Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (38 page)

Black enough that it had to have entered the visual spectrum, even for the most magic-poor watcher. No point in hiding—not when Orren already knew this little secret of hers.

Now for the hard part
, Xhea thought. As if the cloud of magic was her hand, an extension of herself, she willed the magic to move. Shai had shown her how to do this, but in miniature: dark little flows of power caught between her palms made to turn slow circles or form a shape. And as Shai had always said, it was one thing to work magic when caught in a rush of emotion; another thing entirely to use it with thought and precision and control. It was much, much harder. But Shai was there, her tether an anchor, the memory of her voice a guide. Desperation, it seemed, was the best motivation of all.

Xhea willed the magic to form a wide ring and spin, and though she struggled with the power she could feel it moving faster and faster, until it spun dizzily above her head. Then she broke the ring into a spiral and sent it curling inward and down, and tipped her head back to meet it. Opening her mouth, she inhaled sharply.

Sweetness save me
, she thought as the magic rushed back into her, hot and cold and like a shock of sugar to the blood.
Oh sweetness, don’t choke.

Her hand shook where she gripped her pipe, and she shuddered—but made herself stare straight at Edren. She waited.

A minute passed, and another. A nervous sheen of sweat broke out across her skin. In the distance she could hear movement: people leaving their houses, vendors beginning to set up outside the market walls. If they didn’t answer soon there would be witnesses, something she wanted as little as Lorn would want their arrangement publicly known.

Perhaps it wasn’t too late to go around the back doors—but no, of course it was. It was two days too late, Shai in her enemies’ hands all the while.

Still Xhea waited.

There was one other thing she could try, though it meant breaking a sworn promise. There was a story she could tell, a secret, and she already knew how the telling would begin:
Once upon a time there were two brothers who both lay dying: one from a terrible wound, and one from an illness with no known cause . . .

With every word she would make an enemy of Lorn. He would honor the favor he owed her, but no more, and his enmity would turn all of Edren against her. She knew it—and yet still she drew breath to speak the words.

The door cracked open. A young man slipped out, tall like a light-starved tree, a lock and chain still held in his hands. He jumped and scrambled out of the way as the door opened again and Lorn stepped through, still buttoning his shirt. In all the tattoos that patterned his dark chest, it was the one above his heart that held her attention: a single name in bold cursive writing,
Addis
.

Xhea fought the urge to swallow.

Lorn came down the steps, his expression blank, his feet bare. His limp was more pronounced than she remembered; his leg stiffened, perhaps, from sleep. “Xhea,” he said, looking down at her. His rough voice was perfectly calm, perfectly polite, and it chilled her to the core. “Would you care to explain yourself?”

Xhea glanced down at her boots, wishing it was only fatigue that made her turn away. “You owe me a favor, and I’ve come to collect. I need—I’d like to ask of you two things.”

“I owe you only one favor.” The hard, naked simplicity of the words told her just how angry he was.

“Both are small,” she hastened to add. “First, I’d like to send a message to the City. Paper and pen is fine, any method of delivery so long as it’s fast.” An easy task. Lorn took a slow breath, as if to steady himself—as if to keep his large hands from curling into fists. At last he nodded, and Xhea continued. “Second, I’d like you to call me an elevator and provide the fare to take me to a central Tower.” A moment’s work, and a few renai. Surely he would not refuse.

Yet Lorn just watched her, expression stiff, a faint crease between his dark brows.

“Look,” Xhea said. “There’s no catch. Just deliver a message, call me a lift, and all debts between us are clear.”

Some of the anger went out of him, at that. He shook his head, frustrated. “Why this, Xhea? Why now?”

“I need . . . it’s just . . .” Xhea fumbled over her words. “I don’t know how to explain.”

“Try.”

Again she looked to her feet, their ragged nails and cold, discolored flesh. Favor or no, she realized that Lorn was as likely to send her away as to help. She swayed slightly; she was so tired. She had to trust him, she realized, trust him as he had trusted her.

“They stole someone,” she said at last. “A Tower. They stole someone—a friend—that they had no right to take. I’m the only one who can help her.”

“A . . . ghost?”

