Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Worse, the sight made her angry.

  Shai glanced at her hands. They were as they had always been: soft, uncallused, and haloed with light, her ghostly skin untouched by blood or dirt. After the past weeks, her hands should have been black with both; her nails should have been cracked and torn; her fair skin should have been dry and patterned with small cuts.

  Lower City hands.

  Looking back to the crowd before her, Shai thought of Xhea’s failed attempt to get herself kicked out of Tower Celleran, months ago. Xhea had screamed at the crowd that they weren’t better than her, that they hadn’t earned their lives of luxury and ease, but were born to them. They’d been handed gifts that were forever outside Xhea’s reach—outside the reach of any Lower City citizen, no matter how hard they worked. All because of their magic.

  For the first time, Shai didn’t just understand Xhea’s anger but felt it herself, deep in the pit of her belly.

  These people had their own problems; their lives had their own hardships, their own stresses and disasters and threats. She knew it, and yet she only saw the smiles, only heard the laughter. She saw manicured hands holding cream-filled pastries up to pink, painted lips and the perfect white of their teeth as they bit down.

  You’re not here for this. She repeated the words until they felt like truth. Even so, it was hard to turn away.

  Shai didn’t think to wonder whether her home—the one she’d shared with her parents for all seventeen years of her life—would be where she expected, not until she was rushing toward it through familiar halls. Due to her mother’s position, the Nalani family had lived in Allenai’s higher levels, and those seemed largely untouched by the merger. Even so, the layout might have changed during those first tumultuous weeks, whole homes shifted like marbles inside a shaken container and settled into new positions.

  Or worse: what if her mother had sold it? Councilwoman Aliane Nalani’s husband and daughter were dead; would she have even wanted to remain by herself?

  You don’t need to go home, Shai told herself. She wanted to find her mother to beg for help, and her mother had never worked from home if her constituency office was open. Her work schedule had always been relentless, and Shai had suspected that she’d liked it that way, despite protestations to the contrary. Councilwoman Nalani had risen before dawn each day, and often worked long into the night. Those days that they’d been supposed to do something together as a family, Shai’s mom had manipulated their schedule to assure that she could get in a few hours of work anyway—and Shai had never seen her delay the receipt of a message spell.

  She was not eager; the thought of returning home made her feel ill. Yet she moved as if drawn, toward that familiar door and then through it, unable to stop her momentum.

  Shai had never thought of her house as big—yet it was. The open space before the front door felt as large as the lobby in skyscraper Edren, if cleaner and in much better repair. Rooms spread about her: the formal living room to her left where her mother had received important guests, and the dining room beyond; the library to her right, its shelves heavy with books, its wall adorned with a huge oil painting of a tree. Before her, a wide staircase swept up to the bedrooms, her mother’s home office, and her father’s small studio; while off to one side was the hall to the kitchen and the solarium and the family room with its squishy couches where Shai had liked to lounge. Above, the small daylight spells bound to the antique chandelier that her mom had found so charming glinted in the hanging crystals and patterned the ceiling with shards of rainbows.

  It wasn’t the sight that caught her breathless, tears pricking her eyes, but the smell.

  If asked, Shai would have said that she couldn’t remember what her home had smelled like, though she’d lived there all her life. She would have guessed that it smelled of clean air, perhaps, or growing things, or even the sharply floral scent of her mother’s favorite perfume.

  But it was this, the scent that suddenly overwhelmed her—a scent of fresh bread, of cinnamon and sugar. Beneath that, there was the ever-present smell of the living, mossy carpeting that most Towers preferred—a smell that had always reminded Shai of sweet clover.

  Her home smelled of cinnamon buns and earth. How could she have forgotten?

  Shai struggled for breath, pushing back the need to sob. Silly ghost. You have no lungs, no need for oxygen, no need to breathe at all. But the desire to cry, it seemed, went deeper than the demands of mere flesh and blood.

