even as it killed her. She trembled, wanted to fall; but in that moment, she cared little for her weakness. The clear and evident failings of her flesh were as nothing; and her death, which threatened with every breath stained dark, seemed no more worthy of notice than the most distant Towers.
I’m dying. The thought brought no fear. There was only the magic’s perfect calm, its feeling of wholeness and strength that filled her even as she collapsed.
Lying sprawled on the roof’s hot surface, Xhea took a long breath and another, blinking as her vision shifted to see pure magic—black against glowing white—and back again. Everything was bright and dark: the spires spilling magic like fountains of light, Farrow below her shaking and shuddering as the spells within it grew. Her magic, and Ieren’s. The flames of the distant fire, and the pillars of black smoke that stretched skyward.
If fear held no sway, logic could: her magic could still hurt Torrence or Daye. Force it back, she commanded. She pulled hard on that dark power, drawing it into her like a snail into its shell.
Ieren, too, had collapsed. He sprawled on the roof’s gritty surface, twitching. Not dead, she thought, but nearly so. Torrence barely glanced at the boy as he stepped around him and came to Xhea’s side. After a sharp, assessing look, Daye turned and ran to get the car.
“Are you okay?” Torrence asked, low and urgent. “Xhea? Can you stand?”
In all the years she had known him—in all the jobs they had done, all the tight spots they had gotten into—never had she heard his voice sound like that. Once she’d thought that if Torrence stood at the end of the world, he’d laugh to see it—maybe greet it with a mocking smile and a crude gesture. Now, he sounded afraid.
“Run,” Xhea whispered. For what did it matter if she had fallen, or if she lay here on Farrow’s rooftop as the skyscraper began to rise? She was going to die anyway, from one magic or the other, and the only way out would be for him or Daye to carry her.
“Stand,” he countered. “Come on, Xhea. We need you.”
But they didn’t. She laughed at the absurdity; it came out as little more than a wheeze.
“Not to get away,” he said, understanding her reaction. “After. We get you out, you get us into Edren—you see?”
She did, because he was suddenly an open book before her, all the hurt and desperation beneath his smiling exterior coming to the fore. Without Rown, without Farrow, they had nothing. While she had Edren—or so it seemed.
For it was impossible to imagine a life after this moment; impossible, even, to imagine living at all. She was weak, injured, failing—and her magic brought only death. Wasn’t it better if that death was hers, here, now, rather than someone else’s? Rather than ghost after ghost, person after person, destroyed to buy her a few more days? It was clear she could not control her power, nor the desperate hunger that drove it.
I don’t want to die, she thought, and realized it was true. Not that she could stop it; but perhaps she could die standing. Perhaps she could look that death in the face—not just shake and shiver until the darkness came over her and swept her away. She could die like a true Lower City dweller: defiant until the end.
Unable to touch her, Torrence held her cane as she fumbled for it with weak, numbed fingers. The pain came then, pain and pain and pain, and Xhea laughed even as she cried out. She would stand, one way or the other. Torrence nodded his approval as he, too, rose.
From behind him, Ieren reached out and grabbed Torrence’s leg.
Ieren’s hand was so small, Xhea expected Torrence to just shake him off, swearing at the pain. Instead, Torrence froze. Every muscle went rigid, and the tendons in his neck stood out like wire cables. He barely seemed to be breathing, his chest fluttering with the erratic spasms of his diaphragm. Only his eyes showed that he was still conscious; they were wide and terrified, locked on Xhea’s face.
“Torrence?” Her voice broke, and she struggled to toward him.
Ieren was faster. Weak as he was, he dragged himself toward Torrence with single-minded intensity, hand over hand as he used Torrence’s legs and then arms to support him until he was standing, swaying, clinging to the bounty hunter as if Torrence were his last hold on life. And perhaps he was.
Ieren didn’t hold to Torrence with his hands alone, Xhea saw, but with his magic. Dark power flowed from Ieren into Torrence, dark power that twisted and dug deep inside him like claws. Then he reached for Torrence’s face, fingers spread. His power was a black rush that leapt across the space between them and into Torrence’s eyes.
Torrence’s own magic was but a flicker; beneath the onslaught, even that dim light faltered. But Ieren’s purpose was not to drown Torrence’s power. As she watched, Ieren’s magic wrapped around Torrence’s spirit, gr
abbed hold tight, and pulled.
