Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  Eridian.

  For them she had no thoughts, no words. There was only the ache that had settled deep inside her when Shai had left and not eased a moment since. Xhea closed her eyes. The ending was inevitable, she thought, however slow it might be to play out. It wouldn’t help her to watch as Eridian glowed brighter as it absorbed Shai’s stolen power; began to shift and transform into a more aggressive shape to prepare for its battle upward; began to rise.

  Wouldn’t help her, and wouldn’t help Shai. But what else could she do? So she lay on the cold floor, shivering and alone, and waited.

  A spark jolted her from her doze, forcing back the dark.

  “Okay, okay,” Xhea muttered, struggling to regain control of her magic. “Shai, I’m—”

  The words died, and the thought.

  Like a rush of blood, magic flowed harder on the heels of her sudden remembrance: awareness of the cold floor beneath her, the chill radiating from the windows by her side. She clamped down, hard and fast, the magic’s sudden constraint almost a physical pain in her chest. She ran through the first control exercise Shai had taught her, and the second, feeling the magic’s pressure ease, if not her heart’s pounding. Xhea took a long, shuddering breath and opened her eyes.

  There was no ghost watching over her; just the room, filled only by weight of silence. Wisps of smoke-like black slid along the floor, fading until the only darkness she cast was shadow. She glanced at the indentation in the far wall through which she thought her captors might be watching. Perhaps she had caught her magic before it had entered the visible spectrum. Perhaps her captors wouldn’t recognize the strange, seeping dark as magic at all. Thin hopes, and little worth clinging to.

  Xhea absently rubbed the spot in the center of her chest where she’d imagined the spark. Beyond the windows, Towerlight crawled across the sky like violent aurora. Though only hours had passed since sunset, the scene she saw was subtly different, Towers moving in their constant dance. Only two truly seemed unchanged—the only two that she cared about.

  Xhea frowned and pushed herself to sitting, one hand still pressed to the center of her chest. There was something . . . off about the scene: Eridian’s stillness, Allenai’s frozen position, both poised as if waiting. Waiting—but for what? Perhaps Allenai didn’t know of Shai’s capture. They might still be searching the City and Lower streets alike for sign of the Radiant, a whisper of her signature, or word of the girl who could see ghosts.

  “Too late.” Xhea stared up through the glass.

  Then the jolt came again, a spark of magic that struck her sternum through her protective hand. With fumbling fingers, Xhea opened her jacket and pulled at her shirt’s neckline until she could see it: not a mark or burn, but an almost invisible flicker against her skin. Not bright magic, as she had expected—yet neither did it bear her taint. She touched the spot with cold, tentative fingertips and felt a hair-fine line of smoothness, as if the air had been oiled. There was a quiver of reaction at her touch, like the vibration of a guitar string softly played.

  A tether.

  Faint and flickering but there, the tether led sharply up beyond the barrier of window glass and across the unthinkable distance to the City above. It tugged at her, calling, as if she might traverse that empty stretch of open air by desire alone.

  “Shai?” she whispered.

  As if in response, her magic again stirred, reaching for the ghost. It struggled in time to the tether’s flickers, as if both she and Shai were fish caught on the opposite ends of the same line. She touched that thin line and seemed for a moment to hear Shai’s voice, screaming.

  Shai needed her. Xhea looked about in sudden desperation, but the change in circumstance did nothing to fill the room around her, bringing no tools or assistance, no ready means of escape. Nor did the sudden pounding of her heart do anything to ease her hurts, strengthen her aching knee or make it able to bear her weight.

  “Think,” she whispered, feeling every quiver of the tether’s fading pull. She would pace if she could, try to clear the fog from her brain, shake off the hurt and lethargy that weighed her down. “Think, think, think.”

  It was crazy to think she might still help Shai—she couldn’t defend herself against Orren, never mind a Tower that she had no way of reaching. She couldn’t even get out of this cursed room. Couldn’t walk.

  You’re all alone, child, she heard, words spoken softly in the Orren woman’s pitiless tones. All alone, hurt, and falling to pieces.

