Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (18 page)

“It’s okay,” the man said again, and Xhea suddenly knew his voice and the rhythms of his speech—knew his face, that close-cropped hair, that dark skin. Lorn Edren, the eldest living son of the skyscraper’s ruling family—and the man whose life she’d saved two years before.

Xhea took a deep breath.
Nothing happened
, she told herself.
You got away.
Yet her knees still quivered hard enough that she thought she might fall.

“You all right?” Lorn asked. Now that the guard had gone, his voice softened, the gentleness of his tone belying his hard exterior. She nodded shakily.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “What were you doing out there?”

“It wasn’t by choice. It . . . it’s a long story.”

He stared down at her for a long moment. “With you,” he said at last, “it would be.”

Xhea shrugged; he wasn’t wrong. “How did you know I was out there?”

“You tripped the perimeter spell. Lucky for you, I was supervising the watch.”

Lucky indeed
, Xhea thought, nodding. Slowly, she looked around. She stood in what had once been one of the hotel’s back service corridors: pale paint flaked from breezeblock walls, the floor a river of cracked linoleum. Wires had been stapled along the hall, branching up the walls and through the ceiling. While some seemed to power the electric lights overhead, others had the telltale glimmer that spoke of magic.

It was the glimmer that made Xhea glance over her shoulder to where Shai usually stood, hovering one step behind like a shadow in midair, but she wasn’t there. Xhea remembered the ghost staring at the blind man, the night walker, and that terrifying look in his milky eyes as he stared back. She turned back toward the door as if her attention would bring Shai to her; and yet it was only a door, flat black and dented, and the ghost did not appear.

“Don’t worry,” Lorn said, misunderstanding. “It’s stronger than it looks.” Xhea could only follow his lead down the corridor, steps dragging across the broken floor. Lorn still had a limp, Xhea saw, slight but present; a reminder of the accident that led to their first meeting. Farther from the entrance, she heard a distant, rhythmic thump, the bass throb of music filtering down through untold floors and the spaces between. Even if the Towers slept, she thought, perhaps the skyscrapers, huddled in the dark, never did.

Lorn led her to a room so small she assumed it had once been a maintenance closet. The space held only a cot with a thin blanket.

“Stay here,” he said, ushering her inside. “No one will bother you.” She heard the words he didn’t speak:
No one will know
you’re h
ere
.

“But,” she protested softly. “The other man, won’t he—”

“He won’t say anything.” Lorn’s tone guaranteed it. “I’ll come get you at dawn, okay?” She nodded before falling onto the cot, muscles trembling with fatigue and worry and the after-effects of fear. She thought again of Shai; but there was only darkness.

Xhea settled onto the cot, and pulled up the blanket. Her eyes closed seemingly of their own accord, and she lay there, thinking:
I’ll sleep forever. I’ll never sleep again.
Believing both to be true.

It was only a few moments before a faint light entered the room. Xhea didn’t need to open her eyes; only smiled in relief and shifted position to make a space beside her. There was a pause, then she felt a familiar chill; imagined that the cot shifted with a weight not her own; felt a light pressure against her shoulder that might have been the shape of a hand.

“So.” Shai’s quiet voice came from somewhere near her ear. “That was your plan?” The ghost still sounded afraid, if unhurt; but also . . . happy.

“Yeah,” Xhea managed. “Something like that.”

A jolt of bright magic hit Xhea in the arm, knocking her from sleep and the cot with a cry. She rolled, tucking her limbs close, then sprung to her feet with the wall at her back. It wasn’t elegant or well-executed, but served her purposes: she steadied in a crouch with her hands raised, ready to fight or run or scream. Yet the only thing before her in the tiny room was Shai, the shining ghost standing with one hand outstretched. She wore a shocked expression that could only mirror Xhea’s own.

Xhea relaxed fractionally. “Did you see what it was?” she whispered. “Where did it go?” Her whole left arm felt strangely numb, though when she flexed her hand her fingers moved normally.

“I—” Shai whispered, her hand falling to her side. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think . . .”

