Defiant Page 6

  Neither ghost was visible, nor was Shai’s light. Xhea watched her image limp down the corridor in a direct line to the barricade; watched herself pause, reach out—and stop. That was when the ghost had been pulled away, and yet even to her it looked different. It looked like she had been about to touch the barricade.

  She stared, a sinking feeling in her stomach, knowing what came next. In the video, her grainy self stared unmoving for a long moment. There was no way to hear what she said to Shai, no glimpse of her face; only the unexpressive expanse of her back and the slight movement of her charm-bound hair. At last her image lifted her hand once more, reached farther, and touched the barricade. For a moment, nothing. Silence, stillness—not even a glimpse of the slow crumbling of the concrete block that had stood before her. Then a cloud of dust and debris billowed outward, obscuring Xhea’s image and filling the corridor entirely.

  The image flickered and went dark. The video loop began again.

  “Well,” she muttered under her breath. “That looks bad.”

  As she looked away from the screen, Xhea realized the room had fallen silent and the councilors, one and all, were turned toward her. Desperately she cast her mind back, trying to recall the echoes of a question that she had not truly heard.

  “Verrus Edren asked what you thought of the video,” Shai prompted.

  Xhea turned to meet Verrus’s iron-dark eyes, the clink of her hair the only sound. Lies or misdirection—neither would work with this man, and his was the only opinion that counted.

  Step lightly. Her sweaty hand tightened around her walking stick.

  “It looks like I knew where to touch to make the barricade fall,” Xhea said. She kept her words bare and direct, and managed to hold his gaze. “It looks like I walked directly to the point of weakness. Like that’s what I was there to do.”

  “It does,” he replied. Only that.

  It was the horse-faced councilor from the table’s other end who asked the question: “Why did you sabotage Edren’s barricade?”

  Xhea looked toward him with a glare that said exactly how stupid she found that comment. “I didn’t, I only touched it.”

  “Let me rephrase the question,” horse-face said. “Who paid you to bring down our barricade?”

  “What?” Xhea said. She looked from one serious face to another. “No one! I’ve said what drew me there.”

  “Another ghost,” said a different councilor, skepticism clear in her face and tone. “A story that is nearly impossible for us to verify.”

  “Councilor Lorris, Councilor Suriel,” Emara interjected, halting Xhea’s reply. “Xhea has been in our care for two months and has rarely left her assigned room. Security has kept a watch on her, day and night. When, exactly, do you think someone was able to hire her? Unless, of course, you are suggesting she was hired from within.”

  The news that she’d been under security watch made Xhea cringe. She could only wonder if Mercks would have been so kind were it not for his orders.

  “That supposes that the girl’s injuries were not a pre-arranged part of the plan.”

  Xhea straightened at that—or tried to. “As if I’d cripple myself to get at your barricade,” she spat. “Why would I sabotage it from here when I could have approached from the other side at any time, unseen? And that’s if I had any idea how to turn solid objects into dust, which I don’t.”

  Again, deep in the pit of her belly, Xhea felt her magic stir and turn. It was all she could do to keep from clutching her stomach, though whether from fear or surprise or a sudden fierce gratitude at its return, she could not say.

  Emara rose, placed her palms flat on the table, and leaned forward as she spoke. “For all the inelegance of the segue, Xhea has struck upon the reason that I requested she join us today. Councilors, as the video demonstrates, Xhea has the ability to go underground without preparation or long-term consequence. The debate about who damaged the barricade and their direct motives for doing so is a necessary one—but we need more information. I assume we have not heard formal word from our rivals?”

  “Not yet.” Lorn spoke for the first time, his voice a bass rumble. “Though they know of the attack. Our various guests and partygoers from last night’s celebration were all too happy to spread news of the barricade’s fall. We are the talk of the Lower City.”

  “As we were before,” Emara said with a nod. “The warehouse district aside, our recent contract renegotiations and attempts to claim our rivals’ City contacts have not gone unnoticed. We have been making enemies, councilors, and clumsily at that.”

