Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Again he said, “Let me show you.” Then he looked at her, and seemed for the first time to see the weariness and confusion that underlay her every word and action. “Let me see if Ieren has returned,” he said then. “Perhaps you’d like a few moments of quiet before I show you more?”

  No—what she wanted was for it suddenly to be yesterday again, a day defined only by pills and their absence. What she wanted was to be gone from here, gone as if she’d never been. What she wanted was for this to make sense.

  But then, she’d never really gotten what she’d wanted. Desire, it seemed, existed only to be thwarted.

  Yet Xhea hadn’t realized how short her breath had become until, at Ahrent’s quiet offer, she felt like she could inhale again. No words: she only nodded. He rose, murmuring that he would return shortly, and gestured Daye to follow.

  The door clicked shut.

  Quiet.

  Seconds passed. Minutes.

  She was not alone; Xhea was not so much a fool to believe that she would be left untended. Daye had gone no farther than the hall, and now stood guard in silence.

  Let her stand.

  Yet even that presence seemed muted, the few steps and the closed door between them like a vast and echoing space. A welcome space at that.

  Xhea slowly looked around the apartment. She could not bear to face the pictures that so liberally scattered the walls, nor their import; her eyes skimmed over them and landed instead on tiny, insignificant details. The scuffed doorframes, bare patches testament to the years upon years of hands that had rested upon them; the teacup on the makeshift table and the near-invisible print left by lips upon its rim; the faint smell of lilacs in the air.

  Welcome home.

  She did not feel like she was home. No comfort, here; no warmth nor joy nor safety. If anything, she felt more hopelessly off-balance than she had locked in Edren’s halls, struggling to walk again.

  What Ahrent Altaigh had said did not make sense—not her birth here, not Farrow’s transformation, not any of it. Yet she could not deny her shock, nor her feeling when she saw the older woman in the photo. She had no name for that emotion, nor could she say what she felt now. Only that she struggled to breathe, to focus, and wished for the willful oblivion of sleep or drugs with all her being.

  Because what Ahrent Altaigh had said did not make sense—but if it were true? Oh, dangerous thought. She could not help but imagine it—and not just meeting the family that Ahrent assured her she’d once had, but knowing them. Never having lost them at all.

  To have grown up within these walls, in this very place; to have her image on the wall, a picture for every year of her life. To have the memories, good and bad and in-between; so many memories that she could spend all day staring, thinking, and never go through them all.

  To have had a home.

  She would never have known Abelane, nor lost her; she knew that. She might never have learned she could travel underground. She would never have met Shai. The sharp, precious joys of her life would never have been—gone, unmade, as surely as all the difficult times.

  But it was not those memories on which her thoughts lingered—not the memories, true or imagined—but the thought that lay underneath them all: to be wanted.

  Oh, to be wanted.

  Shai, she thought, pressing a hand to her sternum. Where are you?

  Xhea sat on that battered couch, let the moments pass around her like water, and tried not to cry. What Ahrent had told her could not be true because she wanted it too much. Bright dreams had the hardest edges, she knew; they cut too deep when they shattered.

  Shai slipped into Edren’s council meeting only minutes in Emara’s wake.

  She hadn’t wanted to. She had turned to leave, to sink back down into tunnels, so she might search for Xhea the way her grief and guilt demanded. Ease the restless anger in her hands, if not her heart.

  Yet, hearing Lorn and Emara’s conversation, she could not deny that there was more at play than just the attack on Xhea and Mercks, or the destruction of Edren’s barricade. More threats, more people who might be hurt or die—and her own bright magic was at the root of it all.

  There was no evidence that Rown’s attack had been an attempt to steal the Radiant ghost spoken of in whispers on the Lower City streets. No evidence, either, that it hadn’t. For all that she wanted to turn and run, Shai could not discount that Xhea may have been drawn into the underground as a means of capturing the ghost to which she was bound. After all, the dark magic boy had tried to grab Shai, and then only after killing Xhea to free Shai’s tether.

