Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (41 page)

No, the difference was that Shai had fought. Perhaps that ghost that Xhea had met so long ago—a hesitant spirit, passive and afraid—would have undergone this process without struggle, slipping into the stolen flesh with no one to hear her cries. But that girl was dead as surely as her body. The ghost that bucked and twisted, screaming as she fought against her bonds, wore dark clothes: a jacket with many pockets, laced boots good for running or kicking or making a stand. This girl had had her father taken from her, only to be faced with his spiritless body; she’d had her sacrifice turned into abduction; and she had, in all likelihood, watched these people sever a young woman’s spirit so that they might have use of her flesh.

To the man before her she said, “No,
you
don’t understand. You’re torturing her.”

When she made to step forward, Derren’s hands clenched like vices against her shoulders—but at a gesture from the man, he released her and stepped away. Still he loomed behind her.

“Xhea,” said the man. “Your name is Xhea, is it not? I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. This is a routine procedure. We’re not torturing anyone. And yes, we’re asking for your assistance—but this is only a minor delay, I assure you.”

Perhaps this was a routine procedure. But something about the scene—maybe the stress written in their faces, the sweaty exhaustion of the working casters, or the obvious disarray—spoke of more than routine gone wrong. It was, she thought, very much like Orren’s attempt all those years ago, if vastly different in scale—as if they were trying to re-create something they didn’t quite understand. Yes, the power of Radiants, both living and spirit, were harnessed daily by every Tower in the City, that much Shai had told her; but not, she thought, like this. So what was missing?

“You’re torturing
them
,” Xhea said as if he hadn’t spoken. “Shai and that girl whose body you’ve stolen.”

“We haven’t stolen anything.” An edge of exasperation crept into his voice. “The body you see is that of a girl who was in an accident more than a year ago. She’s brain dead, child—has been for months. There was nothing we could do.”

“I can see her,” Xhea hissed. “I can see her ghost right there on the floor, weeping and struggling to get back to her body.
I can see what you did to her.
”

The man—a politician, he had to be a politician with that neat clothing and a face that could look kind while speaking only misdirection and lies—glanced at the woman who stood beside him, his hands lifting fractionally to suggest a shrug. The woman turned to meet Xhea’s eyes, and Xhea knew that she was no politician: there was too much frustration in the set of her mouth and crease of her eyebrows, too much anger in those eyes, too much weariness in her hand as she pushed a stray strand of hair from her face.

“Normal people don’t have ghosts,” she said shortly. Spellcaster, Xhea named her, and likely the one managing the details of this disaster; she wondered how many of the spells dragging at Shai had been cast by this woman’s slim fingers. “Only those with very powerful magic remain—and even then it’s not a person, only the shape of their power.”

Xhea shook her head, the denial causing a clatter of charms. “I can see them,” she repeated, each word sharp. “And they are not just reflections of power, either of them.”

Idiots
, Xhea named them in silence, clenching her jaw until her teeth creaked. Morons and idiots all, to think that the Radiant’s glow was a ghost—to believe that only a Radiant spirit could form a ghost at all, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

They would have chosen someone with strong magic to be Shai’s vessel—but even so, the young woman’s ghost was but a ghost, no glitter of bright magic to her form. Xhea looked from face to face, from the politicians before her to the three spellcasters who ringed the platform, trying fruitlessly to untangle the spells that bound Shai to the living body. Yet none could see the ghosts or their tethers, regardless of the strength of their power—so what did they see? A shuddering body and a bright magic in the shape of a young girl’s ghost; spells that arced and broke and tangled for no reason that they could discern.

The caster’s look had sharpened. “The other ghost,” she said. “She’s interfering with the transfer?”

“Anya,” the politician broke in. “I don’t think we should
encourage—”

“She’s here because you thought she could help, Councilman,” Anya snapped. “What does it matter what the girl believes so long as she helps get the job done? I don’t know about you, but I’m out of ideas here—and we’re running out of time. The Tower won’t sustain much more of this.” She gestured at Eridian’s flaring heart.

Turning back to Xhea, she asked, “Can you remove the other ghost? Stop her from damaging the spells?”

