At last, Shai stopped. This was far enough. She could return to the Lower City without difficulty—but the walkers? Too far to go and return before daylight, she judged. Their burrows were out here somewhere, little places where a once-human thing might curl and hide from the sun that burned their eyes.
Shai turned—and there he was.
She had gathered a crowd of some twenty night walkers; they stared blankly up at her, their faces so different, their expressions identical. Her eyes went only to one. Shai lost the ability to breathe, to think; all her words were suddenly gone, as if her mind were a street that the wind had scoured clean.
The walker stood in the shadow of what had once been a wall, shielded from both the multi-hued Towerlight and Shai’s own soft luminance. His head was lifted, unkempt brown hair hanging limply into his eyes. His clothes were muddy and torn, nothing familiar in their shape or color. Shai did not move or speak, yet he responded nonetheless, his mouth opening as if to reply.
Her father.
No, Shai thought. Her father was dead, she knew that; he was dead as surely as she was, though his body still walked. Even so, her heart clenched at the sight of him.
It had been little more than four months since she’d seen him alive, shortly after her own death; less since her first glimpse of his empty body in the subway tunnels beneath the Lower City. He had changed much since then. His face was heavily lined and hollow-cheeked, his eyes lost in sunken shadow. His body, beneath the frayed and stinking ruins of what had once been fine clothes, was bent and broken as if he bore the weight of untold years.
He was her father, and… not. For when he moved toward her—and he did, stepping closer until he was hemmed in by the other walkers—there was nothing in his posture or gait that spoke of the man she’d known; nothing in his expression that told of the father she’d loved. Only the slow and steady footsteps of a night walker.
Shai shivered, wanting to scream or weep, she knew not which. She wanted to reach for him, as if anything of her father might remain in that ruined shell of flesh; she wanted to run away as far and as fast as she could, as if speed or distance might separate her from even the memory of this moment and the blankness of his eyes.
She floated, standing in midair a good five feet from the ground—but as she looked into the empty face of the man who had been her father, Shai found herself sinking. Her feet touched the earth light as a falling leaf, and she sank no further.
The closest walker reached for her, and another; gathering her magic, she pushed them aside, clearing a path to her father. She reached for his face as if she might cup his cheek in her hand—and hesitated. She could not touch his face or flesh; her hand would pass through unfeeling. But it was not that which stopped her hand and made her fingers curl toward her palm like a wilting flower’s petals, but a painful realization.
Here he is, after all this time.
She could not count the nights she had spent looking for him, searching the ruins as if she knew no other purpose. Her searches had become routine, a pattern of thought and action long stripped of expectation. Time had numbed her to hope; it was easier that way. Or maybe it was only that she never quite knew how to stop.
Yet here he was. She had found him.
Now what? The thought echoed in the recesses of her mind.
She’d seen so many walkers—more, she thought, than any living person. Young and old, male and female; she’d come to recognize many on sight. She recognized, too, when a new walker joined the crowd: healthier, stronger; their hair not yet matted; their clothes not yet stiffened by weeks of sweat and rain and grime. The walkers that died? Those she did not mark, only wondered at the absence of their familiar features as weeks passed.
Again and again Shai had wondered what she’d feel upon seeing her father again. Now, looking at the starving ruin of his face, she could only think, Not this.
Not this ache, as if her insides had been hollowed out. No hope, now; no joy. Even her grief and anger withered—that, or grew so all-encompassing that she could no longer see their edges.
Father. The word was on her tongue and it felt like a lie, bitter and hard-edged. He just looked at her. His expression did not change; the rhythms of his breath remained slow and steady. Only his eyes revealed that he saw her, his dilated pupils contracting from the light of her magic.
No recognition there. No reaction.
Shai took a long shuddering breath as she finally understood the words she had repeated in the silence of her mind. There was nothing left of the man she had loved, nothing of the man he had been. Nothing.
Only this.
The next thought came more slowly and, she knew not from where; it was just there, a sharp presence in the center of her mind.
I could kill him.
She could not touch him—but she had her magic. For all that bright magic was the light of living and growth, it could kill; of course it could. She could kill—couldn’t she? She had the power; she had, perhaps, the motivation.
But the will?
She wanted to laugh at the absurdity, or cry. Tears won, as they always had. She ignored them, letting them fall glittering to the uneven ground.
She couldn’t kill him; she didn’t have to attempt the spell to know its inevitable failure. She hadn’t been able to hurt a night walker she’d never known; how could this be easier? Which left her—what? Only the tears, and the span of seconds that rolled by, slow and inexorable, within the walkers’ sight.
Instead, Shai closed her eyes and rose, higher and higher, as if with enough distance she might leave even memory behind. Higher and higher, until the walkers might see her as nothing but another Tower, another light glowing in the sky.
Shai tilted her head back toward the City, the Towers, the stars, and she thought of nothing at all. She felt the whisper of Towerlight as it brushed across her face, magic on magic. She tried only to breathe.
She did not open her eyes until she knew the walkers would have gone, moving on to other ruins, other worn paths, other places.
