Shadowshaper Legacy

by Daniel José Older

  It was winter, and decades of chaos followed by a blockade had kept supplies low on the island, even for the supremely wealthy expatriates like La Contessa.

  She had, in the not too distant past, done something she’d never done before in her entire, blessed life, and that was give up. After the death of her firstborn and the realization of how clearly inextinguishable her lastborn was, La Contessa realized she, for now at least, had somehow met her match, and took comfort that it was at least a member of her own family that had managed to outdo her, albeit a child.

  And so, she brought María Cantara more or less into the fold of her other three daughters.

  Three? you say, concern and curiosity etched on your young face. And yes, you have counted right — there should have only been two other daughters after Death so unceremoniously swiped Angelina from existence.

  But that was one fight La Contessa hadn’t given up on. In fact, she took her frustration over not being able to murder her youngest and directed it toward finding a way to bring back her oldest. And of course, it worked, up to a point.

  Angelina returned to life as a shimmering golden wraith, not quite dead and not quite alive either, trapped forever in that not so sweet in-between, and even more inelegantly frightening than before.

  But, you know, beautiful, if you’re into that sort of thing.

  Now, with war raging through the jungles around them and the vast imperial armies sapping resources and making life in the palace very basic and irritating indeed, La Contessa gathered her four daughters in the tower room.

  El Yunque spread out in a beautiful, bright green canopy on all sides of them, mountains rising and falling, great cloud castles sailing smoothly amidst them like towering metropolises of the sky.

  From far, far away the cannonades could be heard, echoing through the valley.

  My children, La Contessa said grimly, with a nod at each one. Angelina was impossible to read: Those dead eyes glared out from her shroud of gold and they gave away nothing. María Cantara managed to make herself almost as much of a blank slate as her somewhat-resurrected sister, but that was nothing new. The girl simply showed up, did what she was told, and then vanished back into her strange, dark world.

  The other two, Veinalda and Septima, looked terrified. For the first time in their overprotected little lives, the outside world was encroaching on their faraway paradise, and La Contessa realized she had completely failed at preparing them for this moment.

  The truth is, I had planned to do this much later on, you know, when you had all fully matured.

  Veinalda made a small, terrified squeal. La Contessa ignored it. That one was born early and tiny and had remained a pathetic, insolent brat ever since, so it was no surprise that a mere notion warranted concern from her.

  But, as you have seen, the events of this cruel and broken world have necessitated that we step forward as one, that we, the powerful, join together collectively to increase our powers and use them for good, for the triumph of light, for the advancement of civilization in this new place, yes?

  All four sisters nodded. La Contessa wondered if any of them truly understood the depths of their struggle though, or what it meant to fight for one’s survival. They didn’t, of course, except maybe little María Cantara, and she was still just barely a teenager, incapable of really understanding anything.

  Still: She was easily the most powerful of the quadrangle, even if her powers were a little unsettling. And she’d behaved herself, hadn’t made a fuss about who her father was, or gone traipsing around the nearby villages with languid chisme. Sure, she disappeared for long periods of time into the shadows of the forest, but she always made it back for supper and just shrugged when pressed about what she’d been up to.

  Anyway, they needed her. If this was to work, it would be her power that lifted them from being merely a close coven of light-wielders to something much more extraordinary. The other sisters had their magic, to be sure, but even combined, it wouldn’t be enough to really bring them to the next level.

  None of them needed to know all that though. Especially not María Cantara. She would get cocky, become a problem. Perhaps a very grave one indeed.

  Together, La Contessa said, we will bring an end to this brutal war, and our power and influence will spread across the island and then this region and then the world, an empire unto itself. As individuals, you each labor endlessly toward mediocrity. As a singular whole entity, you four will become something more powerful than the sum of your parts.

  She closed her eyes. They wouldn’t understand, couldn’t, not for a very long time still, but it didn’t matter. This was the beginning: In this room, in this tower, on this day, as the low rumble of cannon fire rippled across a sun-soaked sky over the mountaintops and forest canopy.

