The Hidden City

by Michelle West

  He’d taught her well enough; she knew just how far that would get her.

  What was the point of knowing? Of seeing things before they happened? She hated the vision, the helplessness that came with it, the utter failure that marked her whenever it came. Why had she been cursed this way?

  And yet, she had an answer, now, in the streets of this holding, her father—her whole family—nothing more than memories, some bitter and some sweet. No one listened to a child. No one heard what a child said clearly. No one but other children.

  And Rath, maybe.

  Her Oma was gone, and her mother, and her father, all of whom would have stopped her from her headlong flight into Winter streets. They would have held her back, held onto her, kept her safe from the cold and the danger.

  She missed them bitterly. She missed the safety of their arms, the warmth of their stories, even the heat of their anger, the bitter sting of their worry.

  And yet . . .

  She didn’t. Because the safety they offered had been a type of cage, and she understood that now. The cage came with love, was born of it, but in the end—in the end, had she still been under its lock and key, Finch would be dead, and Rath would be dead and Arann and Lefty, and Lander, Fisher, Jester. Duster would be something else, and might still become that.

  And this boy?

  She knew his fear. Felt it as if it were her own because it was her own. He spoke to her, wordlessly, and she, unable to speak in kind, spoke in a different fashion, running faster and faster as his fear peaked, as it shifted, as it grew so damn big he could no longer contain it.

  It would devour him. It had already begun.

  She cried out, she couldn’t help herself; what he couldn’t contain, she didn’t even try. She stumbled in the snow, her hands plunging through it to the hard, frozen dirt beneath. She tasted it, felt it melt against her hot cheeks, her warm skin.

  Arann was there in an instant, and he hauled her to her feet as if she weighed no more than Lefty. Carver waited in silence, and Lefty stared at her as if—as if this were normal.

  Quiet, succinct, he said, “He found her body.”

  Jewel swallowed and nodded. It was true. He had.

  They didn’t ask her why.

  Why this boy? Why this one? She had no time to think it, although she knew—who better?—that there would be many deaths in the city over the next few days. She couldn’t save them all. It had never truly occurred to her to try.

  And how did the gift—the cursed gift—choose?

  Like this, instinct and more driving her, herding her, taking her through twisting lanes of the oldest part of the City. Tears had frozen, had stopped; everything had stopped. The world had ended.

  She made no noise because he made no noise. It was trapped inside him, as if, by silence, he could stave off knowledge. She stopped a moment, hand against a wall that was leaning at an awkward angle. Cold wall, snow running between her fingers like a winter web.

  Lefty caught her elbow. Arann caught her shoulders.

  She started to speak, but Lefty spoke instead—in silence, in the language of hands and fingers dancing across palms. As if she were Lander.

  And as if she were Lander, watching his hands, his missing fingers some part of their movement, she understood what he was saying, and she swallowed. She could breathe now.

  She had found him.

  But as she turned the last corner, as she came shoulder to almost-shoulder with Carver, it was almost too much.

  He was a boy. Smaller, she thought, than Finch. Possibly younger, it was hard to tell. His eyes were ringed with dark circles, his hair darker with snow, wet and flat against his unadorned head. No hat, of course. No heavy sweater. She couldn’t see his feet, couldn’t tell if there was anything between his soles and the snow.

  But she could see that he was struggling with a burden several times larger than he; that he was trying to pull that burden across the snow, toward the mouth of the alley in which they all stood in silence, bearing witness.

  He looked up as he approached them, struggling, pulling. She met his eyes, thought of them ever after as a brown so dark it was almost black. He did not let go of his burden.

  His mother.

  And Jewel found herself kneeling in the snow. She didn’t know what had killed his mother; whether it was the cold or something else was impossible to tell at this distance. Nor was it important; it was fact, it was the past.

  The present was here.

  She held out a hand to him, both hands, palms out to show that they were empty. She might have approached a starving or injured dog in the same way, but it was the only way she knew to approach; she was afraid he would startle, or run, and if he did—he would be lost.

  Lost to snow, an orphan among orphans.

  She said, distinctly, forcing her breath to even out, “My name is Jay. These are my friends. We’ve come to help you.”

  He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. And she was; she was speaking in Torra. Her Oma’s tongue. The language of comfort and disapproval. She shifted into Weston, spoke again, slowly.

  He said, “My mother’s not well. She has to go home.”

  No one spoke.

  He knew now. He had to know. But knowing something wasn’t the same as accepting it; never had been. This boy—she shook her head. Lifted it, made certain he could see her eyes as clearly as she could see his.

  She could have asked him what his name was; she didn’t. Instead, she said, “If you’ll let us, we’ll help you. We’ll help you take her home.” And she turned a pleading gaze on Arann, the only one of her den that might be able to make truth of the statement.

  Arann didn’t even blink. He nodded, but he approached the boy very slowly, and his hands, as Jewel’s, were exposed and empty.

  The boy was beyond shivering, and his skin was so white it was almost blue. His hands were bunched in fists, frozen in shape.

  Arann knelt, slid his hands and arms into the snow that surrounded the body, and lifted; he tried not to grunt or stagger. He did them all proud. But Carver understood and moved to help him anyway, handing Lefty something as he did.

