Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  As if it were no longer needed.

  The sound was coming closer, she realized. And there was a smell . . . the strangest sweet smell . . . honey and burning plastic . . .

  She tried to think, fighting the desire to place her head on her arms and rest. Only rest.

  Closer, she repeated. A sound coming closer, and nothing around her. Nothing before her but empty air. Almost as if . . .

  Xhea looked up, but it was already far too late to run.

  Little more than a body-length above her hovered a battered aircar, the air twisting and shimmering with its exhaust. From its open doors hung three people, all but their eyes hidden by medical masks. Two held between them a simple net, ready to unfurl, while the third held a canister from which seeped a haze of sweet-smelling drug. The haze cascaded down and over her, tranquilizing her, and she’d thought it nothing but fog.

  Xhea tried to stand, to roll, to crawl back toward the hotel, and for nothing. There was no need for the net; she saw the same realization in those watching faces. She sagged to one side, suddenly too heavy, too loose, to keep her body upright. Her shoulder hit the concrete steps, her head not too far behind, and she felt a strange and horrible twist in her damaged right knee.

  But the pain, when it came, was muffled, as if she were wrapped in invisible cotton wool. Nothing could reach her, not pain nor help nor light.

  In the darkness behind her eyelids, she cried as hands lifted her up—lost, insensible tears—but they were tears of gratitude. No pain, she thought in her haze. No need to struggle. No need to fight.

  No more.

  In that darkness, unresisting, they raised her up and took her away.

  Xhea licked her lips with a tongue that felt like sandpaper. Her mouth tasted of sour fruit, and her head felt as if it had been pounded with a sharp rock. She tried to sit up. Failed. Tried to muster the energy to care, and failed at that too.

  She remembered someone putting a needle in her thigh. Remembered the sound of conversation around her, senseless words rising and falling like waves. Hospital was her first thought, but no: while she lay in bed with instruments and bandages arrayed on a table beside her, the table had rusty folding metal legs, and the bed was just a cot with a pillow so worn it was barely there.

  Definitely not a hospital, she thought, looking around. The room was massive, echoing, and stripped bare. There was no carpet, only adhesive stains left on the concrete to mark its absence, and the ceiling tiles had been removed, exposing wires and plumbing made fuzzy from decades of undisturbed dust.

  Before her, there was a wall of featureless gray light—windows, she realized. One full corner of the room was made from glass that looked out into a bank of day-bright cloud. She’d never been in this room, but there was something familiar about the space nonetheless. Something in the air whispering through the ancient vents, filtered by cloth and magic but still smelling of crumbling drywall and unwashed doors stained with greasy handprints, of floor after floor of leaking pipes and corroded wiring.

  It had never been a good skyscraper, never a prosperous one, for all that it still stood. She looked around and the building itself seemed to mock her, whispering, “Welcome home.”

  Orren.

  She could have laughed, voice edged with hysteria. She could have spit. The one thing she would not do was cry. Not here. Not ever again.

  Instead, she took stock. She wore her shirt and jacket, but her pants had been cut away. Her bare legs, skinny and pale after the long winter, looked almost fragile. Anger stirred at the sight of the ruined pants in a heap on the floor; even dirty and torn, they were hers. A replacement pair was folded over the back of a nearby chair, seemingly unworn, with large pockets down each leg. She eyed them: they wouldn’t just fit, but fit well. She scowled.

  Better that than to let eyes and mind alike linger on her knee. Her rough bandages had been unbound and lay across the sheet like a gift’s discarded wrapping. Her skin tingled as if from phantom touches, but little more; from mid-thigh down, her right leg was numb. Even without the pain, there was something about the knee that looked—that felt—wrong. She turned aside.

  At the movement, a figure stepped into her peripheral vision. She glanced at the boy, for boy he was—no nurse this, no doctor with clever tools and healing spells. He had an adult’s size, but his open expression and the downy stubble across his chin made him seem little older than Xhea herself.