  She moved from room to room—not walking now, only sliding like a tear across glass. Her fingers passed through the bronze statue on the table in the front hall; her touch did not disturb the fine layer of dust that had gathered on the kitchen’s wide marble countertops. She glanced at the framed photographs on the walls, seeing her younger, smiling face and no hint of her current reflection.

  Shai flowed through her home, feeling every bit the ghost that she was. Feeling, somehow, that if she could just touch something—a doorframe, a light switch, the cover of a book she’d read to tatters—that it all could be undone: her illness and her death, her absence from this place, and everything that had filled those strange, difficult months.

  There was a photo of Shai on the mantle in the family room, above the fireplace where only spelled flames burned. In it, she was young—twelve, maybe thirteen; she was golden and happy, sunlight shining in her blond hair, her face alight with joy. Wasn’t that who she truly was?

  Not anymore.

  Shai went upstairs. Her mother’s home office was empty, as she’d known it would be; but, as in the kitchen, dust had settled across the desk’s surface. She shouldn’t be surprised—her mother had likely lost herself in her responsibilities, staying at the office at all hours, pretending that if she just worked long enough she could escape the weight of memory.

  Her parents’ bedroom was similarly empty, the bed neatly made, her father’s glasses resting atop a book at the bedside. It looked as if no one had slept there in months. Yet Shai paused, sinking as if she might sit on the bed, and stared at those glasses. Stared at the absence around her, empty and echoing, and could not help but see her father’s face. Not the face she had known and loved, but as she had seen it last: gaunt and blank and starving.

  She remembered, too, the thought that had come like a lightning strike from the night sky: that she could kill him. Not that she could heal him, or ease the pain of his countless hurts; not that she could care for him as he had so long cared for her. She’d thought only of death.

  Horrible as that thought was, she could not say it was wrong. Because she looked at those glasses and their dust-patterned lenses, and couldn’t pretend that he would have wanted otherwise.

  Wasn’t that what he had done for her at the end? In stealing her away to that broken, impoverished Tower; in finding Xhea to help with her ghost. He’d not offered Shai healing or hurt’s ease, for such things had become impossible. He’d not given her new life or freedom—for such things, if they existed, were denied to her because of what she was and the permanence of her binding to Allenai.

  He’d only found a way to stop it, the hurt and the need and the power that underlay it. He’d found a way to let her die.

  Shai remembered dying, and the moments that had come before. She remembered how she had felt, what she had thought, hard though it was to do so. Though she had feared death, in that moment the choice he and Xhea had offered—the choice to die—had felt like a gift.

  To her. She didn’t know whether her father had felt the same in the end. And Xhea? Shai almost smiled. Never before had she known anyone with as many complicated and oft-conflicting feelings as Xhea. In this, she thought, Xhea’s joy would have been equal to her guilt and sorrow.

  But if death had been a gift to Shai, did that make it right to kill her father? Or rather, kill his body. Her father was, now, unable to make that choice. Some dark magic child had ripped his spirit from his living body and consumed him.

  His spirit was not lingering in this world,
had not left for whatever might wait beyond. He was just… gone.

  Truly gone.

  Maybe it wasn’t Shai that was the ghost here, but the house around her; for she had changed after death—she had, in her way, tried to live—while this place had lingered, caught in a reality that no longer existed. Waiting for her father to come home, to lie down in this bed, place the glasses on his nose and flip his book to the place marked with a green ribbon. Waiting for Shai to return to her routine of school and homework and outings, the many things she did to forget her illness; or, even, waiting for Shai to curl once more in her bed, sweating and in pain, staring at the ceiling as the hours passed. All of them waiting for her mom to come home.

  Shai took a long, slow breath and wiped away tears that she didn’t remember crying.

  Time to go to Mom’s office, she thought, rising. There were far more important things at stake than her own grief.

  Even so, she hesitated at the top of the stairs. Turned.

  She would not return here, she knew, not ever again. Before she left, there was just one last place she had to go.