  Join hands, my children.

  This is how it would all begin. Light, unstoppable, pure, ferocious as fire, light poured through La Contessa and into the four girls standing hand in hand in that room at the top of the tower.

  “No, no, emphasis on the four! Try again! Hold up, everybody.” The clackity disaster that was the signature sound of Brass Monkey ground to a halt. Juan Santiago was pretty sure he’d never enjoyed silence so much as during the rehearsals of his prison band. If you could even call it a band (you couldn’t).

  “Six-eight means emphasis is on the one and then a slightly lesser one on the four, y’all.” He waved his hands like a conductor. “One, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah? Not —”

  “But then why not just do it in three-quarter time?” Beezo asked, lowering his trumpet.

  “Urk,” Juan said. It was a perfectly reasonable question, and Beezo wasn’t trying to be a dick as he stared with those wide blue eyes at Juan. It was just that, these days, even perfectly reasonable things felt utterly insufferable: one of a million cracks that seemed to rupture through him all over again every morning when he woke up in a cage, and then over and over again throughout the day until he lay down and closed his eyes and tried to make all the cracks fall away, at least long enough to let him get to sleep. And then it began all over again.

  Everything was steel and concrete and bright unforgiving lights and buzzes and hums and clanks. Everything was shouts and threats and the reek of body odor, blood, and grease. Everything was hoping he would give up, fall apart, crumble, and crash. He wouldn’t crash — he had to keep it together for Anthony if nothing else, and he had to be okay for his family and Bennie when he got out — but he couldn’t help the cracks from splitting through him, tiny lightning bolts of desolation that grew with each day.

  He wondered if the cracks would ever go away, even after he got out.

  If he ever got out.

  “Uh, what does urk mean?” Brayson asked. Brayson didn’t play an instrument, but he liked to hang out at Brass Monkey practices because, he said, music made him hate himself a little less (“even y’all’s wackity wack little jams”).

  “It means,” Juan said, sending up a tiny prayer for his own patience, “that I don’t have a clear answer, I just need you guys to understand that in this time signature, in this song, you gotta throw the heavier emphasis on the one, and the lighter one on the four, and none whatsoever on the five, which is where it keeps ending up. Which is just weird.”

  “Wow,” Gerson said from behind his still raised triangle. “Music snob much?”

  Juan rolled his eyes. Where was Anthony? He’d stopped coming to rehearsal a week or so ago. Juan couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his friend smile. Everything felt dire. Nothing had happened, and Juan believed his sister when she said they were safe under the Iron House’s guarantee of protection, but still … sometimes he thought he would prefer it if they had to deal with some imminent attack — at least it would break up this feeling of slow, rotting death.

  “Alright, kids,” Officer Grintly said, looking up from a decade-old issue of People magazine. “Time’s up. You still suck, alas.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Gerson s
aid. He plinged the triangle one last time, and even that note was somehow off-key, like the whole cursed island just radiated some off-kilter vileness that bent any note into dissonance.

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” Beezo said, always so tragically hopeful.

  “Yeah.” Juan sighed. “I guess so.”

  “Don’t you get tired of it?” Officer Grintly asked as the last couple kids cleared out of the cramped practice room.

  “Making bad music?” Juan said. “Every day. But what other choice do I have? Bad music is better than no music.” He knew he used to think that; it was definitely something he’d said before and meant. But it felt less and less true every day.

  Officer Grintly laughed. He had bright red hair and an Elvis cut and no chin whatsoever. And he sweated, a lot. Faded tats of naked ladies and dogs with born and died years underneath them ran the length of his arms. “The other thing. The shadows.”

  “Oh.” Juan had figured out pretty quickly that Officer Grintly was one of the Iron House’s people on the inside. It was obvious somehow, and he’d intimated as much one day early on when he’d sat down next to Juan in the mess hall and whispered, “Old Crane says not to worry. You’re in our protection as long as you’re on the inside.” Then he’d walked away without another word.

