As a girl born buried, I knew never, ever to make eye contact with the Light guards, to walk the other way with my head bowed at the sight of anyone carrying a whip and wearing the snow-white uniform with its glittering insignia. We all knew stories, of friends of friends, of relatives, who had suffered at the hands of the guards and their interpretation of the Light laws.
Nothing bad had ever happened to me as a child. I was much loved, cautioned but always fiercely protected. The worst sights were kept from my eyes. Sometimes my parents seemed busy all the time, but I always had my Aunt Leila to look after me. She would take me with her on walks around the Dark city, under a shining clock enhanced by the guards’ Light magic, distributing pamphlets condemning the laws of the Light Council under the guards’ very noses. She was tall and stern and never afraid of anything, and I wanted to be just like her.
I think I would always, no matter what my life was, have been a scared child. I remember long nights in my childhood, lying awake and feeling as if a heavy weight was pressing on my chest, thinking about all the small things I had done wrong and all that I feared for the future. But I never feared what actually came to pass. My nightmares were not big enough to encompass all that. My parents told me that my imagination was too good, but it turned out that even my racing, scared imagination was not good enough.
The Light can destroy the Dark. They say that in both cities, but it sounds different in the Dark.
It was just the way life was. I listened to my mother and father and my aunt and my uncle discussing injustice, knew that Aunt Leila attended rallies about the Light Council’s laws, but I did not think those laws would have any further effect on my life than they had already. I obeyed all the rules, and I thought that would keep me safe.
Until they took my mother away.
She used to go into the bad part of town and heal the people there who needed help and yet would not go to a hospital: people on dust, vagrants, criminals. Aunt Leila always said she was a fool for going, that she would get caught using Light magic or be suspected of different criminal activity. My father always begged her to be careful, and she always said she would be, and she was always back before morning.
Until one day when she was not. She never came back. We never saw her again.
My father hoped the Light Guard had merely taken her into custody. He went to get her back, and when he asked where she was, the Light guards said she had broken the council’s laws and that he would not see her again. My father spat in a guard’s face and insulted the whole Light Council: he said their laws were wrong and that they had murdered her. He marked himself a traitor.
He told the truth. He was punished for that courage, but people are always punished for courage.
My Aunt Leila and my Uncle Douglas took me in. We all knew that my mother was dead, that any Dark citizen could disappear and be lost forever with no excuse. Nobody cared if the buried died.
But Dad was a different matter: he was a prominent Light citizen in the Dark city. People would notice. They could not simply let him disappear, so they made him an example instead. They punished him in public.
I said before that Dark magicians use blood for their spells. What they did to my father is one way to get it—the most horrible way, which grants Dark magicians the most power, which gives them both blood and death.
The Light Guard imprisons the condemned in heavy black iron cages hung high in the trees in Green-Wood Cemetery. The victims are transfixed in place with long iron spikes, slowly dying, as the worst Dark magicians come drink their blood and drain away their life force.
The Dark magicians permitted to do this are those who collude with the Light guards, who are willing to betray their fellows for the Light Council’s favor, for this rich reward.
They are only allowed to use criminals.
Which meant they were allowed to use my dad.
Dark magicians get power from all blood, but they draw the most power from the blood of Light magicians. My father, a powerful Light magician, was the richest possible prize for the Dark magicians who served the Light best.
People came from all over the Dark city to see people caged. The Light guards encouraged it: they thought witnessing the ultimate punishment was a deterrent to crime. I do not think people went to learn good behavior, though. They went because of the endless morbid hunger people have for the pain of strangers. I had never gone there before—my gentle father would never have taken his child there in a thousand years—but I’d seen recordings, heard the cheering of the crowds drowning out the caged ones’ screams. They watched the recordings in the Light city too, and they knew justice had been done.
When we heard that they had caged my father, I remember sitting in my aunt and uncle’s kitchen. My mother was already gone, and now I lived completely in a nightmare. Everything that had been familiar and beloved was suddenly hideous to me: the boiling kettle shrieking with anguish, my aunt’s eyes black as ink, the red tea towel a bloody flag. Uncle Douglas said heavily, “There is no way to save him.”
But I found a way.