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.
Families who produce both Dark magicians and Light magicians are very rare. We pretend it never happens; we all know that when it does happen and the council hears about it, the whole family disappears. We keep the Light and the Dark separated by walls, by beliefs, by blood. We pretend it is not true that sometimes people find each other through anything.
You can’t get Light medic training in a Dark city, but my mother worked in the hospital anyway, did what Light magic she could do undetected. It’s forbidden to do Light magic unless you’re certified, unless you have the rings. I’ll never have as much power as my mother, but I can do things she was never allowed to do. She could work miracles, but with rings she could have saved thousands of lives.
Light magic works better than Dark for healing, unless the situation is desperate, the patient on the very threshold of death. Then, only the Dark can fight back the last darkness.
My dad found out my mom was doing Light magic, but he didn’t turn her or her family in. He taught her how to do more. He helped her do better. She was better than he was, he always said. She never wore the magic rings, but my father bought a necklace for her on the black market: one beautiful, fire-hearted diamond hanging from a silver chain. She never wore it outside the house, but sometimes at night we would close all the shutters, draw every curtain, and she would do magic that made that diamond blaze.
Mom and Dad considered themselves married, though Light magicians cannot legally marry people from Dark magician families. Mom pretended she lived next door with her parents and her sister and her sister’s husband, not with us. On paper, I was the child of my father and a dead patient who’d had no Light or Dark magic in her veins. Mom and Dad would talk sometimes about getting fake papers for Mom, going to the Light city and getting her rings. Dad would get cards from his best friend from med school, Penelope, and she would always write “Hope to see you in the next year!” on them.
I never really believed we would leave. It would have meant leaving our whole family. I thought I would be buried all my life. I was used to Light magic being something my parents taught me behind blackout curtains, our family secret. I was a Light citizen from the day I was born, because any children of Dad’s were qualified to be Light citizens. When he saw I was a Light magician too, he applied for certification for me and got me my rings, but I could stay because he was the chief surgeon in the hospital by then, and as far as the law was concerned he was my sole guardian. By the time I was fifteen, I had still never passed through the gates of the Dark city.
Light guards were posted at the gates, checking paperwork and making sure no unlicensed Dark citizens passed into the Light. The Dark city was ruled mainly by the Light guards, acting on behalf of the Light Council. Working directly under the Light guards were the most powerful Dark magicians. The magicians who made themselves useful to the Light were rewarded with blood, and blood to Dark magicians meant power. Everyone else in the dark, everyone weak, everyone powerless, walked in fear.