  The door to Shai’s bedroom was closed. The nametag that had been there since Shai was little—the one bearing her name in her own clumsy, child’s hand—hadn’t been re-hung; hadn’t, in all likelihood, made it back from that broken Tower where her father had taken her to die. She could see where it had been, a faint, bleached shape against the door’s natural wood.

  Closing her eyes, Shai slipped through the door. When she opened them, she might have stepped back in time.

  There was no hospital bed there anymore, no medical equipment, no IV or monitors or the countless bottles of pills that had clustered on her nightstand. Instead, her childhood bed had been replaced, pulled from storage absent gods only knew where, and topped with a blanket patterned with blue flowers. Next to the bed was the chair in which her father had sat and slept during the years of her illness—the chair that she had sent an image of to Xhea.

  The curtains were drawn, hiding the spelled window panel and the sunlight beyond. For all that their home was near Allenai’s core, every room had a window with a view; this window, with its blue curtains, had been Shai’s only glimpse of the world outside for a very long time. Even with that view hidden, its light shuttered, she could see the pieces of her old life everywhere: her certificates on the wall, her books and trinkets on the shelf, her best attempt at watercolor painting framed and hung.

  And there on the bed lay her mother.

  At first Shai did not see her, not even as her Radiant light spread though the room like a candle’s golden glow; she only wondered why the bed had been left rumpled and the frilled-edged decorative pillows cast aside. Then she watched as the blanket rose and fell in the rhythms of breath. She stepped closer, hesitant, and saw unwashed blond hair spread in a messy tangle across the pillow.

  Shai’s breath caught and she stared, trying to believe that the huddled, unkempt woman lying here, asleep in the middle of the afternoon, could truly be her mother. Lying here, Shai realized, as if she had not risen for days.

  “Mom,” Shai whispered. But Aliane Nalani could not hear her daughter—would not, even if she shouted—and Shai’s heart ached to know it.

  Ached, too, to see her lying as if she were broken. Because whatever Shai had expected of her mother, it was not this.

  Shai crept closer. It was wrong to say that she’d never seen her mother in her room, here at this bedside, for all that the lie felt like truth. Yet it’d seemed that her mother had only ever been passing through, had stopped by for a quick word, had peeked in when Shai was sleeping.

  “Your mother’s gone to the office,” her father would tell her so many mornings, “but she checked on you while you were asleep.” Shai had thought he was lying, not out of malice, but in an attempt to make her feel better. To make her feel loved by the one person who had never had time for her, no matter what Shai tried.

  But a memory returned to her now, one she had always believed a comforting dream: her mother standing over her, seen through eyes all but closed. The feel of a cool hand pushing back sweaty hair from her face; the feel of lips, soft and dry, feather-light against her forehead.

  Dream or memory, she was not sure—and it didn’t matter. For Shai moved slowly, softly, as if her tread might wake the woman lost in this unhappy, graceless sleep, and leaned over the bed. Brushed her hand over the sweaty tangles of her mother’s once-perfect hair; kissed her forehead with trembling lips.

  Tears fell, glittering. Her own, and her mother’s.

  Aliane woke then, or perhaps just opened her eyes, and stared unseeing as tears rolled down her face to darken the pillow beneath her cheek.

  Shai knelt before her, willing her mother to sense her. She reached for her mother’s hand, lost beneath that too-heavy blanket. Her hands slipped through blanket and flesh and the mattress beneath, and only once before had Shai felt so bereft of touch or its illusion.

  A sense of a presence, a flicker at the edge one’s vision, a half-heard whisper—these were the ways Xhea said most people sensed ghosts. But then, Shai was no ordinary ghost.

  All her half-made plans, all the ways she’d thought to communicate, the spells and clever tricks that she had learned in the weeks past—they were gone as if she’d never known them. Gone or pushed away, for she did not know what she might write with her pinpoint light; knew no gesture she could make that would speak when she could not.

  “Mom,” she said again, louder, her voice breaking. Shai willed her mother to see her, to know that she was here.

