Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  She tried now to listen as Lorn reviewed their instructions: Document as much as possible. Find what evidence they could without putting themselves at risk. Remain in contact with Edren. Remain together. Flee at any sign of danger.

  “Got it,” Xhea said. “Don’t die.”

  Mercks just nodded and stared at the stairs like a man looking at his own grave, clutching a flashlight in one white-knuckled hand. Looking at his hopeless face, Xhea wanted nothing more than to apologize. But then she hadn’t damaged the barricade; only touched it and watched it fall. She hadn’t wanted this—not any of it.

  Yet she felt as much as saw Shai by her side, that so familiar presence and the tether that joined them, and knew that wanting had nothing to do with it. Xhea was here because of Shai, and Shai was here because of her, and Shai’s Radiant magic had disrupted so much in the Lower City so very quickly—so maybe it was all her fault in the end.

  Mercks turned to her and something in his stark expression softened.

  “Tonight?” he asked, gesturing to the stairs—the same question he’d asked every night. For an instant, she forgot the watching onlookers—forgot the pack and the sledge and all the unknowns that waited—and simply smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so.” She reached out and gripped the brass railing.

  “I always said I’d give you a hand, didn’t I?” Mercks laughed then, genuine amusement beneath the strain. Night after night, and neither of them had ever imagined this.

  Together, they descended into darkness. Xhea could not walk quickly or easily—the still-sharp hurt, despite Shai’s healing, kept her from even trying—but she was on her feet. At her side, Mercks moved just as slowly, his breath already short despite the drugs.

  The temperature dropped, step by step, as if they left summer in Edren and descended into another world. A world colder and darker, the air no longer thick with heat and humidity, but chill and damp and smelling of dust. Despite the chill, a pressure lifted from Xhea nonetheless as she took her first breath of the underground’s dusty, closed-in air: tension of which she hadn’t even been aware loosening its grip on her chest and shoulders, brushing away the fog from the inside of her brain. The fog—and the last of the spell’s bright magic. The gleam of yellow vanished from the beam of the flashlight Mercks held, leaving only gray.

  Home, she thought unbidden—and just as quickly pushed the thought aside.

  Beside her, Mercks felt no such ease. Even through his drug cocktail, his discomfort was evident. With effort, he pried his white-knuckled hand from the stairs’ railing and took a heavy step forward.

  Once his reaction would have made her laugh, such fear and the weakness of which it told a sharp contrast to the ease with which she traveled below. Now, nothing in his fear or pain was amusing. They were each slamming up against their bodies’ limits, she knew; each pushing past with will alone. Perhaps she could make this journey easier for him, as he had made her long nights of painful exercises and the inevitable failures of her wounded flesh easier for her.

  A noble concept; if only it made words come to lips or mind.

  Shai watched Mercks, and it seemed her thoughts followed a similar path—or, at least, ended at the same destination. “Say something,” she said.

  Xhea swallowed and said the first thing that came to mind. “When was the last time you went underground?” The image of him pinch-mouthed and sweating halfway down the stairs loomed large in her mind’s eye, and she winced. “Before yesterday, I mean.”

  “Two months ago,” Mercks said. He visibly struggled to slow his breathing. “We hold regular attack drills.”

  So much for drills. Xhea just managed to suppress the snort that accompanied the thought. She’d seen how far the guards’ footsteps made it into the underground—barely at all.

  Mercks played the harsh white beam of his flashlight across the walls, the ceiling, the crisscrossed pattern of footsteps across the floor—looking, Xhea could only assume, for some evidence she didn’t know how to recognize. At the same time, Xhea tried to feel whether there was anything different—whether she might feel the faintest hint of either that strange pull or the unease that had come in its wake, or the feeling of being watched. Goosebumps rose on her arms, and she shook her head. Only the cold. All else felt as it should.

  At last Mercks started toward the barricade, leading the way.

  “My record was twenty-five minutes below,” he added quietly. “This, I think, will be longer.”

