Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (31 page)

There was no fighting him, Xhea thought again, because he was not there to fight. He bore no message but death—his or hers, and each was its own kind of understanding. And death? Death she did not fear. She had stared into its face, into its echoes and memory, for as long as she could recall. It was only dying—the pain and suffering—that made her afraid.

She exhaled again, mouth pursed as if to blow a kiss, until dark coils of magic swam before her like a veil. She wept from the pain of his grip, and the magic flowed with her tears; it seeped darkly from the small wounds on her arms where his ragged nails had dug through fabric into flesh.

She watched the magic enter him, and he shuddered at the touch.
Oh
, she thought,
how did I ever think of this power as anything but death?

Xhea stopped fighting and pulled him closer. Knife forgotten in the flesh of his arm, she gripped his shoulders in both hands and pulled, drawing them together like strange and stilted dancers. She breathed his breath of ash and paper, as he breathed deeply of hers, and he shuddered from the touch of it, from the taste. Sweet and bitter, rainwater and apples, a scent like the beginnings of decay and the promise of rain on the horizon.

She released the magic and it flowed through her like blood, pulsing down her arms, slipping through her fingers, and into his body. His grip on her shoulders eased.

She was afraid—oh, she was so afraid—and yet she wasn’t, as if her magic and this slow death were enough to take her to a place beyond fear and hurting, a trance where nothing else existed but the two of them. She watched the darkness sink into him; watched his shoulders go slack, his fingers loosening and falling away; watched his breathing slow.

Watched herself kill him, and felt as if it were right.

He sagged into her arms. For all his strength, the wiry hardness of his limbs and the knife-sharp edges of his face, he was so light. She might have held him if not for her injuries. Instead they fell together, a slow collapse of hurting limbs tumbling to the tunnel’s gravel bed, and landed with his face somehow still held in the cradle of her arms, staring upward.

So light
, she thought again, eyes tracing the dirtied mats of his hair, the sweaty hollow of his throat. As if he were not flesh and blood but dried leaves and emptiness. Even his relentless determination was fading, his intensity dimming with his life, and though no true awareness came into his face, she saw something in him like an abandoned child’s weakness. Something that looked almost like loss.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, holding him to her. He calmed at the sound of her voice, though she doubted he understood.
No spirit anymore
, she thought. No ghost bound in this flesh to be released at her hand; no magic to flicker and fade. They had been taken from him already, leaving only this dying, crumbling shell.

Yet at the last that shell of a man opened his mouth, cracked lips bleeding as they struggled to shape his faltering breath. He made a noise that almost sounded like “I . . . I . . .” though whether he meant to speak in truth or was merely caught in his body’s dying memory, she did not know. Would never know. For his eyelids flickered and fell, and his weak and struggling mouth became still. His body was suddenly a slack weight in her arms and across her lap.

For a long moment Xhea did not move, her eyes half-lidded, lost in the final moments of her trance. Then she took a long, shuddering breath and the world crashed back upon her, pain in her shoulders and legs and knee, and a cold and creeping shiver that she could only take to be the after-effects of adrenaline—or the beginnings of shock. She looked up, and gasped.

Shai stood above, quietly radiant and hovering a full foot from the ground, staring with a look that Xhea could not read. Behind the ghost, all the other mindless creatures, broken shells and murderous husks of people, stood in their ragged half-circle, watching with mindless intent. They had watched everything, she realized. Could they even understand the death of one of their kind? Would such a thing even matter? The corpse pinned her legs to the ground, and light though he was Xhea could not easily push the body aside.

She had killed a night walker, yes, and with a gentleness she’d never imagined; yet it had left her adrift. The magic still moved through her, slow and contented, but she did not know if she had the strength to take on a second, never mind a tenth or eleventh.

There was no need. She saw no signal, no word or nod, but the creatures turned as one and began to walk away. Their movements slow and steady, they walked in a ragged line toward the flooded end of the tunnel and the gaping hole beyond.

Shai watched her father go with them, her face a study in despair. She raised a hand toward the shell that had once held the person she’d loved, but only that; and even that movement she quickly hid, curling her hand into a fist and turning away. Within moments they had gone beyond reach of Shai’s soft glow; a moment more and not even Xhea’s keen eyes could pick their shapes from the darkness. She listened as their splashing steps receded, becoming faint echoes and then only memory.

Mission accomplished
, Xhea thought in a haze of confusion and pain.
Message delivered
. She looked down at the body in her arms, thinking of death and consequences. After a moment, she drew her blade from the old man’s shoulder and wiped away the worst of the blood. Then slowly, gingerly, she rolled his body from her lap.

“Why?” Shai whispered into the silence.

There was too much to say; Xhea only shook her head.

Confused and hurting, Xhea woke sometime in the indeterminable dark from dreams that she couldn’t—didn’t want to—remember. She clenched her jaw to keep from whimpering.
Just a dream
, she thought, pushing away the image of her vomiting magic the same inky-dark as spilled blood.

Just a dream.

She saw a faint glow through her eyelids, and sagged against the concrete floor, taking a long, shuddering breath to slow her heartbeat. For all her years living underground, there was comfort in waking to that glimmer of light. Knowing that, even here, hurt and battered and down at the depth of all things, she was not alone.

“Morning,” Xhea managed. She brushed away the crust of tears cried in sleep. “Is it morning? Do you know?” Her inner clock, usually infallible, was confused by the rough night. But Shai, seeming to perch on piled rubble on the other side of the closet-sized room, only stared at her hands.

After rolling the old man’s body aside, Xhea had wanted nothing more than to collapse and sleep, but had managed to drag herself the rest of the way to the service room. The room was in poor repair and overflowing with scrap metal, but she had forced the twisted door nearly closed and cleared a small patch for herself on the floor—heroic efforts both. A very subdued Shai had promised to watch over her.

