She thought of the way that plants struggled to grow within the Lower City core, while the badlands were nothing but green. She thought of these buildings here still standing—aged and marked, but standing, even whole—while the ruins beyond were succumbing to wind and time, the concrete marked with moss and mold and mildew, home to countless living things.
Not here. Nothing so small could live here. Nothing could thrive.
She thought of the people here, poor and ill and ailing, barely enough bright magic in them to live, never mind flourish. Sometimes someone came to the Lower City—a true City citizen, fallen on hard times—thinking that they’d stay only for a week or a month, just until they were back on their feet. Few ever left—for who could grow rich again, healthy and strong—who could even generate the bare minimum of power that the Towers required—when dark magic fell upon them every night, undoing all they had wrought?
Xhea stared and stared and stared, as if she might see something else that would make her understand why. As if understanding might strip away her horror.
How long has the City been poisoning us? She laughed then, the sound hard and bitter, for she already knew the answer to that: perhaps as long as there had been a City.
And from that poison … this. This song, this place, this feeling that echoed around her. Xhea remembered what Ahrent had said to her but days ago—days that now felt like years, with everything changed in their wake.
With enough magic and enough time, things begin to change—to become something more than they were. Eventually, even metal or glass or stone can begin to awaken.
She had thought him crazy—a fool to imagine that something constructed by human hands might ever be something more. Might live. But if he had been crazy to think his skyscraper could become a living Tower, she must have lost her grip on reality entirely.
For the Lower City was not just singing—it was singing to her.
As she’d approached, Xhea had heard surprise in that song. Surprise—and then, beneath that, welcome. Joy. It was foolish to ascribe emotions to a thing that she could not rightly name, never mind understand. But how else to describe the way the song shifted and changed with her every step until it seemed to reverberate in time with her magic, her bond to Shai, the very rhythms of her heart and breath?
“Hello,” Xhea whispered. Then again, the words stained dark—imagining she could make her very magic vibrate with the greeting: Hello.
There was a pause, then the song roared up, so loud that she flinched from it—a rush of power that vibrated in joyous echo of that word.
No, not in echo, but in reply.
“It’s alive,” she breathed. “The Lower City is alive.”
Alive like a Tower was—only not born of bright magic, but dark. Beneath her could only be its heart.
Shai said something, and Torrence, but Xhea heard neither. Someone screamed.
“It’s going to fall!” a woman cried, her voice high with fear. “It’s going to fall!”
Only then did Xhea realize that the crowd around her was gathered not just to put out the fires, but to look at the sky. She followed their gazes.
Farrow.
The skyscraper had risen as Ahrent promised it would. Yet this could not be the glorious transformation he had envisioned. So much power, so many spells, so many years spent planning—and Xhea could only think that they’d forced the transformation too quickly.
If transformation it was. Farrow looked worse for the wear: cracked and crumbling, once-whole windows shattered, holes in its side gaping wide like screaming mouths. It still shone, the spells were still working—and yes, it lifted slowly, slowly, into the smoke-stained sky—but it was no Tower, only concrete and stone.
Xhea had heard and felt Farrow’s heart taking shape, yet it had been nothing compared to a true Tower’s heart, that glowing orb of pure power on which every Tower functioned. It had been nothing compared to the song that resonated even now from the ground beneath her, different though they were.
Still she stared, as if by watching she could somehow change the inevitable.
Beside her, Torrence asked, “What’s happening?” Xhea glanced at him; he shielded his eyes with one hand, blinking and squinting in Farrow’s general direction. Not blind then—or not wholly so. “What is that? It looks like the moon.”
“Farrow,” Daye said. But she didn’t look at the airborne skyscraper, only at Torrence in evident worry. Even Xhea’s eyebrow rose—for how could Torrence, poor and all but magic-blind, see Farrow’s light? Or perhaps he saw only the visible defensive spells that cascaded from the two spell-spires—though they had weakened, and were fading by the moment.
