Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “I can’t,” Xhea protested, looking at the aircar and the rope net beneath it. Her face was ashen.

  “Get. In.”

  From beneath them came a great cracking sound, and then the rumble and rattle of falling concrete. That made Xhea move, when all else did not. She grabbed her cane and rose—and if her movements were stiff and she still favored her right knee, she showed none of the weakness she’d displayed but moments earlier.

  “Sweetness save me,” Xhea muttered as she grabbed the ropes. “Sweetness and blight.”

  The moment Xhea scrambled into the net, the woman slammed her door closed and the aircar rose, its movement quick enough to startle a yelp from Xhea. Behind them, the door to the skyscraper slammed open and a man ran out onto the rooftop, looking from the fallen boy to Xhea in sudden panic. He shouted something but Shai could not understand his words, not above the whine of the aircar’s engine and the sound of shattering glass and falling concrete.

  Shai turned and followed the aircar, watching as the woman navigated between the cascading curtain of the defensive spell and the skyscraper’s edge—all without jostling Xhea or scraping the aircar against the shuddering building.

  No, Shai saw as they entered the open air, Farrow was not just shuddering—but rising. The sound had been the final detonation that separated the skyscraper from the ground. Now, in defiance of gravity and the weight of stone, they hovered as she did, hanging above a pile of broken concrete and twisted rebar—and lifting slowly, slowly into the air. Shai, who had grown up in a Tower floating on air, watched slack-jawed as the tall, heavy building became airborne.

  At last she turned away, speeding after the aircar as it made a slow and spiraling descent to the central edge of Edren’s territory. When Shai reached it, Xhea was just scrambling out of the net and cursing all the while; she dropped to the ground, cane in hand, and looked as if she wanted to fall to her knees and kiss it, dirt and ash and all.

  Nearby, a tall, sandy-haired man sat on the curb, his head in his hands, shaking with magic shock. Xhea stumbled toward him.

  There was something about these two, something strangely familiar. Shai frowned.

  “It’s not safe here,” Xhea was protesting. “You need to take the car out into the badlands.”

  The woman who had rescued Xhea from the rooftop just stared, her expression flat and unyielding. Xhea shook her head, grimacing, as if that unchanged expression had been response enough.

  “Fine, then—but we can’t just stay here.”

  The bounty hunters, Shai thought suddenly. The ones who had tried to abduct Xhea and take her away to Tower Eridian—the ones who had abducted her, but days before. The ones who had stabbed Mercks and left him to die alone in the tunnels beneath the Lower City. Whatever she might have said or done as the anger welled within her was forgotten as a building only blocks away collapsed in a rush of smoke and sparks. Even from this distance, Shai could feel the heat—could smell the acrid smoke as it rushed over them in a wave.

  Shai turned, Xhea and the bounty hunters ignored behind her as the import of what she had seen atop Farrow suddenly hit home: despite the combined efforts of the Lower City citizens, the fires were spreading. Without thinking, Shai lifted into the air, seeking a better vantage.

  The fires to one side of the destroyed market were nearly under control, a wide, multi-laned street clearly helping slow the fire’s progression. Closer to Senn, the flames raged hotter, higher. Those few who still battled the blaze could not get close; they fought now only to try to limit its spread. And what were a few buckets of dirty water against such flames?

  People were fleeing. Children held in arms or on hips, older children leading younger, elderly folks stumbling along. Some held bundles of clothing or other possessions, but most held nothing at all as they ran, faces smeared with ash, coughing into dampened cloths that seemed no protection from the acrid smoke.

  Where could they go? The ruins, or the badlands beyond. But Shai had seen those places, had walked them at Xhea’s side and alone after night had fallen. No food, no clean water, no shelter awaited them; only the barest hope that the fire might not spread so far. And what would there be left to come back to?

  Shai dropped back to the ground—but not only Xhea watched her fall, for still the light of her magic shone from her unthinkingly. Even the man was looking at her, squinting, his bloodshot eyes tearing at the sight.