“No!” Xhea cried, still struggling to push past pain and find the will to stand. For beneath her horror, she felt her own magic rise in response. It was all she could do to hold it back, to keep herself from reaching as Ieren reached, as if a living man were but a ghost in the making.
Hungry, came the thought, echoing through her like a bell. Her magic tried again to rise and she fought to hold it back—because she was not like that, she refused.
Ignoring her magic, she grabbed her cane and swung for Ieren’s legs. The solid wood impacted hard against the boy’s lower leg, but it did little to deter his attack; he clung to Torrence like a small, vicious predator with its jaws already locked on.
Torrence’s eyes, still wide and staring, shone now, even wreathed as they were by the flow of Ieren’s power. It took Xhea a moment to understand what she was seeing.
Ieren was ripping Torrence’s ghost out of his body through his eyes.
Something screamed—a person’s scream, an engine’s scream—and a battered aircar flew from the garage and slammed into Ieren’s side. The boy went flying, his hold on Torrence roughly broken. He tumbled like a rag doll, rolling, limbs loose and flailing, across the surface of Farrow’s roof. He came to a stop face down near the wall that surrounded the skyscraper’s edge, and did not move.
Torrence had taken only a glancing blow, but even that was enough to send him sprawling. The car skidded to a stop near his fallen body and Daye rushed out.
She was screaming. She, who Xhea had never heard raise her voice, screamed so loud that it suddenly felt like all Xhea could hear, all she had ever heard. The sound went on and on and on, seemingly ripped from Daye’s throat.
Daye fell to the ground at Torrence’s side, grabbing his body to cradle him roughly, and only then did she fall silent. Silence, Xhea thought, was worse. Daye bowed her head, her short tangle of dark hair falling over her eyes, and it did nothing to hide her grief or her rage or her pure, naked pain.
Xhea pushed herself off the ground and staggered toward them. Daye looked up, meeting Xhea’s eyes.
“Let me help him,” Xhea said. Beneath them, Farrow shook—not a small quiver, not a shudder, but what felt like an earthquake that rolled and rattled all around them. Xhea heard concrete crack, glass shatter—but she did not look away, only stared at Daye with single-minded intensity. When the shaking stopped, Daye nodded.
Xhea looked down at Torrence’s unconscious body—and unconscious he was, for all that his pale eyes were open and staring. Oh, let him be unconscious—for she did not want to think of why else he had grown so still.
As with Marna, she could see his ghost inside his body—except that his ghost wasn’t in his body anymore, not fully. Where Marna’s spirit had been an astigmatic echo of her physical form, Torrence’s spirit had been almost dislodged entirely. Even now his open eyes seemed to gleam with the energy that she associated only with ghosts and their tethers.
If Ieren had succeeded in pulling Torrence’s spirit from his body … A walker, Xhea thought in dazed shock. He would have been a walker.
Beneath it all, her hunger roared, demanding that she finish what Ieren had begun. But she was stronger than that; she had to be. If she had to do but one thing before the power overwhelmed her, let it be this.
She reached out with hands and magic both, took hold of Torrence’s ghost, and pushed.
Hungry—oh, sweetness and blight, she was so hungry—but she was not Ieren, would never be.
Never, she thought, never, never, never, and held to the thought as tightly as she held to her magic. For it was not a creature outside her—not a wild beast beyond her control—but a part of her. A terrifying, horrifying part, yes, but it was her nonetheless. Letting it dictate her actions? No, that was a choice, and one she would fight with every part of her being.
She felt the moment Torrence’s spirit reconnected with his body, and she drew back and pushed herself away, putting as much physical distance between her and Torrence as she could. Will could only do so much.
Torrence gasped and blinked, then flailed wildly in sudden panic. Daye restrained him, holding him until he calmed.
“Daye?” he said, and his voice was like a child’s, pleading and broken. “Daye, I can’t see.”
Without speaking, Daye gathered him more fully into her arms and picked him up. Despite her size, and his, she did not struggle under his weight, only stared at his face as if he were the last person in the world. Step by careful step, she made her way to the aircar and lay him down in the cargo space in the back. She moved to the driver’s seat, settled herself inside, and only then did she turn to Xhea and meet her eyes.
“I—” Xhea started.
Daye slammed the aircar’s door closed and hit the controls, sending the vehicle rocketing upward without a backward glance. Xhea stared, open-mouthed. She could only watch as the car sped away, banking hard as it turned across the Lower City, the air in its wake shimmering with spell exhaust.
