When I woke up it was dark, and not just because it was night either. For a head-spinning moment, I couldn’t decide where I was, even who I was. No Glow globes lighting the room, or the walkways outside the window. A candle set on the bedside table was the only light, and someone moved in the flickering shadows. A cool hand on my wrist, another on my forehead.
“About time you woke up.” A cool voice to go with the hands. When my eyes adjusted, I saw it was the nurse. The one who, what seemed like several years ago, had flirted while she took me to see Dr Whelar and let me promise her dinner. Not flirting now, but she had kind eyes and a soft manner that was just what I needed.
“It was a long and very trying day.” I flexed my broken hand, and winced at the throb, at the pull of splints and stitches that obscured my fingers.
The smile was kind too, when it came. “That wasn’t today. Or yesterday either, for that matter.”
I sat up and found I was in a bed, but not one I knew. The room was bare, blank of any decoration, unless you count bars on the windows. Or Dench leaning against a wall. Not very decorative, but a welcome sight just the same.
He pushed himself off the wall, away from the window where he’d been contemplating the view. “You’re looking pretty good, considering you’re dead. I was quite surprised when the news came in, that the Ministry had found and shot you, since you were already in the hospital.”
“Ah, yes, well—”
“Mind you, it stopped a lot of the talk about having you executed. Seems the Archdeacon went missing too, which helped. Funny, that.” He raised an eyebrow my way and I licked at dry lips. “But maybe not all that surprising, considering. Lots of people went missing Downside the last day or two. Might take us months to work it all out.”
The nurse glared at him and made a show of inspecting the splints on my hand. Dench paid no attention to her, but came and sat in the single chair next to the bed. His face was more careworn than ever, but the moustache bristled nicely. I think he was pleased, but trying not to show it.
“You want to tell me what happened?” he asked.
The nurse stopped fiddling with the splints, but she kept close by. I got the feeling she disapproved of Dench, or maybe of his Specials uniform. An unexpected ally. I got up, a bit shaky on my feet, and went to look out of the window. Cold air ghosted across my bare back and chill bumps rippled down my arms. No Glow anywhere, not even at Top of the World. No lights, no carriages chuntering along the Spine, no glaring advertisements, no distant thump and rumble of the factories. No lights, no noise, no life. Just the glint of moonlight on a dark and dying city. I laid my forehead on the glass. The Kiss of Death. Way to go, Rojan. Dench might be pleased, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything other than disappointment, in myself and everyone. Talking further than trivialities seemed beyond me, because there was too much else I wanted to let out, and didn’t dare. “Not really. You want to tell me what happened? Amarie?”
“Safe and with her father, who’s on the mend. Pasha’s doing as well as can be expected.” The nurse muttered something at that, but Dench ignored her.
I stared back out of the window, not wanting to ask, but needing to know. “Jake?”
“Jittery thing, isn’t she? With Pasha – where else? That isn’t what you want to know.”
The cool hand on mine again, the nurse murmuring that I should get back to bed, that I might still lose the hand, had lost a lot of blood.
“Did I stop it?”
A pause full of something; perhaps caution, maybe regret. Maybe something else. “Yes. No more Glow. What’s left up here has been ordered to be saved for emergencies. Special announcement by the Ministry. Along with the news that they’re deliberating which cardinal gets to be the acting archdeacon, and that Alchemy Research is working flat-out to try to find a replacement. No official news on what the Glow was, but Downsiders are everywhere. It won’t take long. My Specials are busy, along with the guards. Looting, rioting, you know the sort of thing. We need a new archdeacon fast, and a new power source faster.”
I turned back from the window, from the darkness I’d made, and let the nurse sit me on the bed. “Can I see them?”
“Who?” Dench looked sympathetic, but there was a steely bent to the way he held himself that didn’t bode well.
“All of them. Perak, Amarie – I never actually met her, you know? And Pasha, Dendal. Jake.” Especially Jake.