  “Shai?” Xhea said. She sounded almost uncertain, as if she had thought that Shai had been leaving her again. “We have to go below—find safety.”

  Shai just shook her head. “No,” she said. “We have to help them.”

  “Shai, we—”

  “I have to help them.”

  For already she could feel the magic within her—more magic than she’d ever held, more magic than she’d ever known, spreading through her ghostly body and out into the world. Brighter she shone, brighter and brighter; and she could already feel the spell that lay beneath that magic, and feel the rhythms of its song.

  A spell for rain.

  The very thought was absurd. There were no spells that could control the weather—or so she had been told. Too many factors, too large an area to influence—the reasons not to even make the attempt were many and varied. Yet she had also been told that spells had to be learned like careful recipes of pattern and practice, and that only a rare talent might create something new.

  What was the point of power, of magic, if it didn’t do anything? If it was used only to hurt and control but never to help? The Towers would never have wasted such untold fortunes as she now held on something so small as the lives and homes of a few thousand people down in the dirt.

  Shai smiled then at the irony, for only now did she realize: her responsibility never should have been to her Tower, but to the people.

  These were her people now.

  She did not need a memory to direct the power, nor a mental image to shape it; only the feeling that rose now within her, a feeling so strong that she all but wept from its pressure. Fear and hope and a terrible empathy, growing as fast and as bright as her magic.

  She felt, too, as the spell began to pull on the strange link to Xhea—the tether and spell both that joined them, one to the other. She did not understand the link that they had created, nor what she was drawing from Xhea; she only knew that she felt stronger, steadier, and more real.

  She looked to her friend. “Will you help me?” she asked.

  Xhea glared at her. “Of course I will. Do it. Whatever you’re going to do, do it.”

  She touched their link. “I’m pulling energy from you somehow. Is that okay?”

  “You’re … asking my permission?”

  Shai nodded.

  “You have it. I …” Xhea shook her head, coins chiming.

  “Tell me if I’m hurting you,” Shai asked.

  Xhea snorted. “You tell me if I’m hurting you.”

  From the curb came a voice: “Whatever you and the dead girl are doing, now might be a good time.”

  Shai turned toward the fire and sent her magic cascading outward, as if mapping the world with its light. The buildings around her, the burning ones beyond; the skyscrapers and the people scurrying through the Lower City’s streets; even Farrow, hovering now only a few stories in the air and struggling to rise ever higher. Then farther, out to the ruins and the badlands, up through the gap of open air that separated the City from the Lower City, and into the mass of Towers beyond.

  It was not the people and structures themselves that Shai sought, but the water that filled the air all around them. Closest to the fire, the intense heat had driven away the moisture; but elsewhere the summer air was still thick with humidity. She reached as if that water was something she could gather with her outstretched hands, and drew it to her.

  Even without letting the water fall, Shai knew it wasn’t going to be enough. So she reached farther, and farther still, even the vast power of her newly strengthened magic growing thin as
she reached and reached and reached. She reached into the Towers’ water reservoirs and yanked them open; reached up and up toward the wispy clouds above. She felt as if it were not just her magic that was stretched so far but her very self, as if she had no ghostly body, only a strained kind of consciousness pulled taut and straining across untold reaches of sky.

  Xhea was her anchor. Through it all, Shai could feel her: Xhea’s magic and her presence, holding her steady and keeping her from flying apart entirely.

  When she had reached her absolute limit, Shai pulled her magic and the water it contained toward her. Cold, she thought to it, thinking of the cool breezes she had created so laboriously before. No breeze this: as the temperature in the air she held dropped, the water condensed. Water droplets formed and were claimed by gravity.

  Rain.

  There, she said, directing its fall.

