Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “It worked.” Shai’s smile was like the sun coming out.

  “I don’t know how it helps us,” Xhea said, for all that the idea had been hers in the first place. “But now we know. Next up, our amazing magical plan to save everyone.”

  Shai’s smile dimmed. “Right.”

  They worked for hours, discussing every possible idea, no matter how strange or outlandish, as if it might save them. As if it might hold a faint glimmer of hope that they might tease out into the open with their careful, patient questioning.

  To no avail.

  At last Xhea went to rummage through some of her old food stashes in the hope something might have survived, whole and edible, in her absence. She paused only to stare up a broken escalator to where, stories above, dwindling daylight filtered in through the shadows.

  Three days, Xhea thought. Three days and the first was gone.

  In the Lower City, night was falling.

  That night, Shai lingered at Xhea’s side long after the girl had fallen asleep.

  Xhea had gone to one of her rooms, a small space hidden in the back of a store where she’d slept many times before. It wasn’t home, not even a temporary one; only a dusty corner with a makeshift bed, some stale water, and a bucket in the corner. “What else could I possibly need?” Xhea had said, lowering herself carefully into the nest of blankets. Her knee, it seemed, hurt more than she wanted to let on. She’d lain back, and within moments was lost to the world.

  Shai knew she should stay. This was not just any night when she might walk through the empty Lower City streets, alone but for her thoughts and the other dead. The poorer Towers held the Lower City now, or would shortly; and Lozan, at least, was looking for her. How many other Towers would have heard rumors of the Lower City’s Radiant by now?

  It wasn’t safe, and yet she was drawn outside, as surely and as strongly as she’d once been pulled by her tether.

  She believed she could help people.

  Shai had not thought of any way out of the impending disaster. Even so, there were a thousand small tasks that needed doing, all of which might be sped along by a bit more power or a small spell. She thought of the things she’d done when her magic had been waning, before she’d discovered that Xhea was still alive. She’d healed wounds and bolstered ailing people fleeing the fire, supported a falling wall just long enough for rescuers to drag a man to safety.

  Surely there was something she could contribute now.

  It wasn’t fear for herself that made her hesitate. Shai looked down at Xhea’s sleeping face, the tangle of her charm-bound hair spread across the blankets.

  She couldn’t help but think of the image that Xhea had sent to her of Abelane sitting in the apartment they had shared when Xhea was young. The details had been hazy, like the memory of a dream; but the rush of emotions that had come with it had momentarily robbed Shai of words. That feeling of pure, simple happiness—washed away, hard and sudden, by… what? She struggled to name what she had felt. If emotions had a color, these had been as black as Xhea’s magic.

  Shai thought she’d understood what Xhea had felt at being abandoned as a child; thought she’d known what had driven her, shaped her, in the years that followed. After all their quiet conversations—all the things they’d discussed and confessed, just the two of them—she thought she’d understood Xhea better than anyone.

  Perhaps she did. But what she felt in wake of that memory hadn’t been anger at being left behind, or a sense of injustice or even pain. It had been a weight of inevitability; a cold grief and an acceptance of her loneliness as the only thing she truly deserved.

  Shai never wanted to be the one to cause such feelings. But here, with Xhea asleep, there was nothing Shai might do but watch and wait.

  “Sleep well,” she whispered at last. “I’ll come back soon. I promise.”

  Above, the world was dark and cool. The shadows in the streets shifted as the Towers lit the darkened sky, and the wind eased through the empty spaces, sending scraps of garbage scraping across the ground like dried leaves. That much, at least, was normal. But the rest?

  Shai looked around, eyes wide.

  She had traveled alone through the Lower City’s streets night after night, until she knew these streets better in Towerlight, moonlight, than she did by day. Where usually there was silence, here there was noise, motion, light.

  Doors were closed, and each building’s lower windows were boarded over. But higher, where heavy curtains usually blocked the candlelight, lights shone like beacons. Sounds, too, echoed through the empty streets: voices shouting, arguing; things being moved; the scrape of heavy items being pushed across the floor. Nearby, someone was weeping.

