Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

“And your hands are in your mouth.”

  He stared. Listed alarmingly to one side, and barely righted himself without use of his arms. Mumbled something through his mouthful of fingers.

  Xhea sighed. “If you want me to understand you, take your hands out of your mouth.”

  The ghost stared. Tilted. Righted himself.

  “Your hands.” Xhea wiggled her fingers in emphasis.

  Comprehension dawned and the ghost pulled his hands free, strings of spit hanging between his fingers. Empty, his mouth hung open, gaping; he licked his lips once, twice and again. The ghost looked from Xhea to his wet hands and back again in growing confusion, that intensity slipping from his expression, leaving little in its wake. Then, with a cry, he fell to his knees and clutched his head, spit-darkened hair protruding from between his fingers in spikes and tufts.

  Charming. Just what every girl wants to find in her room.

  She watched him rock back and forth, and wondered how long this next phase of crazy was going to last. More than a minute, it seemed. More than two. Her windowless room wasn’t large, but it suddenly felt far smaller.

  “Hey,” Xhea called. The ghost jumped at her voice then curled in upon himself further, rocking and near-tumbling to the ground.

  “Hey, you. Dead guy. I’m over here.” No reaction this time; she might as well have been talking to the wall. Sighing, Xhea shuffled closer and lowered herself awkwardly to the floor, the charms and coins bound into her hair chiming as she landed.

  “Look at me,” Xhea said.

  The ghost stilled and looked up. His eyes were storm-cloud dark and afraid, but with something else behind, as if he were seeing things that had nothing to do with Xhea’s tired face—a landscape far beyond this breezeblock room with its peeling paint.

  She wondered suddenly who this man had been. Not just what had killed him or brought him to her, distraught and afraid, but the person he had been in life. What he had done, where he had lived, what had made him laugh. Whether this darkness—this fear and hurt and confusion—had haunted his living years. Whether someone missed him.

  There was a time she would have never thought to ask such questions, nor cared enough to wonder. Now she leaned forward and asked, “Who were you?”

  He sat mute, swaying.

  “Why are you here?”

  Still nothing. Simpler, then: “Why were you shouting?”

  His eyes seemed to grow darker as she watched. Lost eyes, with something terrible hiding behind.

  “Gone,” the ghost whispered at last. Quiet, so quiet.

  “What is?”

  “Gone, lost. Find.” He looked down at his hands then back to her face, his gaze as unsettled as a startled flock of birds. Afraid, Xhea thought, but not of her.

  What’s he tethered to? Every ghost had a tether, a line of near-invisible energy that bound him or her to the living world—a link to something that they had not, or could not, leave behind. Through long practice, Xhea had learned to sever ghosts’ tethers and reconnect them to other people or things. Sometimes she had released the tether entirely, freeing the ghost to dissolve like sugar into tea. Once she’d had a knife for such tasks, an ancient silver blade that she’d carried in a jacket pocket near her heart. Gone, now; taken when another skyscraper, Orren, had captured her. Thought of that theft was still enraging—even more so as Xhea was totally helpless to do anything about it.

  It wasn’t until she glanced around him that she saw his tether. Most tethers connected to a ghost’s heart, the center of their chest, or their head—indications of the type of connection that bound the dead to the world. This tether connected to ghost’s back between his shoulder blades, as if the tether—or whatever it tied him to—had targeted him as he fled life.

  Xhea shook her head to dispel such thoughts. Yet something else about the tether bothered her; she just wasn’t sure what. Frowning, Xhea leaned closer, trying to see what looked—what felt—so different. Strong as the line appeared, she couldn’t imagine what anchor would allow him such freedom of movement—especially, she realized, as the tether didn’t point up into the Edren skyscraper, nor out toward the Lower City streets beyond Edren’s walls, but down. Not sharply, not steeply, but the tether pointed ever so slightly toward the floor.

  Something in the underground. But how?

  She took hold of the tether. Its vibration, too, was different than she expected—lower and more intense—and its frequency increased with each moment as if drawing power from her touch. Within seconds it was akin to pain.

