Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Anything to keep from thinking of that darkness.

  “Okay,” Xhea whispered, trying to think. “Okay, okay . . .” Except it wasn’t. She would wear her boot soles to nothing pretending otherwise.

  Fine, then: a distraction. She grabbed a crazed plastic basin from the corner and filled it with water from one of her reservoirs, pouring carefully to avoid disturbing the thick sludge that had settled in the bottom. She threw off her jacket and the sweaty shirt beneath, dropping each to the floor. Her hands shook as she wet a cleaning rag, and she watched waves flutter across the water’s surface, each heavy with a weight of meaning that she could not translate. She lifted the rag and rung it out, fighting for calm. Suppressing the desire to scream.

  It’s just fear, she told herself. Uncertainty and adrenaline.

  Felt the lie, and tasted it; closed her eyes and made herself breathe.

  She washed her face and neck and arms, rivulets running down her chest and dripping from chin and elbows. The water was cold and it was just this, she told herself, that made her gasp. Only the chill that caught the breath in her throat and twisted it into a sob.

  Xhea scrubbed until her skin felt raw and her fingers tingled from the cold, washing away the sweat—if not the memory of the shadow that lingered beneath. She stopped only when her shivers turned violent, then dressed in cleaner clothes. Her jacket came last, its weight a comfort across hunched shoulders.

  “Xhea?” That quiet, hesitant voice.

  Xhea didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to meet those strange pale eyes and all the unanswered questions in their depths. Even so, she could feel the ghost. She had always been aware of ghosts, sensing them as it seemed they sensed her; yet never before had she felt a ghost’s presence like a bruise in midair. Though she willed it to stillness or oblivion, the darkness woken inside her reached for Shai, as if by yearning it could ease through the boundaries of her flesh toward the imbalance of a ghost lit with bright magic. Perhaps it could.

  She should stand, she knew. Leave. Outside, this would soon be a morning like any other. On the edge of the Lower City core, small groups would gather: hunting parties with weapons and survival gear, planning their trips out to the badlands; scrounging teams going to search the ruins for anything usable; a few misguided souls with handfuls of seeds and fertilizer and more hope than sense. The rising sound of voices, the low roar of generators with their stinking plumes of dark smoke, the sizzle and smell of food frying. Breakfast.

  It all seemed so far away.

  Xhea turned to the ghost and found Shai watching from on high, legs curled beneath her, head cradled in one hand. There was no trace of her earlier pain and fear, only a slight wariness in the eyes Xhea knew to be blue. That was the thing with ghosts. They were terrified one moment, back to normal the next. Fears were strange and fickle when you no longer had a life to lose.

  “Can you get down here?” Xhea asked. “You’re cricking my neck something fierce.”

  “Can you put the knife away?”

  Xhea glanced at her hand, surprised to find her fingers flipping the opened knife over and over in a familiar nervous gesture. There were no traces of blood on the blade, ghostly or otherwise. Years of obsessive polishing had worn the silver clean.

  “It’s not like I’m going to cut you,” she said, thinking: Probably. Not yet, anyway.

  “Still.”

  Xhea shrugged and folded the blade but kept the knife in hand, fingers restlessly rubbing the mother of pearl handle, its weight a comfort she little wished to banish to a pocket. Even closed, it held her attention. It was, she knew, the simplest answer to this problem; cutting the tether that tied her to Shai was the only sensible thing to do. What had she promised? A day, maybe two, and then they’d discuss more. Surely, after that night and all the distress the ghost had caused, she’d done work enough for the payment received.

  Besides, the longer she kept Shai, the greater the chances that the ghost would be called again to her body, dragged back along the second tether and into the cold shell of flesh that had once been her own. If that happened, what would keep the strange darkness from rising again? Black tears and vomit, breath and sweat, wrenched out of her regardless of what she demanded or desired.

  And that, right there, was the part of the problem that she couldn’t cut away. The darkness, she called it—had always considered it such, if only in the part of her mind where fears and bad dreams lingered. Now that she had seen it, felt it ascendant, she knew it had another name and one far truer: magic. Magic unlike any she’d known or of which she’d heard tell. Magic dark and languid, like thick oil, like branching smoke.

