Radiant: Towers Trilogy Book One (29 page)

Though it had galled her to admit it, she needed help. The time had come to call in her favor from Edren.

Yet there was no way easy way for her to reach the skyscraper. The streets were watched, and though running the roofs was supposed to be a quick way to travel through the Lower City, Xhea couldn’t even stomach the thought of traversing the rickety bridges and knotted ropes strung between buildings as so many others did with ease. Her only hope, she’d decided, was to return to the tunnels and try to find a way past Edren’s basement barricade. After all, it had been years since the last battle between skyscrapers—surely they’d relaxed their security.

After that, sunset couldn’t come fast enough.

Yet for all her hours spent wishing the sun from the sky, as twilight fell she wished she could stay its course. Surely the man would leave soon; neither of them wanted to be out when darkness came. Xhea shifted, boots grinding against the crumbled brick that scattered the rooftop, and resisted the urge to stretch her legs.
Just a moment more
, she told herself. The lengthening shadows mocked her words.

“What’s he doing?” Xhea whispered, watching the man and trying to see what his hunched body shielded. “It’s almost like . . .”
A glittering light rose from the man’s hands to hang in midair, and Xhea swore vehemently enough that Shai looked up.

“Weaving spells,” she spat. “This entire time, he was just weaving more spells.”

Three now guarded her supposedly safe entrance. The original two followed the pattern that she’d come to know so well, tentacles and all. The new spell was a softly glowing sphere, set some distance apart.

His work finished, the man—City man, spell-weaver, enemy-at-large—rose, dusted his pants, and set off down the street. Xhea waited a moment before lifting her head above the roof edge. Caution told her to wait long enough for him to round the corner, or catch an elevator—but there was no time.

“Sweetness save me.” Xhea gestured to Shai and crept to the rusted fire escape. She made her clumsy way down, her eyes only open enough to let her see her next handhold. Back on real ground, she hurried across the street, and ducked under the faint tendrils of one of the old entrapment spells. The new spell was more difficult to avoid, but not impossible; by pressing herself to the hotel’s brick wall and inching along, she made it up to the doors without coming within an arm’s span of the hovering sphere. Though locked, the doors’ once-shatterproof glass had long since been pounded to powder; faint remnants glittered underfoot.

Shai spoke as Xhea crouched to duck inside. “This one . . . I think it’s keyed to me.”

Xhea turned back to find the ghost peering warily at the sphere. “How can you tell?”

“This section.” Shai pointed at spell lines at the thing’s core. “That’s my signature. Or . . . almost.”

“That’s rather more efficient,” Xhea replied cautiously. After all, no one really wanted Xhea, only the ghost in her possession. If they had found a way to capture Shai herself, a spell that trapped not flesh but spirit . . .

Turning, Xhea caught sight of the warning placed beneath the original entrapment spell closest to the door. Not an X of stones this time, but an object: an ancient solar-powered calculator, its screen still intact. Her breath caught. Carefully, she crept toward it and knelt, hesitant to touch it.

“I sold this to Wen,” she whispered. “To Brend. He wouldn’t . . .”

Even without his father’s skill for the antique trade, Brend wouldn’t have lost an object of such value, wouldn’t have discarded it. Had he sold it? She thought again of the disarray she’d found in the warehouse, precious artifacts smashed and the daylight spell flickering, and wondered for the first time whether Brend was all right.

Distracted by the thought, Xhea stood. There was a flash as the entrapment spell activated. She gasped, twisted, and tried to turn away—all too late. The spell’s light was the last thing she saw as a tendril fell across her face and caught fast.

Xhea barely stifled her scream. The magic burned, then froze, the sensations fierce along her cheekbone and across her left eye. She staggered back and tried to pull away, but the tendril held her effortlessly. Her struggles only allowed other tendrils to catch her hands and arms, and grasp at her sides. Every tendril burned, even through her clothing and hair—the pain from the magic so sharp she felt dizzy with it, disoriented. She wondered if she was going to pass out.