  Without speaking, he helped her sit, then tried to prop her up with another flat pillow. He handed her a blanket, which she used to cover her legs, and a cup of water. His hands were gentle, impersonal, even kind; yet Xhea found herself tensing, ready to cringe or run. As if either were an option.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” the boy asked. He dragged the plastic chair to her bedside and sat.

  If it had been easier to speak, she would have simply said “No”—and how appropriate, for her first word in this place to be a flat denial. But once she looked, there was something familiar about him. Xhea realized that he had been the one holding the fog canister. She recognized his eyes with their upturned lashes; the soft, dark curls of his hair.

  “What was that?” she croaked. “The drug.” Sweetness, her head hurt.

  “Nothing to worry about, really. Just an airborne sedative—a nice mild one.” He blushed at her incredulous look, the deepening color barely noticeable through his skin’s natural dark.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I thought it’d be easier than the net.”

  “Easier?” That was one word for it. “It would have been easier to just leave me alone.”

  Instead of replying, he moved the edge of the blanket and probed her wounded knee, hissing softly at that first touch. It was strange to watch someone touch her; stranger still to feel none of it, not even the whisper of skin on skin.

  She watched his face. His forehead creased and the skin around his eyes tightened, lips pursing, and knew that more than concentration wrote such lines. Yet he did not recoil or pull back, almost as if he knew what it was to touch her.

  “You really don’t remember me, do you?” He smiled sadly.

  But that smile stirred a memory buried deep with all the things she tried never to recall. Xhea stared a moment, considering. Imagining those eyes, that softly curling hair, on someone much smaller. A child who had always looked young, with thin limbs and a face that seemed gaunt no matter how much he ate. A quiet child who had been as ostracized from the other boys in the dorm as surely as Xhea had been from the girls—though less content with such treatment. Had they been friends? Aching from the loss of Abelane, she’d had no friends; yet if she’d had a companion in that year, someone familiar enough to almost be safe, it would have been him.

  She remembered, too, the night of her escape. After the failed resurrection, the skyscraper had been in chaos. Orren’s magically supported systems had failed at the spell overload, everything from lights and elevators to security on the fritz, all hands scrambling to restore power before another skyscraper took advantage of the disarray. Xhea had no plan, only the sudden conviction that this was her one chance to run.

  With evening already darkening the sky, she’d slipped from her dorm with only her knife and jacket. As she’d crept away, she caught sight of dark eyes watching her, two glints in the shadows. She’d frozen before she realized that it wasn’t Orren security, only the quiet boy who never seemed to grow. He’d peered through open crack of the door to the boys’ dorm, one hand clutching the doorframe.

  “Are you coming?” she had whispered, suddenly thinking that maybe she could save him, if no one else.

  After a long moment, he had mutely shaken his head. She’d shrugged and slipped out to make good her escape, only looking back once. In the years that followed, she’d tried not to think of him. Pretended she didn’t remember those dark eyes, watching her as she ran.

  Sometimes you have to leave someone behind.

  Yet now that she looked, she could see the chil
d’s echo in the young man before her, the quiet boy grown tall and strong. Wondered, too, who he would have become had he followed her that night; what he might have meant to her.

  “Lin,” she said, the name rising like the memory of a dream. “You grew.”

  Lin laughed. “Rather a lot, actually. I’ve been going through clothes like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Nice to have that option, Xhea thought.

  He pulled his hands from her knee and surreptitiously massaged his fingers. She caught a glimpse of the gray that tinged his fingers and knuckles—blue, perhaps, as if from cold. She couldn’t remember anyone who had touched her for so long.

  At least no one living.

  “Your kneecap is isn’t broken,” Lin said, “but there’s ligament damage.” His gaze flickered to her face, gauging her reaction. “It’s pretty bad.”

  “Define bad.”

  “Unless you give me permission to perform a healing, it’s not going to heal at all. Not well, anyway.”

  “A healing. At what price?”

