Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Better to be alone than abandoned.

  Even so, for years Xhea would wake from half-remembered dreams of a shadowy person walking away while she was helpless to follow—a figure that did not turn or acknowledge Xhea’s cries, no matter how loud she shouted, how desperately she pleaded.

  Her subconscious had never been subtle.

  And yet here she was, Abelane, whole and healthy if not unchanged. Not dead after all, Xhea thought, and she didn’t know whether the emotion surging through her was joy or rage. Perhaps both.

  “So are you.” Abelane smiled again, the faint expression lighting her face. “All these years, I worried—”

  Once Xhea would have run to Abelane, thrown her arms around her—or tried. Even when she’d been young, her magic bound, her touch had been uncomfortable to endure.

  Once she would have cursed at her, shouted, kicked the wall, demanded that she turn around right now and stay out of her life forever. Because if Lane had chosen to abandon Xhea, that choice could not be unmade or its effects undone; and, walking back through that door, even metaphorically, did not make anything right.

  Once she would have wept.

  Xhea wanted to do all of those things. Tears pricked her eyes and her throat became tight. She wanted to do all those things and instead did none, despite the desire, because none of them felt right.

  Instead she said, “No.” Her voice was low and intense. “Don’t. Don’t pretend that you cared. Don’t you dare.”

  “You don’t understand. I didn’t know that you—” Abelane raised a hand as Xhea made to interrupt again, but there was no command in that gesture; and her eyes, meeting Xhea’s, seemed almost to beg. “I know you’re angry, and you have a right to be. But I had to come.”

  Whatever she wanted, whatever she was going to say, Xhea didn’t want to hear it. More than six years had gone by since they’d seen each other—six years in which Xhea had existed perfectly well on her own, thank you very much, and she wasn’t going to go back.

  “Well, now you’re here.” Xhea shrugged, wishing she were standing just so that she could turn away. Wishing she wasn’t swaddled in blankets like a child. “You’ve seen me in all my glory. And now you can go.”

  A moment, then: “Xhea?” Abelane’s quiet voice had become quieter. She hesitated. “Is that really what you want?”

  Xhea looked at that strange, familiar face.

  Where was the Abelane she had known? That girl had been young and scared and entirely out of her depth, as much as Xhea herself had been—but she’d also had nerve to spare. She’d been resourceful and clever, quick to anger and quicker to forgive. Even now, Xhea knew that sometimes when she set her jaw and rolled her shoulders back she was mimicking Lane’s stance when the girl had readied herself to face down someone far larger.

  Given her age at the time? That had been nearly everyone.

  Where was that Abelane? Because the young woman before her now stood as if expecting a blow; and though she held her head high, her dark eyes were shadowed. Afraid.

  Gone, Xhea thought. Gone as surely as that small, prickly child that Xhea herself had once been. For good or ill, they were different people now.

  Instead of responding, Xhea slowly pushed the covers aside. Swung her legs over the edge of the mattress, supporting her bad knee with her hands, then worked to tighten the brace through her pants. Not looking at Abelane, she reached for her cane and stood. Swayed a moment—still tired, still weary—then caught her balance.

  When she turned to once more meet Abelane’s eye, the older girl—woman, now—was staring in open-mouthed shock. “Your leg,” she said. “Xhea, what happened?”

  Xhea laughed at that, though the sound came out little louder than a puff of air. It seemed, hours before, Abelane hadn’t noticed her cane.

  What happened? Her life had happened; years upon years that she’d fought through alone. Almost all of the big moments had occurred following her polarizing loss of Abelane.

  The collapse of the Red Line subway tunnel. Learning to live alone, finding a place for herself, discovering the ways a girl with no magic might earn what she needed to survive. Her year in Orren, and the botched resurrection. The discovery that she could travel in the tunnels below. Her clients and her business associations; the long string of ghosts she’d helped and ignored, spoken to and cast aside.

  Meeting Shai and saving her.

  The rise of her dark magic.