  At their creeping pace? Of that Xhea had no doubt. The sound of her stick against the floor echoed around them like a heartbeat.

  They were almost to the turn toward the small shopping plaza before Xhea spoke again. In the quiet, even her soft words seemed loud.

  “This is the hardest part, you know.”

  “The hall?”

  “The fear.” She smiled grimly. “Anticipating pain makes everything worse. When the pain comes? Then it’s just a matter of dealing with it.” Story of the last two months wrapped up in a neat little box, that was.

  Mercks made a sound that could have been a laugh or a grunt or nothing at all.

  Another step. Another.

  “How do you know him?” Shai asked. The same question she’d asked the night before.

  Xhea glanced at her. The ghost’s voice had been quiet, her face impassive—but the anger there was poorly hidden. New anger, old anger, and hurt beneath both. Xhea didn’t understand; the healing she’d asked for had been a risk, but a worthwhile one. Shai’s magic had worked, if imperfectly.

  Xhea shrugged. “I don’t sleep much these days, and he supervises the night watch. I used the main stairs for my knee exercises—or tried to. I walked the halls.” Again she shrugged, as if the admission and its heavy subtext came easily.

  That’s how I spend my nights, Xhea wanted to say. Where do you go? Hurt, too, in those words; the hurt of night after night spent alone. But now, she knew, was not the time to ask.

  Shai looked surprised. “I didn’t know …” she started, but Mercks spoke over her hesitant words.

  “Your friend?”

  Xhea nodded. No time for anything more: they turned the corner and the barricade was before them.

  They stopped, staring. Before, this corridor had been untouched, pale dust coating every surface like winter’s first snow. Now everything—from the benches and fake trees to the floor and the gaping holes of the light fixtures—was coated in a thick layer of grit and debris blown out from the collapse. The barricade itself loomed at the hall’s end, the hole through its center like a dark, gaping mouth.

  Mercks played his flashlight over the damage, and made a sound of disbelief. The video, she supposed, had done little to capture the truth of the collapse. The shape and the fact of it, yes, in grainy black and white; but not the feel in the air, heavy and cold; not the smell, or the sheer size of the destruction. But it was not the barricade’s appearance that made her stare, nor Edren’s request that made her step forward.

  As Mercks used his radio to call back to those waiting above, Xhea moved carefully toward the barricade, Shai at her side. The ground was treacherous underfoot, covered in shards of debris and chunks of concrete; more than once Xhea’s walking stick was the only thing that kept her upright. When she stood in the half-clear patch that marked the place where she’d fallen the day before, Xhea paused and extended her free hand toward the barricade. Her hand trembled.

  “You feel it too?” Shai asked. Her anger seemed forgotten: now there was only fear. The ghost looked like she wanted nothing more than to turn and flee the way she had come.

  Xhea nodded. Except she had no words for what she felt, no name for the sensation that played across her fingertips and made her stomach twist and roil. At first it had felt almost like Shai’s light on her face: something so faint as to be all but unnoticeable until she trained her attention on it. Except instead of the warmth and light she had come to associate with Shai’s presence, this was something cold an
d still and dark.

  And it drew her.

  The fear that Shai clearly felt, that dread that made the light of her magic flicker and flare—Xhea felt none of it, only that pull urging her forward once more.

  No, more than urging—it seemed to drag at her, yanking at her thoughts and body alike, stronger and stronger with each passing moment. Xhea took a step without meaning to, and another, stumbling closer until she stood just inside the barricade. It was only then that she saw the reason for the new tunnel’s perfect darkness: something blocked the tunnel’s far end, a wall of solid black that even her vision could not pierce. Though the light of Shai’s magic played across the barrier’s broken ends—severed pipes and shorn-clean edges of metal doors, concrete and oil drums and bicycle frames—it did not touch that black.

  Say something, Xhea thought. Anything. But it was all she could do to keep breathing.

  Another step, another, and she walked through the tunnel toward that impenetrable darkness. Her hand clutched her stick, cold and sweating. Her heartbeat was so loud that though she could hear Shai’s voice—suddenly, urgently—she could not understand the ghost’s words through the staccato beat.

