Fade to Black (28 page)

She shrank back, her eyes wide and searching mine for long heartbeats. I stood away, ashamed now for using her fear against her, no matter how necessary it was. But then she stood straight, pulled herself together. Her hands still trembled, but she had a solid grip on her swords – her last, only, shred of her wall – and on herself. I have never admired anyone more.

“So what are we going to do?” she asked and her voice was cool again, controlled.

I really wished I didn’t have to say this. “
We’re
doing nothing. I’m going to try something. You are going to stay there and make sure no one kills me while I’m gone. All right?”

Her nod was terse but determined. “All right.”

It wasn’t going to take much – power was all but dripping down the walls. The call was too strong, and I couldn’t be sure if I was trying this because it was sensible, or because I was too weak to resist. I leaned back against the wall and tried to close my poor swollen hand, and that was enough.

Amarie wasn’t alone, not any more, and they weren’t protecting her with magic either. They
wanted
me to know where she was, to try to get her, and they had done all along. Now they’d moved her, and she had company. Dwarf lay in a corner of the room, both his legs twisted unnaturally, his ugly-attractive face a bruised and battered mess. Lise was there too, holding Amarie on her lap and crooning a lullaby. That was a comfort to more than Amarie. So was the look on Lise’s face when she saw me.

Amarie should never have been able to see me, know I was there even, but she had, the first time I looked for her. Each time, she saw me, she heard me when I spoke. Each time, she tried to grab my hand. The first had met nothing but air, but that last time – I’d felt her touch, soft as silk. That last time, I’d thought if I could just push hard enough, stretch far enough… It shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t but maybe it was. I was in uncharted territory now, at least for me. Maybe Dendal would have understood what was happening with me,
with my magic, but I sure as shit didn’t. Yet it didn’t matter whether I understood it, as long as I could use it. Except, of course, it could send me mad or kill me. Sometimes you just have to say screw the ever-present fear and do it, or lose every hidden particle of self-respect.

Lise stared at me as though I was a ghost, and when I looked down I could see the faint outline of my hands. I was here, almost. Here and elsewhere too, because a tiny part of my brain was back in a corridor with Jake watching me, pacing up and down, muttering to herself and holding her swords like they were the only things that were keeping her this side of sane.

I could push it, I could go deeper, I could be here with Amarie and then do it all in reverse and take her away. If I did, I’d be lost. The black was calling now, a sweet song of temptation, a blaze of lust. I wanted it like I’d never wanted anything before. I could taste it on my tongue. Maybe Amarie was the excuse. It didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that I had the power to do something, to save her, like Pasha had saved Jake, and I’d not had the guts to help. Then Lise was on her feet, her arms clasping Amarie to her, looking over my shoulder and shouting something, words I couldn’t make out. I tried to turn, but the lust, the
wanting
made me clumsy.

I turned straight into a smack in the face, a face that shouldn’t have felt a damn thing because it was only half there.

When I woke up, I was numb. Not just bits of me – not being able to feel the mess of my hand was a relief – but
all
of me. I fumbled my fingers over my cheeks and couldn’t feel them, or indeed my fingers. I tried to sit up into the blank darkness. Finally I managed it, but it was no better. I couldn’t feel what I was sitting on, not even the pressure of backside against wood. No tingle in my arms, no sensation of magic in the air. I’ve never been quite so terrified in my life. With the numbness came powerlessness. No pain, no gain. I was ordinary, I was useless. Funny how you loathe it till it’s gone and then you miss it.

The door to wherever I was banged open, letting in flickering light and two shadows in the shape of men. One of them hurried towards me, and I caught a glimpse of his face. The good Doctor Whelar, patcher-up of Perak in the Sacred Goddess Hospital and cutter-up of pigs, now with a big syringe glinting in his hand.

“Experiments worked, then,” I said. Or tried to. Not being able to feel your tongue or lips makes it hard. He seemed to get the gist though, because he blushed as he pushed the syringe in.