“Farrow’s rising?” he asked incredulously.
“No.”
And they weren’t. Farrow’s upward progress had halted in midair. Planning their upward attack, she thought. But as moments passed it became clear that they wanted to rise higher, and could not. The skyscraper shook and surged, looking for all the world like a broken-down aircar too weak to fly.
Strength left only to hover, and fight for a time. Strength left only to fall.
“I could …” Shai started, but it wasn’t hard for Xhea to hear the uncertainty in her voice. Uncertainty that Xhea echoed, much though she wished it were otherwise. For all Shai’s power, that endless Radiant light, there were limits—and this went far beyond all of them.
“No,” Xhea said. Only that.
“But I … I have to try.”
“Try what?”
“I don’t know.” Shai sounded like her heart was breaking. Xhea reached out and took the ghost’s hands in hers, lacing their fingers together.
Xhea had never asked Ahrent about Farrow’s backup plans; somehow she knew that there were none. Perhaps they hadn’t thought much farther than the moment of transformation itself. Higher, the poorest Towers circled their prey, waiting to swoop down and grab Farrow from midair.
Perhaps it’s better that way. Better that than smashing on the ground.
Except that any takeover, hostile or otherwise, saw two Towers merged. Their grown-metal flesh went liquid and they joined, one into the other. If a Tower fell on Farrow, piercing the structure, it would only be to take what magic they could from its struggling newborn heart. There were no other resources there that a Tower might want, no matter how poor; no citizens worth enough to save and claim and feed.
This is your fault. The thought was heavy with recrimination. You left them like this. You made it so they would fall.
Except this was no small failure that might have been solved by binding the lives and spirits of another few people to those concrete walls. Everything—all those years and lives, all that magic and misspent renai—and for what? All it would earn them, in the end, was a broken building smashed upon the ground, lives ground to nothing beneath it.
Xhea watched as the skyscraper struggled again to rise and enter the City proper; watched them fail. Slowly, Farrow tilted from one side to the other like some unsteady top, objects and rubble tumbling from its balconies and the holes in its walls. She could not see the ground on which the skyscraper had once stood, but knew how it must look: that gaping hole so laboriously dug, bottomed now with the piled rubble from the detonations, rebar and plumbing pipe stabbing upward.
“Could we … flatten Farrow’s base somehow?” Shai asked, clearly struggling to accept the hopeless reality. “Cut off those ragged pieces? And make some sort of cradle for it to land in. And …” Shai’s voice trailed away as she thought through the myriad little details, none of which might be skipped. Because it wasn’t just a question of power. If it had been, perhaps between the two of them they might have found a way—if they’d had days to plan and prepare. Perhaps.
One of the smaller Towers, already pushed from its previous altitude, dove toward Farrow, arrow-straight. Farrow, too, dropped—and even expecting it, Xhea’s stomach clenched at the sight of the building dropping like a stone. Nearby, people screamed.
&nbs
p; A moment, then the Tower pulled up with such speed that Xhea could only imagine what it was like to be a citizen inside. Its bottommost spires nearly scraped Farrow’s rooftop as they swooped skyward once more. They didn’t dare get so close to the ground, or the destructive power of the dark magic that pooled within it.
Though the attack had been aborted, Farrow’s delicate equilibrium was broken. Spells flared around the skyscraper, but to little avail: they slowed but could not stop the skyscraper’s descent.
Xhea squeezed Shai’s fingers with one hand and gripped the top of her cane with the other. She couldn’t watch. She couldn’t look away.
She hadn’t realized that her power still flowed—that her words and thoughts were being carried in the magic that filled her breath and tears—until she felt the Lower City’s song change in response. No words, no thoughts, only a deepening of the song’s resonance as its myriad melodies shifted: chords played in question and in sorrow.
Oh, what could she say? What could she do? How could she explain herself to an entity of living structures, of earth and street and broken concrete? How could she tell it what it meant for Farrow to fall?
