Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (17 page)

It was as if she had lost her voice; she could barely whisper. “For . . . damaging the spell. And for scaring those people, and breaking their things, and making them angry. I just threw something. I didn’t know that it would cause such a problem, and then I was so upset, and I just . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“You’re from the Lower City, aren’t you?” Now there was something gentle in his tone, a softness that lay beneath his surprise. Xhea found she was looking at her hands, her limp fingers curling like old leaves. She nodded.

“And how did you come to be here?”

Xhea glanced at Shai. “You’re lost,” the ghost prompted softly.

“It was an accident,” Xhea whispered. “I never meant to be here. To stay. I’ve tried to get home, but I’m lost and everything I try . . .”

“You didn’t mean to cause that damage.”

Xhea shook her head, the movement doing nothing to hide her sudden flush. “I can’t pay for it. I just want to go home.”

“I know what you said this afternoon. I understand why you were upset.” He picked up the rod from the table, but before she could tense, he used his fingers to draw it apart, expanding it into a wide rectangular shape. Not a weapon, Xhea saw, watching as a fine spell stretched between the thin spans, but a screen. It lit at his touch and he spun it toward her, allowing her to see a recording of her shouting at a crowd, the image dancing through the spell-strands. There was no sound; she didn’t need it. She felt the words, as if they echoed through her.

“I could help you,” he said. “I can’t undo what you did, but there are ways to make amends. While you’re here, you’d be given a room, three meals a day, a change of clothing.”

Xhea realized that she was staring in bewilderment—but even her confusion couldn’t hide her sudden eagerness. To have so much . . .

She allowed herself an instant of hope before crushing it. Beautiful as the City was, she didn’t belong here. She didn’t know the rules, didn’t know how the rhythm of life’s varying heartbeats in this vast landscape spread across the sky. Didn’t know what to do with even the scraps of luxury she had been offered, or these strange, small kindnesses; could only imagine how each would twist and turn upon her when they learned who she was or what she had done. Even if she could make amends to Celleran, no place in the City would be safe for her—not with Allenai searching for her.

“Please,” she said. Her voice trembled and cracked, and she felt so ashamed. “Please, just let me go home.”

He tried for a while longer to convince her, outlining her options, before at last nodding and collapsing the screen. “If that’s what you want,” he said. If he sounded disappointed, Xhea imagined that he was also relieved.

He rose and gestured to the door. “This way.”

She had expected an aircar ride, but instead he led her on foot down to one of the Tower’s landing bays. The bay she knew from her arrival: a cavernous room with a wide opening protected by an opaque spell; collections of aircars parked one atop the other like toy blocks, while elevators hovered like flies. Jer raised a hand and an elevator rushed toward them.

“You’re sure,” he said, but the words were resigned.

Xhea nodded. She couldn’t thank him; the words stuck in her mouth. She stood awkwardly until he activated the elevator and the bright ribbons arced up and around her. Shai slipped close as the spell enclosed them in a bubble of light and silence. They rose.

It was only as the elevator began to move and the boundary spell opened to let them through that Xhea saw what lay beyond: darkness.

Night.

“No!” she cried. She tried to force the elevator to reverse its course, but it moved inexorably forward. “No, please, not at night!” She thought of the night walkers roaming the Lower City streets, the torn bodies she’d discovered, the blood, and she screamed.

Yet the spell was designed to keep the sound of wind and traffic from buffeting its passenger; it silenced her cries. She twisted to see Jer Errison, but he hadn’t stayed to watch her go. She only caught a glimpse of his retreating back as the elevator bore her out of Celleran and away.

The elevator fell surrounded by Towerlight, mercury and pewter, star-white and rainfall’s gray; yet even the City’s raw beauty couldn’t distract Xhea from the approaching ground. Peering down through the ribbons of the elevator spell, she could just see the Lower City’s huddled structures, glints of fires burning low on rooftops and electric light creeping around the edges of drawn shutters.

Only the skyscrapers let Xhea make sense of the shadowed roadways. They stood like squat sentinels in a wide, uneven ring: Senn, Edren, and Orren formed the circle’s heavy base, while Farrow and Rown were spaced some distance apart. As if the ring were a target, the elevator fell arrow-true toward its center. Unless they’d dumped her in the ruins, Xhea couldn’t think of a worse place to land. Within her temporary bubble of safety, she began to tremble.

The skyscrapers’ core territories held little refuge to those not owing allegiance to one of the five, the glow of warmth and shelter glimpsed through their shielded windows a promise that their closed doors made a lie. All she needed was an open tunnel entrance—a subway station, a mall entry, a connecting passage—and knew them all blocked. Though few but Xhea herself could stand to travel the underground routes, that was threat enough for the skyscrapers, all of whom had connections to the underground mall in their lowest levels. Fearing attacks from rival skyscrapers, the likes of which had rocked the Lower City in a civil war just over a decade before, the remaining entrances and tunnels beneath were boarded over and barricaded.

She would have to run for blocks to find safety, run and pray—and she felt her fatigue like a weight of stone.

Shai hovered at Xhea’s side, her anxiety accentuating her helplessness. Shai’s eyes seemed brighter than Xhea remembered, though—sharper, as if true death had brought her an intensity denied in her former ghostly half-life. She watched everything as they fell.

For a moment they descended through the empty gap between the City and the ground, a stretch unbroken by Towerlight or traffic. Then the roofs were rushing toward them and Xhea reached out, unable to fight the feeling that she was falling to smash on the pavement below. She caught a glimpse of bright light behind the blur of Senn’s black glass windows, the flicker of rooftops, tangles of strung wires, and then she was landing.