  Shai had expected rain, called rain, shaped rain from the very air around her. Except what fell was a deluge. Water struck the burning buildings not with a hiss but a concussive shock. Water exploded outward, and steam rushed skyward—only to be caught again in Shai’s shaping, cooled and condensed to fall once more. Beneath the onslaught, the flames began to die.

  Shai released her hold on her magic, but still it rained. For all that Shai had dumped most of the water on the fire, the downpour even here had been like a spring storm at its worst. Water flowed in shallow rivers through the streets and sidewalks, poured from roofs, dripped from limp laundry lines. It was all she could hear, all she could see, in a Lower City gone still and silent in shock.

  Not least of all herself.

  Despite her power and newfound skill, Shai realized only now that she had expected to fail as she had failed so many times before. Yet the fires, where they still burned, were but weak tongues of flame amidst so much soaked rubble and smoldering ash—flames that would yield more surely to the Lower City dwellers’ buckets and sand. Though she felt the strain of the spell in every part of her imagined body, her magic still shone; not just bright, but radiant in truth.

  There was so much more to be done—so much that her mind quailed even from the thought. But here, now? This victory was hers. Shai found herself laughing.

  Shai turned to Xhea, who stood unmoving beside her, water dribbling down her forehead into her eyes. She barely blinked.

  “Xhea?” Shai asked, her laughter fading. She reached out, and touched Xhea’s shoulder—and oh, to have someone she might touch again, if only so briefly. To know her words were heard.

  Xhea did not respond to that touch nor the sound of her name, only stared.

  “Xhea?” Shai said again, louder, more urgently—and found the sound echoed in the voice of the injured man behind her. He stepped forward cautiously, shielding his bloodshot eyes, the small, dark woman like a hulking shadow in his wake. Xhea took no more notice of him than she did of Shai—only stared, brow furrowing.

  A moment, then without a word, Xhea turned and walked away.

  The Lower City was singing.

  Xhea closed her eyes, opened them, blinking like she stood in the path of some strange wind. She shook her head, as if the sound might be shaken away with the rain that even now poured down her cheeks and dripped from her hair. Nothing changed the sound—the vibration—the feeling that seemed to rise from the very ground.

  From the moment her feet had hit the asphalt, stumbling out of the net Daye had slung beneath the aircar, something had felt different. But then everything had been smoke and fear and the sound of distant voices screaming, the roar of the fire, the shifting glimmer of Shai’s light. It had been easy to push aside the thought that something had changed, something far deeper than the chaos she’d seen all around her.

  Only now she realized that there had been no change in the ground itself, not in the asphalt nor the tunnels nor the earth through which they wove. Only in her.

  Even now, power flowed through her, the likes of which she’d never known. All the things she had once imagined—that cold, dark lake within her, the weight of darkness clotted beneath her breastbone—gone now, as if they’d never been. Not because the magic was gone, but the opposite: power flowed through her flesh with no start and no end.

  More, she could feel herself drawing strength from Shai. It was not the horror she’d imagined, not the awful taking she’d seen from Ieren; for as she drew sustenance from the ghost, Shai also drew power from her. She did not understand quite what they had done, nor how they had done it; only that they had created a joining of binding and tether both, where Ieren had only had one. The energy seemed to flow between Xhea and Shai, quick and easy as breath, in an unending loop.

  The ghost beside her shone brighter than daylight while she, living flesh and blood, stood like death incarnate.

  It should have hurt; she knew that now. Knew the feeling of that power ripping through her, destroying her from the inside out even as it made her feel whole—knew the hunger that had driven her magic and actions alike. There was none of that now; only power, pure and black. Dark magic seemed to vibrate through her, sing from her very heart, stronger and louder with each passing moment.

  And the Lower City responded.

  Xhea was aware of the rain that Shai had called from the smoke-hazed sky; aware, too, of the flames still sizzling and dying under that onslaught. Yet none of it seemed real—not the heat, not the smoke and ash, not even the acrid smell—as if the world around her had become the memory of a dream.