Yet as she thought the name, Farrow, she felt the Lower City shiver.
Of course it would know. Farrow, so long a part of the Lower City, had changed in the span of a morning and been ripped away. Explosions in the ground, rubble left behind. The Lower City knew; of course it knew. Who would not know that they had lost a piece of their very self?
It was still hurting, she realized; hurting as much as the people here, the ones with their homes burned, their loved ones lost. Farrow’s absence was part of that song; so too was the place where the market once stood.
Farrow slid sideways, sinking ever lower, and someone cried, “It’s heading for the market!”
Whether their trajectory was guided or sheer accident, she did not know; yet Xhea heard the gathered watchers murmur thanks to absent gods that the skyscraper wouldn’t crash somewhere that the buildings were still standing. Murmurs, too, of fear and shock, of what that crash would mean.
So much hurt. So much pain and death, with only the promise of more to come. While she—while they all—just stood here, helpless.
No, Xhea thought.
She released Shai’s hand and her cane alike, and lowered herself awkwardly to ground. She placed both hands against the wet, ashy street, fingers splayed.
Help them, she said in word and magic both, pushing a torrent of black from her hands into that ground as if her message might be conveyed through sheer will alone. Help them.
She felt the Lower City respond, its song growing and swelling until it seemed her whole body vibrated with the sound. Above her, she heard her name—heard screams and cries as Farrow fell—
None of it mattered. There was only her and the Lower City and the power that flowed between them in this strange communion.
Xhea was not the Lower City—not the ground and the tunnels within it, not the ancient buildings perched atop; she was just one girl, small and dirty with braid-tangled hair. She was not the Lower City and yet she was, for as her power flowed into the ground like a gift, her senses expanded, out and out and out, echoing across the landscape.
She felt the skyscrapers—four, now, and the aching hole where once had stood a fifth. She felt the hurt of the market burned, and beneath that, the place where Rown’s weapon had scored a line across the Lower City’s living heart. The warehouse district, the broken highway overpasses, the arena, the wide and empty stretches where great houses once stood—the roads and the sewers and the pipelines beneath—Xhea felt it all, more and more until it seemed she could dissolve into it, soak into its bones like her magic itself.
Shai did not understand what was happening, that much was clear, and yet Xhea felt the ghost crouch at her side and pour her own magic into the link that bound them, letting Xhea draw upon her strength at will.
She needed it. The Lower City’s need seemed endless—not for the magic itself, but for the understanding that laced it. No words passed between them, not even now; their languages had nothing in common. Yet understanding—urgency—need; such things passed between them at will.
Save them.
Xhea looked up, and with her gaze came the attention of all the Lower City. She looked to Farrow, losing its battle for altitude, and lifted her hand.
Hers was just a gesture skyward, fingers reaching as if she might pluck the falling skyscraper out of the empty air, the way a child might try to catch the moon. It was the Lower City who reached for Farrow in truth.
There came a great roar of sound: asphalt ripping, concrete cracking, buildings crumbling and collapsing. The ground beneath them shook, and onlookers screamed, stumbling back from the rush of dust that burst outward from the ruin that had been the market. Above it, a shape exploded, stabbing into the air in a perfect mirror of Xhea’s gesture.
Farrow was falling, falling, and it didn’t matter, for at Xhea’s command the Lower City rose to catch it. It had not fingers, not a hand as she did, but a hundred twisting tendrils of rock and rubble, the broken pieces bound together only by dark magic. Where Xhea’s magic was smoke and shadow, the Lower City’s power was the deepest black, the cold and the dark that waited at the ocean’s depth, the heart of flame unburning.
No, Xhea realized, holding her hand aloft as she poured all of her power into the ground beneath her to communicate her need. It wasn’t even rubble, for as she watched the pieces blended and merged, one into the other into a strange whole. They were all a piece: roots and branches, each growing almost faster than the eye could track, twisting as they grew upward like a great, reaching tree.