  Magic at last; her own magic. She choked back a bitter laugh. How long had she wished for magic, even the smallest glimmer? Her whole life, it seemed. She thought of the dark magic rushing uncontrolled from her throat and lips, leaking from her eyes and skin, and she shivered. Never had she imagined that having her wish granted could be so terrible, so horrifying or so cold.

  “What are you thinking?” Shai asked softly, and Xhea looked up from her knife. The ghost had come to kneel beside her—or tried to, instead hovering a hand’s width above the floor. She still had a lot to learn about being dead, but it wasn’t a bad first try for a ghost so new.

  That I’m afraid, Xhea thought, and don’t know what to do. Instead she said, “Shai, how did you die?”

  She expected the ghost’s usual denial, but Shai just shook her head.

  “Okay. What’s the last thing you remember? Before you met me.”

  The answer came after a long pause. “I remember . . . the dark. A long time in the dark.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Another pause, the silence stretching between them. “I don’t know,” Shai said, hesitant and unsure, as if Xhea might scold her for giving the wrong answer.

  “Okay.” Xhea sighed. “Don’t worry about it.” Shai wouldn’t be the first ghost to forget her death, nor the first to not know quite how it happened. Death snuck up on people in a thousand ways, fast and slow and by surprise, and its inevitability made it no easier to accept.

  Yet Shai seemed not to hear. “I remember . . .” she whispered, twisting her hands together. “I remember . . .” As if words might conjure the memories, bring them to the tips of teeth and tongue.

  “I remember the dark, and I remember . . . hurting. But there are moments when the pain stops, and my father is there. Those times, he’s with me.” Perhaps she was remembering the first moments after her death—the moments when she left her body? If so, it seemed her dying had been a blessing; caught in the memory of her pain’s ease Shai’s face seemed alight, the faintest of smiles gracing her lips.

  “But the rest of the time?” Xhea asked softly, thinking: Careful, now. Careful.

  “All of me, my whole body. Hurting.”

  “Did someone do something to you? Hurt you?”

  “No.” Her denial was almost inaudible. Shai shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “No, it’s . . . me.”

  “You hurt yourself?”

  Shai’s voice seemed to come from impossibly far away. “Only by living. By living and breathing, and the magic . . .” She shook her head again. Ghostly tears crept from the corners of her squeezed-tight eyes, sliding down her face to fall and vanish in midair. When she spoke again, the words were rushed and tinged with panic. “The magic . . . it’s sick, wrong. Broken. It’s all going wrong, all of it wrong—it’s eating me from the inside out and I can’t—I can’t—I can’t stop it.” With a cry, she buried her face in her hands.

  Xhea could barely touch the ghost—was unsure what little comfort she could offer—and so she waited awkwardly, turning the knife over and over as she tried to make sense of Shai’s explanation. Her mind circled the word “sick,” fixated on it. Sick, wrong, broken—something eating her from the inside out. What could it be but an illness? Illness was rare in the Towers where the prevalence of magic brought health and long life, magic enough to keep sick
ness at bay, with spells to ease pain and cure disease. But their rarity did not mean fatal illnesses were impossible, and someone—her parents, most likely—might have been made all the more desperate for the unexpected nature of her death.

  Question was, had they become desperate enough to resurrect her?

  Oh, how she wanted to cut Shai’s tether. Yet that would mean turning her back on what could only be an attempted resurrection—a horror Xhea had seen only once, and had sworn she’d do anything, everything, to keep from happening again.

  She needed a cigarette. No, she needed a bit of bright magic to cast all this into memory, or the courage to cut the line that joined her to this cursed ghost, and had neither. She waited, rubbing the knife’s smooth hilt, until Shai’s cries quieted.

  “Come on.” Xhea forced herself to her feet. “I want to show you something.”