  All alone . . .

  It was this place, Xhea realized. It was as if pieces of her younger, shattered self had entered Orren’s very walls, its air and pitted glass, its decaying concrete bones. Here she had tried to keep her mouth shut, to keep herself still, obedient—helpless—to avoid rejection. She had listened to the howl of the snow-heavy wind outside during the long winter nights and known that she was but a misstep away from dying in that snow, cries unheard—or worse, ignored.

  Yet she had faced that wind and cold, faced abandonment and starvation and worse, and she’d survived. She’d escaped Orren before, eluded their pursuit for years. She was not that helpless girl anymore.

  So why, she asked herself, are you still cowering in the corner?

  Xhea took a steadying breath, then pushed herself upright and brushed the worst of the dust and grime from her clothes and hair with trembling hands. Not afraid, she thought, tasting the lie. She touched the dark window and the glass against her palm was cold, as if winter lurked beyond the pane. With outstretched hands braced against both windows, and the trembling efforts of a single leg, she managed to stand.

  Somehow, standing, the distance from the top of Orren to the ground seemed even farther. The reach to the City proper was impossible. Yet still the tether tugged: a flutter like insect wings above her pounding heart.

  Shai needed her.

  To the voice that still murmured, helpless, trapped, all alone, she said, “So what?” Her voice, thin and shaking, echoed in the empty room. She repeated it, louder: “So what?”

  Yes, she was trapped, and yes, she was alone. But she looked down at her hands and the slow swirl of shadow that wreathed her fingers at her call, and knew that one thing she would never be again was helpless.

  She went to work.

  The deadbolt on the door was strong, Xhea thought, remembering the shorn-off medical probe. But she also recalled one of Abelane’s old lessons: the easiest way to escape is rarely through the guarded door. Neither could she try the window; even if she dared break the glass, it was too far to climb, and her leg would never allow the attempt. Too far to fall.

  Pushing herself in the chair with her good leg, Xhea peered down the wall’s length, looking for ripples in the drywall, screw holes, inconsistencies. Everything around her was dirtied and water-stained, damaged by years of rot and exposure that Orren’s increasing power had done little to repair. Yet this wall, stained though it was, was whole but for its single seeming peephole; and drywall, she knew, rarely stood long in the rain. New, then, and likely poorly made. There was no reason to waste valuable building materials in an area where they would soon succumb to the elements.

  Making a fist, Xhea tapped on the wall. A deadened thump greeted her touch. She shifted her chair and rapped again; a little farther, and again. With taps and knocks, she mapped the structure beneath. Wood in places, still strong and unyielding at her touch; metal in others, thin strips that rattled like aluminum within the wall’s housing, their tension maintained by little more than strapping and screws.

  Near the wall’s far end, she found a place between wood and metal both that was wider than her shoulders and seemed to have no bracing pieces between. She tsked at Orren’s builders, then lowered herself to the floor and placed her foot against the wall. Without a horizontal fire-stop, a fire could use the inside of the wall like a chimney. That, and it left enough give for even a small, injured girl to kick out the wall.

  Xhea grinned, and proceeded to do just that.

&nb
sp; After she’d dragged herself through the hole she’d made and shaken the drywall dust from her hair, Xhea looked around. This side was as empty as her room had been—more, lacking furniture entirely. She peered along the wall, but where she had expected to see cameras, there was nothing. Had they truly not been watching? She shook her head. The only real difference on this side of the wall was the bank of elevators, their metal doors reflecting her face as a moon-like gleam in the dark.

  She dragged herself to the elevators, only noticing the call button when she lay sprawled before the doors. Of course, she thought. Orren had once been taller, but whatever had sheered away the top of the building, leaving a ragged stump and exposed iron bars stabbing skyward, had also taken the top of the elevator shafts. The lifts that moved now through the darkened shafts were driven more by magic than by wires and pulleys. The call button, just beyond her reach, wanted not the press of her finger but her magical signature.

