Chapter 78 Rebuilding
The city had always been a mess, but this was a new flavor. No one knew how to describe it yet. The revolution had killed the old order, but the body was still warm and the streets still stank of it. Daisy paced the morning with Oliver at her side, taking the city’s temperature the way a veteran might check a fevered child’s pulse: gently, but with one hand near the knife.
She hadn’t slept. The spiral was gone, but every nerve in her body buzzed with leftover magic, a permanent hangover. The world looked sharper, the air too sweet, like a punch that just missed her face. Everywhere, people moved with a nervous energy, building or breaking or just wandering like they’d been set loose in a dream. Daisy’s scales itched. She kept her gloves on, even though half the city had already seen her with the claws out.
They started at the old water market, where the new authorities had set up their “Resource Council” in the carcass of a burned-out bathhouse. Here, ex-merchants and ex-thieves argued over how to split the food convoys. Three men yelled at each other in voices that could have felled trees. A fourth, skinny, underfed, with a wild patch of beard, just watched the crowd for Daisy. When he spotted her, he bowed, grinning. It was the kind of smile that came with an invoice.
“Should we intervene?” Oliver asked, jerking his chin at the scrum.
“Not yet,” Daisy said. “Let them bleed out first.”
They kept walking. On the next block, a pair of girls practiced magic in the gutter, the younger one trying to hold a light orb above her head. She managed it for three seconds, then the orb popped, sending blue sparks everywhere. A nearby shopkeeper ran out, screamed at them, then scurried back inside when Daisy passed. The girls gawked at her, but Daisy ignored it, focusing on the orb residue still hanging in the air: it tingled, a little dangerous, a little delicious.
On a side street, two men, one wearing a noble’s ruined waistcoat, the other a street tough’s tattoos, argued over a crate of what looked like moldy bread. The noble pointed a trembling wand at his adversary. The tough snorted and whacked the wand out of the man’s hand with a pipe. They glared at Daisy as she walked by.
Oliver nudged her. “Everyone wants to be a wizard now. Even the idiots.”
“Especially the idiots,” Daisy said. She caught a whiff of sulfur, checked the rooftops, saw a flock of teenagers launching bottle rockets laced with blood-magic. They’d painted their faces with spirals, but none of them were born to it. When the first firework exploded, it left a crimson afterimage on the clouds. Daisy didn’t know whether to be proud or afraid.
Oliver led her toward the slums. The change here was the most dramatic. Buildings that had threatened to collapse now wore bandages of quick-dried magical mortar, slapping the brickwork together with veins of shimmering resin. Streetlamps, once just rusted iron, now glowed with bottled spells, each a little different: some lit up in purple, some pulsed like a heartbeat. The air itself felt alive, but unstable, like it was waiting for a fight.
They rounded a corner and saw a new class of merchant: a woman hawked amulets from a makeshift stall, her wares spread on a tablecloth painted with warding runes. “Guaranteed to deflect curses!” she shouted, waving a charm made from chicken bones and brass wire. “No refunds!”
A boy tried to snatch one, but the amulet sizzled, giving him a static shock. He yelped, but Daisy saw the look on his face as he slunk away, impressed, not angry.
Oliver stopped at the stall. “Any chance these actually work?”
The merchant looked him over, taking in the scars, the old blood on his boots, the half-smile that dared her to lie. She hesitated, then shrugged. “Depends what you need ’em for.”
Oliver bought two. He handed one to Daisy, who pocketed it without comment.
A commotion broke out farther up the street. Daisy’s senses prickled, metallic tang of fear, then the distinct, sickly snap of stone under stress. They jogged toward the sound, weaving through a crowd that had already started to gather.
At the foot of a tenement, a kid, no more than ten, barefoot, face smeared with charcoal, stood crying on the stoop, hands pressed together in a desperate gesture of prayer. Overhead, the building’s facade was fractured, a web of cracks radiating from a single point where a misfired spell had gone off. The stone shifted, a slow-motion avalanche, ready to drop and end a dozen lives.
Screams ricocheted up and down the street.
Daisy reacted before she thought. She dashed forward, skidding on loose gravel, and extended her hand. Crimson tendrils snapped from her palm, seeking the cracks, flowing into the gaps. The blood-magic felt different now, but it answered her, writhing into the fissures, stitching the broken rock like a spider sealing a wound. The effort hurt. It cost her. But the stone froze in place, the danger passing in a wave of awe that swept through the onlookers.
Oliver leapt onto the steps, hauled the weeping kid into his arms, then turned to the crowd. “Back up! She’s got it, get out of the way!”
People moved, not out of trust, but out of self-preservation. Daisy pressed her bloody hand to the building, shored up the last of the fracture, then let herself slump to the ground. Her vision spun. The scales on her hand glowed with heat, the blood on her jacket already blackening at the edges.
A woman limped forward, clutching her leg. A jagged chunk of stone had slashed her thigh, and blood pulsed from the wound in time with her heartbeat. Daisy’s stomach lurched, but she forced herself upright.
She beckoned the woman closer. “Sit,” she said. The woman obeyed, eyes huge, sweat running down her brow. Daisy examined the deep wound, but not fatal if sealed quick. She knelt, ignored the crowd, and let her claw score a new cut along her own wrist. She pressed the bleeding scales to the injury.
The sensation was immediate and electric: the magic wanted to knit, to bind, to mend. Daisy had never healed anyone before, but she remembered the feeling from her own nightmares. The blood-magic threaded itself through the other woman’s veins, then sealed the wound with a hiss.
The woman gasped, then started sobbing. “Thank you,” she choked out, over and over.
Daisy wiped her arm, let the blood crust over. She met the eyes of the nearest bystander, a former noble guard, his insignia hastily cut from his jacket. The man gaped at her, then looked away.
“She’s not the monster they claimed,” he muttered.
Others nodded. No one said it louder than a whisper, but Daisy felt it moving through the crowd, a slow shift in the air.
Oliver rejoined her, the rescued kid in tow. The boy looked up at Daisy, eyes shining with gratitude and terror.
“You saved us,” he whispered.
Daisy ruffled his hair. “Don’t do magic until you’re ready,” she said. “It bites back.”
He nodded, ran to his mother, who scooped him up and held him tight.
Oliver slung an arm around Daisy’s shoulders. “Look at that,” he said, voice quiet. “City’s starting to believe in you.”
She shook her head, but didn’t argue.
They walked on, leaving the crowd to their rumors and their new stories.
Daisy glanced back, once, and saw a dozen eyes watching her, half in awe, half in fear.
It was progress, at least.