Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Shai just shook her head, not meeting Xhea’s eyes. “Yes, I am afraid. But this is the only choice left to me. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  The finality in her voice hit Xhea like a rock to the gut. “Shai, I—”

  “Goodbye, Xhea. I’m glad I met you.” Shai rose and turned away. She moved toward the service room door with steps that slid across air, her pale hair shining.

  “Shai, no—”

  Then she was through the door’s surface and gone. The tiny room with its tangles of metal scrap and debris, its single gaping girl, was plunged into perfect darkness.

  “No,” Xhea whispered. “No, no, no—”

  She struggled to keep her balance, rushing to the door, metal scraps catching on her pant legs and slicing at her hands as she reached out for balance. She adjusted quickly to the darkness, seeing in a way that had nothing to do with her eyes. The twisted door had taken many long minutes to coax closed, bit by careful bit toward its frame; yet now she grasped its edge with both aching hands and pulled it open in a series of hard, fast jerks, the corroded hinges squealing. She struggled out the gap, hopped forward on her good leg, and all but fell down the steps to track level.

  At last she stood, clutching the remains of the metal railing, and searched the long stretch of tunnel around her. To her right, toward the flooded end, the faintest wash of gray was just visible beyond the tunnel’s curve—but it was pale enough to be the first hint of daylight from the hole from the collapse, not the glow of a Radiant ghost’s magic.

  To her left there was only darkness, the rails’ sweeping arc, and rough gravel underfoot. No flicker of light; no final words echoing back to disturb the silence. Xhea stared at that emptiness. The long, slow climb to the surface stretched before her, and every part of her felt bruised and battered, scabbed wounds torn open and bleeding—not least of all her heart.

  “Please,” she begged. “Please don’t leave me.”

  But she was alone.

  If she could have, Xhea would have run after Shai, would have checked every room and passage in the underground complex in the hope she could stop the ghost and make her change her mind. But she could not run—wouldn’t for months, if she understood the fiery pain that ripped through her right knee with every limping step—and the swelling made bending the joint all but impossible.

  “I’d be easy to catch now,” she said between panting breaths. “Too bad there’s no one down here to find me.”

  She’d always talked to herself; the sound of her own voice had been a comfort in many dark places. Yet now she heard only her voice’s echoes, not filling the tunnel’s cavernous space but emphasizing it, and the emptiness when she fell silent was worse.

  Still she staggered on, clutching at the dirty pipes strapped to the tunnel wall, counting her steps and cursing under her breath, because anything was better than weeping. Too slow, too late: her unspoken accusations reverberated around her. She’d said too little, she’d said too much; she should have talked to Shai about her father before collapsing into sleep; she should have begged her to stay.

  She pushed herself onward, inching her way up the incline—and for what? Did she truly believe that she would find Shai—that the ghost might return as quickly as she had left? As if anything awaited her beyond empty days of searching. This was a road she’d walked before, and she knew where it led.

  Admit it, she thought savagely. This was just like when Abelane had left her—and “left” was the right word, the one she’d never dared say, even to herself. Lane hadn’t been killed or kidnapped, hadn’t been captured or stolen away. She had left, simply gone, leaving Xhea behind.

  The only difference was that Shai had stayed long enough to say goodbye.

  Reaching the subway station took two hours; it only felt like more. By the time she pulled herself onto the platform, Xhea wanted nothing more than to collapse to the ground and sob. Which, of course, would do precisely nothing except delay her, and so she continued, eyes leaking tears, hissing in pain at every step.

  Soon, she could not walk at all, could not even manage the awkward limp-and-drag of her earlier passage. Her knee had swollen to twice its size, straining against the fabric of her pant leg, and throbbed with every movement. So Xhea sat, legs stretched before her, and pulled herself backward across the filthy floor. She winced when she thought of what this would do to her pants, then clung to the thought as a distraction from the pain. So many stains, she thought. So many rips and tears, and where would she find a needle?

