Fade to Black (34 page)

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.

Where to start? Tricky. Let’s start at the beginning. My family, for ceaseless encouragement and putting up with the fact I spend as much time in my own head as I do with them. Absolute Write, for educating me about writing, publishing, and for the friendships it’s brought me. Thanks, Mac! Special thanks to JCD and Quicklime. Smutty thoughts to Scarlett, like she needs them, for helping me when things got dark. The T-Party writers’ group, for the unstinting ability to tell me where I’ve gone wrong, writerly camaraderie and curry. Deb, who taught me more about writing than I care to admit. Alex Field for his boundless enthusiasm. Devi and Anna for their illuminating comments, suggestions, sterling editorial manner and patience with a newb. And last, but by no means least, Bettie-Lee Turner, Luke Walker and Sarah Ellender, for reading my draft and telling me what you really thought!

Thanks, guys. I owe you all a pint. Except Luke, who gets half a mild and a packet of pork scratchings.

F
RANCIS
K
NIGHT
was born and lives in Sussex, England. She has held a variety of jobs from being a groom in the Balearics, where she punched a policeman and got away with it, to an IT administrator.

When not living in her own head, she enjoys SF&F geekery, WWE geekery, teaching her children Monty Python quotes, and boldly going and seeking out new civilizations. Find out more about Francis Knight on her blog
http://knightknoir.blogspot.com/
or on Twitter @Knight_Francis.