Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (33 page)

The fabric was smooth in her hands, almost slippery. She had not Brend’s strength, but with the help of her teeth, she managed to rip the sleeves into a few long strips. She raised her pant leg, gasping and whimpering as the bottom hem scraped over the swollen joint. Her knee was burning hot, lumpy and discolored. Xhea swallowed, wanting to look away.

“It’ll be okay,” she lied.

She bound the joint, giving it whatever stability mere fabric might offer, her fingers leaving smears of dirt and blood. A fingernail bent backward as she struggled to tighten her poor knots and she hissed, more in frustration than from the small hurt.

All she needed was someone to help. Just a finger placed
so
. A bit of cloth to wipe clean her face. A hand to help her stand. And no one to give any.

Oh, to be grateful for torn shirtsleeves. For stones and scraps left as ambiguous warnings. For the veil of fog; for a sky not yet releasing its rain; for a bit of cold ground on which to rest. Were these her blessings? She could not count them as such. She mocked herself as a little girl, lost and alone, yet knew in truth she was all these things, had always been such. Would always be.

For even if she was valued, was known, was even cared for, it could only be for a moment, brief and fleeting. There was always—would always be—something greater than her, more important. More worthy of time or attention. Something, someone, worth being loved.

As she would never be.

Stop it
, she thought, savagely, viciously, as if vehemence could force the emotion back, could dry the tears that spilled down her cheeks or ease her wracking sobs.
Stop it, stop it
, she cursed in silence, for she could not speak, could not rise; and the only sounds in the cool morning air were those of her crying.

Faint and muffled, a sound came from somewhere nearby. Xhea took a slow breath, calming the last of her sobs; after many long minutes, she had little left to cry.

What had it been? A whir? A whine? She could not tell; the mist curled in upon the sound, deadening all but a whisper. Probably just an ordinary noise—a hungry child, a bit of debris falling from a crumbling rooftop.

Still
, she thought. Still.

She lifted her head and looked around, each movement an effort. There was no one on the broken sidewalk before her, nor on the road. She saw no movement in the mist but its own slow swirls and eddies, pushed by a subtle wind.

She knew she should run, scramble away and hide, drag her bruised and hurting self back inside the shell of the hotel’s front lobby, ignoring the pain—just in case. She felt a quiver of alarm, an echo of her usual wariness, but it too seemed dulled; whatever fear now stirred within her seemed distant, close enough to see but too far to touch. It was as if the fog had seeped into her, deadening her emotions, slowing her thoughts. She imagined the mist creeping down her limbs into fingers and toes, leaving only cool and quiet in its wake, a soft and numbing chill.

Xhea stared at her hands and the patches of skin washed clean by tears. She opened and closed her fingers, feeling them as something apart from herself: the gritty, bloody skin; the tired, aching joints; the black-sliver moons of dirt beneath the fingernails. So easy to lose herself in details.

Again the sound came, louder this time. She jerked her head back from where it had sagged, and forced her eyes open, not knowing when she had closed them. But there was no one there, not even a stray Lower City dweller wandering the early-morning streets. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Yet as she gazed around something made her afraid as mere sounds had not, the dregs of adrenaline stirring in her blood. Something was different. Something had changed.

She felt so tired, so leaden.

Again the sound, louder and longer:
whirr-thump.
Then a sound like hot metal cooling:
tick . . . tick . . . tick
.

Her gaze fell upon Brend’s almost-completed X of pale stones, undisturbed on the pavement.
Ah
, she thought, understanding coming in a slow and heavy wave: where the spell had hovered, there was only air. Not triggered, she knew. Recalled. Dissolved.

As if it were no longer needed.

The sound was coming closer, she realized. And there was a smell . . . the strangest sweet smell . . . honey and burning plastic . . .

She tried to think, fighting the desire to place her head on her arms and rest. Only rest.

Closer
, she repeated. A sound coming closer, and nothing around her. Nothing before her but empty air. Almost as if . . .

Xhea looked up, but it was already far too late to run.

Little more than a body-length above her hovered a battered aircar, the air twisting and shimmering with its exhaust. From its open doors hung three people, all but their eyes hidden by medical masks. Two held between them a simple net, ready to unfurl, while the third held a canister from which seeped a haze of sweet-smelling drug. The haze cascaded down and over her, tranquilizing her, and she’d thought it nothing but fog.

Xhea tried to stand, to roll, to crawl back toward the hotel, and for nothing. There was no need for the net; she saw the same realization in those watching faces. She sagged to one side, suddenly too heavy, too loose, to keep her body upright. Her shoulder hit the concrete steps, her head not too far behind, and she felt a strange and horrible twist in her damaged right knee.

But the pain, when it came, was muffled, as if she were wrapped in invisible cotton wool. Nothing could reach her, not pain nor help nor light.

In the darkness behind her eyelids, she cried as hands lifted her up—lost, insensible tears—but they were tears of gratitude.
No pain
, she thought in her haze. No need to struggle. No need to fight.

No more.

In that darkness, unresisting, they raised her up and took her away.

Xhea licked her lips with a tongue that felt like sandpaper. Her mouth tasted of sour fruit, and her head felt as if it had been pounded with a sharp rock. She tried to sit up. Failed. Tried to muster the energy to care, and failed at that too.

She remembered someone putting a needle in her thigh. Remembered the sound of conversation around her, senseless words rising and falling like waves.
Hospital
was her first thought, but no: while she lay in bed with instruments and bandages arrayed on a table beside her, the table had rusty folding metal legs, and the bed was just a cot with a pillow so worn it was barely there.