  The warehouse district? Contract negotiations? Xhea frowned. But what—

  The blood drained from her face as she understood. What good was magic merely filling Edren’s coffers? For that’s what she’d imagined: storage coils almost overflowing with Shai’s power … and then left there. As if Verrus would let power sit idle. If Emara spoke openly of attempts to steal other skyscrapers’ trading contracts, Xhea could only imagine what they had been doing in secret.

  Edren had never been the most powerful of the skyscrapers—until now.

  Emara continued, “As news of our vulnerability spreads, the other skyscrapers will be all too happy to take advantage. We need to understand what’s happening below ground, and we need to know now.”

  “But we have the ghost girl’s power,” someone said. “Can’t we just make a spell for that now?”

  Only Xhea heard Shai’s indignant sound of disbelief.

  Verrus glanced toward the councilor and she pulled back from the table, shutting her mouth so quickly that her teeth clacked together. Verrus turned away, once more pinning Emara with his flat stare. “Make up your mind, councilor,” he said dryly. “Either the girl is too injured to have sold us out, or she is well enough to be useful.”

  “I fail to see the two as mutually exclusive.” Bare words stripped of all emotion. “Her condition has been serious, but she is well enough now to be of assistance. And my suggestion is not to use Xhea to examine our barricade, but those of the other four skyscrapers.”

  Verrus’s eyebrow rose—the only movement in his otherwise impassive expression.

  “Further,” Emara continued, “the attackers may have left some evidence, which Xhea may be able to identify. As my colleague said, we could ‘just make a spell for that now’—but I think Xhea will know what to look for better than any of us. This is a far better use of still-precious resources, should tensions continue to escalate.”

  “And they will,” said a new voice, low and filled with gravel. Pol. Xhea turned to stare at the tall man, so long silent at Verrus’s side. He seemed no happier to be here, nor had his body language changed; if anything, the words he spoke were a challenge. “We should send the girl below.”

  Verrus met the general’s eye. Knives, Xhea thought. A dagger in the back. Each would be gentler than the look that passed between them.

  At last Verrus nodded. “Agreed. But not alone.”

  “But I—” Xhea interjected.

  “Be silent,” Verrus said without a glance. “Lorn, have the watch accompany the girl. One guard should be sufficient. How long to have someone ready?”

  Xhea thought of the presence that both she and Shai had felt waiting beyond the barricade—the watching presence, and the strange draw it had on her. That part of her story she’d not told to Emara, or to anyone.

  Again she felt that thin wisp of dark magic within her, responding not to anger now, but to fear. It was a far cry from the torrent of dark she’d known two months before—but already it was steadier, stronger. As that power trickled through her, she felt something in her ease, even as her shaking grew worse. A slow rivulet of sweat ran down from her temple; another rivulet, slower, traced a path down her calf from her injured knee.

  “No, listen,” she started, and was again cut off.

  “You will be silent when told.” Something in Verrus’s tone made Xhea’s blood run cold.

  “No sooner than this evening,�
�� Lorn replied, as if there had been no interruption. He, like his father, did not so much as glance at Xhea. No smile, no nod, no hidden gesture to acknowledge her presence, unsteady and upset against the far wall. So much for her one-time rescuer.

  “See to it.” Verrus rose. “We will have a ten minute recess.” As if the words were a command, the councilors pushed their chairs back and began to file from the room. Pol left last, his posture stiff and angry; he didn’t speak, only gently touched his daughter’s shoulder as he walked past. Only Emara and Lorn remained in the stuffy room. Xhea looked from one to another, all but grinding her teeth in frustration.

  “And what, exactly, was the point of that?” she said at last. “Other than humiliating me.”

  More humiliating still: her hands were visibly shaking now, her right fist trembling with her stick in its white-knuckled grip.

  “They needed to see you,” Emara said. “They needed to know that you are not a threat.”

  See that she was too small and weak and injured to have sold them out, she meant; see that she was too stupid to have even thought of such a plan.