  The ghost stopped moving, then looked up slowly. He turned to her, and his gaze was no longer confused or unsettled but sharp enough to cut.

  “Run,” he said.

  Xhea drew back, struggling to both hold the tether and meet the ghost’s eyes.

  “Run.” His voice was rough and raw, the word a fearful command. He saw her, of that Xhea had no doubt; he stared at her as if she were the only thing left in the world. And he said, “Run.”

  “I—”

  “Run away. Run away.”

  That’s what he had been screaming. Something in her chilled at the thought. The same words, over and over again: Run away, run away, run away. The repeating cadence echoed in her memory as the ghost’s stare pinned her to the spot.

  The tether’s vibration increased to a fever pitch and seemed to cut into her, a narrow blade slicing into her palm. With a gasp, Xhea released it and scrambled away.

  As if he were a puppet and the tether his guiding string, the ghost collapsed. A moment of stillness and then he shook, shuddered, and struggled to right himself. When he raised his head, that vital energy was gone from his eyes and expression both, leaving only darkness and confusion. Again he swayed, back and forth in an unsteady rhythm.

  Xhea exhaled, and reached for the now-familiar grip of her walking stick. Run away. If only she could. Sweetness and blight, these days she’d settle for a quick walk.

  “Lost,” the ghost murmured almost too quietly to hear, his voice forlorn. He bowed his head toward his hands, lying limply in his lap. “Find.”

  Xhea lifted a hand—it was shaking, she realized. Unsettled, she grabbed the tether that connected to her sternum and gave it three sharp tugs.

  She didn’t know where Shai went during the long nights, though she had almost asked a thousand times. She’d followed the direction of the tether that bound them, up, up, and away, and wondered where her friend wandered, what she did when she left Xhea behind. Shai didn’t seem to know that Xhea spent the nights awake as often as not, staring up at the ceiling’s acoustic tiles or attempting to read the same book over and over until she fled her bed, seeking any distraction from the pain and the too-familiar tracks of her thoughts. Shai didn’t know, and Xhea could never seem to tell her, taking comfort instead in the knowledge that the ghost always returned to her side by morning.

  Shai’s arrival was heralded by a sudden glow that cast shadows in the otherwise dark room. From the floor, Xhea glanced toward the Radiant ghost who stood looking down at the rumpled blankets in no little surprise.

  “Xhea,” Shai said, “you’re actually—”

  There was no opportunity for her to finish, for the man screamed—a raw sound that seemed ripped from his throat. Xhea swung back to face him and it was all she could do not to scramble away.

  He’s just a ghost. He couldn’t touch her, couldn’t hurt her in any way.

  But it wasn’t Xhea that the ghost attempted to hit, though his flailing fists passed through her in a sudden wave of cold, but Shai. He screamed again, and there was panic in expression—panic and confusion and something that she suddenly thought might be rage.

  Shai gave a startled cry, and the shadows danced as she stumbled back to avoid the strange ghost’s swinging fists. Another step and she would be through the wall and beyond what little help Xhea might offer. Xhea couldn’t stand fast enough to stop the crazed ghost—and, sitting, his tether was beyond her reach.

  Instead she shouted, �
�Stop!”

  The man fell silent. No, more than silent: he had frozen mid-step, his hands still reaching over Xhea’s head toward Shai. Xhea’s shout reverberated through the room, a sudden sound in the silence, the ghost’s scream but a memory heard only by Xhea’s living ears.

  “What’s happening?” Shai whispered. “Where did he come from?”

  Xhea could only reply, “I don’t know.” Then—despite her racing heart, her hands’ unsteady quiver, and the tension even now thrumming between the two ghosts before her—Xhea laughed. The sound was tinged with hysteria and fatigue, yes, but no less true. This was the first truly new thing to happen in weeks, and Xhea felt almost giddy with relief.

  As if the sound were a cue, the man sagged.

  “Gone,” he whispered. “Lost.” He dropped his arms to his sides, bowed his head toward the floor. “Found.”

  He took a step back and another, until he slipped backward through the door and was gone.

  Xhea grabbed her stick and managed to get to her feet with aid of the far wall.

