Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Xhea lifted a hand palm-up, gestured slightly with her fingers, and pretended to blow smoke from her palm. Magic-blind as he was, Torrence had no way of knowing that there was no magic in her hand, no dark power. Xhea’s edged grin matched Torrence’s own.

  “Be careful,” Xhea heard Torrence mutter in Daye’s ear as he passed. Maybe he’d be a bit more cautious of her now—or at least cautious of her magic.

  Daye did not close the door, only waited as their footsteps receded before turning to Xhea. Despite the drugs that Xhea knew were coursing through the woman’s system—despite the sheen of sweat across her brow and the slight tremor to her fingers—Daye’s eyes were cold, her expression unsympathetic.

  “What now?” Xhea asked.

  All too easily, she could imagine the myriad fates that might await, from questioning to staying locked in this room to being traded to some rival skyscraper. But Daye said only, “Dinner.”

  Daye spoke rarely; her voice, those few times that Xhea had heard it, had always come as a surprise. It was soft and undeniably feminine, and, though there was nothing gentle in her tone or in the clipped edges of her words, it nonetheless made Xhea think of a lullaby. Though Daye was the last person she’d want singing her to sleep.

  When Xhea didn’t move from her perch on the bed, Daye inclined her head toward the door. “Get up,” she said.

  “Or what?”

  Daye raised a single shoulder and tilted her head, both movements so slight as to be all but unnoticeable. Her version, Xhea thought, of a shrug. Then she just watched Xhea, as if to say, “Why don’t you find out?”

  Xhea forced herself off the bed and limped to the door. There she paused, seeing if Daye would walk ahead of her with her flashlight—allowing Xhea the slightest chance to slip away into the darkness—but Daye only waited, expressionless and clearly not amused, until Xhea sighed and stepped into the cold hall.

  She did not recognize the hall, nor the one after it, though she paid attention to the patterns on the stripped concrete walls, listened to the distant drip of water, looked for evidence of paint or carpet or the marks where drywall may have been torn away, hoping for clues as to her location. Seeking hints as to the direction of her escape.

  Maybe Shai could find her, too, now that Ieren wasn’t there to scare her away. She tried not to hold too closely to the thought; without the tether joining them, it might take the ghost hours or more to track her down.

  The healing helped, Xhea thought as she stumbled forward; even so, she missed her walking stick. Without its aid, there was no way she could hide the unevenness of her gate, nor her winces as her braced leg bore her weight. There was a time when pride would have made her struggle on regardless, head up and shoulders back as she walked, doing everything in her power to mask the extent of her injury. Perhaps here, in enemy hands, she should have dredged up the will to pretend one more time.

  But oh, her pride was long gone, bled out and discarded with yet another tangle of post-operative bandages. She only had so much strength—and would need it more for whatever lay ahead than for masking the pain when only Daye was present to see. Xhea held to the wall and made her steps small and careful. Daye did not protest, only kept pace just behind and out of Xhea’s line of sight, her flashlight a steady white glow. The only sound between them as they walked was the clink and chime of the charms bound into Xhea’s hair.

  No stairs this time; Daye directed her with the flashlight’s beam toward an elevator. Mechanical—no glimmer of magic on the call button, no gleam of spellwork in the elevator shaft beyond. The elevator, when it arrived, looked as bashed and battered as a tin can used for a children’s kickball game, but it worked. Daye pressed the button for the highest floor and they rose in silence, the elevator vibrating all around them. Daye did not relax as they rose from underground; yet something in her eased with each moment, the corded tension of her jaw and shoulders softening.

  It wasn’t Daye that gave Xhea pause, though, but the elevator itself. There’s something … she thought. Not the threadbare carpet nor the scraped and dented walls, but something … The floor buttons, she realized: there were rows upon rows of them. Far more than were needed for Rown’s thirty-five stories.

  The elevator jerked to a stop and the doors creaked as they opened into a room filled with the light of the setting sun. Xhea drew back, blinking; it was only Daye’s quick, hard shove in the center of her back that made her stumble forward.

