Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  No, these people weren’t stupid or impulsive. They wouldn’t have sent thugs after her—at least not without reason. But it was that reason she failed to see.

  Then again, maybe Allenai hadn’t sent the hunters. If it were known that a Tower wanted her, other Lower City dwellers might attempt her capture in hope of a reward. But was that potential temptation enough to endure the pain of traveling underground? Xhea shook her head, wishing the pieces would fall into place. Wishing the cold knot in her stomach was only hunger.

  “So,” Xhea said, breaking the silence. “What was it about the spell keeping you alive that you didn’t want Wen to hear?”

  She didn’t need to look at Shai to see her startle. The movement broke the rhythm of her false walk, and for a moment Shai slid helplessly through the air as if across ice. Xhea couldn’t help but grin, and not even Shai’s offended glare could chase the expression away.

  “When I die, you’re welcome to laugh at me too,” Xhea offered. “I imagine it’s hard getting used to being dead.”

  “It’s almost too easy,” Shai admitted, regaining her balance. “What’s hard is remembering what it was like to be alive.”

  “You’ve only been dead—what, a little over a week? Were you outside your body for so long?”

  “No.” She made a sound that was almost a laugh, bitter and hard. “But I was dying for a very long time.”

  “Months?”

  “Years.”

  They walked together in silence, the ruins quiet but for the rustle of the wind through new leaves and the crunch of Xhea’s footsteps. At last Shai said, “Being dead is almost like being real again. Even if I’m only real to you, and to Wen.”

  “If you were suffering, why wouldn’t they let you die?”

  Shai sighed. “Power. Of course. It’s all for the magic.”

  “And the spells binding you to your body?”

  “My father tried to break them. I think he damaged them enough that I wasn’t always trapped in myself, and yet . . .” She shook her head. “Kept alive, a Radiant’s body can generate magic for a long time, even if the person is . . . like I was. Unable to stand, or eat, or even think. Caught on the edge of death.”

  “For years,” Xhea said.

  “Years upon years. They can block the pain, but . . .” Shai shrugged, a short, sharp gesture. “But that’s only if the person—the spirit, I suppose—stays in the body. Without its spirit, a Radiant’s body loses its ability to generate magic. The power slows, and within months the body is just . . . a body.”

  “Your father believed that if you were separated from your body, it would die without you. You’d be free.” Free to die; free to fade away.

  Shai nodded.

  “But even if your ghost generates some magic, why do they need you if your body is dead?”

  Shai said bleakly, “There are other bodies.”

  “Other—?”

  “Other Radiants. Their spirits gone and their bodies kept alive until another can be found to fill it.”

  “But if only a few Radiants are born, and they bind your ghost to your body, then how—”

  “It doesn’t need to be a Radiant’s spirit, though that’s best. Any spirit is enough to keep the body generating magic. Fueling the Towers and their people.”

  “And if they only have a Radiant’s ghost?”

  Shai’s face was grim. “The same, in reverse: any body will do.”

  She’d known possession was possible—but this was worse. The resurrection of a body with a ghost foreign to the flesh. A ghost forced there, trapped there, helpless. The thought was enough to turn Xhea’s stomach.

  Shai continued as if Xhea’s reaction did not matter, could not matter. “If Allenai didn’t have an empty body for me, they could buy one from an allied Tower for a price—even arrange to have a body . . . vacated. But there is one. A Radiant’s body.” She looked up at the City. “I knew him when I was a child. He used to tell me stories.”

  Xhea tried to imagine it: Shai bound to a body not her own—a man’s body, the body of someone she had known. Hidden away in a Tower, broken and hurting and dying, endlessly dying, for years. Unable to escape. Bound so she couldn’t even try.

  “I won’t let that happen,” Xhea whispered, reaching for her knife as if to fend off those futures. There were worse things in the City than she knew, than she had ever dreamed.

  “I will not let it happen,” she vowed again. She knew she sounded savage, her voice harsh with anger, and did not care. Could not care. “Anything in my power, I will do it, Shai. Anything. I won’t let them take you.”

