Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (42 page)

Had Eridian slipped, she wondered. Lost an inch or two of sky? Had its shimmering halo of spell exhaust thinned for but a moment, its displays of light and power grown faint?
Something
, she thought.
Anything
. And let it be enough.

It had to be; there was no second chance.

As her magic faded, oil-black darkness thinning to gray and shadow, a hand closed around her wrist and another grabbed her hair to haul her up. Then a cry—a man’s voice made sharp with sudden pain—and the Councilman stumbled back from her, hands cradled to his chest. Anya was smarter: a swift kick, and Xhea rolled, gasping from the impact to her ribs. She clutched her side, her magic no more than a pale wisp of gray.

Slowly, the Councilman crouched on the cracked floor by her side, his hands palm-up, red and blistered. “We ask for your help,” he said, voice heavy with recrimination. It was clear in his expression: he expected criminals to weep when he used such a tone, mothers to bow their heads and wail at the shame. “And this—” a gesture to the room around them, “
this
is what you do?”

Xhea coughed, hands still pressed to her throbbing side as she struggled to regain her breath. “Oh, spare me,” she said scornfully.

But she followed his gesture, scanning the vast space around them. Cracks radiated from the place where she had lain, running riot through the floor and crazing the glass milk-white—and though the destruction’s progress had slowed, it had not stopped. She watched as cracks ran up the walls toward the domed ceiling and further fractured the floor, the sounds in the sudden quiet like melting spring ice.

The protective walls around the pedestal had fallen, and the casters had scattered in three directions: one to the side of the young woman’s body, still fighting with the spells, while the other two had hurried to the room’s far edges where, unnoticed until now, two more platforms sat, hidden in shadow. Yet these, unlike the one atop which Shai struggled, were not clear sculptures of carved glass, but coffins: a body lay in each one, features hidden by the faceted sides; each was bright with magic that flowed from them into the walls of the Tower beyond.

No, not just bright: Radiant.

Xhea looked back the way she’d come. The opening to the lift tube gaped wide, an invitation to flee that she wished she could accept. Between her and the lift entry, Derren was slowly regaining his feet. Nearby, the Councilman’s aide still lay on the floor, sprawled just as he’d fallen. Xhea looked quickly aside.

Whatever else the Councilman had been about to say was forgotten as the lights of message spells appeared, whirling about his head for his attention. He turned away, touching one after another, his eyes flickering closed as he absorbed the spells’ energy and messages alike.

He glanced back. “Get rid of her,” he said with a slight wave of his hand, his attention already elsewhere. To Derren, he added, “Come on. We have imbalances all across the Tower, sections middle through base. Light only knows how many cases of energy shock we’re dealing with. Of all the stupid . . .”

“What do you—” Anya began.

“I don’t want to know. Just get her out of the way while we take care of this.”

Anya reached for Xhea then hesitated, glancing at the fading blisters on the Councilman’s hands. Her hesitation gave Xhea a chance to choke out, “Wait.”

The Councilman made a disgusted face and turned away, ordering the enactment of a disaster plan whose name was composed more of numbers than words.

“Please wait.” Xhea tried to sound desperate. “You don’t understand. I wasn’t trying to damage Eridian.”

Anya’s mouth twisted. She shook her head and pulled the long scarf from her hair. “You succeeded admirably, regardless.” She wrapped the scarf’s silken length around one hand in a makeshift glove. “Tell me,” she said. “Who paid you for this attack?”

“This wasn’t an attack. It wasn’t
the
attack.”

Anya gave Xhea an incredulous look and bent to grab her by the hair.

“Don’t you get it yet?” Xhea wanted to laugh, shivering from the after-effects of magic and adrenaline, weak and numbed. “I’m not here to stop you. As if I could. I’m only the distraction.”

At this, the Councilman paused and looked back. Xhea watched his brows draw down as his thoughts cascaded—watched him put the pieces together, one by one. By then it was far too late.