“Rojan, you’re dead. Officially dead; I identified the body myself. No, you’re here until we can work out what to do with you. Right now, we’ve got bigger things to worry about. Like getting people food and warmth and light. Once we’ve got that done, most of the problems will fade away. Perak’s working on it, and there’s a good chance he might make Archdeacon, in which case we might be all right. Better than a lot of the alternatives. Dendal’s helping him, but until they figure something out we’re screwed. Royally. And so are you. Make your face someone else’s, slide out into obscurity. I can get you Outside; maybe you can find another city, somewhere else to live.”
When I looked up there was something like sympathy in his eyes, but I knew he couldn’t give in to it. I’d screwed with his city – and his Goddess too, probably. I couldn’t find anything to say, and he left without another word. I couldn’t work out whether he hated me, hence the bars on the windows, or was pleased at what I’d done, hence the fact I was still alive. Everything was a whirl inside me.
The nurse huffed about the room after Dench left, checking my pulse and my temperature with her cool hand. I remembered her name through the haze: Lilla.
When her hand rested on my forehead again, I pulled it away and held it in mine. Her eyes, the kindness in them, were all I had to hang on to, the only vestige of my former life. I needed something and I didn’t know what. “Does the hospital have a temple?”
Lilla tilted her head, and I had to look away from her eyes, from the cool pity.
“I’ll help you get dressed,” she said, but I shook my head, oddly ashamed, and managed by myself.
The windows were barred, but the door wasn’t locked. I soon found out why, but I took Dench’s advice and changed my face, just a bit. The hallway was as dark as the room, and lined with Specials. I kept my head down and followed Lilla, past dim doorways and silent wards, past the nurses’ station, a small haven of candlelight, starched uniforms and brisk efficiency. Past sidelong stares, knowing looks and whispers behind hands – and doors with grilles on them and heavy locks. Not the Sacred Goddess Hospital.
Lilla stopped by a door like half a dozen others we’d passed. The interior was dim, as everywhere else, but a candle had been set on the altar, and the moving shadows on the mural made the Goddess look alive. Lilla went to turn away, but I grabbed for her hand. Before I’d always, consciously or unconsciously, tried to stay apart, alone, even when I feared that same aloneness. Now it was the last thing I wanted. “Stay?”
She hesitated with a frown, but in the end we walked to the altar together, past the saints and martyrs and their blind, plaster eyes. The mural was one of the pretty ones, all flowers and sodding birds and the Goddess looking sweet and a bit constipated as she offered her hand to the tiger. Guilt and sacrifice.
I looked down at the splints over my fingers. Still guilt and sacrifice, and now I couldn’t look at the mural, couldn’t look at her face without seeing the other one, down in the ’Pit, all blood and violence and contempt.
“Rojan?” Lilla’s voice was small in the space before the altar. “Rojan, forget Dench. You did the right thing. For everyone.”
“I didn’t do it because it needed to be done, or because it was right, or wrong, or for the Goddess. I did it because I was afraid.” I flexed the fingers and thrilled at the run of magic when they hurt, at the memory of it all pouring through me and knowing that I wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t be like him, even though I was. That I’d made a choice, for good or ill, and could only hope it was the right one. The words tumbled out, but I wasn’t talking to Lilla. “I’ve always been afraid, of my magic, of what it’ll do to me, afraid since I was ten and he left us on our own. Mostly I was afraid I’d be like him. I always took after him more than I did Ma. So I made sure I couldn’t be, and became like him while I did it. I did it because I was afraid, and I’m still like him. I did the necessary evil, and made sure he died, even if I didn’t kill him myself.”
Lilla squeezed my good hand. She probably had no idea what I was talking about, but she didn’t let it show. “You got rid of it, you stopped it. You did the right thing.”
