Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (2 page)

The man watched her in an angry, uncomfortable silence.

“Ah.” Xhea sighed. “Don’t know, do you? Just came to see what the freak girl had to offer.”

It was only then that she realized how thin his umbrella of magic had become, fading in his exhaustion, or that the circles beneath his eyes were dark as bruises. She squelched what little sympathy she felt. Even if he had lost everything, if everyone he loved had died, he still had magic, a gift of nature and blood. With that power, doors opened to his touch; vendors could sell him food; the City acknowledged he existed. He was, in a word, normal.

Unlike Xhea. There was no brightness in her, no magic, only a dark stillness in the depths of her stomach; an ache, like hunger, that she could only think of as absence.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ll take your ghost for a day, maybe two, give you a little break.” No more flickers at the edges of his vision, or the feeling he was being watched; no more whispers half-heard—or whatever it was he could sense. Each felt their haunting a little differently. “If that turns out okay, we can discuss something more permanent.” Or she could offer him more temporary arrangements, and more, turning his indecision into months of steady business. She suppressed a grin.

“How much,” he said brusquely.

“A week’s worth of food chits, and five hundred unshaped renai.”

“Five hundred!”

“You’d use less to get a taxi across the City.”

“But unshaped?” he asked, confused that she didn’t want the renai—the magical currency—to be spelled to her own power signature, but raw. “Why?”

“I didn’t ask how you got a ghost,” Xhea said. “Don’t ask what I’ll do with the payment.”

His umbrella flickered and failed, and the rain poured down on his unprotected head. Xhea watched as, to her eyes, his hair and clothing changed from mottled grays to tones of charcoal and black, the fabric slicking to his shoulders and arms and the slight paunch at his waistband. Water dribbled in his eyes and trickled from his nose as he stared.

“What they say about you is true, then,” he said, his voice low. “You
are
a freak. No magic in you at all.”

Xhea ground her cigarette against the wet concrete, watching the ember sizzle and dull to black. A line of smoke rose upward, vanishing.

“You’re the one standing in the rain.”

A deal was struck. The rest was only negotiation.

Changing the anchor of a ghost’s tether wasn’t easy, but it was one thing Xhea could do well, a knack honed by years of practice. Ghosts remained in the living world because of unfinished business, something they couldn’t leave behind. What few knew was that they were literally bound to that unfinished business.

Unless, of course, you had a really sharp knife. Xhea’s knife was silver, with a narrow blade that folded into a handle inlaid with mother of pearl. The handle’s sheen had been dulled by the touch of countless hands, but the blade was polished mirror-bright, its maker’s mark worn to a mere squiggle in the metal.

The man, soaked to the bone, stood rigidly as Xhea climbed onto an overturned fruit crate, knife extended, and examined the tether above his head.

“Don’t cut me,” he said.

“Don’t complain,” she replied.

Carefully, Xhea closed her hand around the near-invisible tether. It felt like little more than a length of slippery air and vibrated at her touch like a plucked guitar string. Holding it steady, she probed with the tip of her knife for weakness. As she shifted, her jacket rattled: the pockets were full to overflowing with a week’s worth of chits, small plastic discs imbued with just enough magic to buy a single meal. They were designed for children too young to understand the value of their own magic, more likely to weaken themselves buying candy or be drained by a predator than to buy a balanced meal. Though she appeared younger than her age, Xhea knew she still looked too old to be using chits. She couldn’t bring herself to care. With no magic of her own, she had no other way to buy food; it was that, steal, or starve.

The rest of the payment had been spelled to transfer to her upon completion of their transaction. A small sphere of magic—nearly five hundred renai, the man’s inclination to bargain being weak at best—now floated above Xhea’s head like her own shining ghost, awaiting its time to leap into her body.

There.
Her silver knife slid into a weak section of the tether a few hands’ length from its anchor in the man’s chest, and the line’s vibration quickened at the blade’s intrusion. She slid her hand down the length until she could touch that weakness with both fingers and knife, feeling for details that even her eyes could not see.

The City man looked from the knife to Xhea’s face, then closed his eyes. “Hurry,” he said. “Please just . . . hurry.”

