Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (6 page)

Sighing, she picked her way across the expanse of mud, past the lone tree, and sat on a bench. Its ancient cast concrete supports were now spanned with boards from packing crates that creaked beneath her weight as she drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees. After a moment, Shai attempted to sit beside her.

Only then did Xhea look at the building that loomed beyond the park’s farthest edge like a tombstone marking a muddy plot. Orren: the Lower City’s rotten tooth, jagged-edged and leaning. In the times before memory it had been an office building, sixty-five stories of gleaming black glass—a skyscraper in truth. Now it was called “skyscraper” only because it was one of the five tallest buildings left standing. Sometime during the fall of the city that had come before, Orren had been broken, nearly a full thirty stories toppled or ripped away, leaving the shortened building topped with jutting beams and broken concrete supports. Now only the buttons on its elevator banks stood as testament to its lost height.

Though the upper levels were still in the process of being reclaimed—Lower City code for “totally uninhabitable”—Orren’s first twenty or more levels were in use, some packed almost to overflowing. As Xhea knew all too well. Usually she stayed as far from Orren as possible within the Lower City’s boundaries, avoiding even the streets near its base as if she could feel its shadow heavy in the air like fog.

Xhea tugged on the ghost’s tether to get her attention, and pointed. “See that? That’s Orren.”

“What . . . ?” Shai looked around slowly, as if unable to decide on which of the strange and incomprehensible things her gaze should rest.

“A skyscraper. It’s about as close to a Tower as we get here on the ground.” So much so that the five skyscrapers had names, mimicking those above—and a sad and sorry mimicry, at that. The airborne Towers were everything to their people: not just a home, but life and livelihood, business and family, community. Whatever spare magic citizens generated went into the Tower itself, fueling not only its ability to stay aloft but also its internal systems and spells, its businesses and industries, its coffers. In return those citizens lived in the communal glow of their Tower’s magic, the gifts of health and happiness and long life inherent in every breath, every bite, every drop of captured rain.

The skyscrapers were just . . . buildings. Old and crumbling structures kept from collapse by years of hard work and, some said, the preserving effect of the City’s magical runoff. Yet the power that resided in the Lower City—magical, political, and otherwise—belonged to one or other of the skyscrapers, as did most of its inhabitants. Only they had enough resources to garner attention from even the weakest Towers out on the City’s fringes. Those few Towers that deigned to do business with the skyscrapers kept the Lower City alive: selling food and seeds, tools that worked, supplies to repair what little they had. And if the quality was but a fraction of that known to those in the City proper—well, who were they to complain?

“People live there?” Shai asked. She stared at Orren’s crown of twisted girders.

“I lived there,” Xhea said, and managed to keep her voice steady. “Once.” It had been four years since her escape. At times it seemed but a moment ago, her fear little abated with the distance of time.

Joining Orren had been a mistake from the beginning. She’d known within days—hours—that she’d made the wrong choice. Had lain awake watching the snow swirl outside the window of the girls’ dorm, wishing she’d chosen the very real possibility of freezing to death instead of the relative comfort of Orren’s reclaimed glass and steel walls. But the indenture had been signed, and even the signature of a ten-year-old child was binding.

Orren’s industry—for every skyscraper had one—was people. They could make it sound so safe, so promising, for it was only through a skyscraper that a Lower City dweller had even a chance at living in a Tower. Orren trained them; and while some few held respectable positions or learned skilled trades, most jobs were of the type that no City citizen would want, no matter how desperate. There were many uses that a young girl could be put to—yet Orren’s recruiters had made a mistake when Xhea signed her contract: they hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t even tried.

She’d wondered since what might have happened had someone brushed her shoulder that fateful morning she signed away her life; how her future might have changed had someone tried to shake her hand and felt the crawling discomfort of her touch. The sensation had been described to her as an unending static shock, or pins-and-needles—even once as the ache of a new bruise. A localized version of the feeling that everyone else experienced underground.

“But . . .” Shai stared at Orren with her brows lowered. Mottled light shone dully from the skyscraper’s metal and glass sides, darkened and pitted by the dirt of untold years. Xhea watched her judge the worth of those walls—even broken, even twisted—and deem them preferable to dank subway tunnels and forgotten shopping concourses.

