Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “Yes, but I—I don’t know that I can do it,” Shai confessed. “I saw the spell, I remember it, but … it’s more complicated than just magic, Xhea. I’ve read books, too, but that doesn’t mean I could recreate them from memory.”

  “No, but … you could do something, couldn’t you? Anything.”

  Shai looked away, looked to her hands, looked anywhere but at Xhea’s face. Her expression seemed almost ashamed, Xhea thought; but, try as she might, Xhea could think of no reason for either the ghost’s hesitance or her shame.

  “Please, Shai,” Xhea whispered. “Won’t you at least try?”

  Silence was the only reply.

  At last Xhea muttered, “It was a stupid idea, anyway.” She waved a hand dismissively as if the request didn’t matter, couldn’t matter; as if she didn’t feel the weight of despair settle once more like a yoke across her shoulders. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  Xhea reached for fresh bandages from the nearby shelf, fingers fumbling for purchase. No, she told herself as she grabbed first the bandages and then a bottle of water, the real mistake was allowing yourself to hope. To believe, however briefly, that things might be different.

  She wet the cloth and dabbed at the reopened wound’s edges. She showed no reaction to that pain, though it stung and the skin was tender with fresh swelling. There was no need for theatrics.

  To distract herself, she cast her mind forward. Her walking stick alone would not be enough to travel to each of the skyscrapers’ barricades, not in the shape she was in. There was something to the idea about the wheelchair, much as it pained her to admit it. She wanted to walk under her own power, yes—but practicality and survival had to be her priorities. Right now she needed Edren’s protection more than she needed her pride or independence.

  Xhea forced out a breath, blinking back tears. Just the pain, she told herself. She leaned down to look at the wound. With the blood washed away, it didn’t look quite as bad as she’d feared. New stitches might have helped, but she wasn’t going to attempt that herself. She readied the bandages.

  “I’ll do it,” Shai blurted.

  The ghost wasn’t looking at Xhea but at the floor—and the little dark spots where Xhea’s blood had dripped.

  “I’ll do it,” Shai repeated, her voice catching. “I’ll try. Just … sit back. Quick, before I change my mind.”

  Xhea hurried to comply, supporting her knee with her hands and turning awkwardly until she could stretch both legs along the length of the cot and lean against the wall.

  “You can do this,” Xhea whispered. But as the ghost’s trembling hands hovered above her knee, she wondered whether she meant the encouragement for Shai or herself.

  Shai reached until her hands were but a whisper away from Xhea’s flesh, and let her power flow. Xhea jerked as the magic flowed over her knee, through it, feeling like fire and ice combined. Then the pain came, an ache that seemed to anchor itself to the ends of her bones before blossoming beneath her kneecap. Nausea rose in its wake.

  It’s not so bad, Xhea thought, even as she shivered and fought not to shy away. She grit her teeth and focused on her breathing.

  “Okay,” Shai said at last, “I’ve set the spell anchors. You ready to begin?”

  “That wasn’t—” Xhea stopped herself. Of course Shai hadn’t started the real spellwork yet. She swallowed and nodded. “Let’s do this thing.”

  Again Shai’s hands glowed—brighter this time, like noonday sunlight; brighter, like spotlights turned on full; and brighter still. This time when Shai’s magic touched her, Xhea could not help it—she screamed. Her back arched and her muscles seized, her body locking into a twisted arc.

  Shai recoiled, her magic vanishing, and Xhea collapsed onto the cot.

  “Are you okay?” Shai cried.

  Xhea’s hands shook, and her legs, muscles spasming as if in reaction to extreme cold. She managed to nod. Forcing her eyes open, she could just make out Shai’s face, a pale light in the darkness. Everything else seemed dim and distant, blurry shapes far beyond her reach.

  “I’m okay,” Xhea whispered. She rubbed her eyes, but could not seem to clear her vision. No color now, only darkness, blurred and indistinct. No matter; she kept her eyes closed and grabbed the sheet, twisting one end into a makeshift gag.

  “Okay,” she said, teeth chattering. “Start again.”

  “What? Are you insane?”