“Is it? Was it right? All these people, no Glow, I—”
Lilla cut me off with a stern nurse-in-charge-of-patient look. “You weren’t the one to get Pasha patched up, or those kids. You didn’t see…” She shook her head with a pained look to her eyes. “I don’t care about the rest, not yet. The Ministry have plenty of Glow stored, I’m sure. And plenty of everything else. Bet my boots they’ve got enough food for months.”
“But—”
“Enough. Sod Dench and his ‘you’re dead’. Come and see.” The smile was as dimpled as I remembered, and did nothing to me except make me want to sit here for ever, where it was quiet and no one knew who I was or what I’d done. No one except Lilla.
She led me out of the temple, and I had no strength to resist. I was sure I could feel the Goddess’s eyes on my back. Great: eyed up by a figment of my imagination. Lilla stopped at the first door and nodded her head towards the ward. A dozen beds, each with three or four small bodies curled up under blankets. Two Specials stood silent and watchful just inside the door. As we watched, one of the kids whimpered in their sleep, and another curled into them, a soft hand comforting, understanding what only they could know, what they never should have known.
“You did that,” Lilla said. “If you hadn’t done what you did, they’d still be there.”
Because they were worth more, to me. Because Jake was worth more and no one should ever have to go through what she and Pasha had. Yet all these people Upside, hundreds of thousands, more maybe, without Glow, without trade or any way to make a living… were they worth less?
“Come on, you need to get back to bed.” Lilla pulled at me and I followed her, not a little bewildered and still feeling oddly floaty, as though I was no longer part of the world around me. The only solid anchor I had was Lilla’s hand in mine and I hung on to it, bizarrely afraid I might fly away otherwise.
The moon shone through the windows of the corridors she led me along, ridiculously beautiful when it was unimpeded. Its silver light fell unhampered across Trade, lit all the factories and made even their silent, blocky bulk seem delicate. No buildings above Trade to shield the moonlight, no Glow to compete with it, to blind me to it.
Something was waiting for me on the bed. My pulse pistol, with a note in Dendal’s writing. I thought you might want this back. Maybe it does have its uses, after all.
How did Dendal know I was still alive? Then again, how did Dendal know anything? I picked up the pulse pistol, and it felt oddly heavy.
Lilla looked at it curiously and I told her what it was.
“How does it work?”
“What? I don’t know.” I stared down at it, at maybe the very thing that had started this whole chain of events: me chasing Lise, and using the pistol on her. The last time things had been normal, when a cut on the thumb for magic had been a big deal and the black was to be feared, rather than just another part of me that I didn’t want. No more fear, Rojan, remember? Easier said than done.
The pistol. The fucking pistol – the answer staring me in the face. “Where’s Dwarf? And Lise?”
“Rojan, the doctor said – and Dench—”
I grabbed at her shoulders, wincing as the splints twisted on my fingers, and relishing it too. Also relishing the new hope surging through me. I could make it up, to everyone. “Lilla, this is it. The answer, maybe. I know how to get Trade up and running. I just have to get it to Dwarf. Please.”
She looked up at me, her dark eyes worried, but in the end she nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yes, but how does it work?” I waited impatiently for Dwarf to think it through. His broken legs had been set, and Lise – my sister, I had to keep reminding myself – had fussed round him worse than a new mother with her first baby. Until I turned up, and now they were both lost in concentration, considering what I’d asked. “Can you use that?”
Lilla had worked a miracle – found Dwarf a floor below me, behind the same sort of bars. Not the Sacred Goddess Hospital, she finally agreed when I’d asked. A secret place, for the Ministry. Run by Specials. A prison of sorts, for all those people who were just too awkward to have around but whom the Ministry, for whatever reason, didn’t want dead just yet.
I’d changed my face again, but I had trouble with the voice, so at least Dwarf recognised me when I spoke. His attention was all on the pistol though.
“Well, I expect so,” Dwarf said in the end. “But it’s going to take some time to set up. And money.”