  Such mundane concerns got her down a long service corridor, across a hall, and then up the narrow escalator that led to the hotel lobby. The charms in her hair clanked with every heave, tread by tread, almost loud enough to smother the sounds of her whimpers.

  At the top, she dragged herself toward the shattered doors, following her own day-old tracks through the dirt. Outside, the world was the gray of fishing weights and galvanized nails. Early morning, and a foggy morning besides. She couldn’t have slept more than an hour or two.

  She knew that the ghost was not outside. There was no shimmer that spoke of Shai’s magic—only the light of a single entrapment spell. Even through the cracked glass of the hotel’s front windows, she could see that the sphere that Shai had said was keyed to her own signature was missing.

  Xhea took a long shuddering breath. That spell had been the ghost’s ticket home. Shai was truly gone.

  Xhea crawled out through the broken doors and sagged on the hotel’s front step, her breath ragged. At last she raised her head. It took a long moment to notice the hunched figure on the sidewalk, the last remaining spell shining above him—longer still to connect his unshaven face with the man she knew.

  “Brend?”

  Brend stared, surprise yielding to concern as his eyes moved from her dirty clothing to the dried blood on her hands and arms, and the awkward wreck of her leg. Mist swirled, seeming to enclose them in a veil of gray. Still, her mind reeled: Brend had been helping set the traps? But no—as he turned, she saw what lay behind him: small white rocks forming an X on the pavement.

  X marks the spot, she thought in a daze. X for her name. She remembered the calculator left the night before, and all the other bits and pieces sure to catch her attention. Warning her away.

  “They haven’t got you yet,” Brend said. His mouth moved, forming an expression that was all but foreign to his face: a real smile.

  “Sweetness,” Xhea breathed, prayer and curse in one, and was suddenly glad that she was crippled. If she could have run, she would have thrown herself into Brend’s arms, and sobbed until she had no more tears left. Just for the touch of someone who knew her name; someone who cared enough to smile when he saw that that she lived.

  It was just as well. She could imagine the pained look on his face, or his reaction to her touch. Wen she could have trusted, even before his death, but Brend . . . Even the knowledge that he had been trying to help her didn’t ease her natural reaction: hide your weakness.

  Xhea forced herself to lean back, feigning a casual pose, and brushed idly at the dirt on her pants. Given the level of filth, the gesture seemed flippant enough to be a joke. It was a mockery of her usual self, but it would serve as mask enough.

  Brend remained crouched with his hands where she could see them, a small rock held loosely within the cage of his fingers. “Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

  She met his eyes, a dark gray ringed by shadows, and struggled for words. The weariness written across his face was as unfamiliar as the look of his patchy, unshaven chin. If only he would smile again, she thought. How she longed to see his familiar mask of false cheer. There was no safety in his concern, and she struggled to rebuild a façade to hide behind.

  “Had a bit of a rough night,” Xhea said and shrugged. She hoped he hadn’t heard the hitch in her voice or seen her wince at the movement of her bruised shoulders. From his expression, he missed neither.

  “A bit? You’re bleeding.”

 
Xhea lifted a hand to her scraped cheeks, tentatively touched her nose, licked furtively at her lips but tasted no salt. Brend watched her unthinkingly catalog her hurts, until she realized what she was doing and abruptly stilled.

  Tired and hurt and it’s making you stupid, she thought, hard and fierce, and it didn’t make any of it any better. Brend gestured at her hands, now curled against her pant legs, jagged fingernails whirring against the fabric. She turned them over to find the palms ripped raw and bloody, leaving little patches of blood on her thighs.

  “Huh,” she said. Blood gathered in the tracery of lines across her palms, darkening the creases in some unreadable fortune. “Would you look at that.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  They? Answers piled on top of one another—they came on us in the tunnels, and we had no way to run—they stalked me and followed me and tried to trap me—they left me, both of them—until she didn’t know how to speak, how to untangle one thought from another and have the words make sense.