  They’re packing, she realized. Getting ready to flee.

  But it was more than that. Because as she watched, a door to a nearby building opened and two people stumbled out, a man and a woman, laughing. Between them stretched a glimmering spell upon which rested a heavy spool of wire, which they took down the street to an aircar parked in the middle of the road.

  Rising, Shai saw more aircars on the building’s roof—new aircars, polished to a mirror shine—being loaded with what Shai would have once called scraps: buckets of nails and lengths of heavy metal pipe, pieces of wood and boxes filled with personal belongings. Materials that the Lower City dwellers would surely need if they were to have any chance of creating safe shelter out in the ruins.

  Fuel for the Towers. For all that the Towers were beings of magic, their physical forms were made from other things. The eldest, largest Towers rarely needed to augment their structures, even during significant renovations; younger Towers—and poorer Towers—knew no such luxury. The things they were pulling from the buildings were not the highest quality, but the price, as they said, was right.

  Shai watched as the pair maneuvered the heavy spool into the aircar’s storage compartment, laughing and joking as they settled it with their other spoils. Perhaps they thought their voices quiet, their lights dim; perhaps they thought themselves cautious.

  Not cautious enough.

  Shai turned away. Yet farther, she saw more of the same: desperate Lower City dwellers packing, shouting, sometimes fighting with City citizens who used spells to hold back fists and knives alike with ease. In some places, people of the poorer Towers had taken over the buildings entirely, forcing out their inhabitants.

  Small spells, small ways to help, she’d thought; but what was she supposed to do in the face of this?

  A cry in the street made her freeze, then turn back the way she’d come.

  The pair stood near their aircar, its storage compartment gaping wide—but a third figure had joined them in the street. A night walker.

  The walker was a woman, or had been in life—a life that was long behind it now. The walker had obviously spent some untold months out in the ruins; its clothes were but dirty tatters, so stained that Shai could only guess at their original colors. The walker’s skin sagged from its face and hung loose from its arms as it raised them, making Shai think that the living woman had been larger in life. Almost, she could imagine it: the rounded flesh of the woman’s belly and breasts, her wide, glowing cheeks as she laughed, the softness of her arms as they wrapped around a loved one. Gone now, that body and the person who had once owned it.

  She’d seen this walker once or twice before over the past months, though never so close. It was slower than some of the others; looking at the scabbed, infected ruin of its feet, Shai understood why.

  The City citizens had cringed at the walker’s appearance, but now, watching its slow approach, they straightened, some of their fear leaving.

  “It’s just an old woman,” one said, wrinkling her nose—as if that seeming old woman wouldn’t tear her apart if it reached her. The other raised his weapon. It was a shock gun like those carried by Tower security, used to shut down dangerous situations before they got out of hand.

  The spell flashed from the gun’s barrel, lightning quick, and hit the wa
lker square in the chest. The walker jerked back, then stumbled and fell to the asphalt, its body twitching.

  The man laughed dismissively. “How easy they fall—with a little help.”

  “Keep watch,” the woman replied, unimpressed with his bravado. “There might be others.”

  Shai watched the walker. Shock guns did not kill; they incapacitated their targets with pain. One shot was often enough to immobilize, if not knock a person unconscious for minutes at a time.

  But night walkers no longer registered pain.

  In silence, the walker rose to its broken feet with a swiftness that Xhea would have envied. It glanced toward Shai, its pupils contracting at her dim light—then back to the City citizens. The latter were far closer. The walker started toward them.

  Step. Step. Step.

  The pair pushed the spool of wire deeper into the aircar’s storage compartment, trying to create room for another load. Beneath the noise of their efforts, the sound of those slow, steady footsteps was lost. Shai wanted to cry out and warn them—even as that angry, hurt part of her said to do nothing.

