“No,” the ghost said. “No, no . . .” The words were a continuation, not a response, as if Xhea hadn’t spoken.
She tried again, eyeing the human-shaped creatures that stared back with unblinking eyes. “There are too many, Shai. I can’t stop them. You don’t . . . you don’t want to see what they’re going to do.” She rather wished she could skip that part herself. She swallowed, choking back something that felt like a whimper.
“Please,” Xhea managed. “Please, Shai, just get out of here while you can.”
Oh, so noble, she mocked herself silently, and just as silently told that part of herself to shut up and die.
Shai turned to her, crying. Each teardrop shone as it traced a path down her cheek and fell glittering to the rocks below. She ran the last few steps that separated them and, heedless of Xhea’s magic and knife, grabbed her arm. Xhea cringed at the touch, thinking of what her magic might do to the ghost—yet Shai seemed not to notice, her eyes intent on Xhea’s face as she tried speak through her panicked gasping: “It’s—it’s—my da—”
It took a moment for Xhea to grasp Shai’s meaning. She looked toward the walkers that had followed Shai down the tunnel and now joined their brethren in the large, uneven half-circle, effectively blocking all escape. Even without Shai’s cry, she would have seen him: the middle-aged paunch, the faint thinning of the hairline, that face that she’d never seen looking unwearied. He was cleaner than those around him—his clothes sodden and dirtied, yes, but clearly new to such treatment. It was Shai’s father.
Or, rather, what was left of him. Whatever Xhea might have said to him, this City man who had begged her to kill his daughter, died in her mouth unspoken; for his eyes were blank as stones and fixed unblinkingly on hers.
“Oh, sweetness and blight,” she said, and yearned stupidly, desperately, for a cigarette.
She banished the thought as the gaunt old man in his dripping sweatshirt stepped forward, blocking her view of Shai’s father. He walked slowly, no hesitance in the movement, no caution. Only mindless determination.
“Stay back,” Xhea said. She turned the knife to let Shai’s light flash from the blade in vain hope that a sharp edge would give the thing pause. Oh, please stay back, she begged in silence, the thought so desperate as to be a prayer to absent gods.
It was not only fear of stabbing the man that made her reluctant to strike. For if Shai’s father was among their number, the walkers could not simply be things, twisted human remains dredged up and out of the ruins. They, like him, might have once been people—real people, with lives and loves and the glitter of magic flowing through them.
There were so very many. She tried to count, eyes darting from one to the next: was it six from the flooded end—or seven? Five from the tunnel’s other end. Her hand trembled. How could she kill so many? How could she even kill one?
Would that she saw light in the old man’s eyes, or purpose, or understanding. He reached for her, curled fingers grasping, as Xhea cringed back against the wall. “Stay back,” she said again, “I’m warning you.” No theatrics now, no threats of movement—only the feel of the knife handle, slippery with her sweat, as she tightened her grip.
His hands closed around her shoulders, his skinny fingers as strong as rusted vice grips and as hard to pry away. He squeezed and did not stop, fingers digging into the already bruised joints single-mindedly, his hold pinning her upper arms to her sides. Xhea cried out in fear and pain and for courage as she struggled to raise the knife. She stabbed him in the only place she could reach: the muscle of his upper arm.
She felt the blade tear through the sodden fabric of his sweatshirt and the resistance as it parted flesh and muscle until it scraped against bone. She twisted the blade and blood flowed, trickling over the handle and her hand, and dribbling to the gravel below. He did not waver, did not so much as flinch, only held her, those iron-hard fingers of withered flesh and bone digging into her shoulders until she gasped.
So close, Xhea could see his storm-dark eyes, the whites veined and bloody. He breathed across her face, and she smelled only dryness, as if his insides were filled with salt and sand, desiccated flesh and ashy paper.
Beside her, Shai grabbed at the walker, clawing at his eyes and the sagging flesh of his throat. He flinched from her touch, but little more; Shai’s ghostly hands passed through him unhindered. She cried out in frustration as he held Xhea ever tighter.