Definitely not a hospital
, she thought, looking around. The room was massive, echoing, and stripped bare. There was no carpet, only adhesive stains left on the concrete to mark its absence, and the ceiling tiles had been removed, exposing wires and plumbing made fuzzy from decades of undisturbed dust.

Before her, there was a wall of featureless gray light—windows, she realized. One full corner of the room was made from glass that looked out into a bank of day-bright cloud. She’d never been in this room, but there was something familiar about the space nonetheless. Something in the air whispering through the ancient vents, filtered by cloth and magic but still smelling of crumbling drywall and unwashed doors stained with greasy handprints, of floor after floor of leaking pipes and corroded wiring.

It had never been a good skyscraper, never a prosperous one, for all that it still stood. She looked around and the building itself seemed to mock her, whispering, “Welcome home.”

Orren.

She could have laughed, voice edged with hysteria. She could have spit. The one thing she would not do was cry. Not here. Not ever again.

Instead, she took stock. She wore her shirt and jacket, but her pants had been cut away. Her bare legs, skinny and pale after the long winter, looked almost fragile. Anger stirred at the sight of the ruined pants in a heap on the floor; even dirty and torn, they were
hers
. A replacement pair was folded over the back of a nearby chair, seemingly unworn, with large pockets down each leg. She eyed them: they wouldn’t just fit, but fit well. She scowled.

Better that than to let eyes and mind alike linger on her knee. Her rough bandages had been unbound and lay across the sheet like a gift’s discarded wrapping. Her skin tingled as if from phantom touches, but little more; from mid-thigh down, her right leg was numb. Even without the pain, there was something about the knee that looked—that felt—wrong. She turned aside.

At the movement, a figure stepped into her peripheral vision. She glanced at the boy, for boy he was—no nurse this, no doctor with clever tools and healing spells. He had an adult’s size, but his open expression and the downy stubble across his chin made him seem little older than Xhea herself.

Without speaking, he helped her sit, then tried to prop her up with another flat pillow. He handed her a blanket, which she used to cover her legs, and a cup of water. His hands were gentle, impersonal, even kind; yet Xhea found herself tensing, ready to cringe or run. As if either were an option.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” the boy asked. He dragged the plastic chair to her bedside and sat.

If it had been easier to speak, she would have simply said “No”—and how appropriate, for her first word in this place to be a flat denial. But once she looked, there was something familiar about him. Xhea realized that he had been the one holding the fog canister. She recognized his eyes with their upturned lashes; the soft, dark curls of his hair.

“What was that?” she croaked. “The drug.” Sweetness, her head hurt.

“Nothing to worry about, really. Just an airborne sedative—a nice mild one.” He blushed at her incredulous look, the deepening color barely noticeable through his skin’s natural dark.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I thought it’d be easier than the net.”

“Easier?” That was one word for it. “It would have been easier to just
leave me alone
.”

Instead of replying, he moved the edge of the blanket and probed her wounded knee, hissing softly at that first touch. It was strange to watch someone touch her; stranger still to feel none of it, not even the whisper of skin on skin.

She watched his face. His forehead creased and the skin around his eyes tightened, lips pursing, and knew that more than concentration wrote such lines. Yet he did not recoil or pull back, almost as if he knew what it was to touch her.

“You really don’t remember me, do you?” He smiled sadly.

But that smile stirred a memory buried deep with all the things she tried never to recall. Xhea stared a moment, considering. Imagining those eyes, that softly curling hair, on someone much smaller. A child who had always looked young, with thin limbs and a face that seemed gaunt no matter how much he ate. A quiet child who had been as ostracized from the other boys in the dorm as surely as Xhea had been from the girls—though less content with such treatment. Had they been friends? Aching from the loss of Abelane, she’d had no friends; yet if she’d had a companion in that year, someone familiar enough to almost be safe, it would have been him.

She remembered, too, the night of her escape. After the failed resurrection, the skyscraper had been in chaos. Orren’s magically supported systems had failed at the spell overload, everything from lights and elevators to security on the fritz, all hands scrambling to restore power before another skyscraper took advantage of the disarray. Xhea had no plan, only the sudden conviction that this was her one chance to run.

With evening already darkening the sky, she’d slipped from her dorm with only her knife and jacket. As she’d crept away, she caught sight of dark eyes watching her, two glints in the shadows. She’d frozen before she realized that it wasn’t Orren security, only the quiet boy who never seemed to grow. He’d peered through open crack of the door to the boys’ dorm, one hand clutching the doorframe.

“Are you coming?” she had whispered, suddenly thinking that maybe she could save him, if no one else.

After a long moment, he had mutely shaken his head. She’d shrugged and slipped out to make good her escape, only looking back once. In the years that followed, she’d tried not to think of him. Pretended she didn’t remember those dark eyes, watching her as she ran.

Sometimes you have to leave someone behind
.

Yet now that she looked, she could see the child’s echo in the young man before her, the quiet boy grown tall and strong. Wondered, too, who he would have become had he followed her that night; what he might have meant to her.

“Lin,” she said, the name rising like the memory of a dream. “You grew.”

Lin laughed. “Rather a lot, actually. I’ve been going through clothes like you wouldn’t believe.”

Nice to have that option
, Xhea thought.

He pulled his hands from her knee and surreptitiously massaged his fingers. She caught a glimpse of the gray that tinged his fingers and knuckles—blue, perhaps, as if from cold. She couldn’t remember anyone who had touched her for so long.

At least no one living.

“Your kneecap is isn’t broken,” Lin said, “but there’s ligament damage.” His gaze flickered to her face, gauging her reaction. “It’s pretty bad.”