  Perhaps it was just as well, given her magic’s unpredictability; her presence alone might be enough to damage the elevator’s spells. She hadn’t wanted to fall out the window, and couldn’t imagine that the drop would be much improved from inside a metal box.

  Stairs, then. The stairway door was a mess of peeling paint; the dirty sign, hanging above it from a single limp wire, read: exit. Let’s hope so, Xhea thought.

  She didn’t know what made her pause, turning back to the elevator doors. There was no sound from the shaft behind, no shimmer of spell exhaust, no vibration of motion. Yet her eyes narrowed. She was tired of being afraid. Now it was someone else’s turn.

  With hands and magic alike, Xhea reached toward the doors and the complex spells she knew lay beyond. Dark magic, black magic: a seeping fog, a roiling smoke. It rose to fill her: a pressure behind her eyes like hot tears; a tingling in her fingertips that asked for release. She granted it.

  As the magic reached out, Xhea felt the spell-reinforced cables beyond as clearly as if she held them in her hands. A moment, and it became clear that the elevator cars were still, sleeping with the rest of the skyscraper. The spell on the call button died first, sparking and sizzling as it unraveled; then spells on the cables, the cars themselves, and the electronics that had given the magic its shape. Her magic flowed from floor to floor, burning plastic and twisting circuit boards in its wake.

  A thread of true smoke drifted from between the closed doors, the only sign of the damage she’d wrought beyond. It had only taken a moment—seconds at best. And in that moment the taste and smell of her magic was all around—lightning and rain-wet pavement, burnt sugar and winter-deep night. She wanted more: for one wild second she yearned to follow through on the threat inherent in that small gesture, to release the darkness on the skyscraper and see, freed, what havoc she could wreak. Set the building afire, just to watch it burn.

  “Focus,” she whispered, as Shai had so many times before.

  That dark part of herself simply vowed: soon.

  Her elation died when she saw the stairs. Somewhere above the stairwell was exposed to open air; a chill wind swept down through the black, murmuring and sighing around bare corners. Untold years of rain and snow had washed water and worse down the stairs, leaving the treads worn, thick puddles of standing water lingering where foot traffic had worn hollows, mildew blooming in every corner.

  “This,” she murmured, “is not going to be fun.”

  By the time the treads below her were merely damp, Xhea had lost count of the number of flights she’d descended, sitting and lowering herself down one stair at a time. No matter: she’d be able to count every step from the bruises that now patterned her backside.

  Some few floors below was a level that was clearly under construction. The door to the stairwell stood propped open with a heavy can, airing out paint fumes. Xhea paused, struggling to catch her breath, and peered inside. The entire floor was empty, stripped of whatever walls and furnishings had once filled it, leaving only bare concrete and reinforced pillars. Building materials were stacked nearby: some seemed newly purchased from City sources, but most bore the look of material reclaimed from the ruins. It was in one of these latter piles that she spied a length of heavy plumbing pipe—no flimsy copper this, but good iron, its surface textured as much from age as from casting.

  It was a little too weighty to be a good crutch, and tall enough to almost reach her shoulder, but it was too good a find to ignore. With the pipe and the rickety banister taking most of her weight, she managed to make her way downward, step by careful step.

  And still too slowly. The tether, always weak and thin, seemed to falter, and Xhea could only wonder whether it was about to vanish entirely. Her mind spun images of Shai’s torment, each more awful than the last. The attempted resurrection she remembered, performed within these cold walls, was surely but a crude and doomed version of Eridian’s method, but her imagination was far too willing to extrapolate.

  “Hurry,” she whispered, and pushed onward.

  When at last she reached the main level, she all but crumpled to the floor. Her good leg was so fatigued that it trembled, and she felt as if she’d been beating herself with the iron pipe rather than carrying it. Still, she managed to stay standing—and was glad of it when she heard the footsteps approach from the other side of the stairwell door.

  So much for everyone being asleep, Xhea thought.