Xhea nodded and met his eyes. “A bright ghost,” she said, gambling. “A ghost that shone.”

A change came into Lorn’s face, though she couldn’t read the expression that swept across his features as fast and fierce as a storm wind—and was as quickly gone.

“And what you did before?” Lorn moved his hand in a circle above his head, mimicking her ring of darkness. “What am I to think of that?”

Xhea shrugged, uncomfortable. “I needed to get your
attention.”

“So you threatened me?”

“What? No! I—” Xhea clamped her jaw shut. He knew something about her power, she realized—as had the woman in Orren—and she needed that knowledge. Wished she knew the right questions, or had the time in which to ask them. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she whispered.

Lorn studied her. “You don’t understand, do you? You don’t understand what you did.”

Xhea shook her head, the slightest fraction of movements.

“A blade to my throat,” he said quietly. “A bomb. Those might have been lesser threats.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she whispered.

“Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll help you save your friend. But when you return, we should have a talk, you and I.”

She met his gaze, those dark eyes so steady.

“Yes,” Xhea said softly. “I think I’d like that.”

To the voice that still whispered,
all alone
, she thought:
I might be alone, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have help.

Her message was a simple thing, no more than a few lines, and Xhea knew that she should have agonized over each one, tested the weight of each word. No time. Instead she strove for clarity in wording and penmanship both, and trusted the rest to fate.

After her message was whisked away, Xhea ran through her breathing exercises, resisting the urge to rush. Even a stray wisp of magic might disrupt the elevator, and she shuddered to think of the fall. She visualized in time to her breath: a door swinging shut; a hand curling into a fist; a flower, petals closing. With her emotions running high, her magic was slow to contract. She struggled, at last feeling the power clot beneath her breastbone into a weight like stone.

When the elevator that Lorn had called arrived, whirring quietly, Xhea opened her eyes. “I’m ready,” she said.

Lorn flicked a small sphere of renai toward her—just enough magic to get her to Eridian. Xhea expected a shock, expected pain, and braced herself for both. It wasn’t enough. She cried out as the magic struck her, and cringed so violently that she lost her balance. She fell hard, barely avoiding landing on her injured knee, and the iron pipe clanged to the ground beside her. The bright magic
burned
, running through her veins like fire. All she could hear was her heart, pounding too hard, too fast, its rhythm frantic.

Xhea struggled to draw breath, gasping as her muscles twitched and shuddered.
Keep control
, she told herself—but where was the control in this? She struggled to see, trying to focus on her hands splayed on the dirty pavement. She struggled to rise. Lorn called to her, but she couldn’t understand him, nor could she shape a reply. Color came in brief, harsh flashes, each a knife’s point to her eyes. She saw her new pants, not black but muddy green—the brown of Lorn’s skin, the amber flecks in his eyes—the pipe’s rust and its residue on her hands, orange like a sunset, orange and brown and a strange flaking red, and it hurt, oh sweetness save her, it
hurt
.

Lorn had already paid the elevator and now, hovering above her, it opened like a flower. Its spell-strands fell around her, glowing liquid gold—gray—gold. Again she tried to push herself off the ground, but her head was spinning, spinning. Xhea grabbed for her pipe, thinking,
I’ll stand when I get there
.

Yet as the elevator strands closed around her, one fell across her bad leg. It sizzled as it touched her, then flickered and died, gold burning to ash.
No
, she thought, and looked up. Another strand fell across her leg instead of trying to hold her, as if her leg was a lifeless thing, undetectable.

Then the elevator collapsed all around her, the strands sliding across the backs of her hands, her upturned face, their brilliant light turned harsh and cold. She heard its noises, the protests of a machine struggling against its destruction, the whirr of its engines as it tried to pull away. Xhea tried to speak, tried to scream, but the world was spinning, or she was spinning against the hard ground, and she was going to be sick, and nothing came out of her mouth at all.

Then: black.

Blind
, she thought. No room left for panic or shock.

She lay on the ground, the pavement cold beneath her cheek. Slowly the light crept back to her eyes, bringing with it dimension and shape, the perfect arc of a stone-gray sky and only Towers’ shadowed bellies above her. It took a long time to focus; the world swam before her, smeared and uncertain, until any hint of color faded. The elevator was gone, destroyed, she knew not which. With a quivering hand, Xhea wiped away her tears.

