Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (10 page)

“Isn’t it strange? There’s so much I don’t remember, but
that
I can’t imagine forgetting.”

Footsteps drew nearer, and nearer still, until Xhea realized that one of the walkers stood directly beneath her. Not daring to move, Xhea watched as Shai looked to the City then back down to meet her eyes.

“It’s going to be a long night,” Shai said, “but I think I can remember a story or two.”

A moment passed before Xhea realized that it was an offer. She felt the hours before dawn stretch before them like a unbroken highway, and forced her head to nod.

Please.
No sound: Xhea only mouthed the word, too-dry lips cracking.

“Okay,” Shai said, and rested one hand palm-up on her knee. “So this was a long time ago, when I was just a child, and my parents took me to see the sky gardens in the Central Spire . . .”

It was impossible to forget where she was, or why. Yet something in the rise and fall of Shai’s voice made Xhea think of a lullaby. It was not the words, but merely the speaking of them, that had the power to comfort. Listening to Shai’s story, Xhea could almost pretend that she didn’t see movement out in the darkness; that the sound of things creeping all around her was only the wind, or rubble shifting under its own weight, or her imagination.

Hours had passed before Xhea truly noticed the hand that Shai had reached toward her. Story after story the ghost had told, pulling tales from her gap-ridden memory—all without withdrawing that hand, or moving it from its place on her knee. Xhea remembered what Shai had said of her father:
When I was afraid, he used to hold my hand and tell me stories.

Xhea’s grip tightened on her knife’s mother-of-pearl handle. She could only think of one person who had held her hand—one person who had even tried—and that had been a very long time ago. She felt immobilized, not knowing what to do with the gesture, or the strange and sudden wanting for such a thing: another’s hand closed around her own. Distrusted the urge.

But what did it matter, for her fingers’ tight grip seemed locked upon the knife. She was too tired, too bone-dead weary to gather the courage to reach across the small gap that separated them.

Yet it was there, an offering, and somehow that was enough.

The walkers moved off just before dawn, heading out to the badlands, leaving only a tense, echoing silence in their wake. Xhea tried to stifle her whimpers as she uncurled. Failed. Each movement hurt, muscles locked tight from fear and exertion and cold, and her swollen eyes burned with every blink. Yet morning brought gifts: the chill dew was just enough to ease her thirst, each bitter, metallic drop tasting as good as fresh rainwater; and the sun, when it rose, made her weak with relief.

Safe at last
. She unbound her hair and let it tumble down her back in a ringing choir, then raised her face and arms as if the sun’s pale light could wash her clean.

“Xhea,” Shai murmured, and her voice sounded strange.

She felt she could dissolve in sunlight; felt its warmth enclose her, granting the freedom to breathe. Even years living underground hadn’t purged her desire for sunlight—especially the rare moments when it shone unbroken by the Towers’ shadows or cloud. Despite morning’s chill, she pushed up her sleeves so the light could reach just a little more skin.

“Xhea,” Shai said more urgently, and Xhea opened her eyes. Before them hovered the small, blinking shape of a City elevator.

After the long night, Xhea felt she’d lost her capacity for surprise. But she paused, staring at the palm-sized elevator and its flickering lights as one might look at a particularly difficult puzzle.

“Why’s it here?” Xhea had tried to reach the City for years, only to be frustrated at every attempt. Yet now an elevator simply appeared—for the second time in three days. They’d done
nothing
—made no sound, no signal; she’d barely so much as breathed for hours.

She raised a hand and waved. No response. She made her gesture broader, as if trying to attract the attention of someone across a crowd, but the thing’s lights only flickered, as if confused.

“It’s blinking yellow, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Shai said.

Yellow meant it was thinking. It wasn’t denying her passage, yet neither was it offering. It seemed the thing hadn’t quite decided whether she was human.

What was different? Could it sense her strange magic, newly risen? Yet her magic was calm, once more the dark lake she’d so long envisioned. Besides, she reasoned, an elevator couldn’t have sensed her magic that first night, smothered as it had been by Shai’s father’s payment.

Struck by a sudden thought, she turned to the ghost in a clatter of charms. Maybe it wasn’t reacting to her or her magic; perhaps it sensed Shai. She watched as the elevator seemed to tremble in its orbit, as if turning to face her, then Shai, then back again. Almost as if it saw a body with no magic, and magic . . .