There was a sharp chime, and a woman’s uninflected tones echoed throughout the great room. “
Proximity alert
,” the voice announced. “
Proximity alert. All citizens, please brace for impact. This is not a drill.
”

The Councilman did not brace but ran headlong toward the lift, spells flying from lips and hands. The spellcasters abandoned the pedestals and ran for the crystalline walls, placing their entire bodies against the glass as if the Tower might absorb them if only they pressed hard enough. Light flashed and flared around them, swirling into the Tower faster and brighter than Xhea could read. Defenses, Xhea supposed, and wondered what spells now flared around Eridian in a brief and desperate effort to maintain the Tower’s independence.

Anya cursed, tore the scarf from her hands and rolled Xhea onto her side with her shoe. Xhea was too slow: before she could squirm away, Anya grabbed her arms and bound Xhea’s hands with a few wrenching twists of the scarf. “Don’t move,” she commanded, then spun and sprinted to the lift tube.

Even tied, even exhausted, Xhea couldn’t help but grin as she sagged to the floor.

“Battle stations,” she whispered, and counted the seconds until Allenai’s arrival.

Ten—did they have ten seconds? Xhea rolled onto her back, pinning her tied hands beneath her. On the platform, Shai had managed to free most of her right arm, the spellcasters’ distraction allowing her to make some progress against her bindings.

Nine. Eridian’s proximity chime continued to sound, the voice repeating its calm warning. “
All citizens, please brace—
”

Eight. Seven.

How many hostile takeovers had she watched from the ground? She couldn’t begin to count. The fast, brutal battles lasted just long enough for vendors’ stands to sprout on every street corner and public roof with a clear view of the action, selling snacks and magnification lenses in quantity. High entertainment, this. She had never wondered how a takeover looked—or felt—from the inside.

Six—

Xhea was thrown into the air in an explosion of light and noise. No time to think, no time to scream before the floor reclaimed her, impacting hard against her face and shoulder and injured leg. The world shook and spun, an unending assault of screaming metal, shattering glass, and an awful grinding noise that Xhea couldn’t name. Shards of faceted glass rained down in a sharp, chiming hail.

Allenai hadn’t just attacked but impacted, and if her flight path was any indication, they’d struck from directly above. Eridian’s stabilizing spells had been totally overwhelmed by the force of an entire Tower falling upon them, aided by magic and gravity. If Allenai had already drilled through Eridian’s layered defenses so that the two Towers now touched, then somewhere above the structures’ flesh was beginning to meld, each battling for control of their combined shape. Each seeking to claim the other’s heart.

Xhea lay limply, caught between the conflicting desires to whimper and to laugh hysterically.
Oh
, she thought.
It feels
like t
hat
.

“Xhea?” Shai’s voice was halting, its raw sound testament to her screams. “Are you okay?”

It took a few attempts to respond: “Still breathing.”

“Speak for yourself,” Shai muttered, and then yelped. There was a snapping noise and a flash, and Xhea managed to turn just in time to see one line of the binding spell break away, the magic shimmering as it vanished. “I need help.”

“Can you see the casters?”

“Emergency merger protocol,” Shai managed.

“What?”

“They have to protect the Tower. Defend it.”

Xhea tried to understand what that meant. Above, Shai continued to struggle, then made an exasperated sound. “They’re being absorbed into the wall.”

Xhea twisted, craning until she just caught sight of a human shape vanishing inside the crystalline structure. The aide’s limp body had similarly been absorbed, and now was no more than a shadow inside the cracked floor.

“Huh,” she said. “Good enough.”

Unable to free her hands, Xhea wormed across the floor, doing her best to push aside the largest glass splinters before she lay on them. With her face but inches from the floor, she could see all too well what was happening below. Eridian’s heart stuttered wildly, streamers of raw magic pulsing in every direction. Through the magic, she could just see the vast garden, and it looked a paler gray, as if the very life was being pulled from the trees and flowers and moss. Of the crowd, she could only see the dark spots of their bodies, all quiet and perfectly still. She hoped the Tower would absorb and protect them too.