Each tendril found its hold—and began to rise. Xhea screamed then, unable to quell her panic as her boots left the ground. With her single unaffected eye, she caught sight of Shai’s horrified expression. The ghost reached for her, shouting something that Xhea couldn’t understand over the ringing in her ears.

“Make it let go!” Xhea cried. She reached for Shai’s hand as if that ghostly flesh could keep her earthbound. Tears, hot and furious, leaked from Xhea’s eyes—and as the tears slipped down her cheeks, she felt the tendril’s grip on her face ease. She saw a wisp of something dark pass in front of her unbound eye, soft and sinuous as smoke.

The thought came, falling in perfect time to the words shaped by Shai’s lips:
Magic. Dark magic.

The thought was a call, a need, and it came, a rush of black power. As if it were air, she cried with the force of it, screaming as it left her lips; as if it were sweat and tears, it poured from her, a liquid antidote to the pain’s fire. Around her, the tendrils’ light flickered and seemed almost to flinch, their edges darkening as they curled in upon themselves. Face, arms, legs, torso—their tightly woven grip loosened, and Xhea fell to the ground.

She landed hard on her right knee and tumbled into a boneless heap, the air forced from her lungs on impact. Her scream was no more than a choked cry; she could only grasp weakly at her knee with trembling hands as she struggled to inhale.

It was a long moment before she could breathe, and air did little to dissipate the pain. She grit her teeth, trying not to whimper, and rolled over. The last of the spell hovered between her and the Towers’ growing light, flailing and twisting in on itself as it died. She took a long, slow breath, and another.

“Magic,” Xhea mumbled, road grit clinging to her swelling, bloodied lip. “Keep forgetting about that.”

A paler light, Shai sank until she knelt at Xhea’s side. Xhea welcomed the chill of the ghost’s touch as Shai tried helplessly to check for breaks, or slow the sluggish bleeding of the cuts on Xhea’s cheek and palms. There was no sign of Shai’s introverted guilt and hurt, or the closed expression that had become so familiar over the course of the afternoon.

A moment of hesitation, then the ghost offered softly, “That looked like it hurt.”

Xhea laughed, cringing as the movement hurt her ribs, but managed her reply. “A good observation.”

Shai smiled.

“Come on.” Xhea slowly got to her feet. Her knee hurt—oh, how it hurt—but it would hold her weight, if barely. She covered her aching, dazzled eye with her palm, and limped to the doors. “The night’s not getting any younger.”

Xhea made her slow way into the tunnels. Even half-blind from the entrapment spell and stumbling from the pain in her swelling knee, she tried to hurry. Though she doubted her pursuers could investigate at night, having triggered a spell would help narrow their search. Her only escape was to go deeper than anyone could follow, and in this end of town her only choice was the Red Line tunnel. She followed the rails downhill.

All too quickly the spring-like warmth gave way to a damp, aching cold that settled into her bruised limbs. A nearby storage cache yielded an emergency blanket and a few bland ration sticks; she wrapped herself in the former and chewed mechanically on the latter as she descended. The scrape of her boots against the gravel rail bed echoed the length of the tunnel.

Only when she could hear the lap of water against the concrete walls did she stop. The only thing farther down the tunnel was the collapse, the fallen tunnel walls and the floodwaters that had brought them down, ringed now by years of heavy mud and sediment. Safe enough for one night, she supposed. There was a service room nearby filled with scrap metal where she’d planned to sleep, but now she didn’t think her injuries would make the shelter worth the pain of entrance. Though the smell of rot and mildew was choking, Xhea lowered herself to the ground by the tracks and leaned back against the cold wall.

Wrapped in the crinkling blanket, she pressed her hands to the sides of her knee and hissed in pain.

“It’s not supposed to do that,” Shai said. “An entrapment spell, I mean. It’s not meant to be painful.”

“Guess I’m just lucky. Lucky, lucky me.” Xhea raised her pant leg to look at her knee, blinking and squinting to see past the dazzled after-images still painted across her vision. Already the flesh was mottled dark with spider-like tracings of broken blood vessels patterning the kneecap.

“That’ll be a good one,” she said, her voice loud in the tunnel’s silence. “You’ll have to tell me what colors it turns. Purple, for sure.”