  Shai simply looked at her, her face bright with the magic that built inside her, minute by minute, day by day. She reached out and touched the back of Xhea’s knife hand with the tips of her fingers. But all she said was, “I know.”

  They walked through the ruins without speaking. Xhea couldn’t break the quiet, even had she found words to capture the sudden tightness in her chest. It had been a long time since she’d made a promise; longer still since she’d meant to keep one. Yet the feel of the words lingered in her mouth, dark like her magic, and heavy; and if those words had a taste, she only knew not to name it sweet.

  In silence she asked herself: What are you doing? All she had needed—wanted, worked for—was to be safe. To have enough to eat and drink, a secure place to sleep, a way to care for herself when surrounded by those who cared for nothing. Now she was risking what little she had managed to earn—and for what?

  Did she mourn the destruction of her safe haven, the ruin of mere things? She mocked herself for it. To keep this promise and protect the strange ghost that had fallen into her keeping, she was setting herself not only against one of the more powerful Towers, but the hidden workings of the City itself. How many Towers were there? They glittered across the sky, plentiful as stars; and if what Wen and Shai had told her was true, a Radiant—perhaps more than one, perhaps many more—was present in each. A dying person, or a dying body with a spirit trapped inside, bound to each structure. She could barely comprehend it.

  Against all that, she was but one girl. One girl with strange magic that she didn’t understand and barely controlled, no friends but a ghost, allies few enough to count on the fingers of one hand.

  But I don’t have to save everyone, Xhea thought. Only one. This one.

  She would not abandon Shai to face this alone.

  It was only then that Xhea realized where she was walking. At her feet, the road split. To her right the street continued uninterrupted; it would, she knew, take her to a crossroads that led quickly back to the Lower City, mere moments away. But to her left the ground sagged, sloping down and away. The depression was almost circular, and the surrounding buildings leaned in like broken teeth. Farther, she knew, there was no ground, no structures standing; everything had fallen in the collapse of the subway’s Red Line tunnel. Sometimes, in dreams, she still heard that fall: the roar of asphalt, steel, and concrete losing the battle against gravity, the sound almost—almost—enough to obscure the screams.

  But it was not that memory that made her want to turn and run, but all the ones that came before. Memories she would have called happy, if she had any right to the word.

  She did not run, did not take the safe route home, but turned instead toward the destruction, careful of the asphalt’s crumbling edge. Her feet had found and followed this path, once so familiar, without thought; and though the road had changed much in the intervening years, it still felt like returning home. Had she not walked on such treacherous ground, the thought would have made her close her eyes. As it was, it was all she could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  “What happened here?” Shai’s eyes were wide as she took in the wide bowl of destruction. “An earthquake?”

  It was easier to look at now, with the dust settled and the sharp edges of so many broken things dulled by years of rain and wind and snow. Easier, too, now that time had stolen the details of how the buildi
ngs had looked while standing, and the names of those who had lived in the fallen structures. Easier not to remember their faces.

  “A subway tunnel collapsed.” The Red Line tunnel—the deepest subway tunnel—had been flooded for as long as anyone remembered. Water always won in the end.

  She skirted the disaster’s edge, turned left onto a side street, and walked up the overgrown lane to a large rectangular building. The multi-paned windows were hazed dark with grime. It stood far enough from the collapse that the structure hadn’t been threatened; a thrown stone would fall short of the crumbling edge. Even so, it was close. Too close.

  There were seven steps to the building’s front doors; she didn’t need to count them. The doors were closed and locked, the large brass handles more solid than the wood in which they were mounted. Xhea did not kick out the lock as she would have in any other building, but reached into her tangled hair. There, braided to a thin cord and hidden against her neck, hung a brass key.

  Her hands were steady as she freed the key; steady, too, as they fit the key in the lock and turned, struggling only briefly against its resistance.

  “How do you—?” Shai began.