  If they wanted to take everything good from the Lower City, shouldn’t they have a taste of the bad? They had come here to steal—and not from the dead, but the living. They’d written off the Lower City dwellers, down to the smallest child.

  Poor though their Towers were, their wants were nothing compared to the needs of the Lower City. Still they took, and took, and took.

  Step. Step. Step.

  The man looked up and exclaimed in surprise, stumbling back as he fumbled for his shock gun. Again he shot the walker, the spell hitting the creature on its shoulder and reverberating through its body. The walker stumbled but did not fall. It stared unblinkingly at the man before it.

  Step. Step.

  He shot it again and again. The walker’s muscles twitched and spasmed. Its skin reddened from spell-burns, and it blinked, half-blinded with every shot.

  Still it came for him.

  At last the gun’s storage coils whined, bordering on empty. The man hit it against his hand as if a jolt might fix it, and stumbled back until his back hit the wall of the building behind him.

  Instead of panicking, the woman had prepared a spell—a quick twist of power meant to bind and incapacitate. Shai recognized the simple spelllines from the self-defense training she’d received as a girl. Simple though the spell was, it was clearly not one the woman had oft practiced, and fear did terrible things to one’s accuracy.

  The woman’s first shot went wide—but her second, hastily woven, hit the walker square in the face. It stumbled, slowed but in no way bound by the magic that wound around its face and neck. It righted itself, and reached for her.

  Enough, Shai thought, breaking herself from her immobility. Anger had goaded her to many things these past months, but these people’s blood and screams would solve nothing.

  She did not need a spell. Instead, Shai descended to the ground, raised her arms, and let her power flow.

  She had held her magic damped on instinct, hoping to avoid detection. Now she relaxed that control. It felt like letting her hair down from a too-tight braid at day’s end; it felt like falling back onto fresh sheets and exhaling.

  Magic radiated from her as if she were the dawning sun, sending long shadows racing across the darkened pavement. The City citizens cringed, raising their hands to shield their eyes from the sudden glare.

  The walker had frozen mid-step; now it turned toward Shai.

  Her light transcended the magical spectrum, shining into the visual one. As that light fell full upon the walker’s face, it flinched; its mouth opened as if to cry out, but no sound emerged.

  Shai thought of Torrence’s new sensitivity to light and magic—and Xhea had saved him before the dark magic boy had done more than begin to draw his spirit out through his eyes. She could only imagine how much stronger that sensitivity would be to one who had known no such salvation.

  The walker moved toward Shai as if there was no one else in the world. The City citizens, behind it, were forgotten; the walker paid them no more attention than it did the broken ground beneath its feet.

  “Get back inside,” the City woman was saying. “Come on, get up—get up!”

  The man just stared, his spent shock gun hanging from limp fingers. But not at the walker, Shai saw, but at her—or, rather, the featureless glowing figure that he surely saw in her stead.

  “It’s true.” The words were soft and reverent.

  Xhea was right: rumors of Shai’s presence had spread far beyond Edren’s walls. Yet she did not fear these two—not here, not now. The walker filled the whole of her attention.

  I have to do something. But what?

  Because seeing it here—seeing even City citizens, unprepared, made all but helpless by its approach—she could only think of the Lower City dwellers cast into the ruins, left to the walkers’ absent mercy. There were more people than there were safe walls to hold them.

  Somewhere nearby she heard a panicked scream and the crack of a spell discharging. The sounds’ echoes danced around her. Hers was not the only walker in the streets, or the only one to have spotted prey.

  Shai looked at the walker. She could try to bind it or incapacitate it. She could try to kill it; perhaps she should kill it. She tried to think of how many innocent people she might save, as if such thoughts could help her conjure the sharp, vicious spell she would need to accomplish the task.

  The walker stared at Shai, enraptured by her light, and did not move. It barely seemed to breathe. For all that the walkers were alive—though their hearts beat and blood flowed through their veins; though they ate, when they could—she could not call the thing before her one of the living. There was no person behind those staring eyes; only a body, empty and echoing, and the needs that drove the flesh.

