“Good morning,” Radha said, when I came out of my room. A cup of hot, sweet milk tea waited for me on the table.
I hugged her. My landlady, my auntie. My foster mother. My friend.
Immense and unstoppable.
She’d taken me in four years ago, when Ash had fallen sick and her mother, the queen, had kicked me out of the Palace. Traumatic at the time, but in some ways it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
“Sit,” Radha said.
“Can’t. I need to get going.”
“You need to sit.”
I sat. I sipped my tea as fast as I could, and watched the Underbridge come awake. The shantytown beneath Dragon Pagoda Bridge was at its quietest now, before the night shift workers trudged home and the day shift ones marched out. The wind was right, so we got the breeze from the river instead of the swamps to the north. I kissed Radha on the cheek, then crossed the square to the shower stalls.
Shacks were piled ten stories high, dilapidated but stable on their scaffolding. Narrow streets and alleys and garden plots ran between them. Everyone paid a tiny bit into a common fund every month, to pay for repairs and maintenance and security. And feed for the monsters, of course, who slept in a big pen to ensure they didn’t get hold of someone’s chickens.
That’s how it was. Poor people knew that all they had was each other.
Migrants had been living under the bridge for decades when the police started cracking down—arresting people for trespassing, burning shacks when people refused to get out. To her credit, and everyone’s surprise, the queen had intervened. Granted royal permission to live under the bridge to anyone who wanted to. Ordered the cops to stop messing with people. Which pissed the cops off immeasurably.
Ten years later, we’re still here. Five thousand of us. It’s overcrowded and everyone is always up in your business and sometimes it smells bad, but I love it. Walking back, fresh and clean and hungry, I looked up in time to see a pod of sky whales heading east. Their massive tails shattered clouds with each swing.
“Connor still asleep?” I asked, when I got back.
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” she said, and chuckled.
I debated waking him up, before I headed for the Clarion’s office. Radha’s six-year-old son had entirely too much energy, and was way too much work, but I adored him. He was smarter than most kids twice his age—and he was a prodigy with his abilities, able to control fire from the age of four, while most othersiders don’t come into their abilities until they hit puberty.
Or, in my case, later. Or possibly never.
There is magic in me. I feel it all through my arms and legs, shivering in my stomach, burning in my brain. But when I try to access it—I freak out. Sometimes it’s like a seizure, other times I black out. Sometimes I start smashing stuff up.
But it’s there. I’ve always known it’s there. I’ve also known I need to keep it a secret, in a city that hates my kind so much.
I opened the door to the room we shared and watched Connor sleep.
I loved him—but sometimes, in my darkest, most self-pitying moments, I couldn’t help but envy him. Sure, he was dirt-poor like me, but he had a mother and he’d grown up surrounded by people who loved him. They’d valued him, nurtured him, encouraged him. The light in his deep brown eyes had never dimmed. Spend thirty seconds with Connor and you could see that the fire he could summon was part of his very soul.
Someone ran past the window, sobbing. Someone else laughed.
And then the shouting started.
“Stay here,” I told Radha. I grabbed my camera and ran outside. Random jerks routinely came around the Underbridge, looking to beat up on some othersiders. They tended to regret it pretty quickly and run like hell. But hopefully I could get off a couple of good photos for my editor, Cass, first.
A crowd had gathered in the dusty alley, so thick I couldn’t get anywhere near the action. I could see what was happening, though. These were not random jerks. These people were together. They were organized.
They all wore ultramarine armbands. I don’t know why that worried me so much. Maybe it was the idea that someone, somewhere, had sewed them. That these people were part of something bigger.
My feet slid into horse stance, one of the few things I remembered from the self-defense classes that Ash’s trainer let me sit in on. My hands made fists. I may not have known yet what my ability was, but I would fight with all of my regular human strength before I let anything happen to Radha and Connor.
An armbanded man walked right up to me.
Now, I’m pretty tall, and muscular, so people tended to assume I knew how to fight. What frightened me was the confidence on his face. Like he’d marched right into a lion’s den and didn’t believe the lions could hurt him. It enraged me.
“You lost?” I asked him.
“I’m exactly where I need to be,” he said. “It’s you who aren’t supposed to be here. You aren’t supposed to be anywhere. You’re an abomination. All of you.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You really believe that?”
“We haven’t forgotten the Night of Red Diamonds,” he hissed.
“Neither have we.”
Just a few years back, the simmering tension between people with magic and people without it boiled over. A big bloody brawl in the streets; each side said the other was to blame. And whatever the real story was, at the end of the night there was a whole lot of blood and a whole lot of broken glass in the street. Glittering like red diamonds.
That was when street gangs started targeting us. Othersider businesses were burned down. People began calling on the queen to make our magic illegal, or to drive us out of Darkside altogether.
“There will be a reckoning,” he whispered, stepping closer.
A rock struck him, in the head. Not too big, and not too hard. He knelt there, his face reddening, one hand holding himself up and the other clenched into the tightest fist I’d ever seen. I dropped to my knees, to be eye level with him, to capture the chaos in the background, the blurry crowd and the flames, and took a photograph.
He stood up, breathing heavy. Ran off. I remained on my knees. My friend Shoshana waved, from the window of a shack across the way. She held her hand out in front of her, and rocks rose up into the air, waiting for the next jerk who came along looking for trouble.
It wasn’t long before we had the armbands in retreat.
I glanced down at my camera. What I had captured—if it came out— It was powerful. The best picture I’d ever taken. Cass would be proud.
I headed for the dinosaur paddock.
“Come on, girl,” I said, when I got to Maraud, and kissed the smooth pebbled texture of her purple skin.
The streets smelled like patchouli oil and cigarette smoke. On my way out, for the first time I saw the graffiti. An ultramarine silhouette, life-size, on one of the pillars that held up the bridge. A man, broad-shouldered, legs apart, hands clasped behind his back.
Spray-painted underneath: “He Is the Answer.”
But who was “he”?
And if he was the answer, what the hell was the question?