Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “And you?”

  You can’t help me. No one can. The words floated between them, unspoken.

  Xhea laughed and tried to grin; it was either that or weep. “Maybe I won’t die.”

  There came another hard, echoing impact against Farrow’s exterior walls, and the room around them shuddered.

  Again, and spider web cracks appeared in the window’s ancient glass.

  Again, and daylight shone into the room, brighter and brighter, as the living Lower City’s grown tendrils were torn away. Outside, Xhea caught glimpses of an aircar’s side, the shimmer of spell exhaust, the bright flash of something that might have been metal or spell.

  Xhea looked back at Shai. There was nothing to do but wait.

  Don’t let them take me. The words were on her tongue and yet she choked them back, tasting tears.

  Don’t leave me alone.

  Instead, she raised her right hand and held it hesitantly before her.

  Shai looked at her, looked at that hand, and then raised her own in a perfect mirror. Slowly she pressed their hands together, palm to palm.

  Oh, Xhea’s magic was so weak. She had less power now than she had even that first night she’d spent in Shai’s company, the first night her magic had risen. Just a thin trickle of dark slipped through the cracks in the binding.

  But it was something. Please, let it be enough.

  And there, whisper soft, came the feel of Shai’s hand against her own. She felt the warmth of Shai’s magic, the chill that said ghost, and she didn’t see either because she could not look away from Shai’s eyes.

  Xhea was suddenly aware that, joined though they might be, this might be the last time she saw Shai. The thought was sharp enough to cut.

  There was so much she wanted to say and she did not have words for any of it.

  The exterior wall tumbled down. Dust and shards of glass flew into the room on a gust of hot air. Shai did not move and yet power surged from her. Light arced around them, bright, gleaming, as it effortlessly held back the debris. Intruders forced their way into the room, shouting, and Shai did not look away from Xhea’s face. Did not so much as blink.

  “Let me fight them,” Shai said. “I could push them back—we could escape into the ruins. The badlands. Farther. I can do it, I know I can.”

  How she wished she could. Once, she would have taken that offer without a second thought; she would have run from this place laughing and never looked back.

  “And then what?” Xhea whispered. “Everyone will die, Shai. The Lower City will be destroyed. You’re their only hope—and me?” She smiled, or tried to. “I’m your only weakness.”

  Tears welled in Shai’s eyes.

  “Save them,” Xhea said. “I’m not worth it.”

  “You’re wrong,” Shai told her, but she let her hand fall.

  Slowly, Xhea turned to face the masked people who now stood inside, silhouetted by the gaping hole and the daylight streaming in. If she had any doubt of who had come to claim her, it fled.

  There were two men and a woman, each tall and muscular, and they wore the Spire’s uniform, masks and all. Their uniforms were not white like the Messenger’s, but a dark gray that Xhea knew to be red.

  Bound to each was a ghost.

  Like their living counterparts, the ghosts wore that dark gray uniform, their features blurred where a mask of light had once shone. They stood at attention, vigilant even in death, and Xhea wondered foolishly how the Spire had earned such everlasting loyalty.

  Enforcers, all.

  She could feel them—had felt them, even from so far away. Something about these ghosts was so cold, so abhorrent, that her flesh shuddered to have them near. The living Enforcers made her want to step back, but the dead ones made her want to turn and run.

  Instead, Xhea squared her shoulders and forced her lips into a grim parody of a grin. Perhaps the expression could hide the tears that threatened to fall.

  A male Enforcer stepped forward, dragging his ghost at the end of a wide, dark-spelled tether.

  “By order of the Central Spire,” he began.

  “I know, I know,” Xhea said impatiently, waving her free hand. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Xhea did not scream or fight as she was pushed into the back of the armored aircar that hovered outside the hole in Farrow’s wall, much as she wanted to. Instead she ducked her head and sat quietly, gripping her cane as if it were a lifeline, tasting bile. The living guards took seats across from her. The ghosts were somewhere behind her. She did not know why she felt their presences so strongly, why having them there hurt.