  As Shai watched, something seemed to leave the creature—some coiled tension or yearning; some pain that had nothing to do with the wounds of its failing body. As the light of her magic poured over its gaunt face, for just a moment it seemed not to be an empty shell of flesh, but the memory of a person. Shai imagined that she could see something more, as if kindness or humor might be written in the lines of one’s face, the curl of aging fingers, the grown-out cut of tangled, dirty hair.

  She knew, then, that she could not kill it—could not kill her; yet neither could she allow the walker to remain.

  There came a flash and a spell struck Shai’s chest—or tried to. Like all else, the twist of magic flew through her; there was less substance in her glowing, ghostly body than in a gust of wind. Even so, Shai jumped in surprise, reading the spell’s intent even as it discharged harmlessly in the street.

  A defensive spell, she realized. A spell meant to catch and bind.

  The City woman stood with her hands raised, looking confused. The woman hadn’t hit Shai by accident, aiming for the walker, but on purpose. Even as she watched, the woman started another spell—a stronger, more complex weaving—her eyes never leaving Shai’s glow.

  Trying to catch the Radiant ghost, Shai thought, her dismay transformed to irritation. Just another treasure to haul home from the ruins.

  With a flick of her ghostly fingers, Shai unraveled the woman’s half-woven spell, then turned away. She moved slowly, putting space between her and the walker—and step by uneven step, the walker followed.

  Down the street and around the corner, Shai led the night walker out toward the ruins, moving just slowly enough that the creature might follow. Farther she went, out to where only a few of the buildings had inhabitants; farther, where the roaming gangs held more sway than the skyscrapers; and farther still.

  Shai wasn’t sure when the second walker joined her, or the third; only heard their footsteps in echo of the first. She glanced back. She recognized one of them, an old woman who wore only the tattered remains of a dress that hung down to mid-thigh, her legs like thin branches, her knees swollen. The other was newer—a young man that she had never
seen before.

  Soon they reached the edge where the Lower City surrendered to the ruins beyond—the place that had been marked in red on the Messenger’s map.

  In the days since the market had burned, she’d come here each night to watch as people claimed these structures, finding the empty hulks and gutted buildings that were strong enough to house themselves or their families in some semblance of safety. In some, roofs were being built, walls reinforced, holes patched and mended. In others, the glassless windows were being boarded over—or, better, bricked with stone, chunks of concrete, and rough mortar.

  Homes for the people displaced by Rown’s attack, homes to replace the buildings that had burned. Homes, too, for those who had fled Rown itself, abandoning their allegiance to the skyscraper in wake of the attacks—though those were far fewer in number.

  Homes that were now being abandoned. Already, Shai could see places where that new construction was being torn down, bundled up, and dragged into the ruins. While the skyscrapers’ leaders planned and pleaded, and crowds gathered in the burned market, shouting and brandishing stones, there were other Lower City dwellers who were quickly and quietly leaving.

  Shai could see hints of their presences around her: faint, candlelight flickers inside gutted hulks, hastily extinguished as the walkers’ footsteps neared; dimmer lights, less than the glow from banked embers, of people’s magic, their rare spelled possessions, and the power of their makeshift defenses. She tried her best to avoid them as she led the walkers onward.

  She didn’t know how many walkers were following her now; she’d stopped looking back, not wanting to see their blank faces, their empty, staring eyes. Instead she watched as the buildings gave way to rubble and the rubble to rounded stone; she listened as the walkers’ footsteps no longer crunched along broken asphalt but kicked loose rocks, swished through grass, rustled through leaves.

  So far from the Lower City’s dark magic, things grew. Grass and flowers. Trees, in places; some stunted and twisted, but others growing strong and tall, destroying crumbling foundations with their insistent roots. It smelled different here, too; less of garbage and sewage and things left to rot, and more of earth and pollen and wild flowers’ faint perfume.