  It was the as long as you’re on the inside part that worried Juan. What would happen when they were out? What had been happening all this time on the outside? For all he knew, a whole war had broken out between the House of Shadow and Light and the others, whoever they were. Juan had never kept up much with the whole spirit side of things, even though (or was it because?) Grandpa Lázaro had let him in on the secrets of shadowshaping at a very young age. But now … now it all seemed to be demanding his attention, and his sister had had to pick up the mantle and save everybody’s asses, and here he was locked up and kicking himself for being so aloof and behind on his own family’s spiritual legacy.

  And, worst of all, he was away from his instruments. So he couldn’t even strum the regret and uncertainty away the way he would’ve if he was free.

  “Santiago?” Grintly’s croaky voice interrupted Juan’s space-out. “You there?”

  “Yeah, the shadows, ah no? What do you mean?”

  “I mean” — Grintly heaved himself up onto a file cabinet and sat there with his legs dangling off like a little kid — “you shadow folks mess with the dead, right? That’s what those shadows are, really. And, okay, that sounds like it might get pretty tiring, honestly. The dead. That’s a lot. Especially for a young person such as yourself.”

  It was hard to take Officer Grintly seriously because he said everything with a slight buzz of incredulous sarcasm. But Juan was pretty sure he was being sincere just now, so he thought it over and then shook his head. “Nah, the dead are really alive, when you get to know them. That’s how my sister explained it to me once, and I realized she was right. They died, but there they are, still moving through this world and interacting with each other and us and art and all this stuff. And the deeper in you get, the more you understand them, so they’re not just like woo-woo spooky shadows, you know? They’re like … people? Just people who happened to have died already, is all.” At least, that’s what Sierra had said it was like. Juan hadn’t really gotten close enough to them to figure it out, even for all those years he’d been a shadowshaper. The truth of it — that negligence — was like an ongoing cringe.

  “That’s kinda deep,” Grintly acknowledged. “I’m just saying, iron is the truth.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s just a thing we say: Iron is the truth. Like a motto? That’s one of our basic principles. That’s why we can’t lie. It’s foundational.”

  “Oh. You can deceive, though, right?”

  Grintly shrugged, which Juan took to be an extreme yes.

  “When we say iron is the truth, though, it also means we’re unbending; we are who we are, deep down, on the surface, whatever, wherever: the truth.”

  “Sounds like something a corny dude would caption his shirtless photo with on Instagram, to be honest.”

  “Oh, the Iron House doesn’t have a social media presence. That’s where snakes and charlatans run rampant.”

  “Probably for the best,” Juan conceded.

  “Alright, shadow kid,” Grintly said, hopping down from his perch. “Let’s get you back to your cell.”

  “Yeah.” Juan felt suddenly exhausted. He hadn’t done much at all today, but it didn’t matter really. Just existing took its toll with all those bars caging you in.

  They made their way through the bright unfriendly hallways, clanging metal doors and jeers echoing through the building around them. Then Grintly let Juan into his cell, nodded once, and walked away whistling.

  Anthony didn’t even look up. He was sitting on his bunk, bare feet on the cold floor, staring at his hands.

  “Uh, you okay, man?” Juan asked.

  “You ever wonder what the hell was wrong with you that you once found prison rape jokes funny?”

  “Wha —” Juan sat down next to his friend and put an arm around his shoulder. “What happened, Pulpo? You okay?”

  Anthony blinked. “Huh? Oh, yeah, no, nothing happened. Sorry.” He shook his head as if coming out of a trance. “I’m — I was just thinking, is all. Just … when we came in, and then the whole time we’ve been here, right? I’ve been so afraid that could happen, because you hear stories and you hear jokes, and then I thought, wow — I’ve, like, laughed at those jokes. Like, somehow that was funny to me.”