  After days of rain, the bare patch of ground that was the Lower City’s only park resembled a lake dotted with islands of churned mud. Xhea grimaced at the sight. Above, the sky had yielded to a sluggish dawn, the heavy cloud cover hiding all but the lowest Towers, their shapes hulking shadows in the haze. No more rain, and praise be for such small mercies; but if the sun didn’t come out soon, the few plants that managed to grow so close to the core would be drowned entirely.

  Sighing, she picked her way across the expanse of mud, past the lone tree, and sat on a bench. Its ancient cast concrete supports were now spanned with boards from packing crates that creaked beneath her weight as she drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees. After a moment, Shai attempted to sit beside her.

  Only then did Xhea look at the building that loomed beyond the park’s farthest edge like a tombstone marking a muddy plot. Orren: the Lower City’s rotten tooth, jagged-edged and leaning. In the times before memory it had been an office building, sixty-five stories of gleaming black glass—a skyscraper in truth. Now it was called “skyscraper” only because it was one of the five tallest buildings left standing. Sometime during the fall of the city that had come before, Orren had been broken, nearly a full thirty stories toppled or ripped away, leaving the shortened building topped with jutting beams and broken concrete supports. Now only the buttons on its elevator banks stood as testament to its lost height.

  Though the upper levels were still in the process of being reclaimed—Lower City code for “totally uninhabitable”—Orren’s first twenty or more levels were in use, some packed almost to overflowing. As Xhea knew all too well. Usually she stayed as far from Orren as possible within the Lower City’s boundaries, avoiding even the streets near its base as if she could feel its shadow heavy in the air like fog.

  Xhea tugged on the ghost’s tether to get her attention, and pointed. “See that? That’s Orren.”

  “What . . . ?” Shai looked around slowly, as if unable to decide on which of the strange and incomprehensible things her gaze should rest.

  “A skyscraper. It’s about as close to a Tower as we get here on the ground.” So much so that the five skyscrapers had names, mimicking those above—and a sad and sorry mimicry, at that. The airborne Towers were everything to their people: not just a home, but life and livelihood, business and family, community. Whatever spare magic citizens generated went into the Tower itself, fueling not only its ability to stay aloft but also its internal systems and spells, its businesses and industries, its coffers. In return those citizens lived in the communal glow of their Tower’s magic, the gifts of health and happiness and long life inherent in every breath, every bite, every drop of captured rain.

  The skyscrapers were just . . . buildings. Old and crumbling structures kept from collapse by years of hard work and, some said, the preserving effect of the City’s magical runoff. Yet the power that resided in the Lower City—magical, political, and otherwise—belonged to one or other of the skyscrapers, as did most of its inhabitants. Only they had enough resources to garner attention from even the weakest Towers out on the City’s fringes. Those few Towers that deigned to do business with the skyscrapers kept the Lower City alive: selling food and seeds, tools that worked, supplies to repair what little they had. And if the quality was but a fraction of that known to those in the City proper—well, who were they to complain?

  “People live there?” Shai asked. She stared at Orren’s crown of twisted girders.

  “I lived there,” Xhea said, and managed to keep her voice steady. “Once.” It had been four years since her escape. At times it seemed but a moment ago, her fear little abated with the distance of time.

  Joining Orren had been a mistake from the beginning. She’d known within days—hours—that she’d made the wrong choice. Had lain awake watching the snow swirl outside the window of the girls’ dorm, wishing she’d chosen the very real possibility of freezing to death instead of the relative comfort of Orren’s reclaimed glass and steel walls. But the indenture had been signed, and even the signature of a ten-year-old child was binding.

  Orren’s industry—for every skyscraper had one—was people. They could make it sound so safe, so promising, for it was only through a skyscraper that a Lower City dweller had even a chance at living in a Tower. Orren trained them; and while some few held respectable positions or learned skilled trades, most jobs were of the type that no City citizen would want, no matter how desperate. There were many uses that a young girl could be put to—yet Orren’s recruiters had made a mistake when Xhea signed her contract: they hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t even tried.