“Of course we can do it,” Lise countered. She looked up at me, a bit shy at first. “The pistol converts magic to energy, the same principle they used to run the factories before synth, only better, much better. Besides, the Ministry’s got lots of money.”
“But this mechanism magnifies magic?” A small cut on the thumb gave enough of a burst to knock someone out, using more power than it should rightfully have. Azama had known about my magic, thought it very powerful, because I’d used this. Particularly powerful I probably wasn’t, but the pistol had magnified it.
“Oh, yes. It’s very clever.” Lise looked over at Dwarf, admiration in every quiver of her body. Dwarf blushed. It made him look almost human.
“So you could make one bigger, that does the same? Or maybe just some more of them, to start with?”
“What do you want to do, Rojan?” Dwarf was looking at me like I’d gone a bit mad. Maybe he was right, but it had to be worth a go.
“I want to get the factories running again. We have to replace the Glow with something. Maybe we can replace it with what it actually is – pain magic. Only no using anyone else. It failed before because Mahala got too big, too much of a drain on the mages. But if we magnify it?”
Lise’s eyes snapped wide. “Or better. Eddin, electricity, the generator you’ve been working on. Couldn’t we use that?”
“Eddin?” I raised an eyebrow at Dwarf.”
It’s my name, you want to make something of it?” The blush was now a deep red and curling round his ears. “And maybe, Lise. But it’ll take time. That brother of yours, Rojan, he can help. In the meantime, I’ve got another two of these at my lock-up. It might be enough to get some things started. It’ll take a heck of a lot out of anyone, though. The amount of factories…”
“We can start with a few, until we get going. How long to make more?”
“A couple of days, once I get out of this bed. Or you can get someone to bring the workings here. I could manage something. Probably an enhancement or two.”
I nodded my agreement and left them to their incomprehensible jargon as they discussed ways of improving the mechanism. Lise kept talking about electricity, and maybe that would be a way forward eventually, if she could get it to work.
It was Lilla that got the message to Dendal, and Perak.
And it was the news of what the pistol might be able to do that got Perak the archdeaconship. And me free.
I asked Lilla to find someone to get Dwarf’s things, and snuck down to the nurses’ desk. Dwarf hadn’t been in the forefront of who I needed to see. I didn’t want to, but I needed to.
As I entered the room, a shadow at the window turned. Jake’s hair was a darker red in that light, her eyes shining. They clouded slightly when she didn’t recognise me, and her hand went to the bed – to Pasha, dozing and pale, propped up on pillows. Such a small thing, that she touched his shoulder to wake him, but it told me everything I needed to know, and made my heart twist.
I let my face bleed back into its normal planes and her face lit up. It was almost worth it all just for that.
“They told us you were dead!”
“Not yet, sorry to disappoint. You like the view, then.”
Her smile was timid, so unlike her it jarred me for a moment. “I never realised it was so beautiful.”
“The moon?” I moved to stand next to her, keeping a careful distance because I was still tempted. To just touch her, run a hand over her cheek, across the back of her neck. Kiss her again. She wasn’t mine and never would be. Like the moon, I suppose. Maybe that’s why moonlight always looks so sad.
She shook her head and looked back out of the window. “The city. The sky. I never saw the sky before.”
Her shoulders twitched and she kept her face carefully turned away from mine. “I did it for you,” I wanted to say. I did it all for you. But I still wasn’t quite fear-free enough to say it.
Pasha sat up on the bed, looking gaunt and hollow. He didn’t speak, but he didn’t really need to. We stared at each other for a while, not saying anything, and I wondered if he could hear what was going through my head. Maybe not – Lilla had said they’d doped him with painkillers pretty hard. Love and sacrifice, that was what was running through my head. What the Goddess had always been trying to say, I think, that she had done it willingly, for everyone. Jake had shown it to me, and Pasha, in what they’d done, every day. No life but the matches to earn money to fund what they really did: save children, with no expectation of thanks or reward. Pasha willing to kill for her, to die for her, because she’d saved him. Because he loved her in a way I never could.