  “Fine. You got what you wanted.” In truth, Xhea had also gotten what she thought she’d wanted: the opportunity to go below, investigate the mystery of the disappearing ghost, and see what else had been wrought in the tunnels beneath the Lower City in her absence. But this hardly felt like success. “Happy now?”

  “Xhea,” Emara started.

  “No, leave it,” Xhea said, ignoring everyone as she limped to the door. No one moved to stop her, nor spoke until the door slammed at her back.

  “I wish we could go home,” Shai said at last.

  “Me too.”

  If only she knew where that was.

  Xhea was exhausted by the time she reached her small room, and her anger had fled with her energy. She sat on the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands.

  Shai, in contrast, had only grown angrier the farther she got from the meeting room, her usual steadiness giving way to frustration. She paced back and forth before Xhea’s bed, the rant that had begun floors above still going strong.

  “And the casual way that woman just mentioned using my magic? Like it was just assumed that I’d give it to her—to any of them? I’m not even a person to them, am I? Just some sort of resource.”

  Xhea wanted to lie down, but she couldn’t, not yet. Instead, heart in her mouth, she carefully rolled up her pant leg, wincing as the pockets’ stitching caught on her knee brace. The fabric was dark green, she thought—dark enough, anyway, that it hid most stains.

  Ignoring Shai’s ranting, Xhea opened the brace and pulled it from her knee, hissing as it tugged on the flesh around the bandages. The bandages were next, the thin gauze wrappings stiff and crusted dark.

  Xhea sat back and regarded the renewed ruin of her knee.

  The swelling and mottled bruising were the same as they had been that morning, yet her skin was now smeared dark with blood. The medic’s cut across her knee had reopened, splitting along its length to gape like a slack-lipped mouth.

  Shai had gone quiet. “What happened?” she whispered. Her anger, so fierce and sudden, had fled as quickly as it had come. The ghost knelt by Xhea’s bedside and reached for her wounded leg with one tentative hand. “It was better than this before. I saw it this morning—that wound was healed.”

  Not healed, but it had been closed, the stitches removed. She could give the easy answer, she knew: that she had overexerted herself, stretched the new skin too hard in climbing the stairs. It was, after all, the answer she would give to Emara or Lorn or the medic who had treated her—the answer for anyone who would not know her steady, calm words for lies, or hear the panic, carefully suppressed, that lay beneath.

  To Shai and Shai alone she said, “It’s returning.”

  Shai met her gaze. Her silver eyes, her gentle face and long pale hair, seemed to fill the whole of Xhea’s vision.

  “Your magic.”

  Xhea nodded. “Last night, before the ghost got pulled through the barrier, I felt it. Just a little bit, but there. And again when I got angry in Emara’s office, and in the Council meeting. That’s when I felt my knee start bleeding.”

  Shai rose from the floor and moved to sit at Xhea’s side, close but not quite touching. For a moment Xhea closed her eyes, feeling the chill of Shai’s presence and the warm glow of her magic.

  She missed the painkillers’ haze. Missed, if she were honest, the cocooning blanket of misery and despair in which she’d existed these past few weeks, and the artificial distance it had created. Awake now and aware, she could not keep the fear at bay.

  “I think that this is what it does.” Xhea stared at her knee and its traceries of blood and sweat, its storm-dark swirl of bruises. “My magic. Whatever this power is, it’s the opposite of bright magic—the opposite of your light and life and growth. I’ve been turning it over in my head, hours and hours just staring at this blighted ceiling—what this magic is, what it does. Now it seems like the stronger this power gets, the more damage it will do.”

  “So—what are you saying? That you’ll never heal?”

  Xhea smiled. It was a pale imitation of her normal grin—but then she felt like a pale imitation of her normal self. “Maybe not. Not on my own, anyway.”

  Shai opened her mouth to protest and Xhea cut her off with an impatient wave of her hand.

  “No, stop. Listen to me. My magic, whatever it is—it kills. More than anyone, you know that. It kills and unravels spells, turns everything to black and ash. How can that power flood through me and not do any damage?” Xhea looked back to her knee; a bead of blood glistened as it rolled down her shin, a slow and dark tear.

