Towers Fall

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Shai said only, I hope that you are wrong.

  Maybe this woman knew Xhea when she was younger; maybe she knew children who had Xhea’s power—but she did not know Xhea now and she did not know Shai. Did not understand any part of what they’d created together.

  And it was true that Xhea took from her; Shai felt the faint, steady pull of the spelled tether even now, drawing some essential part of her away. But even bound, some part of Xhea flowed back to Shai down that link. Magic, yes, but something else, something deeper. Shai believed that, for all that her very self was bound to Xhea, so was Xhea’s spirit bound to her.

  Shai moved to wake Xhea, but Abelane held up her hand.

  “Wait.” Abelane raised something on the flat of her outstretched palm. It was a moment before Shai recognized it as a wet and slightly battered elevator port. “Can you fix this?”

  Shai hesitated, then peered closer.

  One look at the remaining spelllines and Shai knew what had been done; she could see the unique degradation of both the magic and metal casing that spoke of dark magic. Despite that damage, only a few key guiding spells had been snapped; the whole had not unraveled.

  Xhea’s control is getting better, Shai thought; or maybe it was that she had only a thin thread of power instead of an unbound torrent. Either way, the port could be fixed—even reprogrammed.

  She had not been able to create a working such as this, but as Shai studied the lines of intent that remained and their stabilizing anchors, she understood where she had gone wrong. Carefully she added her repairs, watching how each added to the whole, and memorizing its shape so that she might recreate it. A moment more, and she refueled the empty storage coil that fueled it.

  She drew back.

  “Thank you,” Abelane said, and rose.

  Shai watched, eyes widening, as Abelane made to activate the elevator port. And yet she looked back to Xhea, hesitated, and then gave a small, shuddering sigh.

  As one, Abelane and Shai said, “Xhea, wake up.”

  Abelane stood back as Xhea opened her eyes and pushed herself to her feet. She muttered about the ground’s poor comfort and the foolishness of falling asleep—words that neither Abelane nor Shai truly listened to.

  Shai saw Abelane holding the repaired elevator port behind her back, fingers tense. Abelane tried to smile and nod as Xhea spoke of her plan to return to the Lower City—her plan, she said, to save them all.

  “Look,” Abelane said at last, holding out the elevator port to show its blinking lights. “It works again.”

  “I fixed it,” Shai said quietly.

  Xhea looked from one to the other, and did not speak.

  Abelane broke the silence. “I can’t do this. I can’t go with you.” She held her hand flat before her, as if it was an explanation; it was shaking. She was sweating, Shai realized, and her skin looked far too pale.

  Xhea seemed to notice none of these things. She stiffened at the words, as if Abelane had slapped her—and Shai watched as that sharp, sudden shock bled into anger.

  “Xhea,” Shai said, understanding—and wanting to interrupt the argument before it started. “She’s afraid.”

  Xhea just glanced at Shai, yet Shai understood the question nonetheless.

  “Of you, yes, but mostly of all the rest. Think of what she’s walked into.” A pause, then, “I know where Edren’s encampment is. They have spelled walls, they have food, and I’m sure they have work that she could do. She could even help protect Edren’s children.

  “It’s not about you, Xhea,” Shai added softly, and hoped that her words were true. “We’re going to the besieged Lower City on the dawn of the Spire’s attack with no plan, no allies, nothing. Who in their right mind would want to come with?”

  Xhea laughed at that; the sound was tight. But she nodded and looked back to Abelane.

  The woman stood with her brow creased in worry; she knew that Shai had been speaking and had no sense of her words. She all but sagged in relief when Xhea told her, “You should go somewhere safe.”

  The rest was only details: Shai’s map to Edren’s encampment, Abelane testing the elevator’s new controlling spells, discussions of who to find and what to say. At last the spell ribbons arced up and over Abelane, enclosing her in an opaque, white bubble. It rose.

  A moment, and then Xhea turned away, looking to the light of the Lower City. Only Shai watched the elevator as it skimmed over the ruins until it vanished. Some part of her was glad to see Abelane gone.