The blade flashed down. The ghost’s eyes flew open and she recoiled, springing back to the end of the tether that Xhea refused to release. The ghost opened her mouth as if to scream, her once-perfect calm gone, but no sound emerged. Their eyes met. Locked. The ghost’s eyes were pale too, Xhea saw; bright silver to her vision, reduced to but a thin ring by fear-widened pupils. Yet she only watched in silence as Xhea fought the tether, drawing it down and pressing the severed end to her own chest. It sank into her like rain into a storm sewer, vanishing completely.

The City man turned to her, Xhea’s position on the crate bringing their eyes to a level. He reached out to grasp the wrist of Xhea’s knife hand—and jerked back as if shocked. She acknowledged neither touch nor recoil.

“That’s it?”

“You want to pay more?”

“I—”

“Then that’s it.”

He stared at her, and took a long, shuddering breath. The rain had slowed to little more than a drizzle. He stepped back from her concrete shelter and into the middle of the street. For a moment he stood, watching with an expression that she could not name, then walked away without another word.

“Two days,” Xhea called after him. “She’ll return to you in two days, unless you come back.”

There was no reply, only the sight of his hunched back vanishing into the market crowd.

His absence was a signal. Xhea’s payment brightened, then sped forward and slammed into the center of her forehead. She gasped as the magic washed over her, through her; she stumbled back, lost her footing on the crate, and fell. There was a roaring in her ears like floodwaters’ rush, and she tasted bile as her stomach attempted to return what little she’d eaten that day.

“Breathe,” Xhea whispered. Her head spun. She reached out to grab at the concrete wall as a sudden rush of vertigo seemed to flip the world on its side and tilt it back again. She gagged and clutched at her stomach. “Breathe . . . breathe . . .”

It was in these moments with raw magic coursing through her body that she always swore she would never ask for renai in payment again—never demand it, never crave it. With no magic of her own, it was a waste, a rush, a surge of power without purpose or end. Helpless to process the renai or make it her own, her body fought the onslaught. Next time, she thought, gagging and shuddering—next time she’d stick to food chits and pity, everything else be blighted.

Then the vertigo began to subside, and the nausea eased; Xhea took one long, slow breath, and another. In the sudden quiet, she heard the rain begin again, a faint patter against the concrete, and the wind as it sighed through the Lower City’s corridors of broken glass and twisted steel.

She felt . . . she almost had to struggle for the word . . . alive. With the bright magic burning within her, she felt no darkness in her center, no stillness. She was light, empty, on fire.
This
, she thought,
is what it must feel like to be normal.

Xhea opened her eyes. Instead of a world of unending grays, she saw color. The brilliance made her breath catch—even now, after so many times. She stared upward, unsure if she wanted to shield her eyes or never close them again.

She saw only glimpses of the floating Towers of the City above—the shadows of the lowest few, the downward points of defensive spires—but even those were jewel bright, gold and green and blue. Closer, the ghost had resumed her meditative pose, legs curled beneath her as she looked down at Xhea’s fallen form in no little confusion. The ghost’s pale hair was blond, her silver eyes a light and luminous blue, but it was her dress that made Xhea stare. It was not the gray she’d seen, nor the red she’d imagined, but a rich plum like new blossoms.

“That looked like it hurt,” the ghost said, her voice tentative.

“A good observation.”

Xhea felt that she had but to lift her arms to float beside the ghost, untethered by weight or the world. Reality had other ideas. It took her three tries and the assistance of the wall to gain her feet, and even then she stood swaying, hoping that her trembling legs would hold.
Breathe
, she reminded herself as another wave of nausea curled and crashed over her.

“First things first.” She looked toward the market tents. When her balance had steadied, Xhea stepped cautiously from the alcove. She felt a tugging against her sternum as the tether stretched, then began dragging the ghost in her wake. The ghost girl gave a yelp of surprise, which Xhea ignored, instead tilting her head back so the quickening rain fell upon her upturned face. The clouds were just gray, but aircars wove among them, their shimmering exhaust like fine strands of copper wire strung across the sky.