  “Xhea? I’ve tried—”

  She struggled to follow his meaning, as Brend struggled to find words. He’d tried to tell her about the spells, he meant—the people tracking her and Shai. She looked at the one remaining spell, staring at it as if the magic held answers, then back down to Brend. Who was watching her. Who had watched her look directly at the spell—which should have been invisible to her, weak and magic-less creature that everyone thought her to be.

  “Tired and hurt and stupid,” she whispered, too low for any ears but her own. She would have fled, if she could: away from Brend’s piercing look, his growing suspicion; away from the spell in its glimmering slumber; away from all of it. But there was no away. Not anymore.

  “Well,” Brend said. The stone fell from his fingers. “I see I’ve been wasting my time.”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  “But you can see it, can’t you? The spell.”

  A moment of frozen stillness, then Xhea nodded and looked down at her bloody hands, all strength gone with the movement. The long-kept secret was in the open, hovering like a spell waiting to trigger and just as dangerous.

  Brend swore, but without any real anger. “I can barely see them,” he said.

  “I’ve always . . .” She shook her head again, but the words refused to be spoken, sticking in her throat in a lump. Instead she asked, “You were trying . . . to protect me?”

  Save me, she thought, plea and realization in one. He was trying to save me.

  Brend nodded. “Little good that it did.” His mouth twisted. “I don’t know enough to diffuse the spells, or change them.” As his father would have.

  “But . . . why? Why are you doing this?” She hated how pain and barely suppressed tears made her sound foolish and weak. Little lost girl, weeping on the steps. “You don’t even like me.”

  “No.” This time he almost did smile, and if the humor in his expression was bitter, it was no less true. “But what does that matter?”

  “Then why?”

  “Without you, I wouldn’t have my father’s business.” A pause, then quieter: “I wouldn’t have my father.”

  “You paid me.”

  He shrugged, the movement so like her habitual gesture that for one crazy moment she wanted to laugh. Hysteria; she choked it back.

  “Still,” Brend said, as if it were explanation enough. “I’d help more, if I could, but they’re watching Dad’s warehouse in case you return, making my life miserable. They turned the daylight spell into a giant camera—did you realize? I managed to change it back, but . . .” Again, he shrugged. “Nearly destroyed it in the attempt.”

  He glanced up at the sky. The world around them was the featureless gray of slate and ashes: cool and overcast, the Towers and most of the Lower City lost in heavy mist.

  It was only then, staring at his profile, that Xhea realized: Eridian. Brend had warned her about spells he could barely see—and yet the warnings had appeared nearly as quickly as the spells, no matter what strange corner of the Lower City they’d been placed, nor how well they’d been hidden. He had some way of knowing how and where her enemies were trying to capture her and Shai . . . which meant that the entrapment spells had not been placed by Allenai’s agents at all.

  For Brend was a citizen of Eridian.

  Xhea looked to the empty spot where a shimmering sphere had hovered, keyed to Shai’s signature—the spell that Shai had used to return home mere hours before. Except it wouldn’t have taken her home. Blindly committed to fulfilling her responsibilities to protect those few she loved, Shai had instead handed herself to Allenai’s enemy.

  And there wasn’t a blighted thing Xhea could do about it.

  Brend sighed, the sound just enough to draw Xhea back from her despairing thoughts. “I have to go,” he said, dusting his pants and moving carefully away. Xhea watched emotions flicker across his face like shadows: happy to leave, reluctant to leave her behind. Watched, too, as he weighed his options and found them too few and all inadequate. She knew the feeling. “But if there’s anything . . .”

  If only he could rescue a ghost for her—though for all she knew, it was already too late. If only he could heal her, or turn back time.

  She was about to shake her head, wave him away with dismissive assurances of her safety, when she reconsidered. “Do you have a bandage?”

  Brend thought, then pulled off his jacket and the shirt beneath. These, like all his clothes, were good quality, though now hopelessly wrinkled. With a couple of sudden pulls and the sound of threads snapping, he tore both sleeves from his shirt, which he tossed to her before dressing again.

  Xhea carefully picked up the ripped fabric, as if the sleeves might somehow vanish. Softly, she said, “Thank you.” Brend nodded once and was gone, the sound of his footsteps muffled in the misty morning air.