“But . . . you don’t live there anymore.”

“No.”

“Why?”

Xhea’s quick reply caught in her throat. Oh, she didn’t want to talk about this—didn’t even want to think of it. Yet memories rose, and with them came fear. Xhea swallowed, choking on both. Remembering the only other ghost she’d ever seen who glowed and glimmered with magic when the light was right. Remembering his screams, and the whine of magic storage coils as they overloaded, flickered, and died. Remembering the feel of her knife, sticky with dark blood—and a man’s soul.

“Something happened there,” she managed. “Something very bad.”

“And you just . . . left?”

Xhea nodded, wanting to laugh at the simplicity of that word. Left. As if anything could be so easy.

Again Shai frowned, looking from Orren to Xhea and back again. “It has to do with me, doesn’t it? The thing that happened.”

“Yes.” She turned to Shai, shifting her eyes’ focus to see the magic that imbued the ghost. It was stronger now, brighter: Shai seemed almost to glow. “I’ve seen a ghost like you before—a ghost who sparkled with magic. Someone had put spells on him. On his body, and . . . on his ghost.”

“Spells?” Shai glanced down at her hands as if she too might see the magic that wove through her. “What were they supposed to do?”

“Bring him back to life.”

It was a ludicrous idea, even in concept. No one—certainly no one in the Lower City—had enough magic to return life to the dead. Even with a skilled caster and assistance with the ghost, resurrection would require so much magic, so much power, as to be impossible. Magic to prepare the body, magic to prepare the ghost, magic to join the two and more to bind them. Magic to slow time’s ravages and heal damage that the body could not. Magic to animate the flesh and tie it to the ghost’s will: spells upon spells, one for every part of the body that needed to move; spells upon spells to animate every muscle in the face and mouth, lips and throat, required for even the most garbled of speech. Magic as fuel guzzled down: energy enough to make any person a force in the City. Energy enough to keep a Tower aloft.

Still, someone had tried—there, within those twisted walls. And she, gods save her, had helped.

“Heal him?” Shai asked. “But how could that be bad?”

Xhea shook her head, coins chiming, as if the memories and the emotions that swelled in their wake might be brushed away like flies. “Not heal him.” She managed to keep her voice steady. “Force his spirit back into his dead body—and keep him there.” Trap him, no matter how much he fought or screamed or cried. No matter how much it hurt him, or how he pleaded. And what use were pleas that only Xhea could hear?

It was hard to think of those days; harder still to accept that she’d helped willingly, even eagerly. After a year of near uselessness within Orren, the debt of her indenture increasing as she struggled to earn her keep with menial chores, Xhea had confessed her ability to see ghosts. Then there had been work for her—and sudden interest from Orren’s elite. They started with small jobs to prove her skills: speaking to a ghost, banishing another, changing tethers to a dizzying array of anchors. Only later did she realize that they’d been testing her for the one job they cared about.

They explained little of their goals, these men and women she’d known more by reputation than as living beings: the skyscraper’s few casters, their magic strong enough—or so it was said—to have lived in the City proper but who chose to live in the Lower City like gods among mortals. Even with their power, preparations had taken weeks, spells woven from threads of magic, layered lines of will and intent that bound spirit and body both. Xhea had guided the casters to the ghost that she alone could see, and had steadied the ghost when he had struggled or shied away. The ghost had glimmered, then, as he moved: the spells’ roots dug deep into his spirit, sparking as he fought to be free.

“But . . . why?”

“I don’t know,” Xhea whispered. “They didn’t want to know something from him—they forbade me to speak to him. I thought he might have been someone important, but that’s not how they treated him. I even thought that they might have been using him for his magic. They hooked him up to the skyscrapers’ systems, as if he were a battery—maybe you can get more magic from a man when his body doesn’t use it to live?” She shook her head. In all the time she’d thought about it, all the sleepless nights, the pieces had never quite fit.

“He was dead,” Xhea said. “I mean, he had to have died for his ghost to be free—but they’d brought his body back. His heart was beating, lungs were breathing, but only because of the machines. Just looking at his body . . . you never would have thought something that broken, that ruined, could be alive.”

