Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (14 page)

I can think of nothing I’d enjoy more
, Xhea thought. But what she said was a slow, poorly enunciated, “Yes, okay.”

When the police were brought in, Xhea kept her eyes closed to mere slits and allowed her tongue to be heavy and slow, so that she garbled even simple one-word answers. Even so, Xhea responded carefully to their patient questions, relying on vagueness, supposed memory loss, and outright lies to keep her anonymous.

No, she didn’t remember anything. No, she couldn’t tell them who had stripped her of life force and left her to die half-naked in a fountain. No, she didn’t know who they could contact, nor the name of her Tower; she felt so strange—couldn’t she sleep for a while longer, please? Oh, please. Surely she’d feel better soon.

Except that she didn’t.

She received dose after dose of magic, and with each shot she seemed to wake less—to remember less—in the times between. She spoke to doctors, to nurses, to security—she didn’t know quite who; their faces blended, one into the other, until she could not remember who’d she’d seen last or which of her visitors were still alive.

Places where people died were often thick with ghosts, and Celleran’s hospital was no exception. The old man’s ghost was waiting every time she opened her eyes, his greeting utterly predictable: “You’re in my bed.” Other ghosts visited as their tethers allowed, drawn to her presence. She tried to ignore them, but still they came: young ghosts and old, those that bore signs of their wounds or illnesses, and those that seemed whole and healthy and were nonetheless dead. Some of them spoke to her; some of them wept or cried or showed her the hurts that had killed them. After a while, she simply kept her eyes closed.

Still the magic pumped into her, beat after beat, breath after breath, until she felt she should glow with it, like Shai, radiant against the bed sheets. Until she felt like a ghost herself, bodiless yet tethered to this spot, this bed, this room.

I’m dying
, she thought. The realization brought no fear.

Fight
, she told herself. She could pull the wire from her neck, or try to reach the storage cupboard that held her knife . . .

If only the magic ebbed enough to let her care.

Perhaps it was better this way, she thought. At least she felt no hunger. At least there was no pain.

Shai came to her then. She stood at the end of Xhea’s bed and shouted until Xhea forced her eyes open.

“Xhea,” Shai said. “You have to wake up. You have to fight it.”

Xhea looked at her, that long blonde hair, those so-blue eyes, and struggled to think what was wrong. Her hand lifted from her side—so heavy, so strangely light—its movements jerky as it came to rest on her chest.

“Gone,” Xhea murmured. “Broken.” She had done that. Done . . . something. Hadn’t she? Why did she wish to apologize? The answer was slow in coming.

“Oh,” she said, her voice a faint murmur. “You’re dead.”

Shai spoke slowly, shaping each word with care, and yet Xhea struggled to follow. “. . . get up. You have to get out—you can’t let them find you.” She made as if to grab Xhea’s arm. “Understand? They’re tracking . . .”

Something else bothered her. Xhea squinted at Shai, watching the fall of her pale hair against her shoulders, the way her skin looked almost transparent in this light. She watched Shai’s lashes rise and fall over her perfect blue eyes as she blinked, the soft movements of pink lips as she spoke. Wasn’t something missing, she wondered. Something . . . purple?

Her dress, she realized. Shai’s plum dress with the full hem, the one that fluttered and flowed at her movements—gone. Instead Shai wore a plain eggplant shirt with embroidered vines at the neck and wrists, fitted pants, and a tailored vest arrayed with small pockets. Clothes that Xhea might have worn had she been able to afford them.

That’s when Xhea understood. “Ah,” she said slowly, interrupting Shai’s increasingly frantic explanations. “I’m hallucinating.”

“No, listen, Xhea—please! You have to—”

“I used to wonder, sometimes, what would happen if I got too much.” Her voice was dreamlike and slow. “All the money in the world. Biggest job ever—a thousand renai, a million, all mine. All that light . . . color . . . power. Maybe I’d be normal.” She laughed then, the sound slipping from her lips like dark liquid.