Her boots hit the street and the elevator dissolved, spell ribbons fluttering down around her as the elevator port sped back to the City. While the elevator had protected her from the fierce wind and noise of travel, so too had it shielded her from the night’s chill. With the spell fizzling against the asphalt, she keenly felt the lack. Xhea peered around, orienting herself, and took a tentative step forward.

Yet it wasn’t only the cold that made her shiver, but the sudden silence, the Lower City’s absolute still. It seemed as if her breath were the loudest sound, quick and fearful gasps that even a closed mouth could not stifle; and when the wind came, rustling through the ancient corridors of concrete and steel, setting distant balcony charms to jangling, it only served to enhance the silence that lingered beneath.

It wasn’t the silence she needed to fear, Xhea knew. But if the quiet was not her enemy, neither was it her friend; even the sound of the broken asphalt crunching beneath her boot-soles echoed, announcing her presence to anyone—anything—that knew to listen.

“Run,” Shai whispered. Warning or encouragement, the word was the only spur Xhea needed to take flight. She knew these streets. Even panicked, she could navigate almost by instinct, memory providing the details that speed and darkness obscured: the blocked alleyway, the pothole deep enough to turn her ankle, the sagging line of charm flags that she had to duck beneath. She stumbled down the street that divided Edren from Orren and through the intersection where a single traffic light still hung, defying gravity and scavengers alike. The Lower City’s smells were all but choking, drawn deep into her lungs with each panting breath. As she sped into an alley, all she noticed was the smell of refuse and urine, mud and putrefaction.

She’d run two steps before she saw the figure, and two more before she was able to bring herself to a skidding, pinwheeling stop.

A man stood before her, midway down the alley—and it was a man: she knew from his height and bulk, the way his shoulders seemed to fill the narrow space. He was still and silent in a way that she, gasping and shaking, couldn’t hope to replicate. She stared, caught between the urge to beg for protection and her body’s demand that she turn and run somewhere, anywhere, so long as it was
away
.

The man stepped forward—cautiously, like an uncertain animal—and Xhea noticed the hunch to his back and his head’s lolling bow, lank hair hanging around his face and shoulders. Another step and he came into the thin pool of Towerlight that shone, faint as starlight, into the alley. He was dirty and naked, untold filth hanging in clumps from his body.
That
, she thought faintly,
explains the smell
.

He did not look at her—his eyes, she saw, were clouded milk-white—but Xhea could feel his attention, see the way he rolled his head slowly back and forth, nostrils flaring as he caught her scent. He inhaled, seeming to draw her essence deep into his belly. She knew that sound, had heard it countless times that long frozen night she’d spent in the ruins, trapped with only a ghost’s voice for comfort. What hope remained turned to ice inside her.

Don’t move
, she thought.
Don’t make a sound. Don’t eve
n b
reathe.

Then Shai stepped forward, moving to stand in front of Xhea as if her incorporeal body were a shield. Xhea saw the ghost with a clarity with which she could not view the night walker, as if Shai were softly lit from all sides.

Xhea thought the gesture useless, yet at Shai’s appearance the walker again stilled, his building tension changing as he shifted to view this new threat. He could see the ghost, that much seemed certain, wincing as if sight of her pained him; and yet when he inhaled, sniffing for her scent, he made a querulous sound, his head rocking on a neck that seemed too loose.

“Back away,” Shai whispered without turning. She seemed as frightened as Xhea felt; her voice shook as she spoke.
He can’t hurt
you, Xhea wanted to say, but she suddenly felt unsure.

Walking blindly, Xhea stepped back and back again, retreating from the alley. She crept around the corner until all she could see was a space between buildings that gaped like a dark mouth, and then she ran.

Fearing the sound of bare feet pounding after her, their movement a fast-paced metronome. Fearing the silence. The closest unbarred subway entrance seemed impossibly distant. There were people all around her in the low, barricaded buildings, behind those dark, blank windows. They would hear her scream if she were caught and killed. They would listen as she died—as she had listened, over the years, to others. Nothing to do, no way to help: caught on the wrong side of the walls, those on the nighttime streets were truly alone.

Senn was behind her, and Orren. By the time she reached Edren, the antique hotel with its towering addition, she didn’t even try for quiet: her boots fell heavily upon the broken asphalt and she whimpered with every breath. The revolving door was locked tight and barricaded; the lower levels’ embellished window frames held concrete blocks, not glass. Nothing to break—nothing, even, to pound against. She wanted to scream at Edren’s darkened façade, reach her hand for the slivers of light she saw in the windows above.

Help me—oh please, help.

As if her words had been screamed in truth, there came a sound from the alley on Edren’s far side, and a sudden beam of light shone from an opened door. Xhea changed course without thinking, barreling down the narrow passage and through the service entrance to the promise of safety just beyond—smack into a large man’s chest.

A clothed, warm, breathing chest. The metal door closed with a bang that echoed down the bright hallway, and she almost collapsed in relief. Not thinking, she flung her arms around the unknown man, buried her face in his shirt, and wept.

He flinched but did not push her away. She recognized the way he tensed, the quiver that spoke of discomfort and the effort required to remain still as she clung to him. Later, she would be humiliated by her weakness; yet shuddering and gasping, she could not force her arms to release him.

“It’s okay,” he murmured, his voice a soft rumble that vibrated through his chest and against her cheek. “Stand down.”

A moment passed before she understood the words; a moment more before she could raise her head to see the other man who stood before her, holding a length of shaped metal as one would wield weapon. Whatever it was, he lowered it slowly and with obvious reluctance.

“But—”

“I’ll handle it. Return to your post.”

The pause spoke louder than words. “Sir,” he said at last, and turned.

Xhea swallowed and felt her face flush with embarrassment. She stepped back.