  And yes, the injury that led to the cane she now needed, the knee brace, and the permanent limp to her gait. Compared to the rest, it seemed like such a small thing. Not inconsequential, but not enough to eclipse the other aspects of her life.

  The thought felt almost like a revelation.

  “I fell,” Xhea said, and laughed. It was even true.

  “Xhea, I—”

  This time Xhea interrupted. “No,” she said. The word was almost gentle—at least, for Xhea. No extra edge to that short, sharp syllable. “Tell me the truth. Why are you here?”

  “I shouldn’t be.” Abelane took a steadying breath. “Do you mean here, right now, or here in the Spire, or…”

  “All of it.”

  “That… that would take a bit to tell.”

  Xhea raised an eyebrow. “Do I look busy?” Unless… “Have you come to let me out?” she whispered. “Help me escape?”

  Abelane only shook her head. “I don’t have anything like that kind of power. I’m trapped here just as much as you are. Just as much as the rest of them.”

  Xhea nodded, trying—and failing—to hide her disappointment.

  Abelane continued, “I just couldn’t believe that it was really you. Then I thought—I mean, I hoped—” Words seemed to flee from her; she looked down, but not before Xhea saw her eyes fill with tears.

  Abelane? Xhea thought. Crying? Maybe after a half-hour shouting match; maybe in the middle of the night, sobs poorly stifled as the memory of some daytime terror rose unbidden—but this?

  Abelane, too, seemed ashamed, for she wiped the tears away with the back of one hand, the gesture quick and angry.

  “Maybe we could talk,” Abelane said at last. The tentative note to her voice made it sound almost like a question.

  Xhea considered, looking toward the ceiling. It was only white. She could see no monitoring spells, no hint of any magic—not magic, that is, that wasn’t connected to Abelane herself.

  Yet as Xhea shifted her vision to see that power more clearly, it wasn’t the glow of magic at Abelane’s heart that drew Xhea’s attention—not the reflection of her natural power—but the gleam of the silver ring that encircled her neck. It was so very bright—and yet there was something else, too. A darker core within.

  Xhea squinted, trying to understand the spell’s fine, complex lines of intent, bright and dark, and could not. Perhaps Shai could have, but this working was beyond her.

  “Is it safe?” Xhea gestured to the collar.

  Are they tracking her movements? Monitoring her words? Controlling her?

  “Safe for me? No,” Abelane said, and something in that word made her draw herself a little taller. She lifted her chin in a small gesture of defiance; and when she smiled, it was with some hint of her old fire. “But why should that stop me?”

  For all her shock and anger, Xhea couldn’t help it: she grinned.

  “Well, then.” Xhea gestured to the stark, impersonal room. “Here we are.”

  “I didn’t want to leave,” Abelane said. She had said many, many things since her unannounced arrival, but that was the one to which Xhea returned, rolling the words over in her mind like a stone polished smooth.

  They had not gone to sit on the couch or on the edge of the bed. Too personal, Xhea had decided; and without a word of protest, Abelane had followed her to the kitchen. There they sat separated by the wooden table, an expanse that felt every bit as real and solid as the barrier of years that now existed between them.

  Xhea had fetched another package of cookies from the cu
pboard and placed them on the table. A peace offering—or a gift to a stranger.

  And she is a stranger, Xhea reminded herself. A stranger for all that a glimpse of her face, the sound of her voice, spoke of comfort and home.

  “That’s not true,” Xhea replied. “We both wanted to leave. To escape to the City.”

  Oh, her myriad plans and schemes to find their way aloft. Xhea used to lie awake for hours, staring at the water-stained ceiling of their broken apartment, whispering new ideas to Lane in the darkness.

  “To escape, maybe,” Abelane conceded. Her smile was sad. “But I started life in the City, and some days it was the absolute last place I wanted to be.”

  Xhea nodded slowly. She had always wondered whether Abelane was a runaway; it was not a revelation. That first year together, though Xhea had been a child of no more than five or six, there had been so many basic things that she’d had to show Abelane: where to dump waste and how to bargain for food, the names of the skyscrapers and how to tell one from the other. Abelane had always had more magic than most Lower City dwellers, too, little though she’d known how to use it.