  “I mean, it’s funny to a lot of people,” Juan said, trying to remember if he’d ever laughed at one.

  Anthony shot him a shrill look.

  “Not defending them! Just saying you weren’t alone in laughing at them.”

  “Right,” Anthony said, turning back to his thoughts and scratching his close-cropped haircut. “That’s what I mean. Like, it’s sociopathic, really, if you think about it, to think something like rape is funny. It’s completely evil. But, like, we do, we’re told that’s just cool, haha, wow … It’s just gross to me, and I’m mad it took me being in a position where I was worried about it actually happening for me to take it seriously. What kind of a human am I?”

  Juan looked his friend over carefully.

  Anthony had lost weight since they’d been inside. He’d come in tall and fit, like almost ridiculously fit, bulging muscles and a six-pack and all that. Now you could see his ribs through his T-shirt and the skin seemed to just hang off his arms — not flabby, just lethargic — like it had given up. Like he had given up. Even his skin, usually a rich dark brown, seemed to be slowly turning gray somehow. Or maybe that was just the lighting in this god-awful pit. Juan had lost all perspective.

  “You’re a really amazing human,” Juan said.

  Anthony looked up, opened his mouth to say something.

  “— in a shitty, shitty world,” Juan finished. “That teaches us how to be monsters. And we’re locked up in the wickedest heart of this shitty world, and so our only job right now is to make it out of here without becoming the monsters they’ve been trying to make us into our entire lives. Feel me?”

  Anthony nodded.

  “And if we can do that, well … that’ll be something else. Nothing short of amazing, really. But even the fact that we’ve made it this far, that you’ve made it this far, and here you are becoming an even better human being instead of doing the opposite, well … that’s what matters, man.”

  Anthony looked away. Juan couldn’t help but feel like there was something his friend wasn’t telling him. His face had been strained the past few days, even more so than usual, like he was heaving around some great weight. And being locked up was plenty heaviness for anyone to lug, but this seemed different. They’d always told each other everything, everything, but Juan had no idea how to ask what the feeling of this sudden distance between them was about.

  “You’re right,” Anthony said. “Feel like my brain keeps
looking for a way to blame me for everything wrong with the world. Especially these days.”

  “Of course it does. Look where we are. It’s trying to make sense of why we’re here. But there ain’t no good reason for it, man. None at all. And the sooner we both get that, the better off we’ll be.”

  He nodded.

  Juan eyed him. “Hey, you feeling like … you know?”

  Anthony rubbed his face and scowled. “Nah. I’m alright.” He stood up, shook it all off. “Just overthinking is all.”

  He hadn’t had an anxiety attack in a while — two weeks, maybe? — and when he did have them, they’d somehow always happened when it was just the two of them in the cell, thank God. Still: The threat of it seemed to pulse through every moment while they were imprisoned. Knowing the guards here, any of them could take Anthony freaking out as an excuse to try and beat his ass. And sure, they were supposedly protected, but how much could Busted Elvis really do for them when push came to shove?

  “I’ll be alright,” Anthony said. “Just gotta …” His voice trailed off, because there wasn’t much he could do, really, and both of them knew it.

  “Santiago! King!” a gruff voice called from the doorway.

  Juan looked up, heart beating double-time for no reason he could name.

  “You’re free to go. Let’s move.”

  Juan blinked. “What?”

  Tee whirled around in her chair and glared at Bennie and Sierra. “She has a what now in her attic?”

  Sierra rolled her eyes and put her head down on her desk. “It’s not an attic, it’s my abuelo’s old apartment.”

  “Feel like that’s aggressively beside the point,” Tee said.

  Bennie just shook her head.

  “Didn’t the Sorrows, like, try to kill us? Like, a month ago?”

  “A month and a half,” Bennie said. “But yeah!”

  “Bennaldra,” Mr. Cruz said. “You with us?”

  “Hydrogen!” Bennie called without looking up from their conversation.