Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  “Lift your arms.”

  “Turn.”

  “Stand up.”

  “Look here.”

  “Hold your breath. Now breathe out. Again.”

  She had only one living Enforcer to guard her now, and the dead one bound to his chest. But even he did not speak—at least not to her; only led her from one place to the next with rough efficiency.

  It was only as she stood, arms outstretched as the man before her prepared some sort of spell, that she realized: there was almost no magic here, neither bright nor dark. Not in the walls or the floor beneath her feet, not on the doors through which they passed or in the lights along the ceiling.

  “Hold still.” Xhea turned to look at the man. She moved one arm, then the other; shifted her weight and winced as her bad leg protested.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as she had no half-dozen times before. She slid one foot forward, tilted her head—small, inconvenient motions.

  The man huffed out his breath in displeasure, and met her eyes.

  “I’m measuring your magic. Now hold still.”

  Xhea froze, inside and out. Her power was restrained by the binding spell, its pressure like a weight on her chest; yet she’d been pushing against it in an effort to force that small crack wider. Now she pulled her magic to her like a snail vanishing into its shell and held it tight, hoping that no trickle of black emerged.

  Sweat beaded her forehead. She closed her eyes.

  “Binding’s secure,” the man said at last. “But who unraveled the tracking spell?”

  Xhea huffed out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “I’m very talented.”

  “Rather the opposite.” Xhea could not tell whether he sounded pleased or disappointed at that revelation. He looked to her guard. “She’s safe enough to handle, if it comes to that. We’ll have time for a more detailed examination in a few days.”

  “She done here?” the Enforcer asked.

  “For now.”

  It should have been a relief. Yet as Xhea gathered her jacket and cane, it was all she could do to keep from pressing her hand against her stomach, as if that might ease the cold, unhappy ache that had nothing to do with her magic.

  Another aircar ride, this one to another location in the Spire no more than a few stories away.

  “What,” she asked her guards, living and dead, “you never heard of elevators?”

  They did not deign to reply.

  But it was clear, as they moved beyond the landing bay, that they’d brought her someplace far different. There was carpet beneath her feet—not the mossy covering she knew from her time in the Towers, but real carpet, soft beneath her boot soles. The walls were pale but faintly patterned. There were numbered doors at regular intervals along the hall and paintings hung between them. Xhea glanced at the images as she passed. A sunset. A branching tree. A flower.

  The hall, too, curved gently, seeming to form a ring; Xhea wondered if she kept walking whether she might eventually walk the whole circumference of the Spire. Huge as it was, it had few living platforms, and none were as wide as a Tower’s. For the first time, Xhea considered just how many levels the Spire might have within its slender length, floor upon floor layered atop each other like a teetering stack of dishes.

  At last the Enforcer stopped at a door and pushed it wide. Mechanical door handle, Xhea noted—not a touchpad or magical sensor in sight.

  “In here,” he said, gesturing to the room beyond.

  A sudden pressure between her shoulder blades sent her stumbling through the door and nearly sprawling onto the carpet beyond. Xhea fought to regain her balance, breath gone short, then turned back to glare.

  No faces there: only a shining mask of magic, and a blurred set of features. Still, she could imagine his unkind smile as the ghost Enforcer gave her a brief wave.

  “Enjoy your stay, princess.”

  The door closed and a heavy lock clicked home.

  Xhea looked around. Despite the lock on the door, this was not the cell she’d imagined; nor was it the luxurious accommodations she’d assumed would be omnipresent throughout the City. It was just a room—one of a small suite—though it was clean and neat and comfortably furnished.

  She took a slow circuit through the rooms. A living room with a soft gray couch and chair, a bathroom with a shower, a bedroom, and a kitchen with laden cupboards. No one else there; no signs that this was anyone’s home. Everything seemed new, plain, untouched.

  “Hello?” she called. No echo: her voice vanished in the space like a stone thrown into dark water.

  She wanted to lie down; she wanted to close her eyes, wanted to scream or rage or weep. Instead she limped slowly to the kitchen and methodically filled her arms with the contents of the fridge and cupboards. When she could hold no more, she brought the food to the table.

  Sitting was a relief beyond words, her knee’s ache having grown to a hot, throbbing pain; only that hurt had been enough to distract from her stomach’s insistent demands. She’d barely eaten today. Barely eaten, truth be told, the day before that. One by one, she ripped open packets and pried lids off of containers, then began eating their contents.

  Cookies with swirls of cinnamon. A sandwich layered with tender meat, juicy tomatoes, and lettuce so fresh that it crunched. A bowl of self-warming soup with rich, spicy broth. In spite of herself, she enjoyed every bite.

  Xhea peered around as she chewed, refocusing her eyes. Here, as before, there was no sign of spells—no sign of any magic at all.

  It wasn’t just the lights and door handles that were fully mechanical; for the span of at least three or four stories up and down and in every direction, she could see no spells on the structure, no ribbons of magic snaking through the walls. Here, in the City where the use of magic was omnipresent, there was nothing.

  She pushed the thought aside.

  There would be time, she judged, before a representative would come to offer what threats or promises they deemed appropriate. First they would make her wait, simmering in her own anxiety. She rolled her eyes at the thought.