“Now I know. I’m just . . . nothing.”

When the next dose of magic came, she did not fight it, only sighed and watched the world glimmer as it stole her away.

Clarity felt like the sun rising. Xhea blinked as she woke—truly woke, rather than struggling out of a magic-induced stupor. The world was still alight with color, but it no longer dazzled her, and her body, numb and clumsy, nevertheless moved as she willed.

A nurse stood at her bedside, adjusting the equipment above her head. Noticing Xhea’s attention, he smiled broadly.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, all professional cheer.

“Okay. Tired.” She tried to speak clearly. “What are you doing?”

“Just adjusting the drip. You’re going to have a visitor, and we can’t have your treatment interfering with his tests. Seems like it’s been making you a little drowsy.”

That was one way of putting it.

“So I won’t be getting as much energy?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Once the specialist has completed his examination, we’ll increase the dose again—or whatever he says will help you best recover.” Again he smiled; the expression was not nearly as comforting as he seemed to think. He advised Xhea to rest—as if she could do much else—and said that they’d let her know when the specialist arrived.

But a cold knot had settled in her stomach. She wasn’t certain what kind of specialist would be called for a case of suspected magical sapping, only knew that she never wanted to be examined by such a person. It wouldn’t take long for a specialist to realize that her condition wasn’t the result of an attack, but her version of normal. While she couldn’t be certain of the reaction, her imagination provided her with any number of possibilities, ranging from unpleasant to deadly. If nothing else, there was the medical bill.

Then there was her dream of Shai. She remembered the intensity of the warning, if not the exact words.
Fight it
, Shai had said.
Get out of here. You can’t let them find you.

If only she could remember why.

It all brought her right back to the question of escape. Only now, she thought as she tried to curl her numbed fingers into a fist, she had perhaps an hour to make good her attempt.

“You’re in my bed.”

“Hello to you too,” she muttered without looking up from her fingers. Make a fist, relax. Make a fist, relax. After a few dozen repetitions, the movement was no easier.

“Can’t you see I’m an old man?” the ghost said. “I need rest, girl. Rest. Give a little precedence to your elders, hey?”

She shook out her hands and then tried to rub some feeling back into her arms. “I praise the wisdom your supreme age has surely granted you,” she replied absently.

“Heh. Don’t get snippy with me. I’m just asking to lie down in my own bed, that too much to ask?”

“Still can’t move my legs, thanks.”

Maybe recovering from a magical overdose was like a bad case of pins and needles—she just needed to convince the blood to return. No, not blood, she realized, and her head felt clear for the first time in days. Not blood, but magic—
her
magic, that energy dark and slow. When it filled her, she’d had the power to destroy the spells that kept Shai’s body alive. Even when it had worked beyond her control, it had leeched the bright energy from living things, killed plants, unmade renai.

Yet this—to have her body and blood rage with bright magic—was the cure she’d stumbled on all unknowing, dosing herself with renai to keep the darkness down. She knew how to fight her magic, or at least subdue it; but calling it? That was beyond her. The one time she’d used it intentionally, the magic had already been drawn to Shai and the imbalance she represented—a living ghost, a dead girl filled with magic. She had felt the pull of Shai’s presence, that ache like a bruise in midair.

Xhea looked at the old man sitting in the corner chair. He had no magic, nor its echo. And yet, as she stared, she felt . . . something. A trembling on the edge of her senses.

She frowned, concentrating. It was only with eyes closed that she truly felt it: a faint disturbance in the room’s far corner—a chill like a cloud’s passing, a hitch like breath held. The presence of a ghost.
Perhaps
, she thought.
Perhaps
. . .

“I’m sorry,” she said. She tried to sound like she imagined a young City girl would: naïve and overconfident, perhaps a little embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I’ve just been feeling bad.”