Another tremor rocked Eridian, shaking the structure to its very bones. There was nowhere to hide, no way to protect herself from the splinters that fell, glittering, and so Xhea kept dragging herself forward, pushing with her good foot and inching along the ground as the shaking allowed. The surface beneath her continued to crack, thin fractures branching endlessly.

On the pedestal, the young woman’s body had been tossed to the side and now lay in disarray, one arm hanging limply, the sheet slipped to expose a length of sickly-pale leg. Xhea could just see the side of Shai’s face staring upward, one long arm and part of her chest; the rest of her had vanished inside the body. Whatever progress she made was constantly undone by the spells’ pull.

“I’m stuck—” Shai said, squirming harder and whimpering at each move. It hurt, of that Xhea had no doubt, but without new spells being added it seemed the pain’s intensity had faded, allowing panic to set in. “I can’t manage—Xhea, Xhea it’s pulling, and I can’t—”

“Shai, you need to run through your breathing exercises.” The familiar actions had always calmed her.

“Help,” Shai cried as another tremor shook the Tower. Her free hand waved wildly, grasping at air as she fought for purchase. “Oh please, Xhea, you have to help me. I can’t fight it and it’s going to—”

“Shai, listen to me. You have to relax.” Xhea tried to sound calm, struggling for the steady tone that Shai herself had so often used—and failed. Her heart pounded and her breath came too quickly, while Shai whimpered above. She could only think how good it was that the ghost couldn’t see her, bound and beaten on the floor.

She changed tactics. “Shai,” Xhea said, and this time she didn’t try to hide her fear or exhaustion. “I need your help. My magic—it’s out of control. It’s too strong for me. Please—I can’t remember which breathing exercise to do.”

Shai whimpered again, arching against the bright lines that held her down. The body moved with her, muscles jerking spasmodically.

“Please,” Xhea said, voice trembling. “Shai, I can’t stop it. I don’t know what to do.”

Shai took a long and shuddering breath, the action echoed perfectly by the body. A pause, a breath. “You need . . . you need the first exercise.”

“Which one was that? I don’t remember.”

“I . . .” Shai managed. “It’s . . . I’ll show you.”

They began to breathe together as Eridian shook and shuddered around them. Shai’s instructions began to come slower, her voice losing its panicked edge. What Xhea hadn’t expected was the way her magic responded in truth to the now-familiar routine. She had thought her power exhausted, and yet as she ran through the patterns she felt a curl of dark in her stomach, a whisper beneath her breastbone. Carefully, as one might coax a flame from damp paper, Xhea guided it down her arm to her hands, letting it curl around her wrists as she breathed.

“Okay,” Shai said at last. “I’m okay.”

Xhea exhaled in a slow stream and tugged at her restrains. There was a rip of protesting fabric, and then her arms were free. “Real silk,” she murmured. She raised her arms and let the ashy, blackened tatters of the scarf flutter to the floor.

Now stand
, she told herself, staring up at the glass pedestal.
Don’t think about it, just do it.

She struggled, rose. It was only looking down at the mess of spells and tether lines that she saw the true problem that Eridian—and now she—faced. Countless spell-lines arched up and over and into Shai, dragging her down and binding her to the still-living body. Her struggles and flaring power had damaged some spells, tangled others—while through it all ran the other girl’s tether, now so frayed that it was not one line but many, knotting wherever it touched. The ghost girl must have tried instinctively to reconnect with her body, and her tattered tether had indeed reached her body—but it had done so by impaling Shai through the chest.

The tether was a help, in a sense; even as the spells pulled Shai down, the other tether repelled her—likely a large part of why Shai’s fight had lasted so long. Yet the other ghost would only be able to return to her body by following the length of her tether—and unlike the near-invisible length of energy, there was no way one ghost could pass through another.