  Then Shai turned, returning to Xhea’s side, and they planned their return to the Lower City.

  If Shai had missed the underground—and she had, strange as it seemed—she had not missed the tunnels.

  “Ugh,” she said, staring down the long, dark length of what Xhea insisted was the perfectly stable Yellow Line subway tunnel.

  “It’s an express line,” Xhea said. “Runs deep and straight. At this end there’s hardly any flooding.”

  “Hardly any is not the same as none.”

  Xhea shrugged. “It was just raining. What do you expect?”

  Sure enough, the tunnel roof was patterned with rivulets of water, some running along the tunnel’s curved ceiling, others dripping to widening puddles on the ground. Nearest the tunnel entrance—marked by a wide bridge, mostly standing, where the trains had surfaced—the tracks had long since been dragged away; yet within sight of her light, Shai could see rails where the tunnel deepened, descending underground. The ground itself was flat, made of gravel, and covered with decaying leaves.

  The Yellow Line, Xhea had explained, ran directly into the Lower City through Rown’s territory. It was the deepest of the tunnels, and while within the core it was often flooded to impassibility, it would bring them close to the underground tunnels that they needed. Close to the Lower City’s heart—or, barring that, Farrow.

  It was a good approach—faster and easier than walking through the ruins. Even so, just stepping inside the mouth of the tunnel made Shai wrinkle her nose at the smell.

  Xhea, seemingly oblivious, tromped forward.

  As Xhea walked, Shai spread her hands and wove the beginnings of an elevator spell. It was delicate work—far more delicate than the brute-power spells she’d managed to date. To make matters more difficult, she was attempting to create the spells without the physical structure of the elevator port to support the anchors, while simultaneously trying to modify the spell to their needs.

  Frowning over her work, Shai said, “Tell me the rest of your plan.”

  Xhea told Shai what she had seen: the dark magic of the City above swirling toward the Spire in a vortex of power. The Spire, Xhea explained, was not alive, only a channel for magic.

  “Everything seems to make dark magic, if only in small quantities—part of the spell exhaust, I think. Part of the power itself, like a balance to so much light. Because bright magic might be the power of life, but there is no life without death, right? There’s nothing that lives that does not die.”

  Shai looked down at her ghostly hands and the half-woven spell within her cupped palms; she glowed as if she were made only of light. There was no darkness, there; no shadow.

  She had no more than opened her mouth to dispute Xhea’s claim than she thought of the way that magic now flowed between them. Filtered by that link, Shai’s magic and ghostly essence stabilized Xhea, fed her in a way that mere food could not—and Shai? Unbound, she had all but lost her magic entirely, before the link to Xhea—and the power that came to her through it—brought it rushing back.

  Each a balance, one to the other.

  Yet if that were true, where was the balance in the City? Like her, it was made only of bright magic; bright magic its foundations and its walls, its power and its life.

  Xhea was still talking. “So they take all that waste power, and they dump it down here. I don’t think they realized that it, too, could create a living being. And why would they? The Lower City was almost dormant—until Farrow fell, anyway.

&n
bsp; “But all that dark magic that they pour on us, night after night. What if we gave it back? Repel the dark power and let them deal with it.”

  From everything that Xhea had seen, there was no reason that channel couldn’t work both ways. They could funnel all the dark magic of the Lower City up through the Spire and out into the City beyond.

  “Poison the Towers?” Shai asked, incredulous. “All of them?”

  Right now, she wouldn’t mind if the people of the poorer Towers faced retaliation—and knew that those she saw here, stealing and scavenging on the ground, would only be the most visible set of culprits.

  She thought, too, of her conversation with Allenai: its massive complexity, its strange understanding of the world, the purity of its joy. Though they profited, the Towers themselves were ignorant of many of the their inhabitants’ choices; and she shied away from the thought of making them needlessly suffer.

  Xhea said, “Think of Farrow. It’s alive, isn’t it?”

  “It’s dying,” Shai countered.

  “But not because of the Lower City. Not because of the dark magic.”