Gone, all of them.
Gone.
Shai had never been brave.
There had been times when her mother had told her otherwise, sitting at Shai’s bedside wearing her office clothes. “You’re so brave,” she’d say sometimes. “Try to be brave,” she’d say at others, when the pain was bad and getting worse, as if bravery might bring Shai hope or strength or oxygen.
When things truly got bad? Shai’s mother hadn’t been there at all; only her father, quiet and calm. He’d held her hand, and steadied the shaking glass as she tried to take a sip of water. He’d slept in the chair by her bedside, curled uncomfortably into a too-tight ball just so he’d be there. He’d told her stories.
Even then, that word had made her angry. Brave. Where was the bravery in illness? She’d had no choice. And if sometimes she had wept or screamed, if she been afraid or wanted to close her eyes and just stop—and she had, more times than she could remember—did that somehow make her a coward? No, to be truly sick wasn’t about bravery or cowardice. Merely endurance.
At last, she’d found something she could not endure.
It wasn’t weak to run from the creature that had once been her father; it wasn’t cowardice that made her squeeze her eyes shut so she wouldn’t see him walk away. She told herself that truth over and over, and every time the words tasted like lies.
Shai finally looked down. There were no walkers beneath her anymore, only a span of empty ground.
Pretend that everything’s fine, she told herself. Pretend that nothing’s changed.
And do what?
She thought of the need that had driven her from the underground—the belief that she could do some good. Heal a wound or ease some anonymous hurt; fix a crumbling wall or lighten some heavy burden.
Her small spells felt as nothing now; grief burned her magic to ashes.
Instead, she looked farther into the ruins. There was no light that wasn’t reflected from the C
ity above: all was calm and silent.
No one out here but her and the walkers, and she didn’t think that either counted. Only an untold expanse of time-smoothed ruins stretching from here to… she didn’t even know where.
Why are you here, Shai? she asked herself in silence. In this place, in these ruins—in the living world at all. Oh, absent gods save me. What am I doing?
Never had she felt so alone.
Yet, as she floated over the dark entrance to a half-collapsed basement, she saw a glimmer of light from inside. She hesitated, thinking, Just Towerlight reflecting from glass shards, then turned back. Again she saw it, that faint glimmer—not true light, but magic.
It was a man, she saw, lying curled around a knife with a spelled blade. The knife was unsheathed, the metal glowing faintly with magic. The concrete wall was at his back, and he used a heavily stuffed bag as a pillow. Even in the darkness, his eyes were open, watching.
What’s he doing?
But Shai already knew the answer. For that bag wasn’t the sign of a hunter caught out in the ruins after daylight; and the knife, held in his white-knuckled hand, trembled with every breath. He could hear the night walkers, as surely as she could; he was only here because he had to be.
He was walking away from the Lower City. Away from the skyscrapers, the buildings, the food supply—away from the Towers, the Spire, the magic, the threat. Away from all of it.
He wasn’t the only one. For as Shai rose, shocked, she caught a glimpse of a figure perched atop a crumbling wall, much as Xhea had done that long night shortly after they’d met. No magic, there, to betray the figure’s location; it was only the movement of hair in the wind that caught Shai’s eye. Again she saw a bundle at the figure’s side, a dark patch that surely represented the whole of their belongings—or everything they could carry.
Farther out, and farther still? She found more. Ones and twos, mostly; few families this far out, fewer that one might count as elderly.
These people weren’t just abandoning their homes and seeking the shelter they might carve from the fallen buildings. They were heading out to the badlands, taking only what they might carry. Or maybe they were walking farther, out into the world beyond.
Shai stared at the far horizon, untouched by Towerlight, lit only by pinprick stars. She did not know what was out there, if anything. The thought was enough to pierce her haze of grief—and it filled her with something that could have as easily been named excitement as fear. Because there was a whole world out there, little though she’d considered it in life or death; there was more to this life than the City and the Spire and those crushed beneath the floating Towers.
For a moment, it was all Shai could do not to flee toward that great unknown—to run and run and never look back.
She raised a hand to the center of her chest—to the tether, spelled with dark magic, that joined her to one small, hurt girl curled alone in the darkness beneath the Lower City. Shai wanted to run, but would not—could not. Not alone.
Instead, she took a deep breath and started her journey back to the Lower City.
In memory, Xhea watched Farrow as it fell. All the weight of that pale, ungainly structure as it struggled through the air, broken concrete dropping from its shattered base like hail. The fountain of magic from its peak, cascading into a shimmering bubble that flared and flickered and failed, while the magic coursing through its walls tried to spark life from the inanimate.
In the early morning light, there was no glow, no magic, only the wan sunlight on its black-wrapped surface. Farrow’s height drew the eye, as did the twisting chaos of the grown tendrils that held it aloft; its shadow stretched long and dark across the burned market. Yet for all the changes that had occurred in the weeks since Farrow’s hard landing—the makeshift doors bored through the encircling vines, the stairs hewn into those black sides—nothing seemed to have changed at the skyscraper’s peak.