  She did not turn; she could not stand to see Shai alone behind her.

  The ghost Enforcers, though they had clearly seen Shai, had done no more than glare at her before walking away. Narrow orders, Xhea could only suppose, and gave thanks for that small mercy.

  The aircar rose, its engine whisper-quiet. Only the changing light and the shifting view of Farrow’s damaged side revealed that they were moving.

  Xhea called upon her magic. With effort, she forced a thin trickle of dark past the binding, down through her hands and into the seat below her. Her last aircar trip to the City had nearly ended in disaster when her magic had unraveled the car’s spells as they flew. Surely this car, with spelled magic shining from its windows and doors, from the blighted seat cushions, would be no less vulnerable.

  No more than a whisper of power had left her hands before the Enforcers around her stiffened.

  “Stop it,” said one, his tone hard, commanding.

  “The car’s reinforced against your power,” the woman said, almost cheerfully. “But keep it up, and I’d be happy to knock you into tomorrow.”

  Xhea rolled her eyes. Yet she lifted her hands in surrender, and released her hold on her magic.

  As they circled and rose, she peered out the window, ignoring her stomach’s lurch as she looked down and down and down. They had barely risen above the tops of the skyscrapers, but already the Lower City was spread out beneath them. It seemed so very small. On the ground, the skyscrapers seemed huge, dominating the landscape—but from on high? They were nothing, just crumbling sticks in a sea of ruins.

  Xhea mentally traced the ring from the Messenger’s map on the landscape before her, marking the Spire’s target and all that lay within. Marking the limits of the living Lower City.

  Xhea grew very still, her eyes going wide.

  “We’re fools,” she whispered at last. “All of us, such fools.”

  “You can say that again,” muttered one of the Enforcers disdainfully.

  But Xhea only had eyes for the Lower City. Small as it seemed—all those tiny buildings, all those scattered homes dwarfed by the Towers above them—the whole of the Lower City was huge.

  All of this time, Xhea thought in a daze. So long trying to figure out what the Spire will do, how it will attack the Lower City.

  How could none of us think to ask why?

  Shai stood in the emptiness where Farrow’s destroyed side surrendered to open sky and watched as Xhea was taken from her. Watched the armored aircar rise, surrounded by a shimmering halo of spell exhaust; watched it circle, higher and higher, heading toward the Spire.

  Was it better, letting that departure be a choice? Knowing that they allowed the distance that grew between them, a widening gap that soon even Shai’s gaze could not traverse. Her choice to stay, Xhea’s choice to leave her behind—did it really matter which? In the end it felt the same.

  It felt wrong.

  Don’t be foolish, she chided; the words took on her mother’s oft-critical tones. Shai knew that she could at that moment—at any moment—choose to follow Xhea, just rise like a bubble through the air and walls that separated them until she stood once more at Xhea’s side. Somehow that made everything worse.

  “Don’t go,” she whispered—words said far too late. Or perhaps she should have said, “Take me with you.”

  Shai looked away from the Spire, from i
ts golden glow and the Towers slowly circling it, back to the market’s burned-out rubble. Only ghosts stood there now, staring about them in desolation.

  She rose and looked farther. There were more people—more, truly, than she’d seen ever gathered in the market, more than she’d imagined lived in the Lower City. In every direction they streamed out from their homes and skyscrapers, taking every road, every alley, every path leading out. No destination, Shai thought, but away.

  “These people need you now,” she told herself, as if she might conjure resolve from her sudden desolation. She heard Xhea’s words, echoing in memory: Maybe you can help them. Help them save themselves.

  She tried to push away the thought that echoed through her mind like thunder. If you’re not here, Xhea, what’s the point? Without you, what does any of it matter?

  These people needed her—or they needed her magic, the spells she might weave. They did not, truly, need her. But now was not the time to debate the distinction.