  “Its heart is tainted.” She had felt that, holding it in her hands: the otherworldly shiver of its magic across her palms, its softly golden radiance turned gray. It had not hurt—yet it had not felt quite right, either.

  Was it wrong? Shai asked herself. Tainted, poisoned? Or just different?

  “And if the Towers became tainted, what then?” Xhea asked. “What do you think will happen?”

  “Well, obviously something that they’re concerned about, otherwise they wouldn’t be dumping the magic in the first place.” Even so, Shai considered.

  Dark magic in a Tower—a tainted heart—would mean, what? Her mind went right to the people: any dark magic in their surroundings would affect the Towers’ citizens—tainting not just their magic, but the health and long life and prosperity that they took for granted. The people of the Lower City had lived in close proximity to a high concentration of that power—but for all that they were poor and sickened and died, she would not have said that it was only the dark magic that made them suffer.

  If not the people, then what? It might hurt the workings, perhaps—the internal structures of the Towers that supported people’s lives and luxuries; it might affect their defenses, or perhaps the Tower’s ability to shape and reform itself.

  Or was it simpler than that? Dark magic unmade light, as surely as bright could burn away dark. Combined, even in such small quantities, the magic would be less powerful. To keep any amount of dark magic was tantamount to throwing away renai—unraveling the very fortunes upon which lives in the City were based.

  Lives, Shai thought, and economics. And politics. Always, always politics.

  “I think it would be a disruption,” Xhea said when Shai explained her thoughts. “But I don’t think anyone would die. And the Lower City is bigger and stronger than any of the Towers. Maybe we can’t stop the Spire or the Towers themselves—but it can. If it wants to. If it knew that it could.”

  “You need to speak to it, then. Convince it.”

  “Not convince it,” Xhea said. “But… show it. I don’t know what I could say, but there’s so much it doesn’t understand.”

  Shai understood; she’d spoken now with a Tower. She remembered that feeling of opening herself up and all her truths pouring out—little good that it had done in the end. If Xhea could just reach the Lower City and connect with its heart, it could learn what stood against it—and what it might do to defend itself.

  They walked in quiet for some time, though the tunnel around them was anything but silent. Water dripped, and Xhea’s hair chimed, and the gravel beneath Xhea’s feet crunched with every step.

  Give the magic back. Xhea’s idea was simple, and yet…

  “If the Lower City sent all the dark magic back to the City above,” Shai said slowly, “how would it live?”

  Because that magic was the Lower City’s body and soul, its blood and breath and life. To stop the flow of dark power to the ground—to send it back—would leave the Lower City no better off than Farrow: sickly and starved, slowly dying.

  “Sweetness,” Xhea muttered. “I don’t know.”

  Shai frowned. “Or would it just reverse the flow for a day, an hour?”

  “A night,” Xhea replied absently—and stopped dead in her tracks. She turned to Shai. “The dark magic only flows at night. And the Spire attacks tomorrow.”

  “How long is it before dawn?”

  Xhea didn’t bother to reply.

  If Xhea could have run, she would have. As it was, she pushed to the edge of what her body could handle: her breath came short, her limp more pronounced, and sweat beaded across her already damp forehead.

  “Here,” Shai said at last. “Stop a minute.”

  She held out her hand and the elevator spell bloomed from her palm. Xhea’s eyes widened as bright ribbons of magic arced up and around her. Shai felt the sudden tug on her magic that meant that Xhea was trying to compress her own power as tight as she could.

  As spells went, it wasn’t beautiful. It was, if anything, slightly crooked; and as it lifted Xhea unsteadily into the air, jerking and sputtering, it leaned precariously to one side. Xhea, clinging to her cane, looked alarmed.

  But they didn’t need it to lift her very far from the ground—a few inches above the tracks and flooded sections would be high enough. Shai controlled the spell’s speed and direction. Even so, Xhea yelped as the spell leapt forward.

  In her mind, Shai tried to measure distance. She did not know this tunnel, its markings or its curves. How long until we reach the Lower City? The tunnel descended, deeper and deeper, and soon the tracks beneath them were lost under a foot of stagnant, swampy water. Shai wrinkled her nose, pushing the spell faster.

