Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Xhea turned back to find the ghost peering warily at the sphere. “How can you tell?”

  “This section.” Shai pointed at spell lines at the thing’s core. “That’s my signature. Or . . . almost.”

  “That’s rather more efficient,” Xhea replied cautiously. After all, no one really wanted Xhea, only the ghost in her possession. If they had found a way to capture Shai herself, a spell that trapped not flesh but spirit . . .

  Turning, Xhea caught sight of the warning placed beneath the original entrapment spell closest to the door. Not an X of stones this time, but an object: an ancient solar-powered calculator, its screen still intact. Her breath caught. Carefully, she crept toward it and knelt, hesitant to touch it.

  “I sold this to Wen,” she whispered. “To Brend. He wouldn’t . . .”

  Even without his father’s skill for the antique trade, Brend wouldn’t have lost an object of such value, wouldn’t have discarded it. Had he sold it? She thought again of the disarray she’d found in the warehouse, precious artifacts smashed and the daylight spell flickering, and wondered for the first time whether Brend was all right.

  Distracted by the thought, Xhea stood. There was a flash as the entrapment spell activated. She gasped, twisted, and tried to turn away—all too late. The spell’s light was the last thing she saw as a tendril fell across her face and caught fast.

  Xhea barely stifled her scream. The magic burned, then froze, the sensations fierce along her cheekbone and across her left eye. She staggered back and tried to pull away, but the tendril held her effortlessly. Her struggles only allowed other tendrils to catch her hands and arms, and grasp at her sides. Every tendril burned, even through her clothing and hair—the pain from the magic so sharp she felt dizzy with it, disoriented. She wondered if she was going to pass out.

  Each tendril found its hold—and began to rise. Xhea screamed then, unable to quell her panic as her boots left the ground. With her single unaffected eye, she caught sight of Shai’s horrified expression. The ghost reached for her, shouting something that Xhea couldn’t understand over the ringing in her ears.

  “Make it let go!” Xhea cried. She reached for Shai’s hand as if that ghostly flesh could keep her earthbound. Tears, hot and furious, leaked from Xhea’s eyes—and as the tears slipped down her cheeks, she felt the tendril’s grip on her face ease. She saw a wisp of something dark pass in front of her unbound eye, soft and sinuous as smoke.

  The thought came, falling in perfect time to the words shaped by Shai’s lips: Magic. Dark magic.

  The thought was a call, a need, and it came, a rush of black power. As if it were air, she cried with the force of it, screaming as it left her lips; as if it were sweat and tears, it poured from her, a liquid antidote to the pain’s fire. Around her, the tendrils’ light flickered and seemed almost to flinch, their edges darkening as they curled in upon themselves. Face, arms, legs, torso—their tightly woven grip loosened, and Xhea fell to the ground.

  She landed hard on her right knee and tumbled into a boneless heap, the air forced from her lungs on impact. Her scream was no more than a choked cry; she could only grasp weakly at her knee with trembling hands as she struggled to inhale.

  It was a long moment before she could breathe, and air did little to dissipate the pain. She grit her teeth, trying not to whimper, and rolled over. The last of the spell hovered between her and the Towers’ growing light, flailing and twisting in on itself as it died. She took a long, slow breath, and another.

  “Magic,” Xhea mumbled, road grit clinging to her swelling, bloodied lip. “Keep forgetting about that.”

  A paler light, Shai sank until she knelt at Xhea’s side. Xhea welcomed the chill of the ghost’s touch as Shai tried helplessly to check for breaks, or slow the sluggish bleeding of the cuts on Xhea’s cheek and palms. There was no sign of Shai’s introverted guilt and hurt, or the closed expression that had become so familiar over the course of the afternoon.

  A moment of hesitation, then the ghost offered softly, “That looked like it hurt.”

  Xhea laughed, cringing as the movement hurt her ribs, but managed her reply. “A good observation.”

  Shai smiled.

  “Come on.” Xhea slowly got to her feet. Her knee hurt—oh, how it hurt—but it would hold her weight, if barely. She covered her aching, dazzled eye with her palm, and limped to the doors. “The night’s not getting any younger.”