  Xhea ground her teeth. Her payback, when it came, would be something that neither Torrence nor Daye would ever forget. Sometimes betrayals were just about business, Xhea knew that. This had crossed the line.

  She found her balance and looked around the huge room. There was a heavy wooden table in the center—real wood, polished to a mirror shine—and two chairs pulled up to the table’s sides. Platters of food had been set in the center, steam rising from around their edges. The walls to either side were clean, the drywall showing only the barest hints of water stains around their corners and edges, while the remains of a staircase led to a loft-like second story.

  But it was the windows that held her attention, wide panes of glass that seemed to stretch the length of the building, with only a few cracked or patched or boarded over. They looked across the Lower City, the huddled structures bathed in the setting sun’s light—a thousand shades of gray to Xhea’s eyes. In the distance, she could see Edren and Orren and Senn, the smoke from the market generators rising in a thick pall between them.

  Xhea swallowed. Sweetness and blight, she hated heights.

  Above was the Central Spire, the vast needle that marked the City’s center. The Spire was massive; it stretched from the City’s bottom to its peak, managing to all but touch the ground and pierce the very sky at once. Around it spun the Towers, each seeming to dance against the brilliance of the setting sun, light sparking from their sides as they rose and fell, sliding on air.

  Closer, Xhea saw the dark, squat shape of another skyscraper.

  This isn’t Rown. Xhea took a step toward the windows. This wasn’t Rown, for Rown was right there, the dark-stained skyscraper sitting in a patch of shadow cast by the overhead Towers, ratty flags and mottled pennants flying from its uppermost level.

  Not Rown at all, but Farrow, the tallest skyscraper—and the Lower City’s dominant power. This room was the former condominium’s penthouse suite.

  It was only as she moved cautiously forward that Xhea noticed the man that stood to one side, hands behind his back. He stared across the Lower City and all the structures huddled near Farrow’s base as if he owned them all. Perhaps he did.

  He turned, casting his face in shadow. He met Xhea’s eyes and smiled.

  “Hello, my dear,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  The rescue team found them near the barricade. The guard’s progress had been slow and painful, minutes marked by his labored breath and the squeal of dust-clogged wheels against the floor. When he had been whole and healthy, his progress underground had been a matter of will, each step paid in hurt. Now, Shai could not imagine what gave him the strength to keep pushing forward.

  Perhaps it was the sound of his own breathing, or the masking thud of his beating heart; perhaps it was that shock had made the world around him seem distant and dim. Whatever the reason, he did not hear the rescue’s approach, only lay there, exhausted and despairing, trying to gather the strength to push himself forward another few inches.

  There was only so much one spell, a small light, and a bubble of unshaped magic could do—but she had tried.

  The thought was little consolation.

  Even so, as Shai saw the approach of the rescue team’s red-shielded flashlights, she closed her hands around her spell and absorbed what was left of the magic. The guard looked up as, to his eyes, all went dark but for the pinprick light she’d attached to his hand. A light that glowed dimmer by the moment.

  “Please,” he whispered. “Don’t leave me.”

  Then a young man crept t
hrough the tunnel bored through the barricade, and his flashlight’s red beam fell upon the fallen guard.

  “Mercks!” he exclaimed, before cringing at his own volume.

  There was another man, little older than the first, and both were clearly drugged halfway to insensibility. They showed obvious signs of discomfort with being underground, sweating and shuddering as they hurried to get Mercks more fully on the sledge and drag him back to Edren. No coordination in their movements: they fumbled and nearly fell over themselves in their efforts.

  Shai stepped back and back again. Edren thought they were ready for an attack; they believed they could defend their skyscraper. Yet even her inexperienced eyes saw only poorly organized chaos and old training too rarely practiced to be useful.

  They don’t know what’s coming. But then, neither did she. She only had a sick feeling that it would be something far worse than Edren was expecting. A storm was building, and they could only see its edges.