  She remembered what her mother had said to her once after Shai had complained to her about the frustrating, awful unfairness of being Radiant. No comfort there, as her father might have offered; no hug or kind look. It was not, she’d thought later, even truly her mother who had responded; only Councilwoman Aliane Nalani, speaking on behalf of Allenai’s ruling board.

  “Making a difference is exhausting and thankless,” she’d said, “but you do it anyway, because you have to. Because you can.”

  Shai touched the tether that joined her to Xhea and tried to send calm through that link, little though she felt it herself. She wished she could feel something, anything in reply. But there was only the wind, sweeping through her as if she was not there at all.

  Shai returned to Farrow’s rooftop where the two defensive spell generators were mounted, seemingly untouched since the skyscraper’s disastrous rise and fall. She examined each, peering closely at the main spires and their various cross-spars, rusted and twisted by age; then looked deeper at the spells embedded in the metal. Battered and damaged as the generators were, the spells within were perfectly sound—and far more efficient than anything she might create.

  Xhea’s plan was sound, little though Shai knew how to bring it to fruition.

  She struggled with the bolts and rusted screws for what felt like an hour, her spells ineffective, her hands sliding through unfeeling, before—in a fit of anger—she gestured at the generator’s mooring with hand and magic both. The gesture was little more than instinct. Yet her hand sliced through it like a knife through warm butter, leaving the edges of the cut smooth and shining.

  For a moment Shai just gaped—only to spring into action as a gust of air almost knocked the generator from the rooftop toward the ground. She wove a spell in haste and threw it at the tilting spire; it accomplished its end more with sheer force of power than its spelllines. Watching the twisted length fall to the gravel of Farrow’s roof with a clang, Shai couldn’t bring herself to care.

  The other generator she managed to slice free more slowly, and pushed it to the rooftop. At last she stood, looking from one to the other, and wondered how she could get them out to the ruins.

  Lorn, she thought. Surely she’d find some help in that quarter—and Emara had always been more sensitive to Shai’s presence than most. She could find one of them, write out what she needed—

  A glance at Edren told her she’d find no help there. Lozan transport trucks crowded the ancient hotel’s rooftop and were being loaded, it seemed, with whatever wasn’t tied down.

  As she watched, a spell detonated deep inside the skyscraper. A flash lit the windows of Edren’s seventeenth floor, and the whole building shuddered, bits of brick raining to the ground.

  Even if there were a way to stop the Central Spire’s attack on the morrow, Shai suddenly wondered whether there would be anything left of the Lower City to save.

  But surely Edren’s citizens would be gathering out in the ruins somewhere—Edren’s citizens, and the other Lower City dwellers. Such distinctions mattered little now; she’d try to help them all.

  “Where are Torrence and Daye when you need them?” Shai looked around as if her words might conjure the bounty hunters from the roof’s shadows, only to sigh in irritation.

  She tried, again and again, to push the spell generators together, thinking to lift them with a spell the same way she’d lifted Xhea; she could carry them herself. The generators rolled and scraped and banged together, rising but a bare few inches off the roof’s surface before falling back with a clatter.

  Lifting Xhea had been so easy. She hadn’t even thought, hadn’t really tried; the magic had just been there, flowing like an extension of her will, wrapping around Xhea’s slight body so gently—and then they’d just been rising.

  Lifting Xhea had been so easy, and now Shai struggled to raise two small lengths of metal from a rooftop. The absurdity of the situation made her want to give up and just let the hours pass, one after another, until the end.

  She wasn’t supposed to be anyone’s savior, yet she felt the weight of their lives nonetheless—the weight of all her unmade choices, settling over her hands and eyes, pressing on her chest. She couldn’t even save the one person who mattered to her. Not when it counted.

  Shai leaned back and stared at the sky as if that might stop the tears from welling. Stupid to cry instead of fighting to do more, and yet Shai did not know what to do, how to gather the will to keep going.