“Xhea!” Shai cried, and fought harder.
There was no fighting him, Xhea knew, though she writhed and bit at his hands all the same. Even when she kicked him, even when the nails of her free hand ripped open the skin of his cheek, he did not falter. Would not falter. She stabbed him again, wherever his crushing grip allowed her arm to move: his shoulder, his forearm, even a nick that opened the flesh along his bony ribs through a hole in his shirt, to no effect.
Still he stared as he pulled her toward him as if closeness was the only message he had, eyes tainted with neither sorrow nor pain, hope nor denial—yet neither were they blank. There was no person inside this flesh, Xhea saw; he was—if such a thing existed—the opposite of a ghost, flesh without inhabitant, life without memory or magic. But not, she thought, without purpose.
What did he want? She could barely imagine: life again? Magic? The power of thought or speech or recollection? Whatever he wanted, how could she possibly grant it?
For a moment the old man’s lips parted, and the flesh between his brows creased with more than age. His fingers curled tighter—not, she thought, to cause pain, though she wept from it nonetheless, but as if he wished to press understanding into her flesh even if he had to tear holes in her to do so. There was something, something—but, a blank page of a man, he seemed not to know it himself, only trembled with its echoes.
If only she could comprehend the fractured remnants of the thought that seemed lost inside his head—some way to understand the driving need that she saw in him, this living ruin, before he killed her. Because he would, she knew; she felt it with a certainty as intense as the pain of his hands on her shoulders. Her struggles only brought that death closer as his grip tightened and the intensity of his need deepened.
“What do you want?” she cried, the sound low and hoarse with fear and pain and something that felt almost like terrible sympathy. With her words, the dark smoke of her magic slipped from between her lips to drift into the space between them. It hung there, curling in the currents of their movement, before he inhaled and breathed deeply of its darkness.
Briefly, the pressure of his grip loosened. For but a moment his face seemed to ease, weathered lines softening. He was not so old, Xhea saw; only hurting and starved and stripped of everything he had once been.
There was no fighting him, Xhea thought again, because he was not there to fight. He bore no message but death—his or hers, and each was its own kind of understanding. And death? Death she did not fear. She had stared into its face, into its echoes and memory, for as long as she could recall. It was only dying—the pain and suffering—that made her afraid.
She exhaled again, mouth pursed as if to blow a kiss, until dark coils of magic swam before her like a veil. She wept from the pain of his grip, and the magic flowed with her tears; it seeped darkly from the small wounds on her arms where his ragged nails had dug through fabric into flesh.
She watched the magic enter him, and he shuddered at the touch. Oh, she thought, how did I ever think of this power as anything but death?
Xhea stopped fighting and pulled him closer. Knife forgotten in the flesh of his arm, she gripped his shoulders in both hands and pulled, drawing them together like strange and stilted dancers. She breathed his breath of ash and paper, as he breathed deeply of hers, and he shuddered from the touch of it, from the taste. Sweet and bitter, rainwater and apples, a scent like the beginnings of decay and the promise of rain on the horizon.
She released the magic and it flowed through her like blood, pulsing down her arms, slipping through her finge
rs, and into his body. His grip on her shoulders eased.
She was afraid—oh, she was so afraid—and yet she wasn’t, as if her magic and this slow death were enough to take her to a place beyond fear and hurting, a trance where nothing else existed but the two of them. She watched the darkness sink into him; watched his shoulders go slack, his fingers loosening and falling away; watched his breathing slow.
Watched herself kill him, and felt as if it were right.
He sagged into her arms. For all his strength, the wiry hardness of his limbs and the knife-sharp edges of his face, he was so light. She might have held him if not for her injuries. Instead they fell together, a slow collapse of hurting limbs tumbling to the tunnel’s gravel bed, and landed with his face somehow still held in the cradle of her arms, staring upward.