  She’d come from a life, Xhea thought now, where the basics had been provided without asking. And yet she’d run and stayed away, not wanting to return. Fleeing something worse than dirt and hunger, want and ruin.

  “If you didn’t want to leave, why did you?”

  Abelane looked down at her hands, folded in her lap.

  “I had no choice.”

  Xhea took a long, shuddering breath. The words were, somehow, salve to that wound she still bore, scabbed over but far from healed. Even so, the response rose—There’s always a choice. Except now she knew the edges of such choices; bad choices and worse, the making of each its own kind of pain.

  That’s what she saw in Abelane’s face: the pain of a hard choice made and regretted ever since; a choice that she wished she had not been forced to make. Or was that only wishful thinking, Xhea seeing the things she wished to see?

  Once, twice, Abelane made to speak; and then hesitated, closing her lips around the words. She looked at her hands, at the table, at that small package of cinnamon cookies—anywhere but at Xhea’s face.

  Xhea gave her that silence, pushing down her impatience. It was, in the end, all she had to give.

  “They arrived the day before,” Abelane said at last, her voice soft. “We’d been at the market—do you remember? We’d done a big trade for that lot of nails we found in the eastern ruins, and we were stocking up on food for the week.”

  “We bought bread,” Xhea murmured. Or Lane had; with her ability to transform bright magic into renai, everything had been so much easier. At least, that’s how she’d chosen to remember it.

  Abelane nodded. “Bread and noodles and an onion, all wrapped and hidden beneath the cloth from my hair. Then I looked up, and there they were. If we hadn’t worked for days for that bread, I would have dropped it and run.”

  She met Xhea’s eyes, and Xhea knew what Abelane wasn’t saying: how afraid she’d been. Because the first lesson that she’d taught a young, scared Xhea was that there were times to run and times to hide, times to scream and times to fight—and how to know the difference.

  Running when you hadn’t yet been spotted? Running instead of quietly slipping away, losing yourself in the crowd? Clumsy and stupid and just going to get you caught, as Lane used to say.

  Still, she gave her the words: “Running would have drawn their attention.”

  “I nearly ran anyway, but you were there. We went home, and I tried to believe that they weren’t going to follow us. That they weren’t going to find me anyway.”

  “Who?” Xhea asked. “Who was after you?” Unspoken beneath: Why?

  Her parents, Xhea guessed, come to take her home—or bounty hunters hired on their behalf.

  But what Abelane said was, “Enforcers.”

  “No. I would have seen them.”

  Even if she hadn’t seen their uniforms, Xhea would have seen the disruption they caused in the market. Lower City dwellers were used to City folks searching for the lost and escaped among their ranks; they were used to City criminals and the unexpectedly destitute alike, and the bounty hunters that inevitably followed their trails. But Spire Enforcers among those crowded tents? The effects would have rippled like waves, and Abelane wouldn’t have been the only one running.

  “They don’t always wear the uniform or hide their faces,” Abelane said, some of her old edge coming back into her voice. “They don’t have to.”

  Xhea snorted. “And you do?” She gave a meaningful look to Abelane’s metal collar.

  She could understand why Messengers wore the mask: they were the Spire’s will incarnate; not a person, just the channel through which orders and information flowed. Enforcers, too, were the strong and sometimes violent enactment of that will.

  “Yes,” Abelane said, and her tone invited no questions. She returned to her story. “They wore plain clothes, like any other hunter. But I recognized one—and when he moved, I could see a glimpse of silver around his neck.”

  “You recognized them?”

  Abelane just looked at her.

  Xhea sighed. “Even if they were Enforcers,” she said, not convinced but conceding the point, “you don’t know they were after you.”

  “They had an image of me, Xhea. That’s what drew my attention—that picture, made from glimmering light.”