  “You’re going to follow him?” Shai asked incredulously.

  “Haven’t you been pestering me to go out for days?”

  “Weeks, more like it,” Shai muttered. It was true: Shai had been relentless in her demands that Xhea stand up, practice her strengthening exercises, walk more, maybe speak to someone who wasn’t dead.

  “Well then, what’s the problem?”

  “I think there’s something terribly wrong with that man.”

  “I know.” Xhea laughed again, pulled open the door, and followed him into the hall. She could not see the man’s ghost, but she could feel him, heading out toward Edren’s main hall and away. She hurried in his wake, her boots whispering against the threadbare carpet, her stick thwacking in time to her steps. Shai followed, a steady presence just behind Xhea’s right shoulder. Xhea quickly explained the ghost’s arrival.

  Shai shook her head. “I don’t like it.”

  “Of course not. But you can’t argue that it’s not the first interesting thing to happen in weeks.”

  “Maybe other interesting things would happen if you bothered to leave your room.”

  “Yeah, like falling and reopening the wound for the third blighted time. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  Mercks met them at the corner.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, one hand resting on the club looped to his belt. “I heard a shout.”

  “Ghost startled me,” Xhea said. Her chest was starting to feel tight, her breath short, and not just from the pain; this was more walking, and faster, than anything she’d done since her surgery.

  “Your friend?” Mercks asked carefully. He fell into step beside her, his stride comically short as he attempted to keep himself to Xhea’s pace.

  Word about Shai had traveled; though none but Xhea could see her, she was nonetheless felt in Edren’s halls. Even dead and bodiless, Shai produced more magic in a day than all of Edren’s citizens combined. Just by being at Xhea’s side, Shai had filled Edren’s magical storage coils to overflowing—an unexpected influx of power that more than paid for Xhea’s stay and care.

  Xhea shook her head, coins chiming. “Found some crazy dead guy screaming in my room. He was headed this way.”

  “I felt …” Mercks hesitated, clearly uncomfortable. “Something cold. A chill in the hall.”

  “Probably him.” Xhea shrugged. “Probably walked right through you.”

  “Xhea,” Shai asked from behind her. “How do you know this man?”

  Xhea didn’t reply.

  Back in the former lobby, Mercks called to the young guard watching the monitors; the rest were out on their hourly sweep. The guard looked up warily as they approached, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. Not someone Xhea knew, though she’d met many of the guards since Lorn Edren had carried her here, bruised and broken, nearly two months before. Even so, he looked familiar. She wondered if he had been the one on duty when she’d dragged herself here from Orren with aid of a rusty length of pipe to shout for Lorn’s help.

  Xhea’s gaze was drawn inexorably back to the stairs. She saw no glimpse of white, heard no phantom shouts or whimpers, yet knew it was the way the ghost had traveled. Down. She could feel his presence in the darkness just below, a subtle ache that urged her onward.

  She tightened her grip on her stick.

  Before Mercks could stop her—before she could stop herself—Xhea made a beeline for the stairs. She hopped down the first step and lost her balance, grabbing the railing to keep from falling. There was a shout from behind her—the young guard—and then Mercks called her name. Using her good leg, she lowered herself down one step and then another, breath hissing through her teeth as she knocked her braced knee against the banisters. It was only when she’d traveled beyond reach of even Mercks’s long arm that she paused, panting from pain and the sudden exertion. She hadn’t fallen; that was something.

  “Xhea, I need you to come back here,” Mercks said. There was kindness in that voice, with command beneath. She felt a pang at ignoring both; her next midnight visit was unlikely to be quite so friendly.

  “I will,” she said. “But not just yet.”

  She took a deep breath. She was hardly below ground by her standards, but already she could feel the difference. A weight had lifted from her shoulders, and her breath came a little slower, a little easier. Oh, how she missed the tunnels, strange as it seemed; how she missed the wide-open spaces that were hers and hers alone. Something in her eased as she looked down into the basement.