  First through the door were a pair of men: security, wearing black clothing and laden tool belts. Their keys jangled as they walked, and Xhea blinked at a memory: back in the dorms, the sound of the guards’ tool belts had given warning to anyone with half an ear and the patience to listen. Not that she was one to talk, Xhea thought, holding her head still to keep her charms silent.

  It was a moment before they noticed her, barely illuminated by the light from the hall. “Hey,” one said, clearly taking her for a resident. “Shouldn’t you be—”

  The third person through the door was familiar indeed. She bore no clipboard, wore no neat outfit or twisted-back bun; instead, she seemed to have been roused from sleep, her knee-length robe covering very little in the way of pajamas, her hair pillow-mussed. Still, the woman walked briskly, her thin slippers striking the bare ground as precisely as the neat shoes she’d worn earlier.

  She was speaking as she came through the door that a guard held open. “We’ll need to enact emergency transport procedures Seven A through N, until such time as—” She stopped. “Well,” she said slowly. “Xhea. This is a surprise.”

  A surprise? Xhea glanced from the woman to the guards and back. They hadn’t been after her? No, she realized: they’d been dealing with the broken elevators. Catching her mid-escape had merely been coincidence. Score one against vengeful destruction.

  “I don’t recommend you get any closer,” Xhea said to the security men. There was no fear in their expressions, no surprise, just irritation at this girl blocking the way with her little metal pipe.

  Xhea loosened her grip on her magic. The guards did not react to the sudden rush of dark from her skin, the pooling shadow at her feet; stupid as sticks she judged them both, and all but blind to magic. Not so the woman. She stiffened at the sight, as one might when suddenly faced with an unknown danger.

  Xhea smiled thinly at the reaction. “I don’t recommend you get any closer,” she repeated.

  “I see,” the woman said, her voice gone quiet. She raised a hand, gesturing for the confused guards to fall back against the stairwell wall. She was no simple administrator, Xhea realized, no matter what she might feign.

  She studied Xhea, as if she were a specimen beneath glass. Her eyes followed the darkness that drifted up and swirled around Xhea’s head like aimless smoke and pooled beneath her like living shadow. Details, details: from her white-knuckled grip on the plumbing pipe to the damp, mildew patches that now marred her pants, Xhea had no doubt that there was nothing about her that this woman missed.

  At last the woman said, “You’re leaving, then?” Her face was hard, but ther
e was only faint disappointment in her tone, as if Xhea were a guest insisting on leaving a party early.

  “Looks that way.”

  “But Xhea,” she murmured, “our business here is not done.”

  “No need to bill me for the elevators.” Xhea gestured for the woman to stand aside; what little patience she’d possessed had vanished a few dozen flights of stairs ago. “Just add ’em to my tab.”

  The woman’s eyebrow twitched at the word “elevators.” She hadn’t known that was Xhea’s work, then. Cleverness on top of cleverness, Xhea thought, and grit her teeth.

  “Lovely chatting with you again,” she ground out, “but I really must be going.”

  “Let us escort you, then.”

  “No need.”

  “Oh, but I insist.” The woman stood aside and gestured to the vacant doorway and the dimly lit hall beyond.

  Xhea tightened her grip on her pipe, and inched past them into the hall. Faster, she thought; she couldn’t just creep away. She tried to step forward and gasped at the searing pain, stumbling and all but falling. Half-blinded, she clung to the pipe. Yet even through the tears, she saw the sudden rush of motion toward her.

  “Get back,” she cried, throwing out her left hand, fingers stretched wide. Only the woman saw the rush of darkness that all but eclipsed the gesture, but it was enough: she grabbed the security guard closest to her, stopping his lunge toward Xhea just in time.

  Steady, Xhea thought, trying to slow the sudden pounding of her heart and rein in the darkness. Perhaps a single touch of her magic wouldn’t have killed the man—but she didn’t know.

  “Please,” she said, ignoring her voice’s sudden quiver. “Just stay back.”

  Even half-healed, her knee could not bear her full weight; yet she refused to pull herself along the floor again like a child still learning to walk—not now, not with witnesses. If the leg would not bear her, she’d simply drag it behind her.