  “That’s not for me to decide. I have another five years until I earn out my contract.” He was still indentured, in other words, for the time, food, and magic the skyscraper had spent to raise him. Orren would name the cost for his services.

  “Xhea,” he said, then hesitated, as if tasting her name. “Xhea, without treatment, you won’t be able to walk again. Even braced, the joint won’t properly support your weight. At best, you’ll have to use crutches for the rest of your life.”

  She shook her head. “There must be some other way.”

  “In the before-times, there was surgery for things like this.” Lin shrugged, almost apologetically. “I don’t suppose you know any surgeons.”

  Xhea closed her eyes. “Is that why you’re here? So they can trap me with a healing I can never pay for?” Indenture herself again—though in truth, she’d never worked off her earlier debt.

  “I’m here because I asked to be. I’m apprenticed to Orren’s top medic, you know. Only two more years until I’m fully certified.” Lin radiated pride, and Xhea was impressed despite herself; it meant a lot of work for one with so little magical talent. He added softly, “And I remember you. I’ve heard stories about you these last few years. I want to help.”

  He spoke truly, she thought. Yet it was a truth that hid as much as it told.

  “They’re watching us, aren’t they?” she murmured. “A camera, a spell—maybe just a couple little holes in the wall back there, huh? They’re watching us, and you’re just here to try and gain my trust.” A familiar person who had never hurt her, kind hands offering help and healing. An attractive face on someone nearly as young as she.

  I don’t trust your gifts, she thought to the unseen watchers. I don’t trust your gifts, and I don’t believe in coincidence.

  Lin waited silently.

  She knew it would be near impossible to get another medic to so much as touch her, never mind perform a healing, even if she had anything to offer in payment. Maimed and crippled people were not uncommon in the Lower City; yet she knew what such a fate would mean to her. She was just hanging on as it was, scrounging for artifacts and talking to ghosts, living in the tunnels beneath the Lower City. What little of that could she still do, unable to walk—never mind run or leap or climb? It was a death sentence, little more; one that would be served in seasons of struggle and pain, the slow waste of starvation.

  Could Orren’s price be any worse?

  Yes, she thought with cold certainty. Yes.

  Still Xhea whispered, “You have my permission.” For as awful as their price might be, it alone gave her a chance—for herself, and for Shai.

  Lin nodded. All he said was, “Keep still. This may feel uncomfortable.”

  It was only as Lin reached out that she allowed herself to think what the healing would entail. Oh, for braces and bandages, use of the instruments on the folding table. Anything but magic.

  He touched her, fingers cupping the swollen joint, and his weak power flowed through his hands—a bare trickle compared to Shai’s unthinking light. Yet Xhea gasped nonetheless, and bit down on her lip, feeling pain that the injection did nothing to touch. She couldn’t show discomfort or pain—and it was only pain, familiar now as rain in the spring. Let them think her high, her gasp that of an addict reunited with her drug.

  Don’t let them know what magic does to you now. Over and over, she thought it, a slow mantra. They can’t ever know.

  “Do you need more painkillers?” Lin asked.

  She shook her head, managing to say, “It just feels a little funny.” He accepted the lie.

  Yet every moment that Lin poured magic into her knee, shaping and binding and fixing, Xhea felt worse. Her stomach roiled, and her eyes stung as she saw sparks of color: lightning-quick glimpses of dusty red wire, the off-white sheets, the pinkish golden-brown of Lin’s flushed cheek.

  They can’t ever know, she repeated, fighting down bile. For whatever the price of her healing, whatever they wanted of her, if Orren knew of the dark magic they would never let her go. Death or indenture or bargaining chip in a game of power too large for her to comprehend, she did not know; only feared it, a slow and certain terror.

  At last Lin straightened, taking his hands from her knee. “There,” he said, confident for all that his hands trembled, fingers bleached of blood. He fumbled for bandages as Xhea looked at her knee. It seemed no different. Let it be worth it, she thought, and sat still as he wrapped the bandages.