Typical really, and Pasha had been right all along. I’d fallen in love, for the first time ever and against my better, or maybe just more cynical, judgement. And I’d fallen for a cipher, a bit of flash and wind, not the real her. I’d fallen for who I wanted her to be, not who she was. That, what lay underneath all the show, behind the wall of her swords, was Pasha’s, through and through. I couldn’t really begrudge him that. Bastard.
I couldn’t look at him any more, or even at Jake, so I stared out of the window instead. That wasn’t much better – the stillness, the silence, the waiting hunger – but I thought I might have an answer. Not a “for good” answer, but a “good enough for now” answer.
Pasha came and stood next to us, stared out over a city that he probably barely remembered. “I was going to go earlier, but the Specials wouldn’t let me, us. It’s like another kind of prison, only you get to see what you’ve lost.”
“Go where?”
Pasha reached out to stroke the glass, and my eyes were drawn again to the brand, to the scars old and new. “Anywhere. I don’t know.”
Something about him was hypnotic, the dreamy way he stroked the glass, the faraway look in his eye, the twitch in his shoulder as he spoke. I pulled myself together.
“I thought you were going to join him,” he said.
“So did I, for a moment.”
“So why didn’t you?” He looked up at me, a brief, puzzled glance.
“What, join in all that religion shit? No thanks.” Then, because it was about time I started being honest, even if only with myself, I thought at him, You were right. You know her better, love her better. I wanted her to have that. You two were worth more than any amount of people up here. To me, anyway.
Some of it must have got through, because a smile twitched his face. “Rojan, thank—”
“Please, leave me a shred of dignity, all right? I can’t have anyone finding out I’m not a total prick. I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”
He laughed at that, a small shadow of a thing but he was back to being the monkey again. Almost. “All right. But what now?”
“Now, I need you to help me. We’re going to use our magic the old-fashioned way, with a little extra help from Dwarf and my pulse pistol. I took away the Glow, I’ve got to replace it with something. Or rather, we have. You, me and Dendal, we’re going to power up what we can of the factories until we can figure something else out. Here he is.”
Lilla escorted Dendal as he blinked his way into the room, looked around as though he was lost and only belatedly noticed us at the window. “Ah! There you are. Dench said it was urgent, so I came. Rearranging? Goddess, what we could do with that. Your father was always quite good at it, if I recall, in a limited way. As a Major, well, you could run half of Trade and not even think about it. Look, I’ve been working it out.”
He shoved a sheaf of papers under my nose, but I couldn’t make sense of any of the little squiggles. Lilla bit her lip and put a hand to her mouth and I was hard pressed not to laugh myself. I almost hugged the old fairy-brain, I was so glad to see him. I wanted to tell him everything and listen – properly this time – when he told me how I’d got it all wrong and what I should be doing, how I should be mastering myself and my magic. I wanted to tell him I’d found something to believe in, even if it wasn’t his Goddess, and I wanted my feet up on Griswald while I did it.
“So, have you thought what you’re going to do with it, Perak?” Dendal’s anxious, not-quite-all-there face peered up at me hopefully.
“Rojan, Dendal. My name’s Rojan.”
“Is it? Oh, yes. But the question, what are you going to do with it?”
Lilla smiled at me from the doorway, cool and kind and dimpled, safe and normal. I wondered if dinner was still an option. My mind was only half on my words. “Fire up the factories, if we can. Start with the ones we need the most, maybe get some light back. It’s going to hurt, but it’s our hurt, not anyone else’s.”
Pasha nodded thoughtfully. “I can manage that.”
Lilla walked off down the corridor and I admired the swing of her uniform, the memory of her kind eyes and cool hands. Dendal wouldn’t want to hear it, but I also wondered if re-arranging her knickers, as in arranging for them to be on my bedroom floor, might be somewhere in the future. I wasn’t sure, but it’d be a whole lot of fun finding out.