  Time passed.

  When the chair grew uncomfortable, Xhea rose and paced, limping heavily but attempting to keep her muscles from stiffening. When she tired of dragging herself across the same patch of carpet, she flopped down on the couch in the main room and stretched her legs.

  Silence all around her, broken only by the sound of her movement, her breath.

  Was this the prison of which Shai had spoken? If so, it was a strange one. Xhea thought again of the curving hall outside her door—all those numbered doors, and the locks on each. Locks controlled on the outside; locks, she realized, that were set oddly, as if out of a small child’s easy reach.

  Not a normal prison, then, but one designed to hold her. Or, rather, people like her.

  Reaching with her other senses, she felt them. The distant pressure that spoke of ghosts—and, farther, a faint sense of something cold and dark that drew her, like Ieren had.

  Dark magic children and their bondlings.

  The thought was frightening. They were only children—but children with power. Children who’d grown up knowing how to use this magic that had suddenly risen within her, and who had use of that power even now. Despite the crack she’d created and the trickle of power she could conjure, the man had been right: the binding on Xhea’s magic was strong and holding.

  She could break it, she thought, as she had broken the binding that her mother had created for her as a child—but not quickly. A week, perhaps; a few days if she really tried.

  Not fast enough.

  There was no clock. There were no windows through which she could watch the sun pass overhead, the Towers rise and fall, the shadows shift across the distant ground. There was only the sound of her breath and the beat of her heart, each poor at marking seconds.

  What do they want? she wondered. Because if she understood what the Spire wanted of her, she could avoid being caught by surprise. Did they wa
nt her magic, her willing assistance—or only to remove her from the situation? Ensure that they controlled every dark magic user, no matter how weak.

  Time passed.

  Xhea yelled at the ceiling, cursed and shouted and demanded that someone come see her. She screamed until her voice cracked and her throat ached. She tried to smash every dish upon the floor, threw a vase at a wall and awkwardly kicked it when it refused to break. Something, anything, to gain a reaction.

  Nothing worked.

  Time passed, and time passed, and time passed.

  They can just leave me here, Xhea realized at last. An hour, a day, a year—what did it matter? They can just lock me in here and do nothing until it’s too late.

  Perhaps the Spire officials were watching her, waiting until she’d been broken down by boredom and isolation. Or perhaps they already had what they wanted: an uncooperative dark magic girl, and access to the escaped Radiant ghost to whom she was bound.

  And if you had evaded them? asked a quiet voice, hard and bitter. What then?

  Oh, the mockery there. For she knew the thought that underlay it, the belief that lingered unspoken: that she might have saved them, she and Shai together. Saved everyone, the whole of the Lower City, from the Central Spire’s wrath.

  Two girls and their magic winning against the power of the entire City above. Somehow.

  As if.

  Once she wouldn’t have cared what happened to the rest of the Lower City. She’d cared little for anyone else—why should she, when they had obviously cared so little for her?

  But something had changed, because she would save them now, if she could. All those people she didn’t know and probably wouldn’t even like—the angry ones and the awful ones, the families and the City folks fallen on hard times, the orphans and the people that everyone else had forgotten about. The dregs of humanity. The people no one wanted.

  The people just like her.

  She’d abandoned them. No matter her intention, she’d stopped trying.

  Xhea took a long, shuddering breath and forced herself to her feet. Bruised and battered, she thought, but not defeated. She wasn’t going to sit or sleep, pace or fret, when she could be doing something. Anything, no matter how small.

  Xhea turned again to the locked door. Mechanical locks, she thought—and smiled. They were treating her like she was just any other dark magic child, small and helpless and raised in captivity. She was not.

  They’d left her no tools; they’d searched her pockets and taken away anything that could possibly be dangerous or useful—but they had not searched well enough. Carefully, Xhea fished a thick, tarnished needle from the seam of her pant leg. Her good needles were hidden—but this? It was big and strong and near impossible to break.

  Big enough, strong enough, to pick a lock.

  When her mother returned some fifteen minutes later, dressed in a soft robe with her hair twisted up in a towel, Shai was ready.

  Over the past weeks, she had tried to create a spell that would allow her to speak to someone other than Xhea. Her attempts had not all ended in failure, but the sounds she was able to create—screeches, whispers, echoing booms—refused to make spoken words. She’d thought speech was nothing but sound shaped by mouth and lips and tongue; yet the intricacies of those movements were frighteningly hard to replicate.

  The day before, seeing the message spells rising from across the Lower City, she’d wondered if there was some way that she could shape, if not sound, then at least her intent—images, perhaps, or captured thoughts. Such things were theoretically possible, though she’d had no time to experiment.

  Instead she’d done what she could: as her mother had showered, she’d written her arguments in light across the air—and then recorded those patterns into a single large spell sequence.

  “Shai,” her mother said—and stopped. Though Shai waited, haloed in light, the blinking sphere of the spell hovered in the middle of the room, demanding attention.

  “From you?”

  Shai nodded.

  Aliane touched the spell. It read her magical signature, and then unfurled like a golden ribbon unwinding.