  “Slower this time,” Xhea said. “Give me time to adjust.”

  “Xhea, I’m not—”

  Xhea opened one eye and looked at the smeared, glowing shape that was Shai’s face. “Nothing has changed,” she said, fighting the urge to beg, to plead.

  Xhea was almost glad that she couldn’t pull Shai’s features into focus, for it meant that she didn’t truly have to face the ghost’s glare; only saw the flickers as Shai’s magic shifted and guttered like a fire in the wind. At last Shai moved—a jerk that Xhea could only assume was a nod—and reached out again.

  “Slowly this time,” Shai agreed quietly.

  It was not better, Xhea thought, having that magic come upon her slowly, the pressure increasing like the tightening grip of some heated metal vice. It was just easier to control her reaction: she bit down hard on the gag, and smothered the cries that threatened to force their way past her clenched teeth. Her hands, too, gripped the sheet, tightening to fists so Shai wouldn’t see them shake—and so she wouldn’t strike out, hit the wall or the ghost or her own flesh to stop the pain and the pressure that built and built and built.

  She could feel Shai’s magic working inside her knee, as if that power were a thousand small fingers, moving, twisting, prodding—every one of them red-hot and burning like a live wire. Nausea washed over her, numbness eddying in its wake.

  When at last Shai drew her hands away, it was all that Xhea could do to pull the spit-sodden sheet from her mouth and sag against the breezeblock wall.

  “Will it hold?” she gasped.

  “For now,” Shai said.

  Xhea nodded, breath slipping from her in a sigh of relief, and surrendered to darkness that came too fast, too hard, to be sleep.

  Xhea’s first thought upon returning to consciousness was not of pain or discomfort—though there were enough of both to spare—but yellow. Soft and golden and dim, yellow light seemed to wrap around her like a warm blanket. She took a long, shuddering breath, as if that light were a tangible thing that she could draw inside her.

  “Xhea? Are you awake?”

  Not Shai’s voice. Struggling up through disorientation and the waves of yellow, it took her a moment to place the sound.

  Lorn. After all this time.

  She turned toward his voice, and only then realized that the yellow was not a hallucination, but light in truth. The room’s bare bulb was switched on—or at least she thought it was. There was a sharper patch of brightness above her where the ceiling would be, blurred and indistinct. She blinked. There was a large patch of darkness beside her, a hulking shadow in the shape of a man, with a glowing figure standing behind.

  Slowly, oh so slowly—moving hurt, every joint aching in protest, never mind the fiery pain that was her knee—Xhea raised a hand to rub her eyes. Blinked away tears. Rubbed again.

  At last her vision cleared enough for her to see. Lorn sat at her bedside, leaning forward in evident concern, while Shai paced the small room at his back.

  “What’d I miss?” Xhea managed.

  “We have a guard prepped, and you didn’t respond to summons. What happened to you?”

  Xhea looked over Lorn’s shoulder in inquiry.

  “You’ve been out for five hours,” Shai said shortly, angrily. Afraid. “I stopped the flow to the spells when Lorn arrived so you would wake.”

  “Am I better?” she mumbled.

  Shai turned and met her gaze, eyes narrowed and brimming with tears. “I don’t know.”

  Lorn was watching, waiting. Xhea pushed herself toward sitting, and struggled with the sheet tha
t again covered her injury, flipping aside the sheet’s edge to reveal her knee. Lorn jerked back when he saw the swollen joint. Xhea had to admit, even slightly unfocused, the wound seemed far more impressive in color, her dusky gold skin streaked red with blood, the mottled bruises almost … festive.

  The line of the medic’s cut was closed, a neat line of pink, healing flesh in the middle of so much dried blood. Xhea probed the joint with careful fingers. Swollen and tender—but better. Cautiously, she drew her leg toward her, bending the knee. She stopped quickly, hissing between her teeth—but even that much movement told her what she needed to know. It hurt, but it was a different hurt than the one she’d spent the past two months enduring. Not that raw pain of flesh tearing with every movement.

  Not healed, she thought. But healing.