  Xhea made her slow way into the tunnels. Even half-blind from the entrapment spell and stumbling from the pain in her swelling knee, she tried to hurry. Though she doubted her pursuers could investigate at night, having triggered a spell would help narrow their search. Her only escape was to go deeper than anyone could follow, and in this end of town her only choice was the Red Line tunnel. She followed the rails downhill.

  All too quickly the spring-like warmth gave way to a damp, aching cold that settled into her bruised limbs. A nearby storage cache yielded an emergency blanket and a few bland ration sticks; she wrapped herself in the former and chewed mechanically on the latter as she descended. The scrape of her boots against the gravel rail bed echoed the length of the tunnel.

  Only when she could hear the lap of water against the concrete walls did she stop. The only thing farther down the tunnel was the collapse, the fallen tunnel walls and the floodwaters that had brought them down, ringed now by years of heavy mud and sediment. Safe enough for one night, she supposed. There was a service room nearby filled with scrap metal where she’d planned to sleep, but now she didn’t think her injuries would make the shelter worth the pain of entrance. Though the smell of rot and mildew was choking, Xhea lowered herself to the ground by the tracks and leaned back against the cold wall.

  Wrapped in the crinkling blanket, she pressed her hands to the sides of her knee and hissed in pain.

  “It’s not supposed to do that,” Shai said. “An entrapment spell, I mean. It’s not meant to be painful.”

  “Guess I’m just lucky. Lucky, lucky me.” Xhea raised her pant leg to look at her knee, blinking and squinting to see past the dazzled after-images still painted across her vision. Already the flesh was mottled dark with spider-like tracings of broken blood vessels patterning the kneecap.

  “That’ll be a good one,” she said, her voice loud in the tunnel’s silence. “You’ll have to tell me what colors it turns. Purple, for sure.”

  “I’m sorry,” Shai said, seemingly transfixed by the dawning bruise.

  Xhea shrugged. “Wasn’t your fault.”

  “If I wasn’t here—”

  “Then I’d be here all alone, and what’s the good in that?” Xhea sighed at the ghost’s expression. “Look, Shai, I don’t like this any more than you do. But I can take a little pain—especially if it means that we may get out of this eventually.”

  Xhea shifted, trying to settle down, and winced at the movement. Of all nights, she thought, I could have chosen a better one to sleep on gravel.

  “Regardless, we should be safe for now.”

  “I’ll keep watch.” Shai rested against the tunnel’s opposite wall, her soft glow the only light. Xhea should have needed neither glow nor reassurance, yet at the ghost’s words something inside her relaxed nonetheless. It didn’t ease the pain or soften the gravel beneath her—but it was enough to let her sleep.

  Xhea wasn’t sure what woke her first: Shai’s hand against her shoulder, or the sound that echoed softly from the tunnel’s concrete walls. She froze, her wide eyes the only sign of awareness.

  For the space of a few long breaths, there was only silence. Only water dripping from the tunnel roof—only something shifting, crumbling, in the old infrastructure. Just as she was about to move, she heard it again: a splash, followed by the slow sloshing sound of a person walking through water. Someone was approaching—not from the Lower City, but from the tunnel’s broken end.

  Xhea turned toward the noise, resting her cheek against gravel as she stared into the black. Afterimages still clouded her visio
n. She could just make out the empty light fixtures along the ceiling like a row of gaping mouths and the dark, dull gray of the old subway tracks. Farther, she caught a flicker of Shai’s light reflecting across the water as a small wave broke, thick with mud and oil. Cursing the tendril that had fallen across her face, Xhea covered her injured eye. Only then could she see it: a hunched figure, black against the darkness, head down as it crept forward.

  Fear coiled through her, cold and hard.

  “We have to go,” Xhea said almost inaudibly and no less urgent for her caution. Shai nodded, staring down the tunnel with one hand pressed to her lips.

  Xhea pushed herself to sitting, wincing at the pain in her knee and hip and shoulder. Instinct hammered her, shouting go, go, go in surges of adrenaline and that fierce, bitter fear.