Squinting, Xhea could just see them: two defensive spell generators—long spires of bound metal and spellwork—that stabbed skyward from opposite corners of the skyscraper’s rooftop. They had been meant to protect Farrow as it rose and fought for position in the City above. They were makeshift things, broken and rusted, purchased from a Tower; and they would have served only until Farrow could have changed its shape and grown its own spires. Even so, Xhea remembered the defensive spells that had fountained from them like water, and the protective bubble of magic that they had created. The beginnings of Towerlight.
Gone now, those spells and the magic that had powered them. But as Rown had so adeptly proved, defensive spires also made effective weapons.
Shai returned to Xhea’s side, falling from the sky at a speed that made Xhea’s stomach lurch. The ghost slowed and steadied herself effortlessly, landing feather-light beside her.
“They’re intact,” she reported. “No obvious signs of damage. And there’s no one up on the rooftop.”
Xhea nodded and looked at the spires, slim lines silhouetted by a patch of pale sky. Rown’s defensive spell generator was conspicuously absent—either hidden or stolen, if Xhea had to guess. Given the death and destruction it had caused, she hardly mourned its absence. But that left only Farrow’s two spires, hopelessly far above.
“You sure you can get the generators down here?” Shai asked skeptically. “I can reduce the weight and help try to balance the load, but…”
“I’m not sure of anything,” Xhea said with a small, harsh laugh.
“Okay, we get the generators, and then what?”
Xhea shrugged. “Then we have options.”
“Two spell generators won’t be enough to defend against the Central Spire,” Shai protested—and not for the first time.
“No,” Xhea admitted. “But if not the Spire, then the Towers. If not the Towers, the walkers.” She looked back to the ghost. “It’s something, Shai.”
Something that felt terribly, awfully like hope. Xhea tried to crush the feeling.
Yet she couldn’t help but imagine a great dome of power arcing over the whole of the Lower City, shining as it repelled the Spire’s attack. Foolishness, she told herself; she might as well push the Spire with hands alone for all the difference it would make. Even Shai’s power was but a glimmer compared to the Central Spire’s.
But if not that, then perhaps they could bring the spell generators out to the ruins—cast that dome over the broken ground where the Lower City dwellers sheltered, so that they were protected not by walls but by spellwork. Even if Shai could not maintain the protection forever, perhaps it would be enough for them to start building something new—homes and defenses, weapons and plans.
Three days. For the first time since she’d heard those words echo through the streets, Xhea began to believe that the Lower City might have a future—the people, if not the buildings or the entity itself.
It was enough to push her forward, no matter how her stomach churned at the thought of climbing the makeshift stairs that snaked up the dark tendrils to Farrow’s doors. No railings, no smooth surface upon which to walk. It mattered little that no one had yet slipped and fallen from those pathways; the thought alone made her feel faint.
“It’s okay,” Shai said softly. “You’ll be fine. I won’t let you fall.”
Xhea tightened her sweaty grip on her cane and nodded. She wished suddenly, desperately, for Torrence or Daye on that long, dangerous climb; for the comfort of a solid body and a drawn weapon between herself and those who might seek to claim her. She did not know who had bound her magic, but there was no end to the list of those who might seek to claim Shai for her power.
Not helping.
Xhea forced herself forward, trying to ignore the crawling feeling between her shoulder blades of being watched. Trying not to think of how easy it would be to claim her from Farrow’s exterior like one would pluck a grape from its stem.
But as she walked into the chill of the skyscraper’s shadow, it was not fear that made her slow, but the Lower City’s song.
A shiver ran across her skin, raising goosebumps; and her heart sped up, trying to beat in time.
With every step that song grew louder, stronger, until she felt that she was not walking toward Farrow but some echo of the Lower City’s heart. Again her magic tried to rise and flow from her in echo or answer, and again she pushed it down, fighting that surge of power. So exposed, the last thing she needed was the tracking spell calling out her location.
The first step of the winding pathway stood before her, an uneven gouge in the grown vine; yet it was her hand that reached for the surface of that black structure.
Xhea gasped as she touched it. It felt smooth as a time-worn stone and slightly cool, not yet warmed by the late summer sun—but it was the power it held that made her catch her breath.
Home, that touch said. Home, as if there was anything in the grown structure that might have been comforting or familiar.
Only magic, she realized. For all that the living Lower City’s awareness spread to every building and street within the core territories, it was only this structure of reshaped rubble that it possessed entirely. It was only here that the entity lived as the Towers lived, its magic and consciousness an inextricable part of the vines that held Farrow, its magic flowing through the materials like water.
That structure vibrated in response to her touch. Xhea no longer had to strain to hear the song; it rose around her, swelling in welcome.
Oh, how she wanted to reply—to have even the thinnest thread of power to send into all that dark. She had nothing, only the cold, hard stone that her magic formed inside her, and the fear of what would happen if she tried to fight the bonds that held it.
“Hello,” she whispered instead, as if the Lower City might hear and understand. Wishing she could push her thoughts through that single point of contact, or shape understanding from fingers alone.
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