  Still that darkness drew her, closer, closer. It was flat black: no sheen to it, no depth; only a span of perfect dark. As if in a dream, Xhea reached out and touched it.

  Everything stopped.

  Xhea was touching the black and that black touched her, and something that had neither shape nor substance felt as whole and real as her own flesh. It was cold, yes, like dipping her hand into fresh snowmelt—but it did not hurt. Or perhaps it was only that pain was such a constant now that in that moment it was impossible to tell pain from pleasure from the absence of each.

  Oh, she wanted to close her eyes; wanted to release her hand from her walking stick and just fall, boneless, as if this darkness could embrace her, enfold her, and never let her go.

  A sudden flash of light broke her trance—a surge of bright magic—and Xhea gasped, stumbling back.

  Shai was calling, high and urgent; over and over, she shouted Xhea’s name. Her hand, too, was outstretched, light again building around her fingers.

  Xhea struggled to think, struggled to breathe. She grabbed the barrier to keep from falling, her hand grasping a sharp metal edge. It sliced into her palm, and then, only then, did she gasp and shake herself awake.

  The black before her was gone. She could see the hall beyond the barricade: a span of dirty linoleum and the hulking shapes of parts of the barrier dragged carefully aside.

  Heart still pounding, Xhea looked at her hand. The cut wasn’t deep, but it was ugly; already blood pooled in her palm and dribbled over the side of her hand, dripping in black droplets to the dusty ground below. Black on gray—no hint of ruby, no sign that her eyes had ever known color.

  But it was not the blood that caught her attention, nor the wound from which it flowed, but the darkness that even now surrounded her upraised hand in a swirling cloud—the only remnants of the black wall she’d seen before her. She knew this darkness, this shape that moved like living smoke; she knew it as she knew her own self. It seemed to sink into her; at its touch, she felt something deep within her stir in response. Yet she could not feel the lingering smoke that twined through her fingers and rose, spiraling, into the empty air; she had no sense of that power as anything other than something outside herself.

  As she watched, the swirling darkness dissipated—fraying, tattered, gone.

  “Xhea,” Shai said, louder now, more urgent, and she felt the ghost’s hand on her shoulder. She turned, stepping back until she was clear of the barricade, and looked toward Shai. The ghost stared back, wide-eyed.

  “What was that?” No sign of Shai’s earlier anger, now; only fear.

  Xhea looked from the barricade to her hand—bare and bloody—and curled her fingers into a fist in a vain attempt to stop the bleeding. She was not shaking, now; she was not afraid. For the first time in months, her head felt perfectly clear.

  “Magic,” she said. Dark magic, and it had not been hers.

  Run away, some distant part of her mind screamed. Yet she heard the wonder in her own voice, felt tears sting her eyes and run hot down her cheeks, and knew that she would not.

  “Xhea?” Mercks’s voice. She had almost forgotten him. “Xhea, what’s wrong, what do you see?”

  She looked to the guard. She should tell him, she knew—it was, after all, why she was there, to explain the things only she could see. But doing so, she realized, would put her at risk.

  She had said she knew no way to bore a hole through the barricade, no way to turn solid objects to dust—and understood, now, that she’d been wrong. Of everyone in Edren, she was the only one who might have done this damage, had her magic been strong enough. When her power was ascendant, she’d turned petals and leaves to nothing more than fine-grained ash, rotted away a silk scarf in mere moments. It was easy, now to imagine it: a flow of power in the shape of a tunnel, destroying everything from the inside out—and just waiting for that little push to send everything tumbling down.

  It didn’t matter that she was blameless; to say anything of what she had just seen would necessitate revealing her magic, and doing that would make her a suspect, a spy. The control evident in the shape of the damage spoke of one with far more experience than her—yet she doubted few would care to debate the difference.

  “Don’t touch the barricade,” was all she said, holding up her bloody palm in explanation. “Blighted thing’s sharp.”

