Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (22 page)

Her hands were steady as she freed the key; steady, too, as they fit the key in the lock and turned, struggling only briefly against its resistance.

“How do you—?” Shai began.

“I used to live here.” Six years and a lifetime ago.

Xhea pushed the door open on protesting hinges and stepped cautiously inside. It was as she remembered, the circular entrance hall bare but for peeling paint and water damage near the ceiling, the floor’s mosaic showing more gaps than tiles. The floor cracked and groaned beneath her as she crept toward the staircase, following a line of nails and the joist that ran beneath. The stairs were louder and visibly sagged, forcing her to step only on the treads’ far edges and cling to the railing as she ascended.

It would have been safer to stay on the ground floor, but Xhea kept climbing, higher and higher as Shai watched and worried. It was not safety that kept her climbing but merely the memory of it, a feeling as misplaced as her naming this old building home.

On the top floor, all was as she’d left it. There was a short hall and four doors, all closed. A small mat of knotted rags lay before the final door, and though it was a rotted, ugly thing, her heart twisted at the sight. In six years, it seemed, no one had come to search these rooms or claim the possessions that she, and the others who had lived here, had inevitably left behind. This, more than the dust and damage, made her wary.

She unlocked the door and it opened slowly, noisily, its bottom scraping along the floor’s unfinished boards. As she stepped inside, Xhea understood for the first time what people meant when they said they felt like they’d seen a ghost. As if the past, full of dreams and impossibilities and the shards of things that would never be, had come crashing down upon her, surrounding her with a presence that it seemed she could breathe, could taste, could feel in the sudden sting of tears in her eyes.

Oh, she had hated this place. Hated its openness, its echoing space that no screens or hanging fabric could ever properly divide; hated its foolish, lofty ceilings and exposed beams. Hated the way the huge windows sapped the warmth from the room, and gave only a view of crumbling ruins, the wide and empty horizon that the unfinished apartment seemed to mimic. The corner that was to have been a kitchen had always mocked them with the dead-end pipes that had promised a sink, the trailing wires and gaps in the countertops where no appliances would ever be installed. The metal barrel that had been their heat and oven both still stood in the center of the stained floor.

Yet there was the structure they’d called a loft: a silly cobbled-together platform where Xhea had often slept. She’d used sheets and blankets to make a tent there, a little cave in the midst of so much openness, where warmth and secrets could hide. There, on the sagging countertop, was her old mug, an antique blazoned with a logo that she’d never been able to read. Tiny things were still scattered in corners: rotted fabric that had once been clothing, an oil lamp, a hammerhead tied to a makeshift handle, a ball of twine.

And there, against the far wall, was the patchwork quilt that had served as bed and blanket both. So clearly, she remembered watching the needle flash in the lamplight as each of those stitches was painstakingly placed, binding together scraps of towels and cast-off clothes into a chaotic whole that Xhea had always found beautiful. It was into that quilt’s warmth that she had fled on nights when they’d heard screams or worse from the streets below their windows; it was where she had curled when her nest of blankets was not enough to keep her warm.

In fear and cold, she had shivered—and found comfort and warmth near the slight body of the girl she had thought of as mother and sister, protector and best friend.

“Abelane,” Xhea whispered to the empty room. “I’ve come home.”

Throughout the afternoon, Xhea cleaned. She had never been much for neatness; her hidden rooms and corners were organized in a chaotic system of piles that made sense only to her—and sometimes not even then. Abelane had been Xhea’s opposite in this as in so many other things, and Xhea knew that the older girl would’ve had a fit had she seen the apartment in its current state. Once Xhea would have laughed at the reaction, but now the thought was enough to make her seek the straw broom from its place in the corner.

The broom’s bristles were mere stubble now, but it worked well enough when applied with force. Piles of dirt and dust and flaking paint undisturbed for years rose in great clouds, making Xhea cough and breathe through the edge of her shirt. She worked tirelessly, making pointless piles of dirt she had no way to pick up or throw out, dusting objects she had no desire to use or take with her, organizing old belongings best discarded entirely.