  She smiled at Shai. “You did it. It’s working.” Her words were colored by hope and awe—stronger, both, than the nausea and pain. But Shai’s eyes were bright with tears as she nodded tensely and turned away.

  Lorn waited for Xhea to explain. She struggled to do so, not knowing where to start—the wound itself, her nighttime struggles to walk, Emara’s request, or maybe just the effects of her slowly returning magic?

  And sweetness and blight, why couldn’t she focus? Her vision and thoughts alike swam and blurred. She gazed at the yellow bulb overhead, the deep brown of Lorn’s skin and the black marks of his tattoos, the light-flecked amber of his eyes. All the while, her stomach churned. Of course, she thought. Even if her body processed bright magic differently now, it had the same impact on her mind.

  Lorn sat back as Xhea finished her fumbling explanations. “You should have told me,” he said.

  Xhea raised an eyebrow. “And when, exactly, was I supposed to do that? No,” she said when Lorn made to protest, “don’t pretend that not knowing was any fault of mine. You abandoned me, Lorn.”

  “I thought your magic was gone.” He spoke quietly. “I held your hand for an hour or more when you were waking from the anesthetic—do you remember? It didn’t hurt. You said yourself that you thought you might have burned out your power when you saved Shai.”

  “So, what—you only care about my magic?”

  Lorn sighed and rubbed his face as if to push away his weary expression. When he spoke again, his tone had lost some of its habitual edge. His words were softer—and infinitely more tired. Addis’s voice, not that of his brother.

  “No,” he said. “But I didn’t want you to come to my father’s attention. It was better if he took no notice of you at all. If he so much as imagined that you had even a wisp of dark power …”

  “Why?” she asked. “This magic—you know what it is, what it does. Tell me.”

  “Xhea, I—”

  She knew avoidance when she heard it; no need for him to utter the rest of that sentence.

  “No.” He looked at her when she spoke; she felt his gaze as a physical thing. Assessing, reviewing—condemning. “You want to use me to go underground? You want my help? Then give me something back, Lorn.

  “Besides,” she continued. “You promised. Before I went to Eridian to get Shai, you said that my magic was a worse threat than a knife to your throat. You told me you’d explain, but instead you just left me here alone.”

  He stared, his expression bleak.

  “What am I, Lorn?” Xhea held up her hands to that yellow light, already imaging the smoke-like darkness that would once again curl and coil around her fingers. Her vision blurred further—tears, Xhea thought in frustration. Still she asked, “What am I becoming?”

  Lorn’s voice, when he spoke, had gone quiet.

  “In living memory, the Lower City has seen only one person who had something like your power. We don’t know who he was, for he was always fully covered, even his face, but he fought for Farrow in the war.”

  “A soldier?”

  Lorn’s smile was edged. “An assassin. We lived in fear of him. It seemed he could go anywhere, find anyone. One of Senn’s leaders died inside a locked room, no signs of a struggle—just fingerprints burned into the skin of his arm. Those killings that were witnessed, the witnesses all said the same thing: that the killer had some kind of strange smoke around his hands that poured inside the victims until they fell dead.”

  For all her skepticism, Xhea had once killed a man—a night walker—in much the same way.

  A pause. “I was one of those witnesses,” Lorn added. “He killed my grandmother. Back when the skyscraper was under her leadership, relations with Farrow were … tense.”

  Xhea didn’t know what to say to that. “How did you know it was magic?” she asked at last.

  Lorn shook his head. “What else could it be? And that was what my father told me back then. He knows more, I think—not that I’ve asked.”

  “What happened to him? The assassin.”

  “I don’t know. He vanished a little before the end of the war. Died, I can only assume; I don’t know how. But I saw his power, Xhea—power enough to kill a person in mere moments, not a drop of blood spilled—and it was nothing, nothing, compared to what you did in the street outside Edren that day. He had wisps of thin darkness, and you?” Lorn shook his head, suddenly unable to meet her eyes. “I’d never seen anything like it before. If I didn’t know you—if I hadn’t realized you didn’t understand what you’d done—I would have barricaded myself and every Edren citizen inside and bombed you from the rooftops where you stood.”