  Just as strong was the need for silence. It wasn’t the gravel that gave her pause, but the emergency blanket that she’d so carefully wrapped around herself for warmth. And oh, it was warm—she lay sweating beneath it—and near impossible to move with anything resembling quiet.

  Just like opening a ration bar, she thought, and peeled back the silver foil blanket in a single sweep. The sound was like a shout in the quiet tunnel. She caught her breath, waiting—then the figure in the water splashed forward. Another step, and another, in her direction.

  Xhea kicked her feet free of the blanket’s trailing end, heedless of the tear she caused. She could salvage it later—if she had a later. Because as the figure came closer, she knew she’d seen this man before. A dirty sweatshirt hung loose around his distended belly and thin, bony legs, the shirt’s tattered hem trailing through the water. His white hair was wild about his face, matted clumps standing in clear disregard of gravity’s dictates.

  She didn’t spare him more than a glance as he sloshed through the water toward them—didn’t dare take the time. Knew, too, that if she could better focus her aching eyes, she’d see his unblinking stare fixed on her face, as it had been in the street outside her old apartment in the ruins.

  Had she thought she would be safe here, at the edge of where the city that had come before succumbed to time and decay? She knew the hole caused by the Red Line’s collapse as she knew her own self; felt the echoes of its fall in sleep and dream. Had it seemed safe, sheltering in the deep where the tunnel gaped wide, an empty space open to the distant night sky? She’d been a fool.

  Safe, yes, from City folks, true and Lower alike; normal people in whom magic flowed as certainly as blood. But the things, the creatures that walked the ruins’ midnight streets were not people, no matter who or what they might have once been. The walkers didn’t come into the tunnels normally—too complicated a shelter to reach, with nothing they wanted hiding in the depths. And yet she’d stationed herself and Shai close to a hole that the walkers could climb through, knowing that the radiance of the ghost’s magic or her own drew them like flies to spilled sugar.

  “Go, go, go.” The words fell from her lips in thoughtless time to her heart’s hammering. She pushed herself up, heedless of her skinned hands and bruised shoulder—only to cry out as she tried to stand. Her knee wouldn’t hold. The pain she’d ignored now redoubled, the joint aggravated by walking and stiffened from hours on the hard ground.

  Again she tried and fell back as her knee buckled beneath her with a searing pain. She touched it: swollen to nearly double its size and hot even through the thick fabric of her pants.

  Beside her, Shai held out a hand in useless gesture. “Come on.” Xhea tried only to hear the encouragement in Shai’s voice, not the growing panic. “Come on, try again.”

  The pain only worsened with each attempt. At last Xhea grit her teeth and scrambled across the gravel on her hands and single knee, dragging her leg behind her—and crying out as the movement jarred her knee, again and again. Behind her, the walker’s footsteps came faster as it reached shallower water, drawing nearer more quickly than she could crawl.

  Just get to the service room, she thought. The door was warped in its frame, but surely she could jam it closed until the walker was chased away by dawn.

  As the splashing grew louder, Shai stared over Xhea’s head, transfixed by the sight of the approaching walker. Xhea dared not turn, fighting panic. How far was she from the service room? Another fifty feet down the line, at least, just before the last branch in the tunnel. She whimpered as a rock ground into her good kneecap, and forced herself to crawl faster, knowing it wouldn’t be fast enough.

  The thing had come to eat her, and how kind of her to tenderize herself with a good gravel pounding. Lovely loose joints, she thought darkly, horribly. Freshly bruised and delicious.

  “Xhea,” Shai whispered, her voice gone faint.

  “I know,” she managed. “I’m trying.”

  “There’s another one.”

  A second set of splashing footsteps had joined the first—and these sounded as if they were made by something larger. Like the first, this thing didn’t run, but walked, steadily drawing nearer.

  She had to stand, she realized, regardless of the pain. Xhea scrambled across the tunnel to where pipes and electrical wires ran along the wall. Untouched since the Fall, the wires were thick with grime and dust, their plastic casing crumbling at her touch. Heedless of her bloodied palms, she grabbed hold of the wires and pulled until she managed to get her good leg beneath her. Hopping is faster than crawling, she thought. But she did one better: grabbing on to the wall, she forced herself into something like a stumbling, limping run.