  The rescuers helped the guard—Mercks, Shai corrected—farther onto the sledge. One dragged the sledge forward while the other covered their journey back into the skyscraper’s basement, weapon raised, bloody-beamed flashlight shining into every corner.

  Gone, she thought to them. They’re long gone. You’re far, far too late.

  The guilt that came with that thought bowed her head with its weight.

  Even so, Shai expanded the bubble of her magic to encompass them all. Unseen and unnoticed, she trailed behind them, easing their pain as they struggled back to the stairs.

  They had reached the hall leading to Edren’s main staircase when Shai’s magic ran out. There was no warning. One moment she held a bubble of pure magic around Mercks and his two sweating rescuers, and the next … nothing. The magic vanished as if it had never been; even the pinprick light spell that clung to Mercks’s hand guttered and died like a candle flame. The hall plunged into darkness broken only by the weak red lights of the rescuers’ flashlights.

  Shai gasped and staggered to a stop, staring at her hands. The guards swore, suddenly feeling the pain and disorientation of the underground once more. Even Mercks groaned, a sound low in his throat. But they were distant sounds that seemed to echo to her from somewhere impossibly far away.

  Shai’s hands were just … hands. In the faint red light, she could see her pale skin, the shadows of her fingers, and nothing else. No magic shone from within her—not even a glimmer of the power that had been hers since birth.

  A wave of exhaustion rushed over her, and Shai sank to her knees—then farther, until she felt the floor’s tile and concrete sliding through her incorporeal self. What, she thought in sudden fear, would keep her from sinking through the floor or the soil below? What would keep her from sinking and sinking until she was lost forever within the darkness of the earth, unbound and buried? Nothing, nothing. So she tried to cling to the ground with those pale and helpless hands, and prayed to absent gods that the weakness would pass.

  When she could open her eyes again, Shai looked around. There was only darkness—the guards had staggered onward, leaving her behind—but she had practice enough seeing in the dark. After a moment of disorientation she saw again the walls around her, the floor, the distant glow that filtered down from the lobby. She forced herself up and forward, only just noticing that her feet hovered off the ground and her legs’ movement was unconnected to her momentum.

  Just like the early days, when Xhea used to laugh at me. The memory felt sharp enough to cut.

  Then, she’d just been getting used to being dead. Now it was a measure of her distress. She’d never been anything but Radiant, never knew an existence in life or in death where she did not feel magic flowing from her center, through her body and out into the world beyond. Hadn’t even known how central that sensation was to her concept of self until it was suddenly and inexplicably gone.

  And Xhea …

  Too much, even, to think about. She pushed herself onward, weak and disoriented.

  Shai found the rescuers near the top of the stairs. They’d abandoned the sledge and now struggled to carry Mercks’s weak and bloody form between them as they staggered upward. From the main level, other black-clad security members ran down to help, ignoring the discomfort to help drag Mercks to safety. Shai rose unseen in their wake, feeling as desperately unsteady as they looked.

  They laid Mercks on the floor; Lorn and Emara stood nearby, tense and visibly upset. It was hot here, and humid. In the afternoon sunlight that streamed through the lobby’s upper windows, all Shai could see was the blood: dark and shining on Mercks’s dust-caked uniform, smeared stains on his face and neck, his hands so red and sticky that she could not see the skin beneath.

  Within seconds, the medic was at his side, grabbing for scissors and bandages and offering terse commands to a seemingly unflappable young assistant. Emara went to her knees and took Mercks’s hand, out of the medic’s way, while to the side one of the rescuers retched into a bucket.

  “Where is she?” Lorn asked, over and over again. “Where is Xhea?”

  Emara was quieter, steadier. “Mercks,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Gone,” Mercks whispered. His eyelids flickered, but he clung valiantly to consciousness, forcing out the words. “They came at us in the tunnels. Two men and a boy. Rown’s sigil on their shoulders. Took Xhea. Stabbed me.”