  There was only that sound that wasn’t a sound, that strange and discordant song, calling her.

  Xhea took a step forward, and another, leaning on her cane as she splashed across the street. She was tired in a way that neither her magic nor her binding to Shai could touch, a weariness of overstressed muscles and wounds half-healed—yet it did not stop her, only slowed her steps to something that even Torrence, half-blinded, could follow.

  Follow he did—Torrence and Daye and Shai alike. Xhea heard as Torrence regained his feet, heard his swearing; heard what could only be Daye’s footsteps, slow and steady as she supported him. Xhea could feel Shai’s presence at her side, steady and calm, her anchor against the storm.

  They called to her, shouted her name. They can’t hear it, Xhea realized. Whatever the source of the song and the strange feeling that even now seemed to shiver through her, only she had detected its presence.

  “There’s something …” she murmured—but she had no words. Still she tried: “Something …” Her voice trailed away to nothing.

  Xhea kept walking.

  The feeling grew with every step, the song that was not a sound rising and falling all around her. It reminded her of standing beneath Eridian’s flaring heart as the Tower merged with rival Allenai; it was as strange and beautiful and utterly inhuman. A sound that had nothing to do with her ears, the way her black-and-white vision had nothing to do with her eyes. But then, if one could see magic, why not hear it? Why not touch or taste?

  The song led her toward the destroyed market and the smoldering remains of the surrounding structures. The dripping water was thick and black, the buildings still standing stained dark with ash.

  When the sound had reached a crescendo, she stopped.

  There was nothing here, Xhea saw as she looked around; nothing but another stretch of broken pavement, another block of old buildings burned, another ancient intersection. There were people here: Rown hunters, and soot-stained citizens; guards whose insignia identified them as being from Senn and Orren; children in their pajamas. Some milled while others argued, or pointed, or stared toward the place where so recently a funnel of water had seemed to appear from out of the empty sky.

  No one else could hear the sound. None could sense the power that even now echoed all around her.

  “Xhea,” Shai said, looking around in clear confusion. “What is it?”

  Slowly, Xhea looked up. Directly above her hovered the Central Spire, that impossibly tall golden needle that she saw as a bright, gleaming gray. From h
er angle she could only see half of it, from its downward point to the widest of its public platforms; the rest, tall enough to seem to pierce the sky, was lost to her vision. But it was enough—the Spire seemed to point directly at her, at this spot where she stood.

  And that meant …

  Oh, sweetness. Sweetness and blight.

  For the memory of what she’d seen in dawn’s gray light came flooding back. Of the Spire pulling dark magic from the City, all those wisps and clouds of black. Of that magic swirling around the Central Spire and pouring toward the Lower City in a flood of dark magic.

  How long had they done the same, night after night? Power spilled like waste upon the ground and people below. Already she knew that her dark magic was not as strange and unknown as she’d once thought—merely rare, and closely guarded by the Spire itself. Dark magic spells seemed to underlie much of what happened in the City. She thought of those gray, wire-lace spells that had connected Shai to her Tower, and the way that Ieren had so casually spoken of binding Radiants. She thought of the walkers.

  Xhea shook her head and looked around her—truly looked, as if for the first time. She let her eyes’ focus change and did not force back the world that was revealed, no matter that it made her want to flinch.

  It was not just her vision that made the Lower City look so dark; not just the falling ash and smoke stains and thick, black water, but magic. She could see it now—see it as clearly as she heard it, that song rising and falling all around her. The buildings seemed shadowed, as if a Tower or a cloud blocked the sun, dark magic having seeped into every brick and crack and stone. Those stores and windows she could see nearby, those homes and balconies, stained gray with power. The ground beneath her feet was darkest of all.

  Xhea knew, then, what she would see underground.

  Underground, where only those with little bright magic could stand to travel—and people like Xhea. Underground, where dark magic would surround them, pressing in from the very walls and floors and ceiling; every surface imbued with a power it hurt even to touch.