  Until she heard the sound of gravel crunching from the dark tunnel before her. Xhea clutched a rusted pipe for balance, and tried to keep moving.

  “Shai—there’s someone ahead. Can you—”

  “I’ll check.” The ghost hurried into the darkness. As Shai rounded the corner, the glow of her pale luminance vanished, and Xhea struggled to see. From her good eye she saw the gray shapes of gravel and rail lines, distance markers painted on the wall. Her magic-dazzled eye showed only black.

  A moment later, Shai’s voice echoed back: “It’s another one!” Before Xhea could reply, the ghost added, “More than one.”

  “Before the service room?”

  “Yes.” A single, hopeless word.

  At that Xhea stopped, still clinging to the wires for support, and turned to face the two figures that approached from the tunnel’s flooded end. Though both now walked dripping across dry gravel, she still heard splashing footsteps: there were more of them in the darkness.

  Of course, Xhea thought. Of course. She sagged against the crumbling tunnel wall.

  “Be careful.” Xhea’s voice was thin against the sound of countless feet walking, none of them hers. “Remember, they can see you.” Somehow. The only other living things who could see ghosts as she could were blank-eyed, starving mockeries of people, less human than the ghosts themselves.

  “Wait,” Shai said. “He’s . . .” Her voice trailed away.

  Xhea stared at the approaching walkers. Two she recognized from the streets above: the old man in his fraying sweatshirt and the young woman lost in her oversized clothes. The others were unfamiliar—but their eyes, their fixed and staring eyes, watched her as if nothing else existed in the world.

  Xhea drew her knife, long practice allowing her to open the blade with a single hand. The short blade would be all but useless, but it was better than facing them empty-handed. Except these were not normal people, their flesh as devoid of bright magic as that of corpses; perhaps the blade—and her magic, imbued into the silver through years resting in a pocket by her heart—might work against these things as it did against ghosts.

  Or perhaps raw magic would be her only defense. Could her magic kill? Shai had died at her touch, though perhaps that had only been from the destruction of the bright spells that kept her alive so long. Weapon or not, Xhea wanted the strength the magic brought her, its calm. She ignored the breathing exercises she’d practiced; control was not what she needed now, at least not the clumsy control that
was the only thing she could bring to bear. No, she needed energy, raw force. There was no anger to fuel it now; that was gone, burned from her so fully that she couldn’t even stir its ashes. Only fear was left, cold and hard, smelling like sweat and tasting like bile, and it was enough. It had to be enough.

  Had magic already been seeping from her, blood and sweat and tears? It must have been, for it responded to her call with ease, calming her heart and the rush of her breath. The bruise-like pain from the entrapment spell eased, and she blinked as her vision returned. Wires in one hand, knife in the other, Xhea pushed away from the wall and let her good leg take her weight. The magic curled around her hands and the sheen of the darkened blade, rising from her lips to wreath her head with every breath. Steady now, she thought.

  Still the walkers approached, steps neither hurried nor slowed, merely constant, relentless, as if each walked in time to an unheard metronome. The closest ones dripped, their sodden clothes streaming muddy water, their bare skin smeared with things she could smell but not identify.

  Xhea shook her head and the charms in her hair chimed and clattered in the tunnel’s unnatural quiet. “Don’t come any closer,” she said.

  If they understood her, they gave no sign, only walked until they were within a few easy paces of her. Then they shifted until they stood shoulder-to-shoulder around her, blocking the tunnel in an uneven arc.

  The light brightened as Shai returned. The walkers swiveled toward Shai as one, and their pupils contracted at the ghost’s radiance. Xhea expected to see Shai hurrying toward her but saw only the ghost’s back: step by careful step in midair, Shai stumbled backward, her eyes never leaving the figures that approached from the tunnel’s opposite end.

  “No,” Shai whispered. She stepped back and back again, her voice anguished. “No, no, no . . .” A litany of useless denial.

  “Shai.” Xhea looked from one blank face to the next. Dark magic poured from her now, falling from her in a slow cascade and spreading in an ever-widening pool about her feet. “I don’t know if they can touch you, but if they can’t . . . you should run.”