  Gone, taken. If only. Shai pressed her hand to her sternum as if force of will could make the tether reappear and Xhea with it—whole and healthy and alive.

  “They killed her,” Shai whispered, just to hear the words. Just to know they had been spoken—though speaking made them feel no more true.

  The medic had cut through Mercks’s uniform jacket and now sliced away the bloody mess of his shirt, tossing the fabric aside as he looked for the wound.

  He froze. Around him, the crowd fell silent. Staring.

  “What …?” the medic said. He took some water from his assistant and poured it across Mercks’s chest and lower torso. The water ran red, pink, clear, as the medic carefully bathed the wound.

  Or, rather, where the wound had been.

  Shai came closer and peered down at Mercks, sprawled on his back on the cracked marble floor in a puddle of blood and water. At last she could see the effects of her spell. There was no wound anymore—not even the deep pink mark of a wound recently healed. Only a thin, puckered scar marked where he had been stabbed, so pale that it looked years old.

  Around them, the onlookers stared, their stunned silence broken only by the sound of the ill rescuer’s retching.

  “The ghost saved me,” Mercks said, and fainted dead away.

  Then: light.

  Shai gasped and stumbled back as her magic rekindled inside her. She lifted her hand and watched as her skin seemed to glimmer, then to glow, light shining from her once more—weak, now, but growing stronger by the minute.

  She would have said that her magic didn’t have a feeling—would have said she couldn’t feel its presence at all. It was only in the wake of its sudden absence that she knew the error of such thoughts. Magic felt like the sun on a chill day, when the clouds parted and warm, golden light poured down like a blessing.

  It rushed through her, suffusing her, and she closed her eyes. For a moment, she almost forgot what had happened, what was happening all around her; she just let the magic flow through her, purify her, wash clean her heart and thoughts alike.

  For a moment.

  Then reality crashed back in, and no amount of magic was enough to banish it.

  Around her, the lobby had become chaos. The security manager, Lorn, Emara—each called people to their sides, made requests, and issued orders. The medic had moved Mercks to a stretcher and was carrying him away, leaving only puddles and blood smears on the marble flooring. Mercks was going to live because of her spell. She should have felt—what? Pride? Joy? Beneath her surprise and the almost dizzy rush of her power returning, she felt only dazed confusion. All else seemed buried beneath
ash.

  Plans, protocols, calls for emergency meetings—Shai stopped listening. She just let people and words alike flow around her, through her, and closed her eyes. Opened them. What difference did it make? Countless things to be done, and none of them needed her.

  No one needed her. Only her magic.

  If she could, she would hollow out that power and hand it to them, just to be done with it. All of it.

  So much magic, she thought as she shone brighter and brighter. Her sudden feelings of weakness, of exhaustion, eased; and she felt no better for their lack. So much magic, and what does it matter?

  Whatever brief spark of hope she’d felt was gone now, gone and buried. She could not stop thinking about the rush of emotion that she’d felt from Xhea—and, worse, the instant of echoing silence that had followed—right before the tether had snapped.

  She’d felt guilty when her father had been killed, knowing that he was only targeted because he’d tried to save her—guilty and shocked and sad beyond words. During the day she’d almost been able to push the feelings away, distract herself; yet at night, loss felt like a physical weight, as real and strong as gravity. She’d all but staggered beneath it as she wandered the Lower City’s nighttime streets alone, searching for her father’s empty, still-living body.

  But this? This was different.

  Her father had died trying to protect her—but he was her father. Of course her daddy tried to keep her safe. It was a child’s reaction, yes, but no less true.

  Xhea had only been her friend; in the end, she’d owed Shai nothing. And yet she had risked everything—had endured pain and injury, had faced death—to save her. But when Xhea was the one who needed saving, Shai had failed. Truly, utterly failed, beyond any hope of redemption.

  Shai stared at her shining hands, still spread before her, and wondered why she hadn’t just let herself dissolve into air and nothing. She shook her head, trying to push back the tears that once more threatened.