  She did not want Xhea to have died for nothing.

  Such hubris in the thought—but it was enough, however briefly, to make her pause. Enough to force her to turn, for all that something in her screamed and cried and ached in the denial of her true desire, and walk through the wall into the council chamber beyond.

  She needed to understand. Only then might her actions be worth more than the renai she generated.

  Neither Emara nor Lorn’s presence in council had been missed; the meeting was already in full swing. Around the table sat the full suite of councilors, the tall, knife-faced man who Xhea had said was Edren’s old battle general, and a very angry Verrus Edren. Verrus was silent as others around him spoke in ever-louder voices. His hands were flat on the table, and anger seemed to shimmer from him like heat from a sun-baked stone.

  Only Edren’s old general—a tall, scarred, imposing man—sat unmoved, as if neither the arguments nor his leader’s anger had any strength to touch him. The general, and Lorn. Even as Lorn came into the room and noisily took his seat, he seemed to lean into his father’s anger rather than away, like a man braced against a storm wind.

  “Enough,” said Verrus. His voice was not loud, and yet it silenced the room, some councilors stopping speaking mid-word.

  Watching, Shai moved from the back wall where Xhea had stood only that afternoon, behind the chairs toward the head of the table. The councilors did not seem to notice her presence, distracted as they were; only Emara, seated this time to Lorn’s left, stilled and looked up, her eyes unfocused as she scanned the room. She looked, Shai thought, surprised.

  “We have no other choice,” the horse-faced councilor argued into that quiet. “Rown is preparing for war, Farrow has posted a heavily armed perimeter guard, and Orren has sent away our messengers unheard. We must move now, before they can gather their forces.”

  “Councilor Lorris,” said a man down the table, “when we wish to kill our people with hasty, ill-conceived strategies, we will ask for you personally. Until that time, do us all the pleasure of shutting your twice-blighted mouth.”

  “Enough,” Verrus said again. He leaned onto the table, atop which was spread a hand-drawn map of the Lower City in heavy black ink, accented with symbols in red and green. “The question is not whether we will respond to Rown’s unprovoked attack, but when and how.”

  Unprovoked? Shai could have cried, could have laughed. Hysteria; she choked it down.

  “About the girl, Xhea,” Lorn interrupted, voice tight and words carefully calm. “If she’s being held in Rown—”

  Verrus barely glanced up. “The girl is of no importance.”

  Lorn took a deep breath. “With her abilities—”

  “The abilities that patently failed to be as useful as either you or your wife argued?” Verrus’s voice was cold, so cold. “Abilities that now allow her to provide information about our defenses to our enemy? I fail to see the benefit of your argument.”

  “We sent her down there,” Lorn continued, clearly swallowing back an angry retort. “We have a responsibility—”

  “Our first and only responsibility is the good of the skyscraper and its citizens. The girl is neither a citizen nor a valuable asset.”

  “Edren’s resources are limited,” added one of the councilors. She was a small, weedy woman who sounded as if she were repeating an earlier argument—one likely first voiced by Verrus himself. “Rown�
��s target is larger than a single girl. We must focus on the true priorities.”

  Emara interjected, “Are you forgetting of her connection to the Radiant? Her continued presence is critical to—”

  Verrus raised a hand. “Is the ghost still present?” he asked quietly.

  There was a pause—a pause in which Shai wished she was somewhere else, anywhere else, so that the answer to that question might truthfully be “no.” Lorn glanced at Emara and something unspoken passed between them, before at last Lorn nodded to his father. It was a slow nod, and reluctant.

  “She’s here,” Lorn said.

  “Then we have no further use for the girl.” Verrus Edren turned away in dismissal.

  Unseen, Shai could but stare. She felt too hot, too cold—she felt like smoke and light and nothing in between. It that moment, it didn’t matter that Xhea wasn’t waiting to be saved, that no rescue could claim her from where she had gone; only that no one cared. Verrus would just have left her there—was leaving her there, if only her fallen body.