  Then, ahead, there was a glimmer of light—true light. Shai’s brow creased in confusion as they drew closer, and she tried to make sense of what she saw.

  “Xhea,” Shai said, and only then did the girl look up.

  In front of them, the flooding did not end; it had been filled in. There was a hole in the tunnel roof—a hole, and just beyond it, no tunnel at all. Rubble filled the tunnel from side to side, a great mound of dirt and concrete that created a long sloping incline before them. The smell of dust and smoke was suddenly strong in her nose.

  “I thought you said this tunnel was safe.”

  “I did.” Xhea’s voice was quiet, so quiet. “It was.”

  Carefully, Shai set Xhea down on that pile of rubble, banishing her spell. Xhea steadied herself and took a step forward. Another. Her eyes had gone wide.

  “What is this?” Shai asked. “What happened?”

  Xhea walked forward as if in a dream, her steps unsteady even with the cane’s aid. Partway up that slope she paused, bending so that she could touch the rubble before her. Concrete blown to dust and ashes, Shai thought—all of it wet with rain, clumping together and clinging to Xhea’s fingers as she dug.

  Beneath that surface, Xhea found a bit of metal, a small fragment of wood. She fished out a shard of what seemed to be flooring tile and held it before her, turning it over slowly before letting it fall back to the pile.

  Xhea straightened and looked to where the pre-dawn light now filtered down from the hole in the tunnel roof, the rubble leading toward it like a huge, uneven ramp. She took a step, and another, until she stood beneath that hole. A band of dim light fell upon her face, illuminating her features, slack with horror.

  She did not speak, could not speak.

  “What is it?” Shai asked. “Xhea? What’s happened?”

  “It’s…” Xhea hesitated, swallowed. Tried again. “It was… Rown.”

  Xhea staggered up the ragged incline, smelling smoke and dust and rain-wet earth, hoping she was wrong. Knowing she was not.

  She had to crawl the last few steep steps, clinging to her cane. She rolled onto the ground beyond, then pulled herself away from that gaping hole. Sat and stared at
Rown.

  Or, rather, where Rown had once stood.

  Where that dark, hulking mass of a skyscraper had been, blockish and battered, there was only rubble. It made a small mountain, its long sloping sides crushing other, smaller buildings that had yet to fall. No wires in that mess, though; no rebar. If she were to sift through that broken pile stone by stone, she knew she would find no sign of a storage coil, no jewelry, no plants or organic materials of any kind.

  Such things a Tower might use. Of the rest, there was only dust.

  Xhea pushed herself to her feet, staring. She felt like she could not breathe.

  Magic still glittered on some of the pieces before her—anchors for the spells that had brought the skyscraper down, collapsing it floor by floor, or those that had sorted through the pieces, claiming the good from the bad and letting the rest fall.

  She stepped closer. Something dark pooled on the wet pavement before her. Oil, perhaps, or fuel.

  No blood, she thought, the words a prayer. If the poorer Towers had planned on bringing down the skyscraper, surely they had emptied it first; surely Rown’s citizens were all out in the ruins somewhere, huddled together against the rain.

  But, knowing Rown, they had not been.

  In the Lower City, a skyscraper meant life—but to Rown’s citizens, their skyscraper had been more. Rown took those broken by life or circumstance and gave them a home—a community—when no one else would.

  Or they had.

  Being part of Rown was like a religion, or so she’d been told. Loyalty was like blood and breath there, the good of the skyscraper their unthinking mantra. To abandon those walls, that hard-won territory? Many would choose death first.

  Xhea walked on, climbing, and it was not the broken ground that made her unsteady.

  She felt as Shai followed, rising into the empty air; felt the ghost’s shock and horror, twin to her own. They did not speak. What was there to say?

  Xhea looked up. Atop nearby buildings, she could see landed aircars, people moving. One structure, a low warehouse that had once stood behind Rown, already glittered with a pale network of spells, ready to come down. Above, the cloud-covered sky had gone from black to darkest gray, while the Towers danced against that empty backdrop.