“She’s trying to get back to her body,” Xhea protested. “You can’t do this—you can’t just kill her and take her body—” In her anger, she could feel the darkness rising, a surge of raging black. Her hands tingled with it, and the ever-present pressure of the bright magic against her skin, like airborne pins and needles, receded. Dark magic pushed against the boundaries of her flesh, begging for release—slipping into the air with her breath and her sweat, pushing for freedom.

Control it
, she thought. Then:
Why?

This wasn’t a game. These people had taken advantage of the opportunity presented by a girl’s terminal illness, consolidating Allenai’s loans until the Tower was their financial dependent and all but crippled by magical debt. They had lied, fought for, and abducted Shai’s ghost, and hurt Xhea in the process. They had murdered a girl for use of her body. And that was only the little Xhea knew.

Through the shifting light of the Tower’s heart, Xhea could just see the crowd gathered in the garden far below, distant spots like freckles on an outstretched hand. Normal life in Eridian had ceased: every citizen was all but incapacitated; every bit of magic not necessary to keep their blood flowing, their lungs breathing, was being absorbed by the Tower to fuel this transfer.

All for power. All for altitude. Eridian’s future—its status and economy, influence and trade potential, the future of each citizen’s children—was being formed around her. It was future bathed in light and magic, yes, but one birthed in screams of terror, in torture and death. Yet here she stood, arguing semantics and morality, wasting what little time Shai had. Truly, she asked herself, was there anything at all she could say that would change their minds?

“Blight it,” Xhea muttered. She tightened her grip on the iron pipe and swung, turning just far enough to hit Derren across his shoulder. He fell to his knees with a choked cry, his left hand clutching at his upper arm, while his right arm hung limply, twitching.

Her knee burned, but she pushed the pain away, hopping to keep her balance. She fought to keep hold of the vibrating pipe, her palms tingling from the force of that impact. The Councilman gaped, backing away with his hands raised defensively, while the exhausted Anya called for assistance. An aide scrambled toward them, some sort of spell half-woven through his fingers. He was careful to stay just outside the swinging range of Xhea’s iron pipe—but it wasn’t the iron that he should have worried about.

Magic responded to her call, boiling up the moment she relaxed her will to cascade from her like a dark waterfall. The sudden feel of it—the rush—the power—made Xhea laugh, giddy and furious, caught in a cresting wave of dark magic and anger and adrenaline. She was a thousand feet tall. She was all powerful, untouchable. Spirals of smoking black lifted from her hands, coiled up and out of her hair, wreathing her face with every breath. She felt like power incarnate, burning and glorious, and she was going to show them.

Xhea reached out a single hand, fingers spread. No spells for her, no complicated patterns of thought and command: only raw energy, the core of herself let free. Thick and black and angry.

“Hang on, Shai,” she yelled over the sudden clamor. “I’m coming!”

Light flashed as some sort of defensive dome appeared around the Councilman, and a whip-like lash of energy uncoiled from Anya’s hand, slicing the tide of darkness to tattered ribbons as it approached. The aide was slower. His spell caught on his fingers, tangled in his panic, and dark magic washed over him like a cresting fog. He fell without a sound.

There was no time to check if he was breathing.

Xhea cried out at a sudden pain in her bad leg: Derren’s hand clamped around her calf and even the pipe wasn’t enough to keep her from falling. She hit the ground and tried to roll, but Derren’s grip was too tight, pinning her, a glow surrounding each finger. She felt the burn of his magic, searing through muscle to bone, and she screamed. Xhea’s reach was instinctive, the rush of energy borne now by fear more than anger, but no less powerful. Black washed over Derren’s head and he gasped, eyes rolling back in his head as he sagged limply to the floor.

Should have hit him in the face the first time
, she thought, and dragged herself across the floor toward the platform.

The casters who had struggled to maintain the spells holding Shai were ready for her. Walls of shimmering light leapt up to enclose the platform with the girl’s body and the two ghosts, the power’s weave changing as she watched—preparing to repair itself from whatever assault she might attempt. Behind the walls, she could see one caster maintaining its strength, another preparing a more active assault, while one alone still worked on the spells binding Shai to the body.