“. . . with no body. Shai, it can see you. Quick—do something.”

Shai hesitated, looking at her hands and the glimmers of magic that ran through them, then waved her arms as Xhea had done. Again, the elevator blinked.

“Still yellow,” Shai said.

“I think we’re confusing it.” Sweetness, she was so tired; just thinking felt exhausting as slogging through mud. Still her thoughts churned: a living body
and
bright magic. They had everything they needed for the elevator to whisk them away, only in separate forms. If only . . .

At the same moment, Shai extended her hand. “If we . . .” she said, and their eyes met.

“
Yes
.”

Xhea reached for Shai without thinking, as if she had not struggled in the attempt but hours before. With her hand above Shai’s, the ghost seemed but a shadow that Xhea cast, a bright reflection shimmering in midair. The magic within Shai had grown strong enough that it pushed against Xhea, and for a brief moment they seemed to touch. Then they merged, fingers melding into a single hand.

Shai gasped, and Xhea barely kept from doing the same. It didn’t hurt—not exactly. Not quite pins and needles, she thought, but ice and the ache of bruised muscles grown cold. As one, they lifted their joined hands and beckoned to the elevator, banishing the confusion from its wire-spelled mind. It blinked a pale gray that Xhea knew to be green, and descended.

Xhea’s breath caught as the elevator brightened and broke open like a flower. Shai drew close as ribbons of light arced up and around them, surrounding them in a shimmering bubble. Xhea looked down, watching as the concrete of their shelter seemed to ripple as the spell lines joined beneath her feet.

“Oh sweetness,” Xhea whispered, and they were rising.

Xhea had always been afraid of heights. Her bed in Orren had been next to the window, seventeen stories up. Cold in the winter, too bright during the day, beaded with moisture when it rained hard, it was the worst space in the girls’ dorm. She used to lie curled with her eyes squeezed shut, trying to avoid even glimpsing the world stretched below.

Yet that distance had been contained by grimed windows and rusted girders. Now, with only ribbons of magic between her and a fall, Xhea’s stomach dropped as quickly as the ground. Beneath her, she could suddenly see the whole of the ruined building in which she’d sheltered the night. Then more: the shapes of neighboring buildings and the gridwork of nameless streets that stretched in the cardinal directions, vanishing into the distance.

Instinctively she grabbed for a handhold, heart pounding with a sudden surge of adrenaline. She wasn’t just afraid of heights, she realized in panic; she was afraid of falling.

“You won’t fall,” Shai said. “It’s safe.” Their hands were still linked, flesh and spirit entwined, and though her fingers were numb from the contact, Xhea did not pull away.

It was easier to breathe once they’d risen higher. The ground was so far it seemed unreal, like a picture beneath her feet, and the elevator’s veil of light only added to the illusion. She stared at the Lower City below, fascinated, realizing that the scurrying specks were people. Stranger still, the whole of the Lower City was little more than a tiny patch of life in the wasteland of the city that had come before. Xhea had known the ancient city had been large, yet she could barely comprehend its vastness or the extent of its decay. Ruins stretched as far as she could see and beyond, crumbling into nothing.

Then she looked up.

She’d stared at the Towers’ pointed underbellies her whole life, watching as they rose and fell, merged and reshaped in an incomprehensible political dance. Now a Tower loomed before her, so close she could almost touch it. Its grown metal flesh shimmered like sunlight across water, and Xhea imagined it to be water’s blue, deep and hazed almost gray.

“We have to direct the elevator,” Shai said.

She only knew that their destination lay south, and so they pointed southward, hand in hand. Xhea gasped as the elevator accelerated and merged into the line of aircars that zipped through the gaps separating the Towers. They rose and fell with the stream of traffic, moving between the massive airborne structures with the ease of breath. Briefly, she caught the bored expression on a fellow traveler’s face as he sped by in an elevator of his own. Something bubbled up inside her, and it was only as she pressed the fingers of her free hand to her mouth that she realized it was laughter.