  Its first two words were simple, written in Shai’s own hand: Hi, Mom.

  Aliane’s breath caught. She looked from Shai to the words, the tips of her fingers pressed against her lips.

  The ribbon reworked itself, new words writing themselves across the air, and her mother had no further chance to look away.

  Shai had never had her mother’s ability to construct strong, rational arguments, nor had she ever particularly excelled at debate; being put on the spot had made her want to shrink into herself, as if a hunched posture and a face flushed red could deflect attention. Here, now, she had tried nonetheless, attempting to explain her situation and that of the Lower City in the clear, precise terms her mother preferred.

  Her words were rushed, inelegant; she winced to see them, even knowing she’d had time for nothing more. She explained that the Lower City was alive. She told of the Messenger and the Central Spire’s declaration, and the invasion of edge-cast Towers that had quickly followed—but mostly she shared what these things meant to the people on the ground.

  Shai asked for Allenai’s help. An intercession, a message sent to the right person in the Spire, even protection against the poorer Towers. At the very least, Allenai could provide help for the refugees themselves—food or clean water or the construction of new shelter out in the ruins.

  Something. Anything.

  Shai’s message ended in a shower of fading sparks, but her mother did not move, only stood as if frozen.

  “This?” Aliane asked.

  Shai blinked, not understanding.

  Her mother turned to her, incredulous. “This is where you’ve been? This is what you’ve been doing?”

  Shai almost stepped back. It wouldn’t have been the first time that her mother’s words had made her physically recoil; each felt like a slap, weighted by judgment.

  “There you are,” Shai whispered, knowing her mother would not hear. There was the mother she’d known—and whom she’d resented and wanted desperately to please in equal measure.

  Aliane Nalani stood taller, that defeated stoop straightening as if Shai had injected steel into her spine. Her chin rose as if she wished to look down her nose at her daughter—never mind that she and Shai were the same height.

  “So many nights I wondered what had happened to you, how long you’d lingered bound to that girl—and you were down there the whole time. That’s who you want to ally yourself with? Deadbeats and criminals and people too stupid to make anything of their lives?”

  Once, such words—or even the tone in which they were spoken—would have been enough to make Shai crumple. She would have muttered apologies and fled.

  Now such reactions made no sense. She felt no shame or recrimination, only anger. It was a slow, hot burn.

  Shai called forth a light and stretched it, creating glowing letters in the air between them. Not gold, this time, but a harsh, pure white.

  One word, scrawled large: NO.

  “I didn’t come here to fight,” Shai said to her mother, because she couldn’t stay silent. “I don’t need this.”

  Her mother kept speaking as if that message did not hang before her, casting stark shadows—as if Shai’s words were of no consequence. “You returned for those people on the ground. Not for your people, not for Allenai.”

  Don’t, Shai wrote. It’s not like that.

  “Not for me,” Aliane said, her voice gone quiet. “Months since you died, and you never once came back for me.” All at once that steel was gone from her; she folded in on herself, body hunching as if grief struck a blow to her chest.

  What could Shai say? It was true.

  She had searched the ruins for her father, night after night; she had sat at Xhea’s bedside during the girl’s long, fraught recovery. It had never once occurred to her that her mother might need her. No, that she might want her.

&nb
sp; Shai had known that her mother would mourn; of all the things one could say about her—hard and driven and political—she was not a monster. Her worst cruelty had been her absence.

  And mine? Shai thought suddenly. For if she’d ached for her mother all those years, was it so hard to believe that her own absence could create a similar pain? But not a temporary one; death was a barrier rarely crossed.

  Shai opened her hand, relaxing the fist she didn’t remember making. She made to reach out—but her mother was speaking again.

  “Go,” Aliane said, her voice low and hard. “If that’s all you’re here for, then go.”

  Shai stared, not believing the words.

  “The world does not revolve around you, Shai, even though you think it does.”

  As if wanting to help the people of the Lower City was the selfish act. Angry tears stung her eyes. Hers, it seems, was just another pointless message bubble sent skyward, for all that she had delivered it herself. Just another plea rejected out of hand.

  What did you think was going to happen? she asked in savage silence. That she’d care just because you asked it?

  What Tower would spend so much renai without any prospect of future profit? They had systems to run, people to feed, investors to satisfy; all more important than helping the dirty, anonymous masses. And there was no good publicity in crossing the Spire, even if they tried to spin their actions as a misguided attempt at charity.

  Shai bowed her head in defeat, choked back her anger, and walked away. She pulled her magic to her as she went, and the room darkened in her wake.

  “Wait,” her mother said.

  Shai hesitated. Some part of her wanted to storm away, as if the sight of her disappearing back was the only answer she need give. But she didn’t want that to be the last interaction she had with her mother. Not for either of them.

  She took a steadying breath and turned.

  “I didn’t think…” Aliane started, and then stared as if she had no idea how to go on. Shai glowed brighter, that soft radiance an encouragement.

  Again she tried: “Since you and your father…” But those words, too, caught in her throat. Then the look that Shai had always thought of as her mother’s professional mask dropped over her features, blank and unyielding. Breath after breath, Aliane regained control.