  He gave a snort that was almost a laugh, yet Xhea knew he was not joking. If that much power—that swirl of dark that she’d spun about her head and swallowed back down—were enough to cause such fear, she was glad that he had no way of knowing what she’d done in Eridian: that flood of black, thick and dark, cast against the Tower’s living heart.

  Pushing the memory away, she asked, “Who knows about that morning? You and Emara …”

  “Yes. And—” He hesitated, chewing over the words. “—and one more.”

  “Mercks.” Head of the night watch—and so careful to keep an eye on her these past few months, even when she was weak and drugged and barely able to walk.

  Lorn nodded.

  Xhea had questions—she could feel them tumbling over and over in her magic-addled brain, questions birthing questions, more than she could voice—and knew that there was not time. Not now; not yet.

  “When am I supposed to go underground?” Xhea asked.

  “Our guard is ready,” Lorn said—all trace of Addis vanishing from his voice. “Are you?”

  Xhea shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

  Already she could feel Shai’s spell burning out, the magic destroyed by its contact with her flesh—but it was far from gone entirely. Yet while the knee injury was still new to her, being high on bright magic was something with which she had a great deal of experience. She moved slowly, keeping her head as still as possible as she pushed herself up. The world tilted and whirled, and a low, grinding nausea roared to life within her. Only a matter of time before the cold sweats kick in, Xhea thought, and pushed her legs over the edge of the mattress.

  Lorn turned away to allow her to dab the dried blood from her legs, re-fasten her brace, and struggle to pull her pant leg down over the whole mess. At last she took a deep breath.

  “Moment of truth.”

  Lorn and Shai both turned at the words, their near-identical movements making Xhea snicker as she gathered her strength. Laugh while you can. She forced herself to stand.

  For the first time in months, Xhea’s first concern was not the pain in her knee but her stomach’s sudden rebellion. Only her hours unconscious saved her—with nothing but bile in her stomach, she managed to press her lips into a tight line and keep everything down.

  “Xhea?”

  A deep breath. Another.

  “I’m all right,” she said. She blinked and looked toward Shai, her blurred vision suddenly due more to brimming tears than the lingering bright magic.

  “I’m all right,” she said ag
ain, and could have wept for joy.

  Standing, the pain was greater—but even so, it was a pain that didn’t steal her breath and leave her gasping; it didn’t sap her will and make her want to collapse into some dark corner and never, ever get up again. Shai watched, still angry, still upset—but her eyes widened as she watched Xhea stand without falling.

  “I did it?” Shai whispered. “Truly?”

  “Yes.” Xhea was struck by the sudden, strange urge to reach out and hug the ghost—or try. Instead, she ducked her head, rubbed the tears from her eyes, and pushed her tangled hair from her face, coins and charms chiming.

  Lorn held out her stick, the question clear in the movement. She took it gratefully. Only so much a few hours could do, no matter how much magic Shai had pumped into that spell.

  Xhea limped forward, Shai a shining presence at her side.

  “You ready? I think it’s time to go stop a war.”

  Xhea stood at the top of the stairs in Edren’s lobby, staring down into the darkness below. There was no party, and the main doors were closed—if they’d ever been opened at all. No crowd here, no curious onlookers, just the few who knew of this excursion and had some responsibility to see it turn out right.

  Beside her, Mercks settled a pack across his shoulders, then stood as one of his guards tied a wheeled wooden sledge on the back. From the stains on the thing—and its smell—Xhea suspected that it was used to help haul waste to one of the midden heaps a few blocks away. A sad and sorry excuse for a wheelchair. Better than nothing, Xhea thought sourly, and tried to believe it.

  “How’d you get stuck with this gig?” she had asked Mercks incredulously on her arrival.

  “It’s my job,” he’d said simply. As if the supervisor of the night watch was an obvious choice for this excursion. Given how far he’d made it down the stairs the day before, she didn’t doubt that he was among Edren’s poorer citizens—yet she suspected that there were other reasons he’d been chosen. Or had volunteered. She’d shrugged and looked away, as if such things hardly mattered.