  “Don’t worry,” she said over her shoulder. “If I fall, I promise I won’t make you come get me.” Xhea sat carefully on the tread, and began lowering herself down the stairs one slow and awkward step at a time, Shai’s light a steady presence at her side.

  By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, Xhea could barely breathe. She clutched her walking stick and stared at her hand as it trembled against the railing’s tarnished brass.

  “Seriously?” she muttered. Exhausted from one flight of stairs? Despite Shai’s needling, she hadn’t realized that she’d gotten so bad. So … soft.

  She limped forward. Shai cast the open space at the stairs’ foot in a gentle glow, yet even beyond the reach of her light, it was easy for Xhea’s black and white vision to pick out details. Few had walked these halls in the years since the civil war more than a decade before. Near the stairs there were scuffs and recent lines of footprints, yet no more than ten feet beyond the dust lay thick across the floor, disturbed now only by her boots. Years living in the tunnels beneath the Lower City had taught Xhea to minimize the dust clouds her footsteps conjured; even so, she had to stifle a cough.

  Here, as above, Edren showed its past: meeting rooms surrounded her, or perhaps auxiliary ballrooms, though she didn’t know what anyone had needed with so many of either. This level was silent, no hint of the ghost’s shouting, though Xhea still felt him like an ache at the edge of her senses. That way, it told her, drawing her toward the main underground complex. That way—and retreating.

  Soon the hall opened into what had been a shopping corridor for hotel guests. The boutique shops were barely larger than one-car garages—a tourist café, a jewelry store, a women’s clothing shop. Empty now, only display cases and faded signs gave testament to what had once been inside. Benches and fake trees lined the corridor’s center, the trees’ leaves pale with dust, the benches crazed through with cracks. Yet it was the corridor’s far end that held Xhea’s attention: a massive barricade blocked the hall, from floor to ceiling, from side to side; and the ghost stood before it, hands again pressed to his mouth as he shook and shuddered.

  “Careful now,” Xhea murmured to Shai. “If he comes after you again, run.”

  They crept closer—or tried to. There was no sneaking now, not with her stick clacking against the floor with her every step. Might as well use a loudspeaker, she thought, wincing at the sound. Maybe add in a few firecrackers for
good measure.

  The direct method, then. “Hello,” she called. The hall took her words and amplified them, the echoes whispering from far corners. The ghost looked up, his white clothes bright in Shai’s reflected light. He stared at her wide-eyed, and trembled.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Xhea said. She didn’t want to, anyway—not until he gave her reason. “My friend isn’t either.”

  His hands were in his mouth, but he was not screaming now. No, he was biting his fingers; she could see the tension in his jaw as he clenched down, the flash of pale teeth as he winced at the pain.

  It was only as she drew closer that he pulled his hands from his mouth and held them before him to ward her away. Minutes before, his hands had been whole—Xhea remembered those long fingers reaching for Shai. Yet now his fingertips were gone, nothing beyond his third knuckle but air.

  “What are you—” They had not been bitten off, Xhea realized mid-sentence. They were dissolving. As she watched, more of the flesh at his fingers’ ends became indistinct, hazy and fading. The ghost shuddered and shook, hands splayed before him as he folded over as if from some blow to the gut. And again. And again.

  Stranger and stranger. Something more than exertion sped Xhea’s heart—though whether it was fear or exhilaration, she did not know.

  Xhea stopped just outside of arm’s reach of the ghost. His shaking and shuddering worsened with every moment, until it was clear he fought to stay upright, fought to stand. A seizure? Memory of his death? Neither seemed to fit his strange movements.

  “It’s his tether,” Shai whispered.

  Xhea moved to see the tether bound between the ghost’s shoulder blades—and froze. She called it a tether—for what else could it be?—though in that moment it looked like no tether she had ever seen. It was a swirling gray, thick around as her arm and visible without squinting. So, too, could she feel its strange vibration: a deep, insistent thrum that all but made her teeth rattle.

  More, it pulled on the ghost. Not like an elastic band stretched to its limits, but as if it were a living thing intent on dragging him backwards. He fought it, trembling and shuddering at every pull—but he was losing. Weakening, as if each tug on the tether took some vital part of him away.