Marci’s eyes went wide. It was so bright after the emptiness of Ghost’s void, she hadn’t realized until he named it that all that glittering shine below them was acity. An impossibly huge, double-layered city that stretched out in all directions.
With the exception of the sea floor they were standing on, every angle inside the canyon below them was filled. It was like staring into a mirror box. Look to the side, and it was all superscrapers rising to infinity. Look down, and there were infinite warrens of stairs, underpasses, and sewer pipes descending to the vanishing point in a neon-lit tangle. And if she looked straight ahead, it was just city. Miles and miles andmilesof buildings and overpasses and advertisements and cars racing from elevated Skyways down to the grid streets below. But for all its impossibilities, every view was familiar, because this wasn’t just any city. It washercity, the one she’d come to think of as home, despite only living there for a few weeks.
It’s the DFZ.
“It’s the ideal of the DFZ,” Ghost said.
It would have to be. In addition to existing in a crack in the floor of the Sea of Magic rather than the shore of Lake St. Clair, the city in front of them was orders of magnitude larger than the actual DFZ. It was also architecturally impossible, not that that mattered here. The laws of physics only applied to the physical world. This was the realm of spirits, of magic and ideas, andthiswas humanity’s dream of the new Detroit: an endless metropolis where anything could and did happen. She was staring into the vessel of the Mortal Spirit of the DFZ. Not the rat it chose to represent itself. That was no more her than Ghost’s cat. This was the real DFZ, the heart of the human dream of the city itself, and now that she was here, Marci knew what she had to do.
I’m going in.
“I can’t go with you,” the Empty Wind warned. “That’s her domain, the place where all magic is hers. I can’t—”
I know,Marci said, smiling him.Don’t worry. This was the plan, remember? I’ll be fine, I’m just going to talk. Wait here. I’ll be back before you know it.
It was clear from his shaking that Ghost wasnotfine with this, but he didn’t fight her again. He just swirled tighter around her, his icy hand gripping the bond of magic that flowed between them with all his strength.
“I’ll pull you out if things get bad.”
If things went bad, there wouldn’t be much left to pull out. She was walking into the lion’s den. She was just a soul, the leftover magic of a human life. Once she dropped into the DFZ’s domain, she’d be at the city’s mercy just like all the other magic in there. But she knew her spirit well enough to know Ghost wasn’t holding on for her. He needed their connection, so she let him cling, giving the magical link between them a final reassuring squeeze before stepping off the edge.
The change was instantaneous.
The moment her foot left the ground, everything—the dark, the swirling magic, her Empty Wind—vanished in a flash, instantly replaced by bright sun cut up into thousands of reflections from the superscrapers overhead. She wasn’t falling, wasn’t floating, wasn’t anything strange at all. She’d simply stepped from being a soul on the edge of a magical crevice to being a normal person again, standing in the middle of a crowded square somewhere uptown on the Skyways under the blinding midday sun.
Ghost?
The word was soft in her head, which suddenly felt very small. Small and empty. Their connection was still there in her hands, but her spirit’s voice was gone from her mind and her ears. Just as she’d been in her death, Marci was alone in her head again, but not anywhere else.
Just like in the real DFZ, there were people everywhere. They crowded in around her, tourists and office workers, street cart vendors and kids cutting school. Normal people, the sort she’d seen every day, laughing and talking and going about their lives. That was what made the crowd so odd, because these people didn’t have lives. They were shadows, aspects of the spirit that ruled this place. The spirit who had to know she was here.
Sucking the city air deep into her lungs—which were also whole and normal again, just as they’d been in her death—Marci turned in a circle, scanning the crowd for a sign. Something that would out this for what it was: an illusion, an ideal, a home for a spirit.
But the more she looked, the more real the city felt. Down here on the ground, she couldn’t even see the weird infinite skyline anymore. The people looked and sounded like any other crowd on a sunny afternoon on the Skyways, and the smells coming from the street carts were delicious and nostalgic, exactly as she remembered. If she didn’t know better, she could almost have believed she was really—
“Home.”
Marci jumped a foot in the air. The voice sounded like it was right behind her. When she whirled around, though, Marci saw she was actually across the street, looking at her through the unknowing crowd.
When she’d first seen it crouched behind Myron in the dark, the spirit of the DFZ had looked like a giant, evil sewer rat. When he’d sicced it on Ghost, it had just looked like a monster. Now, though, the thing staring at her looked almost human. A very sickly and tragic human with a hunched back and a black cloak made from trash bags. Its bowed head was covered in a deep cowl from which huge eyes shone out like street lights in a dark alley. For all this, though, the thing staring at Marci still looked far more human than the monster that Myron had ordered to attack, and that gave Marci hope.
Hello,she said, hiding her wince at still being a disembodied voice behind what she hoped was a friendly smile.I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Marci—
“I know who you are,” the spirit murmured, her voice soft this time, like the white noise of a crowd. “I saw it all when you jumped in. You’re a mage of the DFZ. One of my own.” She smiled then, her orange eyes gleaming. “Welcome home.”
Thank you,Marci said nervously.But I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. It’s true I lived in the DFZ, but I’m not yours. I belong to the Empty Wind.
“Not anymore,”the DFZ said. “You came to me. You live here.” She pointed at the street under their feet. “That makes you mine. Someonemustcome home. A city can’t be empty.”
But you’re not empty.All these people, the buildings—
“They’re not mine,” the spirit snarled. “Heput them here.”
The raw disgust and hatred in her voice went through Marci like shrapnel. Given that Ghost read her mind all the time, she really shouldn’t have been surprised, but it was impossible not to flinch at the sudden rush of bitter, toxic anger flooding through her thoughts. The only good part was that at least she didn’t have to wonder whom the spirit was talking about. The moment she spoke, Myron’s face appeared on every floating billboard and projected sign in the city, leering down at them like a hateful god.
“He chained me,” the DFZ snarled up at the pictures. “They did it together. The lake has always been my enemy, but I never thought a mage would turn. I am their city, their freedom.” She reached into her trash bags, scraping her clawlike fingers over the silver ribbon wrapped around her throat. “How could he chain me!?”
What he did was monstrous,Marci agreed.That’s why I’m here. I can help you.