“That,” Xhea whispered, “didn’t go so well.” She pushed herself to sitting, palms against the ground as if to keep the world still. She looked at one arm, then the other—at both hands, pressed hard to the crumbling road. She wished no showy display of power, and yet a shadow-gray mist surrounded her, clinging like scent or sorrow. She tried to push it down, to pull it back, to smother it with will and anger and fear, and it did nothing but move gently, drifting as if in a slow current.

She had called the magic to her, allowed it to flow, and now it would not stop. Xhea looked at the growing darkness around her, felt a seeping chill, and could only think:
I’m bleeding
. She wished she could sink into the ground, or walk away; wished she could fly to her destination and be done with it. Wished, too, that the shadowy people she could just see through Edren’s upper windows would stop gaping.
Show’s over
, she thought.
Move along.

Time for Plan B.
Oops
, she thought fuzzily.
Forgot to make a Plan B.

“Hey, kid,” Lorn said, loudly. Slow footsteps and he was beside her. Then in a softer voice, unguarded: “Looks like you could use a bit more help.”

Xhea licked her lower lip, tasting blood. “Looks that way, yeah.”

Lorn held out his hand, and she took it without thinking. He jerked at the shock of her touch and pulled away, shaking his hand as if in pain—and stopped when he saw her expression. He steeled himself, and offered his hand again. Carefully, he pulled her to her feet and held on until she could steady herself with the pipe; and if both of their hands went numb, neither deigned to mention it.

“You still need to get to the City?” he asked.

Xhea stared upward, thinking desperately. She felt for the hair-fine tether that still pulled her and nodded mutely.

“Wait here—I’ll have someone bring a car around.” At her expression, Lorn added, “But don’t get any ideas. I’m driving.”

Xhea fit in the trunk. Barely. It was the farthest they could get her from the aircar’s engine and the storage coil that fueled it without towing her off the back with a rope—an idea that Lorn had rejected out of hand. He dropped the passenger seat to allow her braced leg to protrude forward, makeshift cane at her side, and with a little contortion she could just see out the windshield.

Lorn had chosen the oldest, most mechanical of the aircars in his collection. Even so, it was small and sleek, with glossy paint and an engine so quiet she could barely detect its soft whir. Xhea tried to touch as little of the car as she could as she curled into its trunk, running through every exercise she could remember to stay calm and keep her energy in check. She’d never been particularly good with nerves.

“Speed might be good,” she said as Lorn flared the engine to life.

Knowing this favor pushed the limits of even Lorn’s sense of fairness, Xhea had paid him in her only trustworthy coin: information. She’d told him what she could of Allenai and Eridian’s struggle while a guard brought the car down from the garage on Edren’s roof. She cared little for politics but knew that there was an advantage to be gained by major shifts in Towers’ positions—even for a skyscraper like Edren. From the spark in Lorn’s eyes as he’d listened, he agreed.

Xhea’s stomach twisted as the aircar rose—magic or motion or nerves, she didn’t know. Didn’t matter. A detached voice provided Lorn with instructions from somewhere within the dashboard: “
Entrance to ascension lane accepted. Course correction for sector 7-B-Rising accepted. Please maintain your current speed.
”

“Hang on, Shai,” she whispered. The tether flickered.

They climbed steadily through the gap between the ground and the lowest Towers. Xhea strained and twisted but could see little but empty sky.
This is going to work
, she told herself. The thought did nothing to ease her curdled stomach.

It wasn’t until they were entering the City proper, the lowest Towers’ defensive spires filling the windshield, that the car began to shudder. There were only small movements at first, like a nervous hand’s quiver; yet the shaking grew more violent with each passing moment. The engine whined, and their upward progress slowed. A warning light flashed on, and another.

“
Please maintain recommended speed
,” said the dashboard.

Lorn corrected, calming their flight path—only to swear as the car shuddered and swerved as if hit. The engine’s steady whir sputtered, then rose in volume as if the car were growling. Xhea grabbed for the sides of the trunk, then pulled her hands away just as quickly.