  When she spoke again, her voice was low, haunted. “Look at me, Shai. I’m fifteen, probably older, and I look—what, maybe twelve? If I’m lucky. I’m too small. I never grow. And I don’t heal—not quickly and not well.”

  “You’re hardly the first to be small for your age …” Shai said, yet the words trailed away, and, it seemed, the ghost’s will to speak them. She looked again at the bleeding ruin of Xhea’s knee, her expression a slow study in despair.

  Xhea carefully took off her boots, letting them thump to the floor. She wore socks day and night, despite the summer heat. Only now did she draw the sock off her right foot, showing Shai what she had hidden: a foot bruised black with blood. Such bruising was normal right after surgery, when the blood from internal incisions were pulled down by gravity—but this, like all else, should have been long healed. It wasn’t just the external wound that had re-opened; her knee was bleeding on the inside.

  “I know that you and Emara were just trying to motivate me to try harder and … you weren’t wrong.” Xhea smiled sadly. “And you were. No, I wasn’t trying as hard as I should have been, I know that—and yet my knee isn’t healed. Exercises can’t help a gaping wound. Now that my magic is returning, I think …” Her throat suddenly felt tight; she forced herself to continue. “I think it’s only going to get worse.”

  “But what you said in the meeting—what we’re supposed to do—”

  “I know. But what choice do I have?”

  Verrus Edren had allowed her to stay within Edren’s walls only because of her link to Shai; she knew that now. He had no use for her and would toss her back on the streets without pause or regret if only he could do so without losing Shai’s power.

  Xhea had to prove her worth, no matter how small that worth might be. Perhaps they could find her a wheelchair or a walker, something to help. Even considering that option felt like another bruise to her pride. The shame at being made so helpless, so dependent, burned; and no amount of logic, nor mental reassurances, made the feelings any weaker. If there was any other option …

  She took a deep breath and asked, “The healing spells on my knee—did you get a good look at them while they lasted?”

  “I, well … yes. For the reinforcement.” Shai had attempted to fuel the medic’s healing spells to s
low their degradation. Yet the spell lines had been overwhelmed by Shai’s power, weak and inexpertly wrought as they were. Despite her skill and practice, there was only so much a magic-poor Lower City medic could do.

  “Do you remember the spell’s shape—the lines of intent?”

  Shai looked at her then, the sudden directness of that gaze telling Xhea that the ghost knew all too well what she was going to propose. For all her magic, Shai had never learned complex spellwork, being used instead for raw power rather than any skill with the energy she generated. But that didn’t mean she lacked the ability—or, at least, the potential.

  “You said yourself that healing spells don’t work on you.”

  “I said that they never last long enough to work. They … unravel, dissolve, whatever. But they do work. When I was trapped in Orren, a medic-in-training helped heal some of the damage done to my knee when I got tangled in that entrapment spell.” She’d been able to move her leg again and stand, if barely. Never mind that her crash-landing in Eridian and fall from the City had undone what good Lin’s spells had wrought, and worsened the damage by far.

  “For a spell to work, it would have to be continually recharged by the original caster—which I could never pay for, even if I could find someone willing to touch me long enough to set the spells. But if you created the spells and fueled them …” Xhea let the words trail away, looking at Shai. Trying to keep the sudden, desperate hope from her expression.

  “What about the pain?” Shai asked quietly. “You reacted so badly to even a spark of magic. Now you want me to … what, set a spell and keep pumping magic into it, no matter what?”

  Xhea laughed thinly. “Pretty much.”

  Shai shook her head and looked away. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “I think this is my only chance, Shai. Here. Now.” Xhea looked back at her knee—at the thin trails of blood down her leg, her blackened foot—and bowed her head as if in penitence. “If my magic is returning, then my reaction—and the pain—will only get worse if we wait. I’ll destroy the spells faster. If I’m ever going to be anything but the walking wounded, then it has to be now.”