The other shadow came in. Pasha, looking kind of lost and dishevelled, his normally pin-neat clothes awry, his shirt buttoned up wrong, his brands clear at his wrists where he’d shoved up the sleeves, like he didn’t care who knew any more. His hair was no longer rumpled round his face but stuck out in clumps and his eyes seemed blurred, as though he looked
out on a different reality. I was pretty sure I knew what he was seeing, and feeling, and it was black. “Come on.” Even his voice was distorted, muzzed at the edges. “Something to show you.”

He turned away, his feet stumbling over themselves so he didn’t so much walk as stutter with his legs, like they belonged to someone else. Whelar got his hand under my arm and helped me up. Surprising how hard it is to walk like that – my feet couldn’t work out when they’d hit the floor. When I got through the door, I forgot about numbness, forgot about magic or the call of the black and how I missed it, wanted it, craved it.

The room was vast, towering high above me, receding off into a far distance. Not into shadow though, because the place was lit up like the sun. Glow tubes, everywhere, from tiny things the size of my pinkie to great tubes five times the size of a man. Every one of them glowed with the bright, pinkish-yellow light that Upside had come to rely on. Glow powered everything Upside, from lights to carriages to the great factories of Trade. Glow had saved us from synth, from a long, slow death.

Glow was pain magic stored, and it was only now I saw, now that Glow covered every available surface in a great, shining sea of fizzing tubes, that I really believed it, and believed that mages were farming Downsiders for pain, for Glow.

I could hear them, far across the room, out of sight. A faint shout, a weak scream, and each time another tube glowed
brighter, fizzed with energy, with pain. The air vibrated with it, a constant hum in the bones that even my numbness could sense. This room held enough pain to fill the world. I couldn’t seem to get my head round it.

“Pasha, what—”

“He promised me.” Pasha swayed next to me, twitching at each new scream. His voice was a low moan stretching into words. “Azama promised me he wouldn’t hurt Jake, not if I helped him. He promised. I can’t let her hurt any more. Not any more. I can hear them, in my head. All of them. He promised. They scream in my head. They
pray
, that this time is the last, that the Goddess will forgive them. I – I –” He blinked and his mouth opened and closed, but nothing else came out. It was enough.

He staggered away, swaying so hard I thought he had to fall, but he managed to keep upright. I wanted to be sick, to fall to my knees and throw up everything, the whole black mess inside of me. I’d been a party to this all along, everyone had, whether they knew it or not. We’d moaned about the price of Glow, that it made the older machines clunky, that Glow globes for light didn’t last long, and a hundred other things. Done what people always did, and complained when things weren’t perfect. It had never occurred to anyone just how imperfect, how sickening it was, just as long as our carriages ran, our homes were light and warm, our food was on the table. We were blind because we wanted to be, and now I couldn’t be blind any more, not with that light swarming over me.

Whelar pushed me after Pasha, out of the Glow room, away from the screams, into what looked like an office, of sorts. A desk, chairs, paperwork scattered all over. Some piping ran up one wall, making the occasional hissing grunt of badly maintained heating. Pictures on the wall: a faded one of a dark-haired man very much like Whelar grinning in his laboratory, other people, doctors or alchemists by their lab coats, patting him on the back as he held up a crude version of a Glow tube. A nicely done oil of a young woman, dark-eyed and with a hopeful look, as though all her life were spread out in front of her. Sunlight framed her face, made her ethereal and delicate, and hauntingly familiar.

“So here he is at last.” A new voice that made me look away. Azama. Still creepingly familiar, he looked different now, not the arrogant bully intent on finding his wayward daughter. The daughter who sat hunched in a chair beside him. Lise looked at me from behind a tangled fall of hair and mouthed, “I’m sorry. He made me.”

Azama smiled and nodded for all the world like this was a social occasion. I half expected him to say, “Pleased to meet you,” or something. Instead he said, “It’s been quite an effort to get you here. Didn’t expect you to go missing once you got Downside, though that brought its own little benefits. But you’re here now. The question is, what will you do?”

Jake had been right; his mouth did twist like I tasted bad. And where
was
Jake? I stole a glance at Pasha – no help there. Poor bastard was lost in it, and I envied him that, the expanse
of my black where there is no fear, because I was full of it. Pasha’s eyes were blank and far away, a faint twitching smile on his lips as he wrenched his fingers. He didn’t seem to realise he was doing it, dislocating them, shoving them back in. New scars tangled round his hands and wrists, red scabby vines twining over his skin.