Xhea stared at Orren, its dirty glass façade, and the empty floor near the top of the skyscraper’s broken height where the attempted resurrection had occurred. Some days she had but to hear a sizzle of magic or smell flesh tinged with decay to return there. In memory she could see ghost and body both, each all but blinding from the layered spells that bound them. The machinery that forced the corpse to live had been nearly invisible in that harsh light. She saw too the shapes of the casters gathered around, pulling magic not from themselves but from massive storage coils, the type used by banks, drawing so hard on their energy that the coils whined in protest.

She’d been all but giddy in that room, high on spilled magic, vision dancing with color as often as not—and loving every moment of it.

The silence stretched. “What did they do?” Shai prompted.

Xhea swallowed. “There were four days of prep. On the fifth, they attempted the resurrection. For a while, everything seemed fine. The casters activated the spells—they were like magical lines, ropes almost, that bound the ghost to his body.” Like tethers, she’d thought—a thousand tethers of bright magic, so thick that she could barely see for their light. “The spells drew the ghost down to his body. But when the two touched, the ghost . . .
screamed
.

“I’ve seen a lot of ghosts, and I’ve heard them scream before. Anger and frustration, hurt and denial and grief. But this—I’d never heard anything like it. It was the first time I’d ever heard a ghost in agony.”

Shai’s eyes widened. “What did you do?” she whispered.

Xhea laughed, quiet and bitter. “I screamed too. I told the casters to stop, told them they were hurting him. They didn’t care. I tried to get to him, but . . . I was eleven years old. They held me back easily.” She’d fought, but they were a child’s struggles, a child’s fists, and even her years on the streets had taught her no way to break free from a grown man willing to ignore the pain of touching her.

She continued. “One by one, the casters drained the storage coils dry—the coils, and then themselves. All that brightness going black. They pushed themselves right to the edge, first trembling and shaking as they tried to control the spells, and then just . . . falling. Then the spells began to fail, snapping and fraying.

“Through it all, the ghost kept screaming. On and on and on. He didn’t need to breathe, and it was like the sound was being torn from him somehow, torn from his very self.” She gestured helplessly, as if with hands alone she could shape how she’d felt at that moment, that powerless terror and revulsion and the terrible, terrible compassion. She’d been certain that she would be deafened by the ghost’s anguish, unable to hear anything but the echoes of that sound.

“The spells worked,” Xhea said. “For as long as they lasted. They bound the ghost to his body. But there wasn’t nearly enough power to complete what they’d started. So he was stuck, half in his body, half out, fighting against the bonds and screaming.”

Stop there
, she told herself. Shai didn’t need to know anything more. But the words seemed inevitable now, and the telling.

“As they fell, I freed myself. I took out my knife.” Xhea closed her eyes. It was too hard, suddenly, to look at Orren; all that cracked and gleaming glass, too bright in the early morning light. Too bright for memories so dark.

“I tried to help him,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “I tried. I ran to him with the knife and I started . . . cutting. But they were spells, not tethers, and they were so strong. Ropes and cords of magic. I had to use all the strength I had.”

She took a deep breath, shuddering. “But there was nowhere to cut that didn’t touch either his body or his ghost. And he was screaming and fighting to be free—and I was screaming too, cutting and flailing and nearly blind from so much magic.”

“Did you hurt him?” Shai asked.

“Hurt him?” Xhea laughed bitterly. “I killed him.”

“But . . .”

“He was already dead, I know. His body. It wasn’t that.” Even though blood had coated the blade and her hands, dark and thick and shining. Even though she’d slashed the failing ruin of his body, destroyed the plastic lines and wires that connected the body to the machines, shredded his clothes. No, not that.

“It was . . . him,” Xhea managed. “His ghost. I cut him with the knife, sliced and shredded the ghost himself as surely as I had his body.” When she had realized what was happening, she’d stumbled back, looking from the ravaged ghost and his hemorrhaging body to the bloody knife in her hand. She’d watched in horror as the ghost faded, slipping from existence like blood from a wound until only the echo of his screams remained.