“I’m sorry,” Shai said, seemingly transfixed by the dawning bruise.

Xhea shrugged. “Wasn’t your fault.”

“If I wasn’t here—”

“Then I’d be here all alone, and what’s the good in that?” Xhea sighed at the ghost’s expression. “Look, Shai, I don’t like this any more than you do. But I can take a little pain—especially if it means that we may get out of this eventually.”

Xhea shifted, trying to settle down, and winced at the movement.
Of all nights
, she thought,
I could have chosen a better one to sleep on gravel.

“Regardless, we should be safe for now.”

“I’ll keep watch.” Shai rested against the tunnel’s opposite wall, her soft glow the only light. Xhea should have needed neither glow nor reassurance, yet at the ghost’s words something inside her relaxed nonetheless. It didn’t ease the pain or soften the gravel beneath her—but it was enough to let her sleep.

Xhea wasn’t sure what woke her first: Shai’s hand against her shoulder, or the sound that echoed softly from the tunnel’s concrete walls. She froze, her wide eyes the only sign of awareness.

For the space of a few long breaths, there was only silence. Only water dripping from the tunnel roof—only something shifting, crumbling, in the old infrastructure. Just as she was about to move, she heard it again: a splash, followed by the slow sloshing sound of a person walking through water. Someone was approaching—not from the Lower City, but from the tunnel’s broken end.

Xhea turned toward the noise, resting her cheek against gravel as she stared into the black. Afterimages still clouded her vision. She could just make out the empty light fixtures along the ceiling like a row of gaping mouths and the dark, dull gray of the old subway tracks. Farther, she caught a flicker of Shai’s light reflecting across the water as a small wave broke, thick with mud and oil. Cursing the tendril that had fallen across her face, Xhea covered her injured eye. Only then could she see it: a hunched figure, black against the darkness, head down as it crept forward.

Fear coiled through her, cold and hard.

“We have to go,” Xhea said almost inaudibly and no less urgent for her caution. Shai nodded, staring down the tunnel with one hand pressed to her lips.

Xhea pushed herself to sitting, wincing at the pain in her knee and hip and shoulder. Instinct hammered her, shouting
go, go, go
in surges of adrenaline and that fierce, bitter fear.

Just as strong was the need for silence. It wasn’t the gravel that gave her pause, but the emergency blanket that she’d so carefully wrapped around herself for warmth. And oh, it was warm—she lay sweating beneath it—and near impossible to move with anything resembling quiet.

Just like opening a ration bar
, she thought, and peeled back the silver foil blanket in a single sweep. The sound was like a shout in the quiet tunnel. She caught her breath, waiting—then the figure in the water splashed forward. Another step, and another, in her direction.

Xhea kicked her feet free of the blanket’s trailing end, heedless of the tear she caused. She could salvage it later—if she had a later. Because as the figure came closer, she knew she’d seen this man before. A dirty sweatshirt hung loose around his distended belly and thin, bony legs, the shirt’s tattered hem trailing through the water. His white hair was wild about his face, matted clumps standing in clear disregard of gravity’s dictates.

She didn’t spare him more than a glance as he sloshed through the water toward them—didn’t dare take the time. Knew, too, that if she could better focus her aching eyes, she’d see his unblinking stare fixed on her face, as it had been in the street outside her old apartment in the ruins.

Had she thought she would be safe here, at the edge of where the city that had come before succumbed to time and decay? She knew the hole caused by the Red Line’s collapse as she knew her own self; felt the echoes of its fall in sleep and dream. Had it seemed safe, sheltering in the deep where the tunnel gaped wide, an empty space open to the distant night sky? She’d been a fool.

Safe, yes, from City folks, true and Lower alike; normal people in whom magic flowed as certainly as blood. But the things, the
creatures
that walked the ruins’ midnight streets were not people, no matter who or what they might have once been. The walkers didn’t come into the tunnels normally—too complicated a shelter to reach, with nothing they wanted hiding in the depths. And yet she’d stationed herself and Shai close to a hole that the walkers could climb through, knowing that the radiance of the ghost’s magic or her own drew them like flies to spilled sugar.