  Lefty held Carver’s dagger in his good hand; his maimed hand he had slid into a pocket rather than under his armpit. The boy watched them all, but his gaze was like a trapped butterfly, a frantic moth; it came at last to rest upon the thing that burned.

  His mother’s face, her open, sightless eyes, her slightly parted lips.

  She was stiff with cold, possibly frozen. Jewel knew that you could freeze to death, but she had never seen it.

  They walked, and the boy walked with them, his hand on his mother’s face, or on her arm, the entire way. It took a very long time, and by the end of it, not even Arann could pretend the burden was insignificant. It wasn’t so much that she was dead; it was that she was heavy. But heavier by far, he would have still tried; she saw it in his face, and loved him for it, the sharp kind of love that was mixed with pride and pain. He didn’t notice; he barely looked at anything but the stranger, the young boy, and his expression had the same unguarded worry that he often showed Lefty’s back.

  They had missed most of the early market by the time they reached the building the child called home. He led them in. Stopped to speak, and then stopped again; she could almost hear him say: I have to ask my mother.

  It would have torn out her heart if he had, but she was spared at least that much. She didn’t know him yet. She couldn’t touch him. But for a moment, she wanted to pull him into her arms and shield him from the simple truth of death. To make it a lie.

  And so she came to understand completely how the complicated cage she had lived in almost all of her life was built, just as she had come to understand that it existed at all. She watched him open the door, torn between the two lessons that had been long in coming, and would never leave her.

  “She’s tired,” he said faintly, and led them to the bed that occupied the far wall, stepping across bare, dry boards
in an almost empty room. He pulled the single blanket back; the bed itself dipped in the middle as if it would fold beneath weight.

  Arann was red with exertion, but silent and steady as he carried his burden the final few steps, and with Carver’s help, laid her down. Jewel brushed the snow off as best she could. Saw that the woman’s feet were bare.

  Wondered what the last words she had spoken to her son had been. Wondered, as well, what the last words her son would speak to her would be.

  And found that she didn’t need to know, didn’t want to. She nodded abruptly to the door, and when Arann and Carver just stood there awkwardly, lifted her hands in an abrupt and clumsy mimicry of Lefty’s fluid language: Go out there.

  She said, “We’ll wait for you.” Uncertain that he heard her at all.

  They waited for fifteen minutes, standing in a heavy silence that was broken only when Lefty sat and the floor creaked beneath him. Arann sat heavily by his side, and brought his large hands to his face, covering as much of it as he could. Carver stood, watchful, waiting. Jewel began to pace.

  “You want to take him home,” Lefty said, looking up.

  Jewel nodded. No point in lying to Lefty. “He belongs with us,” she told them all quietly. Carver nodded, and Arann removed his hands, lifted his head, and looked up at her. His eyes were red, but he wasn’t weeping; it might have been exertion that colored his face.

  “Why?” Arann asked her.

  “He just does.”

  But the giant shook his head. “Why us?” He gestured at Lefty and Lefty nodded. “Why any of us?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I just know. He belongs with us. And we belong together. We don’t have to like it,” she added.

  “We don’t hate it,” Carver told her. “But—”

  “But?”

  “There are so many people like us, Jay, we all want to know—why us?”

  She had never really wondered. She shrugged. “I can’t explain it,” she told them quietly. “Not to you, not to myself. But I don’t worry about explaining things I know to me.

  “You’re there, in the future, you’re part of my life, and part of each other’s. And we need him.” The words were true in a way that dawn was; inevitable, unstoppable.

  She was cold and tired, and relief robbed her of the driving force that had carried her this far. “He has nowhere else to go,” she added.

  They didn’t point out that this was true of many, many people, not all of them children. They understood that in some fashion, they’d been chosen.

  But so had she; she bore the gift, but she didn’t control it, couldn’t direct it, couldn’t force it to tell her things she needed to know. She could accept it or deny it; she could be helpless or she could act.

  And that was true of everything. She squared her shoulders and said, “he’s coming now.”

  The door was still.

  But Lefty and Arann stood quickly, backing away from it to give the boy room; the hall was narrow and not at all well lit.

  He came, opening the door with one hand, while in the other he held the gathered edges of a patched, thin blanket, a kind of pack. He was white as snow, just as blinding to her eyes, and so small, so frail, she thought he might be Finch’s brother. His eyes were red, and his lips were swollen, and he looked gaunt. She had never believed in ghosts, but she could see one in him now.

  “I’m Jay,” she said quietly. “This is Carver, and this is Arann. The boy behind him is Lefty. None of us—” She stopped. Held out a hand.

  He looked at it.

  Arann very gently removed his belongings from his hands, and the boy let them go without suspicion or dread; anyone who had carried his mother home could carry anything he owned, anywhere, and he would not question what they meant to do with it.

  He slid his cold fingers into hers, and she caught his hand, holding it a little too tightly. “We’re going home,” she told him. “We have to go to the Common, but we’re going home after that.” She knew he wouldn’t ask.

  But he nodded, sagged a moment and closed his eyes.