  “I used to live here.” Six years and a lifetime ago.

  Xhea pushed the door open on protesting hinges and stepped cautiously inside. It was as she remembered, the circular entrance hall bare but for peeling paint and water damage near the ceiling, the floor’s mosaic showing more gaps than tiles. The floor cracked and groaned beneath her as she crept toward the staircase, following a line of nails and the joist that ran beneath. The stairs were louder and visibly sagged, forcing her to step only on the treads’ far edges and cling to the railing as she ascended.

  It would have been safer to stay on the ground floor, but Xhea kept climbing, higher and higher as Shai watched and worried. It was not safety that kept her climbing but merely the memory of it, a feeling as misplaced as her naming this old building home.

  On the top floor, all was as she’d left it. There was a short hall and four doors, all closed. A small mat of knotted rags lay before the final door, and though it was a rotted, ugly thing, her heart twisted at the sight. In six years, it seemed, no one had come to search these rooms or claim the possessions that she, and the others who had lived here, had inevitably left behind. This, more than the dust and damage, made her wary.

  She unlocked the door and it opened slowly, noisily, its bottom scraping along the floor’s unfinished boards. As she stepped inside, Xhea understood for the first time what people meant when they said they felt like they’d seen a ghost. As if the past, full of dreams and impossibilities and the shards of things that would never be, had come crashing down upon her, surrounding her with a presence that it seemed she could breathe, could taste, could feel in the sudden sting of tears in her eyes.

  Oh, she had hated this place. Hated its openness, its echoing space that no screens or hanging fabric could ever properly divide; hated its foolish, lofty ceilings and exposed beams. Hated the way the huge windows sapped the warmth from the room, and gave only a view of crumbling ruins, the wide and empty horizon that the unfinished apartment seemed to mimic. The corner that was to have been a kitchen had always mocked them with the dead-end pipes that had promised a sink, the trailing wires and gaps in the countertops where no appliances would ever be installed. The metal barrel that had been their heat and oven both still stood in the center of the stained floor.

  Yet there was the structure they’d called a loft: a silly cobbled-together platform where Xhea had often slept. She’d used sheets and blankets to make a tent there, a little cave in the midst of so much openness, where warmth and secrets could hide. There, on the sagging countertop, was her old mug, an antique blazoned with a logo that she’d never been able to read. Tiny things were still scattered in corners: rotted fabric that had once been clothing, an oil lamp, a hammerhead tied to a makeshift handle, a ball of twine.

  And there, against the far wall, was the patchwork quilt that had served as bed and blanket both. So clearly, she remembered watching the needle flash in the lamplight as each of those stitches was painstakingly placed, binding together scraps of towels and cast-off clothes into a chaotic whole that Xhea had always found beautiful. It was into that quilt’s warmth that she had fled on nights when they’d heard screams or worse from the streets below their windows; it was where she had curled when her nest of blankets was not enough to keep her warm.

  In fear and cold, she had shivered—and found comfort and warmth near the slight body of the girl she had thought of as mother and sister, protector and best friend.

  “Abelane,” Xhea whispered to the empty room. “I’ve come home.”

  Throughout the afternoon, Xhea cleaned. She had never been much for neatness; her hidden rooms and corners were organized in a chaotic system of piles that made sense only to her—and sometimes not even then. Abelane had been Xhea’s opposite in this as in so many other things, and Xhea knew that the older girl would’ve had a fit had she seen the apartment in its current state. Once Xhea would have laughed at the reaction, but now the thought was enough to make her seek the straw broom from its place in the corner.

  The broom’s bristles were mere stubble now, but it worked well enough when applied with force. Piles of dirt and dust and flaking paint undisturbed for years rose in great clouds, making Xhea cough and breathe through the edge of her shirt. She worked tirelessly, making pointless piles of dirt she had no way to pick up or throw out, dusting objects she had no desire to use or take with her, organizing old belongings best discarded entirely.