  Is this how Xhea felt? The thought came as if from nowhere. All those years she’d been alone. Was this what her life had been like, day after day of this emptiness, this helplessness, this rage and hurt and sorrow?

  Shai shook her head and tried to just let the sunlight wash over her, through her, as if it could burn away her weakness. Above, the Towers rose and fell on currents of bright power, oblivious to all that happened below.

  Why don’t they help? Because they had the power—if not enough to stop the Spire and its plan of destruction, then at least to aid the Lower City dwellers. People were going to die; it was inevitable.

  She’d heard talk of sending armed bands to kill every walker they could find; of plans for security perimeters and armed lookouts, scouts, and absent gods only knew what else. And, as much as she wanted to believe otherwise, it wouldn’t be enough.

  No shelter, no resources—only what they could claim from the rubble. No trade meant no food, or only the little they could safely grow and raise themselves; and even beyond the destructive range of the Lower City’s power, that was little indeed. People were going to starve and be killed by the walkers; people were going to kill each other fighting for resources. No sanitation, no sewers, no infrastructure—illness would follow shortly thereafter.

  And winter was but months away.

  One Radiant was nothing against such things. But the Towers?

  Shai watched their graceful movement. They could assist with food, water, shelter, protection. If only one Tower contributed, just one of those glittering, brilliant hundreds, everything would change.

  But the skyscrapers had called out to their every contact in the City above, every trading partner, every distant family member, every childhood friend who had made it in spite of the odds—and it had come to nothing. Worse than nothing.

  The Lower City echoed from another explosion—not inside Edren this time, but Orren. Shai glanced toward the precariously leaning skyscraper with its ragged top. A hole had been blasted in its side and aircars hovered around it like wasps.

  She could not stand to see that slow destruction, and so she looked up—and her eyes fell on a familiar Tower.

  Allenai.

  Slowly, Shai sat up. The Lower City dwellers might not know anyone in a position of power in the City, anyone in one of the greater Towers—but she did.

  More than spell generators, more than healing spells and reinforced walls, perhaps this was what she could do. Perhaps this was how she could save them: not with her own hands, weak and fumbling; not with
her magic; but by finding help among the powerful.

  Shai did not remember making a decision; she just found herself rising.

  At long last, and all alone, Shai went home.

  Home.

  Allenai did not look much like her home anymore—at least not from the outside. Once the Tower had been in the classical shape: a single wide platform in the center with great spires jutting up and down. Like a spinning top, Xhea had once described it—no matter that countless smaller platforms and defensive spires had marred some of that silhouette.

  Now only the peak looked the same; Allenai’s bottommost half, which had absorbed Tower Eridian, was entirely unfamiliar. Multiple living platforms now bloomed from its central axis, making the Tower look like a waveform pattern turned on its side. Only its color was unchanged: that deep purple-toned maroon that shifted and shimmered in the sunlight, red and blue sparking from its depths.

  It should have been beautiful; it should have reminded her of orchid blossoms and fresh-picked plums. Yet, staring at the Tower that had once been her life and safety, Shai could only think of bruises.

  Inside, too, everything had changed. She knew that no Tower could undergo a merger and retain all of its halls and familiar sights, but seeing those changes was a shock.

  The public halls were full of shoppers, visitors and citizens alike, many with tea or sugar-dusted pastries in hand. A spelled breeze flowed through the winding walkways, smelling of new leaves and fresh air and ripe peaches. Nearby, a musician played a light-harp, his dancing fingers conjuring birdsong-like trills from its beams. Around his head swirled some dozen pinprick sparks of renai spelled to transfer at the song’s end; they were marks of favor—and the onlookers’ generosity.

  Signs of a healthy, prosperous Tower.

  Shai should have been glad to see them. And she was: the guilt she’d harbored over her abandonment of Allenai was washed away by that sight. Yet she recognized little in the scene, not the walkways or the domed ceiling above them, not the arches or fountains or even the musician’s song. How could this be her home when she knew none of it?