Over and over Shai called her name, asked her what was wrong, and Xhea found she couldn’t answer. Words caught in her throat, thick with dust, and she could only turn away. At last, Shai retreated to the top rung of the loft’s ladder and watched. Xhea kept her head down, pretending she didn’t feel the weight of the ghost’s stare, or all the questions unasked in silence.

Only when the sun vanished from beyond the grimy windows did Xhea sink to the ground against the far wall and place her head in her dirty hands. Blisters marked her palms and her arms ached from hours of unfamiliar motion, but she only felt them now, as if stopping had called the hurt forth. When twilight shrouded the apartment and veiled her naked expression, Xhea spoke.

“Abelane found me on the streets when I was a child,” she said slowly, testing the words. “Four years old, five . . . something like that. She was just a child herself, younger than I am now, but she wanted to protect me anyway. Or maybe she just didn’t want to be alone.” Xhea shook her head; she’d never gathered the courage to ask.

“It was winter. She said that there were bruises around my wrists and ankles, as if I’d been tied and held, and my clothing was too thin for me to have been outside long. I . . . I don’t remember any of it. She said it hurt when she first took my hand, as if I’d shocked her, and her hand was almost numb for an hour, but she took me home anyway.”

Xhea glanced up. Shai now knelt on the floor before her, hands curled in her lap and face unreadable. She was not glowing, now; merely bright, as if lit by moonlight.

“That winter we were always moving. Finding a place to stay for a few days, then moving on. Always afraid. Always hiding.

“Later we found this place. The other rooms were already taken, but this one was unfinished and damaged. People had been using it for garbage. Took a long time to get it cleaned up.” Even then it had been common to wake to the sound of waste bags hitting their door—bags that they’d had to drag downstairs themselves, lest they become trapped in their apartment by the pile.

“How long did you live here?” Shai asked softly.

“A little over three years. We were here until the collapse. Or . . . I was.”

“Only you?”

“Only me,” Xhea said. “In the end.”

Those three years had seemed an eternity. There had been a time when she’d not known what to want if it was not this room, these unfinished walls, this blanket made from scraps. It was Lane who’d taught her to steal and to fight, how to find food and hide in places no one grown could go. She’d even taught Xhea to read and write, to see magic and understand the lines of intent in cast spells—though the learning process had evoked more swearing than gratitude. And yes, they had fought, the petty arguments of girls who were, in the end, only children with no one to help them, guide them, to watch them or to care.

But for those three years, she had not been alone. With Abelane always somewhere near, she’d almost forgotten what the word meant.

Until those last days before the collapse.

“Thing is, Lane was afraid of me—of what I was, or maybe what I wasn’t—but she hid it well. Most of the time.”

“Afraid that you had no magic?”

“Yes, that, but mostly that I could see ghosts. We fought about it. She used to say that I was lying to scare her.” During one of their fights, Abelane had been the first one to say that there was something wrong with Xhea, a wrongness that could be felt by the merest brush of skin on skin.

Xhea shrugged. “Of course, later she was the one who helped turn my ability into a source of income. Not that too little renai was always a problem. Abelane had magic—she just didn’t know how to use it. She didn’t know many real spells, just . . . tricks.” Ways to get vending machines to give extra, ways to create the sound of a voice where there was none, or coax fire from damp wood with a single match. “I’ve wondered whether she wasn’t a runaway from the City. An ordinary girl fleeing something worse than this.” She gestured at the bare room, its dirt and peeling paint.

Shai motioned for her to continue. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Xhea whispered. It was all she could do to force out the words, for here, in this place, the old hurt felt raw again, and speaking of such things was like casting salt atop the blood. “I woke one morning to find her gone. The door was locked, her blanket was folded, and Lane was just . . . gone.

“I waited all day, expecting her to return any minute with food or firewood. But she didn’t, and when night fell, I knew that something was wrong. I was maybe nine years old, and hadn’t spent more than a few hours without her. I didn’t know what to do.”

Xhea closed her eyes, remembering that night. She hadn’t slept, cringing at every sound that might be a girl’s scream or cry, no matter how distant. She had paced these floorboards until the downstairs neighbor pounded on his ceiling for her to stop, and then she’d just sat, hour after hour in the darkness, arms wrapped around her knees as she waited for dawn. Waited for Lane to come home.