So light, she thought again, eyes tracing the dirtied mats of his hair, the sweaty hollow of his throat. As if he were not flesh and blood but dried leaves and emptiness. Even his relentless determination was fading, his intensity dimming with his life, and though no true awareness came into his face, she saw something in him like an abandoned child’s weakness. Something that looked almost like loss.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, holding him to her. He calmed at the sound of her voice, though she doubted he understood. No spirit anymore, she thought. No ghost bound in this flesh to be released at her hand; no magic to flicker and fade. They had been taken from him already, leaving only this dying, crumbling shell.
Yet at the last that shell of a man opened his mouth, cracked lips bleeding as they struggled to shape his faltering breath. He made a noise that almost sounded like “I . . . I . . .” though whether he meant to speak in truth or was merely caught in his body’s dying memory, she did not know. Would never know. For his eyelids flickered and fell, and his weak and struggling mouth became still. His body was suddenly a slack weight in her arms and across her lap.
For a long moment Xhea did not move, her eyes half-lidded, lost in the final moments of her trance. Then she took a long, shuddering breath and the world crashed back upon her, pain in her shoulders and legs and knee, and a cold and creeping shiver that she could only take to be the after-effects of adrenaline—or the beginnings of shock. She looked up, and gasped.
Shai stood above, quietly radiant and hovering a full foot from the ground, staring with a look that Xhea could not read. Behind the ghost, all the other mindless creatures, broken shells and murderous husks of people, stood in their ragged half-circle, watching with mindless intent. They had watched everything, she realized. Could they even understand the death of one of their kind? Would such a thing even matter? The corpse pinned her legs to the ground, and light though he was Xhea could not easily push the body aside.
She had killed a night walker, yes, and with a gentleness she’d never imagined; yet it had left her adrift. The magic still moved through her, slow and contented, but she did not know if she had the strength to take on a second, never mind a tenth or eleventh.
There was no need. She saw no signal, no word or nod, but the creatures turned as one and began to walk away. Their movements slow and steady, they walked in a ragged line toward the flooded end of the tunnel and the gaping hole beyond.
Shai watched her father go with them, her face a study in despair. She raised a hand toward the shell that had once held the person she’d loved, but only that; and even that movement she quickly hid, curling her hand into a fist and turning away. Within moments they had gone beyond reach of Shai’s soft glow; a moment more and not even Xhea’s keen eyes could pick their shapes from the darkness. She listened as their splashing steps receded, becoming faint echoes and then only memory.
Mission accomplished, Xhea thought in a haze of confusion and pain. Message delivered. She looked down at the body in her arms, thinking of death and consequences. After a moment, she drew her blade from the old man’s shoulder and wiped away the worst of the blood. Then slowly, gingerly, she rolled his body from her lap.
“Why?” Shai whispered into the silence.
There was too much to say; Xhea only shook her head.
Confused and hurting, Xhea woke sometime in the indeterminable dark from dreams that she couldn’t—didn’t want to—remember. She clenched her jaw to keep from whimpering. Just a dream, she thought, pushing away the image of her vomiting magic the same inky-dark as spilled blood.
Just a dream.
She saw a faint glow through her eyelids, and sagged against the concrete floor, taking a long, shuddering breath to slow her heartbeat. For all her years living underground, there was comfort in waking to that glimmer of light. Knowing that, even here, hurt and battered and down at the depth of all things, she was not alone.
“Morning,” Xhea managed. She brushed away the crust of tears cried in sleep. “Is it morning? Do you know?” Her inner clock, usually infallible, was confused by the rough night. But Shai, seeming to perch on piled rubble on the other side of the closet-sized room, only stared at her hands.
After rolling the old man’s body aside, Xhea had wanted nothing more than to collapse and sleep, but had managed to drag herself the rest of the way to the service room. The room was in poor repair and overflowing with scrap metal, but she had forced the twisted door nearly closed and cleared a small patch for herself on the floor—heroic efforts both. A very subdued Shai had promised to watch over her.