  Let him think the cut was the reason for her tears. She almost wished she believed it herself. Inwardly, she reeled: there was someone else with her power—not just a story, like Lorn’s, but someone living, someone here. If the screaming ghost from the night before was any evidence, dark magic and the ability to see ghosts went hand in hand.

  And the spell? For she knew not what else that span of solid black might have been but a spell wrought with dark power. What was that for?

  She shook her head, the charms in her hair clinking softly in the silence. She had no way to know. She would just have to be cautious, that was all; keep every sense trained for evidence of whoever this dark magic caster might be, and what they might want of Edren—or of her.

  Mercks finished his cursory examination of the barrier and gestured toward the tunnel with his flashlight beam. “Let’s get this over with,” he said. His hands were already trembling, his breath short.

  “Be careful,” Xhea whispered to Shai. The ghost nodded. One by one they filed through the tunnel, out of Edren and into the underground.

  In the hall beyond, there was no movement as far as she could see in either direction. Mercks played his flashlight across the floor, checking as Xhea had done for any sign that they were not alone. Xhea took a long, slow breath; it was just the underground, dark and quiet and familiar as the sound of her own voice.

  She had expected dust to be thick on the ground, here as in Edren. It was not. Whoever was responsible for the destruction had left neither note nor signature; but beyond the wash of dirt from the collapse, the ground was patterned with countless footprints, and smeared with the heavy trails of objects dragged across the floor. Most of those tracks led down the hall to Xhea’s left—the direction, she knew, of both Orren and Senn.

  Mercks untied the sledge and set it down, then crouched to examine the marks; but there was little point, Xhea thought as she looked around with a critical eye. Just more of the same: more rubble, more things cast aside, more signs that something was not right. She searched nonetheless, looking for evidence that Mercks would never see: signs of ghosts.

  Or, more specifically, the ghost from the night before. She heard no hint of his muffled shouting, nor his words. No sign, either, of to what—or, rather, to whom—he might have been tethered.

  But there was something here, she realized. Something that lingered just on the edges of her senses. Xhea frowned, peering down the hall into the darkness beyond.

>   “This was a bad idea,” Shai whispered. The ghost raised a hand before her as if feeling for heat. “Do you feel that? There’s someone here. Someone’s watching us.”

  Xhea remembered the feeling from the night before, that prickle between her shoulder blades as if someone were targeting her from the darkness. Now there was nothing—nothing but the song that even now played on the edges of Xhea’s hearing, drawing her forward, calling her on.

  Song? Xhea frowned. Why had she thought that? She shook her head as if to dispel such thoughts and the strange feeling that had settled in their wake. There was no song, no sounds at all but Mercks’s increasingly labored breathing and the rhythm of her own uneven steps.

  Tap-scuff. Tap-scuff. Tap-scuff.

  Her cane sounded loud against the floor. So, too, did the scuff of her boots’ heels against that dirty ground. She did not remember starting to walk, only realized that she’d traveled half the length of the hall—and that Shai and Mercks were even now scrambling to catch up.

  “Xhea?” Shai asked. “What is it? Xhea, no—stop.”

  Because this was not her careful, limping walk. Within the limitations set by pain and under-used muscles, she was all but running.

  “I can hear …” Xhea said, glancing back, but could not finish the thought.

  Mercks said something. Xhea tried to understand before letting even the memory of his voice slip away to be drowned beneath something that was—and was not—sound. He hurried to catch her; as he entered her peripheral vision, she saw him reach with shaking hands for his belt and the weapons secured there.

  That means—

  She let the thought go. It did not matter, could not matter. She just had to keep walking. All else was buried beneath the sound.

  And it was a sound—how could she have ever thought otherwise? It sounded like—

  Like—

  Xhea kept walking. Tap-scuff. Tap-scuff. Tap-scuff.

  She reached the old metal doorframe, its paint peeling in long curls, that marked the transition from the corridor to the warren of tunnels and plazas beyond. Xhea paused there, her bleeding hand on the doorframe, as she looked at the paths stretched before her.