It took a moment for understanding to filter through Xhea’s sleep-addled brain. “That was
you
? What, were you trying to kill me?” She stumbled back to the cot and cradled her arm against her chest, as if that might stop its throbbing. Both the numbness and the dissipating pain were familiar; almost like how she’d felt in the hospital between doses of pure magic. Only less severe, more localized. Only . . .

Shocked, Xhea looked up from her hand and met the ghost’s eyes.

“You’re
glowing
,” she whispered. It was true: Shai looked as if she stood in moonlight, a soft light pale and without shadow, and it was not Xhea’s vision that made the ghost look so bright. She had, she realized, seen the ghost’s glow the night before—had looked for the light of Shai’s presence without considering what that glow meant. Light glimmered in Shai’s eyes and beneath her ghostly skin; it had lit Xhea’s path through the darkness, a comfort when everything was black.

Throughout her ghostly half-life, Shai had glimmered with magic—and that light had grown stronger, brighter, with each passing day. Yet what Xhea saw now was not a reflection of spell-light or a mirror of the power that wove through her living body. It was magic in truth.

Xhea’s hand tightened around her arm where the jolt had struck her. Not only was Shai filled with magic, but she could also use the power she held.

Shai’s expression was unreadable. “Yes,” she said.

“It wasn’t just that you were alive. Wasn’t just the spells in your body . . .”

“No.” The single word bore a weight of weariness and sorrow.

Questions boiled up, too many and too varied for Xhea to make sense of them, even in her own mind. Somehow, the one that emerged was: “You have magic, and you used it to
zap me
?”

“I had to,” Shai protested. “You were radiating.”

“What?”

“That’s what we call it with normal magic, anyway. Leaking energy unintentionally. But with you it wasn’t light; it was more like you were . . . steaming. Breathing out smoke. It started to surround you like a cloud.”

Xhea thought of all the mornings she had woken in one Tower or another to find the moss beneath her dead and black, flowers withering, bushes with leaves curled and crisping.
Radiating
, she thought; everything dying at her touch. She didn’t know whether her sudden shiver was born of fear or excitement.

“Which was fine, really,” Shai continued, “until the cloud started reaching for me. I really didn’t want your magic to touch me. Not outside of your control.”

Control. As if she had any of that. Yet, thinking of the ghost of the old man in her hospital bed, Xhea could only nod in agreement. She’d already killed Shai once, in body if not in spirit; she had little desire to finish the job.

“The . . . shock, or whatever—it was the only way to stop me?”

“You didn’t wake when I called, and I was afraid to touch you, so . . .” Shai shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “It was just a little spark, I swear.”

Which didn’t explain why it had felt like being kicked in the shoulder. But—Xhea flexed her fingers—at least there seemed to be no lasting harm. As to how Shai could possibly possess the power to do what she had done . . .

There came a quick knock, then the door cracked open and Lorn peeked through the gap.

“It’s dawn,” he said simply. “I heard you were awake.”

Looking at Lorn, Xhea felt a hot rush of embarrassment. While he might think little of her hysterics, the memory of the night before was enough to make her cringe. Yet he made no comment and did not question her speaking to an apparently empty room; the set of his shoulders said that he could feel Shai there, even if he could not see her. Those who had experienced a haunting knew the sensation—the feeling of a presence, a glimpse of blurred movement at the edges of their vision—and Lorn’s expression said that he didn’t want to know more.

Xhea used the offered bathroom, where she removed the hospital shift from beneath her clothes and lingered long enough to enjoy the running water, the plentiful soap, and the stack of clean towels. In the hall, Lorn offered her a twist of paper full of crackers for breakfast, which she accepted with barely concealed eagerness.

“Listen,” she said at last. “Edren owed me a favor—”

“No,” he said softly; it was still strange to hear that gentle tone in such a deep, rough voice. “Edren owes you a favor, yes, but so did I. For what you did for me, you’re owed more than a night’s shelter.”

He glanced away and straightened, hiding that glimpse of softness. “Besides,” he said, louder, all false cheer, “I just opened the door last night to check on a disruption to the perimeter spell, that’s all. No one will say otherwise.” He forced a smile, teeth bright in his dark face. “Now I’m going to check the perimeter spell again, and that means opening the back door, if you get my drift.”