  “Lin.” Even whispering, her voice shook. “Can you get me out of here?”

  He went still for a moment, only that. Didn’t look up or meet her eyes, only paused, shoulders tense, before resuming his careful bandaging. The silence between them grew and expanded until it was almost tangible.

  “Are you feeling any better?” Lin asked as if she’d never spoken.

  Her leg was still numb. She only imagined the sting and ache of the spells now woven thread-fine through her knee; it was only fear and the after-effects of sedation that made her feel sickly and slow. Lin wasn’t trying to hurt or trap her, she reminded herself; he was a pawn, just as she was. Not a friend or an ally. It was foolish to forget that.

  Yet she was angry with him all the same.

  For all the magic and healing, none of it even touched the real hurt, the absence and the anger and the fear that laced it all. She’d had a friend, an ally, and lost her—driven her away, failed to keep her safe.

  What’s happening to you? she thought to Shai. What is Eridian doing to you?

  Xhea looked toward the window and the featureless expanse of pale gray cloud, looking at nothing at all. “Not really,” she said, voice cold. “But we can pretend.”

  Lin returned after dawn the next morning, the gray beyond the windows heralding a day dull as old iron. The day before had seemed endless, the night worse still. Xhea had sworn she’d never spend another minute within Orren’s steel and concrete walls—had sworn, too, that she’d protect Shai from those who wished to use her. Such vows were only as good as the one who made them, and she felt her broken promises’ sharp edges in heart and hands.

  Lin smiled as he set a tray piled high with food and medical equipment onto the table at her bedside. Addled by pain pills, Xhea almost smiled back. She stopped, and pressed her lips into a thin line.

  Lin seemed not to notice, talking cheerfully as he unwound the bandages. His eyes unfocused as he concentrated on the workings of the joint, mapped out by the magic he’d laid beneath, and he made a sound of surprise and confusion. He placed his hands on her knee, fingers already lit with magic. Xhea jerked back, despite his gentleness—as did Lin, forgetting to brace for her touch. A little warning would have been nice, she thought, all anger and acid, struggling against her suddenly roiling stomach. But when he pulled his hands away, she said only, “What was that?”

  “Sorry.” Lin rubbed the back of his neck in a poor attempt to cover his discomfort. “It was just a spell rei
nforcement.”

  “Something else to add to my debt, huh?” There was no hiding her irritation now.

  He looked at her in surprise. “What? No! I mean, the spell had just . . . weakened. I thought I’d set it better than that, but . . .”

  He shrugged awkwardly, and laughed. “All part of the learning process, right?”

  I bet it weakened, Xhea thought. She’d done her best to keep calm, but her control of her magic was as thin as her patience. She had little doubt that she’d all but ruined Lin’s work overnight.

  Lin took her silence as recrimination and made an apologetic gesture. “Is that what you’re angry about? I’ll cover it, all right? My mistake, so I’ll pay. No worries. And here, look, I brought you breakfast.” He smiled again and uncovered the tray.

  She looked at the offered breakfast: a grilled sandwich roll oozing melted cheese, a sprig of fresh grapes, and a steaming cup of tea. Nothing whets the appetite like the taste of bile, she thought, swallowing.

  Xhea picked at her grapes while Lin applied a new bandage and then attached a brace, immobilizing her knee. The brace was hard plastic with wide fabric bands that buckled around her leg. On either side of her knee there was a hinging mechanism, which Lin locked in place. The fraying straps were pale from age, and the hinged plastic spars were scratched and gouged. Xhea wondered how many others had worn it, staining it dark with their sweat.

  “How long until I can walk again?”

  “Wait at least a few days before you put any weight on it. Take it slowly.”

  “Especially considering the glitches in the healing process so far.”

  Lin blushed and looked away. “Right.”

  Quieter, she said, “You know that they’re using you, right? Using you to trap me and hold me here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “They need me, Lin. They need what I can do, and if they can push me into debt—”