  She had never imagined that he would risk so much for her. It was foolish, then, to feel a pang at the sight of him vanishing into the fog, to ache at the sound of his steps receding. But with him gone, there was no need to posture—if the need had ever been there at all. Xhea sagged, her poor show of strength vanishing in the space of a breath. She shuddered with a sudden chill.

  The fabric was smooth in her hands, almost slippery. She had not Brend’s strength, but with the help of her teeth, she managed to rip the sleeves into a few long strips. She raised her pant leg, gasping and whimpering as the bottom hem scraped over the swollen joint. Her knee was burning hot, lumpy and discolored. Xhea swallowed, wanting to look away.

  “It’ll be okay,” she lied.

  She bound the joint, giving it whatever stability mere fabric might offer, her fingers leaving smears of dirt and blood. A fingernail bent backward as she struggled to tighten her poor knots and she hissed, more in frustration than from the small hurt.

  All she needed was someone to help. Just a finger placed so. A bit of cloth to wipe clean her face. A hand to help her stand. And no one to give any.

  Oh, to be grateful for torn shirtsleeves. For stones and scraps left as ambiguous warnings. For the veil of fog; for a sky not yet releasing its rain; for a bit of cold ground on which to rest. Were these her blessings? She could not count them as such. She mocked herself as a little girl, lost and alone, yet knew in truth she was all these things, had always been such. Would always be.

  For even if she was valued, was known, was even cared for, it could only be for a moment, brief and fleeting. There was always—would always be—something greater than her, more important. More worthy of time or attention. Something, someone, worth being loved.

  As she would never be.

  Stop it, she thought, savagely, viciously, as if vehemence could force the emotion back, could dry the tears that spilled down her cheeks or ease her wracking sobs. Stop it, stop it, she cursed in silence, for she could not speak, could not rise; and the only sounds in the cool morning air were those of her crying.

  Faint and muffled, a sound came from somewhere nearby. Xhea took a sl
ow breath, calming the last of her sobs; after many long minutes, she had little left to cry.

  What had it been? A whir? A whine? She could not tell; the mist curled in upon the sound, deadening all but a whisper. Probably just an ordinary noise—a hungry child, a bit of debris falling from a crumbling rooftop.

  Still, she thought. Still.

  She lifted her head and looked around, each movement an effort. There was no one on the broken sidewalk before her, nor on the road. She saw no movement in the mist but its own slow swirls and eddies, pushed by a subtle wind.

  She knew she should run, scramble away and hide, drag her bruised and hurting self back inside the shell of the hotel’s front lobby, ignoring the pain—just in case. She felt a quiver of alarm, an echo of her usual wariness, but it too seemed dulled; whatever fear now stirred within her seemed distant, close enough to see but too far to touch. It was as if the fog had seeped into her, deadening her emotions, slowing her thoughts. She imagined the mist creeping down her limbs into fingers and toes, leaving only cool and quiet in its wake, a soft and numbing chill.

  Xhea stared at her hands and the patches of skin washed clean by tears. She opened and closed her fingers, feeling them as something apart from herself: the gritty, bloody skin; the tired, aching joints; the black-sliver moons of dirt beneath the fingernails. So easy to lose herself in details.

  Again the sound came, louder this time. She jerked her head back from where it had sagged, and forced her eyes open, not knowing when she had closed them. But there was no one there, not even a stray Lower City dweller wandering the early-morning streets. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Yet as she gazed around something made her afraid as mere sounds had not, the dregs of adrenaline stirring in her blood. Something was different. Something had changed.

  She felt so tired, so leaden.

  Again the sound, louder and longer: whirr-thump. Then a sound like hot metal cooling: tick . . . tick . . . tick.

  Her gaze fell upon Brend’s almost-completed X of pale stones, undisturbed on the pavement. Ah, she thought, understanding coming in a slow and heavy wave: where the spell had hovered, there was only air. Not triggered, she knew. Recalled. Dissolved.