  Over and over Shai called her name, asked her what was wrong, and Xhea found she couldn’t answer. Words caught in her throat, thick with dust, and she could only turn away. At last, Shai retreated to the top rung of the loft’s ladder and watched. Xhea kept her head down, pretending she didn’t feel the weight of the ghost’s stare, or all the questions unasked in silence.

  Only when the sun vanished from beyond the grimy windows did Xhea sink to the ground against the far wall and place her head in her dirty hands. Blisters marked her palms and her arms ached from hours of unfamiliar motion, but she only felt them now, as if stopping had called the hurt forth. When twilight shrouded the apartment and veiled her naked expression, Xhea spoke.

  “Abelane found me on the streets when I was a child,” she said slowly, testing the words. “Four years old, five . . . something like that. She was just a child herself, younger than I am now, but she wanted to protect me anyway. Or maybe she just didn’t want to be alone.” Xhea shook her head; she’d never gathered the courage to ask.

  “It was winter. She said that there were bruises around my wrists and ankles, as if I’d been tied and held, and my clothing was too thin for me to have been outside long. I . . . I don’t remember any of it. She said it hurt when she first took my hand, as if I’d shocked her, and her hand was almost numb for an hour, but she took me home anyway.”

  Xhea glanced up. Shai now knelt on the floor before her, hands curled in her lap and face unreadable. She was not glowing, now; merely bright, as if lit by moonlight.

  “That winter we were always moving. Finding a place to stay for a few days, then moving on. Always afraid. Always hiding.

  “Later we found this place. The other rooms were already taken, but this one was unfinished and damaged. People had been using it for garbage. Took a long time to get it cleaned up.” Even then it had been common to wake to the sound of waste bags hitting their door—bags that they’d had to drag downstairs themselves, lest they become trapped in their apartment by the pile.

  “How long did you live here?” Shai asked softly.

  “A little over three years. We were here until the collapse. Or . . . I was.”

  “Only you?”

  “Only me,” Xhea said. “In the end.”

  Those three years had seemed an eternity. There had been a time when she’d not known what to want if it was not this room, these unfinished walls, this bl
anket made from scraps. It was Lane who’d taught her to steal and to fight, how to find food and hide in places no one grown could go. She’d even taught Xhea to read and write, to see magic and understand the lines of intent in cast spells—though the learning process had evoked more swearing than gratitude. And yes, they had fought, the petty arguments of girls who were, in the end, only children with no one to help them, guide them, to watch them or to care.

  But for those three years, she had not been alone. With Abelane always somewhere near, she’d almost forgotten what the word meant.

  Until those last days before the collapse.

  “Thing is, Lane was afraid of me—of what I was, or maybe what I wasn’t—but she hid it well. Most of the time.”

  “Afraid that you had no magic?”

  “Yes, that, but mostly that I could see ghosts. We fought about it. She used to say that I was lying to scare her.” During one of their fights, Abelane had been the first one to say that there was something wrong with Xhea, a wrongness that could be felt by the merest brush of skin on skin.

  Xhea shrugged. “Of course, later she was the one who helped turn my ability into a source of income. Not that too little renai was always a problem. Abelane had magic—she just didn’t know how to use it. She didn’t know many real spells, just . . . tricks.” Ways to get vending machines to give extra, ways to create the sound of a voice where there was none, or coax fire from damp wood with a single match. “I’ve wondered whether she wasn’t a runaway from the City. An ordinary girl fleeing something worse than this.” She gestured at the bare room, its dirt and peeling paint.

  Shai motioned for her to continue. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Xhea whispered. It was all she could do to force out the words, for here, in this place, the old hurt felt raw again, and speaking of such things was like casting salt atop the blood. “I woke one morning to find her gone. The door was locked, her blanket was folded, and Lane was just . . . gone.

  “I waited all day, expecting her to return any minute with food or firewood. But she didn’t, and when night fell, I knew that something was wrong. I was maybe nine years old, and hadn’t spent more than a few hours without her. I didn’t know what to do.”