  Shai looked from Verrus to Lorn and Emara and the councilors around the table. Despite Lorn’s obvious anger and Emara’s carefully blank expression, no one mentioned Xhea again. Instead, they argued about defenses, offenses, scouting positions, spy reports—she knew not which. Didn’t, in that moment, care.

  Her head spun and she moved with it, pacing back and forth along the length of the boardroom as if motion might dispel her confusion or frustration or the anger that underlay it all. Were they concerned about the destruction of their barrier and the attack it presaged? They would have known of neither were it not for Xhea. What time they had to prepare for the upcoming aggression—time in which they might attempt diplomacy or court allies—was due entirely to Xhea’s intervention. Though her discovery had been accidental, that fact in no way absolved Edren of their debt to her.

  Shai wanted, for one crazy moment, to slap the woman who had spoken out against saving Xhea. As if her hand might do anything but cause the woman a moment’s chill.

  They might never know, she realized. If Edren did not investigate, they might never learn that Xhea had fallen. No chance of justice for her senseless death.

  Shai watched as they placed metal chits on the map, marking out defensive points, places to assign their guards, places to set spells—she knew not which.

  Forget understanding, she thought, suddenly, angrily. Forget patience and politics and trying to stay calm. Just let them argue. She knew little of the names and places of which they spoke anyway; it was easy enough to let the words flow over her, through her, as if they were nothing but the air of which they were formed. Easy, now, to turn her back on them all.

  Gravity, she thought. She pretended the earth’s pull had any claim upon her, and fell.

  Floor after floor, Edren flickered through her, ground and ceiling, furniture and plumbing pipe, empty space and people. She hated the feeling—had avoided such drastic maneuvers ever since discovering that such things were possible, if only she dared try. Now it was just one more discomfort in a long list of hurts. She slowed to a halt underground.

  Edren’s basement level was cold and dark and so still that Shai’s ears rang with the sudden absence of voices. There was no dread to slow her now, nor anyone injured. She sped past the barricade and down the hall marked with Mercks’s blood to the place where Xhea had been killed.

  Shai peered long and hard at those bloody scuffs in the dirt, as if she might read the meaning within them through will and attention. Looked, too, at Xhea’s walking stick, abandoned in the dust. Nothing to learn there, she confessed at last—or, at least, nothing that she could see or understand. She turned her attention to the footsteps. There were so many.

  It was clear that the attackers, whoever they’d been, had come here time and again long before she and Xhea had stumbled onto the scene. Shai was not a particularly good tracker—nor did she have Xhea’s close familiarity with the underground—but the same prints made worn trails in the dust that led not just toward Edren, but toward the other skyscrapers as well.

  The hall from which the attackers approached led to Orren and Senn, she found, and those skyscrapers’ barricades bore signs of damage as well. Yet the most recent set of footsteps came from neither skyscraper; instead, the attackers had stopped in an alcove, just out of sight, as if they had been watching and waiting for Xhea’s approach.

  Shai shivered and turned away.

  At last she found the attackers’ path away, when they had been carrying Xhea’s body. It was marked by a few widely spaced drips of blood in the dust.

  Carefully, Shai followed the path to its source. That exit was not Rown’s own barricade, as she had expected, but a subway station. She rose like a bubble to the surface, and stood blinking in the late evening sunlight, unseen in the bustling roadway.

  Rown. The wide, squat skyscraper was fully visible before her, set like a dark shadow against the sky. Shai frowned. Given the distance, it would have taken the attackers at least ten minutes to walk to Rown from here; longer if they had grown tired of the burden of Xhea’s body. Nor would that journey have gone unnoticed.

  Shai turned—and there, not fifty feet away, was Farrow. There were no footsteps to lead her; she did not need them.