The ghost looked at her from under his eyebrows, forehead creasing as he considered her words. “It’s all right,” he said at last. “I get like that some days too.”

“It’s hard being in the hospital,” she offered.

“Heh. You can say that again. Some days I can’t remember my home, you know?”

Xhea had the feeling that if she were to ask him, he wouldn’t be able to remember his home at all, the memories having vanished with his body. But she smiled, hoped she looked sympathetic, and asked, “Have you been here long?”

He nodded. “Good while, now, yeah. A good while.”

“And you still don’t have your own bed—I mean, your bed back? That’s such a shame.”

“Spoke to the nurses about it, but they don’t even listen. Just act like they’re too busy for the likes of me.”

“Well, you do look pretty tired,” she began, as if sounding out an idea, “and I’d move for you if I could, but I’m in pretty bad shape right now. But maybe . . . maybe I could let you rest here with me, just for a while.” She tried not to shudder; tried to seem as if the thought of a strange, dead old man lying beside her was something she’d welcome.

“You’d really do that?” He was already limping to the bedside.

“Of course.”
Just another ghost
, she told herself.
Think of it like any other job.

As if she’d take a job like this.

He didn’t attempt to touch her or the covers, only lowered himself onto the mattress, slipping through the metal railing without realizing it was there. Xhea shifted awkwardly, the coins in her hair clinking as she tried to make room. He sighed as he lay down, a slow exhalation that seemed to go on forever, and Xhea wondered if he might not bother to breathe again—might simply vanish, his purpose achieved with this brief moment of rest. Then his unneeded breath hissed in and he settled his head more comfortably on the pillow.

Xhea didn’t speak, just let herself feel him there, the unmistakable chill of a ghost. She didn’t touch him, though he was close enough that any movement might bring them into contact, face or shoulder or leg.

Yet even after a few long minutes spent face to face in silence, she felt little different. The colors hadn’t dimmed, and as she opened and closed her hand, she knew her fist was as weak as before. Nothing stirred in the pit of her stomach. No sense of that dark stillness waiting to overflow. There wasn’t even emptiness, just the bright magic, grinding nausea, and a bone-deep weariness that weighed her down as surely as if she’d been bound.

What had she expected? She’d dealt with ghosts countless times, bright with payment and without, and never had a ghost’s mere proximity caused the dark magic to rise. Not before Shai.

It was only then that Xhea realized the old man was crying, ghostly tears slipping down his wrinkled cheeks and vanishing before they reached the pillow. There was no point in asking if he was all right. Instead, she whispered, “Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” He shuddered with thin sobs. “I just want to go home.”

What would she have done had this truly been a job? Used her knife, most likely; cut his tether to the world and released him to dissolve into air and memory. Yet her knife, locked but feet away, was far beyond her reach.

The darkness wasn’t just going to come, she realized. So long rejected and buried under tides of bright power, it wasn’t going to fight back. She’d never
wanted
it to fight back; just the opposite. Now, when it was needed, she didn’t know how to call it.

Hesitantly, Xhea placed her hand against the old man’s cheek. It hurt as her fingers passed through his flesh, suddenly not numb but burning, freezing. Still she persisted, cupping her hand as if she could touch him in truth, brush away his falling tears with a gesture. The pain helped focus her: it was a point of clarity in the midst of so much brightness.

She thought of stillness, of black that waited like the depths of a cold lake and the dark fog that crept from its surface. She was afraid—oh, she was so afraid of what she was, and terror curdled her empty stomach—and yet still she reached for calm and asked the darkness to come. If she had used words, she would have said only
yes
—affirmation and permission both.

This is what I am
, she thought. The balance. The coin’s other side.

This is
who
I am: a bridge between darkness and light.

And the magic flowed. It rose slowly at first, sluggishly. It felt cold, like a thin stream of melted ice rising through her, and where it met the bright energy Xhea burned, too hot and too cold. Still she called to it, welcomed it, and as the magic moved through her the brightness began to give way.