The first branches reached Farrow’s lower levels; they didn’t wrap around the skyscraper but burrowed into it, digging deep into the concrete structure and sending yet more rubble raining down. The reaching branches reappeared from floors some distance up, bursting from walls and windows to wrap around balconies and grip the building’s corners.
Some broke as the skyscraper’s weight came down upon them. Even here, Xhea could hear the creaks and groans and crunch of crumbling stone.
It’s going to be crushed.
But no: more tendrils burst from the ground and rose, wrapping around the trunk as it formed, reaching up Farrow’s sides and gripping tight. The skyscraper shuddered and shook, and then came to a halt.
As the branches formed of asphalt and sewer pipe continued to rise and twist around the skyscraper, Xhea took a long and shuddering breath. It was, Xhea thought as she looked at the creation with an appraising eye, almost vertical.
Slowly, she drew back from the entity that was the living Lower City, and her awareness of that vast space—and the utterly inhuman intellect behind it—faded. But not before she understood some sliver of its song.
If it had words, the Lower City would have sung only this: Home, home, home.
A song of joy and welcome for the ones it had thought lost forever, snatched from the sky and the edge of death.
Within moments, the pale, rectangular shape of Farrow-that-was had all but vanished beneath the dark tendrils of the living Lower City. So, too, did Farrow’s magic vanish. First the spell-spires atop the building sparked and fizzled to nothing; then the spells that lit the skyscraper from within flickered as they grew ever dimmer. It might have only been that the power was exhausted, as Xhea had been; that the newborn Tower was not gasping and dying even as she watched. But she did not think so.
“Xhea,” Shai breathed. She stared at Xhea, at her upraised hand. “What did you do?”
Xhea looked at Farrow, a building held in a tree grown of ash and rubble, then up, up, toward the Towers cast across the sky. She licked her dry lips and swallowed.
“The Lower City,” Xhea said slowly, carefully, “is alive.”
It wasn’t Shai that replied, nor Torrence, but Daye: “Yes.” Her soft voice was weighted with finality, as if that word were the start and the end of the conversation.
It wouldn’t be—it couldn’t—but Xhea still laughed, little more than a small puff of breath. But enough. She lowered her hand, its weight suddenly like iron, and closed her eyes.
Her magic was all but exhausted, and in its absence she could not hear the Lower City’s song. No vibration beneath her that was not from the people running; no thought or feeling that was not her own. Even her awareness of Shai seemed to be little more than it always had been: a link between them and the sense of the ghost’s presence at her side.
All is as it used to be, she thought. And nothing will ever be the same again.
Again, she laughed.
Once Xhea would have fought her way to standing, forced her face to betray no pain. Now, it wasn’t just her knee in its brace that stopped her, nor her aching muscles, but awareness that there were three people who stood beside her. Watching her. Waiting to help.
No need, anymore, to hide. No need to do everything all on her own.
“I think,” she said at last, looking to Shai, “that I’m going to need help to stand.”
As the people of the Lower City ran to where Farrow now towered—or fled from it as fast as their feet could carry them—Xhea walked back to Edren. Step by careful step, she limped with a cane in her hand. Torrence and Daye walked before her, Torrence clinging to Daye’s arm as he too walked with uncertain steps. Shai stayed by Xhea’s side.
At Xhea’s pace, and Torrence’s, it was a long, slow journey, but Xhea found that she did not mind. It was nice to let the world rush around her, and not think of anything that had happened. Only focus on the road before her, and her next step.
You’re in shock, she told herself. Yet her hands were steady, and her heartbeat strong; and if her face was beaded with sweat, it was nothing more than was her right as the summer sun beat down. She was, she thought, simply tired.
At last they came to the ancient hotel that bore the Edren name.
Guards stood outside the doors, armed and armored and wary of Rown’s hunters’ return. But for all their readiness, they too kept turning to look toward the Lower City’s center and the tree that now grew there, a skyscraper clutched high in its grasp.
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