  “Oh no,” she whispered, staring up and up at the pale skyscraper and all its battered balconies, all its glittering windows.

  She had no evidence—nothing she could see nor touch—but felt with sudden, perfect certainty that this was the skyscraper that had sent the attackers and the dark magic boy both, and the place to which they had returned.

  It was Rown that Edren had aggressed upon, Rown whose territory Edren wanted and was preparing to claim, Rown whose symbol the bounty hunters had worn on their mismatched clothing. But Rown had not killed Xhea, nor caused the fall of the barricade.

  Rown hadn’t been behind the attacks at all.

  She stared, horrified, thinking of the plans even now being made in Edren. How many innocent people are going to die for their mistake?

  Something was happening outside the tall, pale skyscraper—there was a sound like cracking concrete, and people scrambled over the ground, yelling—but Shai paid them no heed. Instead she rose and flew arrow-straight back to Edren.

  Neither Shai’s absence nor her return was of any note to those in the council’s war room. Though the council still argued, it was clear that their arguments were winding down, Edren’s plans in their final stages.

  A dawn attack on Rown.

  Shai rushed to the map spread across the table—only to stop, blinking at its incomprehensibility. It was so far from the three-dimensional City maps that she knew—maps that moved as the City did, ever-changing—that for a moment she despaired of making any sense of it.

  Then something shifted in her perception, and she saw past the flat paper with its crude, hand-drawn symbols to the shapes that they represented. There was Edren, which would make that shape Orren and that shape Senn …

  Following the lines that marked roads and pathways, Shai found the square marked Farrow, already thinking desperately about how she could communicate her message. She could call forth a light, and make it blink; one blink for no, two for yes … or was it the other way around? And how could she possibly blink out the message that they were preparing to attack the wrong skyscraper?

  Not blinks, then—could she write with light? She knew how to shape the energy into whirls and patterns—why not letters? Why not a word? There was no reason she couldn’t make such a shape, and even hold it, using the simple light spell to make the word visible to Edren’s magic-poor leadership. She had just never tried it before, living or dead.

  Yet even as she started to form the spell-shape, planning out the lines of intent needed to bring even such as simple thing into being, she knew she was too late: one by one the councilors rose and began to follow Verrus Edren from the room.

  No, she thought, willing herself to form the spell faster—but her sudden a
nxiety scattered her concentration like so much confetti. She, who could make pure magic swirl and dance through her fingers like it was an extension of her body, struggled again to make even the simplest of spells. She reached out as if she might catch the councilors as they passed, might hold an arm or grab a collar, might touch a shoulder—and felt her hands pass through them. Felt the cold of their leaving; felt the cold of sudden despair.

  Only Lorn and Emara remained behind, waiting in silence until the last of the councilors had left the room and the door shut behind them. Waiting, Shai realized, to speak to her.

  “Shai?” Emara asked. “Are you still here?” As before, Emara closed her eyes and raised one hand, trying to pinpoint whatever slight disturbance she felt from Shai’s presence.

  “She’s here,” Lorn affirmed. But even he took a moment to identify the general area in which she now resided, standing near the end of the long table, across from them.

  “Shai,” Lorn said in his deep voice. “I’m so sorry, I—”

  She knew what he was going to say. Hearing the words, heavy with regret and anger and frustration, made none of it easier to bear.

  Instead of listening, Shai kindled a light above her palm. It was just a point of pale gold little brighter than a candle’s flame, like the one she’d used underground. The shadows in the empty boardroom barely shifted as it came into being. Even so, Lorn froze at the sight and Emara’s breath seemed to catch in her throat. Both stared.

  Knowing she was there, it seemed, was not the same as seeing proof of her existence. Nor, she realized, was it the same for her. As with Mercks, Shai found herself momentarily caught breathless, so shocked at the feeling of being seen.

  “I’m real,” she whispered. “I’m here.” She did not know whether she meant the words for them, or for herself.