  She’d wondered since what might have happened had someone brushed her shoulder that fateful morning she signed away her life; how her future might have changed had someone tried to shake her hand and felt the crawling discomfort of her touch. The sensation had been described to her as an unending static shock, or pins-and-needles—even once as the ache of a new bruise. A localized version of the feeling that everyone else experienced underground.

  “But . . .” Shai stared at Orren with her brows lowered. Mottled light shone dully from the skyscraper’s metal and glass sides, darkened and pitted by the dirt of untold years. Xhea watched her judge the worth of those walls—even broken, even twisted—and deem them preferable to dank subway tunnels and forgotten shopping concourses.

  “But . . . you don’t live there anymore.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Xhea’s quick reply caught in her throat. Oh, she didn’t want to talk about this—didn’t even want to think of it. Yet memories rose, and with them came fear. Xhea swallowed, choking on both. Remembering the only other ghost she’d ever seen who glowed and glimmered with magic when the light was right. Remembering his screams, and the whine of magic storage coils as they overloaded, flickered, and died. Remembering the feel of her knife, sticky with dark blood—and a man’s soul.

  “Something happened there,” she managed. “Something very bad.”

  “And you just . . . left?”

  Xhea nodded, wanting to laugh at the simplicity of that word. Left. As if anything could be so easy.

  Again Shai frowned, looking from Orren to Xhea and back again. “It has to do with me, doesn’t it? The thing that happened.”

  “Yes.” She turned to Shai, shifting her eyes’ focus to see the magic that imbued the ghost. It was stronger now, brighter: Shai seemed almost to glow. “I’ve seen a ghost like you before—a ghost who sparkled with magic. Someone had put spells on him. On his body, and . . . on his ghost.”

  “Spells?” Shai glanced down at her hands as if she too might see the magic that wove through her. “What were they supposed to do?”

  “Bring him back to life.”

  It was a ludicrous idea, even in concept. No one—certainly no one in the Lower City—had enough magic to return life to the dead. Even with a skilled caster and assistance with the ghost, resurrection would require so much magic, so much power, as to be impossible. Magic to prepare the body, magic to prepare the ghost, magic to join the two and more to bind them. Magic to slow time’s ravages and h
eal damage that the body could not. Magic to animate the flesh and tie it to the ghost’s will: spells upon spells, one for every part of the body that needed to move; spells upon spells to animate every muscle in the face and mouth, lips and throat, required for even the most garbled of speech. Magic as fuel guzzled down: energy enough to make any person a force in the City. Energy enough to keep a Tower aloft.

  Still, someone had tried—there, within those twisted walls. And she, gods save her, had helped.

  “Heal him?” Shai asked. “But how could that be bad?”

  Xhea shook her head, coins chiming, as if the memories and the emotions that swelled in their wake might be brushed away like flies. “Not heal him.” She managed to keep her voice steady. “Force his spirit back into his dead body—and keep him there.” Trap him, no matter how much he fought or screamed or cried. No matter how much it hurt him, or how he pleaded. And what use were pleas that only Xhea could hear?

  It was hard to think of those days; harder still to accept that she’d helped willingly, even eagerly. After a year of near uselessness within Orren, the debt of her indenture increasing as she struggled to earn her keep with menial chores, Xhea had confessed her ability to see ghosts. Then there had been work for her—and sudden interest from Orren’s elite. They started with small jobs to prove her skills: speaking to a ghost, banishing another, changing tethers to a dizzying array of anchors. Only later did she realize that they’d been testing her for the one job they cared about.

  They explained little of their goals, these men and women she’d known more by reputation than as living beings: the skyscraper’s few casters, their magic strong enough—or so it was said—to have lived in the City proper but who chose to live in the Lower City like gods among mortals. Even with their power, preparations had taken weeks, spells woven from threads of magic, layered lines of will and intent that bound spirit and body both. Xhea had guided the casters to the ghost that she alone could see, and had steadied the ghost when he had struggled or shied away. The ghost had glimmered, then, as he moved: the spells’ roots dug deep into his spirit, sparking as he fought to be free.