Xhea nodded, not inclined to argue. When he pushed the metal door open again on its heavy hinges, she slipped out into the street.

“Be careful,” he called with a wave of his tattooed hand. Xhea waved once and the door slammed shut behind her.

The streets looked different in daylight. Though the overcast sky mimicked concrete, even that dull light leeched the menace from the roadway. The strange, looming shapes half-seen in her terror were revealed to be fire drums, scrap heaps, and other ordinary rubble. But thinking about her close call the night before made her uneasy, and Xhea hurried away from the nameless alley and the memory of the thing that had once been a man.

She managed not to pat her pockets until they were safely beyond range of Edren’s security perimeter. Her jacket was stuffed with tiny bars of soap from the bathroom, and good quality soap at that—creamy, lightly scented bars wrapped in paper. Even after she traded most of it for meals, she would have enough to keep herself and her clothes clean for months.
There’s a balance to everything
, she thought, eating a cracker with Shai at her side.

“Where are we heading?”

Xhea considered. “The market,” she said. She could trade some soap or even the hospital shift for food before the crowds got too thick, and pick up the recent news. Perhaps she’d even find customers waiting for her return.

Shai nodded, looking around. “You know, I never thought I’d see this place again.”

“Being back must be disappointing.”

Shai made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I’m happy to be anywhere.”

Anywhere in the living world: the subtext reverberated between them. Xhea glanced at Shai, studying the subtleties of an expression that she couldn’t quite read. She had so many questions that her mind felt blank—questions about Shai’s magic, about what had happened in those days after her death, about Allenai and the pursuit that Shai had warned of the night before. She asked the first one that came to her lips.

“Why are you still here?”

Shai looked as if Xhea had slapped her.

Xhea grimaced. “No, sorry, I didn’t mean
here
, with me—” She shook her head in frustration; not giving offense was so much work. “I just meant that I don’t see your tether, so I don’t know what’s holding you to . . . life, this reality. Whatever. Here, stop a sec.”

As she had done before, Xhea searched the air around the ghost with eyes half-closed, alert for even the narrowest thread of a tether. Yet though the air around Shai felt different—energized, almost, with a vibration akin to a tether’s—she felt no line, no matter how thin.

“Huh.” Xhea sat back on her heels and looked up at Shai. She’d never seen anything like it. Carefully she stood.

“When I was in Celleran,” she asked, “how did you find me?”

Shai considered. “I just thought about you,” she said at last. “Focused really hard on how much I needed to find you.”

“Can you do it again?”

Shai closed her eyes, brow creasing. A moment passed, and another. There were more people in the road now, individuals emerging from the surrounding buildings in careful ones and twos, and Xhea began to feel conspicuous. She was about to tell Shai to stop when she felt it—
ping
, like the impact of a pin against her sternum. She looked down, and there, like a glimmering cobweb, was a tether.

“You make your own tethers,” Xhea whispered, amazed.

Shai opened her eyes. “Is that strange?”

“Very. To have no tether . . .”

“What does it mean?”

Xhea shrugged. “A tether is what holds a ghost to the living world. But I interfered with yours before you actually died. Maybe that just means that, now, you have no unfinished business—only what you choose.”

Shai made a noise that Xhea would have called a snort in someone less delicate. “No unfinished business? Too much, maybe.” A pause, and then: “There was a moment when I was torn between everything. I didn’t know where I belonged—with my father, trying to find my mother, doing my duty for Allenai, being here with you . . .” Her voice dropped as she spoke, as if the weight of all the possible responsibilities were dragging her slowly down.

“Why would you stay for
me
?”

“Probably the same reason that you helped me, in the end.”

Payment
, Xhea thought—then,
no.
Not at the end. Yet even she didn’t want to put words to the tangled motive that had driven her into the ruins and to the City itself—didn’t want to name what she felt kneeling at the dying girl’s bedside as the spells flared and flickered to black.

“At first,” Shai continued, “I was staying away from you. To protect you. I’d already caused you so much trouble.”

“And now?”

“You can see me.”

“I could always see you. What changed?”