Focus
, Xhea reminded herself, and none too soon; within moments, the elevator’s swift passage brought them to the cluster of Towers she had identified from the ground. She’d thought them small, and though they were dwarfed by the central Towers, each was far larger than all of the skyscrapers combined. She craned upward just trying to catch a glimpse of the peaks of their top defensive spires.

“Do you recognize—?”

“No,” Shai said, her voice gone hollow. “But I can feel it pulling.”

“Your Tower?”

“My body.”

Shai moved to point in the direction her second tether led and Xhea hurriedly mimicked the gesture. The elevator dove out of the aircar traffic at their command.

Their destination was a wide Tower, its central structure a misshapen orb like a blown-glass ornament gone wrong. Though it bore defensive spires on both top and bottom, even Xhea’s untrained eye could see the obvious angles of attack another Tower might use, great sections of its bulk protected by neither spire nor spell.

Traffic thinned as they approached and circled toward the main landing bay. The Tower was dark—red, perhaps, or even brown—but as they neared, Xhea saw patches of discoloration along its side, and the air around it was almost still, undisturbed by spell exhaust. Xhea had seen Towers far younger and less damaged attacked and absorbed in a hostile takeover: materials, magic, and citizens alike physically absorbed by a more powerful Tower. Only location seemed to have spared this one a similar fate.

She glanced at Shai. From the cut of her dress to her bewilderment with the Lower City, everything about Shai spoke of close familiarity with luxury. Yet she had died here, in a Tower so old and poor that it risked falling from the sky.

Xhea blinked as they entered the Tower’s shadowed landing bay. There was little to see: the gaping space held only a cluster of worn aircars parked to one side, while a row of poorly marked doors ran along the far wall, all closed. It felt like a parking garage—albeit larger, cleaner, and in better repair than the ones she knew.

The elevator set her down so gently that it was a moment before Xhea realized she could feel the floor. The spell peeled away as quickly as it had formed, the bright ribbons fluttering down around her and vanishing.

“I didn’t pay,” she said, watching the elevator swoop across the cavernous space and back into the sunshine. Not that she was complaining.

“Registers the signature,” Shai whispered, staring blankly at an interior door. She released Xhea’s hand and pressed her palm to her chest as if she might feel the echo of a living heart. “I don’t . . .” she said. “I can’t . . .”

“Can’t what?” Xhea massaged her numbed fingers.

Shai closed her eyes, her face tightening in pain, and pressed her hands harder against her sternum, fingers splayed. No, Xhea realized; Shai was holding the place where the tether joined them, both hands flat as if to keep the tether from unraveling.

“Shai,” she said. “What is it? What’s happening?”

“I can’t . . .” Shai was just loud enough to hear. “I can’t stay.” Slowly, slowly, she opened her eyes, lashes rising to reveal irises that gleamed silver. Their eyes met. “
Find me
,” Shai said, and was gone.

Xhea braced as the tether snapped back against her chest. The free end swung as it sought the suddenly absent ghost, and—though thin—it was still tangible enough to handle. Xhea sighted off the tether’s length; wherever Shai was being kept, it was on a higher floor than this. Magic stirred in the pit of her stomach—slow, but curious.

“
Not now
,” she hissed.

She ran to a door in the far wall, but it was closed tight and sealed. No handle, only the blinking panel of a touchplate. She waved her hand before the plate and poked it a few times with her tingling fingers, wishing that enough bright magic remained from Shai’s touch to garner a response. To come this close, and be stopped by a
door
. . .

In response to her frustration, Xhea’s magic built like a storm beneath her breastbone and spread through her body, reaching after the ghost. It rose, curling smoke-like around her fingers and the touchplate.

“I said,
not
. . . oh.” For at the brush of her magic, the spell controlling the door panel sputtered and died. She thought of the dead food chits, the inert payment from Brend—all kept in jacket pockets as her magic had run rampant that very first time.

“Oh,” she said again.

With the latch spell gone, the pressure differential was just enough to open the door a crack. Putting her shoulder against the door and pushing, Xhea forced her way inside.

The curving hall that led from the landing bay was all but silent, only distant murmurs audible over the hiss of air from unseen vents. The overhead lights were cracked and flickering, and the air smelled like a room long closed. The floor was soft beneath her feet—not carpet, Xhea saw, but something growing and slightly damp that reminded her more of mold than moss.