Now Xhea sat up, stifling a groan. If it wasn’t morning already, it would be by the time she managed to drag her aching self to anywhere near ground level. Everything hurt—everything—and she’d have allowed herself more sleep had not her empty stomach and full bladder joined in the aching.
“At least I wasn’t eaten,” she muttered. Always an upside.
It wasn’t until she managed to stand—a slow process involving much swearing and the generous assistance of both the wall and a stack of spooled wire—that Xhea truly looked at Shai.
“Shai,” she began, and faltered. For what could she ask? What’s wrong? What wasn’t wrong? And yet what, in the space of mere hours, could have so changed the ghost? No, she thought: what had taken her friend from her?
Shai’s dark shirt with its embroidered vine patterns at neck and wrist was gone; so too were the pants that Xhea had so envied. In their place, the ghost wore a dress that was all too familiar: an expensive swirl of glimmering gray fabric that Xhea knew to be the color of a fresh plum. It cascaded over Shai’s slim body, hanging loosely over legs that were tucked beneath her. She wasn’t sitting on the heavy spools of wire, as Xhea had assumed, but rather floating before them in midair.
Shai looked up, and her eyes . . .
Could she call them dead, the eyes that now met her own? Yet Shai was as dead as she had been in all the days past, and never had Xhea seen the ghost look so empty or so hollow.
So hopeless.
Xhea had almost forgotten her, this girl—a ghost she had thought so helpless as to be worth her time only if she were paid for it. Yet that girl stared back from the now-familiar planes of her friend’s face, and her hands, soft and untried, lay palm up as if in supplication.
“Shai,” Xhea said again, in shock, in plea, and knew she had no words to follow.
“I don’t want you to die,” the ghost whispered at last. “Not you too.”
“I’m not going to die.”
Shai continued as if Xhea hadn’t spoken. “The longer I’m here, the worse it’s going to get. Your evading capture this long has just been an inconvenience.”
“I’m good at being inconvenient.”
“Look at what they did to him, Xhea. My father. Because he tried to help me.”
Xhea thought of that slack face, those unseeing eyes, the monotonous rhythm of his breath and steps—then shook her head to force the image away. She did not know what had been done to him, or how, or why.
Shai continued in that quiet, helpless voice. “It’s my fault, Xhea. He’s dead because of me—worse than dead—and it’s all my fault.”
&n
bsp; “Even if you leave now . . .” Xhea said, the words halting. Because that’s what lay between them, unspoken to this moment: Shai’s leaving. Already Xhea could feel Shai’s coming absence as if it were a physical thing, a force that pressed on her chest. She forced herself to continue: “Even if you leave now, they won’t stop coming for me. They know about me now—they know what I can do. You think that abandoning me is going to change that?”
“You won’t be their priority. You know how to run—how to defend yourself. You can find ways to stay safe. But the longer I evade them, the more people I endanger—if not you, then my mother, or, or . . . anyone else. No one should suffer because of me.”
“You’re dead. Allenai should let you go in peace, not bind you to some other body for years just to make money.”
“I have a responsibility,” Shai replied quietly, hopelessly, and gestured to her dress as if its mere presence was the only explanation needed. What had Wen said about it? That it was something one would wear to a last binding. A ceremony, she guessed. But why promise to give yourself to a Tower when they would take what they wanted, willing or no?
“I have a responsibility, and all this has happened because I ignored it. How many people have to die, Xhea, before I admit that I can’t ever escape? I can’t think of anything else I can do. This is the only way I know how to make it stop.” Shai looked up, then shook her head and turned away again. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“What’s there to understand? Responsibility? You’re just afraid.” Xhea heard the vicious edge come into her voice, and felt helpless to stop it. “You’re giving in. For the first time you’re finding out that the decisions you make matter, and it scares you. So you’re just giving up—giving in, as if none of it ever mattered—as if nothing we did mattered at all. You’re making your father’s sacrifice worthless. You’re just going to go home and let them use you like they always have.”
Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One Page 23