  Chapter Tweenty-one

  RATH CAME HOME TO a more crowded house. It was, of course, in his nature to notice even the minute changes that occurred within his domicile—or indeed within anyone else’s—but even had it not been, he would have been aware instantly that more than just numbers had shifted.

  There was a good deal of silence, something he prized and often grew weary of repeating demands for, but it was a layered silence, a thing both born of childhood and yet outside of it. The beginnings of something different.

  And there was a new boy.

  He was perhaps Finch’s size, perhaps smaller; it was hard to tell. He did not have Lefty’s obvious skittishness, nor Lander’s mute silence; he did not have Jewel’s wariness, or Finch’s flutter, and if he smiled, it was a quiet smile, unlike the manic and aptly named Jester’s. There was absolutely nothing of Carver or Duster in him. Only in Arann, a boy twice his weight, and at odds with his coloring, did there seem to be any kinship; the new boy was quiet.

  He was, Rath thought, in shock. But it was a shock that did not displace the ability to observe, or the necessity for it. Rath knew at once that this was another of Jay’s orphans, and in this cold and bitter weather, he grudged the addition only slightly.

  Jewel looked up when he entered and made a direct line for him, her hand reaching out for his sleeve. He let her grab him and lead him to his room, as if this were natural; he could tell that she was nervous, and had every reason to be. But Rath was weary, and in this act—the saving of this boy—he saw the opposite of the act that now tormented him; this boy was Duster’s opposite.

  He opened his door and entered, which was difficult because Jewel did not choose to relinquish his arm. Only when the door was shut did she slump, her shoulders folding inward gracelessly.

  “You have a new boy,” he said quietly, his voice measured and deliberately distant.

  She nodded. “You noticed.”

  “Where did you find this one?”

  She shrugged. “Lower holdings,” she said at last. And then, when his gaze did not waver, she muttered, “I don’t know which one. I just ran.”

  “You just ran?”

  “I—I just ran. To him.”

  “Another one of your premonitions?”

  “My what?”

  “Your visions.” He paused. “You knew where he was.”

  “It was different, with Teller.”

  “Teller?”

  “What we’ll call him. He doesn’t talk much.”

  “I’m surprised you think he’d have the chance.”

  She frowned; she was on the edge of an age where teasing of any sort made her prickly. It was why Rath enjoyed it. But he waited. He found himself wanting this story, so different in texture from Duster’s, for he had already made his decision, and he didn’t like it. He wouldn’t change it; he understood that it was, in all ways, a test. But of who, in the end, only time would tell. Time and death, as it so often did in war.

  And this was a war, personal, small, but necessary in all the usual ways.

  “Why this boy?” he asked quietly, when she looked away.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. He’d expected as much; it was almost always her response at times like this.

  “He’s not like Duster.”

  “Nothing like Duster.” She hesitated, and then said, “It was different, with Teller, Rath. I didn’t so much see as feel him. We were on our way to the Common. To buy extra blankets, clothing. Stuff.”

  He nodded.

  “Arann, Lefty, Carver. Me. We were most of the way there—and I . . .” She shook her head. She would have to become more adept with words in the future; they deserted her when she required them, and in the end—but it was not the end, that nebulous future, and it might never come to pass. He held his breath, exhaled. “I am not angry, Jewel.”

  “Jay.”

  “Jay, then. I’m not angry that he�
�s here. I surprise even myself with my tolerance.”

  She didn’t smile. She looked . . . surprised. If it were in him, Rath might have taken umbrage. He smiled instead, deliberately adopting a casual expression. “But I’m curious. You said this boy was different.”

  “The feeling was different,” she said. Her brows furrowed as she frowned. Time would etch those lines in place, but when the expression passed, they were gone, as if written upon the surface of moving water. “His mother didn’t come home last night. He waited for her. Waited most of the morning. And then he went out searching.”

  “His mother—”

  “We didn’t ask,” she said, and her voice was so curt, there was command in it. Or warning. She could surprise him in so many ways, he wondered if that wasn’t part of her charm. Not all of it, but part. “But, Rath—I felt as if he were part of my future. An important part. I felt as if I needed him, somehow.”

  From Jewel, this was an admission, and perhaps a costly one.

  “Needing people,” Rath said carefully, “is not a crime.”

  “You don’t.”

  “And my lack would be considered criminal by many, and has been, Jewel. Do not look to me for an example to follow; it would not suit you. Ever. Be Jewel Markess; allow me to be Old Rath. We are what we are.”

  “People can change.”

  “They can. But for me, need is a weakness. And for you, Jewel, I believe it is a strength. Do not deprive yourself of the strengths you have.”

  “You didn’t say that about Duster.”

  “You don’t need Duster.”

  “She’s a part of the den.”

  Den. He stopped himself from smiling, and found that it wasn’t hard.

  “But yes, he’s different. Calmer. Rath—his mother died. He found her body in the snow.”

  “The others saw this?”

  She nodded. “They were with me,” she added softly. “They didn’t even ask questions; I ran, and they followed. As if I were—” But she didn’t continue, and he didn’t force the issue.

  “She was the only family he had,” she added.