But the platform wasn’t her destination. Xhea stopped many body lengths from their defenses, lying on the glass floor above the edge of Eridian’s living heart. Beneath her, magic pulsed and shifted, the light so close that she blinked back tears.
Bad timing
, she thought, watching as the heart flared: an arc of magic rose through the floor, up and over her like a sizzling-white rainbow. She braced as the arc reached its peak and collapsed, falling through her like a guillotine blade. Her scream was choked, and her back arched of its own volition as the power surged through her, burning, freezing, as she was suddenly, violently sick. But there was little in her stomach: only a thin spatter of water and bile slid across the floor while the world spun and twirled around her, darkness that had nothing to do with magic flickering before her eyes.

Don’t pass out
, she thought, panting. There was nothing to grab on to, nothing but cold glass and flickers of bright magic, and so she held tight to the cobweb-thin tether that joined her to Shai.

When the worst of the vertigo had passed Xhea looked up, craning her head as if she could somehow see through the room’s crystalline structure, through Eridian’s point and beyond to the space of sky where another Tower floated far above.

I told you I’d try to send a signal
, Xhea thought, as if Councilwoman Nalani—and all of Allenai—might somehow hear her.
Here it is
.

Magic coiled in the pit of her stomach, that lake of stillness and black that she’d spent so many years trying to ignore and suppress, and attempted only recently—and futilely—to control. Since learning what her power could do, she had released her magic in thin wisps and fogs, in torrents as one might release floodwaters from a bursting dam. She’d let it escape and rush free—but never before had she called it.

Xhea placed her hands on the floor, the glass warm to the touch, and stared through to the glowing heart beyond. No breathing exercises now, no rhythm of thought—only need.

“Now,” she whispered to herself, to her magic. She closed her eyes and
pulled
.

It felt as if her spirit were being forced through her hands, skin tearing, gushing blood and heat and freezing cold, as if her heart had been opened and she poured her life out on the glass. She felt something deep inside her breaking: a crack in the bedrock beneath that imagined lake. It hurt in ways that she had no way to name—yet she knew that she would live in this moment forever if she could, for in that pain and the surge of energy flowing from her, there was joy. Wholeness, the likes of which she’d never known.

A second passed . . . an eternity, and another.

Yet she did not die. She struggled to inhale and realized she was screaming, forcing the sound from her agonized throat with the same intensity that she willed forth her magic. She drew a shaking breath and heard the echo of her voice reverberate.

Xhea managed to open her eyes, blinking back tears and the veil of power that darkened her vision. Something in the depth of her had cracked, but so had the crystalline floor beneath her. A deep fissure now ran the length of her body, cracks spreading from the points where her hands touched. Yet even through the cracks’ haze of white, she could still see her power flowing from her and into the Tower’s heart below.

If her energy was like smoke, this was the smoke of the world burning: thick black and choking, a roiling cloud of darkness that enveloped all that lay before it—until it reached Eridian’s heart. Where the cloud met the shifting magic that lit the Tower’s core there was only turmoil. The black met the light and damped it, made the great rising arcs of magic sputter and fade into nothing. Yet so too did the brightness burn, shining all the brighter for the shadow cast against it, and beneath its light her magic was shredded to wispy tatters—nothing, less than nothing, and gone.

Xhea stared, one part of her shocked at what she had wrought. More: this was the deepest part of her set free, and it was this dark chaos, destroying everything bright and beautiful that lay in its path. She could feel it, as if that great boiling cloud were but her outstretched hand, her wind-blown hair. The more she concentrated, the more she felt she could slip from her body as one might remove a nightshirt upon waking, casting herself aside to live fully in the power, magic incarnate.

Within seconds it was clear that she could empty her whole self into Eridian’s heart until she collapsed and died, nothing left to run the ruin of her body, and still the Tower would float, its lights on, its people warm and fed. Yet Eridian did not stand unscathed beneath her onslaught. No arcs of light rose through the cracking glass floor, and the light’s intensity in the vast crystal room was manageable, even dim, compared to its past brilliance. She shook, but not just from exhaustion; the Tower itself trembled, an earthquake in a structure that knew no ground.