“It’s a shame about Pasha,” Azama said, and I faced him again rather than watch Pasha in his torment. “I had high hopes for him. The magic is strong, but the mind, the spirit… Weak men are little use to me. I can use him to channel into the tubes for a little while, I suppose, until his mind goes completely. Then there will be other uses for him. You don’t need much of a mind to feel pain.” He shrugged, an offhand gesture that dismissed Pasha as beneath notice. Disposable.

I didn’t like the way this was going and mangled a few words out. “Where’s Amarie?”

Azama beamed and stretched his hands expansively to encompass the Glow room outside, proud of himself. “Safe, and she’ll stay safe as long as you cooperate. Really, it’s taken far too long to get you here. You were
supposed
to stay in the hotel until I came. That girl should have kept you there long enough. But there, an added bonus that you helped us see that it was Jake and Pasha stealing my girls. I’ve been searching for you for quite some time, especially since Perak came to my notice again, and watching you since I found you in that office with Dendal. Oh, the Ministry knows all about him,” he said
when I opened my mouth to speak. “He’s no good for us. Too soft in the head, like Pasha here. Now you, Rojan, are a very different prospect from Pasha.”

It was all too much of a whirl to process properly. “I am?”

“Oh, you are. Stronger in the head than young Pasha. Too clever to use your magic much, but powerful, very powerful; I knew that as soon as you caught Lise. That’s when I knew I had to get you down here: the strength you showed then, the power of your magic.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that wasn’t me, that power was the pulse pistol, but I clamped down on the words just in time. No sense telling him I was weaker than he thought. He’d find out soon enough, it looked like.

He seemed to misconstrue my lack of answer. “Afraid of it perhaps? I think so, but a wise man bewares what can destroy him, and that care will save him. It feels good though, doesn’t it? The flow of it in the air? The call of it in your bones?” His voice took on an odd timbre, somehow hypnotic.

The way Azama shut his eyes, the almost sexual purse of his lips, made me want to puke. The more so because he was right. It did feel good, more than good, and I wanted it back. He knew it too, because he came and stood right in front of me, eye to eye, like we were co-conspirators. The only two people who could know this thing, feel it. I still wanted to puke. Preferably on his shoes.

“We need it, Rojan. Not you and me, the
city
needs it, and there are so few of us capable of this. Without the Glow, what
would happen? No machines, no factories, no trade. Without trade we’d starve. Almost every last ounce of food we eat comes in payment for what we make. We have little land left to farm, little way of producing our own. We grew too big on synth, trapped by the mountains that made us. The Glow is a necessary evil, I’m sure you can see that, the lesser of two terrible things. Without the Glow, it’s starve – or back to the synth. Thousands dying a cruel and needless death. And you don’t want that, do you?”

I stared at him in horror. He made it sound so necessary, so
normal
, when it was anything but. “So you kidnapped my niece to get me to help you?”

“How else would we have got you to come of your own free will? Besides, I wanted to see my only grandchild.”

“Your
what
?”

Only then I saw it, because he let me. The nose shortened, the cheeks hollowed, the voice… the voice I’d remembered long after I’d forgotten his face, etching itself into my head, showing me pictures. The face that was now, piece by piece, becoming his own again, with the talent that he’d given me. The only thing I had of him, my Minor, my talent for disguising myself. I looked up at the picture of the woman on the wall – hopeful, and I hadn’t seen her that way for decades. My mother, before she got sick, before she withered away in front of me.

I looked back again at Azama, and knew him now, and wished I didn’t. My father.

I thought back barely minutes, to when I’d used my presence to scare the crap out of Jake, used her fear against her to make her do what I wanted, because I had to. A necessary evil. Puking was becoming a real possibility. I wasn’t like him, I wouldn’t be like him. Would I?

“You had Perak shot.” It was all I could think of to say – he’d had his own son shot, for this, but at least now I knew how they’d known Perak was my brother.