Now Xhea sat up, stifling a groan. If it wasn’t morning already, it would be by the time she managed to drag her aching self to anywhere near ground level. Everything hurt—
everything
—and she’d have allowed herself more sleep had not her empty stomach and full bladder joined in the aching.

“At least I wasn’t eaten,” she muttered. Always an upside.

It wasn’t until she managed to stand—a slow process involving much swearing and the generous assistance of both the wall and a stack of spooled wire—that Xhea truly looked at Shai.

“Shai,” she began, and faltered. For what could she ask? What’s wrong? What
wasn’t
wrong? And yet what, in the space of mere hours, could have so changed the ghost?
No
, she thought: what had taken her friend from her?

Shai’s dark shirt with its embroidered vine patterns at neck and wrist was gone; so too were the pants that Xhea had so envied. In their place, the ghost wore a dress that was all too familiar: an expensive swirl of glimmering gray fabric that Xhea knew to be the color of a fresh plum. It cascaded over Shai’s slim body, hanging loosely over legs that were tucked beneath her. She wasn’t sitting on the heavy spools of wire, as Xhea had assumed, but rather floating before them in midair.

Shai looked up, and her eyes . . .

Could she call them dead, the eyes that now met her own? Yet Shai was as dead as she had been in all the days past, and never had Xhea seen the ghost look so empty or so hollow.

So hopeless.

Xhea had almost forgotten her, this girl—a ghost she had thought so helpless as to be worth her time only if she were paid for it. Yet that girl stared back from the now-familiar planes of her friend’s face, and her hands, soft and untried, lay palm up as if in supplication.

“Shai,” Xhea said again, in shock, in plea, and knew she had no words to follow.

“I don’t want you to die,” the ghost whispered at last. “Not you too.”

“I’m not going to die.”

Shai continued as if Xhea hadn’t spoken. “The longer I’m here, the worse it’s going to get. Your evading capture this long has just been an inconvenience.”

“I’m good at being inconvenient.”

“Look at what they did to him, Xhea. My father. Because he tried to help me.”

Xhea thought of that slack face, those unseeing eyes, the monotonous rhythm of his breath and steps—then shook her head to force the image away. She did not know what had been done to him, or how, or why.

Shai continued in that quiet, helpless voice. “It’s my fault, Xhea. He’s dead because of me—worse than dead—and it’s all my fault.”

“Even if you leave now . . .” Xhea said, the words halting. Because that’s what lay between them, unspoken to this moment: Shai’s leaving. Already Xhea could feel Shai’s coming absence as if it were a physical thing, a force that pressed on her chest. She forced herself to continue: “Even if you leave now, they won’t stop coming for me. They know about me now—they know what I can do. You think that abandoning me is going to change that?”

“You won’t be their priority. You know how to run—how to defend yourself. You can find ways to stay safe. But the longer I evade them, the more people I endanger—if not you, then my mother, or, or . . . anyone else. No one should suffer because of me.”

“You’re
dead
. Allenai should let you go in peace, not bind you to some other body for years just to make money.”

“I have a responsibility,” Shai replied quietly, hopelessly, and gestured to her dress as if its mere presence was the only explanation needed. What had Wen said about it? That it was something one would wear to a last binding. A ceremony, she guessed. But why promise to give yourself to a Tower when they would take what they wanted, willing or no?

“I have a responsibility, and all this has happened because I ignored it. How many people have to die, Xhea, before I admit that I can’t ever escape? I can’t think of anything else I can do. This is the only way I know how to make it stop.” Shai looked up, then shook her head and turned away again. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

“What’s there to understand? Responsibility? You’re just afraid.” Xhea heard the vicious edge come into her voice, and felt helpless to stop it. “You’re giving in. For the first time you’re finding out that the decisions you make
matter
, and it scares you. So you’re just giving up—giving
in
, as if none of it ever mattered—as if nothing we did mattered at all. You’re making your father’s sacrifice worthless. You’re just going to go home and let them use you like they always have.”

Shai just shook her head, not meeting Xhea’s eyes. “Yes, I am afraid. But this is the only choice left to me. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

The finality in her voice hit Xhea like a rock to the gut. “Shai, I—”

“Goodbye, Xhea. I’m glad I met you.” Shai rose and turned away. She moved toward the service room door with steps that slid across air, her pale hair shining.

“Shai,
no
—”

Then she was through the door’s surface and gone. The tiny room with its tangles of metal scrap and debris, its single gaping girl, was plunged into perfect darkness.

“No,” Xhea whispered. “No, no,
no
—”

She struggled to keep her balance, rushing to the door, metal scraps catching on her pant legs and slicing at her hands as she reached out for balance. She adjusted quickly to the darkness, seeing in a way that had nothing to do with her eyes. The twisted door had taken many long minutes to coax closed, bit by careful bit toward its frame; yet now she grasped its edge with both aching hands and pulled it open in a series of hard, fast jerks, the corroded hinges squealing. She struggled out the gap, hopped forward on her good leg, and all but fell down the steps to track level.

At last she stood, clutching the remains of the metal railing, and searched the long stretch of tunnel around her. To her right, toward the flooded end, the faintest wash of gray was just visible beyond the tunnel’s curve—but it was pale enough to be the first hint of daylight from the hole from the collapse, not the glow of a Radiant ghost’s magic.

To her left there was only darkness, the rails’ sweeping arc, and rough gravel underfoot. No flicker of light; no final words echoing back to disturb the silence. Xhea stared at that emptiness. The long, slow climb to the surface stretched before her, and every part of her felt bruised and battered, scabbed wounds torn open and bleeding—not least of all her heart.