Tell the Wind and Fire(10)

“It’s like her hair,” he said. “What is your name, sweetheart?”

“Lucie, Dad. It’s Lucie.”

“Oh,” Dad said, slowly. He lifted a hand to my face, and the rings on that hand burned brighter, brighter, so he could see me. My eyes stung, but I wouldn’t close them: I squinted and tried to keep my focus on him, past the harsh light and shimmering tears. Gold obscured my vision, the glitter of rings and the shine of magic on the walls, everything gold but my father’s hair. That had gone silver back when they put him in the cage.

“You remember me, Dad.”

“It was so very long ago,” Dad muttered, and his other hand clutched my hair, like a child clutching a teddy bear. “Lucie! Lucie, you have to help me find her. I have to go to her and help her . . . heal her. She needs to be healed. She went to heal someone. I need to heal someone.”

He’d had fits like this before, even while he was in his cage. I’d probably given him the idea. He wasn’t a fraud like me. He was really good, and he really tried. He tried to heal people as if he were still a medic. He’d put his hand out through the bars of his cage to heal people; he’d run up and down the train healing people when we were making our way to the Light city. He’d collapsed in public over and over in the first few months, but he hadn’t been like this for a year.

I’d thought he was better now.

It was my fault. I’d scared him, I’d reduced him to this state where he was fumbling after memories of a time when he’d been happy, when he’d thought he could help people and find my mother. We’d been idiots, once, fools in the dark together.

“She’s dead, Dad,” I said, and tried to keep my voice level. I helped him up from the sofa and kept his steps steady as we went into our room. I led him to his bed and made him lie down. His eyes closed as soon as his head touched the pillow, his body curled up in a trembling comma shape on the bed. I pulled the sheets over him and murmured, “She’s dead, but we’re alive. Don’t you want to live?”

“It’s been so long,” Dad murmured back. “I don’t know.”

Good people are always ready to die for a good reason. It’s only people like me who say, Yes, I want to live. Yes, at any cost. I had said yes for both of us, two years ago.

Dad’s eyes opened, then fluttered shut, then repeated the gesture a few times before he settled. His eyelids looked as thin and fragile as yellowed old pages in a book whose story would soon be over. He muttered in his sleep, like an unhappy child, and I hung over him, knowing that his sleep might be disturbed.

I did not let myself cry for my father who was alive, or my mother who was dead. I had things to do besides cry: I had debts to pay.

I waited until I was sure my father was slumbering peacefully, then left to visit the Strykers.





CHAPTER THREE



I didn’t begin this story right. Penelope told me that I should explain everything, because soon the world might be very different.

I don’t see how I can explain the whole world, though. Am I meant to go back in the story to when there was one united New York, before any of the cities were divided in two? That happened before my father’s father was born. It happened after the magic came.

When the power of Light and Dark was discovered, the world was transformed. There was no going back: the shine and shadow of magic swallowed the old world up.

That was when the world was torn between those who practice Light magic, born of sun and moon and stones, and those who practice Dark magic, which comes from life instead of light. Dark magic uses blood, and the dead.

No wonder the people who could do no magic were scared of Dark magicians, and not of Light. Besides, there were always more of the Light magicians—ten times more. We were always stronger, and we were told that meant we were better.

The long-ago people who would become the first council of Light decided that those who practiced Dark magic were too dangerous to be allowed to live with the rest of us, even though we needed them close by.

The Light magicians, those among us who were first and best at accessing the new power, built walls around portions of our city. The Dark ones are kept in there, and with them all those who have ever had Dark magicians in their families, who might have Dark children.

They are not trapped. That’s what they say, out in the Light cities.

I learned what they say in the Light cities when I was fifteen, but I was born in the Dark city of New York. Those of us who were born Dark or come to live in the Dark ask each other, “Buried how long?”

The Light cities are right, I guess. Buried is different from trapped. The trapped believe they can get out.



My dad was born in Light New York. He graduated from Columbia at the top of his class as a Light medic.

Dad was—and still is, sometimes, when he remembers—a dreamer. He believed in leading the whole Dark city into the light, in providing Light medical care for those within the Dark city, in doppelganger rights, and the acceptance and reintegration of the Dark back into the Light.

After he graduated, he applied for and was granted a pass into the Dark city, where he immediately got a job at Maimonides, the only big hospital we had.

That was where he met my mom. She was born in the Dark, like me, but she was a Light magician.

Unlike me, she never got her rings. She always had to hide that she was a Light magician, because her father was a Dark one. He had been discovered doing Dark magic in the Light city, and his life had only been spared because my grandmother stood between him and the crowd who would have killed him for being what he was. His whole family had been exiled to the Dark city, and my mother had been born there.