Xhea was too tired to laugh, too tired to cry; she just watched as the car vanished into the smoke and was gone. Only her magic held her steady. She had called it in her attempt to save Torrence, and now had nothing left with which to force it back. She held her hand aloft, her fingers silhouetted against the sky; it was hard to see where her magic ended and true smoke began. Both filled the air with darkness. Both made her eyes burn, and her breathing grow short.
Of course, she thought simply. Of course this would happen. That she would be left now, here, with no way up nor down, and all her bridges burned behind her. She looked to the garage and the aircars held within. Perhaps she could find one unlocked; perhaps she could get it started. But flying it, like this? Impossible. That had to be why Daye had left; so much magic flowed from Xhea now that it had to have entered the visible spectrum, had to lift from her skin like steam and pool around her feet in a puddle of black. Too much magic for even a short aircar ride.
She knew it, and tried to pretend that some part of her didn’t want to scream at Daye anyway. Still she stood—slowly, painfully, leaning heavily on the cane that Daye had given her—and started toward the garage.
A sound stopped her. A whimper.
Ieren.
No fear now, no panic; only the sound of her feet crunching against the roof’s gritty surface as Xhea made her slow way to where the boy lay fallen. She, too, nearly fell, once and again as Farrow shook beneath her. Yet that movement was so constant now it was nearly beneath her notice; she had but to time her steps to the building’s shudders.
Xhea lowered herself to the ground at Ieren’s side. She could see the shallow movement of his ribs as he breathed, and a cut on his head seeped blood. His back might have been broken, or his neck. Doesn’t matter now. Carefully as she could, she turned him over.
Ieren’s face showed little sign of his injuries, only an abrasion along one cheek. But his eyes were distant; he blinked slowly, once, twice, and again, as the smoke-diluted sunlight fell upon his face. It took a moment more for him to focus on her. He smiled then, pale lips stained dark with blood.
“Xhea,” he said. He raised one hand clumsily toward her. After a long, frozen moment, she took his hand.
His skin was cool and clammy to the touch. Yet though her magic still flowed, Ieren showed no pain. He was just like her—or she was like him. Perhaps it was the same in the end.
Though she looked, Xhea could see no flicker of his earlier hurt or sadness. It seemed not to matter how truly she had earned his hatred; he only smiled at her, closed his eyes, and tried to squeeze her hand.
A minute passed, perhaps two. Xhea realized that Ieren’s breathing had stopped, and she did not know when. Still she held his hand.
Slowly she looked up at the Towers circling overhead and the smoke-hazed sky. Farrow’s spell-spires shone brighter now, brighter and brighter until it seemed that her whole world was defined by that light. Somewhere below came a low whump, and the skyscraper shook—a different
movement than all the ones before. Again, the noise came and the vibration—and again.
Explosions. They were setting off the bombs. Xhea took a long and shuddering breath.
Then, as if from nowhere, a tether connected to the center of Xhea’s chest. Its impact against her sternum felt like little more than a drop of a pin, and for a second Xhea could only stare at it, disbelieving.
A span of a breath, and then her magic and the hunger beneath roared up like a tidal wave, hard and fast and inexorable. Darkness washed over her, and she collapsed.
Rain, Shai thought as the flames grew and spread. If only it would rain. But the sky, behind the thickening haze of smoke and the shifting Towers, was a perfect cloudless blue.
The Towers themselves had water to spare, caught as rain or condensed from the humid air; she had never heard of a Tower’s cisterns running low, never mind dry. Yet none, she knew, would open those stores to dump their water upon the Lower City below, no matter how high the flames reached, no matter how thick the smoke. The lives and deaths of the people on the ground made no difference to those above; they would suffer and burn and die, and in the City they would only complain about the haze and the harsh smell of smoke.
Once that would have been her. A myriad concerns filled her days long before the time when she lay dying, and never once had she thought to look down. Never had she wondered about the lives lived so far distant, scratched out of dirt and ruin.
Now she did what she could, little though it was. Her magic had all but vanished—and was exhausted seemingly as fast as it was generated. There were too many choices: did she battle the flames, or help the people who tried? Did she heal those on the edge of death, or spread her power thinner, helping dozens instead of one?
Wait, she told herself. Let the magic come back first, let it get stronger. But how could she let a hurt family pass her by, knowing that with a quick spell to aid that boy’s fractured ankle, that mother’s mangled arm, she could speed their escape from the danger zone? How could she not help the flagging people on the fire’s front lines, knowing that even a little magic might strengthen their defense?
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