  Perhaps she did, for Aliane’s eyes went wide. A moment, then she slowly tried to raise her head from the pillow.

  “Shai?” she whispered. Then: “I’m dreaming.” Such broken hope and sorrow in the words.

  “You’re not,” Shai said, unheard.

  But if her mother could not hear her voice, she could see her—or see, at least, the light that she cast. Though Shai’s had been the most powerful magical gift within her family, it was not because her parents had ever wanted for magic—her mother especially.

  Instead of speaking, Shai reached again for her mother’s hand, glowing brighter as she did so. Brighter, until her glow lit the room, throwing shadows across the wall; brighter, as if someone had thrown open the curtains and let the sunlight pour inside; and brighter still.

  Aliane gasped softly, as if finally realizing that she was awake. Realizing that her dead daughter sat before her, full of Radiant light.

  “Shai,” she said again. “You’ve come back. You—”

  Shai shook her head.

  “Can you speak?”

  Again Shai shook her head, and then raised her shoulders in a broad shrug. Her mother seemed to understand. Even so, Shai sparked a light and wrote in midair.

  Only like this.

  Her mother struggled to sit.

  Sitting, Councilwoman Aliane Nalani looked down at herself in dazed disbelief, as if this was her first moment truly conscious for a very long time. She touched her hair and grimaced, then held her hand before her, seemingly surprised to see it tremble.

  “What must you think, to see me like this?” She laughed thinly, the sound doing nothing to hide her shame. “Falling apart.”

  At that moment, Shai was glad her mother could not hear her. There was no need to disguise her sudden loss for words.

  “If I go take a shower,” Aliane said, as if it were a foreign concept, “will you be here when I come back? Can you stay?”

  Shai nodded. At that moment, there was nowhere else she could imagine being.

  All her life, Xhea had dreamed of Towers.

  She’d only had pictures and stories on which to build her fantasy, snippets of overheard conversation that she wove into her imagined life like glimmering threads. Stories of rich food and bright, open halls; stories where no one hurt or cried, grew sick or felt pain. A place where hunger and cold and want could not reach her.

  But she’d never though
t to dream of the Central Spire—not before she’d met Shai. For all that its presence dominated the landscape above, it had never seemed like a place she might visit. It had been more like the moon: beautiful and wholly untouchable.

  When Shai spoke of visiting the Spire, she spoke mostly of the sky gardens. Rose gardens with winding pathways surrounded by heavy blossoms, the air heady with perfume; wild gardens with trees that grew tall and thin as they struggled toward the sun; topiary gardens with trees shaped into dancing ladies and rearing horses, mythical creatures and birds taking flight.

  There was more to the Spire, too: homes and offices, shops and galleries and theaters. There was a prison, where the worst of the City’s criminals were sent; there were courts and offices for the magistrates.

  Yet as the armored aircar settled to the ground in an open landing bay low in the Spire’s downward point—as the Enforcers led her from the car and into the Spire proper, pushing her as fast as her limping gait would allow—she could not help but look around in surprise. Whatever she’d expected of the Spire, it was not this.

  Bare walls, stark and unadorned. Wide doorways with heavy doors that rose and fell at their approach, clanking and grinding like shielded metal. No mossy covering on the floor. Air filtered and tasteless and utterly without scent; air blank like white paper.

  When they’d taken her, she’d expected—what? An official to greet her, perhaps; someone to try and convince her of her value to the Spire. Maybe a bribe, like Ahrent Altaigh had tried in Farrow—plentiful food and clean water, a comfortable home, knowledge and respect and clean clothes—as if her allegiance might be purchased. Maybe even a cell, some dark room with no windows, where her eventual release would be a reward for good behavior.

  Instead she was processed as if she was not a person but a thing, some strange artifact pulled from the ruins of the city that had come before. She was examined, measured, and cataloged. No greetings, not even as she was passed from one white-coated person to the next; only bare, necessary words.