But only the sun returned.

“The next day I searched,” Xhea said. “Up and down streets and alleys, in the market, the skyscrapers, asking anyone and everyone I could find. No one had seen her.

“The day after that was the collapse.”

Then, what was one more lost girl, one more child who might be dead, in the midst of so much chaos? Xhea was not the only one with hair and skin caked white with dust to cling to passersby and beg for word of a lost loved one.

“Was she in the collapse?” Shai asked.

Xhea smiled, a thin and bleak expression. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Sometimes I used to hope that she was, just because it would mean that she hadn’t abandoned me.

“I stayed for weeks anyway, sleeping here and combing the rubble in daylight. The ground used to shake and shudder—you could feel it, as if the bones of the world were moving beneath your feet. The other survivors left quickly, heading closer to the core, but I just couldn’t.” It had been too hard to care, scratching each day through the rubble until her hands bled and her muscles shook with exhaustion. Let the ground take her, if it would; she had no way to stop it anyway.

“I was the last one to leave.”

Xhea turned to look at the mound of the quilt in the far corner, a dark shape that she could almost imagine was a girl lying curled for warmth. How old would Abelane be now—nineteen? Twenty? Yet she still saw a child. She didn’t know how to imagine Lane as anything else.

“I kept looking for a long time,” Xhea murmured, her eyes not leaving the quilt. “Watching the areas of the Lower City where we used to shop or steal, checking our hideaways. I never found anything. No one remembered seeing her after the collapse, or in the days just before.”

Sometimes you have to leave someone behind
, Xhea thought.
Sometimes you’re the one that gets left.

With Lane gone, so too was the life Xhea had known. Their friends and acquaintances were scattered across the Lower City, and those few that Xhea knew how to find spoke to her less and less without Lane’s comforting presence between them. Already word of Xhea’s strange talent had spread, and with it came fear—that same fear she’d seen born in Lane’s eyes years before. Even those who still offered food or a moment of companionship turned distant when Xhea asked for a place to spend the night.

She’d done the rest of the work for them: walking away when they tried to speak to her, bowing her head as they passed as if she didn’t recognize their faces, didn’t hear them speak her name. Abandoning them before they too could leave her in slow ones and twos.

Sometimes she wondered what might have happened if someone had taken her in. She wouldn’t have gone to Orren, desperate when winter’s chill set in—yet maybe she wouldn’t have ventured into the tunnels, either, and found she was untouched by the pain that all others felt beneath the ground. She remembered finding the tunnels: a whole world for her to explore and claim as her own; and if some nights she’d felt the press of earth above her head and remembered its terrible power, such thoughts only made her cautious, ensuring the respect that dark places deserved.

“I’m sorry,” Shai said. “It doesn’t change anything, but . . . I am sorry.”

“I don’t need your pity, Shai.”

Shai just shook her head. “Why did you bring me here?”

Xhea wanted to protest that she hadn’t brought Shai anywhere—that she hadn’t even meant to come here herself. Yet she couldn’t speak the lie; and she knew it to be such, even when voiced only in the depths of her mind.

“Because they can’t take this from me,” she said at last. “Your Tower. The City. Whoever’s after us. They can’t take it from me, because I lost it a long time ago.”

She laughed, then—a choked and sputtering sound, but a laugh nonetheless, for she heard her own words and scorned herself for her blatant self-pity. Was glad, again, that the darkness hid her face, for she could feel the sudden flush burning to the tips of her ears.

“Oh, listen to me.” She laughed again, for it was suddenly a choice of that or crying.

“Xhea,” Shai said, and in that moment her voice was that of a patient older sister. “You’re tired.”

“When am I not?”

“When you’re asleep.”

Xhea sighed, a long exhalation that seemed to take with it the edge of her mirth and the bruise-like ache of disturbed hurts. There was no use protesting that she could not sleep now, not here, with memories and her words and the smell of dust heavy all around them—she could, and would. She slid down the wall to the ground, curling on a patch of floor made almost clean by her obsessive sweeping. After a long moment, she reached out and dragged the stinking quilt over her legs and shifted so that it dulled the press of her hip against the floor. Reluctance and weariness spoke in every movement.