  “No,” Xhea said. Because she had asked in the market, in the streets; she had asked everyone she could find, everyone who she could get to listen: “Have you seen Abelane?” She’d even shown a rough sketch, drawn by someone who’d lived nearby—a sketch she’d bought with her last piece of that bread.

  No one had seen her—and no one had mentioned Enforcers or bounty hunters seeking someone of Abelane’s description. That sort of thing stuck in the memory, even if it took more than a spark of renai to loosen a witness’s tongue.

  “I looked different. In the picture.”

  “Younger,” Xhea said.

  “Yes, and… different. Even you wouldn’t have recognized me.”

  Xhea stared at Abelane, thoughts crashing together inside her mind almost too fast for her to follow.

  “The Lower City wasn’t the first place that you ran to,” she said. “Was it?”

  It wasn’t really a question.

  “No,” Abelane whispered.

  “You went to a skin sculptor?” Xhea asked. It wasn’t the right term—the official term—for the people who used magic to shape flesh and blood and bone like clay; it was only what everyone called them. Though the City’s elite regularly reshaped their faces and bodies to perfect their appearances, she’d not heard of such procedures being commonly used on a child—especially not changes so drastic as to leave the person unrecognizable.

  Abelane nodded. “My family had power, then. Influence. They sent me to the best they could afford—new face, new name. New life. Paid extra to keep everyone silent. I fell asleep as Mirae, an eight-year-old citizen of Irlasel, and woke up Abelane, adoptive daughter of some mid-tier family in a mid-tier Tower. Jortanen.”

  It wasn’t a Tower name that Xhea recognized. But Irlasel? It was not Allenai, not quite; but strong and influential enough that they could reach Allenai’s altitude within a few decades, if not sooner.

  And Mirae? Xhea shook her head. Whoever that girl had been, Xhea had never known her. Though Abelane had been young when Xhea had known her, she’d been older than eight. How long had she spent in the City above, running? How long had she hidden in the Lower City before she’d found and rescued Xhea?

  “Is that your name now?” Xhea asked softly, then corrected herself: “Is that your name again? Mirae.”

  “No,” she said. “Mirae is dead.”

  “Legally.”

  “In every way that possibly matters. I don’t know who that is anymore.”

  “And Abelane?”

  A thin, haunted smile. “Her, I’m trying to rem
ember.”

  “But why, Lane?” Xhea asked, the old nickname slipping out before she thought. “What did you do?” Because she could think of nothing that an eight-year-old child could do that would require such a response.

  “It’s not anything that I did. It’s what I saw.”

  Xhea waited. At last, Abelane took a long, shuddering breath, and spoke.

  “Growing up, my friend Ella had a little brother who was born with dark magic. We didn’t know much about it, just that his power was different and that he lived in the Spire. He came for visits, sometimes.” Her eyes became distant. “Tolin, his name was. I’d almost forgotten that.

  “During one of his visits, something happened. His tether to his bondling was severed, or he used up the ghost unexpectedly—even now I don’t know what, only that the boy went from seeming healthy and cheerful to… sick. Curled in on himself, sweating, shaking.”

  The hunger. Xhea’s stomach cramped at the thought.

  “Their mother tried to get Ella and me to safety. But Ella… he was her brother. She didn’t understand. When her mother turned away, Ella ran to him and grabbed him by the shoulders. I think she was trying to hug him, make him feel better. But the moment that she touched him, she just froze.

  “Her mother was shouting, and the minder dove in to try to separate them, but it didn’t make any difference. It was as if there was just the two of them, staring into each other’s eyes—Ella silent and rigid as a statue, and Tolin just looking at her like… I don’t even know.”

  Abelane stared at the table’s surface as if the wood reflected that moment back at her, a mirror for her memory. If it had been a mirror in truth, Abelane might have smashed it into a thousand glittering shards. Xhea didn’t need to see Abelane’s hands to know that they were shaking.

  “She didn’t scream, Xhea. Didn’t make a sound, not from the moment her hand touched him. But I swear she knew what was happening. Because her eyes…” She shook her head. “I saw her eyes before her brother covered them with his tiny hand, and she was terrified.