She found a vendor who knew her and offered no more than a raised eyebrow at her less-than-sober state. With a chit, she purchased a few skewers off the grill—some sort of fatty meat, and a starchy, crunchy thing that might have been a potato, the taste of each buried beneath a thick layer of spice. Xhea hummed happily as she chewed.

“What . . .” the ghost said, then faltered into silence. A moment later, she tried again: “Why . . . why am I here?”

“That was the deal,” Xhea said, turning to look at the ghost over her shoulder. The world spun at the movement. “Nothing personal, I assure you.”

She turned down a side street, slipping between low apartments. Their ground levels had been reinforced or disguised to look abandoned: doors bricked or boarded over, windows clouded from untold years of dirt. Higher, the ruse had been abandoned. Warning chimes and fluttering prayer flags hung from balconies, while a line of laundry strung between two buildings was heavy with dripping clothes—all pinned too securely to be dislodged with a thrown rock.

“Deal?” the ghost asked. “I was just sleeping. And now . . .” The ghost looked down, apparently just realizing that she inhabited a space without gravity, hovering five feet from the ground and skimming forward without walking.

“Oh,” said Xhea. “That. You’re dead.”

“I can’t be,” she whispered, peering over her crossed legs and watching the pavement speed by. “No. I’m just asleep.”

Great
, Xhea thought.
A talker.
She had seemed so quiet at first, so serene; Xhea had thought that she might dream away her death in silence. It would have made things so much easier. Perhaps this was why the man had wanted to get rid of her—a sense that an unseen presence was doing her best to talk his ear off.

Well, she had only committed to a day, perhaps two, and then she could let the tether go. The girl would catapult back to her original anchor and be out of Xhea’s hair—unless, of course, the man wanted to pay her significantly more.

“I’m asleep,” the ghost girl insisted. “Only asleep.”

“Then this must be a very bad dream.”

Xhea made her way through the Lower City core and out toward the edges where the buildings fell in slow surrender to the surrounding ruins. After a few more protests, largely ignored, the ghost fell into an uneasy silence. She made no attempt to propel herself forward, leaving Xhea to drag her by her tether like a rock on a string.

Just a City girl
, Xhea thought, glancing back at the ghost. She’d probably spent the whole of her life in the Towers, never looking down, never considering what lay on the ground below or all the lives scratched out in the dirt and ruin. Then again, few even from the Lower City chose to leave the core; out in the ruins beyond, Xhea felt that she had the whole world to herself, a wide space that held only the memory of people and the echoes of her footsteps. Here the infrastructure was succumbing to rot and the slow erosion of rain and wind and time. Buildings sagged where they hadn’t fallen entirely. Even the clearest streets were strewn with rubble, bits of lives—of a time—that even history had forgotten.

But here, too, it was beautiful. Shoots pushed up from between storm sewers and around the stagnant ponds that had once been basements, and the broken street was veined green from new leaves struggling through the cracks. Xhea looked from one small plant to the next, caught by their perfect green.

At last she came to her destination, a low building that from the outside seemed no different from its collapsing neighbors. Stepping between glass shards and exposed rebar, she made her careful way to the door. It hung from rusted hinges, leaving only a small gap for Xhea to squeeze through. She closed her eyes against the rain of paint flakes that fell from the old frame, then grabbed the tether and dragged the ghost in after her.

Inside, it was so bright she had to squint. Daylight poured in from every side, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, as if she stood in the shade on a sunny day. Captured light, the owner called it: a spell that gathered sunlight on bright days and brought it inside, tamed to the flick of a switch. After days of rain and overcast skies, the effect was dazzling.

The building was a warehouse, clean and neatly kept, entirely filled with labeled shelves. But it was the structure itself that always took Xhea aback, for it was something that no one in the Lower City ever saw: a new structure, little older than Xhea herself, with straight walls and floors that did not dip or sag underfoot, its ceiling unstained. No reclaimed materials had gone into its construction, she knew, and she marveled at the cost. The exterior was an illusion, the owner had assured her, as if that was the start and end of it.